Landlord Faces Lawsuit for Harassment
By CHARLES V. BAGLI NY TIMES
State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced Thursday that he intends to sue a major New York landlord that he says harassed hundreds of tenants in rent-regulated apartments in Queens and Manhattan in a systematic effort to force their departure to create vacancies for higher-paying tenants.
The landlord, Vantage Properties, routinely filed eviction notices and other legal actions against working-class and immigrant families in tenements that the company had recently acquired to generate “substantial tenant turnover,” investigators and tenant advocates said. But most of the legal notices, the attorney general said in a letter to Vantage, contained “deceptive and misleading representations.” Investigators said the majority of those notices were eventually rejected by the city’s housing courts, although the company denied that.
The attorney general notified Neil Rubler, president of Vantage Properties, that his office would file a lawsuit in five days unless the company stopped the harassment, paid damages to tenants and agreed to a monitor to oversee its future rental activity.
“Landlords who illegally harass tenants to boost their bottom line do great harm to the fabric of the city,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Their underhanded tactics displace longtime residents from their homes and exacerbate the acute affordable-housing shortage.”
Vantage issued a statement Thursday evening saying it looked forward to demonstrating to Mr. Cuomo its commitment “to serving its residents and to the future of affordable housing in New York City.”
But its financial partner, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, also issued a statement expressing regret that Vantage had not yet reached an agreement with the attorney general “incorporating best practices and other tenant protections, which we fully support.”
“We expect that Vantage will work with Attorney General Cuomo’s office to get this matter resolved quickly,” Apollo said.
Marina Materon, 63, a cleaning woman who has lived in the same four-story building in Sunnyside, Queens, for 26 years, said Vantage had been harassing her since it bought the building in January 2008. She said she had to go to court to resolve a false claim that she owed back rent, but still regularly receives notices demanding back rent.
“It’s harassment,” she said during an interview at her home, “because I’m paying my rent and every month they’re sending me this thing that says I have to pay this amount. I don’t know what I would do if I had to move.”
Ms. Materon, who pays $754.70 per month for her two-bedroom apartment, said her building is deteriorating. There are rats and cockroaches; the front door is broken and sometimes stays open at night.
A relative newcomer, Vantage spent more than $2 billion at the height of the market in 2006 and 2007, buying about 125 buildings with more than 9,500 apartments in Queens, Washington Heights and Harlem. Most often, it did so in partnership with Apollo.
Vantage, like the Pinnacle Group, the Praedium Group and other private equity firms, paid top dollar for rent-regulated buildings in working-class neighborhoods and wrapped them in inordinately large mortgages. Although rental income did not cover their mortgage payments, their business plan was to profit by forcing out tenants in rent-regulated apartments, renovating the units and sharply increasing rents.
Indeed, after Vantage and Apollo bought eight buildings in Washington Heights, rental income covered only 40 percent of the annual loan payments. Only one of the 455 apartments was not regulated. But Vantage expected quick turnover.
“The borrower anticipates to recapture approximately 20 to 30 percent of the units by year end 2008, and 10 percent per year thereafter,” according to a 2007 corporate filing.
But the average annual turnover in a rental building in New York is closer to 5 percent. The attorney general and tenant advocates said the only way that Vantage could achieve those numbers was by harassing tenants with fake eviction notices and other tactics.
“The Wall Street type of competition and profit seeking of private equity financing is causing an epidemic of tenant harassment,” said Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association of Neighborhood Housing. “Vantage and their financiers are jeopardizing economic diversity and long-term stability of our neighborhoods.”
Vantage claimed that it was only trying to weed out those tenants who did not qualify for rent regulation. But investigators point out that 86.2 percent of the termination notices filed by Vantage at one complex, Savoy Park in Harlem, were resolved in favor of the tenants.
Marcos Oliveira said he never had a landlord problem before Vantage bought his building in Jackson Heights, Queens. Vantage sent him a letter saying that he and his family had to leave because the apartment was not his primary residence. He said he gathered up years of bills from Con Ed and other vendors to prove that he was a longtime resident. But Vantage, he said, refused to cash his rent checks.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. Oliveira said. “How come I’ve been here so long with no problem? Everyone in the building knows me. What do I have to do to get them to leave my family alone?”
Ann Farmer contributed reporting.

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It"

Andrew Sullivan
"[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. ... The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society," - John Adams, as cited by Jim Sleeper.
"Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation.
But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight. The only reason we are is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard, to do what was needed even when success was uncertain, to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and grandchildren," - Barack Obama, last night.
My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance. I do not believe that in the Bush administration, the United States was effectively governed by its Constitution. The forms were still there, but the reality wasn't. Beneath it all, the desire for despotism ran, fueled by the despot's greatest ally, fear. Fear of foreigners, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of immigrants, fear of the inevitable uncertainties of real reform.
It was entrenched by the military's own embrace of the role of imperial adventure, by the CIA's embrace of torture, by the president's assertion of total, extra-legal power in a never-ending war that now encompassed the US as well as abroad and citizens alongside non-citizens, and by a resurgent, right-wing partisan media that saw its job as fomenting propaganda rather than seeking any kind of truth, and liberal mainstream media so afraid of its own shadow and so intimidated by accusations of elitism that it became the equivalent of Harry Reid.
And I share Sleeper's deep dismay at the myopic, callow crowd in this capital city, more obsessed with passing instant phony judgments on political fortunes than with addressing with seriousness the vast challenges this struggling and ailing and now fast-declining republic faces.
I've lived in Washington for twenty years. I saw in Obama the real hope that something constructive could emerge from the corruption and decline of the recent past. I saw last night the civil tone that marks a responsible politics, rather than the glib cynicism and mock heroism that has marked us in much of the new millennium.
I saw in the civic spirit - especially among the young - a means of renewal for the republic. And I remain convinced that those who want to "reset" Obama's agenda to the old forms with which they are comfortable have waged a take-no-prisoners war on real change and real reform.
So this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses - or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it. My faith in this country - so strong in the past - is not as strong as Obama's now.
But I sure as hell believe in fighting for it, and for him, against the forces at home and abroad that would truly end this experiment in self-government while pretending, of course, that everything is exactly the same. I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe - because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force, but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.
Those, in my view, are the stakes. Are you ready to get back into the arena and fight? And if you don't, who will?

