A very well deserved response!
Jury awards father $11M in funeral case
By ALEX DOMINGUEZ, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 5 minutes ago
A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.
Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress.
Snyder's attorney, Craig Trebilcock, had urged jurors to determine an amount "that says don't do this in Maryland again. Do not bring your circus of hate to Maryland again."
Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "God hates fags."
A number of states have passed laws regarding funeral protests, and Congress has passed a law prohibiting such protests at federal cemeteries. But the Maryland lawsuit is believed to be the first filed by the family of a fallen serviceman.
The church and three of its leaders — the Rev. Fred Phelps and his two daughters, Shirley Phelps-Roper and Rebecca Phelps-Davis, 46 — were found liable for invasion of privacy and intent to inflict emotional distress.
Even the size of the award for compensating damages "far exceeds the net worth of the defendants," according to financial statements filed with the court, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett noted.
Snyder claimed the protests intruded upon what should have been a private ceremony and sullied his memory of the event.
The church members testified they are following their religious beliefs by spreading the message that soldiers are dying because the nation is too tolerant of homosexuality.
Their attorneys maintained in closing arguments Tuesday that the burial was a public event and that even abhorrent points of view are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and religion.
Earlier, church members staged a demonstration outside the federal courthouse. Church founder Fred Phelps held a sign reading "God is your enemy," while Shirley Phelps-Roper stood on an American flag and carried a sign that read "God hates fag enablers." Members of the group sang "God Hates America" to the tune of "God Bless America."
Snyder sobbed when he heard the verdict, while members of the church greeted the news with tightlipped smiles.

Why They Called It the Manhattan Project
By WILLIAM J. BROAD NY TIMES
By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.
Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb.
Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.
In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.
“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”
Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.
“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”
Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.
Dr. Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of The New York Times for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its role in the epochal events. And most people who encountered his entourage, which included a photographer and videographer, knew little or nothing of the atomic labors in Manhattan.
“That’s amazing,” Alexandra Ghitelman said after learning that the buildings she had just passed on inline skates once held tons of uranium destined for atomic weapons. “That’s unbelievable.”
While shock tended to be the main reaction, some people hinted at feelings of pride. More than one person said they knew someone who had worked on the secret project, which formally got under way in August 1942 and three years later culminated in the atomic bombing of Japan. In all, it employed more than 130,000 people.
Dr. Norris is also the author of “Racing for the Bomb” (Steerforth, 2002), a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the project’s military leader. As his protagonist had done during the war, Dr. Norris works in Washington. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, he studies and writes about the nation’s atomic facilities.
Dr. Norris began his day of exploration by taking the train to New York from Washington, coming into Pennsylvania Station just as General Groves had done dozens of times during the war to visit project sites.
“Groves didn’t want the job,” Dr. Norris remarked outside the station. “But his foot hit the accelerator and he didn’t let up for 1,000 days.”
For tour assistance, Dr. Norris brought along his own books as well as printouts from “The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons,” a CD by James M. Maroncelli and Timothy L. Karpin that features little-known history of the nation’s atom endeavors.
We headed north to the childhood home of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the eccentric genius whom General Groves hired to run the project’s scientific side as well as its sprawling New Mexico laboratory. Last year, a biography of Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus” (Knopf, 2005), won the Pulitzer Prize.
“One of the most famous scientists of the 20th century,” Dr. Norris noted, got his start “walking these streets” and attending the nearby Ethical Culture School.
Oppenheimer and his parents lived at 155 Riverside Drive, an elegant apartment building at West 88th Street. The superintendent, Joe Gugulski, said the family lived on the 11th floor, overlooking the Hudson River.
“One of my tenants read the book,” Mr. Gugulski told us. “So I looked it up.” To his knowledge, Mr. Gugulski added, no other atomic tourists had visited the building.
The Oppenheimers decorated their apartment with original artwork by Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, according to “American Prometheus.” His mother encouraged young Robert to paint.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, blocks away at Columbia University, scientists were laboring to split the atom and release its titanic energies. We made our way across campus — with difficulty because of protests over the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, which is widely suspected of harboring its own bomb program.
Dr. Norris noted that the Manhattan Project led to “many of our problems today.”
The Pupin Physics Laboratories housed the early atom experiments, Dr. Norris said. But the tall building, topped by observatory domes, has no plaque in its foyer describing its nuclear ties.
Passing students and pedestrians answered “no” and “kind of” when asked if they knew of the atom breakthroughs at Pupin Hall. Dr. Norris said the Manhattan Project, at its peak, employed 700 people at Columbia. At one point, the football team was recruited to move tons of uranium. That work, he said, eventually led to the world’s first nuclear reactor.
After lunch, we headed to West 20th Street just off the West Side Highway. The block, on the fringe of Chelsea, bristled with new galleries, and Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. On its north side, three tall buildings once made up the Baker and Williams Warehouses, which held tons of uranium.
Two women taking a cigarette break said they had no idea of their building’s atomic past. “It’s horrible,” said one.
Dr. Norris’s “Traveler’s Guide” fact sheet said the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s cleaned the buildings of residual uranium. Workers removed more than a dozen drums of radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy in Washington. “Radiological surveys show that the site now meets applicable requirements for unrestricted use,” a federal document said in 1995.
