Tuesday, May 5, 2009

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Jesse Kornbluth: A Great Day For Classical Music: Richard Goode Records Beethoven's Piano Concertos Top
If you're in the mood to hear five of the greater piano concertos ever written --- and if my experience is any guide, it's a very easy mood to slip into --- then Richard Goode's your man. Oh, there are other pianists who have climbed this mountain, but of the living practicioners, Goode stands alone. He's given the bulk of his creative life to Beethoven. And it shows. Beethoven had an ego as big as his talent and emotions that ran hotter than a blast furnace. He had heroes; he liked the idea of heroism. And as a composer, he tended to write grand heroic music. (No one has ever admired his Ninth Symphony more than Stalin, who saw it as a great propaganda weapon.) But Beethoven began his career as a pianist, and his writing for piano is something else. The 32 piano sonatas are the darlings of music critics; they show the enormous growth of The Complete Sonatas . I can only echo the reviews I've seen --- Goode understands Beethoven, has absorbed this work so fully that, when he plays, it almost feels as if he's composing or improvising. As legendary as those recordings are, I prefer Goode's edition of Beethoven's Complete Piano Concertos . Shallow me: I like the colors of an orchestra. And even more, I like the interplay of the instruments. The Concertos are, simply, more available music. Their comparative directness is a trick. Or rather, a triumph. The point of Beethoven's piano concertos is their inevitability. If you listen at all carefully, you can almost see him thinking: this , then this , then t his . Rather like Mozart ---- a stream of brilliance. But that was veneer; it wasn't Beethoven. Composing came hard for him, and his manuscripts were a mess of scribbles and reconsiderations. What you are hearing is thought at its greatest possible level of refinement, emotion that's been edited and carefully parceled out. If Richard Goode's name is not familiar, that's almost his design. He's a scholar of the music he loves, not a brash showman --- he was 47 before he gave his first solo recital in Carnegie Hall. He plays, he teaches, he reads. And the deeper the dive, the richer the music. It seems right that he was the first American-born pianist to record all the Beethoven sonatas. The drama of Goode's playing is that he reduces the distance between the listener and the composer. He's not looking for fresh interpretations. He knows what's there. I find his description of Beethoven admirable: "Beethoven's music is immensely powerful and positive. It is completely satisfying. Beethoven's music is like a meal made up of all the basic food groups. There is nothing left out." Like Beethoven, Goode has Big Ideas and Grand Goals. "Music takes all the possible feelings we have," he says. "And by somehow ordering them and making something meaningful out of them, music creates a sense of harmony that maybe we can assimilate and carry away." I was listening to the Concertos the other night, sometimes giving my attention to Goode, sometimes admiring the excellence of Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, sometimes letting the music fade into the background as I read and wrote. It didn't take long for me to feel my spirits rising, my thoughts sharpening, my world shrinking to this admirable music and feeling. My wife, who had been in the next room, couldn't stay away. She stood behind me. "This is very beautiful," she said. And we were together like that for a while. I'll cherish that moment. [cross-posted from HeadButler.com ]
 
Damian Murphy: Pakistan's Genuine Democrats in Peril Top
President Asif ali Zardari will meet with President Obama tomorrow for difficult talks on the growing threat the Taliban poses to his country. While he fashions himself the vanguard of Pakistan's resurgent democratic movement since the ouster of the latest military dictatorship, he has done little to protect those on the front lines actually working to promote democracy in Pakistan: the NGOs and civil society groups. During this incredibly difficult time in Pakistan, President Obama should encourage Zardari not to turn his back on these essential non-governmental actors. Pakistan's civil society groups have a storied history, most recently with a lawyers' movement that was instrumental in restoring the ousted Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. While President Zardari had committed to restoring Chaudhry upon taking office, he delayed and the issue became a partisan battle with opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. The lawyers' movement, tired of waiting for the change promised by the President, took to the streets in protest. As this movement gathered momentum, Zardari met their demands and restored Chaudhry to the bench. With this victory, Pakistan's vibrant civil society once again proved its value and essential role in deepening democracy in the country. For years, large swaths of Pakistan have suffered from no government services or protection of basic rights. NGOs have filled the void by vaccinating babies, feeding the population and building schools that teach math and science. Even during the dark days of military dictatorship, Pakistan's civil society has kept alight the flame of rule of law and human rights. As a result of their efforts, democrats like former UN Special Representative for Human Rights Defenders Hina Jilani and lawyers' movement leader Aitzaz Ahsan are now internationally renowned figures. Those that study civil society movements and NGO programs around the world often look to Pakistan as a model and beacon for how to operate in difficult environments. NGOs and civil society groups have earned their respected position in Pakistan. Because of their strong reputation and key role in Pakistan's democratic development, they now find themselves under threat from a fierce and invigorated enemy - the Taliban. And unless President Zardari steps up to protect them, the very fabric of Pakistan's fragile democracy is under threat. In March, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Muslim Khan ordered all NGOs out of the Swat valley. "NGO is another name for vulgarity and obscenity," he said. "They hire women who work with men in the field and in offices. This is totally un-Islamic and unacceptable." The Taliban opposes the use of the polio vaccine because (they say) "it causes infertility" and is manufactured in foreign countries. NGOs have also come under severe threat in Pakistan's media. Labeled "foreign agents," the NGO acronym has become a slur to the point where humanitarian and human rights organizations in Pakistan are afforded little to no protection. Those in the NWFP and FATA are particularly vulnerable, but there have also been reports of intimidation and attacks against NGO workers in Punjab and Sindh. NGO staff in the Shangla district have been forced to close their doors by the Taliban and ordered to place ads in the local paper that they will never work for an NGO again. A group of NGO and civil society leaders recently signed a public proclamation to President Zardari calling upon him to aggressively pursue the Taliban and immediately address the suffering of IDPs and others in the devastated Malakand division of the NWFP. Perhaps for fear of appearing self interested, nowhere in the declaration do they call for the protection of NGOs working on the front lines. Someone should be sticking up for this important band of citizens. A strong democracy in Pakistan is vital to U.S. interests. The best protectors and promoters of democracy in Pakistan have been its civil society and NGO community who now also happen to represent the most powerful ideological opposition to the Taliban. These courageous activists should be protected by the Pakistani government, not scorned or ignored as the Taliban attack. President Obama's checklist of issues to discuss with President Zardari in Washington will be long, but the protection of NGOs should appear near the top. Without a strong and vibrant civil society, the U.S. may find itself with little democracy to support in Pakistan. Damian Murphy is a Senior Program Manager at Freedom House. More on Pakistan
 
Shu Kim: What to Do When You Get Laid-Off Top
As former Lehman Brothers colleagues, we understand how debilitating being laid-off can feel. We worked in Lehman Brothers' Real Estate Group for over a decade and if it weren't for the financial crisis, we may have worked there for another decade. Lehman Brothers gave us the constant thrill of working on high-profile deals, the security of a good salary, and the prestige of being associated with a blue chip name, and with top caliber colleagues and clients. What it didn't give us was the time to consider what we really are about. In this light, being laid-off from Lehman Brothers was a gift. It forced us to think hard about what would truly make us happy professionally. That introspection led us to start our own web-based company, Shustir.com, that would redirect our talents and resources into something meaningful -- giving back to the community we understood most. Shustir.com is an interactive marketplace that features the small businesses and entrepreneurs who characterize our local neighborhoods and communities, giving them power to more effectively market themselves on the web, at no cost. In these economic times, when every dollar spent is a thought twice, Shustir is also a place where consumers get to know the small business owners close to home and beyond, and spend their dollars where they count. Needless to say, we are very proud of Shustir.com, but our purpose here is to share some of the invaluable lessons we learned along the way to professional reinvention. Our advice stems from taking the time to do the personal work necessary to take a long, hard look in the mirror, and truthfully determine what will be most rewarding for you professionally, now and longer term. Let's begin... 1) Stay Positive, Don't Rush No matter how cliché this seems, keep a positive mindset. Know that your employment status has little to do with performance and more with economic circumstances beyond your control. With that comes a likelihood that there may not be much happening at work (as you traditionally knew it) these days to fully utilize your skills, much less challenge you. Therefore, jumping right back into the workforce -- that is, looking for a job that resembles your prior one -- may not be the best solution. If you were declared redundant at your former company, you are likely to be declared so again at a competing company, assuming the job opportunity even exists. 2) Take That Vacation Depending on your financial circumstances, this may be either the first or last thing you are considering. Regardless, take it. Be it a week, a few months or even a year, give yourself the gift of time to do the things that you've been meaning to do. Travel to another country or explore your neighborhood, visit distant family, spend time with your kids, exercise, or dabble in your dormant talents. You may be surprised how in these moments of ease and peace, you really start discovering what you're about -- the foundation to determining what type of job or occupation will make you happiest. It can mark breaking from "a job that found you" to authoring your own next chapter. 3) Reinvent Yourself Take the liberty to reinvent yourself. It's not jargon. It's critical, because the very ways we work are quickly changing. Larger forces like technology, the environment, our economic systems are changing the game. You need to adapt to find your productive place in the new world order, and that may mean some radical rethinking. If the "old jobs" just aren't out there any longer, what to do? Create your own. Consider starting your own business that builds on your talents, skill sets and interests. Entrepreneurship has never been simpler, fueled by enabling and accessible technology accessible to most of us. Even if you don't wind up hanging out a shingle, the exercise of creating a business plan will give you crystal clarity into what job or profession best suits you next. 4) Always be Lunching Whether starting your own business or looking for a new job, connect like crazy with people you know. Most people would call this networking, but we opt to call it lunching. Getting together over a meal or drinks is more effective networking, combining the personal with the professional in ways that invite real opening-up on both sides. Make lunch your new job. Over a nice meal, you'll find project leads, expand contacts, discover niche markets that you might cater to, and test your business ideas. You'll build vital relationships, and discover you're not alone. Don't ever underestimate the power of human connection, especially now. Some of our best work developing Shustir.com happened during lunches with the right people. 5) Engage the Experts Executive search firms and headhunters generally had a poor reputation (mostly unearned) - until recently. People are discovering how these resources can not only power a job search, but also serve as an ad-hoc career coach, or even life coach. Some of the better ones provide counsel on how to best position yourself, recommend alternative paths to consider, and give you a realistic sense of compensation in today's market. Choose your resource wisely, and before meeting with them, do your own homework, clearly identifying, at least in general terms, what your next career must provide to enrich you personally and financially, both near and long term. More on The Recession
 
Supreme Court Prospects Stock Holdings Could Be Conflicts Of Interest Top
WASHINGTON — Several prospects to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter have major stock holdings that could pose conflict-of-interest problems in cases that might come before the court. The stocks include shares in huge companies such as GE and Microsoft, a firm that was involved in a federal investigation and a manufacturer that recalled toys and "Flush & Sounds Potty" toilet seats because of lead paint. Since businesses often land in court, suing or being sued, a case involving a company in which a justice has financial ties could be trouble. If chosen for the high court, some potential nominees might have to step aside from certain cases or unload stocks to avoid conflicts between their official duties and personal financial interests. Among stocks held by people mentioned as President Barack Obama's possible picks: _ Appellate Judges Diane Wood and Kim Wardlaw have reported they have stakes in Whole Foods Market Inc., an upscale grocer that won permission from a federal appeals court in Washington in 2007 to buy rival organic grocer Wild Oats Markets despite the Federal Trade Commission's argument that the deal would stifle competition. To settle the commission's claims, Whole Foods agreed this year to sell several stores. _ At least five Supreme Court prospects have disclosed stock in Zimmer Holdings, a maker of artificial hips and knees that was investigated by federal prosecutors over allegations it paid doctors who used the products. Charges were dropped after Zimmer agreed to pay a fine and undergo monitoring. _ Wardlaw's holdings have included shares in Microsoft, the software giant targeted by a Clinton administration antitrust lawsuit; Tyco, whose former chief executive and chief financial officer were sentenced to prison for grand larceny, conspiracy, securities fraud and falsifying business records, and Time Warner Inc., General Electric Co. and The Walt Disney Co., whose Hollywood studios are suing RealNetworks Inc. over its DVD-copying software. Federal judges generally are supposed to avoid taking part in any proceeding in which they have a financial stake, regardless of how small. In some cases, they may be able to take part if they get rid of the stock in question. Stocks held by mutual funds or common investment funds aren't considered to pose conflicts unless the judge takes part in fund management. It's not a new problem. Over 24 years, former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stepped away from more than 700 decisions in which she had potential financial conflicts. Many others on the court with substantial wealth have opted for blind trusts, mutual funds or other investment vehicles with fewer dangers of conflict. Just last year, three justices' stock holdings and the job of another justice's son prevented the court from getting involved in a lawsuit that accused dozens of businesses of violating international law by assisting South Africa's former apartheid government. The companies and the Bush administration wanted the court to intervene; because four of the nine justices sat out, the court couldn't hear the case, and its only option was to uphold an appeals court ruling that let the lawsuit proceed. Three of the judges could have taken part in the case if they had sold the investments in question. A 2006 law lets federal judges sell shares of stock and put the money into mutual funds and other investments without immediately having to pay capital gains tax. Several of those considered in contention for a Supreme Court seat have substantial assets. Those disclosing Zimmer stock include Wood, a judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago; Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court judge for the District of Columbia; Sandra Lynch, chief judge of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston; law professor Cass Sunstein and Wardlaw, a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, Calif. Wardlaw reported up to $50,000 in Zimmer stock, while Wood, Sunstein and Garland each reported up to $15,000. Lynch didn't give her stock's value. Lynch had roughly $7.5 million to $33 million in assets. Corporate stock listed in her financial disclosure report last year included PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, American Express Co., UnitedHealth Group, mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, Google, Kraft Foods and General Electric. Wood reported up to $15,000 in stock in RC2 Corp., an Illinois-based company whose products include toys and child-care products. Working with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, the company in 2007 voluntarily recalled several products that had lead in the paint, including two styles of its "3-in-1 Flush & Sounds Potty" toilet-training seats and five toys from its Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway product line. Wood reported up to $250,000 in Whole Foods stock and up to $15,000 in Sun Microsystems, which was a top supporter of the government antitrust case against Microsoft and also filed its own lawsuit that wound up in a federal appeals court in Virginia before the companies settled it. In all, Wood described $2.2 million to $7.2 million in assets in the report she filed last year covering 2007, the most recent available. The reports allow assets to be valued in broad ranges rather than specific amounts. Wardlaw, the California appeals judge, disclosed $25 million to roughly $64 million in assets on the financial report she filed in 2007, the most recent available. Court officials said her 2008 report would not be made available to the AP for several days. Garland reported roughly $4 million to $11.6 million in assets in his 2008 report, including up to $250,000 each in General Electric Co. and Procter & Gamble stock, up to $100,000 each in Citigroup and General Mills and up to $50,000 in pharmaceutical companies Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb. M. Margaret McKeown, a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Diego, listed $2.7 million to $7.6 million in assets in her 2008 filing. McKeown's stock included several big names: Apple, Altria, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg Co., McDonald's Corp., Microsoft, PepsiCo., Procter & Gamble, Starbucks and Verizon Communications. Sunstein, nominated by Obama to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, reported $2.7 million to $7.2 million in assets on a financial disclosure report he filed last month. His holdings include stock in Boeing, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. Three others whose names are circulating as possible nominees_ Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge in New York; U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears _ do not appear to have extensive stock holdings, according to their most recent financial disclosure reports. Little is known about the financial holdings of two governors considered prospects. Michigan doesn't require Gov. Jennifer Granholm to file an annual report detailing her investments, as federal officials must. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick does have to produce a personal financial report, but doesn't have to put values on his stock holdings. ___ Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.
 
