Monday, September 28, 2009

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LaRhonda Marie McCall Arrested: Oklahoma Teen Claims He Was Held In Closet For Years By His Mother Top
OKLAHOMA CITY — A woman was arrested after her 14-year-son told authorities he escaped from a home where he'd been kept for 4 1/2 years, spending most of his time locked in a bedroom closet, police said Monday. A security guard at a National Guard facility in Oklahoma City called police on Friday after the teen showed up malnourished and with numerous scars and other signs of abuse, police Sgt. Gary Knight said. "He was hungry. He was dirty. He had numerous scars on his body," Knight said. "It was very sad." The boy was taken to a hospital to be examined and then turned over to the custody of the Department of Human Services, Knight said. After police interviews, officers on Saturday arrested the boy's mother, 37-year-old LaRhonda Marie McCall, and a friend, 38-year-old Steve Vern Hamilton, on 20 complaints each of child abuse and child neglect. Formal charges have not been filed, and both were being held on $400,000 bond, according to jail records. Jail officials were not sure if either had retained an attorney, and no one answered the phone at McCall's home. The teen, wearing only a pair of oversized shorts held up by a belt, walked up to a security guard at the Guard facility around 5 p.m. Friday and asked where a police station was located so he could report being abused, according to a police report. He told police that scars on his stomach and torso were from where alcohol had been poured on him and set on fire. Other scars were from being tied up, hit with an extension cord and choked, the boy told police. "He had scars covering most of his body," Knight said. "They were basically from head to foot." The teen told police he moved to the Oklahoma City area from New Jersey about 4 1/2 years ago after his mother was released from jail. Since arriving in Oklahoma, he said, he had never been to school and spent most of his time locked in a bedroom closet. He told police the closet door was mostly blocked with a stepladder or a bed and that he managed to push the door open enough to escape and leave the house. Knight said six other children living at the home were taken into DHS custody, but none showed signs of abuse. A DHS spokeswoman said she could not discuss specific cases but generally an investigation would be conducted before any of the children are returned to the home or placed with other family members. "There may be family members, but we do a diligent search, and we're very careful about placing kids in a safe environment," DHS spokeswoman Beth Scott said.
 
Aaron Thompson Convicted Of Child Abuse Resulting In Death Top
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Jurors have found Aaron Thompson guilty of one count of child abuse resulting in death in the disappearance and presumed death of his young daughter. The charge was one of 55 in a verdict delivered by jurors Monday after nine days of deliberation. A mistrial was declared on two other charges. Thompson was charged with fatal child abuse and other crimes in the death of Aarone (AIR'-uh-nay) Thompson. Thompson reported his daughter missing in November 2005, when she would have been 6. Authorities believed she may have died about two years earlier. Her body has not been found.
 
Scott Dodd: Q&A: Ken Burns on Climate Change, Wolf Hunting and Why Yellowstone Isn't "Geyser World" Top
Filmmaker Ken Burns has explored baseball, jazz, the Civil War and more. Now, in a six-part series that premieres Sunday on PBS, he turns his lens on national parks, which Burns calls "America's best idea." He spoke to OnEarth magazine about his motivation for the documentary, what he learned about wolves and other wildlife, and his concern that global warming could destroy some of America's treasures for future generations. The interview has been edited for brevity. Why were you interested in telling the story of America's national parks? I've always been interested in how my country ticks, and that's what I try to explore in my films. The national parks are the first time in human history that land has been set aside -- not for kings or noblemen or the very rich -- but for everybody, and for all time. We invented it. It's an utterly democratic idea. In a way, it's the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. Did spending so much time in our national parks affect your thinking about preserving nature and the environment? I think it can't help but do that. It's not so much that you suddenly wake up and think, "Now I'm for nature." It's just that your experience again and again and again transforms all levels of your being by spending time in our national parks. These things work on us in very special ways. There are so many paradoxes. You stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you look down and you see the patient work of the Colorado, and you feel instantly your insignificance in the face of the eons of time exhibited before you. But that has a strange way of making you feel bigger, connected to everything, a part of everything else. You've said that you hope your film encourages more Americans to have that experience. But do you worry about the tension between encouraging more visitors and at the same time preserving the parks? Absolutely, it's a huge tension -- and a wonderfully democratic one to have. It's built into the act that created the National Park Service in 1916, well after the parks themselves. It says that they're here for the benefit and the enjoyment of the people, but they should also be left unimpaired for future generations. So the great tension of course is that when people flock to the national parks, they are in danger, as one park service director said, of "wearing out the scenery," of "loving them to death." And yet this is an important problem for a democracy to have. Ninety-five percent of the people who visit a national park never go more than a few hundred yards from the road and don't see the vast tracts of wilderness in there. They remain pristine and protected. But if the parks don't have constituents, they run the danger that when the next development idea comes down the pike, they're not going to have someone standing up and saying, "No, you can't do that." One of the things that obviously appeals to park visitors is the opportunity to see wildlife such as wolves and bears and bison -- many of which are threatened or endangered. Did your experience provide you any insight into efforts to preserve those animals? During our filming and research, we "met," in a historical sense, a biologist named George Melendez Wright, who was the park service's first biologist and who insisted that the parks re-arrange their thinking about wildlife. In the early days, the parks were almost resorts. It was about recreation. The bears were fed, the predators were killed, park rangers were directed to the nests of pelicans to stop their eggs from hatching because they thought the pelicans denied fishermen of too many fish. We changed our ideas thanks to George Melendez Wright and evolved our relationship to nature and to wildlife. We no longer feed those bears, we no longer open the garbage dumps, we no longer kill the predators, we reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone. These are important benchmarks of progress of the national park ideal. Speaking of wolves, I know you're aware that they were removed from the endangered species list recently in parts of the northern Rockies, and they're being hunted this month in Idaho and Montana. What are your thoughts about that? As Wright and later Adolph Murie, another biologist, pointed out, the wolves were not responsible for the decline of other animal populations. They were in fact part of a very complex ecosystem that culled and strengthened other wildlife by weeding out the sick and elderly of, say, an elk or sheep population. So they're hugely important to the ecosystem, and therefore thank God that they are protected in our national parks so that we can offset whatever dilatory effect comes from these wolf kills, which to me are just inherited fear. We've hated the wolf for reasons mostly unfair through all of human history. Are there other important insights about wildlife and wilderness preservation that you gained while working on this film? If there had been no national parks, there would be no bison. The most magnificent symbol of our country would be a stuffed animal in a museum like a woolly mammoth -- something prehistoric and long gone. But we've got hundreds and hundreds of bison in Yellowstone and other places that are protected through the National Park Service. Without national parks, the Grand Canyon would be lined with mansions. Without national parks, the Everglades would have long ago been drained and replaced with track housing, and so one of the most diverse environments on the planet, the only place where alligators and crocodiles co-exist with thousands of wading birds, would all be gone. Yosemite and Zion would be gated communities. Yellowstone would be "Geyser World." Do you think that if more Americans visited their national parks or connected with nature in other ways, there would be more concern about environmental issues? Of course. Just as we say that we're shamed by the low turnout at elections and that we wished we had a more engaged citizenry, the same thing applies to our national parks. If more people go, you're building more park protectors, and you're encouraging Congress to give more money to the national parks, as they have at many times in our history when attendance has skyrocketed. The more people who come, the more good citizens you make. Thomas Jefferson didn't think you could be an authentic American unless you had a relationship with nature. He couldn't conceive of a national park, because he thought all of America was a park. But the continent he thought would take 100 generations to fill up was filled up in 100 years, so parks had to be created to offset the fact that we were about to lose it all. Your film will delve into a number of challenges that the national parks have faced over the years. What do you see as the greatest challenges facing them today and in the future? From the very creation of the parks, this is not a story of, "Let's watch Bambi frolic in the forest." This is a story of conflict and drama. Human beings, and Americans in particular, are by nature extractive, some would even say rapacious. It used to be said that American progress could be measured in how much land was "redeemed" from wilderness. So in the 19th century, and even today, we had to go against people who look at a river and think, "dam," or people who look at a beautiful canyon or valley and wonder what mineral wealth can be extracted from it. The history of the national parks is the history of that conflict, of people going against the momentum and tide of human affairs to stop that. As our national parks have grown, they've become much more sensitive bellwethers of the environment, recording even more precisely than other areas of our country the effects of climate change, the adverse effects of power plants and pollution, the introduction of non-native species, a whole host of things. They become laboratories for understanding issues that we're dealing with throughout our whole globe. Are you concerned about the changes that global warming could bring to some of our national parks, such as Yellowstone, where scientists are worried that warmer temperatures could allow pine beetles to wipe out entire forests? Tremendously concerned. I had the privilege, if that's even the right word, to witness first hand the impact of those pine beetles at work in Yellowstone. And I dread the fact that my children or my grandchildren might one day go visit an exquisite national park in northwestern Montana, and it will be called, "The Park Formerly Known as Glacier." This post originally appeared on the OnEarth blog . More on Climate Change
 
Sigourney Weaver: Taking Acid Test, Our New Documentary, To Capitol Hill Top
Our oceans feed the world, provide jobs, and generate most of the planet's oxygen. Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth and contain more than 97 percent of the world's water. Our survival literally depends on their health. And yet few people realize that the oceans are suffering from a grave affliction caused by increased carbon pollution. More than one quarter of the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels enters our oceans, where it makes the water more acidic. Scientists have just recently discovered that this rising acidity is threatening ocean life as we know it. This week, we are joining with Senator Frank Lautenberg on Capitol Hill to host a screening of the groundbreaking documentary, Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification . This will give our lawmakers -- those with the power to limit carbon dioxide pollution -- the opportunity to better understand what is happening to our seas due to our dependence on fossil fuels. Acid Test , which premiered on Discovery Channel Planet Green, was produced by our colleagues at NRDC and narrated by Sigourney. We've been friends since high school and were even shared an apartment as young professionals in New York, heading down our very different career pathways. Now we have come together for one of our most important- and most urgent- collaborations. Acid Test (which you can watch online here ) vividly illustrates what is happening to our oceans, and offers solutions to revitalize them. Excess carbon dioxide is making marine waters more acidic, which causes a drop in carbonate -- the key component in shells. When carbonate levels fall, it is more difficult for organisms to make their shells, which become thinner and more brittle. Ocean acidity has increased an average of 30 percent since the industrial revolution. If we continue to dump carbon dioxide into our seas, ocean acidification could result in a "global osteoporosis," harming not only commercially important shellfish, such as lobster, crabs, and mussels, but also key species in marine food webs such as corals and plankton. That could send shock-waves up the food chain, threatening fish, birds, and mammals. Rising ocean acidity will also hit our economy hard. In the United States alone, ocean-related tourism, recreation and fishing are responsible for over 2 million jobs. Indeed, the U.S. ocean economy creates two and a half times the economic output as the agricultural sector, contributing more than $230 billion to the nation's GDP annually. We don't have to watch these economic opportunities evaporate in the face of acidification. We can take steps to turn back the tide. The first step is for Congress to pass clean energy and climate legislation. This week, Senators Kerry and Boxer will be introducing a comprehensive clean energy bill that we hope will jump-start the Senate to move forward with this vital legislation. Along with policies to drive investment in clean energy and reduce carbon pollution, we hope this bill will include additional adaptation provisions to help make our seas more resilient and better able to withstand the stresses of acidification. The next step in defending our oceans is to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. The main reason ocean acidification was 'under the radar' for so long is that we have never routinely monitored the impact of rising carbon dioxide pollution on our oceans. The Senate can change that by fully-funding the ocean acidification research bill introduced by Senator Lautenberg. Already, we have seen a dramatic spike in attention around this issue. Now we need our lawmakers to take the necessary steps to restore our oceans. These measures can lead us to a future of more clean energy and less pollution -- a future that is safer and healthier for our people, our planet and our oceans. Save our Oceans from Acidification: Tell your senators to help save our oceans by passing strong climate legislation. This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog. More on Climate Change
 
State Lawmakers Move To Ban Health Insurance Mandates Top
ST. PAUL -- In more than a dozen statehouses across the country, a small but growing group of lawmakers is pressing for state constitutional amendments that would outlaw a crucial element of the health care plans under discussion in Washington: the requirement that everyone buy insurance or pay a penalty. More on Health Care
 
Jose Antonio Vargas: It's Not Facebook, It's the People Who Use Facebook Top
All the Internet does is reflect -- and amplify -- human behavior. It's easy to be anonymous online, as anyone who's ever been a victim of online slander knows. It's also easy to threaten the life of the sitting American president. And the controversial Facebook poll asking users if President Obama should be killed underlines two emerging ethos of the connected, free-wheeling, open-like-an-open-wound Web. First, people do what they do online because they can. A Facebook spokesman said "the offensive poll" was put up on Saturday, drawing some 700 responses ranging from to "yes" and "if he cuts my health care" to "no." The poll was created by a third-party application, and Facebookers had previously used the poll to ask questions like "What should I wear on Friday?" and "What do you think about health care?", the Facebook spokesman said. Both the individual poll and the application were taken down when Facebook officials were alerted of them Monday morning. The Secret Service is now investigating the case. Second, because of the relative newness of our social networking era -- in which what you fire off on Twitter may end up on someone's Facebook status page before finding its way to some blog and then becoming the subject of a YouTube video -- there's no agreed upon code of behavior online. There's no censoring hub, no stop light to stop the madmen on the virtual freeway from veering off the lanes. What's acceptable to say in the company of your friends or relatives can go public. And spreads. Then hits a collective nerve. Some readers of HuffPostTech are asking others to boycott Facebook for allowing such a poll to exist on its site. A HuffPost reader named "nevergiveup" posted a phone number for Facebook and urged people to call and "leave a message that this is unAmerican and treasonous and they are responsible." In an interview with HuffPostTech, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said: "People are certainly entitled to their opinions, but we argue that we acted responsibly. We took it down as soon as we found out." A quick search on Facebook found that Obama is not the only political target on the popular social networking site, which now has 300 million users . Type "Sarah Palin" and "kill" on Facebook, for example, and an anti-Palin group called "Sarah Palin will Kill us All" pops up. It has 55 members. But Obama, by far, has been the subject of the most persistent and continuous attacks and rumors. During the presidential campaign, a widely debunked rumor that Obama is a Muslim was pervasive. In recent months, Obama's place of birth has been questioned by the so-called "birthers." And here's the third emerging ethos of our social networking era: Online, clinging to their own set of facts, connecting within their own networks, people believe what they want to believe -- one click at a time. "Society has always had extremists. They just haven't had a public venue that we could all see before," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson , an expert on presidential communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Language is evolving because of the Internet, and people have no sense of what's appropriate or not. But you would expect that anyone who would ask people if the American should be killed is fully aware of how extraordinarily serious that is. You would expect." More on Twitter
 
