The Newly Uptight
By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
STEPHANIE LaCAVA has glimpsed fashion’s future, and she likes what she sees. “I’ve really been into this kind of sculptured feminine silhouette,” said Ms. LaCava, 24, a features associate at Vogue. To judge by the outfit she wore at the Winter Antiques Show in Manhattan last week — a sedate cream-colored sheath that Letitia Baldrige would have admired — Ms. LaCava has embraced the fashions of the Kennedy years without irony.
“I like the idea of good tailoring and clothes that are not so demonstrative,” she said. “We’re getting beyond the idea of ‘look at me, look at me.’ Fashion today is more about calmness than flash.”
That assertion puts her in fine company. Some of Seventh Avenue’s most influential tastemakers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the tony aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core.
In collections for fall that American designers plan to present starting on Friday, when another Fashion Week begins in New York, many will jettison the baby-doll dresses, the thigh-high skirts and the disco boots of the spirited Warhol years — touchstones of recent seasons — in favor of a meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House years of Jacqueline Kennedy.
“That moment resonates with a lot of people and how they want to live,” said Michael Kors, whose runway show on Wednesday will cater to the fantasy. “There is not a minidress to be found, not a platform shoe in sight. And ‘suit’ is not going to be a dirty word.”
His show and others’ are expected to pay homage to a period, the late ’50s and early ’60s, that was, in retrospect, an interlude of prosperity and stability, one enriched by material comforts as substantial as a Steuben crystal cocktail shaker.
The past — in fashion and elsewhere — seems to call strongly to the present, as the country grows nervous about a possible recession and a diminished role on the world stage, even as Americans seek optimism through their presidential candidates.
“We have certainly reached the time where people want to feel good again, to go back to Camelot and pre-Camelot days,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm. “Boomers especially are harkening back to a day before there were issues,” among them global warming and teenagers overdosing on prescription drugs.
A harbinger of the current romance with midcentury America surfaced on television late last summer with the debut of “Mad Men,” the hit drama on AMC set in the streamlined steel and glass landscape of Madison Avenue in 1960.
Around the same time, hints of an infatuation with the era emerged on the runways. In a collection Miuccia Prada offered for “pre-spring,” which arrived in stores late last year, she trotted out bouffant skirts that cinched the waist and grazed the calves. Frida Giannini of Gucci has reissued the bandeau brassiere, that late-’50s staple, and Dolce & Gabbana is offering poppy-patterned circle skirts.
Marc Jacobs incorporated vintage-style bras and corsets into the designs he paraded in his New York show for spring. Last month Barneys New York displayed highly structured, satin-panel girdles and bras by Fifi Chachnil in its lingerie department.
Some find the moment bracing. “I’m thrilled that Grace Kelly is being talked about in fashion circles,” said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion and retail trends. Mr. Wolfe noted that repeated references to Kelly and her fastidious contemporaries were “absolutely without irony.”
“That’s what makes them so exciting,” he said. In reviving fashion archetypes like the little beige dress, the circle skirt and the princess-seamed coat, “we’re enabling people to recognize quality, and maybe to develop personal taste instead of hiring a stylist.”
Recent photo shoots in fashion magazines have alternately tweaked and reinforced the corseted sensibility of the early ’60s. The current Vogue highlights a pair of sheath dresses Slim Keith might have worn to lunch at La Caravelle. One, a brush-stroke floral print by Mr. Kors, is accessorized with black-and-white polka dot opera gloves. No less recherché is the accompanying copy, which extols the chic of a sheath and the “smart suit.”
The January British Vogue similarly featured circle skirts, peep-toe sandals, gingham bandeau tops and a shrug — the term itself a throwback to the days of kitten-heel pumps and fin-tail sedans.
Just days ago, in a pre-fall collection for Louis Vuitton shown in Paris, Mr. Jacobs endorsed the type of matched wool skirt suit that used to be favored by young matrons in Darien, Conn., a look Babe Paley would have loved. Its immaculate tailoring and restraint may well be echoed in Mr. Jacobs’s New York show on Feb. 8.
Unlike previous portrayals of the late ’50s and early ’60s as a time of unalloyed optimism, fashion’s latest embrace of the past appears to reflect the nation’s darkening mood.
“It is the fashion equivalent of comfort food — I think we need it,” said Sam Shahid, an art director whose clients include Abercrombie & Fitch. “Even in photography, everything we’re seeing has a classicism about it,” he added. “Things are timeless right now, or you want them to be.”
But some style watchers bemoan such conservative attitudes, arguing that they represent a creative retreat. “Fashion is supposed to be about change,” Mr. Cohen said. “Fashion is risk. But as profits increasingly rule the roost, that risk has disappeared.”
The paradox is not lost on him. Once a standard-bearer of the vanguard, “fashion has become the most conservative of all industries,” he said.
Others predicted that designer runways teeming with period references and understated coats and suits for fall will fail to reverse sagging apparel sales.
“Any time the economy becomes tough and we see the stock market bounce around, the natural tendency is to pull back,” said Robert Burke, a New York retail consultant. But for the fashion industry, such a strategy is counterproductive, he said. “Too conservative an attitude is not the best approach,” he said. “People are not going to be interested in paying luxury prices for basics.”
Designers seem intent on returning to old-fashioned civilities just the same. Some view the resurrection of a more formally controlled aesthetic as a rebuke to young Hollywood’s disheveled style. Thakoon Panichgul, who will show a collection of body-skimming dresses with subtle ’60s details, maintains that such looks are timely. “There is an energy about being proper,” he said. “It’s not about wholesomeness, it’s about respectability, about having manners again.”
That concept has an unexpected appeal to the young. “So many young women relish the idea of looking turned out,” Mr. Kors said. “It is the opposite of trying so hard to look undone” — an attitude that, as he argued, women in their 20s are beginning to find stale.
Revisiting the classics is also a way of dispelling the notion that fashion is disposable. Times are changing, Mr. Kors said. “These days it is a badge of honor to wear an outfit more than once.”