We moved to Manhattan’s southern tip and worked our way up Broadway along the route known as the Canyon of Heroes, the scene of many ticker-tape parades amid the skyscrapers.
At 25 Broadway, we visited a minor but important site — the Cunard Building. Edgar Sengier, a Belgian with an office here, had his company mine about 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore and store it on Staten Island in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge. Though a civilian, he knew of the atomic possibilities and feared the invading Germans might confiscate his mines.
Dr. Norris said General Groves, on his first day in charge, sent an assistant to buy all that uranium for a dollar a pound — or $2.5 million. “The Manhattan Project was off to a flying start,” he said, adding that the Belgian entrepreneur in time supplied two-thirds of all the project’s uranium.
We walked past St. Paul’s Chapel and proceeded to the soaring grandeur of the Woolworth Building, once the world’s tallest, at 233 Broadway.
A major site, it housed a front company that devised one of the project’s main ways of concentrating uranium’s rare isotope — a secret of bomb making. On the 11th, 12th and 14th floors, the company drew on the nation’s scientific best and brightest, including teams from Columbia.
Dr. Norris said the front company’s 3,700 employees included Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy. “He was a substantial physicist in his own right,” Dr. Norris said. “He contributed to the American atom bomb, the Soviet atom bomb and the British atom bomb.”
So how did the Manhattan Project get its name, and why was Manhattan chosen as its first headquarters?
Dr. Norris said the answer lay at our next stop, 270 Broadway. There, at Chambers Street, on the southwest corner, we found a nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park.
It was here, Dr. Norris said, that the Army Corps of Engineers had its North Atlantic Division, which built ports and airfields. When the Corps got the responsibility of making the atom bomb, it put the headquarters in the same building, on the 18th floor.
“That way he didn’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Dr. Norris said of General Groves. “He used what he had at his fingertips — the entire Corps of Engineers infrastructure.”
Dr. Norris added that the Corps at that time included “extraordinary people, the best and brightest of West Point.”
In time, the office at 270 Broadway ran not only atom research and materials acquisition but also the building of whole nuclear cities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington State.
The first proposed name for the project, Dr. Norris said, was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. But General Groves feared that would draw undo attention.
Instead, General Groves called for the bureaucratically dull approach of adopting the standard Corps procedure for naming new regional organizations. That method simply noted the unit’s geographical area, as in the Pittsburgh Engineer District.
So the top-secret endeavor to build the atom bomb got the most boring of cover names: the Manhattan Engineer District, in time shortened to the Manhattan Project. Unlike other Corps districts, however, it had no territorial limits. “He was nuts about not attracting attention,” Dr. Norris said.
Manhattan’s role shrank as secretive outposts for the endeavor sprouted across the country and quickly grew into major enterprises. By the late summer of 1943, little more than a year after its establishment, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Despite this dispersal, Dr. Norris said, scientists and businesses in Manhattan, including The New York Times, continued to aid the atomic project.
In April 1945, General Groves traveled to the newspaper’s offices on West 43rd Street. He asked that a science writer, William L. Laurence, be allowed to go on leave to report on a major wartime story involving science.
As early as 1940, before wartime secrecy, Mr. Laurence had reported on the atomic breakthroughs at Pupin Hall.
Now, Dr. Norris said, Mr. Laurence went to work for the Manhattan Project and became the only reporter to witness the Trinity test in the New Mexican desert in July 1945, and, shortly thereafter, the nuclear bombing of Japan.
The atomic age, Mr. Laurence wrote in the first article of a series, began in the New Mexico desert before dawn in a burst of flame that illuminated “earth and sky for a brief span that seemed eternal.”
In Manhattan, the one location that has memorialized its atomic connection had nothing to do with making or witnessing the bomb, but rather with managing to survive its fury.
The spot is on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th Streets. There, in a residential neighborhood, in front of the New York Buddhist Church, is a tall statue of a Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. In peasant hat and sandals, holding a wooden staff, the saint peers down on the sidewalk.
The statue survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, standing a little more than a mile from ground zero. It was brought to New York in 1955. The plaque calls the statue “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”
The statue stands a few blocks from Columbia University, where much of the bomb program began.
“I wonder how many New Yorkers know about it,” Dr. Norris said of the statue, “and know the history.”

Ben Affleck's Boston

His portrait of the city is far from perfect—but at least it's not wicked bad.By Patrick Radden Keefe (SLATE)
Some cities are blessed with great filmmakers. New York has Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee. Baltimore has Barry Levinson, David Simon, and John Waters. But the good people of Boston have been deeply unlucky in this regard. Whether it's the city's clannish insularity, the fine-bore segregation of its neighborhoods, or the mix of effete, overeducated latte swillers and "gritty, working-class" knuckleheads, Boston has never translated well on film. But when it was announced that Ben Affleck was directing a film of the Dennis Lehane novel Gone Baby Gone, I was excited. For one thing, the novel was set in Dorchester, the "gritty, working-class" neighborhood where this overeducated latte swiller grew up. More importantly, though, back in 1997, Ben Affleck portrayed perhaps the most note-perfect Bostonian ever put on film, Will Hunting's sidekick Chuckie Sullivan. With Chuckie behind the camera, I figured, Boston might finally get the movie it deserves.
And it does, sort of. Affleck's movie feels more grounded in the specific geography of Boston than any other major Hollywood production ever has. And more populated by real Bostonians. But in striving to capture Boston in all its sordid glory, Affleck overapplies the grit. The problem struck me in an early scene in which the camera lingers on a gaggle of daytime boozers, and I swear, more than one of them has a cleft palate. In an effort to cast aside the Hollywood airbrush, Affleck has zoomed in on the freakish underbelly of Boston and somewhat overstated the case. The result is not so much what Mean Streets did for New York as what Deliverance did for Appalachia.
"I wanted something raw and authentic and even a little scuffed up," Affleck told the New York Times recently. For much of the movie, half of Dorchester seems to be standing around outside their creaky wooden houses, just killing time. But as the camera pushes in on dozens of extras—sickly skinny women and gin-blossomed men with complexions like blood sausage—"scuffed up" begins to feel positively generous. At a certain point, the parade of uglies marches past verisimilitude and into freak-show territory. This isn't actually what the people of Dorchester look like. Yes, you can walk into a Dorchester bar and find a healthy crowd at 11 a.m. on a weekday. But give the barflies harelips and cleft palates, and you're overdoing it a bit. It's Dorchester by way of Diane Arbus.
To be sure, it's not easy to make a good Boston movie. Rather than dwell on the particular offenses of, say, With Honors, Celtic Pride, or the peerless Soul Man, let's cut to the root problem: It's the accent. Even for our finest actors, the Boston accent is Everest: an irresistible, but insurmountable, challenge. Some especially foolhardy pros even adopt Boston accents in movies that aren't set in Boston. What was Tom Hanks thinking in Catch Me if You Can? Time to prove the acting chops, that's what he was thinking. Eat your heart out, Rain Man. I can do a Boston accent.
But he couldn't. For all the long as and dropped rs, you could hear the physical strain in the line readings, like they were being squeezed from an empty tube of toothpaste. This may seem like a minor matter to you. But for those of us who grew up possessing, or shedding, a Boston accent, it's a deal breaker. Consider, if you will, the embarrassing hilarity that tends to ensue when my dear father, unapologetic owner of a medium-thick Boston brogue, returns an off bottle of wine at a restaurant because "I know the taste of cork. And this tastes like cork."
There have been decent Boston movies, of course, and some of the best of them, like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, or The Verdict, didn't bother with the accent at all. More recently, Mystic River won all sorts of accolades, which was mysterious to me. Apart from its passing acknowledgment of gentrification, a strain that gets fuller treatment in the Lehane novel on which the film is based, and some nice exterior shots of three-decker apartment buildings, the movie doesn't feel genuinely grounded in a specific place. Besides, Mystic River is just too somber and morose, with none of the music of Boston talk. Scorsese's The Departed captured that music, thanks mostly to the staccato screenwriting of William Monahan, who was born in Dorchester and grew up in West Roxbury. But for all its quick-fire poetry, The Departed felt like a traveling Scorsese show that was stopping through town rather than something truly indigenous.
For my money, no screen Bostonian tops Ben Affleck's Chuckie. Affleck was still a relatively unfamiliar face back in 1997, with a less dazzling set of teeth. He had the accent nailed, the swagger of the semiemployed, and the outfits—the outfits! One track suit after another, with the de rigueur gold chain worn outside the white turtleneck. By contrast, Matt Damon's Will Hunting was too pretty to be believable as a hard kid from Southie. Trust me on this point. I tried sporting floppy bangs like that in the neighborhood, and they didn't secure the respect of my fellow men. But as precisely the type of guy who used to call me Goldilocks, Affleck is perfect. There's the classic "retaiiiner" speech, of course, and also this saccharine, yet still perceptive exchange, in which Chuckie makes clear that he knows his own limitations. He's provincial. But he knows that he's provincial. And that almost makes him cosmopolitan. That's Boston.
Part of the irony, of course, is that Affleck's not from Boston. He's from what Bostonians insist on calling the People's Republic of Cambridge. In writing a movie about the gulf between Cambridge and Southie, and choosing to play the guys from Southie, Affleck and Damon took a risk, and they delivered well enough that the movie has been embraced in Boston. So, I won't begrudge Affleck simply for being Nawt from Dawt, as one Boston blog puts it. (Hell, if we could only claim our genuine native sons, we'd be stuck with the New Kids on the Block.)
Gone Baby Gone does certainly plunge into the neighborhood. Affleck offsets gorgeous, soaring helicopter shots of Southie with exterior shots of lived-in feeling homes around the Fields Corner section of Dorchester, and up and down Dot Ave. Casey Affleck's Boston accent, delivered in his peculiar febrile croak, isn't quite as good as his brother's, but he could pass for a local. And as Helene McCready, the floozy mother of a missing girl, The Wire's Amy Ryan (who hails not from Boston, but from Queens) creates an indelible Bostonian worthy even of Chuckie. As does her phenomenal, foulmouthed sidekick, Dottie, who cusses and preens and, in an inspired Boston malapropism, tells the press there will be a candlelight "visual" for the missing girl.
Yet while the three-deckers and the "real"-looking people might lead one to conclude that Affleck had adopted some kind of guerilla vérité technique, you've got to wonder: Where are all the Vietnamese people? Over the past 15 years Dot Ave, and especially the area around Fields Corner, has become home to a burgeoning community of Vietnamese immigrants. Gone Baby Gone effectively lays bare some of the casual racism in Boston, and those scenes add nuance and credibility to the movie. But that nuance is undermined when you consider the effort that must have gone into creating a Fields Corner without a single Vietnamese passer-by or storefront sign.
This is a modest cavil, I know. To the extent that filmgoers in the Midwest have any notion of racial tension in Boston, it's probably a white-black, legacy-of-busing thing. Throw a bunch of Vietnamese people in there, and you'll just confuse things. Plus, there's a lot to celebrate about Gone Baby Gone; it certainly comes closer to accurately depicting Boston than its predecessors. But for all its authenticity, the Dorchester of the movie still looks the way it might look to an outsider—someone from Los Angeles, say, or from Cambridge. You don't have to stick around through the closing credits for the personal thank yous to Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz to gather that while Affleck may forever be one of Boston's most famous sons, at the end of the day, the truth is that he is not dawt from dwat!

Retirement season hits GOP hard
By Janet Hook and Theo Milonopoulos, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON -- This is crunchtime for members of Congress who must decide whether to seek reelection next year or leave office, and so far Republicans seem to be lunging for the exits. While 16 GOP lawmakers have decided to throw in the towel on their Capitol Hill careers, only two Democrats so far have called it quits -- and they both are seeking higher office.The disparity underscores the sharply different moods in the two parties: Democrats, still heady from winning control of Congress last year, are enjoying the fruits of power. Republicans, their party in disarray and reduced to minority status in the House and Senate, see more allure in retirement or private life.
"I don't like being in the minority," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), who was first elected in the 1994 GOP landslide and will retire after this term. "It's not that much fun, and the pros- pects for the future don't look that good."The wave of retirements compounds the challenge facing the GOP in the 2008 congressional election, because the party is significantly trailing Democrats in fundraising. That means Republicans will apparently be defending more House and Senate seats with less money, and they will be fighting battles in places that otherwise might have been secure.What is more, many of the Republicans choosing to retire are older, more pragmatic lawmakers, such as Rep. Ralph Regula of Ohio; moderates like Rep. Deborah Pryce of Ohio and Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia; and mavericks like Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. These departures reflect the generational and ideological changes that have pushed the Republican contingent in Congress steadily to the right over the last decade.Eddie Mahe, a former GOP official, says it is no surprise that many Republicans are thinking about quitting politics at a time when President Bush's popularity is low, Iraq is in turmoil and the U.S. economy may be going soft."If I was talking to my favorite brother-in-law and he was thinking about running for Congress, I would say, 'Why would you want to do that now?' " Mahe said. "If anybody's not smart enough to figure that out, I don't want them around anyway."Democrats have their own political vulnerabilities: Despite disillusionment with the GOP, many voters are not satisfied with Democratic control of Congress. A recent poll conducted for National Public Radio found that Congress' approval rating has slipped to 25%, down from 36% in April.Still, against that backdrop, more Republicans than Democrats are abandoning the institution. So far in the GOP, five senators and 12 House members have announced they will retire. Among Democrats, no one in the Senate is retiring, and two have said they will leave the House -- to run for the Senate.Retirements are crucial to congressional election strategy because, in most cases, it is easier for a party to hold on to a seat when its incumbent runs for reelection than to retain a seat opened by retirement.That is why Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has been laboring to persuade his party's incumbents to run for reelection. He is urging at least one -- Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota -- to reconsider his decision to retire.Cole says it is always difficult to dissuade lawmakers who leave for personal reasons. Pryce, for example, said she was retiring from the Ohio seat that she nearly lost in 2006 to spend more time with her daughter, who is entering kindergarten."It's hard to say no to that," Cole said. "But that was one that hurts, because we fully expected her to run."The fact that at this early stage, 11 House Republicans have announced retirement -- and one is leaving the chamber to run for Senate -- is not out of line with past years. What is more unusual is that almost all Democrats are staying put.Cole takes heart in the fact that several of the GOP retirees, such as Rep. David L. Hobson of Ohio, are from districts that Republicans will probably be able to hold with little trouble. But others will give the GOP a fight it might otherwise not have had to wage. Of the 12 seats opening, eight are ranked as potentially competitive by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report -- including five it identifies as tossups.Republicans will probably be fighting on that turf with less money: As of the end of August, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had $22.1 million on hand, compared with $1.6 million held by the GOP House committee.There is a similar imbalance in fundraising for Senate races: As of the end of August, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had $20.6 million in the bank; its Republican counterpart had $7.1 million.That financial disadvantage is especially problematic for Republicans because next year the party must defend 22 of its 49 Senate seats, compared with 12 Senate seats to be defended by Democrats.For the GOP, the climb to recapture the Senate majority it lost in 2006 has gotten steadily steeper, as one veteran senator after another announced retirement. Warner cited his advancing age. Hagel and Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado each said he was abiding by his promise to serve only two terms. Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico is leaving due to illness.Those announcements were a big blow to the GOP, because Democrats would have had little hope of being competitive in Virginia, Nebraska and New Mexico against those popular incumbents. They have a good shot at those states now -- especially in Virginia, where Republicans are divided over whom to nominate for the seat and the leading Democratic candidate, Mark R. Warner, is a popular former governor.Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) announced last month that he would resign after his arrest and guilty plea to disorderly conduct in a men's restroom. He has since indicated he intends to serve out his term, to the dismay of some fellow Republicans.Democrats cannot help but gloat that none of their incumbent senators -- not even Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who is recovering from a brain hemorrhage -- is retiring."It's another sign that the enthusiasm and the energy is on the Democratic side this year," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.janet.hook@latimes.com

Fire at Original Joe's

San Francisco - -- The well-heeled, the less-well-heeled and the downright downtrodden won't be dining together at one of their favorite spots for a while: San Francisco's landmark Original Joe's restaurant was shut down by fire Friday.
The Tenderloin institution will likely be closed at least a couple of months while repairs are made, said owner John Duggan. It would be the longest shutdown in its 70-year history.
"Thank God nobody got really hurt," Duggan said Friday morning as he watched firefighters trudge through the front door that has been graced by mayors, rock stars and just plain folks in search of Original Joe's hearty portions. "But there's some tremendous fire damage. It's going to take a lot of work to rebuild."
Workers said the blaze erupted at 10:47 a.m. in or around an exhaust flue above the kitchen of the restaurant, at 144 Taylor St., when the cooking staff turned on the charcoal cooker. As flames built in the ceiling area and surged out of the flue's rooftop opening, smoke began to fill the restaurant and the hotel rooms that sit above it.
"The pipe from the charcoal burner started making a roaring noise, so we called the Fire Department," said longtime waiter Roger Miranda. "That's always a bad noise. When the smoke started, we ran out as fast as we could." The charcoal burner is always lit on Fridays to cook steak and fish, Miranda said.
While Miranda was helping evacuate the 21 workers in the restaurant, waiter Sergio Morales dashed upstairs to the 30-room, low-rent residential Moderne Hotel that occupies the second floor of the two-story Original Joe's building.
"I ran down the hallways, banging on doors and telling everyone, 'Get out! Get out!' and then I got out, too," Morales said.
One man, however, headed up instead of down - hotel manager Dennis Rindell. He hit the roof, grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed its contents down the flue.
It didn't work. He was pulled off the roof by firefighters using an extension ladder.
"The flames and the smoke kept coming, and I couldn't stand it any more," Rindell said as he stood on Taylor Street sucking air off an oxygen mask.
After erupting in the flue, flames quickly spread into a light well, or open shaft, in the hotel and began burning the walls of at least two rooms, said Fire Dept. Lt. Mindy Talmadge. Two residents were treated for smoke inhalation at the scene.
The blaze was finally wrestled under control at 11:42 a.m. The Red Cross will temporarily house residents of 10 rooms.
By lunchtime, the entryway and cooking area of Original Joe's was a soggy, debris-strewn mess. Much of the ceiling over the sit-down counter was smashed open and blackened, and pieces of hotel floor and restaurant wall lay scattered thickly among a half-dozen fire hoses that snaked from one end of the restaurant to the other.
With its faux-leather booths, tuxedo-wearing waiters and portion sizes that can feed a family of five, Original Joe's is an institution.
It should have died as the Tenderloin deteriorated into a place where junkies lay sprawled across the sidewalk - and as small-plate restaurants where grass-fed beef and seasonal ingredients are standard have proliferated. But people keep coming for the famous Joe's Special, a hash of scrambled eggs and hamburger meat, or the chicken cacciatore, baseball-size meatballs or a glass of cheap Chablis. On any given day, a member of the city's elite could be seen scarfing a giant porterhouse steak at one of the plush burgundy Naugahyde booths - often just a seat away from a down-and-outer tucking into an equally big plate.
"I've served everyone from Mayor (Gavin) Newsom and (ex-Mayor) Willie Brown to the average Joe in the street," said waiter Miranda, who has held his job for 18 years. "We get a lot of rock groups from the Warfield Theater, too. Jerry Garcia was a really good tipper."
Duggan said he hopes his insurance will cover the salaries of his longtime staff, many of whom have worked at the restaurant for decades. It's the familiarity of the servers and cooks that keeps patrons packing the tables.
"We're very fortunate. We have everyone from the head politician to the head prostitute in here, and we love them all," said owner Duggan. "But the person who really made us Original Joe's is the common man."
Blue-collar folks in particular like to belly up to Joe's 24-seat kitchen counter, watch the cooking action and pass some pleasant conversation. Most will tell you that the menu may lack today's obsession for artisan foods, but it's a place where you get a lot of bang for your buck.
Ante "Tony" Rodin founded the restaurant in 1937 with a couple of partners. Back then, the joint consisted of 14 bar stools and a sawdust covered floor. It has since grown to 140 seats and is run by Rodin's grandkids, Duggan and his sister, Elena Duggan.
These days, Original Joe's patrons on their way to eat often stroll past homeless people in every direction, as well as crack addicts lighting up pipes.
"I always wanted to eat there," Larry Edmond, who lives in a nearby residential hotel, said wistfully as he watched the fire crews. Heavily bearded, he wore a woman's pink wig and sleigh bells on his wrists.
"I'm a people-a-tician, so I usually get along with everyone," he said, looking around warily. "But this street is kind of seedy. Makes it a little hard to think about eating here."
Chronicle staff writer Henry Lee contributed to this report.

Barak Obama Speech at DePaul University 30 Sept 2007
We come together at a time of renewal for DePaul. A new academic year has begun. Professors are learning the names of new students, and students are reminded that you actually do have to attend class. That cold is beginning to creep into the Chicago air. The season is changing.
DePaul is now filled with students who have not spent a single day on campus without the reality of a war in Iraq. Four classes have matriculated and four classes have graduated since this war began.
And we are reminded that America's sons and daughters in uniform, and their families, bear the heavy burden. The wife of one soldier from Illinois wrote to me and said that her husband "feels like he's stationed in Iraq and deploys home." That's a tragic statement. And it could be echoed by families across our country who have seen loved ones deployed to tour after tour of duty.You are students. And the great responsibility of students is to question the world around you, to question things that don't add up. With Iraq, we must ask the question: how did we go so wrong?There are those who offer up easy answers. They will assert that Iraq is George Bush's war, it's all his fault. Or that Iraq was botched by the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Or that we would have gotten Iraq right if we went in with more troops, or if we had a different proconsul instead of Paul Bremer, or if only there were a stronger Iraqi Prime Minister.These are the easy answers. And like most easy answers, they are partially true. But they don't tell the whole truth, because they overlook a harder and more fundamental truth. The hard truth is that the war in Iraq is not about a catalog of many mistakes - it is about one big mistake. The war in Iraq should never have been fought.Five years ago today, I was asked to speak at a rally against going to war in Iraq. The vote to authorize the war in Congress was less than ten days away and I was a candidate for the United States Senate. Some friends of mine advised me to keep quiet. Going to war in Iraq, they pointed out, was popular. All the other major candidates were supporting the war at the time. If the war goes well, they said, you'll have thrown your political career away.But I didn't see how Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. I was convinced that a war would distract us from Afghanistan and the real threat from al Qaeda. I worried that Iraq's history of sectarian rivalry could leave us bogged down in a bloody conflict. And I believed the war would fan the flames of extremism and lead to new terrorism. So I went to the rally. And I argued against a "rash war" - a "war based not on reason, but on politics" - "an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences."I was not alone. Though not a majority, millions of Americans opposed giving the President the authority to wage war in Iraq. Twenty-three Senators, including the leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared my concerns and resisted the march to war. For us, the war defied common sense. After all, the people who hit us on 9/11 were in Afghanistan, not Iraq.But the conventional thinking in Washington has a way of buying into stories that make political sense even if they don't make practical sense. We were told that the only way to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons was with military force. Some leading Democrats echoed the Administration's erroneous line that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We were counseled by some of the most experienced voices in Washington that the only way for Democrats to look tough was to talk, act and vote like a Republican.As Ted Sorensen's old boss President Kennedy once said "the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war" and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears." In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn't tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.But it doesn't end there. Because the American people weren't just failed by a President - they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress - "a coequal branch of government" - that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let's be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren't really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That's the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?With all that we know about what's gone wrong in Iraq, even today's debate is divorced from reality. We've got a surge that is somehow declared a success even though it has failed to enable the political reconciliation that was its stated purpose. The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you've been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place " the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.Well I'm not running for President to conform to Washington's conventional thinking - I'm running to challenge it. I'm not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war in Iraq - I'm running to change our politics and our policy so we can leave the world a better place than our generation has found it.So there is a choice that has emerged in this campaign, one that the American people need to understand. They should ask themselves: who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong. This is not just a matter of debating the past. It's about who has the best judgment to make the critical decisions of the future. Because you might think that Washington would learn from Iraq. But we've seen in this campaign just how bent out of shape Washington gets when you challenge its assumptions.When I said that as President I would lead direct diplomacy with our adversaries, I was called naïve and irresponsible. But how are we going to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to our adversaries if we don't have a President who will lead that diplomacy?When I said that we should take out high-level terrorists like Osama bin Laden if we have actionable intelligence about their whereabouts, I was lectured by legions of Iraq War supporters. They said we can't take out bin Laden if the country he's hiding in won't. A few weeks later, the co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission - Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton - agreed with my position. But few in Washington seemed to notice. Some people made a different argument on this issue. They said we can take out bin Laden, we just can't say that we will. I reject this. I am a candidate for President of the United States, and I believe that the American people have a right to know where I stand.And when I said that we can rule out the use of nuclear weapons to take out a terrorist training camp, it was immediately branded a "gaffe" because I did not recite the conventional Washington-speak. But is there any military planner in the world who believes that we need to drop a nuclear bomb on a terrorist training camp?We need to question the world around us. When we have a debate about experience, we can't just debate who has the most experience scoring political points. When we have a debate about experience, we can't just talk about who fought yesterday's battles " we have to focus on who can face the challenges and seize the opportunities of tomorrow. Because no matter what we think about George Bush, he's going to be gone in January 2009. He's not on the ballot. This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it's about moving beyond it. And we're not going be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq. We're not going to unify a divided America to confront these threats with the same old conventional politics of just trying to beat the other side.In 2009, we will have a window of opportunity to renew our global leadership and bring our nation together. If we don't seize that moment, we may not get another. This election is a turning point. The American people get to decide: are we going to turn back the clock, or turn the page?I want to be straight with you. If you want conventional Washington thinking, I'm not your man. If you want rigid ideology, I'm not your man. If you think that fundamental change can wait, I'm definitely not your man. But if you want to bring this country together, if you want experience that's broader than just learning the ways of Washington, if you think that the global challenges we face are too urgent to wait, and if you think that America must offer the world a new and hopeful face, then I offer a different choice in this race and a different vision for our future.The first thing we have to do is end this war. And the right person to end it is someone who had the judgment to oppose it from the beginning. There is no military solution in Iraq, and there never was. I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately. I will remove one or two brigades a month, and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months. The only troops I will keep in Iraq will perform the limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda. And I will launch the diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives that are so badly needed. Let there be no doubt: I will end this war.But it's also time to learn the lessons of Iraq. We're not going to defeat the threats of the 21st century on a conventional battlefield. We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors. We're not going to win a battle of ideas with bullets alone.Make no mistake: we must always be prepared to use force to protect America. But the best way to keep America safe is not to threaten terrorists with nuclear weapons - it's to keep nuclear weapons and nuclear materials away from terrorists. That's why I've worked with Republican Senator Dick Lugar to pass a law accelerating our pursuit of loose nuclear materials. And that's why I'll lead a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials during my first term in office.But we need to do much more. We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union " a country that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan and North Korea have joined the club of nuclear-armed nations, and Iran is knocking on the door. More nuclear weapons and more nuclear-armed nations mean more danger to us all.Here's what I'll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.We will not pursue unilateral disarmament. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we'll retain a strong nuclear deterrent. But we'll keep our commitment under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty on the long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons. We'll work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material. We'll start by seeking a global ban on the production of fissile material for weapons. And we'll set a goal to expand the U.S.-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that the agreement is global.As we do this, we'll be in a better position to lead the world in enforcing the rules of the road if we firmly abide by those rules. It's time to stop giving countries like Iran and North Korea an excuse. It's time for America to lead. When I'm President, we'll strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that nations that don't comply will automatically face strong international sanctions.This will require a new era of American diplomacy. To signal the dawn of that era, we need a President who is willing to talk to all nations, friend and foe. I'm not afraid that America will lose a propaganda battle with a petty tyrant " we need to go before the world and win those battles. If we take the attitude that the President just parachutes in for a photo-op after an agreement has already been reached, then we're only going to reach agreements with our friends. That's not the way to protect the American people. That's not the way to advance our interests.Just look at our history. Kennedy had a direct line to Khrushchev. Nixon met with Mao. Carter did the hard work of negotiating the Camp David Accords. Reagan was negotiating arms agreements with Gorbachev even as he called on him to "tear down this wall."It's time to make diplomacy a top priority. Instead of shuttering consulates, we need to open them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world. Instead of having more Americans serving in military bands than the diplomatic corps, we need to grow our foreign service. Instead of retreating from the world, I will personally lead a new chapter of American engagement. It is time to offer the world a message of hope to counter the prophets of hate. My experience has brought me to the hopeless places. As a boy, I lived in Indonesia and played barefoot with children who could not dream the same dreams that I did. As an adult, I've returned to be with my family in their small village in Kenya, where the promise of America is still an inspiration. As a community organizer, I worked in South Side neighborhoods that had been left behind by global change. As a Senator, I've been to refugee camps in Chad where proud and dignified people can't hope for anything beyond the next handout.In the 21st century, progress must mean more than a vote at the ballot box " it must mean freedom from fear and freedom from want. We cannot stand for the freedom of anarchy. Nor can we support the globalization of the empty stomach. We need new approaches to help people to help themselves. The United Nations has embraced the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. When I'm President, they will be America's goals. The Bush Administration tried to keep the UN from proclaiming these goals; the Obama Administration will double foreign assistance to $50 billion to lead the world to achieve them.In the 21st century, we cannot stand up before the world and say that there's one set of rules for America and another for everyone else. To lead the world, we must lead by example. We must be willing to acknowledge our failings, not just trumpet our victories. And when I'm President, we'll reject torture - without exception or equivocation; we'll close Guantanamo; we'll be the country that credibly tells the dissidents in the prison camps around the world that America is your voice, America is your dream, America is your light of justice.We cannot - we must not - let the promotion of our values be a casualty of the Iraq War. But we cannot secure America and show our best face to the world unless we change how we do business in Washington.We all know what Iraq has cost us abroad. But these last few years we've seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home. We face real threats. Any President needs the latitude to confront them swiftly and surely. But we've paid a heavy price for having a President whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuisance. Matters of war and peace are used as political tools to bludgeon the other side. We get subjected to endless spin to keep our troops at war, but we don't get to see the flag-draped coffins of our heroes coming home. We get secret task forces, secret budgeting, slanted intelligence, and the shameful smearing of people who speak out against the President's policies.All of this has left us where we are today: more divided, more distrusted, more in debt, and mired in an endless war. A war to disarm a dictator has become an open-ended occupation of a foreign country. This is not America. This is not who we are. It's time for us to stand up and tell George Bush that the government in this country is not based on the whims of one person, the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.We thought we learned this lesson. After Vietnam, Congress swore it would never again be duped into war, and even wrote a new law -- the War Powers Act -- to ensure it would not repeat its mistakes. But no law can force a Congress to stand up to the President. No law can make Senators read the intelligence that showed the President was overstating the case for war. No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as the co-equal branch the Constitution made it.That is why it is not enough to change parties. It is time to change our politics. We don't need another President who puts politics and loyalty over candor. We don't need another President who thinks big but doesn't feel the need to tell the American people what they think. We don't need another President who shuts the door on the American people when they make policy. The American people are not the problem in this country" they are the answer. And it's time we had a President who acted like that.I will always tell the American people the truth. I will always tell you where I stand. It's what I'm doing in this campaign. It's what I'll do as President. I'll lead a new era of openness. I'll give an annual "State of the World" address to the American people in which I lay out our national security policy. I'll draw on the legacy of one our greatest Presidents - Franklin Roosevelt and give regular "fireside webcasts," and I'll have members of my national security team do the same.I'll turn the page on a growing empire of classified information, and restore the balance we've lost between the necessarily secret and the necessity of openness in a democratic society by creating a new National Declassification Center. We'll protect sources and methods, but we won't use sources and methods as pretexts to hide the truth. Our history doesn't belong to Washington, it belongs to America.I'll use the intelligence that I do receive to make good policy - I won't manipulate it to sell a bad policy. We don't need any more officials who tell the President what they want to hear. I will make the Director of National Intelligence an official with a fixed term, like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve - not someone who can be fired by the President. We need consistency and integrity at the top of our intelligence agencies. We don't need politics. My test won't be loyalty - it will be the truth.And I'll turn the page on the imperial presidency that treats national security as a partisan issue - not an American issue. I will call for a standing, bipartisan Consultative Group of congressional leaders on national security. I will meet with this Consultative Group every month, and consult with them before taking major military action. The buck will stop with me. But these discussions have to take place on a bipartisan basis, and support for these decisions will be stronger if they draw on bipartisan counsel. We're not going to secure this country unless we turn the page on the conventional thinking that says politics is just about beating the other side.It's time to unite America, because we are at an urgent and pivotal moment.There are those who suggest that there are easy answers to the challenges we face. We can look, they say, to Washington experience - the same experience that got us into this war. Or we can turn the page to something new, to unite this country and to seize this moment.I am not a perfect man and I won't be a perfect President. But my own American story tells me that this country moves forward when we cast off our doubts and seek new beginnings.It's what brought my father across an ocean in search of a dream. It's what I saw in the eyes of men and women and children in Indonesia who heard the word " America" and thought of the possibility beyond the horizon. It's what I saw in the streets of the South Side, when people who had every reason to give in decided to pick themselves up. It's what I've seen in the United States Senate when Republicans and Democrats of good will do come together to take on tough issues. And it's what I've seen in this campaign, when over half a million Americans have come together to seek the change this country needs.Now I know that some will shake their heads. It's easy to be cynical. When it comes to our foreign policy, you get it from all sides. Some folks on the right will tell you that you don't love your country if you don't support the war in Iraq. Some folks on the left will tell you that America can do no right in the world. Some shrug their shoulders because Washington says, "trust us, we'll take care of it." And we know happened the last time they said that.Yes, it's easy to be cynical. But right now, somewhere in Iraq, there's someone about your age. He's maybe on his second or third tour. It's hot. He would rather be at home. But he's in his uniform, got his combat gear on. He's getting in a Humvee. He's going out on patrol. He's lost a buddy in this war, maybe more. He risked his life yesterday, he's risking his life today, and he's going to risk it tomorrow.So why do we reject the cynicism? We reject it because of men and women like him. We reject it because the legacy of their sacrifice must be a better America. We reject it because they embody the spirit of those who fought to free the slaves and free a continent from a madman; who rebuilt Europe and sent Peace Corps volunteers around the globe; because they are fighting for a better America and a better world. And I reject it because I wouldn't be on this stage if, throughout our history, America had not made the right choice over the easy choice, the ambitious choice over the cautious choice. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think we were ready to move past the fights of the 1960s and the 1990s. I wouldn't be here if, time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation " to unite this country at home, to show a new face of this country to the world. I'm running for the presidency of the United States of America so that together we can do the hard work to seek a new dawn of peace and prosperity for our children, and for the children of the world.

(From Andrew Sullivan 2 Oct 2007)