NYC Terror Plot Accomplices Known: AP Top
NEW YORK — After interrupting what they believed was a terrorist plot on New York City with a series of raids and arrests, authorities have intensified their focus on possible accomplices of the suspected al-Qaida associate at the heart of the case, a law enforcement official said Monday. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues, confirmed that investigators know the identities of at least three people believed to be in on a bombing plot they say might have targeted mass transit in the New York area. Authorities released a flurry of terrorism warnings for sports complexes, hotels and transit systems even while saying the plot was disrupted before it become an immediate threat. But many questions remain unanswered, including the whereabouts of co-conspirators and whether any may be cooperating with the probe. There also have been no reports that any of the bomb-making materials have been recovered. The accomplices are suspected of traveling from New York City to suburban Denver this summer and using stolen credit cards to help Najibullah Zazi stockpile beauty products containing hydrogen peroxide and acetone, which can be key ingredients for homemade bombs, authorities have said. Before the raids, police detectives showed a source – a Queens imam at a mosque where Zazi had once worshipped – photographs of him and three people considered possible suspects, court papers say. It was unclear whether those three were the same ones suspected of traveling to Denver. The official who spoke to The Associated Press declined to comment further Monday. Spokesmen James Margolin for the FBI, Edward Mullen for the New York Police Department and Robert Nardoza for the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn declined to discuss the case. After initially being charged along with his father and the imam with lying to investigators, Zazi was due in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday for an arraignment on charges he conspired to use weapons of mass destruction. The 24-year-old airport van driver has denied any wrongdoing. A letter filed by Brooklyn prosecutors last week argued that that Zazi should be jailed indefinitely because, as an Afghan immigrant with ties to Pakistan, he could flee, and because he "poses a significant danger" to the community. Evidence gathered so far – including bomb-making instructions found on his laptop computer – shows "that Zazi remained committed to detonating an explosive device" until he was arrested, the letter said. Prosecutors allege that Zazi has admitted that while living in Queens, he traveled last year to Pakistan and received explosives training from al-Qaida. Security videos and store receipts show that when he returned and moved to Aurora, Colo., he and three others bought several bottles of beauty products over the course of several weeks, court papers said. On Sept. 6, Zazi took some of his products into a Colorado hotel room outfitted with a stove on which he later left acetone residue, authorities said. He repeatedly sought another person's help cooking up the bomb, "each communication more urgent in tone than the last," the papers said. The FBI was listening to Zazi and becoming increasingly concerned as the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a New York visit by President Barack Obama approached, officials said. They decided to track him on Sept. 9 when he rented a car and drove to New York. On Sept. 10, Zazi told the Queens imam in an intercepted phone call that he feared he was being watched, court papers said. The imam later tipped Zazi off, saying police had come around and asked questions, the papers said. Zazi cut a five-day trip short and flew back to Denver on Sept. 12. He was arrested a week later.
 
Howard Schweber: Three Choices in Afghanistan: Counter-terrorist war, Counter-insurgency, and Containment Top
This week the leaking of Genereal McChrystal's report - and the subsequent release of a redacted version - has led to a general reevaluation of our strategy in Afghanistan. Most of the attention that has been paid to McChrystal's report has focused on his call for additional forces; on Friday, he specified that he wants 40,000 additional troops . In fact, however, the more important theme of the report is McChrystal's specific and relentless critique of the present strategy. He writes , "inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced " (emphasis added). (For the full declassified version of the report, go here .) Largely in response, the Obama administration is undertaking a strategic review. Obama has declared his intention to consider all options in going forward, to the express distress of some of his military commanders. Some people have staked out clear positions: McChrystal's is one, Biden's is another. Meanwhile, public support for the war is crumbling, particularly among Obama's own party and its supporters. Conversely, the Justice Department's decision to press ahead with CIA probe is giving Republicans ammunition to trot out the old accusations about Democrats being weak on security. Condoleeza Rice - not usually considered a wing-nut extremist - provided a taste of what is likely to come in the event Obama decides to withdraw troops from Afghanistan: "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan." That's the background from the past week. What are Obama's choices going forward? There are basically three strategies: counter-terrorist war, counter-insurgency, and containment. 1. Counter-Terrorist Warfare. This is our current approach. It involves a combination of precision strikes from Predator drones and Special Forces insertion teams, aimed at the leadership of the terrorist organizations, and ground operations aimed at fighting for control of territory. This combination of "clear and hold" and targeted strikes is further combined with development of Afghan forces under the control of the national government, undertaken in the hope of eventually turning control over the operations to the Afghan Army. This is still the current model, and even as Obama is engaging in his strategic review, Secretary of State Clinton and other NATO ministers are reiterating their support for Karzai, (if not particularly enthusiastically). The problems that McChrystal and others have identified with the present approach are daunting: a corrupt and illegitimate central government, insurgents' use of safe havens in Pakistan, recruitment and organization within Afghan prisons (the Israelis have experienced the same thing in the past with their mass internment of Palestinians), and pervasive fear and mistrust of the international forces. McChrystal complains that the Americans and their allies are "pre-occupied with protection of our own forces" and have consequently "operated in a manner that distances us -- physically and psychologically -- from the people we seek to protect." He calls on troops to spend "as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind the walls of forward operating bases" to "share risk ... with the people." Otherwise, he warns, the cause may be lost. "The insurgents cannot defeat us, but we can defeat ourselves." 2. Counter-insurgency. What McChrystal is calling for is a shift from an anti-terrorism policy to an anti-insurgency policy. Anti-terrorism involves hunting down and taking out leadership of terrorist organizations, depriving them of supplies, and degrading their military capacity. Anti-insurgency is something entirely different, a campaign for the hearts and minds of the people in order to deprive the terrorists of a friendly environment in which to operate and diminish their pool of potential recruits. That, in turn, means making a priority of protecting the local population - that is, minimizing damage to civilians rather than maximizing damage to enemy combatants. It means getting soldiers out into local areas so that they will be viewed as friends rather than occupiers. It also means taking even more casualties, asking soldiers to perform a whole range of tasks for which they are not specifically trained (McChrystal calls for soldiers in the field to learn local languages, for example). There are some problems with this strategy, too. For one thing, as McChrystal himself acknowledges, this strategy makes US and allied soldiers more vulnerable: his recommendations, he frankly acknowledges, are likely to lead to increased casualties "in the short run." The strategy also involves a shift in focus away from the national government toward local leadership. It is not only the case (as it certainly is) that the Karzai government has no legitimacy, it is also the case that the very idea of a centralized national government with control over a single, nationalized military force is a strange one in the Afghan context. And it's not just the national government. Foreign NGO's, private contractors, large-scale development plans, all of that way of thinking would have to be abandoned in favor of thinking on a scale of villages and valleys. Lots and lots of villages and valleys. A counter-insurgency strategy requires successfully delivering support - money, training, weapons, investment -- to local Afghan leaders and leaving it to them to implement the actual distribution. The whole point is to strengthen and coopt local authorities, not to compete with them. But that means understanding those leadership structures and meeting them on their own terms. And the eventual turnover of operations to local forces would also have to take place one village at a time, under local control, a scenario that must sound like a nightmare to military commanders trained in the traditional doctrines of large-scale armed combat. In other words, the whole idea of training Afghans to fight like Americans, equipped like American soldiers, would have to be abandoned. A strategy of this kind takes a great deal of time, and requires a very large investment of manpower. It requires the willingness to absorb casualties, extreme flexibility in defining categories such as "ally" and "enemy" ... in every way, the strategy that McChrystal is recommending is anathema to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan that Bush initiated and that Obama has, thus far, continued. The promise is that with sufficient patience - and we are talking about progress measured in years if not decades, here - the outcome could be a genuine success, a stable Afghanistan whose people are, if not unified in a Western nationalist sense, at least mutually committed to the continued success of the state and unified in their rejection of the alternative of fundamentalist religious rule offered by the Taliban and whoever will be the heirs to that movement. 3. Containment. This is the opposite to counter-insurgency, the move toward minimal rather than maximal engagement, in the hope of accepting smaller risks in return for smaller returns. The idea would be to withdraw the bulk of our forces from Afghanistan and rely on missile strikes and insertion teams to continue to take out terrorist leadership. This is essentially the Biden approach. The idea is to contain Al Qaeda, keeping it bottled up inside Afghanistan - or Afghanistan and Pakistan (more on that in a moment) - ceding control over territory while degrading the organizations' capability of carrying out attacks in the West. There are some questions about our ability to maintain this strategy without a robust presence on ground: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for example, has expressed doubt about our ability to pull off such an approach on the grounds that we don't have the necessary kind or amount of intelligence. Assuming such a strategy could be carried out successfully, it still raises a lot of troubling questions. For one thing, it is highly plausible that such a strategy really would mean additional attacks on the West. That may not be an excessive price to pay; at some point, the cost of continuing the war is too high for the benefit in security that it is supposed to secure. No one, after all, is talking about walking away from the conflict with terrorist organizations altogether, and no one suggests that tolerating 9/11-style attacks is ever acceptable. But intelligence sources cited by AP say that there has been significant successes lately in reducing Al Qaeda's capabilities through targeted killings of leadership figures. Moreover, over the past few years Al Qaeda and groups like it have lost a great deal of the public support they once enjoyed by virtue of their attacks on local civilian populations. And there have been significant successes in disrupting international financing operations, not to mention significant enhancements of security operations across the board. And in addition to the kinds of strikes I have already mentioned, there would presumably be continued support for and engagement with the regimes in the "Af-Pak" theater and beyond. Moreover, there are plenty of people - including General McChrystal - who point to the fact that to at least some extent, the presence of foreign troops engaged in the current style of operations creates motivation for attacks on the West. In its most recent message, Al Qaeda threatens to bomb Oktoberfest in Munich unless Germany withdraws its troops from Afghanistan. We may take it for granted that Al Qaeda will never lose its hatred of the U.S., but much more immediately vulnerable European allies may have to balance the security gains of continued military involvement with the security gains of a reduction in their target profile. As for the U.S., it can be argued that extensive military engagement in Afghanistan is not actually necessary to protect the U.S., which depends more on a combination of police work here (as in the case of the recent arrests of members of the Zazi network ) and disruption of global terrorist networks and terrorist leadership Over There. Is containment a reasonable strategy? It has some obvious flaws. For one thing, even if it is the case from a cold, actuarial perspective that the price of either the anti-terrorist or anti-insurgency strategies is actually greater than the cost of the kinds of attacks that might get through, that idea as a political proposition is likely to be - to put it mildly - a tough sell. Moreover, we have other concerns. Withdrawal from Afghanistan means increasing the destabilizing pressures on Pakistan, which is already the place where Al Qaeda is essentially based (and which has nuclear weapons). We also have a significant interest in maintaining a presence in the region; take a look at a map and consider the long border between Iran and Afghanistan, for example. That border is one really good reason to renew our post-9/11 cooperative relationship with Iran, if we can. (I have commented on this issue before.) It is also a reason to worry about leaving Afghanistan if, in fact, our relationship with Iran is not going to improve. And there is the drug trade; again, a matter of significant U.S. concern. Nonetheless, some version of containment may ultimately be the only realistic option. Continuing with more of the same seems like an even more dangerous gamble; McChrystal's criticisms on that score are compelling. But are the American people really ready to accept military casualties in the thousands rather than the hundreds ( 783 to date ), and the continuing expenditures of additional hundreds of billions of dollars? There are a lot of reasons people are dusting off the old analogies to Viet Nam; the need for public support to successfully wage a long war is one of them. A mixed approach is possible that tries to combine elements of counter-insurgency with a long-term fallback strategy of containment is a possibility. In fact, this is what I expect to see come out of the Obama administration, with its relentless focus on splitting the difference. Such a mixed approach would likely involve a counter-insurgency-style strategy combined with "benchmarks" for measuring progress, and a goal of shifting to a strategy of containment within a specified period of years. That strategy would have to be accompanied by a lot of other things, starting with intensive engagement with Pakistan - which includes a different kind of engagement with India, whose traditional close ties and current influence in Afghanistan has everything to do with the sometimes mixed attitudes of Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment. In other words, it's complicated. To their credit, the current administration appears to understand that fact. McChrystal is surely right that the path to the best plausible outcome is the long, hard, expensive and potentially bloody slog that he seems willing to undertake. But I do not believe that there is either current political will or any sufficient guarantee of future willingness to continue with such an approach. Nor is it clear that the kind of vital U.S. interests that justify such an extended engagement applies. As much as I am horrified by the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women, I would not want to go to war - or send my son to war -- to stop it. If this is not about U.S. security, it is not a serious conversation. The combined counterinsurgency-leading-to-containment strategy is rife with flaws and risks, but it may be the best that we can do. More on Afghanistan
 