Creditors May Have Pushed For Chrysler Bankruptcy To Rake In Bailout Cash Top
The White House, auto executives and union representatives were all able to come to an agreement last week to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy. But the car company's creditors -- Wall Street banks and hedge funds -- refused repeated compromises and drove the company under. The refusal doomed a major American auto company to bankruptcy, but it may have been a smart business move for the lenders. Many of the Wall Street firms holding Chrysler bonds may also own credit default swaps that they bought to hedge their bets. These swaps, which are essentially like an insurance policy on the bonds should Chrysler default, were likely mostly issued by AIG. AIG, thanks to the government bailout, has paid off bonds in the past at 100 cents on the dollar. Under the deal they would have had to accept with Chrysler, the bondholders would have received as little as 30 cents on the dollar, for example. Why take 30 or 35 cents on the dollar from Chrysler when you can get the whole buck from the American taxpayer? "The basic story is very simple," says economist Dean Baker of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. "If they hold credit default swaps on the bonds, they're totally happy with them defaulting." In what would rank as one of the great scams of this financial crisis, government bailouts may be colliding. Wall Street may be raking in taxpayer dollars through AIG and returning the favor by driving the auto industry into bankruptcy. Are they? Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who has been closely tracking the AIG bailout, wants to find out. Last week, he met with Neal Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), and asked him to look into it. Barofsky was intrigued. "He seemed open to looking into the bondholder issue when we met last week, and I am hopeful that he will be able to shed some light on this issue if he deems it worthwhile," says Cummings. He followed up with a letter to Barofsky on Tuesday, outlining his concerns and formally requesting an investigation. "While differing accounts exist as to how the actual negotiations played out, the fact remains that Chrysler was not able to reach an agreement with its creditors to the $6.9 billion," writes Cummings. "As an issuer of credit default swaps, it is plausible that AIG had issued swaps on the debt of the American auto companies. We know that the collateral calls and threat of payouts triggered by an AIG bankruptcy forced the federal government to commit up to $182.5 billion to the insurance giant. We also know that many holders of AIG credit default swaps were apparently compensated at 100 percent of par value in order to retire the swaps they held and enable the purchase of the underlying securities (the counterparty payments). Finally, the recipients of the counterparty payments in some cases were the same firms that held auto industry debt." He goes on: "These circumstances could create tremendous potential for abuse of government assistance to AIG. Knowing that AIG swap counterparties have previously been paid with government funds without being compelled to take any discount or "haircut", if auto creditors had purchased swaps on their debt, they may have had a perverse incentive to allow Chrysler to fail. By not negotiating down the claims or accepting a debt-for-equity arrangement, the auto creditors could collect any credit default swap payments triggered by a Chrysler bankruptcy. Essentially, these creditors could stand to potentially benefit more from a Chrysler bankruptcy than from a restructuring out of court." If the creditors negotiated a settlement outside of bankruptcy, the swap payoff becomes ambiguous, "but it's much clearer if you're in bankruptcy," says Baker. Instead of negotiating against itself, the White House could have told creditors that AIG wouldn't be honoring Chrysler swaps in bankruptcy, says Baker. Of course, the creditors could sue AIG to recover the money. But without further taxpayer injections into AIG, even by winning in court the creditors would find very little blood to squeeze out of that dying turnip. Cummings has five questions for Barofsky to look into: 1. Did AIG issue credit default swaps on debt securities of automobile companies? 2. Did creditors to GM or Chrysler hold credit default swaps on the debt? If so, were these AIG-issued swaps? 3. How many creditors to the auto companies also received payments as AIG counterparties? 4. What obligations are owed by the swap issuers to the holders of auto debt in the event of a bankruptcy or other default event? 5. What was the extent of the potential for abuse of taxpayer funds based on the scenario laid out above? Read the whole letter: May 5, 2009 The Honorable Neil M. Barofsky Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 1064 Washington, DC 20220 Dear Inspector General Barofsky: Thank you for your work investigating the American International Group, Inc. (AIG) counterparty payments. I appreciate the update you provided me on this audit on April 28. As we discussed, I am also concerned by the circumstances surrounding the current efforts to resuscitate the American automobile industry. The Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have provided billions of dollars in working capital for General Motors (GM) and Chrysler LLC (Chrysler) while the two firms pursue financial restructuring solutions. While the assistance to Chrysler terminated at the end of April, GM has approximately three weeks left to complete its restructuring before the working capital ends. The Chrysler situation was particularly troubling. The company had some $10 billion in outstanding debt that was due to the United Auto Workers Retiree Health Plan. Chrysler and the union were able to negotiate an agreement that modified worker contracts and gave the union an equity position in the restructured auto company. However, in addition to the contributions owed to the union health plan, Chrysler also carried additional debt in the amount of $6.9 billion. Creditors included JPMorgan Chase & Co., The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley, and several smaller banks and hedge funds. Perella Weinberg Partners, Oppenheimer and Stairway Capital Management have been identified thus far as hedge fund creditors. As you are well aware, Chrysler recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, though a deal is ostensibly in place to merge Chrysler with the Italian automaker Fiat SpA, pending court approval. Until the filing occurred, eleventh hour hopes persisted that Chrysler could reach an agreement with the creditors that provided the $6.9 billion. While differing accounts exist as to how the actual negotiations played out, the fact remains that Chrysler was not able to reach an agreement with its creditors to the $6.9 billion. As an issuer of credit default swaps, it is plausible that AIG had issued swaps on the debt of the American auto companies. We know that the collateral calls and threat of payouts triggered by an AIG bankruptcy forced the federal government to commit up to $182.5 billion to the insurance giant. We also know that many holders of AIG credit default swaps were apparently compensated at 100 percent of par value in order to retire the swaps they held and enable the purchase of the underlying securities (the counterparty payments). Finally, the recipients of the counterparty payments in some cases were the same firms that held auto industry debt. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on April 30, 2009 detailing the objections identified by some creditors: Bank-debt holders, many of them hedge funds or distressed debt funds, voted against the latest deal for various reasons, ranging from financial interests to philosophical ones. Some said their funds had bigger positions in Ford Motor Co. or General Motors Corp. and could benefit by a Chrysler bankruptcy and the production capacity that may eliminate. Some funds may also have credit-default swaps on Chrysler bank debt that pay out in the event of a bankruptcy[1]. These circumstances could create tremendous potential for abuse of government assistance to AIG. Knowing that AIG swap counterparties have previously been paid with government funds without being compelled to take any discount or "haircut", if auto creditors had purchased swaps on their debt, they may have had a perverse incentive to allow Chrysler to fail. By not negotiating down the claims or accepting a debt-for-equity arrangement, the auto creditors could collect any credit default swap payments triggered by a Chrysler bankruptcy. Essentially, these creditors could stand to potentially benefit more from a Chrysler bankruptcy than from a restructuring out of court. While the issues were described in the context of the Chrysler bankruptcy, I believe that potential conflicts could have existed regarding the debt of each Chrysler and GM. Accordingly, I respectfully request that you address the following questions: 1. Did AIG issue credit default swaps on debt securities of automobile companies? 2. Did creditors to GM or Chrysler hold credit default swaps on the debt? If so, were these AIG-issued swaps? 3. How many creditors to the auto companies also received payments as AIG counterparties? 4. What obligations are owed by the swap issuers to the holders of auto debt in the event of a bankruptcy or other default event? 5. What was the extent of the potential for abuse of taxpayer funds based on the scenario laid out above? Thank you for your continued advocacy on behalf of the American taxpayers and for your examination of these issues. Please contact Martin Levine in my office at (202) 225-4741 with any questions. Sincerely, Elijah E. Cummings Member of Congress
 
Sarah Brown: Children Need Mothers, Mothers Want Midwives Top
Progress is being made to save the lives of mothers and newborns around the world. Still, every minute, a woman dies of complications in pregnancy and childbirth, leaving her baby more likely to die within two years. Most of these deaths could be prevented. Join The Huffington Post and the Mothers Day Every Day campaign in the global movement to call upon world leaders to invest in health workers and strengthen health systems so that every day, everywhere in the world, all women and newborns have access to lifesaving care. There was a turnaround conference for MDG5 in London in 2007 and it is no accident that the campaigning group that initiated it was called Women Deliver - oh-so-true in so many ways. I'm starting to see more and more discussion on the blogs and in women's magazines about third wave feminism. It's like those of us lucky enough to benefit from our mother's efforts to urge and discover greater freedoms for women are suddenly all thinking 'so now what?' For me, the discussions of new feminism give us a chance to talk about one of the great insights of the old sort: that women without economic power in the end tend to be denied social, political and personal power too. So if we seriously want our century to be a women's one, we need to think about what injustices remain for women in the developing world. I listened recently to the group of African First Ladies gathered together for a health summit in the US and watched them work out how to build their programs and figure out how to put maternal health at the heart of what they do. They recognized readily that this is the keystone to addressing everything else. At some point we must change how we measure our existing work - our programs for international development, for education for all, for combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and polio, for economic empowerment and cultural change. We need to know how well we are doing on maternal mortality, or we won't know how well we are doing in bringing real justice. More and more people and organisations seem to agree with this - ask the First Ladies, ask the hospital chiefs and midwives, the health ministers, the community leaders, the microfinance lenders, the NGOs and other organisations signed up to the Maternal Mortality Campaign, and go to those heads of Government - from the Global Leader's Network who have taken a stand on this issue to the G8 leaders who seem to be listening. But especially ask the children. Ask them if they need their mothers. Effective development means recognizing that mums matter - and that means midwives matter too. It seems fitting that in one week we see the International Day of the Midwife (5th May) and Mother's Day in the United States (10th May). It is all the more so in 2009. For from now until the G8 meets in July, a series of meetings will be held by G8 Ministers that will decide what happens to the new health worker commitments made last year - will decide, in effect, whether we as a world believe that the mothers we cherish deserve the care that will keep them safe. It was last year's G8 that first discussed maternal mortality - the most threatened of the Millennium Development Goals - at an international level. It was also last year's G8 that set an agreement for 4 million new health workers to be trained to work across the developing world. Of this total, 1 million will need to be trained with the skills to help mothers and newborns to facilitate a safe delivery for both. So it is this year's G8 meeting, to be hosted by PM Silvio Berlusconi, that needs to approve the international health financing facility that will enable these new health workers to move from being pledges on a page to realities in women's lives. The health financing facility must use maternal mortality reduction as a measure of its success and must make sure that up to 25% of these new health workers are doctors or midwives, or nurses and other health professionals who have the relevant skills and training to turnaround the unaddressed neglected area that is maternal (and newborn) health. There is every reason to believe that the G8 will succeed in all this, though not to be taken for granted. New bold commitments for health and MDG5 will start to save lives which in turn will help save communities, economies, and environments. This is the start of where it can all go right. If we can do this, we can save those mothers to raise their children, protect their families, enrich their communities, contribute significantly to their economies and make a priority the quality and protection of their environment. A mothers survival is the key to reaching all our targets but is dependent each time on having a skilled health worker on hand with the right supplies. This could be 40 cents worth of lifesaving blood coagulant to stop post-partum haemorrhage, 3 cents worth of magnesium sulphate administered correctly to stop pre-eclamptic rising blood pressure, or even just basic clean wipes and the means of delivering a malaria net for the start of new life, or the antiretroviral drugs that prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. The problem may be big, but the solutions are there and entirely achievable if we all make the moral commitment and encourage the necessary political will. So in the countdown to this week to Mother's Day in the United States on Sunday, isn't it time to thank our mothers and celebrate their contribution to our lives, by clicking up www.mothersdayeveryday.org in the USA or www.millionmums.org which is the White Ribbon Alliance's campaign from the UK to register your support?
 
