Wednesday, September 16, 2009

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John R. Bohrer: The GOP Is Too Crazy To Be Racist Top
Not to go all Maureen Dowd on you, but today's Republican Party is a lot like the line from that old Brando movie, The Wild One . Somebody asks Brando, "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?" And he says, " Whaddya got? " With all due respect to former President Carter, he is wrong when he says that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man... that he's African American." Perhaps someone who grew up in the rural South as Carter did is more likely to see race as the basis for the Republicans' outrageous behavior over the last few months. It is undeniable -- undeniable -- that people like Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck are consciously stoking racial fears. And yet, the color of the President's skin does not matter to the lunatics dictating the direction of the Republican Party. I mean, it matters in that it's icing on the cake -- but they were baking regardless of all that. Scores of Republican activists would've accused President Hillary Clinton of setting up "death panels." Rallies would've been filled with Hitler mustaches painted on the portrait of President John Edwards. A grandstanding GOP congressman would've shouted "You lie!" at President Bill Richardson. Why? Think back to the fall of 2007 (even earlier than that, maybe). Hillary Clinton was the Democratic front-runner, staking out a cautious path to the White House. And what did we see on what seemed like every Republican website? Big ads for black t-shirts showing Hillary with a red slash over her neck, sandwiched between the words, "RE-DEFEAT COMMUNISM; 2008." The point is that there is no method to their madness. The hardcore whatever-they-are's at these rallies would be there no matter what. How did anyone ever get the idea that these protests are actually about something? And I don't just mean policies or race, I mean anything . It just goes to show that if you say something loud enough and long enough, you will drown out the truth. Remember how these rallies started organizing during President Obama's first month in office? It was so very clear that they were about nothing -- that they were parties for sore losers and extremists. Yay! Bring some crazy signs! Wrap yourself in the flag and call everyone else a traitor! Woo-hoo! The media, politicians, people in general saw all that for what it was: a bunch of loonies who were bummed that the guy they hate won. That's one thing. People like that have always been around. They will always be around. What's different is that a political party has never adopted them before. Because as the rallies met again and again, the Republican Party and their echo chamber got even more into it each time. This was, they said, proof of grassroots opposition to the President's policies. Wrong. It got bigger because Republican bigwigs realized they couldn't compete with Democrats on ideas; that Americans will reject the Bush-Cheney portfolio they continue to use today. So, they figured out something not-so-secret: policy discussions make for boring TV; loud anti-everything rallies make for great TV!... Who needs ideas, anyway? So they're putting everything they've got into feeding this beast of boisterousness. Are there some racists out among the crowd? Absolutely. Is race an overtone? You bet. But -- and it's a big ' but ' -- is "the overwhelming portion" of it based on race as President Carter contends? No. More on Glenn Beck
 
Deborah Tannen: The Secret Bond That Sisters Share Top
Cecile stood up, straightened her back, and stretched her arms out wide, dramatizing how her older sister had always protected her. Then she said: "Sometimes when we talk on the phone, we run out of things to say, but we don't hang up. We put the phones down but keep the line open; just knowing the other is there is a comfort, like hugging a cat." I knew immediately that I'd use these two images in You Were Always Mom's Favorite! , the book I was writing about sisters: the open phone line represented the ineffable connection between sisters, and the older sister's protectiveness was a reminder of the crucial role that birth order plays throughout sisters' lives. But several months later, when I asked Cecile about her sister, she replied, "I don't know. I'm not speaking to her." I was stunned -- and wondered how I could honestly use Cecile's example. Then I realized: a cat doesn't always want to be hugged. The emotions stirred by sisters are so visceral, they can swoop low as readily as they can soar. I would keep Cecile in my book, to capture that truth. Among the over one hundred women I interviewed, for every paean to an older sister who was protective and devoted, I heard one described as "bossy" or "judgmental." And for every younger sister praised as a delightful "blithe spirit," one was resented for failing to do her share of work. This combination of praise and complaint are two sides of the same coin-privileges and liabilities built into birth-order positions (though they aren't the same in all families, and much of what I found is true of brothers as well). No wonder adult youngest sisters sometimes sit back and let older ones do the work. They may hesitate for fear they'll be told they're doing things wrong -- as they often were in childhood and may continue to be when they're with older sisters. And no wonder oldest sisters as adults can come across as judgmental and bossy-growing up, they usually did know better, and many were expected to tell younger ones what to do. Being oldest comes with privileges like staying up later, sitting in the front seat next to Mom, and starring in far more baby pictures. In her novel Harriet and Isabella , Patricia O'Brien quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe: "The first child is pure poetry. The rest are prose." Many children who are not first-born sense this. Some spend the rest of their lives trying to achieve poetry. And sometimes they succeed so spectacularly that their first-born sisters spend the rest of their lives wondering how they got reduced to prose. There's nothing wrong with prose -- unless it's compared to the majesty of poetry. Comparison is a liability for all sisters. We all at times wish for things we don't have -- possessions, achievements, or opportunities. But we miss them more if a sibling got them. Seeing what your sister has is enough to make you want that very thing. No matter how much parents try to treat children equally, kids spot differences. "She got blue and I got pink," a woman recalls, "so I wanted blue." It had nothing to do with the inherent value of blue or pink; it was about green -- as in, The grass is always greener in your sister's yard. There is one gift, though, that all sisters possess in equal measure- having a sister. Though spouses may divorce and lovers may split, sisters are sisters forever. She's someone with whom you can laugh and be silly like when you were kids; who still sees in you the child you were; who shares your past and your memories of it. And anything a sister says carries meaning from all the conversations you've had before. That's why a word from a sister can start you laughing-or send you into a tailspin. I cited that insight when I wrote about Cecile. But the example didn't end that way. Before the book went to press, Cecile called to say that after more than a year, she was speaking to her sister again, and they were again hanging out together with the phone line open. The year they didn't speak had not severed the connection between them. Quite the opposite, it was because of the depth of her feelings for her sister that she could have been so hurt that she cut off communication. Yet she must have known, even when the phone line between them was temporarily disconnected, that her sister was still there. No less than the solace of keeping each other company across an open phone line, that year of silence was an eloquent testament to the sisters' enduring connection. Deborah Tannen is professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, and author of many books, including the just-published You Were Always Mom's Favorite!, from which this essay is adapted.
 
Michael Wolff: White Guys Can't Apologize Top
What do we mean when we say we're sorry? Or what do we mean when we say, "Say you're sorry!" Apologizing has become some formal social, political, and media condition. It's a ritual and nicety like a thank you; it's part of a political process, like a campaign; it's a media event like a season finale. If you do it, and do it well, you're excused and even coddled. If you fail to do it, especially when people are demanding that you do it, well...you're not very nice. Actually, you're pretty peculiar: Because why wouldn't you do it? It costs you nothing, you get credit for it, and you get high-rated air time. Kanye West, for his recent outburst on music video award show, gave many apologies which seemed to have redounded to his credit and public profile. Representative Joe Wilson, for his recent outburst on the floor of Congress, failed to apologize enough and for this was reprimanded by Congress . Democrats, according to the Times , "would not have pursued any action at all had Mr. Wilson taken the floor and apologized to his colleagues." Continue reading on newser.com
 
Stephanie Gertler: Painting the Dream Top
My grandfather died in 1986. I remember him as a strong and strapping man. I believe that he was brilliant and passionate, and yet others have told me that he had a tendency towards arrogance: That was a side of him I never saw -- or didn't notice. Maybe it was the mere presence of my mother that allowed the image of my maternal grandfather to remain. Despite my grandfather's stay in a nursing home until he died of pneumonia after years of Alzheimer's ... despite his declining mental state and increasing physical frailty, I managed to see through and past his deterioration. Until now, I wondered why my mother didn't visit him with the frequency that I did -- going to his nursing home every Sunday with my two older children (the third was born after he died), bringing treats and offering company, letting him play the silly games with me that we played when I was small. Poke me on the belly so I would look down and then chuck me under the chin. I pretended to fall for it every time. Often, my mother sent me with food she'd cooked, and later jars of baby food when his capacity to chew became more difficult. It is only now that I realize it wasn't that she wouldn't go with the frequency that I did, but rather the pain of seeing him that way was too great for her. I had that generational degree of separation, coupled with the innocence and ignorance of youth that allowed for easier visits. He was the grandparent. He was supposed to be "old." For my mother, she was the generation who was losing the shield of her parents (her mother died in 1979) -- becoming the "old" one as he declined, and the oldest generation once he was gone. I have come to realize we are not new as a "sandwich" generation. We just talk about it more. Sometimes it feels as though I am being handed clues to a riddle. Solve this one, something taunts me. Or maybe I am just a storyteller at heart, trying to create a tale - one that provides explanations to so many unasked questions. Perhaps both elements are valid. Several months ago, before she died, I found a picture of my mother and myself: She was 50 and I was 20. If you ask my siblings, they will tell you she was 52: I choose to believe she was the age she claimed to be. Why rob her of that small secret now? The picture was taken at a dinner party in my parents' home. She was always photogenic. I was, and am, not. But in this picture, the camera loved us both. If I take a piece of paper (which I did) and cover parts of our faces, I see that I have her mouth (something I always knew and saw) -- lately, something I recognize in more ways than one. I see the similarity in our musculature, and the way we carry ourselves. Most importantly, we both just look so happy. She, in particular, is beaming; I am shyer. I had the photo blown up to an 8x10, and it sits prominently now on the shelf in our living room. It is painful and comforting at once. All I know is that, for sure, it erases the last five years of her life when she barely resembled herself. In the photo, my mother remains. And so I look at home movies and photographs, read letters from my mother, remember vignettes from the past, phrases she used, battles and conversations we had, and I realize that so many of the memories are from what were my mother's own middle years - the place where I am now. I ask myself if I am projecting as I come up with answers to the riddles, or is it that suddenly I am my mother's peer as she is frozen in time in that photograph. I like to think that I have come to know her in a different -- and more sympathetic -- way. Did my mother feel the way I do in her fifties? Where does she leave off and where do I begin in this quest for truth about her and myself as women? How strange it has been to witness my father/her husband in the last five years without her there to "run interference." Perhaps the duality of the situation rests in both my mother's absence and my father's overwhelming solo presence: It's been odd to see him more prominently as a man and less like a father as I deal with him without her cautions, her advice on how to "handle" him with her as my ally. Illuminating? Hardly. I could forego the perspective. Rather, it feels voyeuristic -- a nearly forbidden glimpse into what life with this man was like for my mother as I often walk in some of her shoes. Although the terrain is not entirely unfamiliar, it is unsettling and odd as I see the woman/my mother roughly the same age as myself now in the photograph. How much of all this is subject to my own interpretation as her daughter? My husband's wife? My children's mother? Myself? What did my mother think/feel/want/eschew as my father's wife? A woman? Sometimes it feels like she and I bleed into one another, challenging the most competent forensic scientist - or perhaps forensic psychologist - to differentiate the two personae. And then there are my own twenty-something children. Once, I was the woman -- the mother -- who nurtured them and the neighborhood. Ours was the house with the overstocked refrigerator, everything in place, extras of pillows, toothbrushes, and bed linens. The woman/mother who knew the answer to "where's that shirt I wore last Thursday?" The one who had a cabinet filled with school supplies, a Halloween costume basket, a menagerie of dogs, hamsters, ducks, frogs and rabbits and still said it was fine if the "team" came for dinner. Yesterday, my oldest son went for a run and ended up at our apartment in the middle of the day. He has a key. I was in the kitchen when I heard the door open. I was caught off guard. Didn't have my "face" on. Hadn't showered yet or made the bed. He stayed for a bit, and we talked. I gave him some left-overs -- hardly on the grand scale of years before. A part of me was self-conscious. Did he pause to think that I wasn't that woman I used to be -- the one who could care for the neighborhood? Did he see me as "old" or simply as a woman with grown children who now lives alone with her husband? I wasn't sure. Last night I dreamed my mother came to me and kept murmuring the word "solipsism." Is this because for me she finally exists both as a woman and a mother with the "woman" part becoming more of what I embrace? Or is this because finally, upon her death and in the photograph, she exists in ways she couldn't when once upon a time she was a wife and a mother and her world was not entirely her own? I have searched her name on websites and credit reports, and except for her obituary, she didn't "exist." Is that why she came to me in a dream and whispered solipsism? She and I are suspended in time in the photograph. We are a continuum, ageless and connected with a touch of innocence. I look back at what neither of us knew then - before she lost her parents, before I lost her. I make up a story as our arms touch one another, as she beams and I look shyly at the camera. It occurred to me this morning that I now own the dress she wore in that photo. She gave it to me about 20 years ago, deciding it was "too young" for her. Even in my dream, I neglected to ask about her reality. And yet if I had, even as we sleep, how much would a mother reveal to her daughter? Do dreams come true only in dreams? Van Gogh said, "I dream of painting and then I paint my dream." Perhaps, in some ways, I am trying to do the same.
 
Leo W. Gerard: Obama Plans to Reform Economy, Not Just Health Insurance Top
Let's go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country's first African-American president. Try and remember what it was like before discussion of health insurance reform raised voices, a time when instead it raised concern. Recollect Aug. 7, 2007, during the Democratic primaries, when then-60-year-old retired and disabled steelworker Steve Skvara stood at a microphone during a political debate and told his story with tears in his eyes and a catch in his throat. He'd worked more than 30 years at LTV Steel in East Chicago, Ind., and assumed like many who earned pensions and retiree health coverage that those benefits were guaranteed. But then LTV went bankrupt and ditched its obligations. Skvara told the candidates: "Every day of my life, I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and I can't afford her health care. What's wrong with America, and what will you do to change it?" Skvara asked that question two years ago when 45 million Americans lacked health insurance. Now 46.3 million are without it. And yet, teabaggers and Republicans are bent on preventing reform. They want to ensure only one thing - that another million Americans suffer no health coverage two years from now. President Obama invoked Skvara's name at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh on Sept. 15 in a speech about the middle class. Mostly Skvara is a symbol of health insurance failure. But to Obama, he's an emblem of something much bigger. It is a struggle of economic philosophies. For the past 20 years, the winning view has been that government should give breaks to big corporations and rich individuals. Obama told the AFL-CIO he believes in something different -- an economy built on a vibrant and wide middle class. Here's what he said: "For over half a century, the success of America has been built on the success of our middle class. It was the creation of the middle class that lifted this nation up in the wake of a great depression. It was the expansion of the middle class that opened the doors of opportunity to millions more. It was a strong middle class that powered American industries, propelled America's economy, and made the 20th Century the first American Century. And the fundamental test of our time is whether we will heed this lesson; whether we will let America become a nation of the very rich and the very poor, of the haves and the have nots; or whether we will remain true to the promise of this country and build a future where the success of all of us is build on the success of each of us." Because of the extraordinary cost of health care in this country, insurance is a middle class issue. Health insurance can make or break a family - place it firmly in the middle class if an employer provides a good plan or bankrupt it if a family loses coverage during a serious illness. Obama said as much to the AFL-CIO: "We'll grow our middle class by finally providing quality, affordable health insurance in this country." Just this week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report showing premiums for family coverage rose 130 percent over the past decade. They now average $13,375 , which is about the same as the entire annual take-home pay of a minimum wage worker. Coverage is not affordable. The price of it is pushing families down the economic ladder. Look what it did to Skvara. He had been a middle class steelworker and remained in the middle class after retirement. But he moved toward poverty after the LTV bankruptcy cost his wife her health insurance coverage. Loss of health insurance and the ensuing medical bills robs families of their life savings, their homes, everything until they're bankrupt. Skvara asked the candidates what was wrong with America and what would they do to fix it. Obama's plan for fixing health insurance would forbid dropping or denying coverage because a person is sick or has a pre-existing condition. He wants the public option to provide competition so that rates are affordable. That public option would cover Skvara's wife - at a reasonable cost. So he could remain in the middle class and not find himself asking heartbreaking questions at public meetings. The teabaggers are apoplectic because this isn't just about health care. This is about the values of a government. The Obama administration fails to fawn over the affluent. Instead, Obama talked of downtrodden workers in the former Jones & Laughlin Steel mill in Aliquippa. Bosses there fired a dozen workers shortly after the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935. The workers, mostly union organizers, challenged the dismissals all the way the U.S. Supreme Court, securing a landmark win that not only got them their jobs back, but also affirmed the constitutionality of the labor law that led to the burgeoning of union organizing, and the growth of America's large, stable middle class. To win that case, Obama told the AFL-CIO convention, workers of different ethnicities and faiths had to work together and stick together. That will be necessary to win this struggle to reform health insurance as well. But that reform is only the first part of Obama's plan for the middle class: "We will make possible the dreams of middle class families and make real the promise of the United States of America." That's worth fighting for. More on Health Care
 
