My Life and Times

today's papersPentagon UndercoverBy Daniel PolitiPosted Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005, at 4:34 AM PT
The Washington Post leads with an investigation into a previously undisclosed branch of the Department of Defense called the Strategic Support Branch that has been carrying out human intelligence missions over the last two years. This move to perform work that was once solely coordinated by the CIA is seen by many as an attempt by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to take control of clandestine operations as well as get around laws that restrict the movement of CIA officers. The New York Times leads with word that the retired general who was sent to assess operations in Iraq will recommend an increase in advisers to train Iraqi forces. The main mission of American troops in Iraq after the elections will be to speed up the training of local troops by adding as many as 10,000 advisers who will work directly with Iraqi forces. The Los Angeles Times leads with the announcement of new security measures in Iraq on the days preceding the election, scheduled for Jan. 30. The Iraqi government will declare a national holiday from Jan. 29 to Jan. 31, at which point an 8 p.m. curfew will be imposed, few cars will be allowed in the streets, citizens will not be permitted to carry weapons, and the Baghdad airport will be closed. Iraqi troops will be in charge of securing polling sites, while U.S. forces will remain in the background to prevent the image of American soldiers watching over Iraqis while they vote.
Although conflicts between the CIA and the Pentagon have often played out in the public arena, WP's story by investigative journalist Barton Gellman reveals for the first time just how far the Defense Department has come in setting up its own human intelligence operations outside of public view. While none of the sources in the story would reveal where the branch has been operating besides Iraq and Afghanistan, an initial memo suggests operations could take place in countries that have good diplomatic relations with the United States. Responding to concerns about lack of congressional oversight, Pentagon officials emphasized that they too remain accountable to Congress. They also pointed out, however, that there are fewer restrictions placed on Department of Defense intelligence gathering than at the CIA. Two members of the House Intelligence Committee contacted by the Post did not know about the existence of this new branch. A sidebar inside the paper also raises questions about the qualifications of the Strategic Support Branch's leader, Col. George Waldroup. Some criticize Waldroup's quick ascent from a civilian job to being in charge of human intelligence operations and say neither he nor his team are qualified to carry out clandestine missions effectively.
As more Iraqi troops are trained, Gen. Gary E. Luck will reportedly recommend that U.S. forces should take over responsibility for securing Iraq's borders as well as supporting Iraqi forces who may need their help. An article inside the WP about the changes in the role of U.S. troops after the election mentions that more troops will be brought in from Saddam Hussein's old army to increase the number of local forces.
Both the NYT and LAT front articles on the way Iraq's different ethnic groups view the upcoming elections. Although Shiites and Kurds are mostly excited about the prospects of electing their leaders, most Sunnis express skepticism, and many are unlikely to vote. The NYT interviewed "50 to 60" Iraqis, among whom all the Shiites said they will vote and all but one of the Sunnis said they were planning on staying home.
The WP goes inside with a new study that reveals relief operations in the Aceh province of Indonesia are still largely disorganized almost a month after the tsunami hit. The report, which was coordinated by several groups including the United Nations, and was still in draft form when reviewed by the WP, will recommend that aid agencies work together to plan relief efforts in order to maximize their effectiveness.
The NYT reefers a story on the future of Jewish settler homes in the Gaza strip. As the Israeli government prepares to remove all of the settlers from Gaza this summer, the Israeli and Palestinian governments seem to be planning on destroying the houses despite widespread poverty among many residents of Gaza. Community buildings such as schools and hospitals will probably be kept standing but some Palestinian officials emphasized that no final decision has yet been made.
The WP fronts an analysis on the high number of members of Congress who come from political families. Six current senators came into office to replace their fathers, and at least seven of the new House members have politically famous last names.