Catholic Relief Services: Staying Catholic, Volunteering in Baghdad's Chaos Top
I've been the last seven days in Baghdad, lodging in a Chaldean Catholic convent in a Shiite neighborhood across from the green zone. The two nuns here - protected round the clock by guards of their own choosing who are paid by the Iraqi government - leave their small compound only to go to the market or to Mass. The 20 orphan girls under their care were taken to the relative safety of northern Iraq late last year. My colleague and I didn't get much sleep in the convent, some combination of the low-flying helicopters all night long and the non-stop generator. Baghdad is a city of concertina wire and concrete barricades and checkpoints and recriminations and fear you can feel. There is nothing normal about this place, and everyone here knows it. Except some of its people. I went to a party last Wednesday at a ramshackle home for abandoned elderly people established by the Syrian Catholic Church, called Beit Anya. As far as I could tell, there was no special reason for the party, other than that a group of volunteers mobilized by Caritas Iraq wanted to do something different for the 48 old ladies - Sunni, Shiite and Christian - who sleep six to a room. I was serenaded with an old Egyptian love song by a woman who thought she was the Beiruti singing sensation Fairouz , and tried to help another lady remember where it was in the US that she did her undergraduate studies 50 years ago. We narrowed it down to Indiana, or Manhattan. "If I wasn't volunteering with Caritas, I would leave this country. To Sweden, the US, Canada, Chile, Australia - I have relatives everywhere. But this is my place, and this is my world," said one volunteer. Volunteering seems to be a family affair here - men dancing with old ladies in wheelchairs, their wives hearing secrets about life in Baghdad way back when, their children handing out sweets. I came here expecting, from all I have heard and read, to find a battered Catholic community, all packed and ready to emigrate. Instead, I found a whole lot of Iraqi Catholics who, in the fear and chaos that is Baghdad still today, insist not only on staying in Baghdad but, more than that, are determined to live fully as Iraqi Catholics. Mark Schnellbaecher, Regional Director for Catholic Relief Services in Europe and the Middle East, writes from Iraq
 
Mark Miller: After the Crash, a New Realism Emerges About Retirement Top
Three months after President Obama's inauguration, one phrase from his speech on the steps of the Capitol comes back to me often: "The time has come to set aside childish things." That line, which quotes loosely from 1 Corinthians:13 in the New Testament, refers to our collective need to wake up to the realities and challenges facing the country. Where retirement planning is concerned, childish behavior wasn't hard to find before the economic bubble burst last fall, and the ensuing economic crisis has provided a loud wake-up call. The huge generation of baby boomers now approaching retirement has been forced to stop kidding themselves. Housing values and stock prices won't appreciate forever. Home equity can't be raided at will to finance expensive travel and second homes--at least not risk-free. Saving money for retirement does require setting of goals and planning. Boomer retirement has been a train wreck waiting to happen for some time now. And in the post-bubble environment, most of the talk has focused on the pain that's immediately before us: decimated 401(k) and housing values, foreclosures and layoffs. That's the close-up on the crisis. But step back and you can see the beginning of some positive changes surfacing in the way Americans think about retirement, and in expectations about how they will live in the years ahead. "People are not just looking at what they have but at the meaning of how they will live," says Laura Rossman, principal of OutsideInsite, a consulting firm that specializes in boomers and seniors. "They're realizing that they may need to put off retirement and be realistic about what it takes--not everyone can retire at 58. The market drop is so severe, and no one ever expected anything like the severity of the shock. It is changing some behaviors, and at least for now, people are resetting their views." This new realism surfaced in a striking set of data released this month by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), a research organization focused on health, savings, retirement, and economic security issues. The headline finding in EBRI's 19th annual Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS) is that just 13 percent of Americans feel confident that they'll have enough money to live comfortably in retirement. No surprise there. But some of the other findings were eyebrow raisers. Workers say they expect to work longer to secure their retirement. Twenty-eight percent of workers say they have changed their target year for retirement in the past year. And within that group, 89 percent say they did so in order to boost their financial security. More people also say they plan to supplement their income in retirement by working--72 percent compared with 66 percent just two years ago. The RCS also suggests people are behaving more like grownups when it comes to money management. Among those who've lost confidence in their retirement security, 81 percent say they have reduced expenses, and 43 percent have changed the way they invest. Twenty-five percent are saving more money and an equal number are now seeking advice from financial professionals. Finally, EBRI reports that among all workers, 75 percent say they have saved money for retirement, one of the highest levels ever measured by the RCS. Rossman sees a new set of expectations coming for retirement--less focused on material goods and more on experience and values. "It's going to be an era of simplicity and new priorities--less is more." More on Retirement
 
Cook County Board Votes To Repeal Sales Tax Increase, Stroger To Veto Top
Cook County commissioners Tuesday voted in favor of repealing a controversial sales-tax hike that was pushed through last year by President Todd Stroger, but the action is unlikely to survive. More on Taxes
 
David Sirota: Who Is Lying - Barack Obama or Sen. Michael Bennet? Top
In the aftermath of the U.S. Senate defeat of "cramdown" legislation (ie. the bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges renegotiate the terms of mortages so as to prevent foreclosures), I'm still wondering why almost nobody has bothered to ask cramdown opponents in the Senate why they support cramdown for rich people but not for The Rest of Us. But now, after a stunning yet little-noticed nugget in the Denver Post , I'm wondering why nobody has asked this same question of President Obama. The president has said - and continues to say - he supports cramdown, but as Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet's (D) office told the Denver Post, the Obama administration signaled it wanted the Senate to stop the cramdown bill. Indeed, in editorial writer Chuck Plunkett's oversimplified editorial* against the cramdown bill, we get this: Bennet's clear-eyed rejection of the provision will help the little guy far more. That this is true is (perhaps) underscored by the fact that no less a champion of the little guy than President Barack Obama apparently let this provision meet its death . I say this because I considered Bennet's vote the first significant break with the Obama administration. But when I talked with his office to seek an interview, Bennet spokeswoman Deirdre Murphy told me Bennet believes that Obama no longer supported the cram-down language . Though the president supported a cram-down approach on the campaign trail, many news outlets have pointed out he did not lobby for it once debate grew heated. On the substance of cramdown, I completely disagree with Plunkett - his claim that "the current economic climate is incentive enough for banks to refinance loans that would help keep borrowers solvent" sounds great, and I wish it were true, but it flies in the face of new data that show "the nation's largest mortgage companies are stepping up foreclosures" (evidently, Plunkett couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes on Google actually checking to see whether his speculation had any grounding in fact). And his insistence on repeating banking industry talking points that claim "cram down" would "force executives to raise [interest] rates to balance the books" is belied by the fact that interest rates have continued to fall as "cram down" has been available for the wealthy and for business in dealing with their vacation homes and investment properties, respectively. But then, one newspaper editorial writer's fact-free screed isn't all that interesting - what's newsy about Plunkett's piece the fairly major allegation within it: Yes, according to the piece, we have a U.S. Senator's office insisting that the President of the United States indicated to key senate swing votes that he was AOK with them voting down a bill he was telling the public he supported. That's pretty big news, especially since the senator making the allegation is a guy who could face a Democratic primary, and therefore will use this rationale as his defense to Democratic voters. The question now is whether Bennet's allegation is true and the president has been lying to the public, or whether Bennet has made up a lie in order to justify his vote for banking industry interests over his constituents interests? Put another way, someone's pants are on fire in this controversy: Either President Obama is lying by telling the public he supports cramdown but is then quietly telling senators he opposes it. Or, Michael Bennet is lying by telling the public he voted against cramdown because Obama wanted him to when, in fact, Obama didn't want him to. So, who do you think is lying - Bennet or Obama? I posed this question to Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent on the morning drive-time show on KKZN AM760 that I'm guest hosting. You can listen to the interview here - he suggests both are fudging the truth in their own ways. But I'm curious what you think... * Not surprisingly, Plunkett doesn't bother to ask - or even ponder - the same question that every other journalist refuses to ask : Namely, why they think it is an outrage to allow cramdown for regular people, but perfectly OK to allow it for the super rich. AFTERTHOUGHT: I guess it's possible Bennet genuinely "believed" Obama didn't support cramdown, when Obama actually did. That would mean neither Obama or Bennet is lying, but instead that Bennet is an idiot and voted based on his belief that all of Obama's cramdown rhetoric countered - and worse, that Bennet voted this way without checking with the White House first. I left this as an afterthought, though, because it stretches the limits of possibility - Bennet is a lot of things, but he's just not that stupid. ADDENDUM: It seems very strange that organized labor is threatening a Democratic primary against Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania for his refusal to back the Employee Free Choice Act, but not publicly threatening a primary against Bennet, who is refusing to take a position on EFCA and who is far more beatable in a primary than Specter (though I do think Specter is eminently beatable). Now, I know there are partisan shills out there who claim that Bennet has some super secret Pony plan to use his silence on EFCA for progressive ends, but that conspiracy theorizing is just shameless politician worshiping, if you ask me. As we've learned over and over again, there are never Super Secret Pony plans - and in this case, if he's doing anything on EFCA, it's trying to play business off labor to maximize campaign contributions. I point this out in this post because this is yet another issue in which Bennet is voting against basic economic fairness, and it strikes me as strange that labor is relatively silent.
 
Michael Phelps Back In The Pool Following Suspension (PHOTOS) Top
From AP : BALTIMORE — Michael Phelps' three-month suspension from competition is now over and he marked the occasion like any other day: He woke up late and headed to the pool. Speaking exclusively with The Associated Press, Phelps said he didn't even realize his suspension ended Tuesday. Coach Bob Bowman couldn't resist making a joke, saying he planned to enter his star swimmer in a meet later that night. "I had no idea," Phelps said of his ban, which was doled out by USA Swimming after a picture surfaced in a London tabloid showing him inhaling from a marijuana pipe. Actually, he'll return to competition next week at a meet in Charlotte, N.C. It will be his first time swimming competitively since winning eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics. "I'm happy to be back in the water and be back in semi-shape," said Phelps, who's lost almost 20 pounds in last two months. "I'm sort of getting back into racing shape and getting ready to race my first race since Beijing. We'll see how it's goes. "I'm happy to have some structure back in my life," he added. SEE PHOTOS FROM PHELPS' FIRST DAY BACK IN THE POOL BELOW: Phelps said he considered retiring from the sport after the picture surfaced. After all, he already broke Mark Spitz's 36-year-old record of seven gold medals and became the winningest Olympian ever with 14 golds. But after writing down the pros and cons of resuming his career, Phelps decided to get back in the water. He's not concerned what the photo did to his image. "It was a stupid mistake that I made," he said during an interview on the deck of the pool at Loyola College in his native Baltimore. "But I'll have what I've accomplished in and out of the pool for the rest of my life. I'm satisfied with what I've done and happy with what I've done." Phelps said the whole experience has "shown me who my real friends are. It's also given me a lot of time to think. Pretty much since Beijing ended, I didn't really know what I wanted to do." After going into virtual seclusion for nearly a month after the photo surfaced, Phelps called Bowman on March 1 _ the coach remembers the day vividly _ and said simply, "I'm doing it." "I was not really concerned whether he would quit or not," Bowman said. "I was concerned that if he did quit, that he did it for the right reasons. Otherwise, it would just be a joke. I have told him, 'You've done all there is to do. If you quit today, you're the greatest of all time. You can walk away.' But I did think it would be bad if he walked away because of this thing. He should go on his own terms." His motivation restored, Phelps plans to keep swimming through the 2012 London Olympics. While he's not going to attempt eight gold medals again, he will continue to do a program that would be exhausting to most swimmers. In Charlotte, he'll swim five events: the 50-meter freestyle, 100 free, 200 free, 100 backstroke and 200 butterfly. Only two were on his record-breaking program in Beijing, the 200 free and 200 fly. "I'm feeling good in the water and swimming some decent times in practice," Phelps said. "But I have no idea what to expect in the meet. I'm going in open minded." As for his life away from the pool, Phelps wouldn't discuss tabloid reports that he's dating Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who made headlines of her own last month when she finished runner-up in the Miss USA pageant. Some thought her response to a question about legalizing same-sex marriage may have cost her the title. Phelps would only say the two "are good friends," but added that he can sympathize with what she's gone through since expressing her opposition to gay marriage. As for tabloid reports of his heavy partying, Phelps rolled his eyes and said nearly everything written about him was false. Specifically, he denied a report detailing a wild night in New York City. "I know I have not been perfect by any means," he said. "But I have learned from all of my mistakes. That's all you can ask for." (This version CORRECTS the school's name to Loyola College, instead of university.) ) More on Photo Galleries
 