Judith Ellis: Teabaggers Should Be Taken Seriously Top
For all of my friends and foes out there who believe that the essence of Tea Parties is legitimate please take a listen to this hypocritical leader, Mark Williams, who tried to mask his racist ideology by saying that the Tea Parties are all about Americans standing up for their rights after being "attacked" by their own government. (Pay particular attention to his incendiary word choices and tone when describing President Obama and the administration. By the way, where was he eight years ago?) His appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 was quite revealing. Mark Williams likened the Washington Tea Party to a "picnic" celebrating America where parents and kids gathered. (Wasn't it odd that there were no Native American, African American, or Hispanic American families in attendance?) The picnic line was reminiscent of some other picnics where charred bodies hung from trees amid joviality and revelry with parents and kids in attendance eating bar-b-que. Mark Williams tried to say that the Washington Tea Party was about the honesty of Americans who want to take back their government from big corporations who gave them the money to hire buses and print despicable signs such as "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy." There will always be nutcases, as there were during the "so-called peace demonstrations," he explained. In attendance were simply fringe elements that did not represent the whole. He painted the Washington Tea Party the with big bold red, white and blue strips that a non-white racist like, Maureen Dowd, could deride. The large majority of those in attendance were rational Americans who love their country and despise interference with the government but were all for such interference in cases like the Terry Shiavo case where they injected themselves and the government in between a husband and wife. This was all sounding pretty good and could have deceived many listeners until Anderson Cooper called Williams out on his hypocrisy: "What you're saying makes sense to me here when I'm hearing what you say but then I read on your blog, you say, you call the President 'an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief .'" Mark Williams did not back down from this statement. This is who President Obama is, he insisted. Now, how can such a movement led by the like of Williams be legitimate? It cannot be said that everybody in attendance in Washington over the weekend were racists. It cannot perhaps be said that everybody at picnics where black bodies burned were racists also; they simply went along. What is most certainly known for sure is that the majority of people have never changed policy for good or ill. History proves this repeatedly, again and again throughout the centuries, in country after country. So, will history repeat itself yet again for ill? More on Maureen Dowd
 
Jonathan Kim: ReThinking Norma Rae: A Union Icon Falls Fighting the Healthcare Industry Top
Crystal Lee Sutton, whose struggle to unionize a North Carolina textile mill became the inspiration for the 1979 film Norma Rae , died last Friday at the age of 68 after a long battle with brain cancer. Sally Field won the Oscar for best actress for her performance portraying a thinly-veiled version of Sutton. Watch my ReThink Review of Norma Rae here: In an interview last year with the Burlington Times News, Sutton described battling her health insurance provider for the care she needed. [Sutton] went two months without possible life-saving medications because her insurance wouldn't cover it, another example of abusing the working poor, she said. "How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death," she said. "It is almost like, in a way, committing murder. " Sutton eventually received drug and chemo therapy and underwent two operations. The AFL-CIO took up donations on her behalf and her husband worked two jobs to pay for the care she needed. When you watch Norma Rae , which was shot in a real textile mill using workers as extras, you can see why Sutton worked so bravely and tirelessly to unionize the J.P. Stevens mills and improve conditions for textile workers. The noise in the mills is deafening, the pay meager (Sutton was paid $2.65 an hour to fold towels), the machinery dangerous, the hours long and sweaty, and the air clouded with cloth fibers to clog the lungs of workers on the production floor. Whether it was preventing injury, sickness or death from dangerous working conditions or preventing the slow slide into poverty, Sutton realized that the fight to unionize was literally a fight for the lives of working people. While deaths in the workplace have dropped considerably over the decades, I wonder if that's because that job has been outsourced to the health insurance industry, which has realized that there's a lot of profit to be made from (often preventable) death and suffering. It is now a given that workers should not have to needlessly put their health or lives at risk simply so a company can increase its profit margin, yet that's exactly what the health insurance industry did to Sutton and continues to do on a daily basis. We should be thankful that Crystal Lee Sutton's struggle to help the working poor has been immortalized in a film as great as Norma Rae for generations to enjoy and be inspired by. Though the struggle to unionize America's workers (and pass the Employee Free Choice Act ) is still being fought, maybe now we need a film dedicated to the working sick, who are forced to endure needless suffering because an insurance company won't cover their treatment, and the working scared, who are one accident or illness away from financial collapse. Or we could pass real healthcare reform. That would be the best tribute of all. For more ReThink Reviews -- the only (and, therefore, best) political movie reviews anywhere -- go here . More on Health Care
 
Malou Innocent: No More Troops for Afghanistan Top
As public support for the war in Afghanistan hits an all-time low, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen has endorsed an increase in U.S. forces there. But President Obama should strongly resist any calls to add more troops. The U.S. and NATO military presence of roughly 110,000 troops is more than enough to carry out the focused mission of training Afghan forces. Committing still more troops would only weaken the authority of Afghan leaders and undermine the U.S.'s ability to deal with security challenges elsewhere in the world. The Senate hearings this week on Afghanistan are displaying the increased skepticism among many top lawmakers toward a war that is rapidly losing public support. At a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Mullen, "Do you understand you've got one more shot back home?" alluding to polls showing most Americans oppose the war and oppose sending more troops. "Do you understand that?" Sadly, a common view among policymakers and defense officials is that if America pours in enough time and resources--possibly hundreds of thousands of troops for another 12 to 14 years--Washington could really turn Afghanistan around. But while military leaders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal say a new strategy must be forged to "earn the support of the [Afghan] people," Washington does not even have the support of the American people. The U.S. does not have the patience, cultural knowledge or legitimacy to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty-stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, and stable electoral democracy. And even if Americans did commit several hundred thousand troops and pursued decades of armed nation-building--in the middle of an economic downturn, no less--success would hardly be guaranteed, especially in a country notoriously suspicious of outsiders and largely devoid of central authority. The U.S. and its allies must instead narrow their objectives. A long-term, large-scale presence is not necessary to disrupt al Qaeda, and going after the group does not require Washington to pacify the entire country. Denying a sanctuary to terrorists that seek to attack the U.S. can be done through aerial surveillance, retaining covert operatives for discrete operations against specific targets, and ongoing intelligence-sharing with countries in the region. Overall, remaining in Afghanistan is more likely to tarnish America's reputation and undermine U.S. security than would withdrawal. Also this week, a group of "realist" scholars and activists (including some of my own Cato colleagues) have written President Obama urging him to reconsider America's commitment in Afghanistan. See the write up from Politico on the letter here . More on Afghanistan
 
Amie Newman: What's So Scary About Home Birth? Top
"The Perils of Home Births " screams the title of the segment at the bottom of the screen in a Today Show attempt to cover the realities of homebirth in the United States. "Is avoiding the clinical nature of a hospital setting for a homebirth worth the risk? " asks the reporter. Never mind that the question seems in part to answer itself with the presumption that there is greater risk inherent in a home birth. The answer further seems rooted in the devastating story of a young couple expecting their first child. As the story is reported, the couple employed a certified nurse midwife ("CNM") to birth at home. After a four-day labor, the frightening voice-over tells viewers, "overseen not by doctors but by the midwife's staff..." the baby is born without a heartbeat, rushed to the hospital and dies from suffocation, a result of becoming entangled in her own umbilical cord. A devastating story with which we all sympathize, to be sure. Should this story, however, be used as a reason to employ scare tactics and to encourage non evidence-based decision making for pregnant women looking into their childbirth options? As Alison Cole, midwife-in-training, notes in her RH Reality Check reader diary on the segment, "My heart aches for this family, but their experience does not shed light on the safety of birthing at home, just as the story of one family mourning the loss of a hospital-born baby is not evidence that all births should be removed from the hospital." Coincidentally, the same day, I receive in my inbox a notification of a newly released study out of Ontario, Canada published in the most recent issue of Birth journal. The study examines the outcomes associated with planned home-birth compared to planned hospital birth, facilitated by midwives, in Ontario over a three-year period (from 2003-2006). The authors find that, in fact, there is no difference between planned home and hospital birth when comparing perinatal and neonatal mortality rates (or maternal mortality rates, either). This is not the first, nor will it be the last, compilation of data confirming the safety of homebirth facilitated by midwives. The results of a study will never comfort a crushed-hearted couple dealing with the death of a child whether born at home, in a birthing center or in a hospital. But the evidence as to the safety of planned home-birth and midwifery care is clear and getting clearer everyday. Unfortunately, with a tremendous lobbying effort and biased agenda, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), continues to use its power to quash access to this kind of care for women in the United States. Midwifery care, in Ontario, Canada, is regulated by the College of Midwives of Ontario and is widely accepted as optimal care for low risk pregnant women. In fact, in many ways, it is the kind of system many midwifery practitioners and advocates are pushing for in this country in hopes of providing women and their babies with the highest-quality prenatal, perinatal and postnatal care. According to the authors of the published study, Midwives are well integrated into the Ontario health care system; they have admission and discharge privileges at their local hospital(s), and access to other health care providers for consultation or transfer of care as required. Two midwives are in attendance at births either in the home or in the hospital. Ontario is not alone in its support for homebirth - nor are the findings an anomaly. The UK's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists fully supports planned home birth for "women with uncomplicated pregnancies." Canada's Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology pursued research which concluded that planned homebirth results in positive health outcomes for both mother and baby: "Women planning birth at home experienced reduced risk for all obstetric interventions measured, and similar or reduced risk for adverse maternal outcomes," writes Dr. Patricia Janssen from the University of British Columbia and coauthors. Newborns born after planned home births were at similar or reduced risk of death, although the likelihood of admission to hospital was higher. The evidence being uncovered regularly - from around the world - suggests that there is great benefit (for mother and newborn) to ensuring access to midwife-care, homebirth and other out-of-hospital birth options. As well, as Jennifer Block notes, there is a cost effectiveness to increasing access to a range of chidbirth options. When women are subjected to increased, unnecessary medical interventions, costs rise for all involved - families, insurance companies and hospitals. Unfortunately, there are significant obstacles to accessing this kind of care for many women in this country. Without regulation and licensure of certified midwives in all fifty states, birthing out-of-hospital with a midwife may be illegal or financially out-of-reach for most women, severely restricting a woman's freedom to choose to birth in the way she sees fit and forcing midwives into difficult, sometimes career-jeopardizing situations. In an attempt to address the reality of how and why midwifery care is out-of-reach for many women, the Today Show segment quotes a source citing the "elite" nature of out-of-hospital childbirth, comparing it to a "spa treatment." And while there is some truth to the idea that access to midwifery and homebirth remain options only for those who can afford to pay out-of-pocket, this is by far the whole story. While The Today Show is busy running tabloidesque segments on childbirth, advocates and providers are hard-at-work attempting to expand safe, evidence-based options for maternity care for U.S. women and their families . If campaigns like The Big Push for Midwives are able to successfully ensure licensure and regulation of CPMs (and legislation to do this is currently pending in 18 states, according to The Big Push), the demand for this kind of care - no matter what a woman and her families' economic situation may be - can be met. It means that midwifery maternity care can be covered under various health insurance plans - including Medicaid. In some states, it's already happening - with impressive results. In Washington state, for example, all births regardless of health care provider or location, can be covered under any insurance plan including Medicaid. As Miriam Perez writes for RH Reality Check, in Washington state, "around 45% of out-of-hospital births attended by midwives in the state are Medicaid births." Midwifery care becomes accessible for all women, and makes good economic sense, when we ensure safe and regulated care through licensure. A cost-benefit analysis performed by the Washington Department of Health showed that licensed midwifery care saves the state $3.1 million per biennium. Despite The Today Show 's insistence on painting midwife-provided maternity care as a cause-celebre, a growing number of U.S. women are choosing to birth out-of-hospital under a midwife's care. Professional medical associations like the AMA (American Medical Association) and ACOG are feeling the pressure. An ACOG representative's blinders were practically visible when she declares in The Today Show segment that "childbirth decisions shouldn't be dicatated by what's fashionable or trendy" -- as if pregnant women who meticulously and thoughtfully prepare for a home birth, with the support throughout pregnancy from a midwife, are simply making their decision after flipping through fashion magazines, spotting a star's story of her homebirth and deciding to just "go for it" to be cool or hip. Last year, in fact, the AMA went on the offensive, targeting celebrity Ricki Lake's documentary, The Business of Being Born , in a resolution stating its opposition to homebirth. The outcry, however, was so great that the organization amended its resolution and deleted all references to Lake and her film. The Big Push for Midwives has this to say about ACOG's focus on homebirth as simply another celebrity led trend: "ACOG clings to this ridiculous fantasy that women choose to deliver their babies outside of the hospital because they want to be like Ricki Lake, Demi Moore or Meryl Streep and that if women would only watch enough fear-mongering stories on morning television they'll be brainwashed back into hospitals," said Katherine Prown, Campaign Manager of The Big Push for Midwives. "Insulting our intelligence and promoting policies that deny us choices in maternity care are not exactly winning strategies for stemming the tide of women seeking alternatives to standard OB care." The Today Show segment does include an interview with a former head of Women's and Children's Health at the World Health Organization, Marsden Wagner, who talks about the tendency hospitals have to treat even low risk, healthy pregnancies as medical emergencies. The reporter also acknowledges the rise in unnecessary medical interventions -- including a 50% meteoric increase in cesearean sections over the past decade. Jill who writes the blog TheUnnecesearean.com notes that according to the latest statistics from the CDC almost 32% of all births are via c-section in this country. What is most important to highlight, ultimately, is that women in the United States are increasingly seeking alternatives to hospital birth for a variety of excellent reasons. For some women it's a desire to experience their low-risk, healthy pregnancy not as a medical condition but as a natural state - a healthy state - with a provider who encourages them to trust their bodies. Maybe a woman doesn't wish to expose herself to potentially unnecessary medical interventions, but wishes to create an environment and experience that speaks to the ways in which she and her family envision welcoming their baby into the world - in a way that seems most compatible with midwifery and out-of-hospital care. Other women are distrustful of our health care system's tendency to treat pregnant women (or any seeker of health care) as merely a consumer or a number without a name, on the receiving end of depersonalized care. Some women view the mainstream medical establishment as patriarchal and demeaning, in general, and reject the idea that "doctor knows best" in any and all situations regarding pregnancy and childbirth. This is not say that ob-gyns cannot be excellent, loving and responsive care providers. There are millions of us out there who are indebted to these kinds of ob-gyns, undoubtedly. Midwives understand the value and importance of a trusted, respectful physician as a partner in a woman's care, should she need it. The midwifery model of care may be an appealing option for many women because it starts from a place of empowerment - if you can envision it, you can do it. Start with an intention of the kind of birth you wish to have, my midwife and doula told me, and we'll go from there. Maybe you have a vision of birthing outside but never dreamt it was possible -- as one woman on Ricki Lake's web site writes of her own desire: "I told my midwife of my dream. Her exact words were, "Mmmmmm, that sounds beautiful. Is that something that you would like to do?" That floored me since I wasn't at that point asking to have an outdoor birth." Or maybe you'll plan for the homebirth you've been expecting and midway through your pregnancy, or after hours of labor, your midwife tells you you'll need an emergency cesearean section, in a hospital. Birth doesn't always go the way we plan - no matter where or with whom we choose to birth. The issue at hand, however, is not that we can possibly know exactly how it will end up but why we wouldn't think that we deserve to do everything we can to experience pregnancy, childbirth and the days and weeks postpartum in a way that feels best and right for us - most importantly, winding up with a healthy newborn warm against our chest, asleep next to our body. The Today Show may present homebirth as an option to be feared but that's only because the unknown is often times a scary venture. If you look at the evidence and listen to women's experiences, It doesn't have to be that way. More on Women's Rights
 