Finally, the NYT visits what has become one of Washington, D.C.'s best-known bars, Smith Point. The bar, made famous by the regular appearances of the Bush twins, has become a sort of refuge for young Republicans. It was packed on inauguration night after all the official balls were over. Describing the bar, the NYT states that Smith Point has become "a genuine velvet-rope hot spot." The article goes on to quote Smith Point's owner on how much he dislikes the term "velvet rope," preferring to call it a "crowd-control stanchion." Maybe the crowds needed to be controlled on inauguration night, but an article in the latest issue of Newsweek revealed that on normal nights, patrons are kept waiting outside even when the bar is mostly empty.Daniel Politi is a writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112583/

January 23, 2005THE WAY WE LIVE NOW The Triumph of Gesture PoliticsBy CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The world's governments, churches and even terrorist-affiliated groups have thrown themselves into the tsunami relief effort. You would expect that passing judgment about which kinds of aid and which modes of delivery work best would be a complicated matter. But you would be wrong. In Europe, at least, the public has separated the heroes from the scoundrels with a simple yardstick -- lost vacation time. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany stands among the winners. He rushed back from a post-Christmas vacation in his native Lower Saxony to set up a crisis center in Berlin, and has since been a whirlwind of activity, pledging more than half a billion dollars in aid and devoting his New Year's address to the disaster. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who chose not to cut short his own vacation in Egypt, finds himself cast as the arch-goat. Blair's government was quite active during the days that followed the tsunami. But even though Britain has offered substantial assistance to the wave-damaged region, that is somehow insufficient. For the past month, the British news media have savaged their prime minister for his ''colossal act of disrespect.'' According to an editorial in The Independent, ''Blair has failed to grasp the essence of leadership.'' If that accusation is fair, then the essence of leadership has changed into something that is less and less about significant undertakings and more and more about dramatic stunts. Thus, at least one European newspaper described President Bush's effort to aid tsunami victims as a bid to show U.S. compassion. What was important was not the particulars of Bush's own aid plan, but whether the public would find it convincingly noble. Not that programs don't matter, but in the public mind they are secondary to (and their success is dependent on) the personal gestures that accompany them. The expression ''gesture politics'' generally describes the substitution of symbols and empty promises for policy. The microinitiatives that Bill Clinton developed for the 1996 election -- promoting the distribution of cellphones to neighborhood watch groups, for instance -- qualify as classic examples. So do Republican attempts to stiffen federal sentences on crimes that are usually prosecuted on the state level. Accusations of ''gesture politicking'' are often made following natural disasters. In 2000 the European Union was embarrassed by reports that of the $440 million it had pledged in aid to the Central American countries hit by Hurricane Mitch two years earlier, none had arrived. This is not quite what Schroder is up to. The policy attached to his gestures may in fact be extensive and effective. But like the other kind of gesture politics, this one implies a citizenry that is either easily bamboozled or disengaged. It appeals to citizens on the grounds of what their leader does as a person -- probably because citizens lack the attention span to follow the things he does as a head of state. In theory, we should strictly distinguish between these two roles, much as medieval subjects tried to distinguish ''the king's two bodies'' (as the historian Ernst Kantorowicz put it): the king was simultaneously sovereign by divine right and (potentially) some fallible, average lout with designs on your wife, money and cattle. But it's ever more difficult to keep things straight. The social theorist Richard Sennett claimed in ''The Fall of Public Man'' that the backsliding began with Lamartine and other leaders of the 1848 revolution in Paris. It was they who first stressed their ''credibility'' as people as opposed to their competence as leaders. They turned political discourse into a sort of seduction. ''What was perceived when people watched someone behave in public,'' Sennett wrote, ''was his intentions, his character, so that the truth of what he said appeared to depend on what kind of person he was.'' Now this confusion crops up everywhere. After last year's Republican convention, the editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, noted the tendency of speakers to praise President Bush's war in Iraq not as a wise effort but as a sign of personal ''inner strength.'' They insisted that we were safer after the Iraq invasion -- not because of anything it accomplished, but because it showed we were led by the kind of person who invaded Iraq. Or consider the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when the royal family's attempt to keep a stiff upper lip backfired terribly. As the English political scientist David Marquand put it: ''The royals behaved as they had been taught to do: as symbols of the state, quintessential inhabitants of the public domain, with all its emotional austerity and self-control. But the populace did not want a display of emotional austerity and self-control. They demanded a public display of private grief.'' There are a few redoubts where the politics of gestures don't penetrate. Francois Mitterrand's love of ortolan, a wild game bird netted on hillsides in rural France and eaten with one's fingers, is a fascinating biographical detail, but that is all it is. It has never been taken (unless by animal rights activists) as having any political significance. The same goes for Jacques Chirac's fondness for sumo wrestling. No Chiracian has ever used it to sell any of his policies. (Although last year, Chirac's rival Nicolas Sarkozy let drop that he thought sumo an enthusiasm of lightweights -- a sign that things may be changing even in France.) Perhaps our own era of personalized politics began when White House spinners used Ronald Reagan's fondness for sweets to convey that he would be a ''nicer'' president. The government, we were encouraged to think, would be pursuing different -- and probably better -- policies than we'd been led to expect. The proof was that Reagan was crazy about Jelly Bellys. It should have occurred to us to say, ''Who isn't?'' Christopher Caldwell is a contributing writer for the magazine.