Margaret Truman Daniel

President Truman's Daughter and Popular Author, Dies at 83
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER NY TIMES OBIT
Margaret Truman Daniel, the president’s daughter who achieved renown in her own right as a concert singer, radio and television host, and author of best-selling biographies and mysteries, died on Tuesday in Chicago. She was 83 and had lived until recently on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Her death was announced by her oldest son, Clifton Truman Daniel. Mrs. Daniel died after a brief illness in an assisted living center, where she had been on a respirator, according to the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. A library spokeswoman said Mrs. Daniel had been preparing to move from her Park Avenue home to Chicago to live near Mr. Daniel.
Most Americans first knew Margaret Truman as the young woman with blue-green eyes, ash-blond hair and dimpled cheeks who was the only child of the somewhat obscure vice president from Missouri who had ascended to the presidency on the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, as World War II neared its end.
Before long, they were following her career as the aspiring singer whose doting father sprang to her defense with a memorably scorching letter to a Washington music critic who had had the temerity to belittle her talent.
In time there was her headline-making marriage to a dashing newspaperman, Clifton Daniel, who eventually became the managing editor of The New York Times, and the birth of their four sons.
As the decades passed, Americans by the hundreds of thousands knew Mrs. Daniel, too, as Margaret Truman, the author of 32 books, including biographies of both her parents and 23 mystery novels in her popular “Capital Crime Series,” all set in and around Washington.
The confrontation that in retrospect became the climax of Mrs. Daniel’s singing career took place in December 1950. She had been singing professionally since March 16, 1947, when she made her debut as a coloratura with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a radio broadcast that drew an audience estimated at 15 million and, afterward, mixed reviews from the critics.
Later that year, in her first appearance on a concert stage, she sang before a huge audience — estimates range from 15,000 to 20,000 people — at the Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by the 90-piece Hollywood Bowl Symphony, led by her favorite conductor, Eugene Ormandy. In the next few years she sang in more than 30 cities, appeared at Carnegie Hall and signed an exclusive contract with RCA Victor Red Seal Records.
‘You’ll Need a New Nose’
And so she came to Constitution Hall in Washington.
“Because of my father, I was more easily able to obtain important engagements,” she wrote in her book “Letters From Father: The Truman Family’s Personal Correspondence” (Arbor House. 1981). “But I also received more attention by first-string critics and more demanding audiences, who felt that because my father was the president, I had to be not better than average, but better than the best in order to justify my appearing on the stage.”
Mrs. Daniel thought her performance at Constitution Hall to be one of her better ones. But Paul Hume, the music critic of The Washington Post, while praising her personality, wrote that “she cannot sing very well.”
“She is flat a good deal of the time,” Mr. Hume added, concluding that she had no “professional finish.”
Incensed, President Truman dispatched a combative note to Mr. Hume, who released it to the press.
“I have just read your lousy review,” it said, adding, “I have never met you, but if I do, you’ll need a new nose.”
In the ensuing uproar, reporters pressed Mrs. Daniel for her reaction to her father’s letter. “I’m glad to see that chivalry is not dead,” she told them.
In a revealing biography, “Harry S. Truman” (William Morrow, 1973), Mrs. Daniel wrote: “Dad discussed the letter with his aides and was annoyed to find that they all thought it was a mistake. They felt that it damaged his image as president and would only add to his political difficulties. ‘Wait till the mail comes in,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll make you a bet that 80 percent of it is on my side of the argument.’
“A week later, after a staff meeting, Dad ordered everybody to follow him, and they marched to the mail room,” Mrs. Daniel continued. “The clerks had stacked up thousands of ‘Hume’ letters received in piles and made up a chart showing the percentages for and against the president. Slightly over 80 percent favored Dad’s defense of me. Most of the letter writers were mothers who said they understood exactly how Dad felt and would have expected their husbands to defend their daughters the same way.
“ ‘The trouble with you guys is,’ Dad said to the staff as he strode back to work, ‘you just don’t understand human nature.’ ”
Mrs. Daniel adored her father. She inherited his candor, directness and wit, and she credited him with prophesying her literary career. “You write interestingly,” he wrote to her in 1946, adding that perhaps in time “you can be a great storywriter.”
Her biography of her father, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, fulfilled an expectation she had raised in her first book, the autobiography “Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story” (McGraw-Hill, 1956).
“I have no thought of writing history,” she wrote in “Souvenir.” “The best I could hope to write would be a footnote to history. As the only child of the president of a great world power at a cataclysmic time, I will certainly be expected to make some comment on this man who will belong to history — to evoke him in special ways, available only to a daughter.”
Mr. Truman, who left office in 1953, died at 88 on Dec. 26, 1972.
Mrs. Daniel memorialized her mother, who died in 1982, in her 1986 biography, “Bess W. Truman” (Macmillan). In it, Mrs. Daniel recounted how her mother had struggled to adjust to life in the White House after Roosevelt’s death, feeling “a smoldering anger that was tantamount to emotional separation.”
Among Mrs. Daniel’s other nonfiction works were “White House Pets” (McKay, 1969), “Women of Courage” (Morrow, 1976), “First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives” (Random House, 1995) and “The President’s House: 1800 to the Present” (Ballantine, 2004).
Murders Most Foul
Mrs. Daniel’s foray into mysteries was an outgrowth of her years as a devotee of the genre. “I had been working on a nonfiction book — a history of White House children — but lost interest in it,” she said in an interview in the 1990s. “I was with my agent one day, and I told him I had an idea for a mystery: ‘Murder in the White House.’ I don’t know where those words came from.”
“Murder in the White House,” about a corrupt secretary of state found strangled in the family quarters of the executive mansion, was published by Arbor House in 1980. The novel climbed onto the best-seller lists, was sold to the movies, became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection and was bought for $215,000 by Fawcett for paperback publication.
Other books in the series, issued at a rate of one a year, carry titles like “Murder on Capitol Hill,” “Murder in the Supreme Court,” “Murder at the Kennedy Center,” “Murder at the Smithsonian,” “Murder at the National Cathedral” and “Murder at the Watergate.”
“My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington,” Clifton Truman Daniel wrote in his 1995 memoir, “Growing Up With My Grandfather.” “That’s why she writes those murder mysteries: so she can kill them all off, one at a time.”
Margaret Truman was born in Independence on Feb. 17, 1924, to the former Bess Wallace and Harry S. Truman, who was a county judge at the time. In “Souvenir,” written with Margaret Cousins, Mrs. Daniel said, “I was christened Mary Margaret Truman, after my Aunt Mary Jane Truman and Margaret for Grandmother Wallace.” Her father usually called her Marg (with a hard “g”) or Margie (also with a hard “g”).
After Mr. Truman was elected to the Senate in 1934, the family spent half the year in Independence, where Margaret attended public school, and the rest of the year in Washington, where she was a student at Gunston Hall, a boarding school for girls. She won honors in Spanish and English and appeared in the school’s Shakespeare productions.
Margaret Truman was not fond of the White House, which she sometimes called the Great White Jail. “You never feel at home in the White House,” she said in the interview. “Not if you have any sense.”
Her bedroom was on the second floor, overlooking Lafayette Park. One night, on a dare, she slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of the 16th president. Meanwhile, her father went in search of a tall White House butler, planning to have him don a top hat and knock at the door in the middle of the night.
“He couldn’t find him; he’d gone home,” Mrs. Daniel recalled with a laugh. “We didn’t see any ghosts.”
Young Margaret had been drawn to music by a piano-playing father, and she took voice and piano lessons with his encouragement. On her 8th birthday, instead of the electric train she longed for, she was given a baby grand piano.
As she grew older, she intensified her voice training, and when she graduated from secondary school, she was eager to pursue a career in music. But her father insisted on college. She enrolled at George Washington University and graduated in 1946 with a bachelor of arts degree.
No sooner had she graduated than she set out for New York to advance her singing career, taking a leave from it only to campaign for her father in 1948 in his successful race as an underdog against the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey of New York.
In 1951, she embarked on a semi-official European tour, mapped by the State Department.
A Churchill Painting
Overseas, she spoke to King Baudouin in Brussels and danced with Prince Bernhard in The Hague; she dined at Buckingham Palace; she visited the Churchills at their country home, Chartwell; and she accomplished the rare feat of inducing Winston Churchill, a respected amateur artist, to surrender one of his paintings to her.
“At the end of our lunch, Mr. Churchill announced that he had a painting which he wanted me to take back to Mother and Dad, as a present,” Mrs. Daniel wrote in “Harry S. Truman.” “ ‘I’ll be glad to,’ I said, ‘if you put my name on it so that eventually it will be mine.’ ” Churchill harrumphed, she wrote, but complied. The painting, “Marrakech,” depicts one of the gates of that Moroccan city against the backdrop of the Atlas Mountains.
Mrs. Daniel sold the painting last month at Sotheby’s in London for $955,459.
Margaret Truman met Clifton Daniel at the home of friends in New York in the fall of 1955. When she returned to Independence for Christmas and New Year’s, she was besieged by telegrams from him. “I had made the mistake of going out to Independence without giving Clifton my phone number, and it was, of course, unlisted and unavailable, even to one of the top editors of The New York Times,” she wrote.
She and Mr. Daniel, then an assistant to the foreign news editor, were married on April 21, 1956, in Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in Independence, the same church where Mrs. and Mrs. Truman were married on June 28, 1919.
The Daniels lived on the Upper East Side and for some 20 years spent at least part of the summer in Point o’ Woods on Fire Island. When Mr. Truman visited the couple in Manhattan, his brisk early-morning walks were accompanied by a contingent of reporters. His off-the-cuff remarks on these “constitutionals” only added to his image as a down-to-earth leader.
Last May, Mrs. Daniel put her Manhattan apartment on the market for $8 million. She had bought the home, at 830 Park Avenue near East 76th Street, with proceeds from her first book.
Clifton Daniel died at 87 in 2000. In addition to her son Clifton, Mrs. Daniel is survived by two other sons, Harrison Gates Daniel and Thomas Gates Daniel, and five grandchildren. Her son William Wallace Daniel died in 2000 from injuries he suffered when a taxicab struck him on Park Avenue near his mother’s home.
Though her singing career ended long ago, Mrs. Daniel was never far from the public eye. For several years in the 1950s she conducted her own radio program, “Authors in the News.” She and Mike Wallace were co-hosts of a radio show called “Weekday.” In the mid-1960s, she introduced music and dance programs from around the world as the host of the “CBS International Hour.” She also acted in summer stock. And then there were her many books.
“It had been widely prophesied that when my father got out of the White House, my so-called career would fold and the public would lose interest in plain Margaret Truman,” she wrote in “Souvenir” in 1956. “Since I had done everything I could think of not to trade on my father’s position and to stand on my own feet from the beginning, I felt more optimistic than the gossipers.
“I do not believe that hard work goes astray, and I know that I had worked. I was willing to go on working.”