Mark Weisbrot: Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" Will Find a Ready Audience Top
When I first met Michael Moore more than 20 years ago he was showing a half-finished documentary to a few dozen people in a classroom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was funny and poignant and had a powerful message. He had taken a second mortgage on his house - equipment for filmmaking was a lot more expensive back then - and raised some money from like-minded locals for a long-shot venture. We all loved what he showed us but thought he would be lucky if a few thousand people got to see it. But the film, "Roger and Me" - about the irrationality and human cost of the destruction of America's auto industry - was a smash hit and soon Moore was on his way to become America's most influential documentary film-maker. Twenty years later, he has produced his most radical work, which was greeted with rave enthusiasm here at the world's oldest film festival in Venice. As the old saying goes, you either blame the victim or blame the system. And Moore is making an appeal to blame the system - big time. You know this film is going to be subversive when it opens with clips depicting actual bank robbers - caught on security cameras in the midst of their heists - grabbing their loot with Iggy Pop's cover of Louie Louie (a special version for the film) blasting away in the background. Moral equivalence for the titans of the financial industry - and their political protectors - is just around the corner. "Capitalism: A Love Story," doesn't just go after the seamy side of the American economy - although that is captured nicely in the scenes of "Condo Vultures" feeding on Florida's housing bust and corporations (including Wal-Mart and Amegy Bank) who take out insurance policies on their employees and cash in big when they die young. These ghoulish derivatives go by the charming name of "Dead Peasants" insurance - enough said. But Moore has bigger targets in his sights: he is questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values, and political economy of American capitalism are fit for human beings. Although this will not seem so radical in Europe, where most countries have had governments in the post-WWII era that at least called themselves socialist, or in most of the developing world, where socialist ideas have plenty of popular appeal, it's pretty much unprecedented for anything that can reach a mass audience in the United States. But you don't have to be a revolutionary to appreciate this film. Indeed it can be seen as a social democratic treatise, with Franklin Roosevelt's proposed "second bill of rights" - an "economic bill of rights" that included a job with a living wage, housing, medical care, and education - as its reform program. Roosevelt is shown proposing this now forgotten program in 1944. As in his previous films, Moore combines the grief and tragedy of the victims - people losing their homes and jobs - with hilarious comedy, cartoonish film clips from the 1950s, and sober testimony as needed. And there are victories, too - as when workers occupy their factory in Chicago to win the pay that they are owed. As an economist who operates in the think tank world, I have to appreciate this film. He gets the economic story right. How is it that Michael Moore's father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today? The answer is not complicated: in the first half of the post-War era, employees shared in the gains from productivity growth; since 1973, most of them have hardly done so at all. (Productivity growth has also slowed.) Moore also explains the structural changes, such as President Ronald Reagan's roll back of labor relations to the 19th century, that helped bring about the most massive upward redistribution of income in U.S. history. He even includes a few graphs and charts to back up the main points with actual data. From an economic point of view, the only thing missing was a look at the stock market and housing bubbles of the last decade. The current recession, like the last one, was primarily caused by the collapse of a huge asset bubble - an $8 trillion housing bubble in 2006, and a similar size stock market bubble in 2000-2002. This is something that most of the media has not really understood. Asset bubbles are as old as capitalism, and since this is a movie about capitalism and the current Great Recession, it would have been nice to see some of this in the movie. But I can't fault Moore too much for not taking on something that most economists and the business press missed completely and still don't talk about. It's a film, not a book. Moore also wins my vote by getting his facts and numbers right. This is worth emphasizing because Moore's last documentary, "Sicko" - which was quite careful with the facts - drew attacks from CNN and a smear campaign from the insurance industry. Both attempted - unsuccessfully - to impugn its accuracy. Wendell Potter, former vice president of corporate communications for CIGNA and the author of several memos attempting to discredit "Sicko," recently admitted to Bill Moyers on camera that Moore "hit the nail on the head with his movie." The new love story also targets the big boys who made our current Great Recession possible: Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers (the three smugly depicted in that ridiculous 1999 Time Magazine cover of the " Committee to Save the World "), and Tim Geithner. Rubin, who came from the "Government of Goldman Sachs," helped deregulate the financial industry and got rich at Citibank from the results. Larry Summers, who came from academia, also made millions from the de-regulated, government-guaranteed casino that he helped fashion when he (like Rubin) was President Clinton's Treasury Secretary. It's a bi-partisan Hall of Shame, tracking the havoc wreaked by a burgeoning, parasitic, and increasingly politically powerful financial industry, through the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II presidencies. In a heart-warming contrast to the Age of Greed, we see Jonas Salk, the man who discovered the vaccine for polio in 1955, saving millions from the crippling and often fatal disease and refusing to get rich off his work by claiming patent rights. He only wanted that it be as available as possible. "Could you patent the sun?" he asks. And the Catholic Bishop of Detroit, when asked what Jesus would think of capitalism, replies that Jesus would not want to participate in such a system. It's all part of Moore's plot to make democratic socialist values as American as apple pie. Which is a tough sell, but if anyone can try it, it's a Midwestern boy from the heartland, the kind that Garrison Keillor writes about when he says that it's "the dummies who sit on the dais, and the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits", the son of a Flint autoworker who is true to his roots and doesn't forget which side he is on. Twenty years later, he doesn't seem to have been changed very much by fame and success. Moore's last film was a devastating indictment of the U.S. health care system, an excellent intro to the current battle for health care reform. This one could very well be a prelude to the mass populist anger and disillusionment that is only beginning to swell in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the official unemployment rate will remain near ten percent through next year. If we add in the underemployed (involuntarily part-time), dropouts from the labor force and other uncounted unemployment we are looking at a number nearly twice as high. Even if the economy were to begin a recovery relatively soon, it won't feel like one for quite some time. This film will have an audience that is ready for it, in the United States and elsewhere. This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on September 10, 2009. More on Financial Crisis
 
Laura Brown: Turning From Tough Chic to Ruffles and Florals for Spring Top
So, it's Wednesday of Fashion Week . But it's not a week, really -- it's more like a fashion epoch. It goes and it goes and it goes. And with it, your will to live. I kid, I kid! With so many shiny things to look at (not least the studded jackets, shoes, and bags many of the fashion editor ladies are wearing) there's a lot to keep you interested. And it's ironic, really, that rows filled with women who look like extras from a Robert Palmer video -- yes, the 80s are back, thanks to Balmain , Marc Jacobs , and YSL -- are witnessing a return to femininity and romanticism. A sort of Newton's Law rules over fashion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You wear a hard core, rock 'n' roll leather look to enter the dark days of winter, and those cunning designers will make you want a painterly print or a dramatic ruffle for spring. Oh, they toy with us so! I'm in a lucky position when I think about it, because I don't have to go to every show (that's for the stamina queens, our fashion department). I go to the big guns, the friends, or the next, next big thing. And this week has been a mixed designer bag: At Alexander Wang, it's always sexytime, even when he's feeling NFL shoulder pads. And what makes him so appealing is the clear joy he has for what he does -- fashion can be fun, remember? Laura and Kate Mulleavy at Rodarte were clearly inspired by my country (Australia's) finest cultural export, Mad Max. You might want to leave the tribal war paint at home, but the shoes were killah. Jason Wu's party frocks were like the contents of a jewel box. I swear my seatmate, the fetching actress Kerry Washington, actually moaned. And speaking of moaning, that was me at the Victoria Beckham presentation. I love me some Vicky B -- she's a hoot and her sculptural, body-conscious dresses are gorgeous. I ordered four just sitting there (um, I'll pay for it later). And today, fashion's hump day, I just got back from Michael Kors . The Michael Kors woman is who I want to be when I grow up. I mean, she flies on private jets (at least in the ads) and lives her life in cashmere. What's not to like? For spring, Michael did Jetson chic -- Perspex cutouts, asymmetric hems and big clear Lucite baubles around the neck. In the end, there are few better designers in New York for when a girl wants to feel put together. And rich. So, if you haven't married up yet, buy some Michael Kors. It might help. While the marathon is winding down, it's not over yet -- so keep checking back for our full coverage of the best of New York Fashion Week .
 
Mark Weisbrot: IMF Gives $164 million to Coup Government in Honduras, Following Familiar Pattern Top
The IMF is undergoing an unprecedented expansion of its access to resources, possibly reaching a trillion dollars. This week the European Union committed $175 billion, $67 billion more than even the $108 billion that Washington agreed to fork over after a tense standoff between the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration earlier this summer. The Fund and its advocates argue that the IMF has changed. The IMF is "back in a new guise," said the Economist . This time, we are told, it's really going to act as a multilateral organization that looks out for the countries and people of the world, and not just for Washington, Wall Street, or European banks. But it's looking more and more like the same old IMF on steroids. Last week the IMF disbursed $150.1 million to the de facto government of Honduras, and it plans to disburse another $13.8 million on September 9. The de facto government has no legitimacy in the world. It took power on June 28th in a military coup, in which the elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was taken from his home at gunpoint and flown out of the country. The Organization of American States suspended Honduras until democracy is restored, and the United Nations also called for the "immediate and unconditional return" of the elected president. No country in the world recognizes the coup government of Honduras. From the Western Hemisphere and the European Union, only the United States retains an ambassador there. The World Bank paused lending to Honduras two days after the coup, and the Inter-American Development Bank did the same the next day. More recently the Central American Bank of Economic Integration suspended credit to Honduras . The European Union has suspended over $90 million in aid as well, and is considering further sanctions. But the IMF has gone ahead and dumped a large amount of money on Honduras - the equivalent would be more than $160 billion in the United States - as though everything is ok there. This is in keeping with U.S. policy, which is not surprising since the United States has been - since the IMF's creation in 1944 - the Fund's principal overseer. Washington has so far made only a symbolic gesture in cutting off about $18.5 million to Honduras, while continuing to pour in tens of millions more. In fact, more than two months after the Honduran military overthrew the elected president of Honduras, the United States government has yet to determine that a military coup has actually occurred. This is because such a determination would require, under the U.S. Foreign Appropriations Act, a cut off of aid. One of the largest sources of U.S. aid is the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a government entity whose board is chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Interestingly, there were two military coups in the last year in countries that were receiving MCC money: Madagascar and Mauritania. In both of those cases, MCC aid was suspended within three days of the coup . The IMF's decision to give money to the Honduran government is reminiscent of its reaction to the 2002 coup that temporarily overthrew President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Just a few hours after that coup, the IMF's spokesperson announced that "we stand ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable." This immediate pledge of support by the IMF to a military-installed government was at the time unprecedented. Given the resources and power of the IMF, it was an important source of international legitimacy for the coup government. Members of the U.S. Congress later wrote to the IMF to inquire how this happened. How did the IMF decide so quickly to support this illegitimate government? The Fund responded that no decision was made, that this was just an off-the-cuff remark by its spokesperson. But this seems very unlikely, and in the video on the IMF's web site, the spokesperson appears to be reading from a prepared statement when talking about money for the coup government. In the Honduran case, the IMF would likely say that the current funds are part of a $250 billion package in which all member countries are receiving a share proportional to their IMF quota, regardless of governance. This is true, but it doesn't resolve the question as to whom the funds should be disbursed to, in the case of a non-recognized, illegitimate government that has seized power by force. The Fund could very easily postpone disbursing this money until some kind of determination could be made, rather than simply acting as though there were no question about the legitimacy of the coup government. Interestingly, the IMF had no problem cutting off funds under its standby arrangement with the democratically-elected government of President Zelaya in November of last year, when the Fund did not agree with his economic policies. We're still a long way from a reformed IMF. This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on September 3, 2009. More on Honduras Coup
 