Daily Beast
Steve Jobs: Flip-Flopper
by Alan Deutschman
David Paul Morris / Getty Images Apple may unveil its new tablet on Wednesday, but the business side is still being worked out: The company has been hosting 11th-hour negotiations with book publishers to figure out how to take on rival Amazon. Unlike Amazon, Apple's new system will allow publishers to set their own prices, shifting the balance of power back to publishers, at least partly. Apple has reportedly asked publishers to set ebook price points for hardcover bestsellers at $12.99 or $14.99, with fewer books offered at $9.99. Below, Jobs’ biographer Alan Deutschman reports on how Jobs' brain works.
Steve Jobs’ longtime friend Heidi Roizen, who worked closely with him when she was a senior executive at Apple, once told me that she wondered for a long time whether Jobs was a compulsive liar. Ultimately, she determined that Jobs wasn’t a liar at all: He could say X one day and not-X the next day, and each time he would genuinely, passionately believe what he was saying. That’s why he could always speak with such powerful conviction. That’s why he exerted a legendary persuasiveness. “Steve’s brain has an amazing ability to recraft things and put a different spin on them,” Roizen said.
Jobs once hung a vintage World War II poster near his desk saying “Loose Lips Sink Ships.”
Jobs has been spin-shifting throughout the long sweep of his fabled career, beginning in the early days of Apple when he denied fathering Lisa, the daughter born out-of-wedlock to his high-school girlfriend. Jobs stubbornly refused to acknowledge his parentage or pay $20,000 to help support mother and child even after a blood test determined a 94.4 percent probability that he was the father. Lisa grew to have an uncanny resemblance to him, and eventually he proudly claimed his parenthood.
Or remember when Jobs, who had treated Bill Gates as an archenemy, embraced his longtime nemesis when a struggling Apple accepted a $150 million investment from Microsoft? More recently, Jobs almost had us fooled when, despite looking skeletal and sickly, he persisted in downplaying the severity of his illness, which, we now know, could have killed him.
The latest example of Jobs’ shrewd spin-shifting is Apple’s long-awaited “tablet” computer, which the fabulous showman is expected to personally reveal at a media event today in San Francisco. The gizmo is thought to be a challenge to Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic book reader, which has attracted a passionate following and cracked open a promising new market. If so, it will mark a stunning reversal: Only two years ago, Jobs contemptuously predicted that the Kindle would flop: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told The New York Times, because “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
But the Kindle has been a winner, and Jobs has had to watch as a rival tech CEO brilliantly lifted a strategy right out of his own playbook: This time it was Jeff Bezos, not Jobs, who was celebrated for a breakthrough design of the hardware, the user interface, and the rest of the customer experience that made things easy, fast, and cheap enough that people would actually pay something for digitized content rather than steal it. Bezos was doing for books what Jobs had done for music with the iPod and iTunes. This time Bezos, not Jobs, was the first to establish and then dominate a new market with great potential for growth. (Amazon captured an estimated 90 percent of the e-book business.) While Bezos is nearly as secretive as Jobs and has refused to reveal the Kindle’s sales figures, it’s likely that its trajectory in its early rollout has been roughly comparable to the iPod’s.
Longtime Jobs-watchers shouldn’t be surprised that Steve has switched from saying X to saying not-X or that he’ll say it with utter passion and persuasiveness at Apple’s tablet launch. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs is betting that new device will enable him to “reshape” the beleagured old-media businesses such as books, magazines, and newspapers “much the way his iPod revamped the music industry.” Despite Jobs’ obsession with secrecy about his upcoming products—near his desk, he once hung a vintage World War II poster saying “Loose Lips Sink Ships”—the news quickly leaked that Jobs’ minions were talking with The New York Times, Conde Nast, HarperCollins, and News Corp. about deals for Apple to sell their words and pictures to the millions of affluent consumers who are expected to pay up to a thousand bucks a pop for the gadget, which is rumored to have a 10-inch-diagonal touch screen.
The burgeoning Apple-Amazon competition is already promising benefits for old media businesses. In anticipation of Apple’s tablet launch, Amazon announced that it would begin giving a more favorable split of Kindle sales dollars to publishers and authors. Amazon also decided to allow outsiders to create software to run on its device.
While Apple’s tablet represents a much-needed new opportunity for struggling print publishers, it’s foolish to believe the pre-event hype about Jobs offering salvation for old media. The iPod and iTunes have enabled the music industry to survive, yes, but not to prosper: Its revenue has fallen by 40 percent in the past decade. Meanwhile, Apple has been so extraordinarily successful that its stock market valuation ($178 billion) is even higher than almighty Google’s. Not bad for a company that had nearly died before its co-founder returned to take over once again. Steve Jobs won’t single-handedly save the media, but his latest creation, whether it turns out to be yet another blockbuster or a mere brand extension, will almost surely help sustain the most remarkable corporate resurgence of our times. And even if it’s a flop, which is indeed possible (remember the Mac Cube?), we can count on Jobs to recraft a brilliant new spin the next time around.
Alan Deutschman is the author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. His most recent book is Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders.