From Times Online

OBAMA WINS SC!

Sarah Baxter: Analysis
Getting bashed about by the Clintons could turn out to the best thing that ever happened to Barack Obama. As he said wryly before the vote in South Carolina: “This is good practice for me so, you know, when I take on these Republicans, I’ll be accustomed to it.”
After trouncing Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina primary by a margin of two to one, the idea that Obama, the 46-year-old senator for Illinois, could win the Democratic party nomination is conceivable again. He did not just win in a state with a large number of African American voters – pause here for heavy emphasis of the racial component from Clinton supporters – he sent the nation’s premier power couple packing from territory they had once owned.
However, you do not have to be a number-cruncher like Mark Penn, the Clintons’ chief strategist and micro-trend expert, to notice that Clinton, 60, still towers over the relatively callow Obama on the question of experience by a margin of 83 per cent to 7 per cent, according to a CNN exit poll. No amount of padding of Obama’s slender curriculum vitae can match the years the Clintons clocked up in the White House together.
This huge gap means that Hillary Clinton still heads into Super Tuesday on February 5, when 22 states vote, as the overwhelming favourite to win the nomination. Add to that her support among white women, blue collar men and Hispanics and it is obvious Obama has his work cut out.
Inspirational rhetoric of the kind deployed his stirring victory speech in South Carolina last night will not be enough to deliver him the nomination. Nor will the well-timed endorsement of Obama by Caroline Kennedy, who writes in today’s New York Times that she recognises in him the qualities of her father, President John F Kennedy, although it could provide him with a new burst of momentum.
The best test of Obama’s mettle is to have him slug it out with the Clintons without resorting to the underhand tactics and smears deployed by Bill Clinton and his aides. After “Big Dog” Bill tore into Obama last week, alienating 68 per cent of South Carolina voters, can it really be said that Hillary is better able to withstand the Republican attack machine?
Obama has already proved that he can out-organise the Clintons in key states and match them dollar-for-dollar in fundraising despite keeping a messy desk, a confession that earned him Hillary’s scorn about his ability to run America’s bureaucracy . He has now shown in South Carolina that he can be as much of a “comeback kid” as either of them, without having to overcome bimbo eruptions or getting teary-eyed at the prospect of defeat.
Having built his campaign from scratch and withstood the pressure the Clintons have put on him, it is beginning to look as though he just might be an effective president on Day One, to borrow a phrase from Hillary Clinton’s lexicon. Perhaps he will have the stamina, creativity and brains to cope with whatever crisis is thrown at him, the question that still lingers over his campaign.
Defeating the mighty Clintons is the only way he can bridge the perceived experience gap. It is a chicken and egg problem – which comes first? – and Super Tuesday is probably closing on him too fast to pull it off. But the pressure is now on Hillary to justify why she would be a much better president than Obama, when she thought she had already won that argument .
In the process of trying to smash Obama, the Clintons have reminded the voters of how polarising they can be. It has given the Republicans hope that they might, after all, be able to get some new mileage out of the Clintons’ rusty scandals of the 1990s and the uncharted role they will play as Mr and Madam President in the White House.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this hard-fought contest, however, is that it is not only Obama who has been strengthened along the way as a candidate. After her initial defeat in Iowa, Hillary Clinton showed that she had some untapped political skills to draw on, such as a remarkable ability to forge a close bond with women voters.
From here on, the character of her campaign is at stake. It is entirely possible she will raise her game again, but if she fights nasty and leans too much on Bill, it will be a sign that she has reached the limit of her political talent, even if she wins.

Ex-WellPoint Exec Accused of Womanizing
TOM MURPHY (FROM HUFFINGTON POST) INDIANAPOLIS