Louise Blouin: NATO heralds new post-Cold War relations with Russia Top
Yesterday, the new NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged a new relationship with Russia. He admitted that differences remained between NATO and Russia but, as in any real partnership "we should also take into account that Russia has legitimate security concerns." I am delighted to hear this: these are opinions that I entirely concur with. Russia is a country that I am very familiar with. I have been doing business there for over 13 years and owned more than 40 magazines in the country. Over the years, I have been amazed at the changes that have taken place. There have been great strides forward -- in democracy, domestic government, increasing economic prosperity, and in Russia's role in foreign affairs. Of course, no country has an entirely unblemished history, nor does any nation possess a spotless record with its domestic government. However, focusing on the negative only reinforces those ideas and patterns of behavior. To encourage the positive trends within Russia, the international community (and, of course, we the media have a role to play here as well) must acknowledge and reward the progress made so far. We in the West often rely on old habits of thinking and old ideas about Russia. It is common in human nature to fall back reflexively to the most comfortable position, and it is sometimes difficult to adapt to change. In international relations, that means we do not always make the most impartial judgment. It is for that reason that we have international law upheld by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Relying on their judgments is the surest way to ensure fairness and justice in foreign affairs. If we consider the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia, I, probably like most other observers, may have been quick to blame Russia. However, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told me something that was a revelation. When Georgia sent troops into Russia in 2008, "Russia, a non-state party, took the Rome Statute into consideration when planning its military campaign and sent more than 3,000 communications with allegations of war crimes committed by Georgia." In the conflict between Georgia and Russia over the territories of South Ossetia, the most of the press and the international community have been quick to criticize Russia. Georgia has been seen as the plucky little country standing up to an overbearing giant. A few observers noted that Russia was hotly provoked in August of last year, when the conflict began, and only a very small minority criticized the Georgian domestic political system. This is because Cold War reflexes and Cold War-era systems of global agencies still dominate international relations. In July, when U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden visited Georgia and Ukraine, he explicitly rejected Russia's "spheres of influence" policy. However, such language is very inflammatory in Russia. It is seen as Cold War rhetoric par excellence. While the West often censures Russia for so called Cold War thinking -- great-power confrontation based on zero-sum power dynamics -- it would appear that U.S. policymakers are not entirely immune to it either. There is a security discourse in international norms that denies Russia's identity as an equal player and, also, one that sets out a series of conditions for Russia to join the international community. The Russians are always asking that the international expert community take Russian concerns and ideas and make them the basis of policy analysis. In 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev claimed that "Russia is not part of any politico-military alliance. ... Yet we are interested in our voice being heard in Europe." Contrary to received opinion in the West, Russia does not disregard all international conventions. It is more accurate to say that she ignores those in which she has little voice and little expectation of her interests being fairly represented. The solution is not to punish and veto Russia but rather to reform global agencies and empower them to make them more representative of the new balances of power and more empathic to diverse security concerns. The conflict in South Ossetia is an example of the failure to do so. Russia's concerns about insecurity on her borders in the Caucasus and her territorial integrity were consistently ignored. As a result, Russia considers herself surrounded by hostile powers, in a fundamentally hostile environment with no reliable friends. Whether this is an accurate depiction of reality is almost irrelevant. We have to take into consideration Russia's political identity and security concerns. As for Georgia, domestic political turmoil and increasingly non-transparent decision-making should have alerted the international community. Rule of law and democracy within borders are absolutely crucial for security and stability outside borders. In fact, Russia was not included and invested into our common security, nor was Georgia protected. We cannot build security in Europe by ignoring the security concerns of its largest country and a major global power. Nor can we ignore our responsibility to protect our vulnerable and small states. A stronger system of international governance that includes Russia will increase all our security. We must embed Russia into the international community and invest her into a shared, safer world. In other words, offer a competing discourse on security -- one of indivisible and united security under a collective framework, defined positively with Russia rather than negatively against Russia. Multilateralism is therefore the only solution. We need to look at the most important structures of global governance and reform them. To that end, I propose a radical overhaul of the existing structure: a NATO that includes Russia and structures of global governance that are truly international rather than only so in name. In recent years, awareness of the need for global governance has become more acute. The present financial crisis, the environmental crisis, world poverty, increasing zones of conflict with their concomitant humanitarian crises and mass violations of human rights have all highlighted how important global solutions are. These issues affect all countries, and no country is able to fight alone. The West needs the rest of the world to help find appropriate solutions to international challenges. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the world includes more than the eight countries that make up the G8. It is a step in the right direction that the G20 meet to discuss the financial crisis. If Europe and the U.S. want the participation of the emerging powers, they must be prepared to allow them representation within international agencies. Such a reform implies the relaunching of the Security Council to include more than the five permanent members, opening the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to the representatives of other world powers, and creating hard security alliances that all countries can participate in. Also, there must be a meaningful commitment on the part of all nation-states to follow the strictures of international law and abide by the judgment of its courts. When it comes to Russia, the most important agency of international governance is NATO. NATO is the pre-eminent security alliance in Europe and the one considered most relevant by Russian policy-makers. NATO has been trying to redefine its mission since the Cold War. Without its previous major raison d'être, being anti-Russia, NATO has worked to promote democracy and stability. However, it has only been relatively successful in doing so (arguably, the European Union is better at this), and NATO has largely remained an organization directed against Russia. There have been formal attempts to build relations. Russia became a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in 1992. Separate institutions were created within NATO just for Russia; the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was established in 1997. However, these positive steps have been overshadowed by actions on the ground. The current European security architecture, centered on NATO, stands accused not merely of failing to alleviate tensions but also of aggravating them to the point of crisis. Western support for the Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, the development of U.S. missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic, and a failure to manage Russian sensitivities in the former Soviet Union have generated considerable resentment in Moscow. A perceived neo-containment policy by NATO is dangerous: It risks weakening the democrats in Russia struggling with powerful undemocratic forces. In international relations, Russia has come to regard the new configuration as illegitimate. The fundamental mistake was that Russia was never formally offered NATO membership. The lesson of history is that it is more dangerous to exclude adversaries than include them and build alliances. Early statesmen of the post-Cold War period realized the importance of membership. The idea of Russia joining NATO was first suggested by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. In 1993, James Baker, the former U.S. secretary of state, suggested that NATO should include Russia: "I cannot imagine a better way to 'enhance the political component' of the alliance than for NATO to consider the possibility that Russia, if and when it qualifies, be eligible for membership." Baker argued that the West has been hostile because Russia has never fully embraced democracy and free markets. Yet if Russia were to join NATO, not only would it alleviate domestic hostility within Russia toward the West, but the NATO Membership Action Plan would act as a stimulus to reform within Russia. Keeping Russia out of NATO encourages Russian expansionism and insularity, and degrades Western security. The argument is often made that NATO should be expanded now if we want to contain Russia in the future. But is Russia inevitably going to become imperial? Such circular reasoning is dangerously close to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nations are not constants and do not always act according to past precedents. Security threats are radically different from those of the Cold War. It is no longer a matter of great powers facing each other -- the so-called "great game" of the Cold War. The world is in transition: We are becoming more interconnected and more interdependent -- interconnected through an extensive infrastructure of transport, energy, information, and technology. Shared economic growth, energy security, and environmental sustainability make all countries in the world deeply interdependent. Let us be clear about the magnitude of the threats we face. Political insecurity has always been closely interlinked to economic instability. We see this in the Third World: Many African and Asian countries are caught in a spiral of political failure, economic instability, and human suffering. Poverty inexorably creates marginalization and social dislocation. We see that all too clearly in the Middle East. Terrorism is the almost inevitable consequence. The complex causes of social dislocation, modernization, and economic deprivation are not just prevalent in the Middle East. They are present in our societies too. Finally, let us not forget climate change; it too has political implications. Competition for natural resources, notably water, will be aggravated by global warming over the next decades and is likely to create further turbulence and migratory movements in various regions. This is all too depressingly familiar. The difference is that today these threats occur in a very different world. Innovations in technology make weapons of mass destruction, whether they are bio-weapons or cyber-weapons, more menacing and more accessible to even the smallest terrorist cell. Increasingly, terrorists are well resourced and well connected by electronic networks and transport infrastructures. All major powers are exposed to this conjunction of political, economic, energy, and environmental crises, and none of them can successfully confront these challenges on its own. Both established and emerging powers have a strategic interest in investing in cooperation to place their prosperity and security on firmer grounds. If the world in 2009 is very different from 1989, some things have stayed depressingly familiar, like military expenditure. According to the Center for Defense Information (CDI), average annual military spending by the U.S. during the Cold War (1945-1990) was $300 billion. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that in 2009 the U.S. will spend $700 billion on military expenditures, which is approximately over 20% of the United States's federal budget. This is a tragic and unsustainable waste that we can ill afford after a global financial crisis. That is expenditure that was not spent on eradicating poverty, developing vaccines, irrigating farmlands, or educating our youth. We should be investing that money on our schools and our health services, in promoting trade, and in boosting the economy. Building a new future is a complex task. Creative and inspirational leadership is in great demand to manage the transition. More than ever, members of the international community have to listen to each other and take into account the voices of other nations. The only way to move closer together is through meaningful and constructive dialogue in open and accessible international forums. I support this collaboration and communication among countries to help us work together to reach common goals. Rather than investing in military expenditures, we must invest more in research, innovation, and education, to bring more economic prosperity to our countries and economic stability to those in need. As we reach out to new countries, we have the possibility of new markets. Expanded markets, trade, and education are positive-sum goods, in turn bringing us other, fresh markets and, above all, peace.
 
Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, Teresa Valdez Klein: Rude Awakening: Has Me-Centric Culture Stymied Our Democracy? Top
It's "awkward public outbursts by public figures" week! Woo-hoo! We can start with Michael Moore , who always has had a penchant for public stunts and the embarrassment of his foes, and his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, is no exception. (Watch the trailer here .) Ted gives us a quick review (more on his blog ), pondering the unchecked dangers of a free market system and wondering if Moore gives us a compelling argument for socialism. Maegan and Teresa, well, they're less on board; they're sick of Moore's tactics and believe this new movie will only help fuel the "Obama is a muslim socialist terrorist" meme on the Right. But there's no stopping that anyway, right? Because it's the truth, and we all know how fast that travels... Next up in our hall of fame of rudeness is South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, whose outburst during President Obama's health care speech - "You lie!" - has been roundly criticized. With Wilson's half-hearted apology and his Democratic challenger raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in its aftermath, this is just another distraction from the real debate. But who cares? It's a me-centric world, and Joe Wilson's got a right to get his part of the Reality TV pie! Oh, and Kanye? Mr. West's public outburst on stage at MTV's VMAs this week made for great TV and for an embarrassing moment for everyone involved. Was it staged? Are there no rules of civility in pop culture? (See: MTV's The Hills.) No matter. What's more important is that Obama called Kanye a "jackass" (why is this in quotes, MSM? You know what it means, right?) during an off-the-record interview. Well, crap. Can't Obama speak his mind with a live-mic on? (That did doom a certain California State Senator last week...) Is there even an off-the-record anymore? Can public figures trust anyone these days, or are they doomed to paralyzing total restraint in the fear that someone, somewhere is recording? Finally, Obama's doing the full Ginsberg this Sunday, hitting each of the morning talk shows, all except one - Fox News. Boo. Wouldn't it be better if Obama took questions from a hostile host for once? I'd buy popcorn and watch. But this does seem like a big ol' case of overexposure; do we need to see Obama so much on TV? What about online? What about through social media? Youtube videos? What's with the social media snub, Mr. President? Listen to the show here , subscribe to the iTunes podcast , or use the Blog Talk Radio player: Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein ( www.teresacentric.com ), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry ( www.maegancarberry.com ). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com. More on Health Care
 
Lita Smith-Mines: Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes Top
A former client's sorrowful tone came through before I even opened her e-mail. Her subject line read: My Big Loss--Help! The correspondence itself was filled with variations on when I thought the real estate market would stop its downward spiral and head upwards again, along with a plea for assistance. Sensing her anguish, but having no details on her dilemma, I asked her to call me. She did, and the conversation quickly veered from pleasantries to the source of her despair. Although she's not yet ready to sell, she was troubled by how the current market has "destroyed her future." Her home, bought for about $250,000 in the 1980s, appraised as high as $950,000 when she last refinanced in 2006. Now, she sadly related, it is "worth less than $600,000 and we owe close to $800,000. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't believe what I've lost." Slipping from my attorney mode into counselor style, I recommended that she refrain from speculating on the present value of her home, as she had no plans to sell and said she didn't need to refinance. I recalled that she had just conveyed how much she loved her backyard pool and the furniture she bought with the money she borrowed. After some discussion, she agreed that no one had forced her to take out such a high mortgage in 2006. I then gently rebuked her: Why label yourself a loser? Using her numbers, I did a quick calculation and figured she had already gained upwards of $300,000 in the 20+ years she'd owned the house (cashing out even more than that to enjoy luxuries she could not otherwise afford). Reluctantly, she acknowledged that if she'd sold her house at just under one million dollars in 2006, she'd have bought a higher priced home in that inflated market, and would be even deeper in debt today. Now more relaxed and thinking semi-reasonably, my caller recognized that she'd knowingly mortgaged her home to fuel her happiness, gaining many material things in the process. Realistically, she hadn't really lost anything but her own expectations, based on a market manipulated by forces she couldn't control. Recently, she'd become unhappy at the enormity of her debt and the decline in her home's value, and found herself in a state of near hysteria by the time she sought real estate therapy. But I reiterated that the predicament she finds herself in is of her own choosing; no mysterious and evil hand reached into her savings account and yanked out hundreds of thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it. I don't know if I merely provided a temporary respite from her melancholy, or actually presented a preferable long-term perspective. But before we hung up the phone, I reminded this homeowner that while she was floating in her cool pool and fretting, or sitting on her love seat agonizing over lost sleep, thousands and thousands of former homeowners now find themselves homeless. I'm guessing not a single one of them would dub her a "loser." More on Real Estate
 
Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol' Sells A Million Copies Top
NEW YORK — Dan Brown does it again. Doubleday announced Wednesday that "The Lost Symbol," Brown's first novel since "The Da Vinci Code," has already sold more than 1 million copies after being on sale for one day in the United States, Canada and Britain. That total includes preorders for the book, which has been at or near the top of Amazon.com for months. An additional 500,000 copies has been ordered, bringing the total print run to 5.6 million copies. "The Lost Symbol" came out Tuesday. Brown's book was well short of the all-time debut, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which in its first day sold more than 8 million copies in the U.S. alone. More on Books
 
Apple Tablet Computer Rumored To Launch February 2010 Top
A new report from Taiwan Economic News lists a number of Taiwanese suppliers which are said to have won contracts to supply Apple with components for "tablet PCs" which will reportedly launch in February next year. This is the latest in a very long string of rumors and offers little new information, but seems to be inline with most recent ones concerning a possible Apple tablet device. More on Apple
 
Obama Touts Chicago Olympics Bid At White House Rally Top
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the whole country is rooting for his hometown of Chicago in its efforts to host the 2016 Olympics. If Chicago wins its bid, Obama says the city "will make America proud and America will make the world proud." Obama held an Olympic event at the White House Wednesday, along with Olympic athletes and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. The International Olympic Committee will choose a host city during an Oct. 2 meeting in Denmark. First lady Michelle Obama will attend the meeting. More on Olympics
 
A New Way to Turn Plastic Into Fuel? Top
The company, Envion, is expected to cut the ribbon on Wednesday morning on a $5 million plant that it says will annually convert 6,000 tons of plastic into nearly a million barrels of something resembling oil. The product can be blended with other components and sold as gasoline or diesel. More on Sustainability
 
EPA Scraps Bush-Era Smog Rule And Will Start Over Top
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is scrapping a controversial Bush-era rule that set stricter limits for smog but fell short of scientific recommendations. In a brief filed Wednesday in a federal appeals court, the Justice Department says the EPA believes the revision made by the Bush administration does not adhere to federal air pollution law. The agency will propose new smog standards to protect health and the environment by December. The Bush regulation, announced in March 2008, was the subject of much controversy. While stronger than the previous rule, it wasn't as tough as the government's scientific advisers had recommended. Smog is a respiratory irritant that can aggravate asthma and has been linked to heart attacks. More on Health
 
Suspected American Sex Predators Tracked In Cambodia (VIDEO) Top
ABC News "Nightline" investigated American pedophiles living in Cambodia for a special news report that will air tonight. ABC News traveled to Cambodia to see how a local nonprofit group is working to arrest suspected foreign pedophiles. The nonprofit has been building a case against Harvey Johnson, a failed real estate developer from Arizona, who is accused of using his position as an English teacher to molest several underage girls. Cambodia has long been a magnet for sex tourists due to extreme poverty and rampant corruption, ABC News reports. Watch a sneak preview here: Watch "World News" at 6:30 p.m. ET and "Nightline" TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET for the full report. Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter! More on Cambodia
 
Connie Rhodes "Birther" Challenge Thrown Out, Taitz Scolded Top
U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land has thrown out a complaint questioning the president's birth from an Army captain fighting deployment to Iraq and gave a warning to her lawyer, birther maven Orly Taitz . Land also put attorney Orly Taitz, who represents Capt. Connie Rhodes and is a leader in the national "birther" movement, on notice by stating that she could face sanctions if she ever files a similar "frivolous" lawsuit in his court. "(Rhodes) has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as president of the United States," Land states in his order. "Instead, she uses her complaint as a platform for spouting political rhetoric, such as her claims that the president is 'an illegal usurper, an unlawful pretender, [and] an unqualified imposter.'" In his order, the judge noted that Rhodes had objected only to deployment to Iraq under President Obama, not to serving in the military generally. Rhodes is not the first soldier to object to overseas deployment on the grounds that Obama is not a legitimate president. Stefan Frederick Cook, a reserve soldier who volunteered for an active duty tour, argued that he should not have to go to Afghanistan for similar reasons to Rhodes. The army revoked his deployment orders . Read Land's full court order here . Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Hemingway Pictures: Rare Photos From Cuba Published Top
In 1952, LIFE sent legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba to shoot author Ernest Hemingway. The magazine needed photos to run alongside a new novella that would run in LIFE before it was published in book format. That book was "The Old Man and the Sea," and the issue of LIFE where it was first printed went on to sell 5.3 million copies in two days. For years afterward, Eisenstaedt would refer to the experience of shooting "Papa" Hemingway as his most difficult assignment ever. Recently, LIFE discovered these photos, all but two of which have never been seen: LIFE's editors opted to print illustrations based on the pictures rather than the pictures themselves. More on Books
 