Diane Francis: Iraq and Afghanistan: the world's crack houses Top
The G20 in Pittsburgh issued an accord last week that was the financial equivalent of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The governments agreed to collaborate, to devise early-warning systems, to force banks to be open to inspection and to crack down on the type of malfeasance that brought the global economy to the brink. The G20 accord is historically significant, and welcome, because it widens the membership beyond the G7 or G8 and deepens the reach of what is becoming the world's de facto economic "cabinet". This is the only way the world can try and permanently mend the global economy. But no matter what edicts are imposed by this united front -- to curb salaries, fraud or jurisdictional divisions -- there can be no long-term economic stability without world peace. Iran the biggest problem That's why it was fitting last week that the world learned about Iran's second, secret nuclear facility. But it was likely known for some time or should have been. But the news and the timing, around a UN meeting in New York and Pittsburgh's G20, optimized its impact. This is because the world's leaders were there, along with its press, and condemnations came from most quarters including a surprising one by Russia that Iran must desist or possibly face sanctions. (Interesting to note that just days before Iran's misbehavior came to light, the U.S. dropped its missile shield initiative. This was likely designed to get Moscow's help with Iran and Afghanistan.) Forget economic health The point of all this is that without peace, there can never be stable economic growth. G20 leaders must be as concerned about controlling the world's political troublemakers as well as about controlling those in banking and business. Lest we forget, the world would have been well-advised in the 1930s as it dealt with the Depression to also concern itself with a deteriorating Germany. The facts are that banking and economic reforms don't mean a thing if the world doesn't shut down the two most dangerous "crack houses" run by regimes in Iran and Afghanistan. Their violence harms many people as well as many economies. Right now, Iran and Afghanistan are the world's two single biggest exporters of terrorism. Afghanistan is also the world's biggest exporter of opium, a major source of corruption, terrorist revenue and socio-economic instability globally. New strategy So while the G-20 members have been dealing mainly with rebalancing the global economy, rescuing the world's banks, relieving unemployment through stimulus schemes and preventing protectionism, they must now also realize they should collaborate to clean up the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. Interestingly, last week's events were also fitting preambles to this week's "P5 plus 1" talks in Geneva between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council - the U.S., Russia, China, France, and Britain plus Germany. That gathering is part of President Barack Obama's "extended hand" initiative and aims at convincing Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment program in return for help in building nuclear power projects. Obama gets it It appears as though this American regime understands that a rogue Iran, and failed Afghanistan, pose threats that are as serious as credit profligacy, trade cheating, excesses or criminality among Wall Street bankers or several nation-states going bankrupt. Fortunately, the world has become more cooperative than before due to this crisis. Now, the G-20's momentum of goodwill must be deployed to eradicate bad practices and political dangers in Iran and Afghanistan that represent barriers to long-term economic sustainability. More on Afghanistan
 
'Beautiful Life' Star Sara Paxton Stranded In NYC With 6-Month Lease, New Furniture, Blown Mind Top
Production for 'The Beautiful Life' was was halted Friday after just two episodes, leaving in its wake not just legions of disappointed fans but the beautiful LA transplants that populated its struggling-model cast. Sara Paxton, who played the rising fresh face to Mischa Barton's washed up one, told Latina magazine about the ugly turns her life has taken due to the show's cancellation. On how it went down: I was sitting in the hair and makeup chair, and I'm getting my hair done just like a normal Friday--we were all excited for Friday. And all of a sudden, they got the call, and the producers had to make an announcement on set that we were done--that we were over! And I was sitting there in shock. I couldn't believe that in the middle of work, the rug was pulled out beneath our feet. On the ego blow to executive producer Ashton Kutcher: I think he's just as disappointed as all of us. This had his name on it, and it was his first scripted series. I don't understand how they've given so many shows in the past a chance, and not ours. I mean why ours? Why us? It blows my mind. On the trials of New York City leases: We thought we were going to be here until December. Literally we packed up our lives from Los Angeles to New York. I spent two months and thousands of dollars without a paycheck moving to NY. And now they just say, 'oh, peace, you're done?' We all signed 6 month leases, and now we all have to figure out how to get out of our leases, and I have to figure out how to get all my furniture back. I don't know what to do with this NY furniture. We're kind of stranded. You can read the whole Latina interview here. Get HuffPost Entertainment On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Dan Geldon: Don't Believe the Hype! Credit Card Sharks Still Hate the Taste of Plain Vanilla Top
On Sept. 16, Bank of America joined an industry trend in announcing a new credit card that will have a one-page explanation of terms and conditions. Bank of America intends this new card to cater to consumer demand for simpler and more transparent credit products. At the same time, Bank of America has joined industry efforts to pour millions of dollars into lobbying Congress to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Agency -- an agency that's main mission would be to promote the use of simpler, clearer consumer credit contracts that people can actually read and compare (so-called "plain vanilla"). If you're paying attention, you're probably asking: huh? Let's take a step back. Today, the market for consumer financial products is broken. Lenders compete over a few basic terms that consumers can compare -- like the nominal interest rate -- but they bury tricks and traps that consumers can't compare in the fine print. This leads to a market that rewards the innovation of tricks and traps but doesn't reward better features or lower costs. At the same time, the market encourages borrowers to over-consume through teaser rates or the functional equivalent of teaser rates (i.e. the tricks and traps), and it produces too much risk in the financial system. You may remember that extra risk as the main contributing factor to global financial meltdown and your dwindling 401k. The concept behind plain vanilla products is that it's time to make banking simple again. Instead of allowing lenders to bury incomprehensible terms in paragraph after paragraph of legalese, plain vanilla means shorter, readable contracts. In a plain vanilla world, lenders would have to make the costs and risks of products clear upfront -- and they would no longer be rewarded by the market for tricking and trapping their customers. While the apparent cost of credit may go up - remember, the tricks and traps would be gone so the number on the front of the envelope is real- plain vanilla will force competition around lower costs and friendly terms. This idea seems pretty simple -- after all, not a lot of people oppose shorter contracts (even the American Enterprise Institute has designed a one-page mortgage ). And so the Obama Administration designed the CFPA to promote the use of plain vanilla products. The CFPA would safe harbor simple, comprehensible contracts but take a closer look at longer, incomprehensible ones. The idea? While we should expect personal responsibility when terms are transparent, regulators ought to take a closer look at opaque and indecipherable agreements. A few months ago, it seemed liked the industry had a hate-hate relationship with this simple idea. Industry groups alleged that plain vanilla is a fancy term for the government "choosing" products for customers. (Actually, plain vanilla would enable real consumer choice by reducing obfuscation.) They alleged that plain vanilla would destroy innovation. (Actually, plain vanilla would enable innovation around lower costs and friendly practices rather than around tricks and traps.) They alleged that plain vanilla would mean that customers would be thwarted from selecting more complex products that better fit their needs. (Actually, plain vanilla would still allow any product that can be explained in comprehensible ways, as well as products that can't so long as they aren't dangerous and abusive.) Today, it seems like the industry has a love-hate relationship with plain vanilla. It loves plain vanilla in that it is apparently embracing it, at least if you look at their marketing campaigns -- that is, their marketing campaigns for plain vanilla products, not their marketing campaigns against plain vanilla products. (With all these marketing campaigns, it's no wonder the $700 billion bailout hasn't been paid back yet.) So, let's jump back to the beginning: Huh? If you haven't guessed it yet, there's a pretty straightforward , two-part explanation for what's really going on here. The first part is that the industry doesn't love plain vanilla. In fact, they view it as a threat to monopoly-sized profits that are possible only in opaque, uncompetitive markets. The second part is that they're lying. They're pretending they love plain vanilla so that the perceived need for Congressional action fizzles, so that CFPA slowly fades away, and so that the public feels safe and protected by a working marketplace (consumer choice won in the end, we'll all think!). And then the banks can scrap the whole idea of plain vanilla once and for all - or, at least until the next crisis. So by appearing to love plain vanilla, the banks are, paradoxically, seeking to kill plain vanilla. If you think this sounds far-fetched, just look to the industry's history of appearing to embrace change under congressional scrutiny but returning to bad habits when the lights go dim and the cameras go off. The best example happened in 2007, when Citigroup pledged to eliminate "universal default" from its credit card contracts. Less than a year later, the company picked the practice back up again. The Fed and Congress ultimately acted to prohibit this practice, but the tactics of the industry succeeded in kicking the can down the road. If you're like me, you're wondering how such a simple idea for simpler products has turned out to be so complicated. Well, there's a straightforward answer for that too: the financial industry has the world's best innovators at making simple things seem complicated. If you don't believe me, just look at your 30-page credit card contract. Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0. More on Barack Obama
 
Houston Food Bank Volunteers Make 4,300 Jars of Peanut Butter For The Hungry Top
This week, as part of a local community activity to build up the inventory of the Houston Food Bank, local Author Tom McCloud, arranged for employees from Hewlett Packard, The Woodlands Minuteman Press, The Roses for Roses Foundation, and others to volunteer their time by canning more than 4,356 jars of peanut butter at a nearby factory. More than 7,400 pounds of freshly picked peanuts were roasted, processed with ingredients, and packaged to be distributed to hunger relief agencies within southeast Texas. Of the estimated half million people who need assistance from the Houston Bank pantries each year, nearly 44 percent are children.
 
Joseph A. Palermo: Afghanistan: Presidential Double Standards and Military Power Top
On October 23, 1983, when Shia militants in Lebanon killed 241 American military personnel outside the Beirut airport with a suicide truck bomb President Ronald Reagan vowed to continue the troops' mission in Lebanon. Reagan had repeatedly claimed that Lyndon Johnson forced American soldiers to fight in Vietnam "with one hand tied behind their backs" and vowed he'd never do such a thing. But about four months after what was the highest single-day casualty toll for the U.S. military since the Vietnam War, President Reagan quietly removed from Lebanon the remaining 1,300 or so American soldiers. Given Reagan's hawkish credentials he didn't have to worry about being portrayed as "soft" on America's enemies abroad. The moral of the story is that if any president is going to "cut and run" from an American military engagement he or she better be a Republican. This narrative runs deep in American political discourse. Joe McCarthy accused FDR of selling out to Joseph Stalin at Yalta and blasted Harry Truman and the "Democrat State Department" for "losing" China to Mao's communists. Truman showed his resolve by initiating loyalty oaths and intervening militarily in Korea. John Kennedy had to prove his "toughness" toward Fidel Castro's Cuba and even escalated his anti-communist rhetoric beyond Richard Nixon's during the 1960 campaign. Like Truman, Kennedy showed his mettle by green-lighting the Bay of Pigs invasion, which turned out to be a disaster. Both Kennedy and LBJ escalated American military involvement in Vietnam reacting, in part, to the never-ending Republican criticism that accused them both of "losing" Vietnam just as Truman had "lost" China (especially Johnson). In contrast, the mainstream press gave President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney a free ride in Iraq even though their military adventure has proven to be one of the worst foreign policy fiascos in American history. General David Petraeus, Bush's commander in the field and currently CENTCOM commander, gave Bush a lot of political cover among elite opinion makers as well as the public in the heat of the acrimonious presidential campaign of 2004. At a time when the Swift Boaters were maligning the military service of Democratic candidate John Kerry, and slammed anyone hinting that America should do anything in Iraq other than "stay the course," General Petraeus wrote a politically-tinged op-ed for the Washington Post championing the wisdom of Bush's Iraq policies. Not only was Petraeus sucking up to his boss but he seemed to skew his military advice so that it boosted Bush's credibility on a war that he had lied the nation into fighting in the first place. Hence, as with every other government agency, from the Justice Department to the General Services Administration, the Bush Administration seemed to have made great headway in politicizing even the U.S. military. It's doubtful General Petraeus will be so generous sharing his tactical acumen with the public in a way that politically benefits President Barack Obama. John F. Kennedy's 1000-day presidency depended in large part on his ability to stand up to the "brass hats" (as he called them) who constantly called for military action in Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy held firm against their hawkish advice to defuse the nuclear standoff that if mishandled could have annihilated millions of people. President Obama will soon learn that the "brass hats," especially the holdovers from the Bush Administration, might be operating under similar biases. The sooner he shows them who the Commander-in-Chief really is, the better. Unelected military and civilian defense officials had free range in the Bush Administration. Today, from C-SPAN to CNN we see the usual stable of hawks giving their armchair military advice to Obama urging him to up the ante in Afghanistan, send in more troops, spill more American blood, and throw away more American treasure. If public opinion polls are any indicator the American people changed the channel on the Afghan war some time after the word "Tora Bora" entered the political lexicon. The pursuit of an ill-defined "victory" dependent on a greater U.S. military commitment and on the actions and popularity of the corrupt Hamid Karzai "government" has lost all credibility with the American public. The time will come sooner or later when President Obama will have to stand up to the military and face the inevitably shrill attacks from the armchair commanders and "conservative" bloviators who populate the mainstream media. I watched Kimberly Kagan the other night on C-SPAN , the president of the Institute for the Study of War, and wife of the Bush military adviser Fred Kagan, prattle on about how Obama must escalate the American military presence in Afghanistan or face "failure" and "defeat." Her advice was just so drearily repetitive: "We must stay in Iraq or Afghanistan (or fill-in-the-blank) because the generals say so and because our national security depends on taking the fight to Al Qaeda and if we leave we'll face uncertainty and . . ." (Zzzzzzzz.) Obama must ignore the likes of the disastrously wrong crowd who inundate the media with their "realistic" and "sober" assessments of what needs to be done in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not even a "failed state" because to qualify as a "failed state" a nation must at least first be a "state." We should declare "victory" and get the hell out of there. I'm sorry but the country is a basket case. Obama cannot listen to the crackpot realists like Kim and Fred Kagan, Mike O'Hanlon, or any of the other "experts" who loved the war in Iraq and now want President Obama to pour more U.S. soldiers into Afghanistan. Kabul, a city of about 4 million people, doesn't even have a functioning sewage system. Why don't we start there, create an enclave and make life a little better for those people before we do anything else? There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan and the "borders" between those two countries don't mean anything. Al Qaeda is in Pakistan and Somalia and Europe. In Pakistan we don't even know which side the ISI is on. All of these unfortunate facts raise the question: Exactly what "nation" is the United States "building" in Afghanistan? The fact that Afghanistan seems to be reaching the tipping point after these long eight years gives Obama an opportunity to establish what could be a nascent "Obama doctrine" that emphasizes multilateralism and engagement over the failed Bush policies of unilateralism and saber rattling. Obama recognizes what Bush and John Bolton and Kim Kagan and the rest of the neo-cons could not get through their thick skulls: Whether we are talking about Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, or the Iranian nuclear issue, all conflicts are regional conflicts. Multilateralism works; unilateralism doesn't. The one silver lining of the terribly misguided Bush foreign policy might be that it showed the world that the United States couldn't go it alone. Any U.S. president can land on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and prance around proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," but the United State can't turn the clock back to a "golden age" (that never really existed) where it can dictate terms to the rest of the world. Truman didn't "lose" China because it was not ours to lose. Johnson didn't "lose" Vietnam for the same reason, and Jimmy Carter couldn't have prevented the Iranian revolution even if he launched a hundred "Operation Eagle Claws." Military threats without dialogue and engagement only strengthen the hardliners. The major problems facing the planet of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change, and financial meltdown require collective action. President Obama showed last week with his historic performances at the United Nations and at the G-20 summit that he understands the nature of the new world order and knows how to cut through the white noise of the armchair generals and so-called experts. Through engaged and thoughtful multilateralism a new era in American relations with the world is possible. Making a clean break with the "conventional" wisdom about how to deal with Afghanistan would be a great starting point. More on Afghanistan
 