David Colby was one of corporate America's most admired executives before he was abruptly fired last spring for what was vaguely described at the time as misconduct of a "non-business nature." Now details about his personal life are spilling out, and it's clear he was more than just Wall Street's darling.
In a cluster of lawsuits gathered up by The Associated Press, the former chief financial officer of health insurance giant WellPoint Inc. is depicted as a corporate Casanova _ a world-class, love-'em-and-leave-'em sort of guy who romanced dozens of women around the country simultaneously, made them extravagant promises and then went back on his word with all the compassion of a health insurance company denying a claim.
One woman says Colby got her pregnant and harangued her via text message ("ABORT!!") to terminate the pregnancy. He also allegedly gave some of his girlfriends sexually transmitted diseases, and proposed to at least 12 women since 2005.
The allegations are contained in lawsuits filed before and after Colby's departure by three women who say they were ill-used by the businessman.
Colby and his attorneys have refused to comment, though in court papers he has disputed some of the allegations, and one of the lawsuits was thrown out a few months ago by a judge who found insufficient grounds for legal action.
By all accounts, the 54-year-old Colby _ a pudgy, bespectacled figure with salt-and-pepper hair _ charmed attractive women by showering them with compliments and gifts. While at least one of his accusers was a WellPoint underling, it appears he met many of the other women outside of work, via online dating sites, and he has not been accused of workplace sexual harassment.
"I'm not surprised that there are women who would come forward with the same story, because that appears to be Dave's modus operandi," said Mark Hathaway, a lawyer for two of the women who sued. "We've been contacted by a number of women."
His ouster is the latest, and perhaps the most lurid, in a string of cases in which corporate chieftains were bounced for alleged misbehavior outside the boardroom.
Last year, HBO's chief executive was forced out after being charged with throttling his girlfriend. Before that, a Boeing CEO lost his job after admitting to an affair with a female underling.
"There's no question companies are much more sensitive to ethical conduct on the part of their executives," W. Michael Hoffman, executive director for the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., said after Colby's ouster.
It was Colby who helped put together the $16.4 billion deal that created Indianapolis-based WellPoint in 2004. He was named best CFO in managed care for four years in a row by Institutional Investor magazine. Stockholders and Wall Street professionals saw the Columbia University graduate as someone who "gave it to you straight," said stock analyst Thomas Carroll.
"He would give you the good news along with the bad news," Carroll said. "If he said something, you could really hang your hat on it."
After the company passed him over for its CEO last February, it gave Colby thousands of stock options to stick around. But three months later, to Wall Street's surprise, he was out. All WellPoint has ever said was that he was ousted over a nonbusiness violation of the company code of conduct.
Days before Colby was fired, a California woman, Rita DiCarlo, sued him for possession of a $4.4 million house in exclusive Lake Sherwood, Calif., that she said he had promised her. (He has denied making such a promise.)
Exactly what his marital status was at the time of some of the alleged romances is unclear, but as of last month, he was going through a divorce from wife No. 2.
Some of the allegations of his philandering began surfacing in the months after his ouster, but the extent of his alleged womanizing and the details of how he supposedly wooed his girlfriends are only now coming out.
DiCarlo and the other women suing him tell similar stories of aggressive courtship, big promises and broken hearts.
They say that Colby was carrying on with more than 30 women in the last half of 2007 alone and that he would tell them all the time them how beautiful they were or how much he loved them. "You forever!" read one text message, included in court files. "I chose you! Goodnight!" another message read.
Colby would supplement such declarations with gifts such as jewelry or trips, the women say. DiCarlo says in court papers that he gave her $100,000 "to make me feel more secure" three days after she found out he wasn't divorced.
Another lawsuit was filed last month by Elizabeth Cook, a Los Angeles woman who met Colby in 2006 at a function for a California school their children attended.
A single mother with two children, she says in court papers that she dodged his initial advances but relented under a bombardment of calls, texts and e-mails, many of them containing sexually explicit propositions.
She says she soon broke her lease at his urging, with plans to move into his Lake Sherwood home. She says she stopped searching for ways to afford the brain surgery her severely epileptic 6-year-old son needed after Colby promised to pay. Then, she says, she got pregnant, and the text messages abruptly changed tone.
"ABORT!!" Colby allegedly told her in flurry of text messages included in the lawsuit. "Get rid of it. Have an abortion and we can be together."
(Her attorney would not comment on the case. According to court papers, Cook was still pregnant as of Dec. 31.)
Cook accuses Colby of infecting her and other women with STDs, including herpes and chlamydia. She also accuses him of breach of contract over the surgery she says he never paid for. She never moved into the multimillion-dollar home _ which DiCarlo still occupies.
As for DiCarlo, she says that she met Colby through Match.com and that he proposed the first time they met in person. An engagement announcement for the couple ran in The Indianapolis Star in February 2006. But the two never wed. DiCarlo says she discovered he was living a "secret life," with multiple fiancees.
She also accuses him of stopping payment on her health insurance even though she had a kidney removed for donation last fall.
Another woman, Sarah Waugh of Ventura County, Calif., sued Colby last June, accusing him of causing her emotional distress and exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases by sleeping with others.
Waugh says her relationship with Colby started with office shoulder rubs and offers for dinner in 2001 when she was a 22-year-old employee and he a 48-year-old married executive at California's WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Waugh says Colby promised monthly support and private school for the children of his many other girlfriends.
Late last year, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner threw out the lawsuit.
"Although Colby's conduct may be ungallant, it simply does not rise to the level of being `utterly intolerable in a civilized community,'" Klausner wrote, referring to Waugh's claim of emotional distress.
Still, Hollywood producer Larry Garrison thinks there's an audience for the lurid stories. Garrison, president of SilverCreek Entertainment, said he plans to put together a book and movie deal.
At WellPoint, Colby was paid more than $700,000 in salary and received a $1.1 million bonus in 2006. He left with a severance payment of $666,190 and later bought a $4.7 million home in Scottsdale, Ariz. His Indianapolis home, which he shared with a woman who identified herself as Angela Colby, is on the market for $1.6 million.
A former neighbor, Chad Christensen, said the couple were "very nice people, very down to earth and open." He also recalled an awkward moment at a neighborhood picnic last summer, a few months after Colby's romantic entanglements first became public.
A magician who was entertaining children asked the kids to reach into a bag and pull out some scarves. Then he turned to Colby.
"David reaches in and what he pulls out is some panties," Christensen said. "I'm just thinking, `How uncomfortable does he feel right now?'"

Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome
By Rick WeissWashington Post Staff Writer
Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce.
The feat marks the first time that anyone has made such a large strand of hereditary material from off-the-shelf chemical ingredients. Previous efforts had yielded DNA strands less than one-twentieth the size, and those pieces lacked many of the key biological programs that tell a cell how to stay alive.
On the basis of earlier experiments, the researchers believe the new, full-length loop would spontaneously "boot up" inside a cell, just as a downloaded operating system can awaken a computer -- a potentially historic event that would amount to the creation of the first truly artificial life form.
Team members emphasized that they have not done that yet but expressed confidence that they would do so before the end of the year.
"There are barriers . . . but we are confident that they can be overcome," said J. Craig Venter, who led the effort with Daniel G. Gibson and Hamilton O. Smith at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. The work appears in yesterday's online edition of the journal Science.
Venter said the goal is to design novel microbes whose handcrafted genomes endow them with the ability produce useful chemicals, including renewable synthetic fuels that could substitute for oil.
Critics, however, countered that without better oversight of the fledgling field, synthetic biology is more likely to lead to the creation of potent biological weapons and runaway microbes that could wreak environmental havoc.
"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'How long?' but 'How wise?' " said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Montreal-based group that has called for a moratorium on the release and commercialization of synthetic organisms pending further public debate.
Venter's team started by determining the precise order of all 580,076 base pairs, or "letters" of DNA code, inside one of the simplest microbes known to science: Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract. The scientists bought small pieces of DNA, then perfected painstaking methods to stitch them together inside bacteria and yeast cells in exactly the right order.
The final product -- 582,970 base pairs in all -- is a near-exact replica of M. genitalium's genome, with a few intentional differences. The team omitted a DNA snippet that allows the microbe to infect other cells, for example, and added extra DNA as "watermarks" to differentiate their construct from the naturally occurring variety.
"It's the first synthetic bacterial chromosome," Venter said. "Every one of those base pairs started as a chemical in a bottle."
George Church, a Harvard geneticist leading competing efforts to develop novel life forms -- not from scratch but by modifying existing bacteria -- said the work marks something less than the dawn of a new era.
"This is not a 'creating life' paper. It is not a test of vitalism. It's an assembly paper," Church said. "The question is: Is it faster or cheaper than other methods? But they don't lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity there."
Venter said he could not provide an estimate of the project's cost.
Venter and others have already made synthetic genomes for viruses, which are about one-hundredth the size of bacterial genomes. Some activists contend that synthetic bacteria pose more dangers because, unlike viruses, they can replicate on their own and can survive a long time in the environment.
Venter said the work was green-lighted by government offices, the National Academies and an independent ethics review board.