Scott Brown: Naked ambition
The former nude centrefold who was elected to the Senate last week has President Obama running scared
Christina Lamb in Washington London Times
The white shining United States Capitol building is enough to make most visitors catch their breath, whether for the grandeur of its architecture or as a symbol of the most powerful nation on earth.
For Scott Brown, the former nude model who arrived in Washington on Thursday as the country’s newest senator, however, the highlights were “how nice everyone is” and “the spaghetti” at lunch. “Though I could have eaten more,” he added. “I was famished.”
As he strode around, shaking hands with doormen and policemen, flashing his wholesome grin and asking random people “You play hoops?” (basketball), it was hard not to be reminded of James Stewart as the country bumpkin boy scout leader arriving to take his Senate seat in the 1939 movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
Like that Mr Smith, who ends up turning the American political system upside down, Mr Brown is clearly not the innocent he seems. Elected as senator for Massachusetts last Tuesday, the 50-year-old concluded his victory speech: “I’m Scott Brown, I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours.”
His humble manner disguises a remarkable political upset that has had America’s pundits reaching for words such as “epic” and “historic”.
He had snatched a Democratic seat that had not been Republican for 57 years and was seen as sacred, having been held initially by John F Kennedy then by his brother Ted until his death in August.
Brown’s victory in this most liberal of states, which did not have a single Republican congressman or senator, was not only humiliating for the Democrats but threatens President Barack Obama’s whole agenda.
For a day Brown was the most famous man in Washington, striding the intricately tiled corridors, trailed by television cameras, reporters, even from celebrity gossip blogs asking if he was “bringing sexy back to the Republican party”.
Some asked if he might run for president in 2012. This is not so far-fetched: Obama had been a senator for only four years when he won the White House.
When Obama was inaugurated a year ago, he looked unassailable with 70% popularity ratings, his photogenic young family, and the hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters in the streets.
However, Brown’s triumph in a state that gave the president a 26-point margin has energised Republicans for mid-term elections in November. Suddenly everything is up for grabs and seats that once looked safe for Democrats are likely to be more contested.
Moreover as the 41st Republican senator out of 100, Brown leaves the Democrats one short of a filibuster-proof majority. He could scupper Obama’s whole policy agenda.
“We are really, really happy to have him here,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, after meeting Brown. “Henceforth, I will always think of him as 41.”
Who is the man who launched what he called a “voter bomb”? And what does his election mean for the Obama presidency?
ALREADY dubbed Senator Beefcake, until this election Brown’s main claim to fame was winning America’s sexiest man contest in 1982 and appearing naked in a Cosmopolitan magazine centrefold.
Raised in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where his father served as a city councillor for 18 years, his parents divorced when he was a year old. Each went on to divorce three other people giving him six step-parents. He was passed between aunts and grandparents and for a while his mother survived on welfare benefits.
In campaign interviews he recalled how his mother had made some “bad choices with guys”. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the banging and the screams and having to be the five-or six-year-old boy having to save mom,” he said.
As a young boy he developed an interest in politics, holding campaign placards for his father. But the instability of his home life seemed to be leading him astray when at 12 he was caught stealing a Black Sabbath album. He was brought before a Judge Samuel Zoll in Salem who asked him if his siblings would like seeing him play basketball in jail and made him write a 1,500-word essay on the topic. “That was the last time I ever stole,” said Brown, “the last time I ever thought [about stealing] ... The other day I was at Staples [an office supply store], and something was in my cart that I didn’t pay for. I had to bring it back because I thought of Judge Zoll.”
He studied law at Boston College, helping fund his studies by modelling jeans and with the $1,000 he won in the Cosmopolitan competition. The accompanying story said the “adorably sexy” Brown likes “slinky girls” and wasn’t shy about taking his clothes off.
“I’m not ashamed of my body,” he told Cosmo. “I work hard enough to keep it in shape. When you go to the beach, you automatically seek out the best bodies, female and male.”
From Sexiest Man to senator Brown has never lost any of the elections he stood for as he worked his way up the state political hierarchy. Voters appear to like the fact that he rides a motorbike and drives a pick-up truck; is a triathlete who gets up at 5am to train; and a committed sports fan who often calls into radio shows to comment on a game.
But there may be another side to Brown. In 2007 he was criticised by Joseph Ferreira, a local teacher, for voting against legalising gay marriage. Brown demanded a chance to explain his position but when invited to the school assembly, he instead used it to attack a student who had criticised him and his daughter on Facebook.
On another occasion, he suggested that Obama may have been born out of wedlock. In 2008 he was asked by a cable news channel about the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol.
“Quite frankly, Barack’s mom had him when she was 18 years old,” he retorted.
“And married,” said the newscaster.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” he replied.
One columnist noted that the Republicans’ new superstar was “already beginning to come off a little strange”. It was an impression he added to in his victory speech when he apparently offered up his college-student daughters to the crowd, shouting, “Yes, they’re both available!” to their obvious embarrassment.
He was never expected to win the Kennedy seat. In November he was trailing 31 points behind Martha Coakley, his Democrat opponent. But he ran a flawless campaign, helped by a friendly local media — his wife is a well-liked television news reporter — and the fact that the Democrats assumed they would win.
Coakley made a series of gaffes. Massachusetts was wrongly spelt on her posters. In a radio interview she labelled Curtis Schilling, hero of the local baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, as a New York Yankees fan — the Boston equivalent of calling Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs a Liverpool player.
“She lived her whole life here and for her not to understand what the Red Sox mean to her constituency is a damning thing,” said Schilling. So cross was he that he appeared at campaign rallies with Brown.
Despite a last-ditch campaigning trip by Obama, Brown won by five points.
OBAMA tried to explain away the defeat by saying that like his own election it was a reaction to the Bush years. “It’s not just because of what happened in the last year or two but what’s happened over the last eight years,” he said.
His odd explanation was undermined by the fact that Brown made his main campaign issue stopping the healthcare reform that is the cornerstone of the Obama presidency. According to a poll by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, 78% of Brown voters said their goal was to stop the reform.
Other polling suggests something wider is going on. Independents who in 2008 elected Obama had swung massively against the Democrats. Their votes went three to one to Republicans in Massachusetts.
Coming just one day after the Brown victory, there was no celebration to mark the first anniversary of Obama taking office. “Sober reflection,” said one aide, when asked about the mood. “Panic,” said another.
What has happened? First, of course, nobody could meet the massive expectations on Obama’s shoulders as he inherited the worst financial crisis in 80 years and two wars.
“I think it’s buyer’s remorse,” said Rhonda Serre, a Massachusetts mother of two who lost her job, but is still supporting the Democrats. “We were brought up so unrealistically high at the end of the Obama campaign that we can’t appreciate what he has achieved.”
Others, such as John Avalon, a political analyst, believe America is a fundamentally conservative country and that the Democrats misinterpreted Obama’s victory. “Independents voted for Barack Obama because he promised to transcend all of the old politics of left versus right, black versus white,” he said. “And I think the liberal White House leadership misread the 2008 election as a liberal mandate.”
Moreover, the trait that served Obama so well during the campaign — the cool, calm demeanour of “No Drama Obama” — may be working against him in office. People complain that his speeches are too professorial, his decision-making too deliberate, and his lack of emotion as Spock-like.
Yesterday he received a further blow when it emerged that the Supreme Court had voted to ease rules limiting the amount lobbyists could spend on political campaigning. “I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest,” said Obama.
This Wednesday he makes his first State of the Union address which has suddenly taken on new significance. Americans will be watching closely to see how he turns the situation around to avoid ending up a lameduck one-term president like Jimmy Carter.
With unemployment at more than 10%, there is a feeling he should have focused less on healthcare and more on economic insecurity. Perhaps for this reason his first reaction to the Brown election was a populist measure of curbs on the banking industry.
The White House claimed the move had been planned for a month but the timing and language were clearly a direct result of Massachusetts.
Some argue that far from being Obama’s nemesis, Brown and his election was a good thing with 10 months still to go before the congressional elections. “The election of Scott Brown is clearly a gift for Democrats,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist. “Because it comes so early Democrats have time to come up with a new recipe to stir the pot and explain what they have done to get out of the worst economic crisis in most of our lifetimes.”
Obama is set to face a more direct challenge from Brown. During a congratulatory call from the president last week, the new senator suggested they face each other on the basketball court.

Time to Fight

Andrew Sullivan

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama's presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama - that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night - reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do... suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.
But the truth is that these forces have also been so passionate, so extreme, and so energized that in a country reeling from a recession, the narrative - a false, paranoid, nutty narrative - has taken root in the minds of some independents. Obama, under-estimating the extremism of his opponents, has focused on actually addressing the problems we face. And the rest of us, crucially, have sat back and watched and complained and carped when we didn't get everything we want. We can keep on carping if we want to. But it seems to me that continuing that - as HuffPo et al. appear to be doing - is objectively siding with the forces of profound reaction right now.
Don't get me wrong. Criticism is still vital. I'm not going to give up on advocating marriage equality or a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade, or for an independent investigation of Bush era war crimes. I think pushing Obama to a more populist position on banks is well and good. But given the alternative, I am going to step up my support of this president in the face of what he is confronting, even when he is not exactly doing everything I want. In my view, you should too.
Look at what we are facing right now: a take-no-prisoners right, empowered by a massive new wave of corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court, able to wield a 41 seat minority to oppose anything Obama wants, setting up a cycle of failure for a president whom they can then pillory at the polls, and unrepentant about near-dictatorial powers for the presidency, and the routinization of torture in the American government. These forces cannot be appeased. They simply have to be confronted.
I do not believe in some massive turn left or faux-populism that Obama cannot characterologically embody. I do not think ramming the healthcare reform bill through before Brown is seated is good politics. I still believe that Obama should embrace a major assault on long-term debt and make that a center-piece of his SOTU next week.
But I have come around to thinking that the one huge mistake right now would be to surrender the Senate health reform bill.
The dust should indeed settle. But it is absurd that one special election should upend a clear campaign promise, a year of work, and a necessary start on a critical reform without which we hurtle toward bankruptcy even more quickly.
More to the point, politics is also about morale and will as well as reason and moderation. I believe Obama has been both reasoned and moderate and civil in navigating between the Democratic Congress and the embittered, mutinous GOP. I don't think his tone should change. But I do think that any surrender on health now would be a betrayal of his entire campaign. I don't think the Senate bill is perfect; but it's far far better than nothing. And not passing it means not passing anything and surrendering to forces that are as proto-fascist as any we have seen in recent times.
This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority's morale, to break a president's foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.
And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.
So fight, Mr President. And to the House Democrats who won't go along with the only way to salvage health reform: this is the only sure-fire way you will lose in November. If you pass this bill, you may also go down in this climate. But you will have done something you can be proud of. Politics cannot always be about narrow self-interest. If it always is, nothing important can get done.
Do your duty. And grow some. Fight back. Explain why you're right. Tell the liberals they can always come back later to reform the bill. Just get this passed.