James Arthur Ray: The Business of Fear Top
For months now we've been literally inundated with how crummy the economy is and how in the words of many, including our president, "It's the worst recession since the Great Depression." Now, as if that weren't enough, the media has a new drum to beat: Swine Flu. Look, let's be rational here for a minute (something the media can't afford to do), you have a greater chance of dying of lung cancer and diabetes than you do swine flu. I just wonder how many people are watching the news in the morning worrying about a pig virus while they eat their Krispy Kreme and smoke a Camel? If I come across as irreverent, believe me my irreverence is directed at the media and not the uneducated individuals being programmed daily with the latest scare tactic. Let's wake up, and take a look at the facts. CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Sanje Gupta stated, "Over 60,000 people per year contract the seasonal flu." Furthermore, according to the CDC, 36,000 people worldwide who contract seasonal flu actually die from it. Now in contrast, according to the latest USA Today tally, there are a grand total of 695 cases of verified swine flu across, get this, 15 countries! Yet, for a full fifteen minutes of the thirty I was watching the morning news this week I listened to the reporters on CNN drone on and on about the swine flu. Finally fed up, I switched to Fox to realize they too were talking about (you guessed it) the potential "pandemic" that has less verified cases then the 822 people per day (300,000 per year) that die from obesity. But you know what? Fear is a business--and it's oh so saleable, isn't it? It's in the media's best interest to keep things dramatic. It draws us in and keeps us watching for fear that we might miss something that will save us from being flat broke with a pig virus. It's in the Obama administrations best interest to address a pig virus fast as well, so they aren't perceived to be out of touch like our past administration was during Katrina. It's in the drug company's best interest to pump the fear of disease onto the airwaves consistently. Everyone has an agenda, but it rarely is the harmony and wellbeing of our nation or our world. The world needs a voice of reason. And we each individually need to wake up, take a stand, and decide what type of life we choose to live. Those who continually take at face value what they're being fed will continually get smacked in the face. And what about the "economic crisis" that we hear so much about? Look, I'm not suggesting that we're not in a recession... but "the greatest one since the Great Depression?" Absolutely untrue! Just take a moment and reflect back upon the 70s and you'll recall that you couldn't even buy expensive gas. Remember the odd/even days and the lines at the pump? Gas is plentiful today. Interest rates were twenty-four percent and unemployment was over ten percent in the seventies. You can get a thirty-year fixed loan right now for around five percent and unemployment is at about eight percent nationwide. It's not the worst recession since the Great Depression. However, give the media long enough and it'll scare us right into creating it. Energy flows where attention goes. What we neglect to remember (and we're never reminded of) is that if unemployment is eight percent... that means fully ninety-two percent of the people in this country are gainfully employed! I guarantee that you'll never hear a news anchor, on any station, stating, "Great news today, ninety-two percent of the people in our country were employed and received their paycheck last week." The Wall Street game and the economy are as much psychological as financial. Peter Lynch, one of the greatest investors of all time stated, "I don't spend more than 15 minutes a year paying attention to the economy." How about you? The things you give attention come to life. In fact, attention equals love. Think about it, if you love your mate do you give him or her attention? What about if you love your kids? Do you give them attention? The answer is obvious--attention equals love. So what are you giving your attention to? If you're really honest you may realize that you're in love with your misery. That's right, you love your misery because you're attending to it all the time. So we continue to give attention to our crummy economy. "Give us more fear," we unconsciously plead... it keeps our endorphins pumping! What's worse than being broke? Being sick and broke. Oh boy, now that's really scary! Energy flows where attention goes. You think we'd learn our lesson after eight years of a "war on terror." Are we any more at peace because of it? Not even close. Think about it... we haven't had one major terrorist issue since 9/11 and yet we're more terrorized then we've ever been. I travel over 200 days per year and not one single day during the last eight years have I heard an announcement from TSA that the threat level is less than "orange." What does orange mean anyway? Who knows, but it sounds pretty scary doesn't it? Our consistent focus of attention is just feeding the bonfire of terror; it rages on and we wonder why it never goes out. Let's wake up and take a stand. Your consistent thoughts, feelings, and actions determine the results you create in all areas. In fact, the formula for success in any area is Think, Feel, Act. There's never been a time in recent history where it's been more vital to direct and control our attention. What you're allowing into your consistent thoughts and feelings are going to determine your subsequent actions as well as the results you produce. Turn off the business of fear. Read good books, watch inspiring movies, and listen to educational CD's. These practices make you better, and more resourceful. When you change your thoughts and feelings, your actions must follow; and your life will change. The time is now to take action--big, bold immediate--for fate favors the bold. When you let go of the fear, and refuse to allow it to be pumped into your home and head on a daily basis, you can place your attention on becoming more creative, resourceful and empowered. Resources always flow to those who are more resourceful. Always have and always will. Get resourceful, lock your attention on what you say you love, and you'll have more to love. You deserve it... and so do
 
New York Times Price Hike: Daily, Sunday Edition Prices Both Go Up Top
NEW YORK — The New York Times is raising its prices for the second time in less than a year to help the newspaper offset a steep drop in advertising revenue. The newsstand price for the Times' weekday and Saturday editions will go up to $2 effective June 1, up from $1.50. The 33 percent increase comes just 11 months after the third largest U.S. daily newspaper last raised its prices. The price for the national edition of the Sunday newspaper will rise to $6, an increase of a dollar. In New York, the Times' Sunday newspaper will cost $5, also a $1 more. The company that owns the Times lost $74 million during the first quarter as its advertising revenue plummeted by 27 percent from the same time last year. More on Newspapers
 
White House Continues To Fully Support Specter: Gibbs Top
The Obama White House, to this point, remains untroubled by the opposition of the Democratic Party's newest member, Arlen Specter, to the president's budget, the Employee Free Choice Act, and a public plan for health insurance. Asked about the Pennsylvania Democrat on Tuesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Specter continues to enjoy Barack Obama's "full support" and that the administration would do "what's necessary to see him re-elected," despite their divergence on these policies. "I think Senator Specter said it the day he made his announcement that he's going to make decisions on individual bills, but I think him switching to the Democratic Party was a belief that that's the party that could best serve his constituents," Gibbs said, in response to a question by ABC's Jake Tapper. "We don't get 100 -- we don't generally get 100 percent of any party voting for us, but we'll continue to try." The White House, of course, can't simply back away from Specter a week after it jubilantly praised his party switch. Vice President Biden played an integral role in securing that defection. But if Specter's political habits continue to be a topic of discussion at the briefing sessions, expect the White House to apply some private pressure to get the Pennsylvanian more in line with the president's prerogatives. Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on Obama's Budget
 
Daniel Altman: The Future of Journalism is... eBay Top
What is the future of large-scale journalism? Meg Whitman might know more about it than Rupert Murdoch. As television networks, newspapers and websites rely increasingly on freelancers, the market for journalism is heading in only one direction: auctions. For several years now, large news organizations have been closing bureaus, cutting staff and replacing full-time correspondents with freelancers. It's a shift that has helped news outlets to trim their budgets, but it does have a downside. Editors have to search hard to find reliable writers and reporters who do quality work, and freelancers have to pitch ideas endlessly to editors - usually several at a time - so they can piece together a decent living. The matching process between freelancers and editors is woefully inefficient. Editors don't often know about all the stories a freelancer is preparing and, if they already have a story in mind, they can't always find the right person to report it. Freelancers, meanwhile, have limited time for pitching their ideas and don't always know what interests editors, and so they might miss out on productive matches. As a response to this problem, some freelancers are already coming together to form clearinghouses for their work. The freelancers submit their ideas to a central database, and editors from various media can log in and pick what they like. But there's still a problem here, since more than one editor might be interested in the same story... and more than one freelancer might be willing to write it. With many potential buyers and sellers in the market for journalism, how can freelancers and editors assure themselves of the greatest possible gains from trade? The answer, as in many markets, is an auction - or, to be precise, two auctions. The first type of auction takes place at the freelancers' clearinghouse. The reporters post their pitches, editors bid on them, and the reporters can choose which bids to accept. As on eBay, they enter a binding contract to supply the story, as proposed, to the winning editor. Only accredited editors can see which stories are being offered, so that freelancers can't steal ideas from each other. The second type of auction takes place at a news organization. Editors post stories or coverage periods that they need, freelancers bid for them, and then the editors can choose who will do the reporting. The freelancers sign a confidentiality agreement that prevents them from sharing the story ideas with other news outlets. In both auctions, the offerings are updated on a 24-hour basis. An auction for a story about an assassination might last just half an hour, whereas one for a feature on birdwatching might last a week. It's a flexible process, as well as a quick and agile one. Entire arms of news organizations would be reduced to small groups of editor-traders who could use different combinations of freelancers every day. But the provision of news would become much more efficient, and thus more news would remain available to the public - which would be the first good news about the news in a while. (Daniel Altman, a former economics columnist for The Economist, The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, is writing a book about the future of the global economy.)
 
Frances Beinecke: Breast Cancer Risk and the Dirty Air We Breathe Top
Last week, the American Lung Association came out with its annual State of the Air report, and concluded that six out of every ten Americans live in communities with unhealthy air. I read these results not only as the head of environmental organization, but also as a breast cancer survivor. What does breast cancer have to do with air pollution? Most of us are familiar with the connection between smog-covered skies and asthma attacks. (See my colleague David Pettit's recent post about what Southern California's pollution does to its residents.) But there are also over 200 chemicals in air pollution--called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--that may also lead to cancer, including cancer of the breast. PAHs are the chief component of soot, and enter the air via burning of coal, oil, diesel, gasoline, wood, garbage, tobacco, and even charbroiled meat. I also read the study's results as a mother. My three daughters--who already have an elevated risk of breast cancer because of my diagnosis--have recently lived in the heavily polluted cities of Johannesburg, Amman, and New York. The United States has taken some steps to reduce air pollution--it still needs to do much more--but tens of millions of women and girls around the globe are exposed to alarmingly high levels of carcinogenic pollutants. What Air Pollution Can Do to Breast Tissue Scientists are just beginning to understand the connections between PAHs and breast cancer, but here is what they have discovered so far. PAHs cause mammary tumors in rats. PAHs appear to increase breast cancer risk in a variety of ways. Common PAHs mimic estrogen, and elevated levels of the hormone are known to contribute to tumor growth. But there is another, more insidious way that PAHs threaten our health. Once in the body, PAHs can bind to genetic material (DNA) and form something with the ungainly name of PAH-DNA adducts. These adducts jumpstart a series of cell changes that can short circuit cell signals, interfere with DNA repair within cells, and ultimately lead to DNA mutations. I know from my experience being tested for the so-called breast cancer genes that genetic mutations can lead your cells down paths you don't want them to go. Several studies have connected high levels of PAH-DNA adducts and breast cancer. One study, from the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project, discovered that women with the highest levels of PAH-DAN adducts had a 50 percent increased risk of breast cancer. Another compared breast tissue from women who had breast cancer with women who had benign breast diseases and found that the cancerous samples were two times as likely to have PAH-DNA adducts. PAHs, Cigarette Smoke, and Breast Cancer Risk PAHs don't just come from diesel trucks and industrial smoke stacks. They also come from cigarette butts. PAHs in tobacco smoke have been linked to breast cancer, but there is a window when women are particularly vulnerable: the teen years. If a girl is exposed to secondhand smoke during the time when her breasts are developing through puberty, she is more at risk for getting breast cancer later than a woman who breathes in secondhand smoke after she gives birth to her first child. A study sponsored by the California Air Resources Board found that women exposed to secondhand smoke have up to 90 percent greater risk of developing breast cancer. And in 2006, the California EPA concluded : "overall, the weight of evidence...is consistent with a causal association between [environmental tobacco smoke] exposure and breast cancer in younger, primarily pre-menopausal women." Now We Need Prevention There is a lot more we need to learn about the way PAHs interfere with human cell function, but we know enough to start protecting ourselves from this hazard. Here are NRDC's recommendations for reducing breast cancer risk for women and their daughters: • Pass tougher standards for diesel-burning vehicles, a leading source of PAHs. Thanks in part to NRDC, pollution from diesel trucks and even off-road vehicles has declined, but diesel fleets could still become cleaner. • Enforce the Clean Air Act provisions that protect the public against cancer risks greater than 1 in 1 million caused by toxic air pollution from industrial polluters. The Bush administration refused to achieve this level of protection and instead adopted policies accepting cancer risks as high as 250 in 1-million and even 400 in 1 million. The Obama administration can and should do better. • Forbid the use of federal funds in connection with any project--such as an expansion of diesel-heavy shipping terminal--that can be shown to increase cancer risk by more than 1 in a million. • Require that all existing coal-fired power plants adopt modern pollution controls. • Ban the incineration of industrial waste. • Extend nonsmoking bans in the workplace and public spaces to reduce the risks from secondhand smoke. Here are a few ways you can protect yourself from PAH exposure: • Stop smoking, urge those you love to stop smoking, and limit your time in the presence of smokers. • Avoid spending significant time in the freeway traffic, where in-vehicle exposure can run high. • Avoid living, working, or attending school directly adjacent to freeways, where pollution levels spike (for instance, within 500 feet). This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog .
 
Nicole Williams: 5 Steps to Take After a Layoff Top
Losing your job can be a major blow to your ego, not to mention your bank account. But once you recover from the initial shock of the news, you'll want to take these steps to help ensure a smooth transition into the next chapter of your life. 1. Make sure you have health coverage. Thanks to the new COBRA subsidies, most terminated employees are eligible for a 65% subsidy of their health insurance for nine months. You'll need to discuss the details with your company's benefits person and make sure you file the enrollment paperwork within 60 days. Depending on your situation, it may make more financial sense to use a spouse's health insurance or buy your own through a group plan. Just make sure you're covered, because the last thing you need is to pay emergency medical costs out of pocket. 2. Ask about references. Before you leave your office for the last time, be sure to find out their policy on giving job references. If you can, get a letter stating that your termination was based on budgeting constraints and not work performance. Also, exchange contact information with other pink-slipped co-workers so you can keep in touch after you leave the company. Maybe one of them is willing to be a reference or share job leads later on. 3. Let people know you're looking. Once you've tied up loose ends at your office, it's time to reach out to your support network. Friends and former classmates or colleagues will prove invaluable as you navigate this transition, both personally and professionally. Don't be shy about letting people know that you're back on the job market. The more specific you can be, the better. "I'd love to meet with art directors at midsize ad firms" is more useful than "Anyone need a graphic designer?" 4. Consider your living costs. Hopefully you've already saved up several months of living expenses. If not, now's the time to think about where you can cut costs. Maybe you can downgrade your cable TV or freeze your gym membership (though many gyms are offering more flexible rates to the unemployed). Try to live within your means, but don't deny yourself occasional treats like a glass of wine during girls' night or a blow-out before an important interview. Web sites like WhatWillYourPlanBe.com and BudgetPronto.com can help you prioritize. 5. Pursue your passion. Nobody needs to job hunt 24/7 (and frankly we wouldn't recommend it), so give yourself time to explore new interests or rediscover hobbies you didn't have time for while you were working. Some people take a trip of self-discovery after a layoff. Not everyone can afford to bankroll an around-the-world adventure, but you could enroll in a cooking class or start a blog to show off your writing. You might even discover a new career path in the process.
 