FROM WASHINGTON POST

SUZANNE PLESHETTE 1937-2008
Actress famed as Newhart's TV wife
Bob Thomas, Associated Press
Suzanne Pleshette, the beautiful, husky-voiced film and theater star best known for her role as Bob Newhart's sardonic wife on television's long-running "The Bob Newhart Show," has died, said her attorney Robert Finkelstein. She was 70.
Pleshette, who underwent chemotherapy for lung cancer in 2006, died of respiratory failure Saturday evening at her Los Angeles home, said Finkelstein, who is also a family friend.
"The Bob Newhart Show," a hit throughout its six-year run, starred comedian Newhart as a Chicago psychiatrist surrounded by eccentric patients. Pleshette provided the voice of reason.
Four years after the show ended in 1978, Newhart went on to the equally successful "Newhart" series in which he was the proprietor of a New England inn populated by more eccentrics. When that show ended in 1990, Pleshette reprised her role - from the first show - in one of the most clever final episodes in TV history.
It had Newhart waking up in the bedroom of his "The Bob Newhart Show" home with Pleshette at his side. He went on to tell her of the crazy dream he'd just had of running an inn filled with eccentrics.
"If I'm in Timbuktu, I'll fly home to do that," Pleshette said of her reaction when Newhart told her how he was thinking of ending the show.
Born Jan. 31, 1937, in New York City, Pleshette began her career as a stage actress after attending the city's High School of the Performing Arts and studying at its Neighborhood Playhouse. She was often picked for roles because of her beauty and her throaty voice.
"When I was 4," she told an interviewer in 1994, "I was answering the phone, and (the callers) thought I was my father. So I often got quirky roles because I was never the conventional ingenue."
She met her future husband, Tom Poston, when they appeared together in the 1959 Broadway comedy "The Golden Fleecing," but didn't marry him until more than 40 years later.
Although the two had a brief fling, they went on to marry others. By 2000, both were widowed and they got back together, marrying the following year.
"He was such a wonderful man. He had fun every day of his life," Pleshette said after Poston died in April 2007.
Among her other Broadway roles was replacing Anne Bancroft in "The Miracle Worker," the 1959 drama about Helen Keller, in New York and on the road.
Meanwhile, she had launched her film career with Jerry Lewis in 1958 in "The Geisha Boy." She went on to appear in numerous television shows, including "Have Gun, Will Travel," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Playhouse 90" and "Naked City."
By the early 1960s, Pleshette attracted a teenage following with her youthful roles in such films as "Rome Adventure," "Fate Is the Hunter," "Youngblood Hawke" and "A Distant Trumpet."
She married fellow teen favorite Troy Donahue, her co-star in "Rome Adventure," in 1964, but the union lasted less than a year. She was married to Texas oilman Tom Gallagher from 1968 until his death in 2000.
Pleshette matured in such films as Hitchcock's "The Birds" and the Disney comedies "The Ugly Dachshund," "Blackbeard's Ghost" and "The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin." Over the years, she also had a busy career in TV movies, including playing the title role in 1990's "Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean."
This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

A remarkable Life!

(Bloomberg)Bobby Fischer, the first U.S.-born chess player to become world champion, died yesterday in Iceland of an unspecified illness, the country's national radio said. He was 64, and had lived in secrecy and obscurity for decades.
Born in Chicago and raised in New York, Fischer became the youngest U.S. national champion by age 14 and a grandmaster a year later. In 1972, he defeated Russian champion Boris Spassky in a world championship match in Iceland at the height of the Cold War. The game became known as the ``match of the century'' and his win was a monumental event in a century which saw the sport dominated by Soviet players.
He was the greatest U.S. chess player. ``The gap between Mr. Fischer and his contemporaries was the largest ever,'' fellow grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2004.
Fischer was known for unpredictable tactics at the board, keeping opponents guessing by rarely repeating specific opening strategies during matches, and displaying a genius for attack. He had a reputation for eccentricity and petulance that matched his talents. During the 1972 Spassky match, he constantly demanded changes to tournament conditions and provisions for the players.
Fischer's victory was followed by two decades of withdrawal from competitive play and he lived as a recluse. The first challenger to his title was Russian Anatoly Karpov in 1975. Fischer eventually boycotted the match, and he lost his title without making a single move. It was his last competitive game for almost 20 years.
Second Spassky Match
In 1992, Fischer emerged for a re-match with Spassky in Yugoslavia. He won the match, taking some $3.5 million in prize money. The U.S. government issued a warrant for his arrest for taking part in the competition, claiming he violated United Nations sanctions against the country. By then, a split in chess authorities meant Kasparov was widely recognized as world champion, although Fischer objected.
Spassky was ``very sorry'' to hear of former opponent's death, he told the New York Times from France.
Fischer moved to Iceland in 2005 after publicly criticizing his home country on several occasions and eventually renouncing U.S. citizenship. Though his mother was Jewish, he frequently made anti-Semitic remarks in press interviews.
Fischer was arrested at a Japanese airport in 2004, where he was accused of trying to leave the country on a revoked passport. After considering his deportation to the U.S., the authorities released him to Iceland in 2005 after the country offered him citizenship.
To contact the reporter on this story: Robin Stringer in London at rstringer@bloomberg.net

Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found
Charles Q. ChoiSpecial to SPACE.com
Antimatter, which annihilates matter upon contact, seems to be rare in the universe. Still, for decades, scientists had clues that a vast cloud of antimatter lurked in space, but they did not know where it came from.
The mysterious source of this antimatter has now been discovered — stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes.
While antimatter propulsion systems are so far the stuff of science fiction, antimatter is very real.
What it is
All elementary particles, such as protons and electrons, have antimatter counterparts with the same mass but the opposite charge. For instance, the antimatter opposite of an electron, known as a positron, is positively charged.
When a particle meets its antiparticle, they destroy each other, releasing a burst of energy such as gamma rays. In 1978, gamma ray detectors flown on balloons detected a type of gamma ray emerging from space that is known to be emitted when electrons collide with positrons — meaning there was antimatter in space.
"It was quite a surprise back then to discover part of the universe was made of antimatter," researcher Gerry Skinner, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.
These gamma rays apparently came from a cloud of antimatter roughly 10,000 light-years across surrounding our galaxy's core. This giant cloud shines brightly with gamma rays, with about the energy of 10,000 suns.
What exactly generated the antimatter was a mystery for the following decades. Suspects have included everything from exploding stars to dark matter.
Now, an international research team looking over four years of data from the European Space Agency's International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellite has pinpointed the apparent culprits. Their new findings suggest these positrons originate mainly from stars getting devoured by black holes and neutron stars.
As a black hole or neutron star destroys a star, tremendous amounts of radiation are released. Just as electrons and positrons emit the tell-tale gamma rays upon annihilation, so too can gamma rays combine to form electrons and positrons, providing the mechanism for the creation of the antimatter cloud, scientists think.
Billions and billions
The researchers calculate that a relatively ordinary star getting torn apart by a black hole or neutron star orbiting around it — a so-called "low mass X-ray binary" — could spew on the order of one hundred thousand billion billion billion billion positrons (a 1 followed by 41 zeroes) per second. These could account for a great deal of the antimatter that scientists have inferred, reducing or potentially eliminating the need for exotic explanations such as ones involving dark matter.
"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," said researcher Georg Weidenspointner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.
Now that they have witnessed the death of antimatter, the scientists hope to see its birth.
"It would be interesting if black holes produced more matter than neutron stars, or vice versa, although it's too early to say one way or the other right now," Skinner explained. "It can be surprisingly hard to tell the difference between an X-ray binaries that hold black holes and neutron stars."
Copyright © 2008 SPACE.com.

fighting words
The Case Against Hillary Clinton
Why on earth would we choose to put the Clinton family drama at the center of our politics again.By Christopher Hitchens