Editorial NY TIMES
The Massachusetts Election
If anyone should have seen it coming in Massachusetts, it is President Obama — the long-shot candidate who rode to electoral victory on a wave of popular impatience and an ability to identify and address voters’ core anxieties.
There are many theories about the import of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat. To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform — even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill, which Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his first year.
Mr. Obama has done many important things on the environment, and in foreign affairs, and in preventing the nation’s banking system from collapsing in the face of a financial crisis he inherited. But he seems to have lost touch with two core issues for Americans: their jobs and their homes.
Mr. Obama’s challenge is that most Americans are not seeing a recovery. They are seeing 10 percent unemployment and a continuing crisis in the housing market. They have watched as the federal government rescued banks, financial firms and auto companies, but they themselves feel adrift, still awaiting the kind of decisive leadership on jobs and housing — in terms of both style and substance — that Mr. Obama promised in 2008.
Mr. Obama was right to press for health care reform. But he spent too much time talking to reluctant Democrats and Republicans who never had the slightest intention of supporting him. He sat on the sidelines while the Republicans bombarded Americans with false but effective talk of death panels and a government takeover of their doctors’ offices. And he did not make the case strongly enough that the health care system and the economy are deeply interconnected or explain why Americans should care about this huge issue in the midst of a recession: If they lose their jobs, they lose their health insurance.
Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing. He appointed an economics team that was entwined with the people and policies that nearly destroyed the economy. He made compromises that resulted in a stimulus bill that wasn’t big enough or properly targeted. Even now, despite a new, rather awkward populist tone, serious relief for homeowners is lacking and financial regulatory reform is in danger of being hijacked by banking lobbyists and partisan politics.
The victory by Mr. Brown, a Republican, should be setting off alarms in the White House. Most immediately, it jeopardizes passage of the reform that the nation desperately needs. The Democrats could try to get the House to pass the Senate’s bill, although their chances seem dim, or as Mr. Obama seemed to suggest on Wednesday, they could seek a stripped-down measure that could win bipartisan support. They certainly should not try to ram a combined House-Senate bill through the Senate before Mr. Brown is sworn in.
The Democrats had an exceptionally weak candidate in Massachusetts, but the results call into question their tactical political competence. The party now has less than 10 months to get it right before the midterm elections, when they are in danger of losing more seats in the House and the Senate. It is indisputable that the Republicans have settled on a tactic of obstruction, disinformation and fear-mongering, but it is equally indisputable that the Democrats have not countered it well.
Mr. Obama has three years to show the kind of vision and leadership on the economy that got him elected — not just because his chances of a second term are at stake, but because the nation needs to get a handle on joblessness and mortgages or the nascent economic recovery could turn into a lost decade or a double-dip recession, or both.
The president is fighting hard for a consumer financial protection agency, in part because he sees it as one element of financial reform that people will understand. What Mr. Obama has to understand is that the agency is unlikely to be as effective as he intends unless other parts of financial reform — regulating derivatives and limiting “too big too fail” banks — also are robust. And homeowners need mortgage relief — not just lower interest rates, but the ability to renegotiate and restructure their loan balances.
We admire Mr. Obama’s intelligence and the careful way he makes decisions. It is reported that he seeks out dissenting views doggedly. He tells Americans the truth. We don’t want Mr. Obama to turn into a hot populist, but he can be too cool and often waits too long to react at big moments. If White House reporters are still making jokes two years from now about checking the president’s pulse, the nation will be in big trouble.

Robert B. Parker dead at 77
Prolific, funny, he reinvented genre
By Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe
Robert B. Parker, whose spare, eloquent sentences turned the tough private investigator Spenser into one of Boston’s most recognizable fictional characters, suffered a heart attack at his desk in his Cambridge home Monday and died. He was 77.
Muscular and gruff like his creator, Spenser shared other traits with Mr. Parker. Behind the pugnacious exterior, both men liked to chase fine food with a cold beer. Both had a sharp wit and lived by a code of honor.
Over the course of three dozen Spenser novels, Mr. Parker introduced millions of readers to Boston, which was as much a character as his burly protagonist. To a predictable genre, he added a complex detective with a sensitive side. The wry dialogue between Spenser and longtime girlfriend Susan Silverman, who was schooled in the art of psychology, gave a modern twist to the repartee between the Nick and Nora characters created generations earlier by noted crime novelist Dashiell Hammett.
“He was responsible for a seismic shift,’’ said best-selling writer Dennis Lehane, whose crime novels “Mystic River’’ and “Gone, Baby, Gone’’ were adapted into movies. “He suddenly made the private-eye novel sexy, in the coolest sense of that word. There’s private-eye fiction before Bob, and there’s private-eye fiction after him.’’
Joseph Finder, a Boston-based author of best-selling spy thrillers, said Mr. Parker “took the American hard-boiled private-eye novel that had been languishing for years, since James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and revitalized it. He took a lot of the standard tropes - the tough guy, the lone wolf, the man of honor on the mean streets - and updated them so that his Spenser character became sort of an avatar of himself. He was actually a guy who cooked, who was incredibly devoted to one woman, the way Bob Parker was to Joan, his wife.’’
Publishing 65 books in 37 years, Mr. Parker was as prolific as he was well-read. He featured Spenser - “spelled with an ‘s,’ just like the English poet,’’ he said - in 37 novels. He also wrote 28 other books, including a series each for Jesse Stone, the police chief of fictional Paradise, Mass., and Sunny Randall, a female private investigator in Boston.
His latest book, “Split Image,’’ extending the Jesse Stone series, is due out next month, said his agent, Helen Brann of New York City.
Mr. Parker’s marquee character was turned into the TV series “Spenser for Hire,’’ starring Robert Urich. “Jesse Stone’’ became a TV movie vehicle for Tom Selleck, and “Appaloosa,’’ his 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 film directed by and starring Ed Harris, who filled a shelf with Mr. Parker’s books.
“Robert wrote about this friendship between these two guys that tickled me,’’ Harris said of “Appaloosa.’’ “It just felt right. It felt good.’’
Mr. Parker, he added, “was a national treasure. I loved him and I’ll miss him.’’
Brann, who represented Mr. Parker for 42 years, said he had a heart attack while his wife was away from the house. “She saw him early in the morning, went out for her exercise, came back an hour later, and he was gone,’’ Brann said. “He was at his desk, as he so often was.’’
Pounding out up to five pages a day, Mr. Parker kept a pace few could match. Pressed for his secret, he made it sound simple.
“The art of writing a mystery is just the art of writing fiction,’’ he told the Globe in 2007. “You create interesting characters and put them into interesting circumstances and figure out how to get them out of them. No one is usually surprised at the outcome of my books.’’
Perhaps, but readers around the world raced to devour novel after novel. Brann estimated that Mr. Parker sold more than 6 million volumes worldwide. His work was translated into 24 languages.
He was teaching English at Northeastern University when he began writing the novels featuring Spenser, whose first name is never revealed. Mr. Parker didn’t care for academia and made no secret of his animosity in his first book’s first sentence: “The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.’’
In 1975, Globe reviewer Walter V. Robinson welcomed “God Save the Child,’’ Mr. Parker’s second effort: “Spenser is back, and none too soon to give the connoisseur of that rare combination of good detective fiction and good literature a chance to indulge himself.’’
Mr. Parker grew up in Springfield, where he and Joan Hall first met at a birthday party when they were 3. They met again years later at Colby College in Maine. He pursued her. She resisted, then relented. They married in 1956.
“He was very smart and he knew it, and I reveled in that,’’ she told the Globe in 1981. “He was the only man who didn’t bore me.’’
After serving in the Army, Mr. Parker worked in a variety of jobs before going to graduate school at Boston University, where he received a doctorate in English literature.
In the early 1980s, the couple separated, then got back together in an arrangement they publicly acknowledged was unusual, but worked for them. They bought a sprawling house in Cambridge and each lived in a private area.
Mr. Parker dedicated his books to his wife, and told the Globe in 1992 that “she has been the central factor in my life since I was a child. You wouldn’t understand me unless you understand me and her.’’
In addition to his wife, Mr. Parker leaves two sons, David of New York City and Daniel of Santa Monica, Calif. The family is planning a memorial service.
Despite the wealth and fame that came with TV, movies, and worldwide sales, Mr. Parker “was so dependable, such a regular guy,’’ said Kate Mattes, who ran Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge for 26 years. “He never put on airs or anything, and he certainly had the right to.’’
Mr. Parker, who sometimes likened himself to a carpenter who built books, helped others learn his trade.
“The debt’s huge and I was always upfront about that,’’ Lehane said. “My first book is so much Robert Parker in the first chapter that I’m surprised he didn’t sue me.’’

The Iranian Exile’s Eye
By NAZILA FATHI NY TIMES
TORONTO, Canada — One day last June, on the quiet Tehran street where I lived, I noticed a man in a white Peugeot across the street looking at me, straight in the eye, as I started to drive out of my garage. “There she is,” he said, and he rushed to start his own car.
I pulled onto the street and looked in the mirror. Behind me was a gray car, already tailing me. Next to it rode two disheveled men on a motorcycle.
So, I said to myself. I’m under surveillance. They’ve sent a whole team.
I drove around the block and returned home. I called a lawyer. My driver went to his office and fetched me papers to sign, so the lawyer could represent me if I was arrested.
But I took no chances. I stayed inside my apartment building for three days. Then I went straight to the airport.
It was time to leave Iran.
I am an Iranian, a journalist now living in exile like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. We were driven out after the June elections that were widely considered fraudulent, and the protests and repression that followed. Our offense was that we covered them too thoroughly.
A daughter of a modern, middle-class family, I was raised to be ambitious and independent. I grew up in Tehran, and studied English translation at the university there. I worked as a stringer for Western media, then studied political science at the University of Toronto from 1999 to 2001, and returned home to report from Tehran for The New York Times.
During periods of turmoil, I learned to lie low and report what I could, through a screen of warnings that some things — demonstrators’ slogans, even executions that had been announced domestically — were too sensitive to be reported outside Iran. But I thought the Iranian government was learning to tolerate us.
All of that changed last June.
Faced with furious street protests by an inconsolable political opposition, the government went to extraordinary lengths to suppress any news about the aftermath of the election. Taking pictures of protests became a crime; reporters working for foreign news media outlets were banned from leaving their offices. Many friends and almost all of my sources were thrown in jail.
One day, the phone rang and a sympathetic hard-line source warned me I would be shot by snipers if I was seen on the streets. Still, I kept going out to report. Only after the surveillance team arrived, about 10 days later, did I and my family decide to leave.
And yet, when we boarded the plane, two emotions were pulling me apart. I was relieved at my narrow escape. But a large piece of me longed to stay. Tehran’s familiar maple-shaded streets were now convulsed in some of the largest and bloodiest protests since the 1979 revolution; I wanted to tell the story, to continue being part of Iran’s fate. I was desolate at the thought of being cast out, with my friends dispersed, my contacts unreachable.
More than anything, I feared falling into what Iranian journalists call “the exile syndrome” — my understanding of Iran would be frozen in the moment of leaving, and I’d be unable to keep up with events on the ground. No doubt the government expected the same for me and others.
As things worked out, we could not have been more wrong. Protest was not about to die in Iran. Neither was news about it, nor our part in telling the story. Three things have made all the difference: the global reach of the Internet; the networking skills of exiled journalists and our sources; and the resourcefulness of Iran’s dissidents in sending information and images out.
When I reached Toronto (I had acquired dual citizenship there while a student), I did feel alone and overwhelmed at first. I realized, for the first time, the toll that the stresses of working in Tehran had been taking on me. I felt a bit like an abused child who had not dared speak about the abuse while it was occurring.
In my mind, I went over the times when sources who had been released from prison told me that interrogators had shown them pictures of people outside my home — a signal of how closely my life was being monitored. It had made me fear anything odd happening in public, like the time a sloppily dressed man on a scooter cut me off, flashing a pistol and handcuffs under the back of his shirt as I drove near my home. He dismounted to yell at me. I locked myself in the car. Then he disappeared. After that, I never again took my two toddlers to a public park in Tehran, fearing they would learn too much about the dangers their mother faced.
Soon after reaching Toronto, I went to New York to cover a hunger strike in support of the Iranian opposition. I was stunned to see more than a dozen former sources of mine — onetime members of Parliament, activists and bloggers — who had gone into exile a few years before. Some were so well informed that they seemed to have just come from a meeting in Tehran.
For me, that was like a new dawn: rather than being cut off, I had made contact with another Iran — a virtual one on the Internet, linking reformers abroad to bloggers and demonstrators still inside the country, and to reporters and sources outside. In fact, by following blogs and the cellphone videos seeping out of Iran, in some ways I could report more productively than when I had to fear and outwit the government.
For example, my contacts helped me find and interview a young man who had left Iran after being in prison, where he said a guard had raped him. That interview could not have happened in Iran. Last month, I could freely translate the harsh slogans that protestors hurled about the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were palpably genuine videos on YouTube from places I recognized, with crowds chanting slogans I knew — or new ones. The slogans were now in fact fiercer, the leaders of the movement less timid, and at least some of the demonstrators clearly angrier.
So I could report, free of government edicts, that the protests were entering a new phase, even as I remembered a cardinal self-imposed rule for any reporting from Iran: There is no way to predict where any movement might be heading, or when it might be stopped.
There is an irony in all this; the years of authoritarian control had educated much of Iran in the need for circumventing restrictions on the Internet, and now I was seeing and hearing the results on my computer and television.
Last month, during and after the funeral of the reformist Grand Ayatollah Hossain Ali Montazeri, one of the demonstrators’ most useful tools was the Bluetooth short-range radio signal that Americans use mainly to link a cellphone to an earpiece, or a printer to a laptop. Long ago, Iranian dissidents discovered that Bluetooth can as easily link cellphones to each other in a crowd.
And that made “Bluetooth” a verb in Iran: a way to turn citizen reportage instantly viral. A protester Bluetooths a video clip to others nearby, and they do the same. Suddenly, if the authorities want to keep the image from escaping the scene, they must confiscate hundreds or thousands of phones and cameras.
The authorities have tried to fight back against such techniques and the Internet itself, but have fallen short. In November they announced that a new police unit, the “cyber-army,” would sweep the Web of dissent. It blocked Twitter feeds for a few hours in December, and an opposition Web site. But other blogs and Web sites mushroomed faster than the government could keep up.
Perhaps the first leader to use the Internet against Iran’s rulers was Ayatollah Montazeri himself, a revolutionary in 1979 who turned critical of the government and was dismissed as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s heir in 1988. In 2000, while under house arrest, he posted on the Internet a banned 600-page memoir revealing that while in power, he had opposed the execution of some 3,000 political detainees.
That changed his public image from an architect of Iran’s theocracy to a human-rights champion, one reason that hundreds of thousands turned out for his funeral on Dec. 21 despite government restrictions, making it a flashpoint between the protesters and the government.
Five days after the funeral, images of members of the pro-government Basij militia disrupting a speech by former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, were posted on the Internet. At the same time, from Canada, I could speak over the phone to people marching to northern Tehran in support of Mr. Khatami. I heard gunshots in the background and, the next day, I spoke to a doctor at a hospital where protesters who had been shot were being treated.
On Dec. 30, the government staged a demonstration to counter those by the opposition. Ayatollah Ahmad Alam Olhoda condemned the reformist protesters as “followers of the path of Satan” and praised the pro-government demonstrators as “followers of the path of God.”
But that exhortation did not stand on its own in my mind. Against it played a video captured three days earlier, on Dec. 27 on Karim-khan Street, in a middle-class area of Tehran that I knew well. The video showed a man shooting blindly into the crowd; I could hear protestors identify him as a member of the Basij.
Then came a cry: “Hamleh!” — “Attack!” And dozens of men and women rushed menacingly toward the armed man, in an amazing turnaround. It seemed, to this reporter, safe to conclude that fear had evaporated among many of those who joined the opposition that day.
It is not clear what happened next, but the government has confirmed the deaths of at least eight protesters in Tehran on Dec. 27. The opposition claims the toll is higher. And, as I write, its voice is still being reported.

Obama's Substantive First Year
Andrew Sullivan
A year ago this week, in even colder temperatures than recently, a young, charismatic, black president-elect gazed across the Mall in Washington DC and gave an Inaugural address that some felt was anti-climactic. It feels like an age ago, and so I went back to see what my first impression was:"From the moment he gave his election night victory speech, Obama has been signaling great caution in the face of immense challenges. The tone is humble... He is not a messiah and does not act or speak like one. He's a traditionalist in many ways."
A year on, that seems like a good call to me. Those on the left who foolishly saw him as a revolutionary are in a major sulk right now. Those on the right who still see him as a leftist ideologue keep railing against the reality in front of their eyes - as if contemplating a small-c conservative black Democratic president is too much for their brains to grasp. To those who hadn't observed or read or listened closely enough to Obama, the first year therefore remains a baffling record. But to my mind, it is almost exactly what I expected and yet much more than I could have hoped for.
Obama is a liberal pragmatist in politics and a traditional conservative in his understanding of the presidency. Once you grasp this, his first year makes much more sense.
He has marshaled conservative constitutional norms - against the radical claims of Bush and Cheney with respect to the presidency - in defense of a liberal restoration of the importance of government. This has made for a frustrating year for those who want instant results - because he has often deferred to Congress; or those who want short-term tactical political coups - because he
prefers strategy to tactics. But for anyone taking the long view, it is hard to see where Obama has really gone wrong.

What mistakes has he made?

His inheritance is one even Republicans concede was the worst since Reagan's: a global economy spiraling into a possible Second Great Depression; a deficit exploding just as long-term debt was poised to enter the red zone; failing banks; an imploding car industry; two flailing wars; a deeply polarized country; a mortgage crisis; a collapse in America's moral standing after the Cheney torture regime; 30 million Americans with no health insurance; crumbling domestic infrastructure; and eight wasted years in the fight to mitigate climate change.

So where did he go wrong? Was the stimulus too big or too small? In retrospect, it looks like a pretty good balance in putting a bottom under the economy without adding too much debt. Was the bank rescue insufficient, as many liberals at the time argued? Nope. If you judge by results, Obama got it right: no nationalization and targeted bailout money led to a stunning turn-around in which many of the major recipients of aid were able to pay it back within a year. Last week,
Obama announced a big new tax on the banks to get back the rest and is preparing a major new bill for financial re-regulation. In other words, he didn't succumb to leftist populism or right-wing ideology. He neither attacked the banks nor let them off the hook. And it worked. The global economy has since stabilized - something that was by no means inevitable.

Did Obama make a mistake by sticking with his campaign pledge to reform and expand health insurance in such a perilous economic time? My view is: no. He crafted a compromise bill that would provide insurance to 30 million people, reduce the deficit, and bring the drug and insurance companies along. Such a result enraged the left, and sent the right into a tizzy of fury - but it will endure as the biggest social reform since Lyndon Johnson if it survives the
Massachusetts special election. Did he err by allowing the Congress to take the lead? Well: the Clintons tried dictating to Congress and look how that turned out. No president has succeeded in this area before, in good times and bad. Obama got his reform in a year of economic crisis. The further you remove yourself from this, the more impressive the achievement is.
His first Supreme Court nominee? Sonia Sotomayor was a smooth, shrewd choice, rewarding Hispanics (who support health reform by massive margins, by the way), and elevating a competent, moderate liberal. His war management? Again, you see the caution of the first Bush, led by Clinton and Gates at State and Defense. Obama kept the second Bush's timetable for Iraq withdrawal, dispatched three Somali pirates, intensified the drone attacks on al Qaeda, saw a huge drop in al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world, a huge rise in pro-American sentiment
around the world, and recrafted an Afghanistan strategy that won both Democratic support and the enthusiasm of General Stanley McChrystal. I retain severe doubts about the future in both Iraq and Afghanistan and suspect both efforts to create stable states there are doomed. But I have learned to reserve judgment in the fog of war and neither of Obama's big decisions here seemed obviously misjudged. They seemed like the least worst option on the table.

More broadly, his quiet demotion of inflammatory rhetoric in the war on Jihadist terrorism in favor of talking softly and taking one Qaeda leader out at a time strikes me as a shrewder way to win this war than Bush's grandstanding. On Iran, he helped the Green Movement immensely by removing the "Great Satan" card from the Khamenei junta's weakening hand. If he can target sanctions precisely at the Revolutionary Guard, he could help some more. But his breakthrough was in understanding - as any conservative should - that this is the Iranians' revolution, not America's. And the job of the West is to get out of the way.

His only obvious failure has been Israel. He misjudged the intransigence of Netanyahu and the power of his support on Capitol Hill. But he will keep persisting in trying to rescue the Jewish state from the perils of its own hubris and paranoia.

And on the social issues, he has stepped right back to help unwind polarization, and allow society to evolve and federalism to work. By merely refusing to use federal agents to police states where medical marijuana has been legalized, he has all but ended cannabis prohibition in large swathes of the country without lifting a finger. Although his term saw marriage equality lose in Maine, it
also saw gay marriage rights come to the US capital, Washington DC, and the debate shift so much that we are now watching a Reaganite conservative, Ted Olson, argue that the California initiative that denied marriage to gays violated the equal protection clause of the federal constitution.

He has also failed to end the cultural and partisan polarization in America. But he has not empowered it. The energy for this polarization has come from the hard left (which is angry at him) and the hard right, which, to a great extent, has gone completely bonkers in the wake of their defeat in 2008. This rabid conservatism - one that seeks more tax cuts as debt spirals, that thinks
Gitmo is an asset in the war on terror, that wants no extension of health insurance, no bailouts, no stimulus - may well ride some populist anger to short term success at the ballot box (watch
Massachusetts' by-election next Tuesday). But under Obama, the Republicans have become whiter, more extreme, more religious, and synonymous in the public mind with polarizing fugures like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn beck. This may be a good ratings strategy for a cable network like Fox News, but it's a highly risky one for a party attempting to win back the center.

And Obama himself? Suffice it to say that his first year revealed something we already knew. He is a very cool customer, a very shrewd strategist, and has also managed to marshall the stagecraft and elegance to inhabit the role of the presidency with more ease and grace than anyone since Reagan. Two years ago, a black president was unimaginable. Now it seems like background noise.
Like all of Obama's revolutions, this was a quiet one. But in the eye of history, my guess is it will be seen as game-changing - for America and the world And finally, from Meet the Press, Mark Halperin and Karen Hughes exchange views on the president's first year.

MR. GREGORY: Mark Halperin, you know, the president himself said recently the American people are right to be deflated about where we are at this point, which is not an admission that he doesn't, you know, that he thinks he's doing a bad job, but the governing is difficult and that the problems are difficult.

MR. HALPERIN: Well, look, go back to the campaign. The country took a risk on Barack Obama, he was untested. And if you look at what Hillary Clinton and John McCain both said about him, they said, "He's just words. He doesn't know how to run the government." I think, ironically, it's just the opposite. He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government, as John said, under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis and kept the world
from going into a depression. He staffed the government with very quality, quality people. He showed he could be commander-in-chief and manage these two difficult wars. What I think, ironically, the problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way. Those are the things I think people thought he would excel at. Those are, I think, are the problems. He's making progress in governance, not necessarily in that bully pulpit leadership.

MS. HUGHES: I think he really misread the country. I mean, 2009 was a year of the greatest anxiety I've ever seen among the American people. People were worried. They felt they were at the whim of these big forces beyond their control--you know, Wall Street and banks failing and businesses that were too big to fail. And rather than calm that anxiety, I worry that President
Obama in being overly ambitious and pushing this massive health care that people worry we can't pay for and, and will have unintended consequences, he actually exacerbated that anxiety. And so I think he fundamentally misread the country. And I, I have to disagree with you, Mark, about rescuing the economy, I think that happened before President Bush left office when they took the action that they did on TARP, and the banks have now repaid much of that money, but that's what stabilized the economy and prevented the collapse of the financial system.

From The Sunday London Times
West turns Africa into gay battlefield
Western evangelists and gay rights groups are stoking Africa’s bitter rows over homosexuality
RW Johnson in Cape Town
The trial of a young male couple charged with unnatural practices and gross indecency after announcing their engagement in Malawi was adjourned last week when one of the accused collapsed in court while enduring jeers from the public gallery.Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, was made to return with a mop to clean up his own vomit, even though he has malaria.He and his boyfriend, Steven Monjeza, 26, have been held in Chichiri prison, Blantyre, for more than a week — in order, the judge says, to protect them from mob violence.Chichiri has a reputation for overcrowding, disease and homosexual rape. The couple say they have been badly beaten and Peter Tatchell, the British gay activist, describes their conditions as appalling.Such scenes will only increase the pressure from western human rights activists and donor countries on Malawi’s government to moderate its draconian anti-gay laws, for which the couple have provided a test case. They face up to 14 years in jail.Following similar donor pressure, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda distanced himself from an anti-homosexuality bill before parliament in Kampala last week. Museveni appealed to MPs to “go slow” on the private member’s bill, which stipulates the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, including homosexual acts by HIV-positive men.Museveni said he had come under pressure from Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in a 45-minute phone call. He was also struck by the fact that a US protest rally had drawn 300,000 people, saying he would have great difficulty attracting such a crowd.The two cases illustrate the way Africa is becoming a battleground over differing attitudes to homosexuality in the West.Both sides accuse the other of being driven by external influences: gay rights campaigners say conservative American evangelists are encouraging homophobia, while the anti-gay side insists that homosexuality is only surfacing openly in Africa because of western encouragement.Some argue that the African rows over homosexuality are really a proxy skirmish in an American cultural dispute, with both evangelicals and gay rights groups in the US pouring in money and support.In Uganda, attention has focused on a visit by three US evangelicals, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, just before the anti-homosexuality bill was introduced. They held seminars for MPs and officials where homosexuality was described as a disease that could be healed, although they have subsequently disclaimed any responsibility for the bill.Lively, the president of Defend the Family International, told Ugandans that legalising homosexuality would mean legalising “the molestation of children and having sex with animals”.Schmierer works with “homosexual recovery groups”, while Brundidge, who claims once to have been gay himself, works with the International Healing Foundation as a “sexual reorientation coach”. He also leads Christian groups to mortuaries where they attempt to raise the dead.Gay activists have placed on the web a video of Lively telling a Ugandan audience that he “knows more than almost anyone else in the world” about homosexuality. He says that the genocide in Rwanda was carried out by gays, that Aids is a just punishment for homosexuality and that foreigners are trying to promote homosexuality in Uganda.
Museveni has warned Ugandan youth that homosexuality is against God’s will and that “European homosexuals are recruiting in Africa”.His minister for ethics, Nsaba Buturo, says homosexuality is a “moral perversion that must not be allowed to spread”.Ugandas churches are themselves strongly homophobic — Archbishop Henry Orombi and Pastor Martin Sempe have been leading a campaign in support of the bill.The Church of Uganda is vehemently against gay clergymen and when retired bishop Christopher Senyonjo preached tolerance towards homosexuals in 2005, Orombi stripped him of his pension.A similar pattern is found in Malawi. George Thindwa, director of the Association of Secular Humanism, who is attempting to help the arrested gay couple, said “the churches are definitely spearheading the anti-gay campaign here”. He said Malawi was often visited by foreign evangelists, though he thought the local clergy needed little encouragement in their homophobia.Pastor Mario Manyozo, of Malawi’s Word of Life Tabernacle Church, says “homosexuality is against God’s creation and is an evil act since gays are possessed with demons”. Similar sentiments are echoed by many churchmen, based on the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.Pastor Joseph Mbeme, of Malawi’s Ambassadors for Christ Church, says the church must pray for homosexuality to be stamped out.Thindwa points out that 83% of Malawians are Christians and another 13% are Muslims — and that Islamic law is even more hostile to gays. In Muslim northern Nigeria the penalty for homosexuality is stoning to death.The claim that western influence is encouraging homosexuality is common. Some wealthy westerners are accused of sex tourism and paedophilia.Peter Atekyereza, a sociology professor at Makerere University in Uganda, said “external influence is definitely behind the spread of homosexuality”. He said international organisations had been giving “scholarships and hand-outs in an attempt to recruit young people to homosexuality”.Many Africans echo President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who calls gays “sexual perverts — lower than dogs or pigs”, and who claims that homosexuality is “unAfrican” — “leave whites to do that,” he has said. There have even been assertions that homosexuality did not exist in Africa until the white man imported it.Last year nine Senegalese gay activists were jailed for eight years after coming out. This followed an international Aids conference attended by 50 foreign activists who stressed the need for gays to be dealt with openly.Uganda expelled the local director of UNAIDS, the United Nations programme on HIV and Aids, for organising a meeting with Ugandan gay activists. The US and Sweden, both big donors, have threatened to cut off aid if the anti-homosexuality bill is not moderated.An anguished editorial in The Uganda Record accused the West of trying to bully Africans into homosexuality. “To Africans this is an almost existential matter. Their very future as societies is at stake.”
Additional reporting: Rosie Kinchen

From Vanity Fair
Vidal Loco
Christopher Hitchens
What has happened to Gore Vidal, the witty, tough-minded subversive of American letters, the 20th century’s only possible answer to Oscar Wilde? After 9/11, the author laments, Vidal’s writings took a graceless lurch toward the crackpot, surpassing even the wilder-eyed efforts of Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, and providing a miserable coda to his brilliant run.

Gore Vidal wrote in 2002 that “Media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind.”
More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious rival.
Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never “off”: his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.

I was fortunate enough to know Gore a bit in those days. The price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included his pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong. One was made aware, too, that he suspected Franklin Roosevelt of playing a dark hand in bringing on Pearl Harbor and still nurtured an admiration in his breast for the dashing Charles Lindbergh, leader of the American isolationist right in the 1930s. But these tics and eccentricities, which I did criticize in print, seemed more or less under control, and meanwhile he kept on saying things one wished one had said oneself. Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.” Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” He once said to me of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.” Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”? In an interview, he told me that his life’s work was “making sentences.” It would have been more acute to say that he made a career out of pronouncing them.
However, if it’s true even to any degree that we were all changed by September 11, 2001, it’s probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant. If you look at his writings from that time, thrown together in a couple of cheap paperbacks entitled Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, you will find the more crass notions of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone being expressed in language that falls some distance short of the Wildean ideal. “Meanwhile, Media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind.” To that “sentence,” abysmal as it is in so many ways, Vidal put his name in November 2002. A small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan. (Not much sign of that, incidentally, not that the luckless Afghans mightn’t welcome it.) For academic authority in this Grassy Knoll enterprise, Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced “the best, most balanced report” on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called “a small but reputable homeland publisher.” Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his “Institute” a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called “Media Monitors Network” in association with “Tree of Life,” whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing. And to think that there was once a time when Gore Vidal could summon Lincoln to the pages of a novel or dispute points of strategy with Henry Cabot Lodge …
It became more and more difficult to speak to Vidal after this (and less fun too), but then I noticed something about his last volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, which brought his life story up to 2006. Though it contained a good ration of abuse directed at Bush and Cheney, it didn’t make even a gesture to the wild-eyed and croaking stuff that Mr. Ahmed had been purveying. This meant one of two things: either Vidal didn’t believe it any longer or he wasn’t prepared to put such sorry, silly, sinister stuff in a volume published by Doubleday, read by his literary and intellectual peers, and dedicated to the late Barbara Epstein. The second interpretation, while slightly contemptible, would be better than nothing and certainly a good deal better than the first.
But I have now just finished reading a long interview conducted by Johann Hari of the London Independent (Hari being a fairly consecrated admirer of his) in which Vidal decides to go slumming again and to indulge the lowest in himself and in his followers. He openly says that the Bush administration was “probably” in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage—broken by “the madhouse”—after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.” Asian subjects never seem to bring out the finest in Vidal: he used to say it was Japan that was dominating the world economy, and that in the face of that other peril “there is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union.” That was in 1986—not perhaps the ideal year to have proposed an embrace of Moscow, and certainly not as good a year as 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt did join forces with the U.S.S.R., against Japan and Nazi Germany, in a war that Vidal never ceases to say was (a) America’s fault and (b) not worth fighting.
Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.” One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second. Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Good grief.
For some years now, the old boy’s stock-in-trade has been that of the last Roman: the stoic eminence who with unclouded eyes foresees the coming end of the noble republic. Such an act doesn’t require a toga, but it does demand a bit of dignity. Vidal’s phrasings sometimes used to have a certain rotundity and extravagance, but now he has descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit. What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?
If Vidal ever reads this, I suppose I know what he will say. Asked about our differences a short while ago at a public meeting in New York, he replied, “You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn’t die. I just kept going on and on and on.” (One report of the event said that this not-so-rapier-like reply had the audience in “stitches”: Vidal in his decline has fans like David Letterman’s, who laugh in all the wrong places lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time.) But his first sentence precisely inverts the truth. Many years ago he wrote to me unprompted—I have the correspondence—and freely offered to nominate me as his living successor, dauphin, or, as the Italians put it, delfino. He very kindly inscribed a number of his own books to me in this way, and I asked him for permission to use his original letter on the jacket of one of mine. I stopped making use of the endorsement after 9/11, as he well knows. I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.
I don’t in the least mind his clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history with me, but I find I do object to the crank-revisionist and denialist history he is now peddling about everything else, as well as to the awful, spiteful, miserable way—“going on and on and on,” indeed—in which he has finished up by doing it. Oscar Wilde was never mean-spirited, and never became an Ancient Mariner, either.
Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

The Tel Aviv Cluster
By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.
Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendents have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.
No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.
Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.
But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.
Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.
As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.
Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.
This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.
But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.
For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.
The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.
During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.