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld: California Acts to Stop Libel Tourism Top
Afflicted with one hazard of globalization -- the spread of the swine flu epidemic -- California's state Senate took measures to protect its citizens from another less deadly, yet terrorizing hazard -- the chilling effects on their freedom of expression by foreign libel judgments . California is the world capital of the entertainment industry, which provides major revenues to the state. To protect it, Senator Ellen Corbett (D), the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, initiated California's Anti-Libel Tourism Act (SB 320) , which on April 28, 2009 unanimously passed in the State Senate. Today, people who could never win a libel lawsuit in United States or California are suing in libel-friendly countries like the United Kingdom, where they obtain costly judgments against Americans. International treaties require U.S. courts to recognize and enforce these judgments. But SB 320, "would prohibit state courts from enforcing a defamation judgment obtained in a foreign jurisdiction, unless the court determines the defamation law applied in the case provided at least as much protection for freedom of expression as offered by the U.S. and California Constitutions." Without this law, every creative enterprise produced in California, and every individual writer, director and producer in California, is now at risk of financial devastation at the hands of Libel Tourists. In fact, all books, television and movie scripts, fiction and non-fiction, radio shows, web content and even video games, are exposed to this predatory legal action from abroad. Libel Tourism is a pernicious and growing phenomenon often used by wealthy and corrupt terror financiers to exploit plaintiff-friendly foreign libel laws and jurisdictions to silence American authors, producers and publishers. Ever since the attacks on America of September 11, 2001, foreign libel laws have become a potent weapon used by the forces of tyranny who seek to undermine our freedom. California's Libel Tourism Act can stop this invasive silencing of free speech and restore our liberty. American libel laws are very different from other countries' laws and strongly protect free speech. But in many countries, journalists can be jailed for criminal libel. Truth is often not a defense; publications can be confiscated; newspapers, film, television studios and broadcast stations can be shuttered; and writers and producers can be heavily fined and forced to publish adverse court orders, and repudiate as false what they know to be true. English laws, in particular, are so friendly to the plaintiff that the Times of London calls London "the libel capital of the world." In 2003, Bonus Books, a small California based publisher published my third book, Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It . In the thoroughly documented book, I showed how among many others, Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz funded al Qaeda, Hamas and other radical Muslim organizations. Mahfouz who does not live in England sued me in London for libel. But I live in New York, and my book was not published or marketed in England. Nonetheless, the English court accepted jurisdiction because twenty-three copies of Funding Evil arrived in England via Internet purchases. What happened next did not occur in a dark backwater of totalitarian repression like Syria, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, but in England. Although Mahfouz's suit has never been tried on merit, the British Court granted Mahfouz a judgment by default, awarding him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and other sanctions, including destruction of all copies of my book. In response, I sued Mahfouz in New York to declare his English judgment violated my rights under the First Amendment. That litigation led the New York Legislature last May to enact the "Libel Terrorism Protection Act" aka " Rachel's Law. " Illinois followed suit last August and Florida's "Libel Protection Bill," Passed by Florida's Legislature on May 4 . And the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, sponsored by Senators Lieberman, Specter and Schumer, and Rep. King and others, is pending in Congress. The bill is supported by most free speech organizations and major media outlets in the nation. Without the Anti-Libel Tourism Act, every creative enterprise produced in California is at risk of financial destruction at the hands of foreign predators. Thus, the State Legislature must protect California's writers, producers and publishers to guarantee the "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" expression the First Amendment was designed to protect. The Senate passed the bill, and I urge California's Assembly to pass the Anti- Libel Tourism Act without delay, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign it into law. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop It, is director of American Center for Democracy More on Arlen Specter
 
Thomas A. Bass: Derivatives: The Crystal Meth of Finance Top
In May 2008, Warren Buffett, the great "value" investor from Omaha and America's second-richest man, announced on the eve of his annual shareholders' meeting that he had lost $1.6 billion in bad bets on derivatives. Most of this loss came from shorting put derivatives on Standard and Poor's Index of 500 leading stocks and on three other foreign stock indexes in Europe and Japan. In laymen's terms, Mr. Buffett had placed a bet--a very large bet, which wiped out 64% of Berkshire Hathaway's profits--that global stock markets would rise instead of fall. Preparing for this year's shareholders' meeting, Mr. Buffett announced in February 2009 that his gambling on derivatives had resulted in an "accounting loss" of $14.6 billion, with $10 billion of this loss coming from his wrong-way bet that global stock prices would rise. On the eve of the meeting itself, on May 2nd, the New York Times reported that Buffett's "worst-case exposure" had risen to $67 billion. After the company's fourth quarter net income fell 96%, Berkshire was stripped of its triple-A debt rating by both Fitch and Moody's, and this was in spite of the fact that Buffett owns twenty percent of Moody's parent company. How could the Oracle of Omaha be getting burned by derivatives? Was this the same Warren Buffett who in 2002 warned that "Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal"? Buffett had promised his shareholders that he would avoid these "time bombs ... for ... the economic system," but here he was, seven years later, announcing that the crystal speed of derivatives had got a fearsome hold on him. Derivatives have got a fearsome hold on all of us, but my fellow journalists, who missed the story in the first place, are still avoiding the subject. They file an avalanche of twitters describing every move made by someone like Bernie Madoff, because this is a story anyone can understand. "I trusted the guy. I gave him my money. He stole it." Camera cues to tears glistening on cheeks. It's a wrap. But derivatives? Financial weapons of mass destruction? Shorting puts on the S&P 500? Whoa, man, how am I going to get my mind around this story? How am I going to explain the exquisite pleasure that comes from using this crystal meth of finance? Why do derivatives exist in the first place, and why have they become the world's biggest betting parlor, in spite of the fact that no one understands the size or nature of these bets? As the Oracle of Omaha confessed in his recent letter to shareholders , "Improved 'transparency'--a favorite remedy of politicians, commentators and financial regulators for averting future train wrecks--won't cure the problems that derivatives pose. I know of no reporting mechanism that would come close to describing and measuring the risks in a huge and complex portfolio of derivatives." Buffett goes on to say, "Auditors can't audit these contracts, and regulators can't regulate them. When I read the pages of 'disclosure' in 10-Ks of companies that are entangled with these instruments, all I end up knowing is that I don't know what is going on in their portfolios (and then I reach for some aspirin)." By now the entire world is joining Mr. Buffett in reaching for some aspirin. Why, for example, did AIG, the biggest financial meth freak on the street, refuse for six months to report on what it had done with the $200 billion that the United States Treasury has dumped into its coffers, and why is there still no public disclosure of the company's assets and liabilities? The answer to the first question is that both AIG and the U.S. government were too embarrassed to announce, in this age of global markets, that much of the bailout money has gone overseas, with sixteen of the top twenty-two recipients being foreign banks. And how much more money will be required to keep AIG in the game? No one knows the answer to this question, or, to quote the great physicist Neils Bohr, "Prediction is difficult, especially of the future." So why have derivatives got such a fearsome hold on our financial system? What is this speedy form of finance, and why, assuming that we will not be setting the clock back to Year Zero, will derivatives be around--transformed and traded differently, perhaps, but around--for the foreseeable future? A derivative is something that takes its value from something else. It is a bet on a bet, a second order gamble that General Motors stock will rise or fall or that the S&P Index of 500 stocks (which includes General Motors) will rise or fall. As the Oracle of Omaha wrote in his 2002 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders: "derivatives ...call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to be determined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices, or currency values. If, for example, you are either long or short [on] an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simple derivative transaction--with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index." These deals get more complicated when you start betting on household mortgages or car or student loans. The underlying transactions are sliced and diced into financial securities that are tied to interest rate fluctuations or some other aspect of currency or financial futures. The key word here is "future." If I sell you a share of General Motors stock, you pay me, and the deal is done. If I sell you a derivative contract with General Motors sliced into it, I am selling you a contingent future payment for which I could be liable twenty years down the road. This is why my friends in finance like derivatives. They see them as a kind of voting system, where today's prices reveal people's expectations about the future. But this is also why Warren Buffett calls derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction." Given the boom and bust nature of capitalism, betting that the markets will not explode twenty years down the road is a matter of faith, not finance. Exploded derivatives contracts are called toxic waste, and the institutions holding these bad bets are called zombies, because they would be bankrupt and buried save for the public handouts that keep them among the "living dead." We have borrowed these terms from epidemiology and Afro-Caribbean voodoo because the situation is really quite terrifying. Let's start with a simple question. How big is the market in derivatives? No one knows, because no one has been recording or regulating these contracts, many of which are traded over-the-counter via telephone calls or electronic signals from one banker or hedge fund trader to another. Derivatives are a kind of "shadow banking system" because the black box trading systems that deal in them can easily shade into black market operations good at money laundering, tax evasion, or outright theft. Tom Foremski, a former reporter for the Financial Times , and British analyst D. K. Matai, using data compiled in 2007 by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, estimate that the outstanding notional value of derivatives is $1.144 quadrillion. To help you get your mind around this number, we are talking about more than a thousand trillion dollars. This sum is made up of $548 trillion in listed credit derivatives and $596 trillion in over-the-counter derivatives, which includes trading on interest rates ($393 trillion), credit default swaps ($58 trillion), foreign exchange ($56 trillion), and commodities ($9 trillion). These numbers indicate the face value of contracts currently traded, but if any of these contracts were to default, which has been happening recently with some frequency--either because the financial markets have frozen up or the financial institutions trading these contracts have gone belly up--then the numbers would be discounted. So instead of saying that the world is currently on the hook for a quadrillion dollars in derivatives, let's cut the number in half and say that the world's derivative bubble is only $500 trillion. How big is $500 trillion? The gross domestic product of the United States is $15 trillion. The money supply of the United States--all the greenbacks currently in circulation--is also about $15 trillion. The gross domestic product of the entire world is $50 trillion. The total value of the world's real estate is $75 trillion. The value of the world's stock and bond markets is about $100 trillion. As you can see, the world's derivative markets--even with a "half-price" sticker of $500 trillion--are huge, and if somebody as smart as Warren Buffett can get burned by trading derivatives then imagine how the rest of us suckers are faring. Lest you think that you, oh, virtuous reader, would never dabble in derivatives, stand warned that TIAA-CREF, Fidelity, and other guardians of your financial futures are big players in the world's derivative markets. As the Oracle of Omaha wrote in 2002: "The range of derivative contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, it seems, madmen)." Again, I hate to disabuse any of you readers who are Marxists, Maoists, anarcho-syndicalists, or goldbugs, but, unless we crank the clock back to Year Zero and bring Pol Pot out of the jungle to reorganize our financial system, derivatives are here to stay. A few flavors might disappear off the menu. One example is the formerly-trendy product known as "portfolio insurance," which blew up during the crash of 1987, when the markets began gapping downward so fast that the "insurance" written against this risk proved worthless. The market in mortgage-backed securities--frozen last fall but thawed this spring with TARP money--will return. The market in asset-backed securities (covering things such as student loans), which was dead in its tracks last fall, until being resurrected with TALF money, will return. The market in credit default swaps (CDSs), which was suffering from an absence of liquidity that resulted in hair-raising volatility, will return. Foreign exchange rate derivatives, commodity derivatives, equity-linked derivatives, all will be with us next year. And why is this? Derivatives are fun. Trading shares in G.M. is grandad's game. Trading puts on the FTSE with a LIBOR chaser is the hepped up work of testosterone-driven bonus boys. Derivatives are useful. They speed up the velocity with which money changes hands, and increased velocity means more volume. Playing the overnight float in the Asian markets and then zipping your money back for a day's work at the Merc effectively doubles your bank, even before you get the mojo going that allows you to leverage your investment ten-fold. Derivatives fill out the mathematical space of financial markets (an argument made best by quants and computers). They lay off risk--or so say my financial friends, when they are not being blown up by bad bets. Derivatives do the work of Adam Smith's invisible hand. They transmogrify individual greed into the collective good. They exist not because they are complicated, but because people find them useful--and I am not talking merely about the dealers who profit from them. The world economy sits on top of the world financial markets, and there is no hope of engineering an economic recovery without a functioning financial system. This is why the government is printing money and pumping it as fast as possible into TARPs, TALFS, and other bailouts designed the get the markets back in business--not the markets that deal in stocks and commodities, but those that operate in the high-speed world of derivatives. This is the big financial story of the day, and any journalist interested in doing more than compiling an updated version of Gustave Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas should be covering this story. More on Warren Buffett
 
"Queer Eye"'s Carson Kressley Will Teach You How To Talk To Boring Straight People (VIDEO) Top
If your gay and bored by most straight people then this ad is for you. Just dial 1-800-strayt-7 to order your set of Carson Kressley instructional videos which will teach you how to negotiate the mind-numbing world of heterosexuality. WATCH: Straight Talk w/Carson Kressley from Carson_Kressley Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Funny Or Die
 
Romney Cracks Joke About Palin Beauty -- But He Made People's "Most Beautiful" List Top
So the latest tempest raging inside the seemingly endlessly fractious teapot known as the GOP involves one-time Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and naturally, it involves something very, very, very, very shallow. See, last week, Sarah Palin was honored with inclusion on the list of the "Time 100," Time magazine's annual list of people they find to be "influential." Well, when asked about the matter by CNN's John King, Romney dissed the list, and Palin. Ben Smith chronicles Romney's epic putdown : KING: As you launch this effort, anyone who picks up Time magazine this week and sees the 100 most influential people, will see two Republicans in that magazine. They'll see Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Is that helpful, hurtful, indifferent? CANTOR: You know, they are two individuals that have a lot of ideas, and our party should be about ideas. That's what this effort is about and the National Council for a New America, and that is what they're about. So I don't think any of us should have any monopoly on the ideas. And I know that there are some who like to make it all about personalities, but it's about ideas. It's about how we take this country forward. ROMNEY: John, I'd like to have a lot more influential Republicans. I think there are a lot more influential Republicans than that would suggest. But was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people? I'm not sure. If it's the most beautiful, I understand. We're not real cute. Oh yeah! Take it from Mitt Romney, second-place finishing fraudbot extraordinaire -- he's a super-serious, not-cute Republican that would rather be thought of as influential than pretty! Of course, it wasn't long ago that Romney was being honored for listicle inclusion himself: From the People Magazine 's 50 Most Beautiful People issue, May 13, 2002 : If you ever meet Winter Olympics organizer Mitt Romney, feel free to praise him for helping to rescue this year's Games from a bribery scandal and a deficit of nearly $400 million. Just don't tell him he's arrestingly handsome. "Nothing embarrasses Mitt more than when someone says he's good-looking," says Cindy Gillespie, a colleague on the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Yet now that Romney, 55, who lives in Belmont, Mass., is the GOP candidate for governor of his home state, it's hard not to notice his blinding smile. Says Olympic skeleton gold medalist Jimmy Shea, 33: "I'd be really excited to look like him when I get to be his age." Political critics like to paint the 6'2" Mormon as a too-perfect Ken doll. The son of former Michigan governor George Romney amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune as a venture capitalist at Boston's Bain Capital and has been married 33 years to his high school sweetheart, Ann, with whom he has five sons. But childhood pal Tom McCaffrey insists that while Romney's "family looks like a Gap ad, which makes us all a bit cynical," he is a man of "immense credibility and character--which shows in his face." OMG! Romney must have been SO EMBARRASSED when this issue with the photoshoot he willingly participated in came out and hit the newsstands! How will we ever feel his influence if we cannot stop ourselves from noticing his "blinding smile" and telling him for "arrestingly handsome" he is! Anyway, this video, via Wonkette , should settle the issue: [Would you like to follow me on Twitter ? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here .] Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on Sarah Palin
 