Sarah Palin Memoir "Going Rogue" Due November 17 Top
NEW YORK — That was fast. Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, has finished her memoir just four months after the book deal was announced, and the release date has been moved up from the spring to Nov. 17, her publisher said. "Governor Palin has been unbelievably conscientious and hands-on at every stage, investing herself deeply and passionately in this project," Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, said Sunday. "It's her words, her life, and it's all there in full and fascinating detail." Palin's book, her first, will be 400 pages, said Burnham, who called the fall "the best possible time for a major book of this kind." The book now has a title, one fitting for a public figure known for the unexpected – "Going Rogue: An American Life." Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, has commissioned a huge first printing of 1.5 million copies. Sen. Ted Kennedy's "True Compass," published by Twelve soon after his Aug. 25 death, also had a 1.5 million first printing. As with the Kennedy book, the e-edition of Palin's memoir will not be released at the same time as the hardcover. "Going Rogue" will not be available as an e-book until Dec. 26 because "we want to maximize hardcover sales over the holidays," Harper spokeswoman Tina Andreadis said. Publishers have been concerned that e-books, rapidly becoming more popular, might take away sales from hardcover editions, which are more expensive. Palin, who abruptly resigned as Alaska governor over the summer with more than a year left in her first term, has been an object of fascination since Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, chose her as his running mate, making an instant celebrity out of a once-obscure public official. Although Democrat Barack Obama easily won the election and Palin was criticized even by some Republicans for being inexperienced, she remains a favorite among conservatives and is a rumored contender for 2012. Interest in her is so high that a fan recently paid $63,500 to have dinner with her, part of an Internet auction for a charity that aids wounded veterans. Palin, 45, spent weeks in San Diego shortly after leaving office and worked on the manuscript with collaborator Lynn Vincent, a person close to her said. She was joined in San Diego by her family and her top aide, Meghan Stapleton, then spent several weeks in New York working around the clock with editors at Harper, said the person, who wasn't authorized to comment and asked not to be identified. More on Books
 
Joan E. Bertin: Banned Books Week: Still Needed in the U.S. Top
This piece was co-authored by Chris Finan, President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. For a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency. Stick a pin in each place where there's been a challenge to a school or library book, and you'll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut. This year already, challenges have been reported from Montana to Indiana to Texas, in high schools and libraries, and from classics like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye , to newer books like Brent Hartinger's The Geography Club and Chris Crutcher's Chinese Handcuffs . This February in West Bend, Wisconsin, a local couple filed a petition calling for the Library Advisory Board to remove or label several Young Adult titles, including Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower , because they felt that all the books in the young-adult section that dealt with homosexuality were "gay-affirming." The couple also requested that the library build a collection of books by "ex-gays" in order to achieve an ideological balance. As this debate raged on, four members of the library board were not reappointed because of accusations that they were "promoting the indoctrination of the gay agenda." Then the Christian Civil Liberties Union Milwaukee branch filed a lawsuit against the city of West Bend, complaining that the mere presence of some of the young adult books in the library caused "mental and emotional harm" to the elderly plaintiffs. The CCLU seeks $30,000 in damages per plaintiff, the mayor's resignation, and the removal of the books for a public burning (literally!). As the late, great, and much-censored author Kurt Vonnegut would say: And so it goes. In 1982, booksellers, librarians, and publishers launched Banned Books Week in response to threats of censorship like this. During this year's event, which will be held from Sept. 26 to Oct. 3, hundreds of bookstores and libraries will mount displays and sponsor events designed to remind Americans of the precarious state of our most precious freedom -- the freedom to read, write, think and say whatever we want. (A list of these events can be found on the Banned Books Week website ). There were more than 400 book challenges in 2007, 513 reported in 2008 and an on-going count in 2009, according to the American Library Association. The most frequently challenged book on the ALA's list for the last three years was And Tango Makes Three , a children's book that tells the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who found an abandoned egg, hatched it, and nurtured the chick. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn still ranks as one of the most commonly challenged books because of its racial epithets. Just recently, Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl was challenged by the parent of a young teen because she felt the story of a kidnap victim was too graphic for adolescents. Of course, parents have certain rights to direct their children's education. What we oppose is the effort of one parent or a group of parents to make decisions about what other people's children may read. The First Amendment gives all parents the right to make choices about their children's education. In our diverse society, it is inevitable that people will be offended by something they see, read or hear, and that some will respond by advocating the suppression of what they dislike. Demands for censorship come from both ends of the political spectrum and all points in between. Nor should we expect this situation to change. It is a measure of the health of our democracy that people feel free to protest. But because the fight over books will continue, so must the battle against censorship. Banned Books Week offers everyone an opportunity to join the effort to save the books -- all of them. Free speech will remain free only as long as we are willing to fight for it. Joan Bertin is Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Chris Finan is President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression , both located in New York City. Together, they are co-directors of the Kids Rights to Read Project , which responds to book challenges and bans and provides support, education, and advocacy to people facing book censorship.
 
Eliza Byard: Colliding Realities in America's Middle Schools Top
The past couple of weeks have brought the American public two very different perspectives on how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues play out in our middle schools, from extremely different sources. On Sept. 19, at the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, DC, Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Senator Tom Coburn, averred that 10-year-old boys have "less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people." (And, by the way, that's a good thing, Schwartz said, because it reflects the fact that they don't want to be gay.) Then on Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on students coming out in middle school, in which students reported knowing that they were gay or lesbian by the age of 9, 10 or 11. Imagine the clash of those two realities--10-year-olds intolerant of gay people and 10-year-olds realizing they are gay--playing out in both hidden and public ways every day in school hallways. Unfortunately, the picture might even be worse than what our imaginations could cook up, considering findings from a newly released GLSEN Research Brief . The brief reveals that middle school LGBT students reported rates of harassment and assault that were significantly higher than those reported by high school LGBT students: more middle school students had been verbally harassed, and a shocking 63% had heard homophobic remarks made by school staff. About two of every five LGBT middle school students had been assaulted - punched, kicked or threatened with a weapon - at school, as compared to "only" one in five of the high school respondents. The fact that so many high school students had been assaulted at school is harrowing enough--now picture things nearly twice as bad for students even earlier in their lives, and farther from having that crucial high school diploma. The bad news continues as you look to critical indicators of academic success, such as school attendance. Middle school students were more likely to report having skipped school in the past month out of fear for their personal safety (fully half of the middle school students surveyed had done so, about one-third of the high school respondents had). Their grade point averages, not surprisingly, suffer as well--averaging a half point lower than those of their peers. Things are so bad in middle schools, at least in part, because they are much less likely than high schools to have addressed these issues head on. In other words, students like those profiled in the New York Times article are much less likely to be getting the help and support that they need to have equal access to an education. Fewer middle school students than high school students can identify supportive faculty members, and almost no middle schools had a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). This last fact is particularly unfortunate in light of what Kendra Wallace, principal of Daniel Webster Middle School in Los Angeles, told the Times about the GSA at her school. The GSA "is a club that promotes safety, and it gives kids a voice," she said, "And the most amazing thing has happened since the GSA started. Bullying of all kinds is way down. The GSA created this pervasive anti-bullying culture on campus that affects everyone." I suppose the good news here is that there is such a clear path to creating a safer school climate. Over time we have seen signs of improvement in school climate in those schools that haven't shied away from this issue and have taken action - instituting explicitly inclusive anti-bullying policies that are clearly articulated to the full school community; providing training to school staff to ensure that all students are safe and supported at school; supporting student efforts to speak out about these issues and improve school climate through GSAs; and using curricular materials that accurately and appropriately reflect LGBT people, history and events. This crisis in American middle schools is a part of the huge challenge that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seeks to tackle, armed with $100 billion in stimulus funds and a general acknowledgment that our schools are not currently living up to our societal obligation to provide all young people with a fair shot at a good future. As schools heed his call to address gaps in achievement and turn around our lowest-performing schools, they must not lose sight of the fact that there are some very basic steps to be taken in the middle grades before that can become part of middle school reality.
 
Paul David Walker: CEO Secrets: Why Does Meditation Improve Performance? Top
As business leaders we need to have a clear picture of present reality in order to make effective decisions. Meditation is a practice designed to clear the mind of stress and distortion, and allow you to experience present reality. 
 Over time our minds become filled with thoughts and beliefs that were placed there both consciously and unconsciously. We have defined experiences and recorded them as beliefs. Thought patterns have developed over the years, some of which are helpful and others are not. We are bombarded with ideas, advertising and images from TV and movies that stick in our memories. These thoughts often circle in our minds causing fear and stress. 

All these thoughts and beliefs were filtered by our mood at the time we experienced them. If we are in a good mood, we tend to record a more positive message; if we are in a bad mood, it will be more negative. When we recall this information it is also filtered by our mood at the moment of recall. The bottom line is our mind is full of highly distorted information that is often conflicting. 

 See Present Reality With A Minimum of Distortion Meditation helps to clear the mind and leave room in our consciousness to experience the reality of the moment. The flow of cause and effect is highly complex and, in order to be successful business leaders, we need to be able to see present reality with a minimum of filtering from the thoughts and images filling our minds. When working with teams of engineers, I enjoy asking if anyone has invented a successful time machine. Of course, they always say no. Then I ask, "So you are certain that no one can travel to the past and the future?" They laugh and agree. Therefore, there is no reality outside of the present moment. The future is a speculation, and the past is what we have recorded in our memory or in writing, which is, as I said earlier, highly distorted.

 Present Moment Is The Portal To Reality Yet how much of the time do most leaders spend traveling to the past and the future in their mind? I would suggest, too much. The best leaders realize that being able to live in the present moment is the secret to both personal power and strategic advantage. They learn to see through false realities and connect with true reality.

 An Example from Sports
 After watching Florence Joyner win the hundred meter dash, the TV interviewer showed a super slow motion playback of her run. She was about equal with the field through the middle of the run, and then she leaped out way ahead of the field to win the race. The interviewer played the run again, and just as she put distance between her and the field, the interviewer stopped the tape and pointed to the screen and asked, "What happens right here?" Florence answered, "I just let go." 

She stopped thinking about the race and slipped into what sports coaches call "The Zone" and, of course, her performance accelerated dramatically. She was integrating all her training with the reality of the present. Being able to find your way into "The Zone" is critical for success as a leader. Some respond to pressure by "clutching" and thereby reducing performance, and others slip into "The Zone." Michael Jordan was famous for performing better under pressure, as are many successful athletes. As a leader, is this true for you? When the pressure is on, do you call for the ball? 

 Integrative Presence Sports coaches realize that if athletes think too much about the past and the future, they will miss the reality of what is happening in the present. The future extends from the present, not from the cognitive frameworks in your mind. Those who can let go of their thoughts will find it easier to integrate their actions with present reality. In business, I call this "Integrative Presence."
 If an athlete can create this state of mind, so can a leader. If these states of mind that seem to create super human results can be created in one area of life, they should be able to be created in others. While the environment is right for this kind of performance in sports, it is not beyond or separated from the business world. The most effective leaders have mastered Integrative Presence. Integrative Presence unleashes genius in any endeavor. Integrative Presence is, as I define it, collaboration with the natural flow that extends from the present integrated with the knowledge, intention and consciousness of an individual or group. Integrative Presence allows you to integrate all the realities of the moment simultaneously while combining them with your intention. Those who master this will Unleash Genius within themselves, and the people who follow them, to create new realities once unimaginable. Business is much more complex than sports, and so I will discuss how to integrate this into your business life in the next post.. More on Spirituality
 