Annie Le Strangled: See Autopsy Details Top
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — The chief state's medical examiner said Wednesday that a Yale University graduate student whose body was found stuffed inside a basement wall died of traumatic asphyxiation. Dr. Wayne Carver's office released the results three days after the body of 24-year-old Annie Le was found in a Yale medical school research building. Carver had previously announced Le's death as a homicide. Police released a Yale University animal research technician from custody Wednesday after collecting DNA samples and questioning him in Le's killing. Raymond Clark III was taken into custody Tuesday night at his apartment in Middletown, Conn., and was released into the custody of his attorney early Wednesday, New Haven police said. Clark's attorney, David Dworski, of Fairfield, said Wednesday his client is "committed to proceeding appropriately with the authorities." He would not comment further. Investigators are hoping to figure out within days whether Clark can be ruled out as the killer. Clark has been described as a person of interest, not a suspect, in Le's death. Her body was found Sunday, which was to have been her wedding day. Clark and and his fiancee, Jennifer Hromadka were both animal research technicians in the lab where Le worked. Hromadka wrote on her MySpace page that she's not perfect, but cautioned people not to judge her. "Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I'm not perfect and I don't live to be, but before you start pointing fingers make sure your hands are clean!!" the 23-year-old wrote. The date of the MySpace posting is unclear. The page has since been taken down. Overnight, state police officers sorted through items on a card table set up outside Clark's ground-floor apartment's door. A tow truck took away a red Ford Mustang neighbors say was used by Clark. A resident of the complex, Rick Tarallo said he, his wife and 6-month-old daughter live in a unit next to Clark and his fiancee, Jennifer Hromadka. He said the couple was "really quiet" and lived with an older man, whom he speculated was one of their fathers. "He seemed like a good guy," Tarallo said of Clark. "They didn't strike me as someone who would try to kill somebody." Police started tearing down the yellow crime scene tape as daylight broke Wednesday. Neighbors said they hadn't seen Hromadka in the area for days. Loraine Falcon, 32, a nurse aid who lives in Clark's building, said the police activity kept her and her three kids – ages 15, 10 and 8 – up much of the night and left her fearful for their safety. "I just want to know if he did it," Falcon said. Clark's apartment appeared empty Wednesday morning after police left. No one answered the door. The brown flowered doormat remained. During the search, one officer commented that the apartment smelled like animals. Multiple neighbors said they saw Clark and Hromadka load luggage, cats and two rodents into a vehicle on Saturday. Falcon said she also saw Clark loading a suitcase and a duffel bag into a car Sunday at about 5 p.m. New Haven police Chief James Lewis said police were hoping to compare DNA taken from Clark's hair, fingernails and saliva to more than 150 pieces of evidence collected from the crime scene. That evidence may also be compared at a state lab with DNA samples given voluntarily from other people with access to the crime scene. "We're going to narrow this down," Lewis said. "We're going to do this as quickly as we can." Police have collected more than 700 hours of videotape and sifted through computer records documenting who entered what parts of the research building where Le was found dead. Le worked for a Yale laboratory that conducted experiments on mice, and investigators found her body stuffed in the basement wall of a facility that housed research animals. In addition to Clark and Hromadka, Clark's sister and brother-in-law were also technicians at Yale's Animal Resources Center, according to Yale records. More on Crime
 
Former Israeli Soldiers Rescue U.S. Citizen Held Hostage By Palestinian Husband Top
Ten former Israeli Army soldiers successfully rescued an American citizen and her son who had been held hostage for three years by her husband in a Palestinian village, the Jerusalem Post reports. The woman had met and married her Palestinian husband in the United States, it reports, and they then moved back to the Tulkarm area of the West Bank. The woman's husband allegedly hit her, prevented her from leaving the house and threatened that if she left, she would never see their son again. He also threatened that if she left the home, she would be apprehended by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). Read more about the rescue here. Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter! More on Israel
 
Pesticides Linked To Parkinson's Top
People whose jobs bring them in regular contact with pesticides may be at increased risk for Parkinson's disease, a U.S. study finds. More on Health
 
Google Better Than Bing, Yahoo Study Finds Top
A group of 1,100 software testers has rated Google the best search engine in terms of accuracy, speed, and relevance. More on Google
 
"Buy American": U.S. And Canadian Companies Fight Over New Law Top
WASHINGTON -- On paper, Tom Pokorsky would seem to be a clear beneficiary of the government's $787 billion economic-stimulus package. Mr. Pokorsky runs Aquarius Technologies Inc., a company in Port Washington, Wis., that makes equipment to treat sewage. The stimulus plan earmarks some $6 billion for municipal wastewater projects that are right in his company's sweet spot. More on Canada
 
One Billion Hungry, Food Aid At 20-Year Low Top
Yahoo! News: LONDON (Reuters) - Food aid is at a 20-year low despite the number of critically hungry people soaring this year to its highest level ever, the United Nations relief agency said Wednesday. The number of hungry people will pass 1 billion this year for the first time, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said, adding that it is facing a serious budget shortfall. Read the whole story: Yahoo! News More on United Nations
 
Swine Flu Vaccine Faces Skepticism Top
Vaccine refusers have long decried vaccine mandates and campaigns as an unwarranted intrusion of parents' and local school boards' rights. And against the backdrop of charges that a "public healthcare option" would hijack patients' choices, such complaints have taken on new resonance for some. More on Health Care
 
Allergies Affect Sex Life For 83% Of Americans Top
Sneezing and wheezing may stamp out those flames of desire. A new study reveals that allergies could be getting in the way of amorous activities. More on Health
 
Frankie Martin: Film on American Muslims Can Help Europe Understand Islam Top
Last week I attended the European premiere of the film Journey into America at the Culture and Cultures International Film Festival near Toulouse in Southern France. The film, which premiered in Washington DC on July 4th, is the result of a nine month cross-country trip I took to study Islam in America with Professor Akbar Ahmed of American University and a team of young Americans. Upon arriving in France it was apparent that similar debates and controversies surrounding the religion were raging. France, like the rest of Europe, is clearly having problems with its Muslim minority. Our film's director, Craig Considine, and I were welcomed by festival director Denis Piel , a former photographer for Vogue and director of the film Love is Blind . Piel had started the festival to facilitate dialogue between different world cultures. Nestled in a medieval village in the French countryside, we ate delicious international food and watched four films a day from all corners of the world. One of the viewing locations was Piel's Chateau de Padies , an elegant 13th century castle-like home that was once occupied by Napoleon's biographer who accompanied him to St. Helena Island. The selections ranged from classics like Edge of the City with Sidney Poitier to modern-day, in competition films like Jackson about America's homeless. The Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino , which, like ours, deals with themes of American identity in the face of immigration, was presented by the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Tom Stern, the film's director of photography. It was great to meet and compare notes with filmmakers who were working on similar subjects like Deborah Harse, whose film Marathon Beirut, For the Love of Lebanon , also dealt with questions of Islam and how the religion is perceived by Westerners. When it came time for our film I was unsure how the audience would respond. When the lights came up, however, my concerns were put to rest. There was an audible hush and a "wow" was heard as applause rang out. Craig and I got up to speak and answer enthusiastic questions about the story behind the film and how it came together. We spoke about the film's goal of improving relations between Muslims and non-Muslims as well as the technical aspects of the production like our method of having every team member film with their own small camera. The film touched a nerve with the audience, and not entirely in the ways I had expected. Some of the responses had to do with the Western perception of Islam and how our film challenged those perceptions. Others responded to different themes such as a German man living in France who spoke about the challenge of living in a society alongside people who are culturally different. When the Berlin Wall came down, he explained, he realized that he actually had more in common with the French, who don't share his language, than the East Germans. The themes of interpretation of religion and the need to prevent violence by building understanding struck a chord among locals from that part of France, it was explained to me, because of the region's history. The film showing took place in an area laid waste during the Albigensian Crusade, an extremely bloody early 13th century war waged by the Pope to suppress local Cathars, an ethnic group whose interpretation of Christianity differed from Catholics as well as the distant King of France. The religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which Catholics and Protestants traded massacres, also devastated the area, and I was told that even today farmers commonly find weapons from the religious wars while tilling their land. The audience response also reflected the controversies surrounding the place of Islam in France. On a bus to the small town of Revel I spoke to a man who used to live in Marseille, a large city on the Mediterranean coast. He explained that despite the city's large Muslim population of Arabs and West Africans, the authorities have refused to allow a mosque to be built which has left the Muslim population to "pray in the streets." The message the authorities were sending, he said, is that French Muslims are "just visiting." A front page headline I glimpsed in the prominent newspaper Le Figaro also reflected a barrier between mainstream French culture and Islam. The paper reported that 2,000 women in France were now wearing the burka, according to a government commission. Out of a population of over sixty million this didn't seem like a high number to me, but people seemed to be worried. Against this backdrop it was gratifying to have a forum to explore issues of cultural dialogue in an honest manner at C&Ciff. Film is a medium that allows us to experience another life, time, or culture in a visceral way that is unique, and I was pleased to note that the movies I saw were honest and did not shy away from controversy, whether the subject was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the African-American experience. Through this film we have tried to promote an honest dialogue with the idea that only with knowledge comes understanding and acceptance. In the American context, this is fully what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created the country. It was certainly thrilling to discuss these issues in reference to our film in France, where the need for Muslims and non-Muslims to talk to each other is great. I look forward to continuing to discuss the film and the issues it raises in the future. Next stop on the festival circuit: Cairo ! You can follow our journey at www.journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com More on France
 
Marshall Fine: Interview: Steven Soderbergh talks about The Informant! Top
Twenty years after he burst onto the scene with sex, lies, & videotape, Steven Soderbergh, dressed in black casual clothes, sits back on a couch in a Toronto hotel and considers what's changed in the intervening decades. "I don't feel that different, really - but then I don't feel different from when I graduated from high school," Soderbergh, 46, says. "I know more about my job now, by virtue of having practiced. I'd say the only thing I know now for sure is that people don't change. For a while, I labored under the illusion that people did change or that you could change them. I let go of that fantasy, which was a healthy thing to do. I've realized that they can change, but they have to do it on their own. They have to want to." Soderbergh was in Toronto for the premiere of his film, The Informant!, opening Friday. Based on a true story, the film stars a toupeed, overweight Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, a real-life whistle-blower who helped the government bring a major price-fixing case against agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland - before being caught himself for embezzling from ADM. It's a studio picture, but hardly a mainstream movie. Whitacre is an oddball central character who's never quite trustworthy - and Soderbergh emphasizes this with a voice-over narration that frequently digresses into Whitacre's random musings about whatever comes to his mind, often in the middle of a scene. "Traditionally, voiceover is there to hold your hand," Soderbergh says. "But this is misdirection. It was (screenwriter Scott Burns') idea to have the narration bear no relation to what you're looking at, so that it didn't help explain things. I was very taken with that. "Tangentiality is an aspect of bipolar behavior that's the most common. What's fascinating is how closely it mimics Mark's own thought process. What gives it the spin in the film is the placement, the fact that it happens in the middle of scenes in which he's talking about something else." The film's music is also hilariously disconcerting. Marvin Hamlisch's score seems pulled from a 1970s' sitcom, though most of the film is set in the 1990s. Again, Soderbergh says, it was a specific choice he made, based on the character. "I wanted the music from a '70s TV show," he says. "It had to function as his soundtrack, his music for his movie of himself. It's not meant for the audience. For me, it doesn't function in the way that a score does traditionally, which is as a path for the audience into the movie. If you take the music and the voice-over away, the performances are pitched in a natural way because I knew we would have other layers. It's crucial that we experience his emotional state musically -and the voice-over gives you the mental landscape." Where Erin Brockovich cast a corporation as a villain in a David-Goliath story, The Informant! only superficially explores ADM's massive misdeeds (for which the government fined it hundreds of millions of dollars and sent its executives to prison). Instead, this is Mark Whitacre's story, as told from his extremely skewed perspective. "His character is what got me into to it," Soderbergh says. "I didn't see it as a movie about corporate crime or price-fixing. My sense was that he would be this guy no matter where he worked. This place was just a terrarium for bipolar behavior, combined with his own ambition." The Informant! is decidedly unconventional, a major release that goes willfully against the grain. But Soderbergh had few problems convincing Warner Bros. to let him follow his instincts about how to portray Whitacre's odd little world. "The studio was willing to believe in me," he says. "When they saw the film and realized I was telling the truth and making a comedy, they were relieved. They saw the dailies and were not seeing that. It's not an expensive movie, but they were taking a chance." Taking a chance: That's something Sony Pictures ultimately was unwilling to do with Soderbergh early this past summer. For the rest of this interview, click HERE to reach my website: www.hollywoodandfine.com.
 