Ian Welsh: America's Essential Political Insanity Top
Walk with me a while and imagine you are mad. Crazy. Insane. It's an interesting sort of insanity-you see the world as something other than it is. You are dead convinced that people are out to get you, but these people have almost no means to harm you and fear your retaliation greatly, because you're a powerful person and they are weak. You believe that you are hale and hearty; but in fact you're ghastly, obese and ill. You think you're rich, but in fact you're poor. You think you have the best doctor around, but in fact your doctor is worse than almost every other doctor and charges 50% more than them. You think you're tough, and you certainly haven't let the fact that two ninety pound weaklings seem to be able to stand up to you get in the way of that. You think that you have the most advanced technological toys, that what you have is the best, and once you did, but these days everyone else seems to have more advanced stuff. The illness goes deeper though, a deep decay in your brain. The parts of your brain that make most of the decisions for your body think everything is wonderful. They seem only able to take in sensations from the taste buds these days, and for the last thirty years you've been on a rich diet. So they think everything's great. Your once lean body, packed with muscles, has been replaced by a flaccid one, paunchy and fat, but somehow the key parts of your brain don't know that. They don't feel your sore back, they don't hear the broken down breathing and they don't see the gut hanging over your belt. The you I'm referring to, as I'm sure many have figured out by now, is the US. For years I've been writing for the US and observing it carefully, and I've found it one of the most interesting problems I've encountered in my life. Because America and Americans are very unpredictable. Now, of course, the first thing I thought was "it's me," and in a sense, that's true. Yet, here's the thing, I have a very good record of predicting what will happen in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. And when I get it wrong, I can look back and easily figure out why. Yet I've never visited any of those countries and really, know very little about them. On the other hand I grew up imbibing American media, know American history well, have visited America a number of times and spent 8 years in jobs that required me to deal with multiple Americans daily. Odd. Very odd. And something I've discussed with other foreign observers of American society and politics. The first clue to what was wrong came around the time of the Iraq war. It was obvious, dead obvious, to everyone outside of the US and to US citizens who were spending a lot of time parsing news, that the war was a joke and that Saddam had no nukes and was no threat to the US. Most Americans, however, didn't get that. The reason, of course, was propaganda. Fair enough. Every country whips its citizens into war hysteria with propaganda. But what was truly remarkable wasn't that, it was that somehow the majority of Americans, over 70%, thought that Iraq was behind 9/11. Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing. Remarkable. Americans went along with going to war with Iraq then because they thought Iraq had attacked them and had nukes and could attack them again. A complete propaganda tissue of lies. But if you believe it all, well of course Iraq needed to be attacked. What looked to the rest of the world as crazy was entirely logical. It was, however, still insane. If I see a tentacled monster from the fourth dimension attack me and I respond by grabbing a knife and slashing apart my next door neighbour who's waving at me, well, I had a logical, coherent reason for what I did, but I still murdered him, and I'm still insane. This is the first type of insanity in the US and it runs deep. I often feel like I spend more time correcting outright lies, outright propaganda, than anything else. Just this week I had to explain to a left wing blogger (who should know better) that single payer health insurance is cheaper and gives better results than private insurance system . Now in the US this is somehow still in doubt, but that's insane-this isn't in question, every other western nation that has single payer insurance spends about 1/3 less than the US and has as good health metrics or better either in most or all categories. This isn't something that's up in the air; this isn't something that is unsettled. This is a bloody FACT. Americans think they are the most technologically advanced society in the world, yet the US does not have the fastest broadband, the fastest trains, the best cellphones, the most advanced consumer electronics (go to Japan and you'll see what I mean) or the most advanced green energy technology. In the primary season Ron Paul was repeatedly cut out of media coverage and John Edwards was hardly covered. The majority of Americans thought that Edwards was running as the most right wing of the Democratic candidates. Huckabee was constantly called a populist when his signature tax program would gut the middle class and slap the poor onto a fiscal rack. And when all is said and done, politicians are still running on slashing taxes and having that make up for itself, while the US runs a balance of payments higher than any other country post World War II has ever done without going into an economic crash. That's one type of insanity-thinking the world is something that it isn't. The second is worse, in a sense. When Diamond wrote his book on why societies collapse he came to the conclusion that it occurred when elites weren't experiencing the same things as the majority of the society-when they were isolated from the problems and challenges the society was facing. For 30 years ordinary Americans haven't had a raise. And despite all the lies, Americans are beginning to get that. But for the people in charge the last thirty years have been absolutely wonderful. Seriously, things haven't been this good since the 1890's and the 1920's. Everyone they know-their families, their mistresses and toyboys, their friends-is doing well. Wall Street paid even larger bonuses for 2007, the year they ran the ship into the shore, than they did in 2006 when their bonuses equalled the raises of 80 million Americans. Multiple CEOs walked away from companies they had bankrupted with golden parachutes in excess of 50 million. And if you can find a Senator who isn't a millionaire (except maybe Bernie Sanders) you let me know. Life has been great. The fact that America is physically unhealthy, falling behind technologically, hemorrhaging good jobs and that ordinary Americans are in debt up to their eyebrows, haven't seen a raise in 30 years and live in mortal fear of getting ill-because even if they have insurance it doesn't cover the necessary care-means nothing to the decision making part of America because it hasn't experienced it. America's elites are doing fine, thanks. All they can taste, or remember is the caviar and champagne they swill to celebrate how wonderful they are and how much they deserve all the money federal policy has given them. This is the second insanity of the US-that the decision making apparatus in the US is disconnected from the results of their decisions. They make sure they get paid, that they're wealthy, and let the rest of society go to hell. In the end, of course, most of them will find that the money isn't theirs, and that what they've stolen is worth very little if the US has a real financial crisis. The third insanity is simpler: it's the wealth effect. At the end of World War II the US had about half the world's economy. Admittedly that's because Europe had been bombed into oblivion, but even when Europe rebuilt the US was still far, far ahead. The US was insanely rich and powerful. See, when you're rich you can do stupid and unproductive things for a long time. There are plenty of examples of this but the two most obvious ones are the US military and the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs hasn't reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US's prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the war on terror is just the war on drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years does anyone seriously say "wait, this doesn't work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons?" Of course not, if anything people compete to be "tough on crime." What's the definition of insanity, again? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results? Then there's the US military. It costs, oh, about as much as everyone else in the world's military combined. It seems to be at best in a stalemate and probably losing two wars against a bunch of rabble whose total budgets probably wouldn't equal a tenth of one percent of a US appropriations bill. And it is justified as "defending" America even though there is no nation in the entire world which could invade the US if the US had one tenth the military. But the US could (not can, they are now unaffordable, but could) afford to have a big shiny military and lots of prisons, so it does. Lots of people get rich off of both of them, lots of rural whites get to lock up uban blacks and lots of communities that wouldn't exist otherwise get to survive courtesy of the unneeded military bases and prisons which should never have been built. Insane-believing things that aren't true. Insane-decision makers are cut off from the consequences of their decisions and in fact are getting reverse feedback, as things get worse for most Americans and as America gets weaker and poorer, they are the richest they've ever been. Insane-so rich that no one will stop doing things that clearly don't work and are harmful, because people are making money off the insanity. All of this is what makes predicting the US so surreal. It's not just about knowing what the facts are and then thinking "ok, how would people respond to that?" You have to know what the facts are, what the population thinks the facts are, what the elites think the facts are, who's making money off of it, and then ask yourself if these facts are having any real effect on the elites and if that effect is enough to outweigh the money they're making off of failure (how many of them have children serving in Iraq? Right, not urgent to fix.) And then you have to go back to the facts and ask yourself "what effect will these have even if they're being ignored." Facts are ugly things, they tend not to go away. All of which makes the US damn near impenetrable, often enough even to Americans. But here's what I do know-you can get away with being nuts as long as enough people are benefiting from you being insane. When the credit cards are all maxed out, when the relatives have stolen even the furniture, suddenly all the enablers go away and the kneebreakers or the men in white pay you a visit. At that point you can live in the real world, or you can go to the asylum. I wonder which way the US will go?
 
Ryan Haydon and Stefani Piermattei: Real Housewives of New York City Liveblog - Charity Wives Top
Grab a margarita, it's Cinco de Liveblog! Join us for the season finale tonight! 10 pm ET. Real Housewives - May 5th More on Reality TV
 
Sahil Kapur: Dear GOP: Evolve or Perish Top
Once upon a time, the Republican Party had ideas. Agree or disagree with them, they campaigned on convictions. Politics has always had its share of mudslinging, but elections once resembled contests between opposing beliefs -- small government versus active government; low taxes and deregulation versus a leadership invested in its constituents' lives. Not anymore. The Republican Party hasn't been about ideas for many years. 9/11 kept them afloat during the first half of the 2000s while they successfully played the national security card. By 2006, Americans began to catch on to the party's corruptions and moral bankruptcy. The economic crash of 2008 hammered the final nail in the coffin for Reagan-era values, wherein the boundless trust in the free market to solve all of America's problems proved catastrophic. What does a party do when its core ideas have failed, when has nothing substantive to run on? Resort to ad-hominem attacks , scare tactics , trifling wedge issues , propaganda and lies -- anything but honest, reality-based dialogue. Every politician's game revolves around power, and its intoxicating lure makes good people do bad things. Once your moral compass breaks, you're susceptible to any wave in the sea you think will lead you to shore. Just ask John McCain. Gasping for air, this is what the Republican Party has devolved into. Politically, their catering to the Dixiecrats , religious fundamentalists , corporate extremists and, lately, the Limbaugh dittoheads may have secured some constituencies. But substantively, these cynical pacts have drained the party of its integrity and convictions. The losers have been the American people -- as well as every country influenced by America, which is most of the world. Now, after their late hero 's philosophy turned out to be something of a fantasy, Republicans are even more beholden to inane platforms like doubting evolution , denying global warming , stripping rights from same-sex couples, prolonging the issue of abortion, vilifying immigrants and Muslims, pretending Islamic militants will take over America , supporting the sadism that is torture, and so on. They're stuck appealing to the basest elements of the American consciousness. Bill Clinton said it best on The Daily Show in 2004: "If you're a Democrat, you win when people think." Voters tend to think most when they're facing adversity. The recessions of 1992 and 2008 led to Democratic victories. The better economic conditions of 1988 and 2004 allowed Republicans to snag voters by touting the Pledge of Allegiance and flag-burning amendments . But this strategy isn't sustainable. Ignoring the real issues doesn't really work when people are losing their homes, their health care and their retirement savings -- largely because of your policies. The verdict is in: a dismal approval rating for Republicans alongside a popular Democratic president with a soon-to-be filibuster-proof Senate majority. Unless the GOP plans to make its opponents die of laughter, party leaders will take this nadir as an opportunity to restore common sense and dignity. There's an important place in American politics for honest conservative thought, but sadly, no party represents it anymore. The only way for Republicans to escape this rush to oblivion is to reject the elements that are disintegrating their ideological core. Believers in limited government and individual liberty shouldn't legislate personal issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Instead of denying climate change, devise practical, market-based solutions to mitigate it. Support the free market, but stop ascribing magical powers to it. End the silly wars against science and intellectualism . And crucially, stop letting religion infiltrate politics to such a chilling degree -- secularism is perhaps the most sacred American value. Breaking from tradition won't be easy for the party of traditional values. But if Republicans want to remain a serious political outfit in the long-run, they need to kick their bad habits and stand for real principles. This means resisting the cheap but politically advantageous tides and instead leading the right-wing constituency in a more thoughtful and scrupulous direction. Do it for your country, conservatives. There's no better or more important time than now. Nothing will be more ironic than if the party that snubs evolution winds up extinct because it refused to adapt. More on GOP
 