Katherine Gustafson: Retail Takes on Slavery: The Body Shop Fights Child Sex Trafficking Top
Think slavery is over? Think our children are safe? A corporate campaign tells us all to think again. Growing up during The Body Shop's heyday, I rarely entered a shopping mall without seeing the cosmetics retailer's familiar "No Animal Testing" signs. And no youthful spree was complete without bagging one of the mango shampoos or pomegranate body lotions that lined the shop's walls like shining, aromatic jewels. Back then, the company was one of few touting ethical consumerism; under the direction of co-founder Anita Roddick, The Body Shop pioneered the idea that businesses can do well by doing good . The concept gained so much traction that angry customers just about stampeded when in 2006 Roddick sold her share of the company to French cosmetic giant L'Oreal, not known for an animal-kindness stance. But Roddick saw the move as a pragmatic one that would take the gospel of socially responsible business to new horizons. And indeed, two years after her death, the company is taking its advocacy work to a whole new level with the launch of the three-year " Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People " campaign, kicked off eight weeks ago in partnership with the organization ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes). The campaign aims to make sure that children's rights are secure, and that governments are held accountable for their contributions toward that goal. "A lot of people do not realize the extent of the problem," Sophie Gasperment, The Body Shop's Global CEO told me last week in a quiet moment after she spent a hectic day discussing this issue with other anti-sex-trafficking activists and advocates at the at the fifth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The extent of the problem? According to UNICEF, over 1.2 million children are trafficked globally for labor and sex each year. Of those, the organization estimates that a million are bought and sold as sex slaves. And yes, I did indeed just say "slaves." At one of CGI's many discussion sessions, Luis C. de Baca, Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. State Department, told the assembled business, government and philanthropic leaders that collectively, we are still working on the project started by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. "We are delivering on a promise made 146 years ago by President Lincoln," he said. "The 13th Amendment is a living responsibility that all of us share." He noted that last year there were only 3,000 trafficking prosecutions worldwide, despite the fact that millions of people are enslaved. Grave under the bright lights of the conference room, he said, "This has to shame all of us." Soft Hands Kind Heart A few days before she died in 2007, Roddick made clear to The Body Shop's leadership that she was keen to see the business take on the challenge of addressing child sex trafficking. It's a tall order in a world so in denial that we usually use euphemisms to talk about the issue. "Euphemisms," Mr. de Baca said, "give us an excuse to look away." However, Gasperment was not intimidated. "It's not the first time that The Body Shop has tried to tackle a difficult issue, or a sensitive issue," she told me. "We've just campaigned for three years on domestic violence, and that was not very easy either." But come on, child sex slavery? I'd say that's a bit more than just a "difficult issue." Then again, its very extremity could be its strength as a cause. Shelley Simmons, The Body Shop's director of brand communications and values, is sure that once people engage with the issue, "there's no going back for them. They want to learn and know more and they want to know how they can support it. The level of awareness is so low that I think people think it just doesn't happen. And that's a fundamental problem. That's why we're so excited to be launching the campaign." The initiative is a robust endeavor that respects the high stakes of the situation. At a press conference last week at CGI, Gasperment unveiled the initial element of the three-year effort. The Body Shop will collaborate with ECPAT on creating "Progress Cards," country-by-country reports that identify gaps in each state's apparatus for protecting children from trafficking and sexual exploitation. ECPAT will collect and validate data on key indicators from its extensive global network of organizations and individuals working to eliminate child sex trafficking and from UN reports and other sources. The Body Shop staff will distribute the cards to customers through the company's network of 2,500 stores in over 60 markets around the world, along with leaflets, info packets and other campaign materials. Posters featuring the campaign's "No No Hand" logo will hang in store windows and behind checkout counters. Customers will be invited to join the campaign's Facebook page. And best of all for us lotion-inclined individuals, a special "Soft Hands Kind Heart" hand cream (which smells great, incidentally) will be on sale, all proceeds of which support ECPAT's efforts. Child vs. Cow As the campaign progresses, customers can keep up on how countries are doing and take action to urge things in the right direction. Carmen Madrinan, Executive Director of ECPAT International appreciates that partnering with a business amplifies her organization's message. "As an NGO specialized in the field, we work with a completely different population," she told me during a break from the CGI whirlwind. "We work with grassroots organizations. We have a network of children who have survived sexual exploitation with whom we work directly. But we don't have the reach to the public that The Body Shop has, the ordinary Main Street public." And Main Street desperately needs education on this issue. At the press conference on human trafficking shortly after I spoke to Madrinan, a reporter (from the moon, apparently) asked a question about the difference between illegal and "legal slavery." On the stage, actress Julia Ormond, a prominent anti-trafficking activist, looked like she had swallowed a frog, and de Baca leapt to the microphone to set the guy straight. I had already heard the spiel from Madrinan: "According to international law, there is absolutely no way a child can consent under any circumstances to being exploited, even if they're deceived, even if there's some perception that they have agreed." Unfortunately, however, in today's world it is all too easy to abscond with children. "If you have an adult crossing a border, usually there is some element of checking," Madrinan said. "There may be some vetting of the credentials of that person. Whereas if it's a child with an adult, oftentimes the assumption is that the adult is a responsible adult for that child. In many parts of that world, the way we conceptualize children as belonging to the adult allows for an easy transition for children to disappear and to be trafficked with much greater ease." The scale of the problem is reflected in how cheaply one can procure such a kidnapped child. At the anti-trafficking discussion session, Kailash Satiyarthi, Chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor, related an incident that occurred earlier this month during a march for children's rights in Nepal. There were child survivors of trafficking marching with him, and he overheard one ask the other how much she was sold for. The little girl responded that her price had been $40. Someone asked the kids if they knew how much a cow costs in Nepal. They didn't. The answer? $200 to $250. "I was almost crying, listening to this," Satiyarthi said. "I was so ashamed." The Bravest Thing You Can Do Experts worry that the global economic crisis is spurring an increase in trafficking, especially concerning society's most vulnerable: children. "We're in a very serious economic crisis, which is extremely worrying," Madrinan told me. "Much of the impact of that is that the most vulnerable who were on the margin and barely surviving are now pushed beyond that margin." And the more children are involved in the system, the more behind the global community gets in its efforts to mount an appropriate response. Madrinan mentioned that the U.S. has only three facilities dedicated to addressing the needs of child survivors of sex trafficking. "You can imagine what it's like in other countries if that's the case here," she said. These are children, however, who have very special needs. Madrinan described how kids in these "criminal environments" become tough, angry and difficult to manage and relate to. They are usually psychologically and physically traumatized, maladjusted and distrustful. "Survival from sexual exploitation is probably one of the bravest things you do as a human being," she said. One of the other brave things one can do, of course, is stand up for those -- like these children -- who desperately need someone to speak on their behalf. Gasperment, like any good CEO, knows her customers and is certain they will respond to the campaign. "It's not the only reason that people shop with us, but certainly when people shop there they do expect that we have that edge," she said. As of Wednesday night, the company had already sold 165,000 "Soft Hands Kind Heart" hand creams. Gasperment sees her own role as a facilitator of others' activism. "The key thing is that you use your skills to make a difference," she said. "I think that's what magical. I'm not an NGO person, I'm not an activist, but I know how to run a business. And if I can do that well, it helps. So I think that's wonderful."
 
Reverend Billy: A Peace Activist Thinks About G-20 Again Top
We're flying home for a labor rally in front of Goldman Sachs as G-20 continues Friday afternoon. The last 24 hours in Pittsburgh leave me with a shudder. The miles of concrete and steel fencing, and the thousands of Robo-Cop imitators -- have come into all of us. We deal with the lock-down in Pittsburgh with a mix of awe and comedy. And sadness: President Obama's turn away from the leadership of peace has accelerated in these last days. He makes his graceful entrances, but he has disappeared into his 20 nations, throwing up hard walls as he retreats. Peace will remain an impotent Hallmark Card if we wait for this recent peace candidate to emerge from his closed meetings with bankers and generals. We can only look to ourselves. Peace is still there, a solid thing, still the hope for an economic alternative to the globalized fiasco that the rich nations want to revive. It is the living and breathing idea of a sustainable economy. The leaders of these 20 nations have their fashionable declarations for "green jobs" -- on a slow news day, that is. No corporation can openly ask what an earth-based economy would mean for their war products and fossil-fuel intense supply lines. But let's ask ourselves the same question. Does our eco-community often mention the implications for peace in our green future hopes? Do we envision solar and wind powered war? I hope not. The point is that we should be exploring a peaceful future as energetically as the G-20 leaders game the world with their latest crisis. And so the almost comic militarization of Pittsburgh gives us a sad picture of Obama's decision to present himself as a strong President. If I'm putting a capital "P" on President, let me honor the word Peace in like manner. Yes, Peace could have been re-affirmed this week without seeming to be soft on Iran, but then that would have required leadership. The answer to the familiar riddle of how to curb violence in others while putting forth Peace yourself: Peace exists in all of us. The sustainable economy of Peace is in all of us. We are that leader. We are that source. The images and facts and language of Peace must come from each of us with such force that the concrete and bullets and posturing in power suits will dissolve before the rise of the peoples' common sense. We don't want to kill one another. Now -- that would be a Peace Summit! More on G-20 Summit
 
Meg Favreau: 75-Year-Old Man Publishes Fan Fiction; BTW, That Man Is Ralph Nader Top
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and consummate presidential-vote splitter, has written another book. The 700-plus page manuscript, entitled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! , is a work of fiction that features real-life people, such as Barry Diller and Yoko Ono, saving America by following Nader's ideals. Journalists are calling the book a novel. Nader has said that he is uncomfortable with that term and instead calls the book a "fictional vision that could become a new reality" (I'm sure Barnes & Noble will be adding a "Fictional Visions → New Realities" section soon). But as any 13-year-old with sweet lightsaber moves or housewife yearning to be nibbled by Robert Pattison can tell you, Nader's book is something much greater than a novel or even a "vision" - it's fan fiction. Yup, fan fiction - the stuff that fans write, taking existing characters they love and crafting new stories for them that express the writers' deepest desires. Fan fiction is what has populated the internet with Kirk and Spock sex scenes, led countless people of all ages to write themselves into the Harry Potter universe, and led me at age 13 to write a story in which Fox Mulder puked on someone's shoes. Hilarious at the time. Nader is doing the exact same thing. Don't believe me? Let me walk you through a hypothetical. For a moment, don't think of Ralph Nader as a 75-year-old man, but instead as a nerdy high-school boy. Sure, Ralph can spout off consumer safety issues like baseball stats, and he's the head of the debate club, but he lacks a few key social graces. And, like any stereotypical high school nerd, Ralph also has a big crush on a celebrity -- Corporate America, the beautiful woman on These United States! , Ralph's favorite long-running TV show. Ralph and Corporate America - or "Corrie" for short -- don't have much in common. On the show she dates rich bad boys, men like Ted Turner, or, at her wildest, the quirky-but-safe Paul Newman. Ralph doesn't let their differences deter him, though. Since kindergarten he has fantasized that Corrie secretly loves the same things as him - and if she'd just take the time to talk with him, she'd realize it. Thus he's pined after Corrie for years, writing her letters and trying to meet her, without any luck (one time Nader received the book he sent her, Unsafe at Any Speed , back at his doorstep marked with a big "Return to Sender" stamp, the wrapping still on). By the time Ralph reaches his senior year of high school, he's tired of pursuing Corrie. And while he still wants to make Corporate America his girl, he also knows there's a good chance he won't get her. Maybe some guy like him will, some day - but not him. So at night he vents his frustration and lust by scribbling stories where all of Corrie's precious rich boys tie her up and do her doggie style. In the stories, Corrie realizes what a terrible person she's been and comes crawling to Ralph, asking how she can make things better. Writing the stories doesn't get Ralph what he wants, but his imagination provides him a certain satisfaction. So now imagine Nader is 75 again, his TV characters are real people (or, in Corrie's case, have corporate personhood), and...everything else is pretty much the same. Actually, I haven't read Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! yet; for all I know, what I just outlined is literally what happens in the book. Hopefully with a good Kirk and Spock sex scene thrown in.
 
Steve Rosenbaum: The Bankrupt Terrorist Top
The media reports of the plot being hatched by Najibullah Zazi offer tantalizing glimpses into his life,  his movements,  and his motivations.    And while the proximity of his arrest to 9/11 makes it hard to engage the story as anything other than another terrorist plot, the story that begins to emerge is far more complex. The two Zazi's that emerge, and eventually collide, represent two cultures and two identities trying to co-exist. Consider if you can the two of them as two separate individuals for a moment. There is the American Zazi, raised in Queens.  Brought up by his first generation hard working immigrant father.   A gregarious, outgoing, engaging man who dropped out of high school to make money.  He's described as 'not smart'  but hardworking by his uncle.  He takes a series of low paying service jobs, works harder than most,  and buys into the dream of his hard work providing him with the "american dream" of wealth and comfort.   Along the way, the New York Times reports ,  he becomes addicted to the free flowing credit card debt that was seemingly thrown at him.  From  a Discovery Card, to a Shell Card,  five more cards, and then Sony and Radio Shack.  He's working by day in the Coffee Cart on Wall Street as the affable doughnut man, and racking up a staggering $50,000 in credit card debt. Where did that money go?  Was it to creature comforts?  Was it to send to his family back home? Or, was it as is now suggested to fund his terrorist operations. But the American Zazi hardly hides. In fact, just days after returning from Afghanistan, he's enrolled in a credit counseling program trying to work out his debts as he files for bankruptcy.  That hardly seems like the kind of thing someone who's got nefarious plans would do. Filling out papers that require you to swear to their accuracy before a federal judge seems hardly like the actions of shadowy figure. Yet while claiming his debts of $50,000 - he chooses to leave off the Federal Bankruptcy form that he is married and has two children in Afghanistan.   The American Zazi is trying - it seems - to live by the rules and embrace the ideas that are American. Of course,  this may have all been an elaborate front. But if so,  the years and years of minimum wage work and mounting debt hardly seem like the ideal cover for someone trying to operate in a covert terrorist cell.  In fact,  they seem more like the actions of a struggling immigrant who - faced with obstacles both economic and educational -  went looking for something to believe in after his quest for riches in his coffee cart and credit cards didn't add up. Now - examine the Afghani Zazi.  First of all,  he's in an arranged marriage to his second cousin.  He has two children.  Is his intention to work to bring them to America (as he was brought by his parents)?  If so,  he never mentions it and in fact seems to go out of his way to keep his life and his US life on separate tracks that will never cross. The question that these two Zazi's raises is troubling - because one can imagine the number of immigrants facing diminished prospects in the current US economy as large and growing. Just as America's native-born and disenfranchised blue collar workforce finds itself angry and disappointed at the increase challenges to keep their economic head above water. So,  who is Najibullah Zazi  - an Afganhi infiltrator who's masqueraded as an American and was now ready to reign terror on his enemy,  or a disenfranchised immigrant who found himself unable to create a life that matched the fiction he'd been told America offered him? There are facts that remain to be discovered.  Was he working alone, gathering chemicals from a beauty supply warehouse to build bombs that he alone planned to plant,  or was he part of a large conspiracy?  If larger,  was he the leader,  or merely an operative?  And more importantly,  for Muslims living in the US,  how can they manage the inherent conflicts between American culture and their faith? The economic tailspin is leaving Americans with their faith in our system shaken and fearful of the future. What if working hard doesn't lead to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? What if our children won't have a better life than we do? Zazi isn't alone in finding himself discouraged and disillusioned - if that's what happened.  He's joined by auto workers,  tea bag protesters,  out of work white collar workers,  and lots of Americans who don't have a clear sense of what lies ahead. More on Terrorism
 
Andrew Ruben: Health Care's True Cost to Small Business Top
Consistent with their mission and values, most socially conscious businesses try to treat their employees well. For me, this means offering health care to all full-time employees. We all know that the health care system needs reforming, but I was shocked to learn this year that our health care premiums went up almost 40%. Why? The addition of one healthy employee in her forties to a pool of employees under the age of thirty, combined with health care cost inflation. It should be clear that this rise in cost to the company is an unsustainable trend, but its consequences are equally strong arguments for reform that often escape the notice of political pundits: 1. If insuring older workers is so much more expensive, why would any small business hire them over younger workers? The status quo encourages discrimination in the hiring process. In the specific, this can ruin an older individual's chance of finding work -- and these people are more likely to have families to provide for. In the general, it encourages market inefficiencies, because the most qualified person might not be selected. 2. It advantages the largest businesses over small businesses, because large companies spread risk across a much greater number of employees. They also have the overall cash flow to absorb rises in health care costs. Not only can the larger competitor then achieve more favorable margins than a small business (and, perhaps, undercut its prices), but it can attract more qualified workers by offering better benefits. 3. It advantages small companies that do not offer health insurance over small companies that do. As my health care costs rise, those competitors' constraints remain the same; their margins become even more favorable relative to mine. The competition's competitive advantage is strengthened over time. 4. These huge, unanticipated rises in costs throw off any financial forecasting a small business does, leaving it subject to the whim of some insurance company's (proprietary) algorithm. Accurate forecasts have always been important for managing a small business -- for doing inventory, budgeting, and dealing with investors -- but they're even more necessary in this economic environment. 5. It pits employer against employee, and reduces the income of both. Even if a given business tries to absorb as much of the cost as possible, it likely will have to pass on some percentage to employees -- and this amounts to a cut in wages. Reversing these perverse incentives in the system -- a system which prevents small businesses, the backbone of our economy, from growing, providing jobs with health care, and creating wealth -- is integral to any economic recovery. In many ways, with an employment-based health care system, the two issues are one and the same. More on Health Care
 
eSarcasm: Starbucks Meets the iPhone Top
Starbucks is getting into the smartphone game with two new iPhone apps unveiled this week. One gives coffee-craving customers the ability to find stores and discover new drinks, while the other, still in limited testing, lets you actually pay for your order using your phone. People seem pretty excited about these apps, but we think some important ones are missing -- apps that reflect the true Starbucks experience. Here are 10 apps we'd build, if we knew jack about programming: 1. DeVentiLater Speak the name of the drink you want ("large coffee with skim milk") and the app will translate into Starbucks' patented MoronSpeak language ("venti nonfat caffe misto no whip for JR"). 2. MPSleaze If you love that drippy music Starbucks has been paid to promote in its stores, you'll love MPSleaze. Just click a button on your iPhone and it will download whatever you're listening to as a ringtone ($3.99). Songs from especially annoying artists (Jack Johnson, The Ting Tings) may incur additional charges. 3. CostlyCoffee A fun game for kids! See photos of different Starbucks drinks and try to guess how much dumb adults will actually pay for them. 4. Anti-Douchinator Find the nearest Starbucks that isn't currently populated with 20-something douchebags wearing hoodies and knit caps, loudly watching videos on their laptops and commenting on how "tight" their Caramel Macchiatos are. 5. StarBust Use the iPhone's touch technology to push the logo-bound mermaid's locks aside and finally see that bodacious bosom. (FYI: They're not real.) 6. BarNone Think you have what it takes to make it as a Starbucks barista? This interactive self assessment will let you know - and if you do well, automatically forward your resume to Starbucks' Seattle HQ. Sample questions include: Am I unable to make change without a calculator? Do I have an attitude problem? Do I look like I care? 7. Fat Facts Nutritional information about Starbucks' healthy transfat-free beverages , such as the venti Mint Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino Blended Creme with chocolate whipped cream: 680 calories, 21 grams of fat, 93 grams of sugar. Hey, it won't clog your arteries (even if it does plump up your ass). 8. Gagger Counter Ever wonder what makes Starbucks' baked goods so inedible? This Geiger-counter-style app gives you a readout of the radioactive isotopes, insect parts, and inert metals contained in every tasty morsel. You'll never go there hungry again. 9. Locator/Creator Using the iPhone's GPS, detect the nearest Starbucks location. If it's more than 72 seconds away, a new one will be built right where you're standing. Watch your head! 10. Motivate This, Asshole Generate your own lackluster motivational quote to be printed on your next Starbucks cup. Some suggestions, courtesy of the gang at Despair, Inc. : You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. There is no greater joy than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality. If a cute saying on a coffee cup is all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind that robots will be doing soon. For more Geek Humor Gone Wild, visit eSarcasm . You'll be glad you did. More on Apple
 
Hooman Majd: Iran Mania Top
Iran is once again back, with a vengeance befitting the summer behavior of its Basij and after a brief post-post-election respite, in Western headlines. And as is customary, Iran experts and analysts and watchers are falling over themselves to explain this frustratingly un-explainable nation and its intentions to the masses. (Of course there are no real Iran experts, not here, not in Iran, not even in the Iranian government, but hey, these days it's an occupation that at least keeps people busy. If you don't believe me, think about this: On June 12th, 2009, there was not one single Iranian, not amongst its population of some seventy million souls (or million or so in the Persian diaspora) or in the government or the opposition; not one non-Iranian Iran expert anywhere in the world, not even working for foreign governments, who correctly predicted what Tehran would look like on the afternoon of June 14th, or the weeks following.) President Ahmadinejad, or for some of our Iranian friends, ex- President Ahmadinejad, single-handedly orchestrated his nation's return to our front pages and our TV screens by first granting an exclusive, first-since-the-election one-hour interview to Ann Curry of NBC, in Tehran, only a few days before he was due to fly to New York to attend the UN General Assembly. The nature of the interview, which Ms. Curry did not allow to become a propaganda coup for the Iranian administration ("Mr. President, did you steal the election?") , must have raised some alarms in the corridors of the Pasteur Avenue presidential compound for the following day, in a speech at Friday Prayers, Ahmadinejad denied the existence of the Holocaust in terms more forceful than he had ever done (after a long period of relative silence on the matter); a sure-fire tactic to deflect lingering questions surrounding his re-election and the brutality of his government in suppressing any opposition to him once in the media glare of New York. It was never going to work 100%, not when American journalists actually have friends who've been beaten up, tortured, or are still in jail, but many took the bait and Ahmadinejad enjoyed (as he seems to) explaining at length, for example to Katie Couric of CBS who actually showed him photographs of Auschwitz victims, perhaps hoping to elicit a tear or two from the president, what he means when he denies a historical fact. Or Larry King, who really, really, really wanted to know if Ahmadinejad really believes what he says about the Jews, while outside the hotel room where Larry and Mahmoud convened Iranians from all over the U.S. and Canada, and even as far as Japan who had ventured to NY to protest against Ahmadinejad, struggled to get their voices heard. Every minute Ahmadinejad spent not talking about the rape of prisoners in Iran's jails, or addressing (as a person who repeatedly proclaimed that Iran has complete freedom of speech) something as simple as why Iran's media had just been banned from uttering or printing the names of the opposition leaders, let alone their thoughts, was a minute won. Every minute not spent discussing why he appears to be singularly unpopular with many Iranians who allegedly voted for him was a damn fine minute as far as he was concerned. He didn't mention the Holocaust at the UN, but he didn't need to. Bibi Netanyahu, not someone one might mistake for political neophyte also took his bait, using the UN pulpit to actually produce Nazi documents to assure a world audience that there was indeed much evidence of a Jewish Holocaust, a surely demeaning and vulgar display if there ever was one, rather than ignore Ahmadinejad's clearly calculated remarks and focus more on what he is willing to do for Middle East peace, an elusive goal that if ever met would defang the Ahmadinejads of the world quicker than a street dentist in Lahore with a pair of pliers. On the eve of Ahmadinejad's departure from New York, he was even given a parting gift by Messrs. Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown. The dramatic revelation by the three leaders that Iran has a previously undeclared nuclear site in Qom resulted in an Ahmadinejad press conference solely devoted to the nuclear issue, which he is particularly skilled at discussing. No more questions about his legitimacy, the American hikers in jail in Iran, or rape, torture and forced confessions in Tehran's prisons. No, from now on it was going to be all nukes, all the time, even in Iran. Although Ahmadinejad was clearly caught by surprise when he was informed of Obama's press conference in Pittsburgh that morning by Time magazine editors, his reaction on camera might to some have appeared to be one of being caught "red-handed", but in fact was genuine surprise at what the Iranian government within hours described as a crude propaganda move, and one that they were surprised President Obama would be associated with. (Flatter Obama; demean the French and the British, is the order of the day in Tehran.) As the day wore on and as Iran experts and analysts had the weekend to consider what the revelation meant, it became clearer to many that the "victory" the US media proclaimed was less of a victory than it initially appeared to be. The U.S. had known about the site since before President Obama's election, the Iranians knew the Americans knew and had already informed the IAEA of its existence. If the Americans knew, the Iranians knew they knew and the IAEA had been already informed, how was this going to put pressure on them or put them at a disadvantage at the nuclear talks on October 1st? If the demand that Iran allow the IAEA to inspect the facility had already been agreed to by the Iranians, how was that "demand" by the Western powers going to put "pressure" on the Iranian government? Yes, there was a disagreement about whether Iran had technically violated its agreement with the IAEA (a contentious "legal point" as Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia later put it), but inquiring minds seemed to want to know what exactly this U.S. "victory" meant. By the end of the weekend, the Russians were already backing off their original commitment to at least consider stricter sanctions once President Obama privately told President Medvedev about Qom. Maybe the Iranian argument, made unemotionally and away from the glare of the U.S. media in Moscow persuaded them that Qom was much ado about nothing, or maybe Putin is pissed that America had known about the facility for a long time but hadn't bothered to tell him , former President Bush's soul brother, after all. In any event, Iran's nuclear program and the government's defense of it is probably the last thing all Iranians, even the opposition, generally agree on. President Obama was criticized earlier this summer for saying that as far as the US was concerned, there would be little difference between a President Ahmadinejad or a President Mousavi, but he was right. The four issues that concern the U.S. are the nuclear issue, Iran's cooperation or lack thereof in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran's support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Mousavi was not going to change Iran's position on uranium enrichment, and when it comes to foreign policy questions of Iran's influence and power, no Iranian president would decide, or even be able to, curtail them. Without their star hitter A-jad, Iran might have shunned talk of the Holocaust or even Israel's imminent demise as a state, and the missing Imam would perhaps be re-relegated to one level above myth himself, but Iran would still be out to win in international competition. Sure, to President Obama and most in the West it now appears that if the Iranians have gone to great pains to build a fortified enrichment facility deep in a mountain hideout (and maybe elsewhere), then that facility was probably designed for nefarious purposes, but to most Iranians the explanation that they need to build it in secrecy and hidden from view because of constant threats by Israel (and the U.S.) that they might bomb Iran's nuclear sites seems perfectly reasonable. By October 1st, the "so what? contingent on the question of the Qom facility will have probably grown to include the Russians, the Chinese, and certainly many in the Non-Aligned Movement. Notwithstanding Thomas Friedman's inane argument in the September 23rd issue of the New York Times that we should tell the Israelis not to bomb, but publicly pretend that we're not doing so, just to scare the Iranians (does Mr. Friedman think the Iranians don't read the NY Times?), Iran welcomes threats for the simple fact that they tend to unite a politically fractured but nationalistic country, because they give the government cover for their secrecy in and expenditures on military affairs, and equally important, because they increase Iran's popularity in the developing and particularly Muslim world. "Be afraid, very afraid," does not work with Iranians, Tom. At least not with those in charge, many of them Revolutionary Guardsmen whose world-view is formed by their experiences in the trenches of the bloody eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Those guardsmen and their patrons are far more afraid of boys and girls wearing green on the streets of Tehran than they'll ever be of an Israeli warplane. In the coming days and well after the October 1st meeting in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 there will be acres of newsprint and hours of TV time devoted to predicting and considering what will happen next in Iran's nuclear standoff with West. There will be shrill voices and there will be reasonable ones, but if anyone thinks the Iranians are going into negotiations from a position of weakness, they are mistaken. Yes, the Iranian government is weakened because of the election crisis and its bloody aftermath, but when it comes to the nuclear issue, it is as strong as it ever was, even with the Qom revelation. The government may know that it is despised in many quarters for its domestic policy, and President Obama may throw them off their game from time to time, but it feels no insecurity or nervousness when it comes to matters of defending Iran's rights. There is a collective sigh of relief in Tehran that the pesky foreigners will be less preoccupied with Iran's dismal human rights record than they have been in preceding months, and the threat of new or "crippling" sanctions, to borrow Hilary Clinton's words, will never force Iran to do what the West demands of it. What needs to be considered is that although Iran will not ever voluntarily give up enrichment on its own soil, it might be persuaded to accept more intrusive inspections (as called for by the Additional Protocol to the Non-proliferation Treaty, a protocol Iran hasn't signed but has indicated it might within the framework of a deal), perhaps even a limit on the number of centrifuges, as long as it believes the West is sincere in its desire to engage Iran in more than just the nuclear issue and on more equal terms than in the past. The advantage for ordinary Iranians is that if engagement does happen beyond nuclear demands and counter-demands and leads to a form of détente with the U.S., not only will Iran be less inclined to ever actually build a bomb even if they know how to, but human rights might make its way back to the forefront. For the sake of my friends in Evin prison I certainly hope so, but what do I know? I'm no expert. More on Iran
 
Dr. Irene S. Levine: Could YOU be a toxic friend? 5 Sure Signs Top
After a tiff with your BFF, it's natural to get upset and ask yourself (or a third person), "What's wrong with her?" That's because it's much easier us to recognize blemishes or faults in our friends than it is to look in the mirror. But if you're finding that you're having frequent conflicts--either with the same person or with multiple friends--or that people who you thought were close friends often wind up dumping you, you have to consider whether there's something you are doing or saying that's sabotaging your own friendships. Here are 5 possible signs of toxicity to watch out for: 1) Are you too needy? Are you always the one who asks to get together? Are you the one putting forth all the effort in the relationship? Friendships need to be reciprocal. Even an ideal relationship may not be balanced every day or even every year but there's a give-and-take that evens out over time. If you are constantly asking for attention, advice, support, time or even material favors from your friend, or are demanding more than they're able to handle, it's not unreasonable for them to grow weary of your neediness. 2) Are you too volatile? Do you blow-up each time things don't go your way or do you tend to hide your feelings until they spew out when they can no longer be contained? No one likes to be with a friend who is intense, unpredictable, and seething, or who is unwilling or unable to work out little problems (before they become big ones) by talking about them. 3) Are you too moody? Everyone has his or her ups and downs but it's difficult to be with a moody person no matter what the relationship. Are you always in the throes of depression? Are you so energetic to the point that you exhaust the people around you? If your moods seem too intense for others to bear or if your moods cycle rapidly, it may be off-putting. 4) Are you too blunt or invasive? Are you the type of person that always says what's on your mind and expresses every thought totally unvarnished? Do you probe and ask questions regardless of whether your friend is ready to answer them. Are you so pushy that you make friends squirm in their seats? Close friends need to be kind and respectful of each other's feelings, not say everything that comes to mind, and be sensitive to and responsive to the lines their friends draw around them. 5) Are you too insecure? Do your friends always make you feel one down to the point that you feel like you need to brag, lie or aggrandize your own situation? Do you hold back or feel too shy to talk, to disagree, or to set boundaries? Are you unable to talk about things that are important to you? If most people make you feel this way, you need to look inside and see how you can make yourself feel better. If you have lost a friend or two in succession, it may not be anything to worry about. But if you begin to recognize a pattern of lost friendships, one after another, intermittently, or very often, it's time to take notice and at least consider the possibility that it's you, not her. Have a question about female friendships? Send it to The Friendship Doctor . Irene S. Levine, PhD is a freelance journalist and author. She holds an appointment as a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. Her new book about female friendships, Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend was recently published by Overlook Press . She also blogs about female friendships at The Friendship Blog and at PsychologyToday.com. More on Relationships
 
Will Rogers: Junior Architects Cut Ribbon for New Playground Top
A few weeks ago I shared a podium in Brooklyn with a group of ten landscape designers--none of them over five feet tall. But in describing their work, these fifth graders from P.S./M.S. 394 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn were all business. They were there to open their new playground and talk about their role in designing it. Their articulate, from-the-heart descriptions of the design process and what it meant to them--and their eagerness to cut the ribbon and begin enjoying the fruits of their labors-- reminded my of why I always try to avoid following a child at a speaker's podium! The playground we were inaugurating was one of more than two hundred the City of New York is renovating for schools and their surrounding neighborhoods. The program is part of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 - a comprehensive green plan that includes ten key approaches to making the city greener, more livable, and more climate-smart. As it seeks to expand its park system, the city has adopted The Trust for Public Land's standard that no child should be more than a 10-minute walk from a park, garden, or playground. By intent, many of New York's new school playgrounds are being built in neighborhoods with no other park facilities. For all the playgrounds, the design process is incorporated into the student's curriculum. They measure the space, create plans, survey other playgrounds, and negotiate with their fellow students and community members about what should be in the playground and who can use it after school hours. Trees, play structures, raised garden beds, running tracks, water features, and basketball courts all find their way into the plans. The joy the kids take in the process--and their sense of ownership in the outcome--ensure that these playgrounds will be loved and well cared for. As I helped cut the ribbon and watched the children pour onto their new playground, it didn't take much to imagine them as tomorrow's landscape architects, entrepreneurs, and community leaders.
 
William Bradley: Mad Men: "Seven Twenty Three" -- HuffPost Review Top
In history, the solar eclipse is an omen of things to come, frequently upsetting. And so it is with "Seven Twenty Three," an episode which caused some confusion in advance. And some after as well, with a major newspaper blog still failing to grasp what the title is about, mistakenly saying it's a time in the morning. As always with these reviews, there be spoilers ahead, so if you've not yet seen this key episode, you've been warned. Last week's episode, "Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency," was quite consequential. Since the previews on Mad Men , unlike most movie trailers, are structured in such a way that they really don't tell you anything about what's coming, and even actively mislead you, I noticed a lot of fan blogging speculation about the cryptic title of this episode. A prevalent theory had it that the title is related to David Ogilvy, the British advertising guru who published the classic "Confessions of An Ad Man" in 1963. But what did the number mean? One favored explanation was that Ogilvy's funeral was on July 23, 1963. Since he actually died in 1989, that was incorrect. What "Seven Twenty Three" is is Don Draper's Waterloo. Or I should say, Dick Whitman's Waterloo. That's the day in 1963 on which Don Draper/Dick Whitman gets lassoed. Fitting, as it's his Westerner hotel magnate friend Connie Hilton who sets it in motion. But before we get to that, let's go back to the beginning of the episode. Which was actually near the middle, per the Lost -style flash forward/flashback mode now in vogue. A quick recap of Episode 5. We see three principals in various forms of repose. Peggy Olsen is stirring in bed beside a man, as distinguished from the usual boy she is around when she's around a guy. Betty Draper, looking very sexy, is in a reverie, alone, on some sort of settee. And Don Draper is face down in a cheap-ass motel room. The rest of the episode revolves around how they got there. This is an episode about people hooking up, making connections, some of which may be disastrous. Except when it's about Don's attempts to flee connections. But try as he might, the master dissembler, with the walls closing in, proves unable to get out of anything. Except perhaps his friendship with Roger Sterling. And I doubt that. Which is as good a place as any to begin, since this is not a blow-by-blow recap. (I must say that I'm surprised by the rise of the literal recap. I thought people watched TV, in part, to avoid reading. The recap is the new way to avoid spending an hour watching a TV show.) So, Don and Roger, whose relationship was key to the first two seasons of the show. But not so key now, at least so far. Don resents the hell out of Roger for spoiling Sterling Cooper by causing it to be sold to the British conglomerate so he could pay for his divorce and afford his marriage to Don's foxy 20-year old secretary. And Roger is so into being married to his now 21-year old that he's not doing much at Sterling Coo other than being (self) important. Which is what he does in this episode, to impotent and near disastrous effect. Don and Roger encounter one another, uneasily, in the ubiquitous elevator on their way to relatively late appearances at the office. Don's matters. Roger's, not so much. Roger mentions that he's reading the galleys of David Ogilvy's classic, "Confessions of An Ad Man." (Ogilvy, in addition to writing self-aggrandizing yet guru-like books -- including the one I first read many years ago, "Ogilvy on Advertising" -- came up with such advertising classics as "the man in the Hathaway shirt," "Commander Hathaway's" "Schweppervescence," and "The only sound you will hear in the new Rolls Royce at 60 miles per hour is that of the electric clock.") Roger is a little jealous, and allows as how he has to come up with a blurb for the Ogilvy book even as he says that any one of a thousand ad guys could have written it. Later, he is more honest, when he declares Don "our David Ogilvy." The essential milieu of Mad Men is not all that admirable. Finally getting into his office at 9:30 AM, Don discovers his surprise buddy from Roger's horrible Derby Day party Connie Hilton already there. Sitting in his chair. This becomes a trope of the episode. Older, more powerful men sitting in the chair of this master of the universe. Showing he will be a handful, Connie tosses a few curveballs at Don, including giving him crap for not having family photos or a bible on his desk, before giving him a piece of his business. Nothing special, just the New York hotels, including the Waldorf Astoria. As these are crown jewels of the Hilton empire, more is clearly to come. If Don works out. But there is a problem with Don. Not that Connie cares, though his lawyers do -- which means that he does but he ain't saying 'cuz they're buddies -- Don doesn't have a contract. He believes, as a major Hollywood star told me years ago, that the best course is to work without a contract. Because that gives you the option on the relationship, and thus the power. Which is generally true. Except that Connie, i.e., the Hilton empire, wants to be sure that Don is going to be around for the next three years. A quick recap of Episode 4. Which Sterling, Bert Cooper, and Lane Pryce run down for Don in an uncomfortable meeting in Cooper's office. In which Cooper -- who, lest we forget, is keeping the secret that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman -- impresses upon Don that he now must sign a contract. A very generous contract. As Roger points out to a nonplussed Betty when he calls her at home to lobby after learning that Don has failed to send the contract to his lawyer for review, as promised, and after Don blows him off in a meeting in Don's office. Betty, of course, knows nothing about her, which is true of most of her relationship with her husband, so she is pissed off. Especially so when she confronts Don about Roger's call. Don goes into patented clam mode and leaves the house, drinking whiskey out of a glass, headed West in his snazzy blue Cadillac. When he decides to pick up a teenage couple hitchhiking. Before he does this, he rips into Peggy when she comes into his office on the pretext of having him sign off on routine art work but actually to try to get onto the Hilton Hotels account. Already feeling cornered by Cooper, Pryce, and Sterling, not to mention Hilton himself, Don dresses her down, telling her that she's swiftly gone from being his secretary to a job "grown men would kill for" and she hasn't produced any work that he "can't live without." So get your hand out of my pocket. Ouch. Here's a quick recap of Episode 3. Which makes it easier for her to ignore Pete Campbell's rather good advice to return an expensive gift from Duck Phillips, who is out to recruit them from under Don's nose to join the Grey agency. Pete, in full neurosis mode, barges into Peggy's office to tell her who the gift is from and compare his own gift of Cuban cigars -- "I'm starting to think they're not so rare" (Doh!) -- to her new Hermes scarf. Which Peggy, naturally, loves, as it's perfect for her. In the guise of "returning" the gift, she agrees to meet Duck in his suite at the Pierre Hotel. Where he proceeds to tell her what he has in mind for her professionally and personally. Professionally, Peggy gets Hermes, Macy's and Revlon if she joins him at Grey. Personally, she gets to climb into his bed in the next room to have her clothes removed by his teeth and, well, you get the gist. As does she. Peggy opts for the latter, with an option on the former. Which is how Peggy came to to be stirring in bed beside a man in the flash forward open of this episode. Betty's journey to her sexual reverie in a settee comes via the route of politics. Not that she's been involved in politics before, mind you. Betty, incidentally, and this was covered in an earlier season, is not simply an emotionally blank Grace Kelly-lookalike mannequin who snaps at her kids. She graduated from Bryn Mawr, the sister school of Haverford, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Realizing that, much as she loves her new baby, named for her late dad, that a third child is not the solution to the problems in her life, she becomes in civic life. Namely, the Junior League in Westchester County. In her freshly redecorated home, another domestic project which did not fulfill. Great early scene with Don and the decorator in which Betty insists on his "professional eye." Move the end table and the lamp, he suggests, correctly. Betty has not yet discovered art collecting. Speaking of which, Mad Men producers and writers, where is the seminal Pop Art work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, former ad men, which is breaking big all over New York now? Okay, I digress. And a quick recap of Episode 2. Citing Rachel Carson's new book, "Silent Spring," these civic activists are big on conservation, the early term for environmentalism. In particular, they are upset about a big, unsightly water tank that will divert water from their beloved reservoir to new developments. Whether they are more concerned about the environment, property values, or keeping the wrong sort of people away is something left to your judgment, and to future episodes. Because the issue is really a pretext for linking to a thread from what turns out to be the very consequential "Derby Day" party hosted by Roger and Jane Sterling. As it turns out that the Rockefeller family owns much of the open space land there in Westchester County and the governor of New York is, of course, one Nelson Rockefeller. Betty volunteers that she has met an aide to Rockefeller. That would be the suave politico Henry Francis. who had the great come-on line with Betty waiting for the loo and engaged in a brief reverie of his own holding his hand against her pregnant belly. It's swiftly established that Henry is, yes, smooth article that he is, a big deal with Rocky and that babelicious Betty is best suited to call on him to intervene. So she does. And Henry calls back in, surprise, about 4.9 seconds. They meet over the issue, naturally, sparring, though she is clearly interested in more than a water tank. Henry, though making himself immediately available for a Saturday afternoon ice cream social rather than the hike Betty clearly didn't dress for, actually plays it rather distantly, perhaps anticipating that she would do the same. As they part, he shows her a Victorian fainting couch, which, to distract from their sparring, he suggests could be just the thing for her. Naturally, she gloms onto the thing, which is gigantic and godawful, and makes it the centerpiece of her newly redesigned living room, much to the displeasure of her decorator, who correctly points out that it absolutely destroys the symmetry they'd been going for. But that's okay, because it's the perfect piece on which Betty can daydream about another older, masterful man who can take her away from it all. Which brings us back to the ur-masterful man of our show, Mr. Don Draper. Don is having a rough episode. He's being pressured by his new super-rich client, who he'd thought was some nice old Westerner he bumped into a party, Sterling and Copper, his protege Peggy, and Betty herself, who gives him crap for not telling her anything about his snazzy new contract he doesn't want to sign, or much of anything else. (Incidentally, I left out a wonderful little moment in which Betty, taking Henry's return call in Don's study, gives another furtive tug on Don's ever-locked desk drawer.) Mad Men 's season opener set the scene in striking new ways. So Don jumps in the Caddy and heads out, drink in hand, for ... Who knows where? California? And he picks up these two kids, a guy and a gal, who say they're headed for Niagara Falls to get married. Not that they're in love or anything. She's just helping the boy out to avoid the draft. Not that he was likely to be drafted in 1963. Don, this is what we call a "clue." They can't pay Don or anything, but they do have drugs, Phenobarbitol, so Don tosses his glass out the window and decides to partake. Whereupon he ends up in a cheap motel dancing with the girl while the guy looks on, in a not especially friendly manner. Don's old man, Archie Whitman, shows up again in Don's druggy vision to give Don crap about the seamy scene to come, Don's "bullshit" profession, and the fact that he is back on the bum again. Fortunately, Don is saved from a relapse into Whitmanville by the enormity of his stupidity. The kids are con artists who have drugged him. When he doesn't collapse fast enough to suit
 
Margie Alt: Where Science and Politics Intersect: Time to Win in Congress on Climate Change Top
This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to unveil its version of clean energy and climate legislation. The new bill will arrive just a week after the release of a sobering United Nations report that concluded that the impacts of global warming are arriving faster than the world's scientists had predicted just two years ago. One thing we can be fairly sure of even without seeing it is that the new Senate bill -- like its counterpart in the House -- won't deliver the emission reductions scientists tell us are needed to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. Yet, if the Senate bill looks like the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES Act) passed by the House this June, it will still be a significant step toward a clean energy future. If that is the case, it will be deserving of ardent support, especially if they fix some of the biggest flaws in the House bill. This wouldn't be my position if I believed we were stuck with this bill forever, or if it headed us in the wrong direction. But as I see it, this is the start, not the end, of federal action to limit global warming pollution. And with the science getting clearer almost every day, we have no time to waste. It's time to stop setting the stage and start the show. The Senate bill is likely to build on the framework of the bill the House passed in June. Here's the bottom line on that bill: Moving us toward a clean energy future The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES Act) establishes a federal limit on global warming emissions for the first time ever. It puts a price on carbon, with some proceeds helping to transform our energy economy by investing in energy solutions of the 21st Century. Beyond that, many of the underpinning provisions of the bill that have not received the attention they deserve take major steps to unleash the clean energy revolution this country truly needs. The bill sets new energy efficiency standards for appliances, dramatically improves building codes to lower energy use, and reduces our dependence on oil by requiring pollution standards for large trucks and ensuring that transportation investments are made with energy and global warming in mind. The ACES Act will lead to measurable reductions in electricity consumption versus business-as-usual trends, as well as lower oil consumption, greater use of renewable energy, and a dramatic reduction in the amount of electricity we generate through the use of fossil fuels such as coal. No doubt the bill has major flaws While setting any cap on the nation's global warming emissions is historic, the cap in ACES has two major problems. The reduction called for in the cap-and-trade program is only 17 percent by 2020. Clear progress, but nowhere near enough. In addition, by allowing for much of the cap to be met by offsets - actions that take place overseas or in areas of the economy not covered by the emission cap - the real emission reductions could be significantly eroded in the short term. The bill also takes away EPA's authority to crack down on pollution from the nation's oldest coal-fired power plants. It is a testament to the power of the coal industry and utilities that the dirtiest old plants have slipped through legal loopholes for decades. The House bill perpetuates that problem and makes it worse. The requirements for energy efficiency and renewable energy are also far too low. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the renewable energy standard in the ACES Act would lead to no more clean energy than business as usual (although other provisions of the bill will encourage modest growth in renewables). And while the bill takes notable steps forward in promoting energy efficiency, it still falls well short of tapping America's full efficiency potential. One step forward one step back? Or the first step in a journey of a thousand miles? We have precious little time to deal with global warming before global warming deals with us. This bill is a good beginning. I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't think we could improve the cap and other standards after we get this first version passed. And if I thought we had the support we needed to overcome the powerful coal, oil, utility and agriculture interests to do dramatically more within a year or two, I'd take a pass. But balancing the science with the politics and public opinion, this bill is the right thing right now. Once in place, Congress will be able to improve numerous provisions in this bill. We've done just that in state after state on clean energy policy. In recent years, 29 states and the District of Columbia adopted renewable electricity standards requiring that a certain percentage of electricity consumed in the state come from clean sources. They didn't all start out as strong as we wanted, but they laid a framework that we have built on since. Of the 29 states, 17 - more than half - have increased their renewable electricity target or accelerated the timeline after adoption of the original bill. Seven states have improved their standards twice. Good politics begets good politics. Once we enact a federal clean energy and global warming bill, and as voters start to see the benefits, I'm confident we will be able to muster the public support to put a stronger bill over the top in the near future. Unfortunately the converse is also true. If this bill fails, or if it gets further weakened, the story will be that clean energy and global warming policy are neither popular nor winnable. Elected officials will disengage rather than engaging even further. A dozen years ago, the Senate voted 95 to 0 in opposition to signing the Kyoto Protocol. Last year when a global warming bill was on the Senate floor, it was withdrawn after three days of ugly debate. We just didn't have the votes. This year is different. With the Copenhagen negotiations just months away and the EPA moving forward to address global warming, our years of hard work and leadership by state governments are paying off. Passing a solid bill through the U.S. Congress won't just be a nod in the right direction; it will be the first of many steps in the journey of a thousand miles toward a cleaner, healthier, and safer world. More on Climate Change
 
Paul Snyder: Public Enemies and the Invention of Video Top
It's 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last few months in the life of bank robber John Dillinger, as Public Enemies does, has been done at least four times before. Michael Mann's version isn't historically definitive, nor narratively the most cohesive, but it looks and feels different than any predecessor -- or any of this summer's other blockbusters. Its raw aesthetic evokes a violence not of John Dillinger's time, but of ours: the movie looks, arguably, cheap. There are many economic and production-related reasons that filmmakers choose to shoot digital, but its flat, uncorrected look, muddy, half-visible blacks in low-light and clipped overexposures in the sun, are considered its flaws and carefully avoided. These days the technology can so closely approximate the look of film, telling the difference has become a matter of trivia (did you know that Benjamin Button and Superbad were shot digitally?). Public Enemies , shot with the Thomson VIPER, brings digital production's unique -- some would say, ugly -- qualities to the fore. The elaborate nightclub is nearly invisible. Cotillard's bathtub is eaten up by glare. Aside from the cast, you'd be forgiven for thinking it didn't cost $80 million. Production value be damned, this is the Great Depression -- er, Recession. But there are advantages to shooting this way, too, and these are the audience's surprises. With multiple simultaneous cameras, the editors often find unflattering, unusual and sublime angles. In a car chase the cameras nearly scrape the dirt road, as likely to fall out of the car as the gangsters. Distant pursuers appear in a deep focus impossible with a film camera. Pretty Boy Floyd is gunned down at such a static angle, it looks like Purvis set up the tripod himself. That's the conceit: a renegade production for a renegade's biopic. Hushed dialogue strains the ear, and sudden, unsweetened gunshots blare. These might be flaws, but it's hard to argue that the volume, in the life of a gangster on the lam, ought to be normalized, or that gunfights ought to be prettier. The raw video aesthetic would be less jarring were Public Enemies not set in 1934. The documentary style makes the action seem more real; the impossibility of video cameras during the Depression makes it all the more unreal. At its best, the movie uses this tension to great effect: paparazzi invade crime scenes, conflating Dillinger's celebrity and Depp's. When a police interrogator abuses Cotillard, the anachronism emphasizes his barbarity, while the verisimilitude makes it painfully familiar. Anachronism enters Dillinger's life within the film, too. The outlaw was famously gunned down on his way out of the film Manhattan Melodrama , and the final aria in Public Enemies is a montage of Dillinger reflecting on his jailed lover in the smiles of Myrna Loy. One has to imagine that as dated as it seems in the middle of a 21st Century crime picture, for a man who'd lived so hard for so long as Dillinger had, the fighting between Gable and Powell was impossibly cute. For all its aesthetic sophistication, the film's spontaneity runs roughshod over a lot of true history. There's the false premise that John Dillinger was made a priority after Purvis killed Floyd; in reality Floyd and Baby Face Nelson were shot after Dillinger. It's glossed over, but the women were prostitutes whom he took to the movies that night, and Dillinger never sauntered into the Dillinger squad, pining for his lost love. Michael Mann sides with Dillinger on the standing question, at the heart of the film's title -- whether he was a friend or an "enemy" of the public good--and transforms him into a sentimental hero whose death was sort of a careless martyrdom. Public Enemies doesn't confront Dillinger with questions or historical nuance; it doesn't makes his heists nor his love life seem very sexy. It tells the story, true or not, of a man who tries and fails to escape a construct he'd made of himself. The history and melodrama are a lot of pretense -- independently unsatisfying -- but the spirit of the film, taking aesthetic risks and chasing what elsewhere would be considered flaws, manages to produce something nearer the spectacle -- or that construct, however anti-spectacular--of John Dillinger. More on The Recession
 
Hector De La Torre: Governor Schwarzenegger: Do the Right Thing, Sign Assembly Bill 2 Top
"I believe that unfair rescissions are a deplorable practice," wrote Governor Schwarzenegger when he vetoed the bipartisan legislation in 2008 that would end unfair rescissions. In his State of the State address early last year, Governor Schwarzenegger shared the story of Todd, a victim of rescission. After being diagnosed with lymphoma, Todd, who was covered by his wife's insurance plan, was rejected because "he weighed less than he did when he applied for the insurance." He died eight months later without insurance coverage. The Governor pledged in his speech that "We are taking action so what happened to Todd will not happen to any other Californian." Yet despite a clear opportunity to right that wrong, he has not taken action and horrific experiences like Todd's continue unabated. Governor Schwarzenegger once again will have the opportunity to correct this abusive practice by signing Assembly Bill 2. The insurance industry has made billions of dollars from their practice of rescission -- unfairly canceling health insurance policies with little to no oversight prior to cancellation. Even if an insured family has been paying their premium on time for years, there are no protections for the consumer. Insurance companies rescind a policy by arguing that a consumer lied or did not provide the adequate information when they applied for health care coverage. There is no oversight of their decision: the insurer acts as judge and jury. Real stories from individuals and families across California and the nation have shown that insurance companies begin a thorough investigation of a consumer's health history after the patient gets sick. In other words, insurance companies will gladly accept a consumer's monthly payments as long as they are healthy. Since 2007, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has restored coverage for 1,092 Kaiser Permanente consumers, 85 Health Net consumers and 56 UnitedHealth/PacifiCare consumers due to unfair rescissions. At the same time, the California Department of Insurance entered into settlements with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Health Net. Even after multi-million dollar settlements with every major insurer in California, the practice of rescission is still left to the discretion of the insurance companies. For over two years, I have fought to prevent wrongful rescissions by health insurers. Physicians, patients, consumer advocates and others have been working with me to address this shameful practice. I introduced AB 2 to protect consumers from being stranded by their health insurer and to shift the burden from the consumer to the insurance company. AB 2 requires that insurance companies get approval from the Department of Managed Health Care or the California Insurance Commissioner prior to rescinding a policy. Most important, the bill requires that a patient keep their coverage while this independent review is performed. The bill has faced strong opposition from the health insurance industry. In the last days of the legislative session, I battled an army of lobbyists that made AB 2 one of the top lobbied bills in Sacramento. As Consumer Watchdog noted, "Without AB 2, insurers will continue to rescind coverage even if patients honestly filled out their application for coverage." The California Medical Association wrote, "Despite hopes for health care reform at the federal level, we simply cannot and should not wait for the federal government to act on this issue. California has the opportunity to be a leader and set the bar for how states can reign in this despicable practice." Outrageous examples of rescissions abound. Individuals who have been diagnosed with cancer are notified that their coverage is rescinded just when they need it the most. New mothers have been told that they and their baby no longer have coverage even after receiving prenatal care. In California, there are nearly 1,000 rescissions each year -- 1,000 people and their families who experience serious medical conditions while battling their health insurer instead of their illness. In Washington, DC earlier this summer, top executives of the three largest insurers - UnitedHealth's Golden Rule Insurance Co., Assurant Health and Wellpoint Inc. - appeared before the Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation and testified that they will not confine the cancellations to those consumers who commit intentional fraud. During the hearing, the three companies were shown to have canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, which allowed the insurers to avoid payment of more than $300 million in claims over a five-year period. In fact, several insurance companies gave bonuses to employees based on how many claims they avoided through rescission. This is the very definition of putting profits before people. Even Republican Congressmembers blasted the insurance companies. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas) stated, "I understand that there is a rule of reason, but again, if somebody inadvertently omits something or there is something that is not material to the claim, that claim in my opinion should be paid, end of story." California can lead the nation once again by removing the insurance industry's power to impose a death penalty on health insurance coverage and the care it is supposed to provide. If Governor Schwarzenegger fails to sign AB 2, your coverage will continue to depend on the sole judgment of insurance companies when you or your family members get sick.
 
Kyle G. Brown: Beyond the Tobin Tax: End the Free Ride for the Financial Sector and Impose Fees to Revive the Economy Top
Michael Moore acted out a near-universal fantasy when, in his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story , he pulled up to a bank in a Brinks truck, stepped out, and announced to security guards: "We're here to get the money back for the American people." As effective as it must have seemed at the time, there are ways to get our money back that don't require moneybags and get-away cars. Taxing trades in financial markets is one of them. But it's been hastily dismissed thanks to a sketchy exaggeration of the difficulties to ensue, a reluctance to take on Wall Street, and a failure to appreciate just how broke the nation is. Let's face it, America: the rest of the world is not going to forever finance your mountainous debt, as it reaches into the stratosphere. Your health care costs will continue to soar, whatever plan you decide on. Afghanistan, Iraq and other foreign adventures won't pay for themselves. Private capital flows, though thickening, are still in short supply, and invariably fail to filter to the rest of society. The answer is to raise capital for the public sector. A lot of it. Like a Tobin Tax, but Better Just weeks ago Britain's financial regulator, Adair Turner, the Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, proposed a global tax on financial transactions to curb excessive speculation and executive pay. It would go beyond the Tobin Tax on foreign currency exchanges, which the late Nobel-prize-winning economist James Tobin had recommended in the 1970s to penalize short-term speculation. The resistance that met Lord Turner's -- and indeed every such proposal -- comes predictably from apologists of unfettered finance, for whom the idea of regulation and additional fees, are anathema. This sector of society, largely untouched by the travails of a still struggling economy, prefers that the excesses of the financial sector go unnoticed, and untaxed. But as the world of finance returns to eye-watering profits, unemployment and poverty levels are on the rise, and the national budget teeters on unsustainably narrow tax revenues. The most reliable way to expand those revenues would be to impose a modest fee on every stock, every bond -- in short, every financial transaction. According to one study, a fee of just 0.5% would raise more than $100 billion a year, in US markets alone. That would defray health care costs, and help struggling states restore social services that have been axed over the past two years. Making it Work Critics opine that such a tax would be unworkable. Not so. A stamp tax of 0.5% is currently imposed on stock trades in the United Kingdom. Far from suffering from subdued trade, it's the home of the London stock exchange, one of the largest in the world. The claim that taxing finance would drive investment elsewhere is part of Corporate America's all-purpose Anti-Tax mantra. By its logic, we shouldn't really tax anything, should we? Why tax cars or clothes? Buyers will just go elsewhere! But unlike other taxes, this levy could be periodically altered, in the same way the Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates: according to market activity. Most individuals or small firms make medium or long term investments -- a pension fund of $10,000 on behalf of a retiree, for example. At a rate of 0.5%, the investor would pay only $50 in fees. The tax would bear more heavily on traders, who make countless infinitesimal trades per day. As their business is based on fine margins, a tax would indeed affect profits. But because of years of falling costs and productivity gains from cutting-edge software, the impact would be minimal. The tax would discourage excessive speculation and casino-style trades, which do little to contribute to the wider economy, and in fact tend to undermine it. Traders may be unenthusiastic about these kinds of proposals, but they're not likely to pack up and go home. There is simply too much money to be made for a half-percent dent to scare them off. Swedish Bonds Critics point to Sweden which, for a short time, imposed taxes on stocks and bonds before abandoning the policy. Some investors avoided fees by trading in alternative financial products. But that is the point: taxes were not applied to all financial products, so investors could trade in some, and avoid others altogether. This is why for maximum effect, all of the major financial markets would have to impose a levy across the board. Perhaps you're thinking, "We could never tax financial transactions here." You already do. The US government imposes a tax on new equity issues, the proceeds of which finance the operations of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It's a minuscule tax to be sure, but this, and the U.K. stamp tax show a levy is not only feasible, but potentially lucrative; it could help replenish desperately dwindling public coffers. Tax is Not a Four-Letter Word The key would be to raise the levy to an international scale. Several countries, including France and Belgium, have already proposed or passed legislation seeking to tax financial transactions worldwide. The German Finance Minister made a similar proposal earlier this month . And at the G20 Summit , a smaller, global tax for development assistance was discussed, but omitted from the final communiqué. Such timidity cannot continue. For any plan to take flight, it would need American support. President Obama must provide it, lest millions more be abandoned by the 'jobless recovery,' and be tempted to take matters into their own hands, with Brinks trucks and moneybags. Kyle G. Brown is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. More on Banks
 

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