Carol Tucker-Foreman: The Myth About Food Safety Legislation and Small Farmers Top
Supporters of local and organic food should be substantially reassured that the new food safety legislation working its way through Congress does not place an inordinate burden on small and organic growers. The Packer, a trade publication for the produce industry, reported Sept 14 that FDA Commissioner Peggy Hamburg pledged that the FDA will be sensitive to the concerns of smaller growers and organic producers as it sets any new regulations. "Everyone has a duty to make their food safe, but there is more than one pathway for that," she said. She promised that the FDA's food safety rules will be based on an adaptable set of preventive controls. "It will not be one size fits all. They will be scaled for risk, and they will reflect the needs and concerns of the community," she said in an address to the United Fresh Produce Association's Washington Public Policy Conference. Ever since Congress began considering new legislation to provide the FDA more authority, responsibility and resources to protect Americans from unsafe food, smaller farmers have been concerned that provisions of the legislation, intended to address problems raised by large produce growers and processors, would be piled on them and become an unnecessary burden. Chrys Ostrander from Chrysalis Farm@Tolstoy argued that "fruits and vegetables are definitely NOT 'at the heart of a weakness in the inspection system.'" He suggested that reforms proposed by the Make Our Food Safe Coalition could lead to the destruction of small farms and small-scale food processors. While Chrys cites only "my impression" that fresh produce is not responsible for large numbers of foodborne illnesses, research shows both imported and domestic fresh produce have been responsible for large numbers of foodborne illnesses and outbreaks. Compiling data from the CDC and state and local health departments, the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that, between 1990 and 2006, produce was second only to seafood in causing foodborne illness outbreaks and was responsible for 21 percent of the illnesses in their database. Produce was responsible for more outbreaks than meat, poultry, eggs, dairy and bread products. Foodborne illness outbreaks hurt producers as well as consumers. Farmers far removed from a contamination incident or outbreak can be driven out of business when consumers decide not to buy a particular produce even though it was produced far away from the problem area. Nationally, the demand for spinach and lettuce dropped radically after California spinach was implicated in an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 poisoning. The industry has not yet fully recovered. Florida tomato farmers were devastated by the connection of their product to the Salmonella Saint Paul outbreak that came at the height of their growing season. USDA recently announced that farmers will likely cut their production of peanuts by about 27 percent this year as a result of smaller contracts from buyers. Folks just aren't going to buy food that might make them or their family sick. We know that under current law the FDA can't fix these problems. The agency has no specific mandate to prevent illness or require recall of adulterated food and inspects food processors only about once every 10 years. They rarely look at imported food. While both farmers and consumers benefit from safer food, no one benefits from a law that puts ridiculous burdens on small farmers. The bill that passed the House does NOT impose fees on farms. They are specifically exempted from the registration fee. Many of the provisions that initially sparked fear among small and organic producers were changed or dropped before the bill passed the House last July. Some farmers who also engage in small scale food processing are concerned that they'll have to pay a registration fee. We think it is likely that the Senate will not support a flat fee for all companies regardless of size but will adopt some sort of sliding fee based on size of the operation or exempt the smallest farms altogether. Members of the Make Our Food Safe Coalition hope we can work with small farmers and organic groups to help assure sufficient funding for the agency to do its work adopts a sliding registration fee based on the size of a processing activity. Dr. Hamburg has pledged that FDA regulations will be sensitive to scale. That should open the door for small farmers to join victims and consumer advocates in urging Congress to pass a bill that recognizes the special needs of small farmers but still has the power to assure that all companies operate in a manner that reduces the risk of foodborne illness to the lowest level. If consumers and small farmers can agree on the need for Congress to give FDA the power and resources and responsibility for preventing foodborne illness, including developing scale-appropriate regulations, we could be strong allies in assuring that that gets into the final legislation and agency rules. We all eat to preserve life and health. No one wins when people eat and get sick, not the farmer or the consumer. No one benefits if all our food comes from giant farms far away. Farmers and consumers and foodborne illness victims should be working together to protect everyone's health and to assure organic farmers and artisanal processors don't get hammered by big guy regulations. We could work together and do better for all of us. It will drive our mutual enemies crazy. The opinions here are the author's alone and do not represent the official policy for the entire Make Our Food Safe Coalition. More on Local Food
 
Cenk Uygur: Corporatists vs. Capitalists Top
When I heard the word "corporatist" a couple of years ago, I laughed. I thought what a funny, made up, liberal word. I fancy myself a die-hard capitalist, so it seemed vaguely anti-business, so I was put off by it. Well, as it turns out, it's a great word. It perfectly describes a great majority of our politicians and the infrastructure set up to support the current corporations in the country. It is not just inaccurate to call these people and these corporations capitalists; it is in fact the exact opposite of what they are. Capitalists believe in choice, free markets and competition. Corporatists believe in the opposite. They don't want any competition at all. They want to eliminate the competition using their power, their entrenched position and usually the politicians they've purchased. They want to capture the system and use it only for their benefit. I don't blame them. They're trying to make a buck. And it's a hell of a lot easier making money when you don't have competition or truly free markets or consumer choice. All of these corporations would absolutely love it if they were the only choice a consumer had. Blaming the corporations for this is a little silly. It's like blaming a man for breathing or a scorpion for stinging. That's what they do. In fact, they are legally bound to make their best effort at not just crushing the competition, but eliminating it. Lack of competition will lead to making more money (presumably for their shareholders; though realistically it winds up being for their executives these days). As the saying goes, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." We have to understand how this system works and then account for the abuses that are likely to arise out of it. I don't hate the scorpion for stinging but I also wouldn't put a bunch of them in my bed. And I wouldn't take kindly to someone else putting them there, either. Politicians are very cheap to buy (and senators from smaller states are even easier to buy - great bang for your buck). So, obviously corporations are going to look to buy them so they can pass laws to kill off their competition. If you don't understand this, you're being at least a little bit dense. You should lose significant credibility as a journalist if you're naïve enough to believe that corporations would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Come on, can anyone really believe that? Yet, in today's media atmosphere, saying politicians are in the back pocket of the corporate lobbyists who raise the most money for them is seen as an unacceptable comment. Anyone who challenges the system is potrayed as an outsider, fringe element who must be treated with scorn and shunned. We are told in earnest tones we must trust the corprations and not question the motives of the politicians. The sensible approach would be to recognize the problem and figure out a way to avoid it the best we can. Money always finds a way in, but we can at least be cognizant of the issue and try to combat it as much as possible. We must do this as citizens who care about our democracy, but we must also do it as capitalists. I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner. But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren't truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system. In order for capitalism to work, they must not be allowed to succeed. We must guard capitalism jealously. So, it is of the utmost importance that we watch politicians with a very wary eye. Campaign contributions are a tiny expense to a large corporation. And the politicians treasure them too much. It is an easy sale. So, beware of politicians receiving gifts. The perfect example of this is the health care reform debate going on now. And perhaps there is no better example of a politician who works for his corporate overlords than Max Baucus, who has received nearly three million dollars from the health care industry. I don't blame the health care companies. I would do the same thing in their position. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to buy an important (and cheap) senator like Max Baucus (he's cheap because he comes from the small state of Montana where it is far less expensive to buy ads and crush your political competition with money they cannot possibly match). If the health care companies can eliminate their competition, they'll make a lot more money. That is why there is so little competition among corporations in so many parts of the country now and why they are desperate to avoid the public option. They'd have to be stupid and negligent not to buy Max Baucus. He is the head of the Finance Committee and in charge of writing the most touted and awaited version of the health care bill. I don't blame them, I blame us. How stupid and negligent are we to let that guy write this bill? The media should be treating Baucus and many of the other senators (who all get millions from the health care industry) with enormous skepticism. Instead, they are treating them as if they are honest actors who would never be affected by all that money. They treat their concerns as if they are legitimate issues. The Republicans and the corporatist Democrats pretend to be fiscal conservatives who care about the budget when they are trying to kill the most important cost constraint in the whole bill - the public option. If you're a budget hawk, that's the last thing you'd kill, not the first. That's what keeps our costs down. You see, these politicians betrayed their real motives in this debate. They made it crystal clear that they are not in fact conservatives or moderates or centrists or even capitalists. They are corporatists. They look out for the interests of the corporations that pay them above all else. Capitalists believe in competition. They believe it lowers costs and gives consumers better choices. So, I would ask the media to please stop calling these politicians conservatives or even capitalists. And could you please look out for the rather obvious fact that they might not be working for us but for the people who pay them? Of course, the media outlets might be able to better recognize this if large corporations didn't also own them. But that probably wouldn't affect their judgment either, would it? Watch The Young Turks Here More on Max Baucus
 
Len Berman: Top 5 Sports Stories Top
Happy Wednesday everyone, here's my Top 5 for September 16, 2009 from www.LenBermanSports.com . 1. Quick Hits The Yankees and Blue Jays brawl at Yankee Stadium. It's not real bright to risk injury when you harbor championship aspirations. The Red Sox and Yankees will open and close the 2010 season at Fenway. Why don't they just play each other every day? Might we actually have a pennant race? The Giants close to within 2 1/2 games of Colorado in the Wild Card race. Michael Vick is activated by the Philadelphia Eagles. He can practice this week with the team, but isn't eligible to play until week three. 2. Contraction Have we reached the long overdue moment of contraction is pro sports? According to the SportsBusiness Journal the New Jersey Nets lost $25-million in the first half of fiscal 2009. Pat Riley has given all the non-players on the Miami Heat pay cuts. The Islanders are awash in red ink. Some NFL teams aren't selling out. Baseball and football ticket prices and personal seat licenses are turning off fans by the thousands. The Yankees announced yesterday that they are reducing the price of their most expensive seats next season. They used to say owning a TV station was a "license to print money." For some teams, owning a sports franchise is a license to burn it. How much longer can this go on? 3. All the News Now we're talking. A New York Times editorial yesterday dealt with the hoary issue of "sports clichés." They did so in the context of Serena Williams' comments following her on court explosion. Such beauties as "It was what it was." "I'm moving on." "I was in the moment." I've never liked sports cliches and I've strived to avoid them. But for athletes who have something to hide, or don't wish to communicate, clichés are the perfect crutch. By the way, I'm taking The Top 5 one day at a time. 4. Mr. Detroit Legendary Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell will address the fans at tonight's game. He will thank them for their support. Ernie has cancer. I first met him nearly 40 years ago. My father published a songwriting magazine, and Ernie was a subscriber. When Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth's home run record, Ernie penned the song, "Move over Babe (Here comes Henry)." In the 1980's when my Sports Fantasy show was on NBC a viewer, an old Dodger fan, wanted to "strike out" Bobby Thomson. Ernie had called the "Shot heard 'round the world" in 1951 on TV. So he recorded the fantasy call for me. Ernie cried "The Giants lose the pennant, the Giants lose the pennant." In "Move over Babe," Ernie wrote how Hank Aaron was "swingin' mean." Take those same cuts at cancer, Ernie. 5. Coupling The Yankees are all about tradition and they've taken Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn to the extreme. A-Rod, Derek Jeter, and Nick Swisher all have girlfriends who are actresses. According to the New York Post , Swisher was seen hanging with Joanna Garcia of Gossip Girls . They were with Jerry Ferrara (Turtle from Entourage ) and actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Not only is Turtle unemployed in Entourage , he gets to wear his baseball cap backwards all day, and drive the car. And now he has Jamie-Lynn as his girlfriend on and off the screen. My hero. Happy Birthday: 2-time Yankee world champ Tim "Rock" Raines. 50. Bonus Birthday: Columbo. Actor Peter Falk (Syracuse alum). 82. Today in Sports: Mayhem at Ebbets Field. When the Dodgers lose to the Reds 4-3, a fan jumps onto the field and starts pummeling the umpire. Leo Durocher is suspended for "inciting a riot." 1940. Bonus Event: There goes the neighborhood. The Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower. 1620.
 
Stephanie Santoro, Jon Gosselin's Nanny, Describes Affair And Rates The Sex Top
IN TOUCH MAGAZINE: Ever since Jon and Kate Gosselin filed for divorce, rumors have swirled about Jon's increasingly wild lifestyle. Though Jon insists he's been faithful to his girlfriend, Hailey Glassman, 22, stories continue to circulate about late nights of partying and hot hookups. And now, In Touch can exclusively report explosive new allegations. Former waitress and single mom Stephanie Santoro, 23, claims that during the month she spent employed as Jon's nanny, she had a passionate affair with the Jon & Kate Plus 8 star in the family home -- and saw a side of Jon that's bound to shock even his most devoted fans. Here, Stephanie describes for In Touch her "genuine" romance with Jon -- and how it came to a bitter end. How did you first meet Jon? I had met Jon and Kate a few years back at a twins convention when they had Cara and Mady [now 8]. Jon and I became friends when I was working at [Pennsylvania bar] Legends, and he came in sometimes. After they filed for divorce, he started hanging out there a lot, and we started talking more. When did you get intimate? We were talking on the phone one night, and the kids were all at home, and he was like, "What are you doing tonight?" and I didn't have plans. So he goes, "Let's hang out. We can go hang out in the hot tub and talk more about everything." So I went over, and we were talking. He asked me if I could give a back massage, and I was like, "Okay, whatever." So I gave him one and then he was like, "my turn." While we were sitting there, he said, "Well, I guess we can kiss just once." At one point he said, "Whatever you do, don't fall in love with me, because it's going to be impossible for me not to fall in love with you." During your relationship, how many times did you sleep together? Nine times. How would you rate the sex? On the romantic end, it was a nine. I wasn't looking for the pleasure part of it. If you care about someone, it's not about how good they are in bed. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't the best I ever had. How close would you say you were? Very close. We would lie in bed and talk about the future. He would say how he wanted to make sure my daughter and I would always be okay, and how he would take care of me. There was no talk about marriage, but we did talk about being together. Was he seeing Hailey when you first got together? I don't think he has ever been apart from Hailey, but he has cheated on Hailey. I know they've broken up before. I didn't know their current status. We talked about it, and he had told me that things were very weird and strange and he would explain it to me, but he didn't want to hurt me in the process. For the full exclusive interview with Stephanie, check out this week's issue of In Touch Weekly, on newsstands now. More on Jon & Kate Plus 8
 
Harry Moroz: Measuring Measurements: Rising GDP In The Great Recession Top
Conservatives like to describe their ideal Supreme Court justice as an uninterested umpire who simply calls the law's balls and strikes, a metaphor Chief Justice Roberts employed during his confirmation hearing. These conservatives also like to describe the free market as the same sort of impartial arbiter, rewarding the productive with profits and the unproductive with, well, not much. For those of us living in the real world, these are just descriptions of ideal types, impractical for their affront to moral ambiguity and, anyway, demonstrably false. Ayn Rand might have advocated a self-made existence in a market without fetters, but her own life showed the falseness of her ideology. The same claims, if not spoken, are often assumed about statistics: with little thought about what we are actually measuring, we assume that if GDP increases, we must be better off. It is with only a little irony then that Ben Bernanke yesterday could assert in one breath that the recession is "very likely over" and in the next regret that "many people [will] still find their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was." To which I am certain that many people responded, "Who cares if the recession is over?" Government measurements of GDP are far from objective gauges of economic health. Like any model, the measurements involve choices about which variables to include and which to exclude. In a provocative article for Harper's last year, Kevin Phillips argued that the federal government specializes in manipulating official statistics: [S]ince the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is. Several commentators have argued recently that GDP measurements need to be revised to better account for household wealth, inequality, environmental degradation, and sustainability, which the current method does not capture well. More importantly, a final report released this week by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, convened by French President Nicholas Sarkozy to reevaluate measurements of progress, reminds us - and uses as its guiding principle - that "What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted." Indeed, it is so easy in our current political environment to forget that GDP, the unemployment rate, the income tax burden - a whole slew of measurements - are freighted with judgments (even if, as is at least sometimes the case, they are necessary ones). We forget or, in the pursuit of simplicity simply ignore, the complexity of the economic and social problems that surround us. We persist with a poverty measure that is grossly outdated , with Pell Grants for low-income students that are not pegged to inflation, with an unemployment rate that last month was either 9.6% or 16.5%, depending on "how unemployed" the unemployed actually are. "GDP" is no less imperfect than the "free market" and "disinterested judges". The relentless pursuit of "economic growth" to raise all boats was always fraught with problems. But doing so without considering how this growth is measured is irresponsible. More on Economy
 