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy "experience"—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim "worked" well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.
Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: "It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add."
Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her "greatness" (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put herself eternally in his debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?" in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton "rapid response" team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's "issues."
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred "experience" on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main "experience" involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. But there was another "experience," this time a collaborative one, that is even more significant.
During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and "experience" to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband's help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Something Happening Here
Brian Williams NBC (Huffington Post)
On Monday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, I called my Executive Producer in New York and said that we needed to pencil in more time than we had allotted for Andrea Mitchell's report on the Clinton Campaign. It needed to be enlarged to include a 48 second soundbite of Hillary Clinton at a roundtable, answering a question about the campaign. She was tired, and she was emotional. She did what any of us would have, and have done at times: she briefly lost control of her emotions. At that very moment, while he was miles away and unaware of it, Barack Obama started to lose control of what we'd been told was a commanding lead in New Hampshire.
I am a son of New England — my father is from Framingham, Mass., my parents met in college in Maine, and over a lifetime of immersion I came to know the psyche well. The core of the older, native New Hampshire population (albeit in a State that is rapidly changing) is still made up of the sons and daughters of the original Puritans. They take civic responsibility seriously, they take care of those who need it and they take pride in "process". In modern political terms, they generally don't like negativity, they reward the downtrodden, they earnestly deliberate over their choice of candidate and they venerate the sturdy among us. In short, they are good people to have in your corner. Hillary Clinton was bloodied in New Hampshire. The people of New Hampshire saw it and didn't like it. They saw assumptions forming and didn't like them. Some felt they were being told what to think: the race was decided, Hillary was desperate and inauthentic. Worst of all — and this was made very clear to me by more than one person: when some in the media quietly doubted that Hillary Clinton's emotions at that roundtable were real (there was quiet snickering about an "acting job" born of an urgent need to seem normal) it was proof to them that cynicism had taken hold of the politics/media realm — and they simply refused to believe that.
Had Bill Clinton not famously coined the title "The Comeback Kid" for himself, his wife would have rightfully claimed it for herself in New Hampshire. That the same State rewarded these two imperfect politicians, in the same way, years apart, is remarkable.
Also remarkable was the apparent transformation of the candidate. The Senator who failed to gain the full support of women voters in Iowa was saved by them in New Hampshire. The woman who gave a victory speech after losing in Iowa — admitted in her New Hampshire victory speech that what she'd really lost...was her own voice.
There will be numerous deconstructions over the days to come. Theories about how African American candidates for office have confounded pollsters (see: Bradley, Wilder, Gant, Jackson) will receive a thorough airing, and deservedly so. We in the media will beat ourselves bloody (and deservedly so) for reaching conclusions before the voters have spoken. A further prediction? Give us a few weeks — we will promptly forget the lessons of this debacle in polling, predictions and primary politics. We will all live to screw up another day, though our performance in New Hampshire will be hard to beat.
It should be noted that virtually everyone got it wrong. The only point of agreement among all the competing campaigns in New Hampshire was that Barack Obama was headed for a double-digit victory, as they told anyone who'd listen. I have an email from a Clinton fundraiser who denounced Hillary as a lost cause and threw his support to Obama...while the polls were still open on Tuesday. A veteran Clinton loyalist spoke of the campaign in New Hampshire in the past tense on the morning of the election, saying the Senator from New York had run smack into "an ideal...a movement," called Barack Obama. There was no defeating an ideal, said this completely defeated politico. Not this year, not in New Hampshire.
In his beautiful, soaring concession speech, Obama mentioned the town of Lebanon for a reason, and listening to him, I knew why. I was with him in Lebanon the day before -- and what we saw there was something of a defining moment in the campaign — it surprised him, his staff members, the Secret Service on board the campaign bus...even the bus driver. We turned the corner toward the event and saw hundreds of people lined up through the streets of the town just to see him, to feel his aura and to later say that they'd done it — they'd been there. There were hundreds more than the venue could hold, and they stood there anyway, and kept coming. Obama, overwhelmed by the overflow crowd, insisted on an outdoor speech before his indoor speech. This much is important, and should be said: any journalist covering any candidate that day, in that town, would have come away as I did after seeing those people, saying something akin to the old song lyric, "something's happening here." A colleague of mine contends Obama got caught up in the history he was making. I don't think that's quite fair. The candidate didn't change his message as much as Iowa changed the way we heard it.
That day, I saw people embrace Barack Obama the way people embrace loved ones returning from foreign battlefields. I saw people with small children, brought along simply so their parents could years later tell them, to the point of predictable annoyance, "you were there...". Losing in New Hampshire may well make Barack Obama a better candidate. While it's the kind of thing that is always said at times like these by those of us whose names have never appeared on a ballot, I think it might just be true in this case.
On the eve of the primary, I attended the last big rally of the Clinton New Hampshire campaign. While large and boisterous enough to distract attention from the decidedly inelegant venue (the indoor tennis courts at the Executive Health and Fitness Center in the shadow of the Manchester airport control tower) it was packed and it was emotional. Our producer spotted tears in Chelsea's eyes. Campaign workers were trying to seem upbeat. A British journalist called the press credential hanging around his neck "a ticket to the last supper." Senator Clinton gave her stump speech, only infused with more emotion: shades of anger, melancholy, frustration and wistfulness. She made a forceful and direct appeal for support, at one point aimed specifically at the women in the audience. Her husband nodded and clapped supportively behind her and shook every hand in the rope line afterwards. I stood several feet away, watching the familiar ballet of incoming hands and thinking of the two years I spent covering his Presidency, and how much has changed since then. He's still in the family retail business, where the basic transaction remains the same.
New Hampshire voters, masters of retail politics and educated consumers all, saw what their Iowa counterparts had done days earlier, and chose not to follow the same path. They instead gave their approval to a former POW, and a former First Lady. Poles apart in many ways, now joined together in the history of this strange process.
As politicians, John McCain and Hillary Clinton have a lot of mutual respect for each other. They have traveled to Iraq together during a dangerous time in the conflict, and they lived to tell about it. Now they can say the same thing about New Hampshire.

FROM Slate
There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race.By Christopher Hitchens
To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an aging and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been "our first black president."
Or perhaps not. Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.
One can't exactly say that Sen. Obama himself panders to questions of skin color. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race—Alan Keyes—accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves! Obama's decision to be light-hearted—and perhaps light-skinned—about this was a milestone in itself. But are we not in danger of emulating Keyes' insane mistake every time we bang on about the senator's pigmentation? If you wanted a "black" president or vice president so much, you could long ago have turned out en masse for Angela Davis—also the first woman to be on a national ticket—or for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. So, why didn't you? Could it have been the politics?
Last week happened to be the week that the nation of Kenya—birthplace of Obama's father—was convulsed by a political war that contained ghastly overtones of violent and sadistic tribalism. It would sound as absurd to a Kenyan to hear praise for a black candidate as it would sound to most of my European readers to hear a recommendation of a "great white hope." A white visitor to Kenya might not be able to tell a Kikuyu from a Luo at a glance, but a Kenyan would have no such difficulty. The time is pretty much past, in our country, when a Polish-American would not vote for a candidate with a German name or when Sharks and Jets were at daggers drawn, but this is all because (to borrow from Ernest Renan's definition of a nation) people agreed to forget a lot of things as well as to remember a number of things. So, which are we doing presently?
Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its Web site. Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant"—a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—this bizarre outfit describes itself as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" and speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric." Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch—the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo—which announces cheerily that "Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money." Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Gov. Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes, and the site offers a volume called Bad Girls of the Bible: Exploring Women of Questionable Virtue, which I have added to my cart, but nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.
All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character.
The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. The sickly canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. has led to a crude rewriting of history that obliterates the great black and white secularists—Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther—who actually organized the March on Washington. It has also allowed a free pass to any demagogue who can manage to get the word reverend in front of his name. The white voters who subconsciously make the allowance that black folks sure love to hear their preachers are not only patronizing their black brothers and sisters but also helping to empower white ministers or deacons who make the same pitch, from Jimmy Carter to Mike Huckabee. The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, "uplift," and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