Kevin Roose: Surprises from Liberty University: What I Learned as an Undercover Evangelical Top
When I stepped on to the campus of Liberty University for my first day as a new transfer student, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew that Liberty was a Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded in 1971 by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell to train "Champions for Christ." I knew it had required courses in Creationist Biology and Evangelism 101, a student body whose political views ranged from conservative to arch-conservative, and a 46-page code of conduct - called "The Liberty Way" - that outlawed drinking, smoking, cursing, dancing, R-rated movies, and hugs that last for longer than three seconds. I knew all those things, which is why I decided to transfer to Liberty from Brown University, one of the nation's most liberal colleges, and write a book ( The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University ) about my experience. Before Liberty, I'd never been exposed to conservative Christian culture - my parents are secular Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader - but during my sophomore year at Brown, I decided to break out of my left-wing enclave and learn about my Christian peers by experiencing their world firsthand. For an entire semester, I took Bible classes, lived in Liberty's single-sex dorms, and sang in Rev. Falwell's church choir, trying to expand my horizons while studying "abroad" in a subculture more foreign to me than Barcelona or Tokyo. A slew of adjectives could describe my Liberty semester - "enlightening," "difficult," and "weird," to name a few - but perhaps the most apt one is "surprising." Some of the surprises I saw at Liberty were off-putting and worrisome. I remember opening my first Creationist Biology exam to find the question: "True or False: Noah's Ark was large enough to accommodate various species of dinosaurs." (According to my professor, the answer was "True" - since dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth after the Flood, they would have had to find a way to squeeze onto the Ark. He suggested that they could have been teenage dinosaurs, so as to take up less space.) Also troubling was Liberty's extreme social and political conservatism, which made for classroom lessons like "The Consequences of Immoral Sex" and textbook chapters like "Myths Behind the Homosexual Agenda." A few surprises were strange but harmless. I'm thinking of my spring break mission trip to Daytona Beach, Florida, where a group of Liberty students and I tried (and mostly failed) to convert drunken coeds to Christianity. Or when I paid a visit to "Every Man's Battle," Liberty's on-campus support group for chronic masturbators. (Insert your own "hands-on research" joke here.) But many - maybe even most - of the surprises I encountered at Liberty were much more pleasant. For starters, I learned that my stereotypes about evangelical college students - that they were all knuckle-dragging ideologues who spent their free time writing angry letters to the ACLU - were almost entirely wrong. Far from crazy, the friends I made at Liberty were some of the warmest, funniest, most intellectually curious college students I've ever met. After a few weeks of frantic acclimation to life in the dorms (aided by a Christian self-help book, 30 Days to Taming Your Tongue , that helped me kick my cursing habit), I began to fit in on my hall, and I found that Liberty students had a lot of the same day-to-day anxieties as my friends back at Brown. They gossiped about girls, complained about their homework, and worried about their post-graduation plans. Many even doubted their faith. I was also surprised to learn that Liberty's strict religious discipline can actually be a good thing. I've always assumed that college students and freewheeling social climates went hand-in-hand, but most of the students I met were thankful for Liberty's rules. (Although I did find a few subversive Facebook groups, like one called "I Hug For Three Seconds, Sometimes Four.") A sociologist named Margarita Mooney has shown that college students who attend regular religious services report being happier, more diligent, and more satisfied with their college experience than students who practice no religion. I still don't consider myself an evangelical Christian, but I can understand now what millions of Christian college students see in faith-based education, and why Liberty's enrollment has grown at a rate that few colleges, secular or religious, have ever matched. Since the book came out, I've taken some heat from people who have argued that, by going to Liberty with an open mind, I was turning a blind eye to intolerance - or worse, that I'd been brainwashed by my time under Rev. Falwell's tutelage. But no community is all bad, and to dismiss Liberty as a place of wall-to-wall insanity is to reduce it, and the evangelical movement that birthed it, to a lazy caricature. I still disagree with a lot of the values Liberty stands for, but seeing the human faces on the other side of the American culture wars made me question my own assumptions and realize that, in some ways, I had just as much to learn about tolerance as the most hard-line fundamentalist. We can all be surprised by our ideological opponents. We just have to give them a chance.
 
Carrie Prejean TOPLESS PHOTOS Out: Miss California Denounces Skin Pictures (PHOTO) Top
**SCROLL FOR FULL PHOTO** Miss California Carrie Prejean topless pictures are making their way to the web. In a photo posted on Thedirty.com , a tan brunette in pink underwear with her arms across her chest is seen mugging for the camera. Prejean has since released a statement, seemingly an implicit confirmation that this photo, and others reportedly being shopped around, are indeed her. As her hair is still brown, one assumes it was before her pageant-funded breast implants . The statement reads: "My comments defending traditional marriage have led to intimidation tactics that seek to undermine my reputation and somehow silence me and my beliefs, as if opinion is only a one-way street. "I am a Christian, and I am a model. Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos. Recently, photos taken of me as a teenager have been released surreptitiously to a tabloid website that openly mocks me for my Christian faith. "I am not perfect, and I will never claim to be. But these attacks on me and others who speak in defense of traditional marriage are intolerant and offensive. While we may not agree on every issue, we should show respect for others' opinions and not try to silence them through vicious and mean-spirited attacks." More on Celebrity Skin
 
Scott Mendelson: Wolverine proves mighter than piracy, swine flu, and mediocrity! Huff Post weekend box office rundown for 05/04/09. Top
Overpowering a month-early leak of the work print, theoretical fears of swine flu, and some of the worst buzz of any summer film not named G.I. Joe or Year One , X-Men Origins: Wolverine powered its way to a terrific $85.05 million opening weekend . The film opened to $35 million on Friday, which included $5 million in midnight screenings. So, if you count the midnight screenings as part of the Friday total (as we always do here, since the studio made the choice to hold said midnight engagements), that gives the picture a decent 2.4x opening day-to-weekend multiplier. For comparison, last year's big summer kick-off picture, Iron Man , opened to $102 million with midnight screenings, giving the picture a 2.6x. So, amazingly enough, not only did the film score a boffo opening day, it actually didn't completely collapse over the weekend. To be fair, I am biased, believing the film to be stunningly not entertaining, but this would-be fourth X-Men picture actually had a comparable multiplier with the previous X-Men pictures. For comparison, X-Men: The Last Stand had a three-day multiplier of 2.3x (to be fair, it opened on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, so it had an extra holiday Monday to take in movie goers). X2: X-Men United opened at 31/85, giving it a 2.74x. And the original X-Men ($20 million opening day/$54 million opening weekend), had a 2.62x. So, the good news is that Hugh Jackman and company weathered an unimaginable storm of bad luck to score a weekend knockout anyway. It is the 8th biggest opening weekend for a comic book adaptation. It is the nineteenth biggest opening weekend of all time, becoming the astounding 21st film to open to over $80 million (all since November, 2001). Remember that pointless figure for 'third biggest opening weekend for a fourth in a series'? Yeah, Wolverine just blew past Fast & Furious to claim that pointless touchstone. Oh, and Wolverine now has the biggest opening weekend of 2009. Is there bad news? Perhaps. In a marketplace that seems more and more front-loaded, we have now seen almost a year since a film crossed the $200 million mark (that would be The Dark Knight back in July, 2008). In that time, we have seen six $50 million+ openings that have failed to even reach $200 million. Twilight , Quantum of Solace , Madagascar 2 , Watchmen , Monsters Vs. Aliens , Fast & Furious ... four of those titles opened well north of $60 million. The closest was Twilight , which opened to $69 million and ended up at $191 million. Monsters and Aliens is now at $185 million and has two weeks to get there before Night at the Museum 2 effectively kills it (and 'MvA' will lose many of its IMAX screens to Star Trek this weekend). Point being, $200 million is not guaranteed, especially with this particularly short-term franchise. Quite frankly, X-Men pictures has the worst legs of any major franchise. The first film, despite getting solid reviews and decent word of mouth from fans and casual moviegoers, still barely made 2.88x its opening weekend. It opened with $54 million and ended with $157 million. And, despite rave reviews, rapturous response from moviegoers, and being considered one of the best comic book movies ever made, X2 opened with $85 million and closed with just $215 million, a downright pathetic 2.5x weekend to total multiplier. As for the 'Last Stand'? That critical and word of mouth turkey opened with a spectacular $122 million in four days (Memorial Day weekend, natch). It closed with just $235 million. If we take the four day number, it gives X-Men: The Last Stand a shockingly poor 1.9x w2t multiplier. But lets play fair and take the three day Fri-Sun portion. Factoring in just the $105 million three-day number still gives the third X-Men picture a poor 2.2x. So, if we play best case scenario and give Wolverine 'legs' on par with the first X-Men picture, that gives it a super-solid $245 million. Not gonna happen, but let's pretend. Anyway, an identical performance to X2 gives it $215 million, same as X2 . If Wolverine gets hit by word of mouth, stiff competition from the allegedly fantastic Star Trek , genre competion from Terminator: Salvation , and, yes, that bootleg, it could see a quick and brutal collapse (do you think anyone who has the bootleg but still saw it in theaters this weekend is going to spend the time and money for a repeat viewing at a threater?). I'm not saying it's going to be Watchmen -terrible (that one opened to $55 million and closed with $108 million... a terrifying 1.96x weekend-to-total multiplier), but a similar to X-Men: The Last Stand 2.2x performance would bring about a domestic total of $187 million. Nothing to sneeze at, but its not a total that gets X-Men Origins: Magneto or X-Men Origins: Gambit greenlit. As always, next Friday's numbers will tell the tale. Once again, the culprit is budget versus plausible expectations. Had Fox kept the budget close to the announced $90 million, this would have been a grand slam home run no matter how well it held up. But alleged reshoots and other behind the scenes turmoil ballooned this thing well past the budgets for X-Men and X2 . I've said this quite a bit, but at some point studios have to stop budgeting every major franchise picture at such a high cost that they MUST break records to even make their money back. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past opened to a mildly underwhelming $15.4 million, which is about what the less-star powered Made Of Honor grossed ($14.7 million) against Iron Man 's much larger opening weekend (compared to Wolverine ) last year. I guess Patrick Dempsey is a bigger rom-com draw than Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner. The Battle For Terra , an ambitious 3D animated sci-fi action film about benevolent aliens and murderous, imperialist humans, completely tanked with just $1 million on 1100 screens. Looks like Lionsgate's hot streak is officially over. Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself (9/11/09) and Saw VI (10/23/09) cannot come soon enough. Other news? Well, Paramount is now a little nervous, as Star Trek once again sits in the unenviable slot of being the 'second big film of summer', a place that has housed mega flops ( Speed Racer , Poseidon ), mid-budget performers ( Monster In Law , The Horse Whisperer ), and an overbudget domestic dissapointment that was saved by overseas muscle ( Troy ). Since 1995, when Die Hard: With A Vengeance overpowered Crimson Tide in the second weekend of summer, only a single film ( Troy - summer 2004) has opened to number one as the second big flick of summer. While Star Trek certainly has the buzz and the reviews to theoretically break the curse, there is no guarantee that non-geeks will show up to sample the updated version of that nerdiest of sci-fi staples (no offense intended, I'm a geek too). Paramount has made not one false move with the advertising campaign since November, so now it's up to fate. Scott Mendelson More on Swine Flu
 
Phil Zuckerman: Who Would Jesus Torture? Top
You might think that after all those tens of millions of Evangelical Christians watched The Last Temptation of Christ , they perhaps developed at least a mild disdain for governments that hire soldiers to inflict violent brutality upon their prisoners. Guess not. A new national survey just released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals that it is precisely those folks who ate up Mel Gibson's blockbuster -- church-going Evangelical Christians -- who are far more likely to support the use of torture than non-religious Americans. And of several groups representing various religious orientations, it is secular Americans that are actually the group most opposed to the use of torture. What's the deal? I thought Christians were into things like mercy, love, and forgiveness. Not water-boarding. Maybe I missed it, but of the thirty or forty times that I've read the New Testament -- particularly the Sermon on the Mount -- I just don't recall the "Thou Shalt Torture" passages. It is fascinating that on this clear question of morality, church-going Christians seem to be the most, well, challenged. One might be tempted to view this survey as some sort of anomaly or outlier. But it isn't. Rather, it is simply the latest of many such surveys reporting what a small minority of us secular folk already know: that when it comes to numerous issues of morality and ethics, religious Americans actually come up quite short on a host of measures when compared to their atheist and secular peers. Consider what many recent surveys have found in recent years on a variety of issues of moral/ethical concern: • The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq: it is the most religious Americans that have been most in favor of the war, while it is the least religious Americans who have been the least supportive. • Women's equality and women's rights: it is the most religious Americans who are least supportive of women's rights and equality, while secular folk are the most supportive. • Full civil rights and equality for homosexuals: again, the correlation is quite strong, with religious people being less supportive of gay rights and scoring higher on measures of homophobia than atheists and secular folk. • The death penalty: the more religious are the most in favor, while the less or non-religious are the most opposed. • General treatment of Prisoners: Strong God-believers and regular church-goers generally favor harsher treatment and strict retribution, while atheist tend to favor more humane treatment and rehabilitation. • Doctor-assisted suicide: the religious tend to oppose, the secular tend to support. • Stem cell research: ditto. The list could go on and on. Whether we are talking about environmental protection or corporal punishment for children, sane drug laws or responsible sexual education, religious Americans are more likely to take a less ethical, less merciful, or less rational position than atheists and secular people. And just to top it off, sociological and psychological studies since the 1950s have consistently shown that strongly religious Americans, on average, tend to be more ethnocentric, prejudice, anti-Semitic, racist, intolerant, nationalistic, and authoritarian than those who forgo church and don't believe so strongly in God -- if at all. How strange, then, that "immoral" is a word people often associate with atheism, while "moral" is a word people often associate with religion. Studies show the exact opposite correlation. Are there lots of immoral atheists? You bet. Are there lots of moral Christians? Hell yes. But study after study consistently finds -- this one on torture being merely the most recent - that when it comes to questions of how we view others unlike ourselves, what kinds of rights we want other human beings to enjoy, or how we generally seek to treat other people, our fellow Americans with the little crosses around their necks and the fish on their bumpers just don't appear as loving, merciful, or forgiving as those of us without. Phil Zuckerman, Ph.D. is a professor of Sociology at Pitzer College and the author most recently of Society Without God (NYU, 2008).
 