Chip Conley: Jobless Recovery = Sexless Marriage Top
The Fed announced the obvious last week. They told us we're on a slow path of recovery and that the recession may be declared over this quarter based upon the fact that current economic indicators are a little less pathetic than they were last summer. But, they also told us the unemployment rate ain't coming down any time soon. In fact, expect the U.S. to crest above the 10% rate some time in the next few months as we're currently at 9.7% nationally. And, in my backyard (California), be prepared for a lucky 13% unemployment rate by year-end. When you factor in people who are no longer full-time or are now earning substantially less in a new job, nearly one in five Californians are "underemployed" or unemployed. I don't know about you, but a jobless recovery seems pretty joyless to me. Earlier this decade, economists were telling Americans that we were experiencing a boom, yet a large percentage of us were still raiding the cookie jar (our home equity) to pay the bills. I'm wondering whether there's a growing disconnect between how we define macro-prosperity with how it shows up in our micro-lives and what kind of psychological damage that does to us along the way. A couple of weeks ago I tipped a few beers back with an unemployed, old friend who lamented the fact he was in a "sexless marriage." Given my natural proclivity toward being a shrink, I inquired a little more without getting into the juicy -- or not so juicy -- details. As it turns out, this poor fellow wasn't as sexless as he proclaimed. In reality, he and his wife had a once a month date night in which they renewed their wedding vows but, from his perspective, their sex life had become as predictable as the depressing monthly unemployment figures. But, the light bulb turned on for me when I asked him why he calls their marriage sexless when, in fact, it isn't. He told me that two of his best male friends had recently gotten divorced from their wives and were living life in the sexual fast lane with all kinds of hedonistic stories to share. My buddy wailed, "I used to be so focused on keeping up with the Joneses with my conspicuous consumption. I lost that game. Now, I'm jobless and sexless. I feel like a failure. The only thing I can do well is to drink beer." We don't like to admit it, but our definition of success has an awful lot to do with positional consumption - how we compare ourselves with others. Our national shrink-in-chief Dr. Obama might want to consider the cognitive dissonance he and the Fed are unleashing on the country when they tell us we're doing better, yet we see the ranks of the unemployed swelling further. While we hear this is a pretty severe recession, many industries (like the one I'm in -- hospitality) are clearly having depression-like symptoms. Whether it's a recession or a depression, it's leading to the Great Repression. One of the dictionary definitions of "repression" is "the classical defense mechanism that protects you from impulses or ideas that would cause anxiety by preventing them from becoming conscious." My buddy is doing his best to stay unconscious about his jobless recovery and his sexless marriage and he's doing it by drinking more. In fact, this summer the Gallup organization reported that alcohol -- especially beer -- is one of the few consumer products that has held its own in this downturn. As a guy who owns hotels, restaurants, spas, and bars, I can tell you that our bars are the only one of those four types of hospitality businesses that have seen little disruption in their year-over-year revenues. So, the next time Ben Bernanke tells us that we're on the road to recovery just know that he's sending a few more people into recovery in the near future once they realize the beer isn't solving their confusion of why their personal financial situation isn't mirroring what they're hearing on TV. Chip Conley is the Founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and the author of PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. More on Sex
 
Christopher Kelly Funeral: Blagojeviches Attend Service For Ex-Governor's Confidante Top
WESTERN SPRINGS, Ill. — The funeral for the chief fundraiser of ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has concluded in a Chicago suburb. Blagojevich, his wife and their two daughters attended the services for 51-year-old Christopher Kelly on Wednesday. Kelly died Saturday of what authorities say was a suspected overdose. His death came less than a week before he was due to enter prison to begin serving a three-year sentence for tax fraud. The Blagojevich family stood outside the church after the service, talking with mourners. The former governor didn't speak to reporters. Blagojevich is due to go on trial on corruption charges in June. He is accused of trying to sell or trade President Barack Obama's former U.S. Senate seat. Blagojevich denies any wrongdoing. More on Rod Blagojevich
 
Jennifer Aniston Dons Sparkly Mini-Dress, Plans Mexican Restaurant (PHOTOS, VIDEO) Top
Jennifer Aniston showed up at the LA premiere of her new movie 'Love Happens' Tuesday night wearing a short silver dress and silver heels. In the movie, which opens Friday, Aniston plays a florist who is drawn to a widowed self-help guru played by Aaron Eckhart. She was also on Conan (scroll below photos for that). Later that night she appeared on Conan and talked about opening a Mexican restaurant in New York because "I love Mexican food and usually a really great night is had inside a Mexican restaurant." She also said she would "guest waitress" there once in a while. WATCH: In the second segment she and Conan talked about 'Love Happens' and revisited her TV past. WATCH: Get HuffPost Entertainment On Facebook and Twitter! More on Jennifer Aniston
 
Dr. Hendrie Weisinger: Are You a Positive Critic?...It's in Your Best Interest to Be! Top
A positive critic , whether giver or taker, is one who can consistently get the power of positive criticism . Since there are hundreds of empirical studies that indicate giving and taking criticism positively is a key attribute of successful individuals, productive organizations, and joyful relationships, it is in your best interest to be a positive critic. Through years of research, clinical experiences, and training or consulting activities, I have observed five characteristics positive critics have in common and I hope, in common with you. First is awareness -of themselves, of others, and of the importance of criticism. Positive critics are tenaciously looking to increase their awareness of themselves and others. They want information about themselves because they know it will help them navigate through life more effectively. Because they value awareness about themselves, it is natural for them to be receptive to criticism (one of criticism's chief functions is to help you learn about yourself). Positive critics are also aware of others -their feelings, their emotions, their actions. Their awareness of others gives them valuable information that helps them mold their thoughts into an effective criticism delivery, often on the spur of the moment. Positive critics also recognize the importance of criticism . They know its role in achieving individual and organizational success. Leadership, team building, customer service, performance appraisals, innovation, coaching, creativity is just a mere sample of work essentials that criticism powers-up. Second, positive critics hold a philosophy that advocates that people are in the process of becoming their best . This implies that people not only can change but also want to do their best. Out of this philosophy comes the view that criticism is a tool to help people develop their potential to the utmost. Third, the positive critic is self-responsible . He acknowledges and acts on the principle that individuals are responsible for their actions. In the case of criticism, he is aware that it is his choice as to how he responds to the criticisms he receives, and his choice as to how he delivers criticism to others. Because he takes responsibility for how he manages criticism, he is able to consciously choose the most effective ways for dealing with criticisms, both given and received. Fourth, the positive critic is active . Accepting responsibility for her actions catalyzes the positive critic to go looking for ways to make things better. For herself, she actively seeks criticism from others, knowing that this input will increase her awareness and thus help her become more effective. Her behavior matches the attitude of, "Please tell me how I can do better. I want to know what you think." She is also active in searching for ways to help others be their best. She offers criticism to others. Because she values criticism, believes people want to do their best, and sees criticism as a tool to achieve that task, she and her criticisms are perceived by recipients as having positive intent. Fifth, the positive critic practices positive criticism . He practices what he preaches, and he does this as a culmination of the other characteristics. self-responsible . Through his practicing, he becomes a role model for other around him. He shows how to give and take criticism. Through his practicing of positive criticism, he further increases his awareness of which of his criticism skills can be more finely tuned for greater effectiveness. But most of all, he has learned that it feels good to give and receive the power of positive criticism. www.drhankw.com More on Marriage
 
Quds Day: Powerful Iranian Cleric, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Barred From Delivering Prayers Top
Reporting from Beirut - A powerful cleric who supports Iran's opposition movement has been barred from delivering Friday prayers during Quds Day in Tehran, an annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian cause that is being turned into a protest against authorities in a move that suggests the declining influence of Iranian moderates within the political elite. More on Iran
 
Arthur E. Levine: The School of One: The School of Tomorrow Top
Right now millions of American children are going back to the same old schools. But this summer I saw the future of American education in a middle school in New York's Chinatown: The School of One. The New York City Public Schools' Middle School (MS) 131 has adopted a bold and radical experiment. " The School of One " is a prototype for our nation's schools in the decades to come. It's a model much more powerful and potentially far-reaching than any other reform, including much-ballyhooed charter schools, to date. Today's schools are an anachronism. They resemble the assembly lines of the industrial era, when they were conceived. Groups of 25 to 30 children, beginning at age five, are moved through 13 years of schooling, attending 180 days each year, and taking five major subjects daily for lengths of time specified by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. These schools are time-based -- all children are expected to master the same studies at the same rate over the same period of time. They focus on teaching -- how long students are exposed to instruction, not how much they have learned. They are rooted in the belief that one size fits all -- all students can benefit equally from the same curriculum and methods of instruction. We have learned much about education since today's schools were created. We know now that what students learn and what they are taught are different, and that learning is what matters. We know that children learn different subjects at different rates, some slower and some faster. We know that children have different learning styles, which make different methods of instruction more or less effective for them. We also know that today's new technologies offer the prospect of individualizing education for each child and gearing instruction to the student's particular learning style and most effective means of instruction. In the years to come, we will be challenged to rebuild our schools to reflect these realities, largely because our information economy, which focuses on achieving common outcomes rather than seeking common processes, demands it. Our schools will shift their attention from teaching to learning, time-based to outcome-based education, and mass instruction to individualized instruction. This is what MS 131 and School of One are seeking to do today. The school is piloting the new approach -- the brainchild of New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the schools' Chief Executive for Human Capital, Joel Rose -- in a single seventh-grade summer math course. The program will expand to three schools next spring. The School of One turns the current model of education on its head, flipping the relationship between teaching and learning. Student learning becomes the focus -- the driver -- of schooling. Specifically, the School of One translates fifth- through seventh-grade math into 77 skill and knowledge areas. Students are assessed on their mastery of each area, and the program is geared to each student's areas of strength and weakness. The goal is for each student to master all 77 skills and body of knowledge. By tying instruction to each student's most effective learning style, the School of One individualizes student learning. A learning profile is generated for each student based upon prior academic performance, student and parent surveys, and ongoing assessment in the program. Based on the profile, students are assigned to particular methods of instruction -- small- and large-group instruction, peer tutoring, individual tutoring, asynchronous instruction, and independent study. To date, a bank of 1100 lessons in different modalities have been developed. After 100 years with "time" as the dominant factor in education, the School of One eliminates it as the constant in education. Instead, time becomes variable and students advance by mastery. Educators benefit, too. They effectively get rid of high-stakes tests for assessments, instead introducing "just-in-time" assessments in each skill and knowledge area. They also do away with the need for students to repeat a grade or entire course, including subject matter they have already mastered. This approach means tying instructional resources, and dollars, more directly to the approaches that improve each student's performance, rather than throwing costly larger-scale solutions at individual problems. And that, in turn, promises a better return on public investment in education, one that more closely assures each student's readiness for the workforce and avoids the pitfalls of one-size-fits-all expenditures that don't fit all. For more than a quarter-century, America has been undergoing a school reform movement. So far, charter schools have been the primary advance, but they do not fundamentally change our model of education. New York City's School of One may turn out to be the single most important experiment conducted in education so far. It is the future.
 
Rick Horowitz: There's High Finance, Then There's Slow Finance Top
Slice o' Life No. 682. File Under: Too Wimpy to Survive. So there I am, last Saturday afternoon, pulling up to the drive-thru ATM. It's a perfect late-summer day. It's also my lucky day: There's only one car ahead of me. Actually, there's only one car ahead of me -- and one pedestrian. There's a guy standing there. Mid-40s maybe, in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. He's waiting to use the drive-thru, too. No problem -- I've done that myself from time to time. Call it a walk -thru ATM. So I've got two customers ahead of me. Except that the guy on foot is waving me past. "Go ahead," I tell him. "You were here first." No problem. "I'm not ready yet," he tells me. He still has to fill out his deposit envelope. Fair enough. (I tried.) And I pull ahead, and pull to a stop a non-intrusive distance from the other car. In a minute or so, the driver is done with her business and drives off. I put my car in gear and start to roll forward. "I'm ready now." It's the guy on foot. Whatever he had to do with his deposit envelope, he's done it. Can he reclaim his place in line? Absolutely! No problem. So the guy crouches in front of the machine, punches the keys, slides the envelope into the slot. When he's done, he looks in my direction. "I'm sorry. One more. I'm sorry." He also needs to make a withdrawal. "Hey," I tell him, a smile on my face. "You're just doing what the rest of us are doing: Put money in, take money out." No problem. "I'm sorry," he says, and punches a few more keys. Out pop the dollars, and I'm ready to roll. "One more." he mumbles. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I raise my palm -- no need to apologize. One extra transaction isn't going to ruin my day. (It's a beautiful day.) He punches a few more keys, and now he's saying "I'm sorry" even while he's doing his punching. He's also muttering something about how frustrating it is to get money from this machine, although he's actually getting money from this machine. I'm the one who isn't getting money from this machine. By now, there's a car in my rear-view mirror, and the thought crosses my mind: What if the machine runs out of money? It's been known to happen on a weekend afternoon. "I'm sorry," he saying. "One more?" "Do it," I tell him. I can feel my smile tightening. This is -- what? -- the fourth "One more"? The fifth? It's hard to keep track, because the "One more"s and the "I'm sorry"s have started coming in a continuous stream now, and it's impossible to know when one transaction ends and the next one begins. I can only imagine what the driver in my rear-view mirror is thinking. Maybe he's thinking it's a beautiful day, and he's not in a rush, and no problem. Or maybe he's about to go homicidal. I'm not about to go homicidal. I'm the mildest of men, and I'm simply being my normal neighborly self. Accommodating. Flexible. I can always -- "One more?" "Now you're taking advantage." Who said that? I said that. I actually heard the words coming out of my mouth. Nothing angry. Nothing threatening. A simple statement of fact. And he leaves. Just like that. All it took was a little bit of standing up for myself. I'm the mildest of men. But even a patsy has a breaking point. Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist. You can write to him at rickhoro@execpc.com.
 