Share this picture:
http://vegasmike433.yafro.com/photo/8027519
[Copy Link]

January 23, 2005THE PUBLIC EDITOR Numbed by the Numbers, When They Just Don't Add UpBy DANIEL OKRENT Some people in the newspaper business - including, I suspect, a few sitting upstairs from me, in the New York Times Company's corporate offices - were displeased by a story that ran on Jan. 10, "Your Daily Paper, Courtesy of a Sponsor." The article, by Jacques Steinberg and Tom Torok, was a pretty sharp pin stuck into the circulation numbers of many American newspapers, revealing how subscriptions paid for by advertisers are delivered to readers who haven't asked for them.I fielded a couple of days' worth of objections from the newspaper industry, and while I concluded that the piece was largely fair and entirely accurate (if somewhat overstated), I do think it could have been more candid about The Times's own practices. Readers who wanted to know how The Times fitted into this story didn't find out until (more likely, "unless") they made it to the 30th paragraph; the practices at The Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times Company, were unveiled in Paragraph 27. Even then the article was slightly less than forthcoming. By studying circulation patterns of Sunday papers, the article made The Times appear less reliant on these advertiser-subsidized subscriptions than it would have if the comparisons had been based on weekday circulation.In fact, one could say there's a stark difference: according to the most recent available numbers, the quantity of the paper's third-party-paid subscriptions on a given weekday is 79 percent higher than the comparable Sunday number. This sounds very ominous. It sounds somewhat less ominous when you realize that these same third-party-paid subscriptions account for 1.4 percent of Sunday circulation, and 2.5 percent of weekday circulation. And it sounds not even worth noting (take a deep breath here) if you consider that the difference between the number of weekday subsidized copies and Sunday subsidized copies is 0.4 percent of weekday circulation, and 0.27 percent of Sunday circulation.Set aside the question of whether The Times should have stated its figures higher and more completely in the piece. (No, let's not set it aside: Caesar's wife should speak early and loudly.) There's another issue rolling around all these numbers - namely, numbers. Do you have any idea which of the figures I've cited, all of them accurate, are meaningful?Neither do I.One of the appealing things about the complaints I receive about innumeracy at The Times is their ecumenical origin; when it comes to how it handles numbers, The Times is an equal opportunity offender. Like a bad cough that spreads its germs indiscriminately, numbers misapplied and ill-explained irritate the sensibilities of the right and the left, the drug company official and the animal rights activist, the art collector and the Jets fan. Number fumbling arises, I believe, not from mendacity but from laziness, carelessness or lack of comprehension. I'll put myself in the latter category (as some readers no doubt will as well, after they've read through my representation of the numbers that follow). Most of the journalists I know who enter the profession comfortable with numbers write about sports, where debate about the meaning of statistics is a daily competition, or economics, a field in which interpretation of numbers will no more likely produce inarguable results than will finger painting. So it is left to the rest of us who write for the paper to stumble through numbers, scatter them on the page and hope that readers understand. Does it matter if many of these figures are meaningless symbols serving the interests of the parties that issue them? Take a variety of reports on some recent lawsuits: A man is suing the city for $20 million arising from charges, eventually dismissed, brought against him for kidnapping and sexual abuse [story]. The mother of the football player Derrick Thomas, who died in 2000, is suing General Motors for $75 million [story]. Villagers on an Indonesian island are suing Newmont Mining Corporation for $543 million [story]. Not one of these numbers is grounded in anything more substantial than the imagination of a plaintiff's lawyer, but each is given the authority of print. No different, really, was Wednesday's assertion that Bernard J. Ebbers, if convicted of all charges in the MCI-WorldCom accounting scandal, "could be sentenced to as much as 85 years," a formulation that bears no relationship to any conceivable outcome yet serves the prosecutor's public case very nicely [story]. Numbers issued by those measuring criminal enterprise ("In Mexico, drug trafficking is a $250-billion-a-year industry" [story]) or the economic impact of a new stadium ("Bloomberg said that he expected the arena to generate about $400 million a year through various economic activities" [story]) don't deserve to be published without challenge; it doesn't serve agencies who want to fight drug trafficking to underestimate the problem, nor can any politician support a development project without hyping its potential benefit. Still, The Times persists. In November, when New York City Comptroller William Thompson released a study purporting to show that New Yorkers purchase more than $23 billion in counterfeit goods each year, The Times repeated the analysis as if it were credible [story]. Quick arithmetic would have demonstrated that $23 billion would work out to roughly $8,000 per city household, a number ludicrous on its face. (In the Web version of this column, I've linked to an excellent dissection of Thompson's report, by freelance journalist Felix Salmon.) Last Sunday, an article on the city's proposed $1.1 billion investment in three stadium projects cited the assertion by the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation that "for every dollar invested by the city in the three projects, taxpayers would get a return of $3.50 to $4.50 over 30 years." [story] It didn't say that the same $1.1 billion invested in a 30-year Treasury bond would return $4 for every dollar invested, and a lot more reliably, too. (Credit where it's due: reporter Charles V. Bagli did note that the $1.1 billion could pay for 25 schools housing 600 students each.)Sometimes the absence of a number is as deflating to an article's credibility as the presence of a deceptive one. Few articles noting that President Bush received more votes than any candidate in history also mentioned that more people voted against him than any candidate in history. Quoting Michael Moore's assertion that standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C., proved that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is "a red state movie" disregards the fact that metropolitan Greensboro has over 1.2 million people [story]; you could probably find in a population that large enough people to give a standing O for a reading of the bylaws of the American Dental Association. Of course both Moore and the reporter who wrote that piece operate in the movie business, where records are about as meaningful as promises. "Shrek 2" is not, as an article in The Times Magazine had it in November, "the third-highest-grossing movie of all time" [story]; if you consider inflation, it's not even in the Top 10 (and "Titanic" is far from No. 1). This record-mania has spread everywhere. "Record-high gas prices" summoned up last year weren't even close; at its summer peak, gas cost 80 cents a gallon less than it did in 1981. Says economics reporter David Leonhardt, "Treating 2004 dollars the same as 1981 dollars isn't much different from treating dollars the same as rupees. The fact that 10 is a bigger number than 9 doesn't make 10 rupees worth more than $9; nor does it make $10 from 2004 worth more than $9 from 1981." Inflation isn't the only culprit stalking the record books: "Record deficits" may not be records when they're expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, a far more reasonable measure than any raw number.Numbers without context, especially large ones with many zeros trailing behind, are about as intelligible as vowels without consonants. When Congress allocated $28.4 billion to the National Institutes of Health, was that a lot or a little? [story] I'd certainly begin to have a sense of it if I knew that this came to 3 percent of all discretionary spending. When John Kerry proposed tax cuts of $420 billion over 10 years, was that a meaningful number? [story] Tell me that it amounts to about $150 per person per year, and I can grasp it. When Harvard announced that it was allocating $2 million more to financial aid for poor students, bringing the total to $82 million a year, was it really being generous? [story] Well, in 2004, $82 million was about six days' income from the Harvard endowment, and the heralded $2 million increase that prompted this fairly prominent article was the equivalent of what the endowment earned every 3 hours and 36 minutes.If all these numbers make your eyes roll, then you're finding yourself in the same position as a lot of readers, and apparently a lot of reporters and editors as well. (I haven't even gotten into deceptive stats that have the patina of authority, like those three all-time champs, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the unemployment rate and batting