Christopher Hitchens Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

From The Sunday Times
Obama emerges as a liberal Reagan who can reunite America
Andrew Sullivan
The historical analogies for the phenomenon that is Barack Obama have already stretched credibility. For a while pundits likened him to the effete loser Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic party’s 1950s version of Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell, the greatest prime minister we never had.
But Obama doesn’t seem like such an airhead after his gritty, crushing defeat of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. I long thought he’d win � but I never thought it would be by eight points, or that he’d push Clinton into third place.
So now the favourite analogy is JFK: the young, hopeful rhetorician urging a New Frontier after two terms of conservatism. But that doesn’t work either: JFK won by out-hawking Nixon in 1960, and Obama is a clear antiIraq war candidate.
Bobby Kennedy is more apposite: a mix of inner steel and an evolving moral candidacy. Just as a vote for RFK in 1968 was seen by many as a form of collective self-absolution for Vietnam, so Obama resonates among many Americans who do not recognise what their country has become these past few years.
The analogy that worries Republicans the most is a more recent one. Could Obama be a potential liberal version of Ronald Reagan? Could he do for the Democrats what Reagan did for the Republicans a quarter century ago?
It’s increasingly possible. Reagan was the cutting edge of the last realignment in American politics. With a good-natured, civil appeal to Democrats who felt abandoned by their own party under Jimmy Carter, Reagan revolutionised the reach of his own party.
He didn’t aim for a mere plurality, as Bill Clinton did. Nor did he try for a polarising 51% strategy, as George W Bush has done. He ran as a national candidate, in search of a national mandate, a proud Republican who nonetheless wanted Democrats to vote for him.
He came out of a period in which Americans had become sickened by the incompetence of their own government. Reagan shocked America’s elites by pivoting that discontent into a victory in 1980. And by his second term, he won 49 out of 50 states.
You can see the same potential in Obama. What has long been remarkable to me is how this liberal politician fails to alienate conservatives. In fact, many like him a great deal. His calm and reasoned demeanour, his crisp style, his refusal to engage in racial identity politics: these appeal to disaffected Republicans.
He is particularly attractive to those on the American right who feel betrayed by the Bush administration’s version of conservatism, just as many Democrats felt betrayed by Jimmy Carter’s liberalism.
These voters � nonevangelical, fiscally and militarily prudent, socially tolerant � do not feel at home in the angry, Southern, antiimmigrant Republican party of the past few years.
Almost a quarter of those voting in the Democratic caucus last Thursday night were Republicans or independents. In both categories, Obama beat Clinton by more than two to one.
In New Hampshire on Tuesday, independents are even more prevalent and may well represent 40% of the Democratic vote. (In both Iowa and New Hampshire, you can change your party registration on the day of the vote.)
Reagan won a national victory on the strength of “Reagan Democrats”. Obama could win with “Obama Republicans”. That’s remarkable in itself. When you realise he’s also a liberal urban black man whose middle name is Hussein, it’s gob-smacking.
Put these disaffected Republicans together with a spectrum of minorities and a black vote potentially greater than at any time in history, and you begin to see what Obama offers his own party.
The other strikingly Reaganite aspect to Obama is his appeal to the younger generation. People forget that the oldest president was extremely popular among the under30s.
Obama has an almost cult-like standing on college campuses. The youth vote is always touted every four years but never materialises on polling day.
Last Thursday, it came out in force. In Iowa, where the over65 cohort usually outnumbers the under30s by five to one, the old and the young were evenly divided. Among the under30s, Obama beat Clinton by 57% to 11%.
This generation, moreover, is a huge one: the Boomer Echo. Between Bush’s pushing them and Obama pulling them, the Democrats’ advantage could define a generation’s politics. And that’s increasingly Obama’s ambition. He has kept his ego in check, but he is clearly aiming not for a small win, but for a major mandate. He isn’t a Clinton in this respect or even a Bush. He is a Reagan, a Thatcher � of the left.
Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, is being discounted as nothing like this significant. But it is, I’d say, very foolish to underestimate him as well. In the wreckage of the postBush Republican party, Huckabee is the most talented natural politician. And he has taken Bushism to its logical conclusion.
He argues � proudly and simply � for a politics based overwhelmingly on religion. He refuses to apologise for previous statements that he wants to reclaim America for Christ or that people with Aids should be quarantined.
In Iowa, he won the born-again vote and the vote of Bush fans. He’s the kind of preacher who lets you know he likes a beer and knows his rock’n’roll. It works. One slogan seemed as powerful as it is simple: “I Like Mike”. And so many do.
And, unlike Bush, Huckabee has combined a belief in the paternalist state with a hostility to Wall Street. He is a potential builder of a future Republicanism that is as socially conservative as it is economically populist: extremely hostile to illegal immigrants, gay couples and abortion, but just as angry at big corporations, free trade and the globalised gilded elites.
In making the case against Mitt Romney � a multi-millionaire former business consultant � Huckabee argued that it was a choice between the bloke you work with and the man who sacks you.
The simmering class resentment, which is just beneath the surface, clearly motivates his supporters. When they were attacked by Washington Republicans as know-nothings, they responded by surging to the polls. They can smell the condescension. And it angers them.
It may be that Huckabee, as the conventional wisdom has it, cannot win the nomination. Underfunded, underorganised and a foreign policy embarrassment, he is unlikely to win New Hampshire against that state’s favourite old codger, John McCain, or slick neighbouring former governor of Massachusetts, Romney.
But South Carolina, brimming with evangelicals, is another matter. And talent counts. Huckabee’s underrated skills have already begun to bring in more established advisers such as former Reagan aide Ed Rollins (now Huckabee’s campaign manager) and Clinton’s scruple-free guru, Dick Morris.
Bill Clinton himself is a fan. Even if Huckabee falters this time around, he represents a viable future for the Republicans, even if it is a very different one from the past. Huckabee represents the consolidation of the Republicans as a Southern, religious, working-class party.
If he wins the nomination, he could push a lot of economic conservatives into the Democratic camp, lose badly and yet reshape his party: a reverse Goldwater, turning Republicanism into something more like religious populism than Yankee conservatism.
Am I extrapolating too much? There is, of course, a natural tendency to overestimate the import of a single caucus. But so far, the underestimaters have been the ones who have got this election wrong. Washington’s elites assumed a match between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani this year. But they didn’t see the turmoil remaking America, and the deep hunger for a new direction. As unrest grows in Pakistan, as the American economy looks headed for a nasty downturn, I see no reason to think that the forces behind Obama and Huckabee will abate soon.
Yes, history happens. And Americans, exhausted from fear and war and economic insecurity, have just informed us that they can shape it again. I wouldn’t bet against them. Simon Jenkins is away

From Newsday
Transcript of Barack Obama's Iowa victory speech
January 4, 2008
DES MOINES, Iowa
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Thank you, Iowa.You know, they said this day would never come.They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days. You have done what America can do in this new year, 2008.In lines that stretched around schools and churches, in small towns and in big cities, you came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that's consumed Washington.To end the political strategy that's been all about division, and instead make it about addition. To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states.Because that's how we'll win in November, and that's how we'll finally meet the challenges that we face as a nation.We are choosing hope over fear.We're choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America.You said the time has come to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don't own this government -- we do. And we are here to take it back.The time has come for a president who will be honest about the choices and the challenges we face, who will listen to you and learn from you, even when we disagree, who won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know.And in New Hampshire, if you give me the same chance that Iowa did tonight, I will be that president for America.I'll be a president who finally makes health care affordable and available to every single American, the same way I expanded health care in Illinois, by...... by bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done. I'll be a president who ends the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and put a middle-class tax cut into the pockets of working Americans who deserve it.I'll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.And I'll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home...... who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century.Common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease.Tonight, we are one step closer to that vision of America because of what you did here in Iowa.And so I'd especially like to thank the organizers and the precinct captains, the volunteers and the staff who made this all possible.And while I'm at it on thank yous, I think it makes sense for me to thank the love of my life, the rock of the Obama family, the closer on the campaign trail.Give it up for Michelle Obama.I know you didn't do this for me. You did this -- you did this because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas -- that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.I know this. I know this because while I may be standing here tonight, I'll never forget that my journey began on the streets of Chicago doing what so many of you have done for this campaign and all the campaigns here in Iowa, organizing and working and fighting to make people's lives just a little bit better.I know how hard it is. It comes with little sleep, little pay and a lot of sacrifice. There are days of disappointment. But sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this; a night that, years from now, when we've made the changes we believe in, when more families can afford to see a doctor, when our children -- when Malia and Sasha and your children inherit a planet that's a little cleaner and safer, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united, you'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long; when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause; when we finally gave Americans who have never participated in politics a reason to stand up and to do so.This was the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism, the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment.Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.Hope is what I saw in the eyes of the young woman in Cedar Rapids who works the night shift after a full day of college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill. A young woman who still believes that this country will give her the chance to live out her dreams.Hope is what I heard in the voice of the New Hampshire woman who told me that she hasn't been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq. Who still goes to bed each night praying for his safe return.Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause.Hope -- hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.That is what we started here in Iowa and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond.The same message we had when we were up and when we were down; the one that can save this country, brick by brick, block by block, (inaudible) that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.Because we are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again.Thank you, Iowa.
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