Luca Sofri: Call him "papi" (Berlusconi's pictures have the web joking) Top
The story of Silvio Berlusconi's divorce made the news a couple of days ago in Italy, and it is not going to end quickly. But a small and funny part of the story lies in a handful of pictures the italian PM has exhibited to show that a visit to an 18 year old "daughter of a friend" to celebrate her birthday, a week ago, was nothing private or embarassing. Thing is, the pictures are very strange, with Berlusconi looking like a cardboard image, and a suspect quality about them. So the italian web has been joking the whole day about details in every picture (a hand on Berlusconi shoulder has apparently six fingers, he looks taller than he is, his smile is exactly the same in every picture) and the debate was later featured on news websites . Later in the night Berlusconi repeated on tv the pictures are true (they are, actually) and his wife's desire to divorce has been fuelled by lies about him told by leftist newspapers: nothing happened beteween him and the teenager (who told in an interview she calls him "papi", a nice word for "daddy") and it is not true that his party wanted to elect to the european parliament some sexy tv showgirls. More on Italy
 
Gibbs: No Supreme Court Decision This Week Top
Batting down suggestions from longtime Republican Judiciary Committee member Orrin Hatch, Robert Gibbs said on Tuesday that the president would not have a nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter in the next few days. "It's not going to happen this week," said the press secretary, when asked to respond to comments made by the Utah Republican suggesting a choice was imminent. At the tail end of the Tuesday briefing session, Gibbs was asked whether a decision could be expected sometime next week. He did not immediately have an answer. Other than providing some detail on the timeline of a Court choice, the topic remained relatively un-addressed on Tuesday. Gibbs repeated the president's desire to find a nominee who was "best qualified for this position." "Obviously, we want to move this process along in a timely fashion so that the next Justice can take over on the Court the next time the Court begins to hear cases in October," he added. He also said that while Obama is looking for a "diversity of experience and background" in his Supreme Court choice, he also values experience "outside" of the legal world. Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Patrick Sauer: Nativism's Swine Flu Field Day Top
Guest Post by Tess Thatcher (This originally appeared in The News (www.thenews.com.mx)) As H1N1 hysteria peaked late last week, Mexicans in US border areas had an extra symptom to worry about: the tide of swine flu phobia turning against them. On the eve of what was meant to be May Day empowerment, José Ramón from Sonora was fretting the "general fear" throughout Tucson would have ramifications for migrant workers like him. "This is just another of the things they will say..." he worried, making listless use of the hand sanitizer being offered around at his coordinated day labor pick-up spot. It unfortunately wasn't just talk show whackos drawing the tenuous link between migrants from Mexico and the spread of the H1N1 virus ("swine flu" turned out to be politically incorrect. Israel is going with "Mexican flu"). "Swine flu underscores the need for illegal immigration enforcement," reads a statement from Arizona's Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio - whose anti-immigrant hysteria-mongering, granted, has earned him national notoriety and a couple of federal investigations. As of Thursday, Arpaio's deputies have been taking to the field masked and gloved against the disease of the 'illegal aliens' - reinforcing a link for the public with an image worth 1,000 words. While top officials have been clear throughout that we won't 'close the border,' any mention should have emphasized the wrongheadedness, beyond the unfeasibility, of such a step, to stem this rash of territorialists manipulating paranoia to advance anti-immigrant agenda. Maybe they deemed the supposed links between between illegality and infectiousness thin to the point of benign. "[T]he very nature of illegal immigration - evading authorities, and unchecked and untraceable contact with different people - actively promotes the spread of a communicable disease," warns Sherriff Joe. Whereas every contact made by each Cancún Spring Breaker was traced? - and uh oh: Is Joe inadvertently arguing for universal access to check-ups? The opportunism of other opponents of immigration outed itself yet quicker: Surely it's dangerous for so many potentially contagious Hispanics to gather for their pesky May Day marches... U.S. Border Patrol themselves were less concerned. A spokesman for the Tucson sector reported business as usual. Apparently they who shan't march together can still be detained together: the San Diego sector was letting the 47-person busloads of apprehended aliens accumulate in "limited" holding cells as always. As for practices on those tinted-windowed deportation buses back across the line, the government can't now or ever speak for that: that's contracted out to Wackenhut. At the Federal District Court in Tucson, mid week saw suspension of 'Operation Streamline' - the trial en masse of up to 70 migrants for the felony of illegal entry, shuffled through daily just as fast as their shackles and bellychains allow - but it was back on as of Thursday. Focus on illegal enterers tellingly ignores the tens of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border through legal points of entry every day. Border towns like Nogales, Sonora, are homes to countless who live their lives on both sides of the border, crossing a handful of times weekly for work or to see family in Nogales, Arizona, on a limited-mileage 'laser visa.' The economies of these cities are interlinked and co-dependent. Respectful of this, ports of entry were operating pretty exactly as always throughout the loudest swine whine. Those entering the U.S. were given a handout. The federal government knows closing the border is an inoperable idea, strongest in the minds of those far from it - and that the economic repercussions would be a guaranteed level 6 alert. The focus should be on education and vaccine development, and above all panic-tempering and avoidance of scapegoating of the kind that keeps people from seeking help for fear of stigma. In Obama's words, to worry about the border after the outbreak would be like "closing the barn door after the horses are out." Now let's quit blaming the horses for what the swine brought. More on Swine Flu
 
Berlusconi Divorce Saga: Leader Denies Relationship With Teen Top
ROME — Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday the suggestion by his wife and the Italian media that he had a relationship with an 18-year-old girl was a "lie" and demanded his wife admit she was wrong if their relationship is to survive. Berlusconi went on a popular, late-night talk show on state-run television to give his side of his story, saying his wife Veronica Lario had "fallen into a trap" and believed lies in the media. Lario has said she wants a divorce, citing Berlusconi's flirtations with younger women. Berlusconi said, "I believe that someone who is charged with public functions can only accept the continuation of a relationship if there's an admission" that Lario's accusations were based on lies, "and if she publicly declares she was in error." In a statement last week, Lario voiced public outrage over media reports that Berlusconi's political party was lining up TV showgirls and starlets as European Parliament candidates. She also lashed out at the premier's attendance at the 18th birthday party of Noemi Letizia, claiming he had never come to the coming-out parties of his own children. Berlusconi said any suggestion that he had a relationship with Letizia was a "lie." "If there was anything spicy or less than clean in the relationship between the premier and a woman younger than 18, wouldn't it seem crazy for the premier to go to a public function and be photographed all over the place?" Berlusconi asked on "Porta a Porta." Letizia has been quoted as saying she calls Berlusconi "papi" or "Daddy" and has been photographed sporting a gold and diamond necklace the premier reportedly gave her as a birthday gift. Berlusconi said he ended up at Letizia's party by chance, because her father wanted to see him and he happened to be in Naples at the time on official business, near the restaurant where the party was under way. Berlusconi also denied that showgirls were among his party's European Parliament candidates. But he defended the record of the TV starlets in his Cabinet and in parliament, saying they far outmatched the men. He said he was an "extraordinary" father to his three grown children with Lario, saying he paid for his daughter Barbara to fly all her friends to Las Vegas for her 18th birthday. Despite the acrimony, Berlusconi said that all he wanted was a "sea of goodwill" with Lario. "About my relationship with her, I don't want to add anything else," he said. More on Italy
 
Tyra Banks' Hair At The Met: Love It Or Lose It? (PHOTOS, POLL) Top
Tyra Banks showed up at Monday's Met Gala wearing a bun on the front of her head. What do you think of her 'do? Photos below. Or see the Costume Institute Gala's best-dressed , worst-dressed and, of course, what Madonna wore. *Follow Huffington Post Style on Twitter and become a fan of Huffington Post Style on Facebook *
 
Tara Sonenshine: America's Next Move on Public Diplomacy Top
Judith McHale, the former CEO of Discovery Communications, has been named, subject to Senate confirmation, America's next Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy. When she arrives at the State Department, Ms. McHale will find a stack of new (and expensive) proposals on her desk from various corners of government and the private sector on how to improve America's image abroad. Over the last 18 months, hardly a month has passed without some new set of recommendations from institutions concerned with public diplomacy. They call for everything from funding a new non-governmental organization aimed at harnessing private sector expertise to doubling the budget for academic exchange programs. Some experts want to completely overhaul the State Department and the international broadcasting operations of the U.S. government. Others want to re-invent the U.S. Information Agency, which held sway over public diplomacy for many years. The best advice we can give Ms. McHale is to take advantage of the tools and techniques in global communications and the best lessons learned in managing international conflict: 1. International tensions are better dealt with before they escalate. Just as preventive diplomacy is effective in stemming the tide of violence, so, too, can preventive public diplomacy used to soften the ground and prepare international audiences for what to expect from the U.S. 2. Effective public diplomacy, like effective diplomacy, is about cooperating with others, locally, on-the-ground, not imposed from Washington. 3. Just as we re-build war-torn societies, we have to re-build relations and alliances around the world. Public diplomacy is an integral part of America's ability to help relieve international tensions by working with others, in a two-way dialogue, using communications and dialogue. Ms. McHale will no doubt understand, from her experience with Discovery Communications, that the key ingredient to a successful public diplomacy strategy lies in networking and collaborating with people around the world and meeting them where they are -- on Facebook, on the web, in the public square. We have to be in listening mode: open to criticism and receptive and responsive to ordinary citizens who are joining what Ms. McHale's predecessor, James Glassman, called "the grand conversation" -- the interface of ordinary people chatting, debating, and discussing the world. We will need a new "information corps" along the lines of the diplomatic corps or the Peace Corps -- information specialists who can deliver messages and engage publics from Embassies to American Centers to a foreign press center, that should be re-energized in the U.S. The new Undersecretary of Diplomacy has a big job in front of her, and an abundance of options. Now the hard work begins. Sheldon Himelfarb is Associate Vice President of the Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding Center of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace. Tara Sonenshine is Executive Vice President of the United States Institute of Peace.
 
Jeff Biggers: Green Commencement Speech: OSU President Gee Should Resign from Massey Board Top
At the 2009 Annual Stockholders' Meeting of Massey Energy on May 19, 2009, board member and Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee will have an extraordinary opportunity to turn a public relations nightmare into a national teaching moment: As one of our nation's esteemed university presidents, he could provide a breakthrough in the clean energy and climate change debate by publicly resigning his position from the board, and calling on Massey Energy to end their devastating mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia. Or, President Gee can sit quietly, collect his board of directors check for an estimated $219,000, and continue to be complicit in one of the most scandalous human rights and environmental violations in the country. As co-chair of the Energy Initiative Advisory Committee of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, President Gee plays an unusually prominent role in the clean energy and climate destabilization debate among our higher education institutions. He has called on our nation to "solve the enormous challenge of energy independence by coalescing our vast human talent, creativity and innovation." In one press release, he hailed: "This century's Sputnik moment awaits our solution." Earlier this spring, Gee steered Ohio State University into a leadership role in a highly touted federal partnership for "Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes." U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown praised OSU's initiative for "ground-breaking efforts of the Ohio State University and Dr. Gee's leadership to transform our nation's energy system. From green energy research to green energy manufacturing, Ohio is ready to lead the nation as we create a green energy supply line that will turn around our economy and stem the tide of climate change." Therefore, Gee's misguided and incomprehensible defense of Massey Energy--the fourth largest coal company in the nation, and one of the most aggressive and denounced mountaintop removal violators in American history-- completely derails any meaningful legacy and efforts for clean energy and academic integrity. Yesterday, in fact, ten citizens groups from Ohio, the Appalachian coalfields, and around the nation called on Gee to uphold a higher sense of academic standards and resign from the board. Posted on the Ohio Citizens website, the letter recalls Gee's promise in April:"If I can't make a difference on a board then I will not serve." The letter continues: "Dr. Gee joined Massey's board in 2000. Since then, Massey has dramatically increased its mountaintop removal operations. It also violated the Clean Water Act over 4,500 times between January 2000 and December 2006, leading to the largest U.S. EPA lawsuit settlement in history. Whatever Dr. Gee has said or done behind closed doors at Massey, it is now clear that he has not made a difference. The company continues -- to this day -- to commit the worst environmental atrocity of our time, mountaintop removal." For more information, see: http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/coal/gee.html ProgressOhio, as well, has called on Gee to resign, and has done a brilliant analysis of the conflict between Gee's interests and Massey's brutal policies in Appalachia. See: http://www.progressohio.org/page/community/post/brianrothenberg/CqRl In a now legendary interview in April with the OSU student newspaper Lantern, Gee attempted to depict his role on the board of Massey as a way of working for environmental change within the tent. As a Director, he is also chair of the Massey Board's committee for Safety, Environmental & Public Policy. But he didn't stop there. In the interview (see the footage below), Gee went out of his way to not only defend Massey's coal mining agenda, but incorrectly justify its outrageous environmental record. Gee declared: "If you take a look at Massey's record, it has one of the best environmental records in the country." In truth, since Gee's directorship began in 2000, Massey's mountaintop removal operations have destroyed thousands of acres of hardwood forests, sullied and jammed untold miles of streams with mining fill, and unleashed a campaign of blasting and coal dust that has had made life unbearable for anyone in the strip-mined areas. Mountaintop removal has ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process, preventing any diversified or sustainable economy, and led to high poverty rates in the strip-mining areas. In the same year Gee joined the board in 2000, a Massey subsidiary in eastern Kentucky was responsible for the largest coal slurry spill in history (at that point), leaking over 300 million gallons of toxic sludge into the area's waterways and aquifers. As the former president of Brown and Vanderbilt universities, a former dean of the West Virginia University law school, and a one-time clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, Gee also made the remarkably unfounded comment that Massey has, "as any major coal company, been accused of certain issues, of which have been litigated and which they have won." In truth, just in recent years, Massey has been forced to pay $20 million in penalties for dumping toxic mine waste into the region's waterways; last year, Massey paid a record $4.2 million for civil and criminal fines in the death of two coal miners in West Virginia. As President Gee knows, OSU students, like the faculty and administration, are held to a code of conduct. Students, faculty and administrators must: Not engage in any activity that tends to compromise the academic integrity of the university; endanger health or safety; destroy property; use dangerous weapons or devices; and exhibit dishonest conduct. If President Gee applied that same code of conduct to Massey Energy, the company he keeps would fail miserably. Here's the interview with the Lantern: More on Barack Obama
 

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