averages; if you're interested, I take a few swings at them in my Web journal, in Posting No. 42.) Although everyone who writes for The Times is presumably comfortable with words, every sentence nonetheless goes through the hands of copy editors, highly trained specialists who can bring life to a dead paragraph or clarity to a tortured clause with a tap-tap here and a delete-insert there. But numbers, so alien to so many, don't get nearly this respect. The paper requires no specific training to enhance numeracy, and no specialists whose sole job is to foster it. David Leonhardt and Charles Blow, the deputy design director for news, have just begun to conduct occasional seminars on "Using and Misusing Numbers," and that's a start. But as I read the paper and try to dodge the context-absent numbers that are thrown about like shot-puts, I long for more. In "Floater," his 1980 novel about life at a newsweekly, Calvin Trillin introduced the Rhymes-With man - a mysterious character locked in a padded room who is allowed out only to provide readers with parenthetical clues to the pronunciation of foreign words, like ratatouille ("rhymes with lotta hooey"). Maybe The Times could sign up several Number-Means people to help the staff - and the readers - through the sticky digits.The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section
Share this picture:
http://vegasmike433.yafro.com/photo/8026918
[Copy Link]

January 23, 2005OP-ED COLUMNIST A Bunch of Krabby PattiesBy MAUREEN DOWD I should have known.I can't believe I thought he was just an innocent little sponge wearing tight shorts. What in the name of Davy Jones's locker would a sponge be doing holding hands with a starfish or donning purple and hot-pink flowered garb to redecorate the Krusty Krab if he weren't a perverted invertebrate?Before this is over, we're going to find out that SpongeBob is the illicit spawn of the Tampa shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. Who knew SpongeBob would become as fraught as the cover of "Abbey Road"?It took Dr. James Dobson, the conservative Christian leader and gay marriage opponent, who claims the president's re-election was more a mandate for his ideas than George Bush's, to point out the insidious underside of the popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. It takes a sponge to brainwash a child.Holy Abe! Dr. Dobson outed SpongeBob at a black-tie inaugural fete last week for members of Congress and political allies. He said that a "pro-homosexual video" - starring SpongeBob, Barney, Jimmy Neutron, Winnie the Pooh, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy - was set to go to elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge," including tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."Hoppin' clams, as they say in Bikini Bottom, the den of epicene iniquity where SpongeBob lives. Nothing good can come of tolerance. Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, where SpongeBob beats the pants off the competition, was flummoxed: "It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality."Dr. Dobson has done the country a service by reminding us to watch out for the dark side of lovable but malleable sponges. He inspired me to fish through the president's Inaugural Address with a more skeptical eye.Mr. Bush's epic pledge to support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and to end "tyranny in our world" may seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, given that the Iraq vortex has drained our military.Although his incendiary speech about "the untamed fire of freedom" has been widely interpreted as a code-red warning to both foes and friends, I wonder if the president knew he was literally promising to stamp out undemocratic governments across the globe, which would include some of our top allies. He probably thought it was a fancier way of repackaging the Iraq invasion, not as a failed search for W.M.D., but as a blow for freedom (a word used 27 times) and liberty (used 15 times).I wonder if W. is surprised that people took it literally. The Bushes don't always understand that they're being held to their rhetoric in major speeches. (Read my warships.) For such a brass-knuckled vision, the president's delivery was curiously unemotional. Some of the same advisers who filled Mr. Bush's brain with sugary visions of a quick and painless Iraq makeover did mean the speech to be literal; they are drawing up military options for the rest of the Middle East. Once again, the lovable and malleable president seems to be soaking up the martial mind-set of those around him, almost like ... a sponge.SpongeBush SquarePants!We can only hope that Dr. Dobson doesn't pick up on the resemblance. SpongeBob, as his song goes, "lives in a pineapple under the sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!" SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous is he!SpongeBush ensnared the country in a whale of a mess in Iraq because he guilelessly absorbed the neocons' dire warnings about Saddam's weapons capabilities and their rosy assumptions about Ahmad Chalabi's leadership capabilities.Dick Cheney is a gruff Mr. Krabs taskmaster to SpongeBush, but SpongeBush is crazy about him anyhow. W. trustingly let his vice president make the worst-case scenario about Iraq a first-case scenario.Mr. Bush might have thought he was just blowing pretty bubbles full of lofty ideals about freedom and liberty in his speech, but Mr. Cheney and the neocons seem intent on filleting Iran and Syria. (Doesn't Richard Perle remind you of the snarky and pretentious next-door neighbor to SpongeBob, Squidward Tentacles?)The vice president told Don Imus that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of trouble spots, and that Israel "might well decide to act first" with a military strike.Even if he's a little light in the flippers, SpongeBob has brought children good, clean fun. SpongeBush has brought the world dark, endless fights
Share this picture:
http://vegasmike433.yafro.com/photo/8026874
[Copy Link]

January 23, 2005QUESTIONS FOR SIMON WINCHESTER Dean of DisasterInterview by DEBORAH SOLOMON You are the author of ''Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: Aug. 27, 1883,'' as well as a coming book on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 -- what went through your head when you first learned of the tsunami? I was on holiday in England at the time. I heard the 5 o'clock news, and I have to confess: I thought, Should I go? Should I ring up The Sunday Telegraph and go? English friends of mine called and said, ''Are you sure you are not exploiting this?'' How odd. Do they think you exploited Krakatoa by publishing a book about it? Krakatoa has passed into history, so it has historical validity. But to write about this current event, and to do it with enthusiasm, you're advancing your career on the back of a tragedy. You Brits are so anxious about advancing your station in life that it's amazing you get can out of bed in the morning. That is one reason I like to live here in America. I am ambitious. I like success. Here it is not something to be ashamed of. You began your career as a geologist, after studying at Oxford. All I wanted to do was wander around the world. But I was a bad geologist. How, exactly, would you define a bad geologist? They're the ones who don't find the copper deposits they are sent to find. Are you suggesting you were too anxious about advancing your career to find any copper? Not quite. I had been sent to Uganda by a mining company and, to be fair, the area where I was sent didn't have any copper. One problem I have with geology is that it reduces existence to rocks. Do you believe in God? You have to take it on faith. And I don't have that degree of faith. Looking at life from the perspective that geology offers, which renders man incredibly insignificant, I find it difficult to regard man as anything other than a biological accident. And what about nature? Do you find it benign or evil? Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil. How will the tsunami change you? I am afraid it doesn't. When the world works in a terrifying way, it doesn't alter my beliefs. If not you, do you think other people will be spiritually tested by the tsunami? In northern Sumatra, it will make for more fundamentalist Muslims, and that has to be dangerous. The imams are there, and the only buildings that survived were the mosques. They survived because they were well built, a solid place of refuge. I recently read that natural disasters most affect the poor, who have less choice about where to live and the quality of their housing. I don't know about that. Why do we as a people choose to live in beautiful and risky places? Beautiful places are relatively dangerous; the forces that made them beautiful are the same forces that will ultimately destroy them. Is there any place safe to live? We should all live in central or southwest Queensland in Australia, which is geologically stable. Or Kansas or Nebraska, because it's relatively geologically stable. I am sure there is no emergency plan for Topeka. How can you say Kansas is safe? Look what happened to Dorothy in ''The Wizard of Oz.'' Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn't really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux.
Share this picture:
http://vegasmike433.yafro.com/photo/8036207
[Copy Link]