Robin Sax: ATMurders Can Be Avoided Top
ATM is practically synonymous with "stick up." Everyone knows that being at an ATM is like practically screaming, "I have cash, rob me!" ATMs are the perfect crime site: they are open 24 hours a day and the people going there are going to get money. Yup--a perfect target! So why aren't there better security measures to keep people safe while using ATMs? This issue has been around for at least two decades, but little progress has been made. How can that be? Well, it's not that it can't be done, it's simply that it's not being done. How that can be? The concept of an emergency PIN system (or duress code) for ATM users has been around at least as far back as July 1986. That's when Congressman Mario Biaggi, a former police offer, proposed protection legislation. Unfortunately, his bill did not make it past committee hearings. So far, state legislative efforts to require emergency PIN systems have appeared in Illinois, Kansas and Georgia, but none have succeeded to date. In 1989 the issue of ATM murders drew more national attention when a prominent Jewish leader, Jerome Weber, was fatally shot over $40 at an ATM in west Los Angeles. A Chicago woman was also murdered in 1989 after bandits took her to an ATM to rob her of $500. There were some debates in the media afterwards, but no real action was taken. In July of this year, we all mourned the tragic death of Lily Burk, who was abducted by Charles Samuel and slain. Police say surveillance video shows Burk and Samuel walking to an ATM in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, just a few hours before her death. Also in July, McKenzie Carl Bryant was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for the 2008 fatal shooting of a federal employee during an attempted LA Westside ATM robbery. It seems that, although individual cases abound, the issue of customer security is being ignored by the banking industry. Barry Schreiber, editor of ATM Security Newsletter and a Professor of Criminal Justice has said recently "the industry appears to have abandoned the issue of security probably because the number of ATM crimes is so small." Schreiber cited the Bank Network News study of 12 billion ATM transactions in the U.S. that found only one robbery occurred for every 3.5 million transactions. But the Electronic Funds Transfer Association (EFTA) estimates that a criminal attack occurs once in every 2 to 3 million transactions. The problem is this: few cities keep separate statistics for ATM-related crimes, so there is no way to be sure the EFTA figures are accurate. Data from some individual jurisdictions indicate that the EFTA's figures are indeed understated and that the true extent of the problem is not fully known. For example, New York City police received reports of 743 robberies at ATMs last year alone, and Los Angeles County officials estimated in 2008 that 6 ATM robberies occur per there every day. The only real safety in place at ATMs today is a "three L" system of security: lighting, landscaping, and location. That's it. No other technology is in place, nor is it required by law. However, there are many viable ideas of how to protect people better at ATMS. Here are a few: ATM SafetyPIN™ software is one idea of how to protect people who use automated machines. It is a proposed software application that would allow users of any kind of ATM to alert the police if a forced cash withdrawal is happening. It works pretty simply: by entering the personal identification number (PIN) in reverse order, the police are alerted. The system was invented and patented by Illinois lawyer Joseph Zingher. For more information about Zingher's ideas, go to zicubedatm.com. As of today, banks have not implemented a Safety Pin system of any kind. Why not? Cost is one reason, of course. Joe Zingher says that it would cost $10 million to install his software in all 270,000 ATMs in the US. But cost is not the only concern. Banks have also said that they're concerned about someone fumbling around trying to figure out how to put their pin in backwards. They worry that this might alert the thief that something is wrong and cause even more fatalities. T he ATM Industry Association (www.atmia.com) has published a list of best practices for ATM operating software this year, but nowhere does it discuss the idea of Safety Pin software. Similarly, the American Bankers Association has a yearly policy issues page (www.aba.com/Industry+Issues/default.htm) that notably leaves out the issue of safety software. So what about putting an actual panic button on ATMs? The button could either alert the bank tellers inside of a robbery happening outside or call the local police (or both!). If potential criminals knew a panic button existed, would it deter them from committing assaults/robberies at the ATM? What about the issue of false alarms? Is it cost effective? The company SafeAlert (safealert.com) developed a type of panic button with their ATM911® Emergency Communications System: Lawrence Steelman, president of SafeAlert, said the idea was developed specifically in response to a need for emergency communications at ATMs. The button is mounted through the faceplate of the ATM. The control unit is theft-proof and tamper resistant. When a customer pushes the 911 panic button, an immediate connection is made with the local police dispatcher, who can hear every noise within 20 feet of the machine. Other options include a card-only activation to deter prank calls and a linked security camera. It can be configured for both walk-up and drive-up ATMs. Michael Boyd, whose wife Kimberly was brutally murdered in September 2005 after being forced to withdraw money from an ATM machine, proposes yet another safety idea: ATM users need an option to purchase a second pin number that would be used in times of emergency. This pin number would be used specifically when someone is being made to withdraw money under duress. The pin would still allow money to be withdrawn (so the criminal does not know anything is wrong), but it would secretly signal a silent alarm inside the bank and dial 911 to that location. This alarm would make the personnel inside the bank aware that the ATM user is in trouble and it gives the victim a fighting chance. It would allow the guards inside the bank an opportunity to help the victim at the ATM unit, as well as notifying nearby law enforcement agencies. More information about Boyd's idea can be found at: kimberlyboydlegacy.org Recently there was a proposed "Lily's Law" by Greig Smith, a Los Angeles politician who has argued that an ATM duress code could have saved Lily Burk's life. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa supports Smith's idea. "The tragic murder has highlighted a significant public safety issue: how safe are you at the ATM cash machine?" Greig Smith asked last week (reported in a Time Online article on September 6th). Smith estimated that it would cost banks just $25 per machine to modify card readers in order to "red flag" the reversed code and alert bank security and police. "The cash would still be disbursed so the robber would not be alerted, but help would be on the way," he told Time. Some people may call all this proposed ATM safety "knee-jerk" legislation - but the facts suggest this concept has been around for at least twenty-three years and possibly longer. What's more, thousands of people have been fatally hurt during attempted ATM robberies over the years. In 2008 alone, it was estimated by the EFTA that 60,000 Americans were held at gunpoint at ATMs. Hardly "knee-jerk" when it comes to passing a law! More on Banks
 
Sharon Glassman: Shall We Brunch? Ft. Collins Politics in Action Top
Taking a snapshot of a movement sounds nonsensical, if not impossible. But if you're in Northern Colorado when Dan Shaner hosts one of his Sunday brunches for change , that's what you'll get -- along with some very fine local bluegrass and an equally tasty homemade meal. Like a lot of reinvigorated Democrats, Shaner had a conversion experience during Barack Obama's run for President. He'd moved to Colorado from Montana in 1981 to be an engineer. Work and family took up a lot of his time after that. The Bush years stripped his hope. In February of 2007, with his life ordered and his sense of possibility restored, he decided, "We wanted to do something more for Barack Obama than cheer." In partnership with a neighbor, Mary Englund, Sladen started a Sunday "Barackfast" where like-minded -- and opposing -- thinkers could gather. The first breakfast netted 8-10 people and sent $200 to Obama's campaign. The brunch hit a major peak in January 2008, providing office space (by way of a retiring bruncher), housing (by way of a landlord bruncher) and 500 calls made in a day (by way of just about everyone) for the candidate and his team. Obama won the election. But by then Shaner's breakfast team had caught the political bug. Government "by and for the people?" Bring it on. Since then, Dan Sladen estimates the Barackfasts have "mailed $15,000" to local campaigns and charities, including the North Larimer Tooth Fairy Fund for low-income adults. The Tooth Fairy is non-partisan. Ft. Collins is more Colo-bi-partisan. It's is the electoral blueberry of Larimer County, which a bruncher described to me as a kind of geographical donut that trends redder closer to its circumference . Larimer is also a vital part of Colorado-the-bluer, voting for for Obama/Biden in '08 by almost 10 points. Democrats like U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey and State Rep. John Kefalis have dropped by Sladen's brunch. Obama campaign workers reborn as campaign aids to Gov. Bill Ritter have shown up, too. All of which is American politics as usual. But what makes Dan Sladen's Coloradan is its relationship to the 2008 caucuses. Before 2008, several guests at Dan Sladen told me, their experience of caucusing -- of placing a live primary vote by raising your hand in front of your peers -- was to be part of a passionate crowd of one or three other people. In 2008, hundreds of politically engaged neighbors showed up. It was like a happy family reunion. And at the risk of throwing a cheesy pop song into the midst of this piece: Reunited , well...you know how that feels. Which brings us back to Shaner's brunch. This Sunday, as The Horsetooth Mountain Rangers played, Shaner's brunchers noshed and chatted about: Health Care : A sign on the door advertised a "Mad Doctors' Rally." But the table-side conversation put a gentler, personal spin on the national debate. A small-business owner said he'd helped his 10 staffers find more affordable, higher quality health care. His approach was homegrown -- a byproduct of desperation leading to inspiration. He had canceled the company plan and given his staffers a raise and helped each of them find better, more affordable plans. He was now enrolled in wife's health plan. So far, so okay, he said. As long as she doesn't retire ... Civil Disagreements -- Was it too late to teach kids -- and adults -- the classic skills of rhetoric? Is there way to infuse a shared respect for fact into emotional debates? Don Cox, another brunch organizer, stirred up his own passions as he fried up some bacon. "I am so tired of chicken-shit partisanship," he said. "Uh-oh. I think I'm going to need to balance this," Dan said, sotto voce , as he served up the eggs. "It's not that 51% of the country are assholes and 49% are patriots," Cox continued. "I'd like to have substantive, bi-partisan dialogue," he added. "We cannot assume that because someone does not agree with us that they don't care about humanity and the country." Outdoors by the band, first-time bruncher Diana Zweygardt was talking to Irma Woollen, a retired CSU advisor-turned political volunteer. "A woman who buys eggs from me said, 'Why don't you come to this breakfast,'" Zweygardt said. "It didn't have anything to do with original politics. It had to with community. "You get involved on a personal level because you met them and they asked you to help them." Irma, a native Spanish speaker of Cherokee-Irish-Mexican-German descent ("I'm all-American!" she said, flashing a huge smile) agreed. As a young mother, she recalled, she moved from Sacramento to an army base in South Carolina. There, she sat in the back of the bus so her kids could spread out on the same seat -- and discovered segregation. She loves Colorado, compared to the South -- and to her home state of Texas, she told us. "You're free to be -- Colorado has that feeling for me. It always has," she said. At the end of Dan Shaner's latest Barackfast, no Big Thing happened. And Dan he was thrilled by that. Politics in Ft. Collins is a part of everyday life -- as opposed to apart from it. "If I had a dream," Shaner says, "It would be one of those Iowa fish fries -- if you were a politician running for office in Northern Colorado would come here." Until then, a civil bluegrass brunch is more than fine. In the state that inspired the phrase, "purple mountains majesty", change is a process. Constant, upward effort is natural -- and ideally, rewarded. More on Barack Obama
 
Michelle Obama Makes People's Best-Dressed List (POLL) Top
To no one's great surprise, First Lady and fashion icon Michelle Obama has landed on People 's best-dressed list . Mrs. Obama tells People "I don't consider myself a fashionista," which is why the magazine names her "Best Accessible Style," celebrating the fact that "she's made a signature style out of sleeveless sheaths and shown an uncanny knack for mixing high and low - wearing everything from Gap and J.Crew to Michael Kors and Narciso Rodriguez." Kate Winslet, Freida Pinto, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and others are also on the list. The magazine hits newsstands on Friday. Need more Michelle Obama style? Visit the Michelle Obama Style Big News page. Follow HuffPost Style on Twitter and become a fan of HuffPost Style on Facebook ! More on Michelle Obama Style
 
Laura Ziskin: Remembering Patrick Swayze and a Campaign to End Cancer Top
Note: I was about to publish a blog (below) on the potential impact of donating $5 to Stand Up To Cancer's new "March of Dimes-like" campaign when I got the heartbreaking news that Patrick Swayze had died. A year ago, when we did the Stand Up To Cancer televised event, Patrick opened the show. For all the star power that night -- the stunning musical collaborations, the participation of the presidential candidates and the profiles of breakthrough scientists, Patrick stole the show. He was the living embodiment of what it meant to bravely "stand up to cancer" and he was greeted with a standing ovation because of it. In the year that followed, Patrick continued fighting, not just for his own life, but on behalf of the more than 35,000 people who die from pancreatic cancer every year, and the 1,500 people who die from cancer every day. He spent a good part of the last year of his life as an advocate in the fight against cancer -- he penned a brilliant opinion piece in the Washington Post , and the determination he showed in his own battle no doubt provided inspiration to others in the fight. Last year Patrick defiantly posed the questions, "Will you stand with me? Will you stand up to cancer?" His words that day are ringing in my ears now, reminding me both of the bravery he demonstrated in facing cancer and the importance of finding a cure. It is up to all of us to stand up to this disease in honor of Patrick and everyone struggling with it. My Blog: In 1916, the first great polio epidemic broke out in America. Twenty-two years later, a prominent entertainer (the great Eddie Cantor) went on the radio and asked everyone to donate 10¢ to help end polio, and thus, the March of Dimes was born. And then, in 1955, a vaccine brought about the end of a disease that terrified a nation. A lot of dimes helped make that happen. Many things have changed over the past eighty years, but some things remain the same. We still have diseases that terrify us. As evidenced by the recent health care debate, we still wrestle with how to get important programs and research funded. And science is still an arduous process of trial and error. Nonetheless, we still have that feisty spirit that is determined to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible in science and technology. We have the ability to make collaboration between doctors and scientists and institutions easier than ever. And while in the 30's and 40's, those passionate mothers and daughters and sons and uncles had to knock on every door in the neighborhood to raise a dime at a time, we can engage thousands by activating our own personal social networks and tapping into our microblogging skills. In 1938, when the March of Dimes was formed, there was a sense that a cure for polio was possible. All that was needed was funding, dedication to the cause and time. Cancer, in that it is actually over 200 different diseases, is far more complex than polio. However, in the cancer community today, there is a prevailing consensus that a cure is possible and, god willing, relatively imminent. All of us at Stand Up To Cancer are borrowing a page from the March of Dimes. We want anyone and everyone to donate just $5 to fund groundbreaking research and innovative dream team projects. The principle is the same: little donations make big differences. The good news is instead of walking up and down the neighborhood with a tin can, we're asking you to reach your friends, your family, and your network by placing this widget featuring Meryl Streep on your Facebook page, your website or wherever you can. And please donate. Five bucks can make a world of difference. We don't know whose dime it was that ended polio, but we do know that happened because someone thought beyond "what good will ten cents (or five dollars) do?" The answer is a lot. Donate and share the widget here. Learn about the difference your five dollars will make.
 
Olivia Wilde's Enviable Life: Married To A Prince, Had Hitchens As A Babysitter, Knows Mick Jagger And More Top
Olivia Wilde may still be best known for making out with Mischa Barton on "The O.C." and playing a bisexual doctor on "House," but she's on the cover of the October GQ and reveals an enviable pedigree full of D.C., Hollywood and media A-listers. Obama has phoned her. And she's married to a prince. Read through some of the details below, read the whole GQ article here, see more pics here , and vote in the poll at the bottom. Excerpts from GQ: On Hitchens: Christopher Hitchens used to babysit me when I was young." "With Olivia you could tell it was going to be the movies or stage or TV or nothing," says Hitchens, the noted writer and political racon-teur who briefly lived with the Cockburns and describes it as the type of place where the worn memoirs of the French military leader Ferdinand Foch were used to prop up a window. "Olivia sort of lived the part--very pretty, and, well, the Victorian term for it is headstrong. She wasn't going to be overlooked or ignored." Growing up in D.C.: Her parents, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, are both longtime investigative journalists based in Washington, D.C. Andrew is the author of unfrivolous books like The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Regime and Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy. Leslie, meanwhile, has produced or directed segments for 60 Minutes, ABC News, and Frontline. This fall the couple will release a documentary about the housing crisis called American Casino. When they weren't traveling on assignment to places like Afghanistan, Colombia, and Iraq, Wilde's parents were legendary for dinner parties at their rambling Georgetown town house. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn remain fixtures on the D.C. social circuit; over the years, journalists like Seymour Hersh and the late Peter Jennings have been friends. "Olivia was exposed to a lot of very clever people when she was little," Leslie Cockburn says. She recalls Olivia eavesdropping one night on a conversation between Richard Holbrooke and Mick Jagger--until the Rolling Stone turned around and shooed Olivia to bed. "How many girls were told to go to bed by Mick Jagger?" she asks. Olivia is married to an Italian prince: Wilde's husband is Tao Ruspoli, a wavy-haired 33-year-old filmmaker and flamenco guitarist whom Wilde met not long after moving to L.A. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple eloped, getting married on a funkily painted school bus with only a pair of witnesses. "They're like Barack and Michelle," says -Wilde's friend, actress Megalyn Echikunwoke. "It's like, give me a break--could you be any cuter? They're probably going to have perfectly amazing babies, and they'll be even more annoying." Nearly every story about Wilde to date makes mention of Ruspoli's aristocratic lineage--he's the son of an Italian prince, the late Roman bon vivant Dado Ruspoli, which technically makes Wilde an Italian princess. "Dado was friends with the Stones, with the Dalai Lama, orgies with Brando, all these people," Wilde says. "We have pictures of him bathing in pitchers of Bordeaux." Olivia got a call from Barack Obama after helping campaign: One afternoon on the set of House, Wilde's cell phone began ringing. The future president was on the line, calling to thank Wilde for her campaign service. The conversation was brief and cordial. Then Wilde hung up and began to jump and scream like a -Jonas Brothers fan: "I was just squealing and squawking, trying to replay the whole thing." But Wilde hadn't actually hung up her phone. Through a friend, she learned that Obama was still on the line and heard every shrill decibel of Wilde's fangirl outburst, laughing the entire time at the lunatic on the other end. "It was awful--horrifying!" Wilde says. "But apparently he was flattered." Julie Christie is helping her deal with impending superstardom: Nothing about her manner suggests a derailment is coming, but Wilde confesses she's turned to a new spiritual adviser: family friend Julie Christie, the British actress who defined a generation of female glamour. As Wilde navigates a similar juncture, Christie has given wise counsel.
 

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