High-rises are a sign of the times in changing San Francisco
Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
The new year marks the beginning of something big in San Francisco. One Rincon Hill, the tallest residential tower west of the Mississippi, opens this year. So does a luxury hotel at the once-bleak corner of Fifth and Howard streets. A condo development at Seventh and Mission, only a block from Skid Row, is described in the newspaper as trendy.
Wine bars and fine restaurants crop up in Dogpatch, a district no one had ever heard of a few years ago. They are building new neighborhoods at Mission Bay and talking about them on Treasure Island.
San Francisco is changing so rapidly some say the San Franciscans of 2007 won't recognize the place in five years.
It's part of a trend that began after the city picked itself up after the dot-com bust of a few years ago. There are plans for more condos, bigger high-rises, so many fine restaurants that more San Franciscans will recognize the name of a celebrity chef than the quarterback of the 49ers.
"Some people say change is bad," said Meagan Levitan, a real estate broker who is also on the Recreation and Park Commission. "I want my old city, but at the same time, change is exciting."
But change is also sobering - some experts worry that a new San Francisco of high-rises and fine living will be a city of the very rich and very poor, a boutique city and not a real one.
"It will be economically less diverse and to some extent less racially and ethnically diverse," said Richard DeLeon, emeritus professor of political science at San Francisco State University. DeLeon literally wrote the book on San Francisco's politics with his "Left Coast City," a study of the rise of the city's cutting-edge leftist progressive movements.
DeLeon notes the sharp decline in San Francisco's African American population, which has dropped from 16 percent of the residents to 6 percent in 30 years.
He said the city may also lose much of its Latino population, driven out by high home prices. It could become a city with fewer children and fewer families - a city without a middle class.
If present trends continue, DeLeon thinks San Francisco might become a city that is white and Asian, with marked declines in the number of black and Latino residents.
The changes are driven by economics and politics, he said. "The issue is who gets to live in San Francisco and who can afford to live in San Francisco.
"Who is going to sweep the streets and serve the lattes, and where are they going to live?"
What the future will look like is an old debate in San Francisco, which featured a citizens revolt against freeways in the 1960s, and worries about tall buildings and arguments about "Manhattanization" in the '70s.
But the high-rises came anyway in the pro-business '80s, and now a new wave of buildings and development has accelerated the trends.
"Living in the city, you can feel all that," said Corey Cook, assistant professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.
When San Francisco lost its industrial base a generation ago, it became a headquarters city, a city of office workers and managers. When the economy shifted again, Cook said, San Francisco began to pursue trends - stem cell research, biotechnology, green technology.
"We keep looking for the next big thing, riding at the peak of the big booms," he said. It is almost as if the city were riding the economy like a surfer.
The downside to this, Cook thinks, is in shifting demographics. He sees San Francisco attracting 25-year-olds, "fresh out of MIT, who want to come to San Francisco because it is the coolest place in the world."
It could become a city of the young - and you can see that trend now in the clubs, in the hip restaurants. Ten years later, this scenario goes, these San Franciscans want to raise families, but the housing stock now going up is one- and two-bedroom condos, and the older houses, their prices driven up by scarcity, are unaffordable. Even now, even in a mortgage crisis, single-family homes in desirable neighborhoods like Noe Valley sell for well over $1 million.
So, Cook said, these San Franciscans move to the suburbs. It's an old story in cities: It happenedin North Beach, the Sunset, the Richmond and other places.
But in the new scenario, after years go by and their family is grown, these ex-San Franciscans move back - a movement planners call "new urbanism."
But now there are places for them like One Rincon Hill, the Millennium Towers and Soma Grand, which advertises itself as "a boutique condominium development."
The new, older San Franciscans who live in them support the opera, the theater, the symphony. All three were booming in 2007, a year in which the San Francisco Opera even showed a profit.
In this scenario, not long in the future, what has developed is a city of the young and the old. "If this happens," Corey said, "you definitely have a different kind of a city."
Housing and change run together. Where the city needs affordable housing, it is getting condos, though some of the building fees the condo projects generate are earmarked for affordable housing. One Rincon, which cost $290 million to build, generated $20 million toward low-cost housing.
DeLeon thinks the next frontier is Bayview-Hunters Point (where, he said, African Americans are cashing in by selling their homes and moving out of San Francisco), the Mission, the areas around UCSF, and Candlestick Point around a proposed football stadium complex.
The rising tide does not lift all boats; there are also pockets of extreme poverty.
Jim Ross is a political consultant, with offices at 20th and Shotwell streets in the Inner Mission. At one time, the neighborhood was where low-cost housing and an industrial area met. It was always a bit rough around the corners, but a few years ago the area slid over the edge.
"If you came to this area not long ago, you'd be looking for hookers and heroin," Ross said. "Now there's high-end condos on every corner. There's latte, and a fancy wine bar at 16th street and South Van Ness Avenue."
The housing in the neighborhood, he said, is one- and two-bedroom condos with parking over retail shops.
"It's not the kind of housing to raise a family in," he said. "If you had kids, would you want to live in a two-bedroom condo?"
The solution, some say, is political, and that could change, too. San Francisco has a moderate mayor in Gavin Newsom, but the Board of Supervisors has a so-called progressive majority that leans left. But the progressives have allowed much of the new high-rise and condo development. On the one hand, the tall buildings have a small footprint; they do not sprawl all over the streets. On the other, they have changed the city skyline.
The shape of the board could change with elections in November, when a number of seats are up for grabs.
For one thing, said political consultant David Latterman, San Francisco might have three Asian Americans on the Board of Supervisors instead of one. For another, he thinks it likely that a Latino will replace Supervisor Tom Ammiano in District Nine, which represents the Mission and Bernal Heights.
USF's Cook thinks the new board could have a decisive influence. "The city has a monopoly on land use," he said. "The city is actually in a position to make real decisions on how it looks."
Latterman is not so sure. "A lot depends on the business cycles, not the political cycles," he said. "A lot depends on jobs, on how good the Muni is, and how well BART works moving people in and out. The forces are economic and not political.
"It's bigger than a few tin-pot supervisors," he said. "It's like a river. The supervisors can dip their hands into the river, but they can't control the current."
Latterman is not so sure a new board will make that much of a difference. "Where's the voice for real change?" he asks. "Who's going to step up and go beyond their identity base and represent the whole city?"
No matter who lives here, it is clear that the new San Francisco will have a different look.
"I think the waterfront will get more and more beautiful," said Anne Halsted, vice chair of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, who has been active in political issues for years.
She thinks the trend toward high-rises and condos will level off. "We won't allow big buildings on the waterfront," she said, and the city will be able to control the new skyline.
San Francisco won't change that much, because, she said, "San Franciscans love their city too much" to see it damaged.
"It's a great city," she said, "one of the best in the world."
San Francisco does have one unique quality: It's always changing, but it opposes change. "We think we are progressive and open-minded," said Levitan, who was born and raised in the city, "but we say, 'Don't change a thing.' "
E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle