William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech

July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention: I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities; but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty--the cause of humanity. ....
Never before in the history of this country has there been witnessed such a contest as that through which we have just passed. Never before in the history of American politics has a great issue been fought out as this issue has been, by the voters of a great party. ....
With a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the hermit, our silver Democrats went forth from victory unto victory until they are now assembled, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already rendered by the plain people of this country. In this contest brother has been arrayed against brother, father against son. the warmest ties of love, acquaintance and association have been disregarded; old leaders have been cast aside when they have refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to the cause of truth. Thus has the contest been waged, and we have assembled here under as binding and solemn instructions as were ever imposed upon representatives of the people. ....
The gentleman who preceded me (ex-Governor Russell) spoke of the State of Massachusetts; let me assure him that not one present in all this convention entertains the least hostility to the people of the State of Massachusetts, but we stand here representing people who are the equals, before the law, of the greatest citizens in the State of Massachusetts. When you [turning to the gold delegates] come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course.
We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day--who begins in the spring and toils all summer--and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak for this broader class of business men.
Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose--the pioneers away out there [pointing to the West], who rear their children near to Nature's heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds--out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead--these people, we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.
The gentleman from Wisconsin [Senator Vilas] has said that he fears a Robespierre. My friends, in this land of the free you need not fear that a tyrant will spring up from among the people. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth.
They tell us that this platform was made to catch votes. We reply to them that changing conditions make new issues; that the principles upon which Democracy rests are as everlasting as the hills, but that they must be applied to new conditions as they arise. Conditions have arisen, and we are here to meet those conditions. They tell us that the income tax ought not to be brought in here; that it is a new idea. They criticize us for our criticism of the Supreme Court of the United States. My friends, we have not criticized; we have simply called attention to what you already know. If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the court. There you will find criticisms. They say that we passed an unconstitutional law; we deny it. The income tax law was not unconstitutional when it was passed; it was not unconstitutional when it went before the Supreme Court for the first time; it did not become unconstitutional until one of the judges changed his mind, and we cannot be expected to know when a judge will change his mind. The income tax is just. It simply intends to put the burdens of government justly upon the backs of the people. I am in favor of an income tax. When I find a man who is not willing to bear his share of the burdens of the government which protects him, I find a man who is unworthy to enjoy the blessings of a government like ours.
They say that we are opposing national bank currency; it is true. If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find he said that, in searching history, he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson; that was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracy of Cataline and saved Rome. Benton said that Cicero only did for Rome what Jackson did for us when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America. We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe that it is a part of sovereignty, and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than we could afford to delegate to private individuals the power to make penal statutes or levy taxes. Mr. Jefferson, who was once regarded as good Democratic authority, seems to have differed in opinion from the gentleman who has addressed us on the part of the minority. Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank, and that the Government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of government, and that the banks ought to go out of the governing business.
They complain about the plank which declares against life tenure in office. They have tried to strain it to mean that which it does not mean. What we oppose by that plank is the life tenure which is being built up in Washington, and which excludes from participation in official benefits the humbler members of society.
Let me call your attention to two or three important things. The gentleman from New York says that he will propose an amendment to the platform providing that the proposed change in our monetary system shall not affect contracts already made. Let me remind you that there is no intention of affecting those contracts which according to present laws are made payable in gold; but if he means to say that we cannot change our monetary system without protecting those who have loaned money before the change was made, I desire to ask him where, in law or in morals, he can find justification for not protecting the debtors when the act of 1873 was passed, if he now insists that we must protect the creditors.
He says he will also propose an amendment which will provide for the suspension of free coinage if we fail to maintain the parity within a year. We reply that when we advocate a policy which we believe will be successful, we are not compelled to raise a doubt as to our own sincerity by suggesting what we shall do if we fail. I ask him, if he would apply his logic to us, why he does not apply it to himself. He says he wants this country to try to secure an international agreement. Why does he not tell us what he is going to do if he fails to secure an international agreement? There is more reason for him to do that than there is for us to provide against the failure to maintain the parity. Our opponents have tried for twenty years to secure an international agreement, and those are waiting for it most patiently who do not want it at all.
And now, my friends, let me come to the paramount issue. If they ask us why it is that we say more on the money question than we say upon the tariff question, I reply that, if protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands. If they ask us why we do not embody in our platform all the things that we believe in, we reply that when we have restored the money of the Constitution all other necessary reforms will be possible; but that until this is done there is no other reform that can be accomplished.
Why is it that within three months such a change has come over the country? Three months ago, when it was confidently asserted that those who believe in the gold standard would frame our platform and nominate our candidates, even the advocates of the gold standard did not think that we could elect a president. And they had good reason for their doubt, because there is scarcely a State here today asking for the gold standard which is not in the absolute control of the Republican party. But note the change. Mr. McKinley was nominated at St. Louis upon a platform which declared for the maintenance of the gold standard until it can be changed into bimetallism by international agreement. Mr. McKinley was the most popular man among the Republicans, and three months ago everybody in the Republican party prophesied his election. How is it today? Why, the man who was once pleased to think that he looked like Napoleon--that man shudders today when he remembers that he was nominated on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. Not only that, but as he listens he can hear with ever-increasing distinctness the sound of the waves as they beat upon the lonely shores of St. Helena.
Why this change? Ah, my friends, is not the reason for the change evident to any one who will look at the matter? No private character, however pure, no personal popularity, however great, can protect from the avenging wrath of an indignant people a man who will declare that he is in favor of fastening the gold standard upon this country, or who is willing to surrender the right of self-government and place the legislative control of our affairs in the hands of foreign potentates and powers.
We go forth confident that we shall win. Why? Because upon the paramount issue of this campaign there is not a spot of ground upon which the enemy will dare to challenge battle. If they tell us that the gold standard is a good thing, we shall point to their platform and tell them that their platform pledges the party to get rid of the gold standard and substitute bimetallism. If the gold standard is a good thing, why try to get rid of it? I call your attention to the fact that some of the very people who are in this convention today and who tell us that we ought to declare in favor of international bimetallism--thereby declaring that the gold standard is wrong and that the principle of bimetallism is better--these very people four months ago were open and avowed advocates of the gold standard, and were then telling us that we could not legislate two metals together, even with the aid of all the world. If the gold standard is a good thing, we ought to declare in favor of its retention and not in favor of abandoning it; and if the gold standard is a bad thing why should we wait until other nations are willing to help us to let go? Here is the line of battle, and we care not upon which issue they force the fight; we are prepared to meet them on either issue or on both. If they tell us that the gold standard is the standard of civilization, we reply to them that this, the most enlightened of all the nations of the earth, has never declared for a gold standard and that both the great parties this year are declaring against it. If the gold standard is the standard of civilization, why, my friends, should we not have it? If they come to meet us on that issue we can present the history of our nation. More than that; we can tell them that they will search the pages of history in vain to find a single instance where the common people of any land have ever declared themselves in favor of the gold standard. They can find where the holders of the fixed investments have declared for a gold standard, but not where the masses have.
Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between "the idle holders of idle capital" and "the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country;" and, my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of "the idle holders of idle capital" or upon the side of "the struggling masses?" That is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
My friends, we declare that this nation is able to legislate for its own people on every question, without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation on earth; and upon that issue we expect to carry every State in the Union. I shall not slander the inhabitants of the fair State of Massachusetts nor the inhabitants of the State of New York by saying that, when they are confronted with the proposition, they will declare that this nation is not able to attend to its own business. It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, that will never be the verdict of our people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they say bimetallism is good, but that we cannot have it until other nations help us, we reply that, instead of having a gold standard because England has, we will restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States has it. If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost.
Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Source: William J. Bryan, _The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896_ (Chicago: 1897), 199-206.
Posted July 10, 1996 on the centennial of the speech
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Andrew Sullivan Responds to Christopher Hitchens

He's my friend and I respect him and he's entitled to his view that Obama is a cynic and a self-serving fraud, but allow me to write where I think Hitch is being unfair. Item One:
Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu.
This seems to me to elide too many connections, i.e. it's too cheap a shot. The point Obama was making in referring to his grandmother, whom he evokes with great vividness and love in his first book, written long before he ran for any office, is that we are all full of fear and anger. The anger that Jeremiah Wright still harbors from the indignities of the 1950s and 1960s is not without reason even if it is wrong; and the fear that his own grandmother has of a black male stranger on the street is also not without reason even if it is wrong. And Obama - who doesn't make the comparison as directly as Hitch implies - says he loves both and that both have a point but that both need to overcome their fear. More: he shows in his book that his grandmother did overcome that fear in many ways, while it is clear that he believes Wright, in some instances, still hasn't. I also don't think you can fairly hear or read Obama's speech and believe he was somehow saying that his grandmother's racial fear was as objectionable as Wright's racist outbursts. He doesn't denounce it in anything like the same terms. These are nuances, but then that speech was indeed nuanced.
Item Two:
I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don't concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn't really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred."
Again, if you read those pages and the totality of the book and Obama's account of his own faith in many other contexts, you will see this passage as a confession by Obama of some of the non-spiritual motives he had for seeking out an authentic black experience as he saw it in Chicago. He is not telling us his own faith isn't real, and it is absurd to read the book and infer that. In fact, what is remarkable about the book is that Obama is able to show how his mixed motives were at one point overwhelmed by sincere religious faith. What strikes me about that is its human honesty, not its cynicism.
Now Hitch, of course, believes that all religious faith is contemptible and a fraud. I don't. And I think Hitch's healthy skepticism toward all forms of uplift, political and religious, has a very important place in our culture and in Western freedom. I would not expect Hitch to feel anything but visceral revulsion to an Obama sermon. And I don't like some of the messianic tinges to the Obama movement much either. But I think Obama's foreign policy proposals in the wake of the Iraq debacle, the resort to reason in his dialogue, and his recourse to to civility and to complexity in an age of ugliness and soundbites more than counter-balance this redemptive temptation.
Of course, I cannot see totally into a man's soul, Obama's or anyone else's, and I cannot know for sure that he is pure of motive. That he has confessed that he has not always been pure of motive is for me a good sign, not a bad omen. Perhaps Hitch is right that all of this is some gigantic fraud in which the most sincere matters of faith and family are being cynically used for pure politics. We can only look at a man's words and actions and self-explanation, and do our best to make a judgment.
This is my judgment. I do not believe Obama is a cynical fraud, a closet anti-Semite, a believer that white people are evil, a man who holds that white men gave black people AIDS, or is so empty that his own beloved grandmother is just another vehicle for his self-advancement. I do not believe his faith as he has tried to express it is phony or cynical. I do not believe his refusal to disown Wright is a function of politics, but a function of human loyalty and love, which can often transcend or even be empowered by that loved one's flaws, and even malice. Do I wish Obama had never known Wright? In one sense, yes. In another, no. It is partly what makes him who he is - a bridge in some extremely troubled currents.
Hitch predicts I will soon be proven wrong, that the mask will soon be ripped off, and great disillusion will sink in again. Maybe it will, and I will be forced into another humiliating confession of misjudgment. There's a vital place in the discourse for such skepticism as Hitch's - and I'm not looking for a savior (I have one already, thanks), just a way forward. But when skepticism lacks the willingness to listen and to grant, even for a moment, the benefit of the doubt to a man whose message is, in tone more than substance, an antidote to our current national and international crisis, it is, I think, missing something important right now. It is getting very close to cynicism.
One of us, I guess, will at some point be proven wrong, or, more accurately, less right. All I can say is that I doubt Hitch will be particularly thrilled when the Clintons move in for the carcass of what was and remains the audacity of hope.

Blind Faith
The statements of clergymen like Jeremiah Wright aren't controversial and incendiary; they're wicked and stupid.

Comments: Christopher Hitchens (Slate)
It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.
You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)
Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.
This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.
That same supposed message of his is also contradicted in a different way by trying to put Geraldine Ferraro on all fours with a thug like Obama's family "pastor." Ferraro may have sounded sour when she asserted that there can be political advantages to being black in the United States—and she said the selfsame thing about Jesse Jackson in 1984—but it's perfectly arguable that what she said is, in fact, true, and even if it isn't true, it's absurd to try and classify it as a racist remark. No doubt Obama's slick people were looking for a revenge for Samantha Power (who, incidentally, ought never to have been let go for the useful and indeed audacious truths that she uttered in Britain, but their news-cycle solution was to cover their own queasy cowardice in that case by feigning outrage in the Ferraro matter. The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics?
Now, by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right. The Ku Klux Klan (originally a Protestant identity movement, as many people prefer to forget) and the Nation of Islam (a black sectarian mutation of Quranic teaching) may be weak these days, but bigotry of all sorts is freely available, and openly inculcated into children, by any otherwise unemployable dirtbag who can perform the easy feat of putting Reverend in front of his name. And this clerical vileness has now reached the point of disfiguring the campaigns of both leading candidates for our presidency. If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome, wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee adorns himself with two further reverends: one named John Hagee, who thinks that the pope is the Antichrist, and another named Rod Parsley, who has declared that the United States has a mission to obliterate Islam. Is it conceivable that such repellent dolts would be allowed into public life if they were not in tax-free clerical garb? How true it is that religion poisons everything.
And what a shame. I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don't concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn't really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred." The most excruciatingly embarrassing endorsement of this same viewpoint came last week from Abigail Thernstrom at National Review Online. Overcome by "the speech" that the divine one had given in Philadelphia, she urged us to be understanding "Obama's description of the parishioners in his church gave white listeners a glimpse of a world of faith (with 'raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor … dancing, clapping, screaming, and shouting') that has been the primary means of black survival and uplift." A glimpse, huh? What the hell next? A tribute to the African-American sense of rhythm?
To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Signs of Hidden Ocean Underneath Titan's Crust
Slippage in Titan's rotation suggests water between its surface and core—and a higher likelihood of ancient life on Saturn's biggest moon
By JR Minkel
Astronomers' mental image of Titan, the solar system's second-largest moon, used to be that of a vast swimming pool. But maybe they should have imagined a water bed instead.Last year, researchers reported that radar mapping of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft had found a peculiar shift in landmarks on the moon's surface of up to 19 miles (30 kilometers) between October 2004 and May 2007.Now investigators say the best explanation is a moon-wide underground ocean that disconnects Titan's icy crust from its rocky interior."We think the structure is about 100 kilometers of ice sitting atop a global layer of water … maybe hundreds of kilometers thick," says Cassini scientist Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. (100 kilometer's is about 60 miles.)If confirmed, Titan would be the fourth moon in the solar system thought to contain such an internal water ocean, joining Jupiter's satellites Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Researchers believe that heat from radioactivity in a moon's core or gravitational squeezing may melt a layer of frozen water.On Titan, Ganymede and Callisto, the liquid would become sandwiched between two different forms of ice, one that floats on water and one that sinks. Astronomers believe that of the four bodies, Europa has a larger and hotter core that directly borders its ocean, which lies beneath a thin layer of ice.A hidden water layer would add to Titan's impressive resume: Larger in diameter than both Earth's moon and the planet Mercury, Titan is the only satellite in the solar system with an atmosphere.For decades researchers suspected that its frosty surface temperature of around –290 degrees Fahrenheit (–180 degrees Celsius) would cause hydrocarbons to pool on its surface in a vast ocean. But during Cassini's first flyby in October 2004, its radar instruments detected no surface-spanning ocean, only methane lakes near the moon's north pole.The shift in Titan's geologic features is strange because the moon is locked in a synchronous orbit around Saturn, meaning it always presents the same face to the planet. "It's a little bit improbable that Titan would be rotating asynchronously," Lorenz says.Writing in Science, he and his colleagues instead connect the geologic displacement to models in which Titan's atmosphere—a dense, rotating fog of nitrogen supporting hydrocarbon clouds made of methane and ethane—pushes against mountains on the surface.The exact thickness of the crust is an important component of the group's model of Titan but is not known precisely. Based on the dimensions of the Menrva impact crater, they estimate a thickness of 100 kilometers.That would make the crust thinner than those of Ganymede or Callisto, where the oceans are thought to lie below as much as 125 miles (200 kilometers) of rock and ice. For Titan's presumed ocean to remain liquid at such a distance from the hot core, the researchers argue that it must contain ammonia.There may also be other explanations for the observed shifting. In an editorial accompanying the report, planetary scientists Christophe Sotin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Gabriel Tobie of the University of Nantes in France, observe that a periodic wobble in Titan's rotation or, less likely, a recent asteroid impact could also explain the finding.The ocean interpretation is still the most plausible one, according to David Stevenson, professor of planetary science at Caltech. "This is a perfectly natural thing to do in a water–ice dominated world, provided there is enough heat," he says.What is less clear, he adds, is the ocean's depth. The movement of the crust likely depends on additional, poorly understood factors, such as seasonal weather patterns and gravitational attraction between the crust and the core, he says.Luckily, the group's model is testable. It predicts a quickening of Titan's rotation rate in the coming year or two followed by a slowdown—something that can be measured on succeeding Cassini flybys.As always, the possibility of water leads to talk of potential life. Researchers have speculated that Titan may have long ago harbored life or its building blocks, catalyzed by sunlight reacting with atmospheric carbon and hydrogen.Experts have considered Europa a better candidate, however, because of the presumed contact between its ocean and the radioactive core, which would provide a steady supply of heat energy.Lorenz and his colleagues note that Titan's ocean might be stirred instead by cryovolcanism or warmer (but still cold) water welling up from below. The addition of water, Lorenz says, makes Titan "astrobiologically very appealing."Stevenson, for one, says he still sees Europa as a better bet for life. He agrees that Titan is an attractive natural laboratory for the kind of chemistry that would lead to life, but when it comes to energy sources, sizzling rock "is much better than ice."

Barack Obama Stands Before History

Tet of Speech at Philadelphia

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."
"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Storms, Tornadoes Batter North Georgia
ATLANTA -- A tornado left two people dead Saturday in northwest Georgia, less than 24 hours after another tornado struck downtown Atlanta, cutting a 6-mile path of destruction through the city with winds gusting up to 130 miles per hour.

One person died after a tornado touched down in Polk County on the Alabama line, said Lisa Janak of the Georgia Emergency Management agency. They were in a structure in the Live Oak community when the storm hit. That's located in the northwest corner of Polk County near the Floyd County line. GEMA reports another person has died in Floyd County as a result of the tornado. Channel 2 has a crew on the way to the area and will have more information as soon as it is available.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, Mayor Shirley Franklin and Governor Sonny Perdue have declared a state of emergency in the city.

Franklin is urging people to stay indoors unless performing essential tasks such as checking on family or property. Her comments came as curious onlookers fanned out across the city taking pictures and surveying the damage in their neighborhoods today.

"Do not use this as an opportunity for sightseeing," Franklin said. "It is not as if something happened last night and everything is over. Our challenge is getting people to understand that this is a serious emergency response effort."

Earlier Saturday, weather officials were confirming it was a twister that hit downtown Atlanta and other neighborhoods Friday night. The storms aren't over either. New tornado warnings and watches were issued for most of north Georgia. A tornado watch remains in effect until 7 p.m. Saturday for northern Georgia.

The tornado that left behind extensive damage packed winds up to 130 mph and was rated an EF-2 storm, said Lance Rothfusz, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City.

"This was clearly a tornado," he said. "The path was about six miles long and about 200 yards wide."

Atlanta residents had about eight minutes warning before the twister hit Friday night, said Rothfusz. Rothfusz said the tornado warning was issued at about 9:30 p.m., and severe thunderstorm warnings had been in effect for the area earlier in the evening.

The funnel cloud first touched down at the intersection of "Simpson and Burbank and went right across the Georgia World Congress Center, right over CNN Center, (the) Omni, right over the Equitable Tower and from that point on went over I-85 and I-75 right at Edgewood and then to the Cotton Mill. The Cotton Mill sustained the F-2 damage, by far the strongest, but there was some near F-2 damage in the downtown Atlanta area," explained Rothfusz.

Crews hauled broken glass and furniture out of downtown streets Saturday and homeowners surveyed damage caused by a possible tornado that surprised many residents and basketball fans.

Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John Oxendine estimates damage from last night's tornado at $150 million to $200 million. He says at least $100 million of the damage was at the Georgia World Congress Center, a state convention center near CNN Center and the Georgia Dome.

He says the storm broke through the roof, sucking walls, glass and furnishings out like a vacuum.

"Had the building been occupied by a significant number of people, you would probably have had major injuries and loss of life," he said.

More thunderstorms headed across northern Alabama toward the city Saturday. "We're bracing for another round of whatever mother nature throws at us," said Lisa Janak of the state emergency management agency.

At least 27 people were hurt Friday night, though no injuries were believed to be life-threatening.

All downtown events scheduled for Saturday were canceled, including the St. Patrick's Day parade.

The storm smashed hundreds of skyscraper windows, blew furniture and luggage out of hotel rooms, crumbled part of an apartment building and rattled a packed sports arena.

Streets around the Georgia Dome, Phillips Arena, the CNN Center and Centennial Olympic Park were littered with broken glass, downed power lines, crumbled bricks, insulation and the occasional office chair. Billboards collapsed onto parked cars.

CNN said its headquarters building suffered ceiling damage that allowed water to pour into the atrium, and windows were shattered in the CNN.com newsroom and the company's library. A water line inside the building broke, turning a staircase into a waterfall.

"It was crazy. There was a lot of windows breaking and stuff falling," said Terrence Evans, a valet who was about to park a car at the Omni Hotel when the storm twister hit.

A tornado warning had been issued for downtown a few minutes before the violent weather hit.

However, there was no announcement of the approaching storm for the 18,000 fans inside the Georgia Dome for the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament. The first sign was rumbling and the rippling of the fabric roof. Catwalks swayed and insulation rained down on players during overtime of the Mississippi State-Alabama game, sending fans fleeing toward the exits and the teams to their locker rooms.

"I thought it was a tornado or a terrorist attack," said Mississippi State guard Ben Hansbrough, whose team won 69-67 after an hourlong delay under a roof with at least two visible tears. A later game between Georgia and Kentucky was postponed. SEC officials said the tournament's remaining games would be played at Georgia Tech.

"Ironically, the guy behind me got a phone call saying there was a tornado warning," fan Lisa Lynn said. "And in two seconds, we heard the noise and things started to shake. It was creepy."

A half-mile away, the sign of the Phillips Arena parking garage was mangled but basketball fans inside the arena noticed little disruption during an NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and Los Angeles Clippers.

Power was knocked out to about 19,000 customers.

A loft apartment building, built in an old cotton mill, had severe damage to one corner and appeared to have major roof damage. Fire officials said they were uncertain whether all the occupants had escaped, but property manager Darlys Walker told WSB-TV there was one minor injury.

Four Georgia Search and Rescue teams continue their search Saturday morning for possible victims at the collapsed building. "Personnel from the DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett fire departments make up this specialty team," according to mayor Franklin in a release. "DeKalb K-9 units are also assisting in the search."

Taylor Morris, 29, who lives near the lofts, said he and his girlfriend took shelter in the bathroom when the storm passed over in a matter of 15 to 20 seconds.

"The whole house was shaking," he said. "We didn't know what was going on."

Fire Capt. Bill May said a vacant building also collapsed, with no apparent injuries.

Grady Memorial Hospital, the city's large public hospital where many of the injured were taken, had broken windows but was operating as usual. Kendra Gerlach, spokeswoman for Atlanta Medical Center, said late Friday the hospital emergency department treated about five patients for minor injuries.

Buzz Weiss, spokesman for Georgia Emergency Management Agency, said state officials and the American Red Cross were setting up a shelter for displaced residents at a senior center.

In East Atlanta, downed trees, debris and power lines were strewn in the streets.

Melody and Brad Sorrells were home in their living room with their two children when the storm hit, and the huge pine in their front yard crash into their house.

"I saw it falling and we ran into the back bedrooms in the closet," Melody Sorrels said. "I feel sick."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the most recent tornado to hit a major city's downtown was on Aug. 12, 2004, in Jacksonville, Fla. Downtown tornadoes have also struck Fort Worth, Texas; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and Nashville, Tenn., in the past decade.

If confirmed, the tornado would be the first on record in downtown Atlanta, said Smith, the meteorologist. The last tornado to strike inside the city was in 1975, and it hit the governor's mansion north of downtown, he said.

The Atlanta Police Department reported numerous injuries in downtown Atlanta area. At least 30 people were taken to Atlanta area hospitals -- one of them was a firefighter. One person is suffering life threatening injuries. No fatalities have been report

WSB TV Report

Dade rolling out massive parks plan
BY CURTIS MORGAN AND ANDRES VIGLUCCI
aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com
Scraggly canal banks transformed into scenic public pathways. Tree-shaded, pedestrian-friendly ''greenways'' replacing barren streetscapes. Bikeways and walkways linking far-flung neighborhoods to local, state and national parks. An inviting public space -- park, natural area, cultural or recreational facility -- within a safe, five-minute walk of every resident.
Miami-Dade County on Friday will roll out an extraordinarily ambitious parks and open-space master plan that aims over the next half-century to re-green and reconnect a community that has spent much of the previous 50 years carving up and paving over the natural landscape.
''This is probably the single most important thing that Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation has been involved in in decades,'' said county parks director Jack Kardys. ``It really is about leaving a legacy for the community.''
The plan, approved last month by the County Commission, reaches well beyond traditional park concepts to what planners call ''the public realm'' -- laying out new principles to guide not only how the county plans parks and public places, but also how it builds and designs streets and sidewalks to encourage more people to walk and bicycle. It calls for what amounts to a massive makeover of Miami-Dade's asphalt look and, planners hope, its increasingly congested quality of life.
''The idea is to create a community in a garden,'' said Maria Nardi, special projects administrator for the parks department. ``The moment you step out of your house, you're in the parks system.''
Among its most ambitious elements: a 40-mile-plus bikeable loop connecting Biscayne and Everglades national parks along Southwest 328th and 344th streets at the southern end of the county, and a vast north-to-south recreational and ecological zone along the eastern edge of the Everglades, most of it on land already under public control.
The plan will be the focus of a county parks summit Friday at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, in which experts from across the country will discuss how parks and public spaces act as catalysts for community revitalization.
Will Rogers, president of The Trust for Public Land, which has worked with Miami and Miami-Dade on greenways and access plans along the Miami River and Biscayne Bay, said communities across the country have seen similar park initiatives improve not just the quality of life for residents, but the economy.
Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and Chattanooga, Tenn., are just a few of the cities that have poured billions into improving open spaces, he said, in part to attract or keep major employers and development.
''The cities that follow through are far more competitive economically. There is absolutely a payoff in this investment,'' Rogers said. ``If you don't do it, you risk not being a first-class city.''
Park planners acknowledge considerable challenges to executing a plan of such scope. It will require development of new guidelines and rules for the design of streets and other public facilities, as well as close coordination with individual cities and county agencies that now often work separately. The county has jurisdiction over only unincorporated areas, but it has formed a joint city-county committee to help encourage municipalities to adopt the plan's strategies.
While millions of dollars were set aside for county parks in the massive 2004county bonds issue, there is no specific budget attached to the new blueprint. The plan would be executed gradually, as opportunity arises -- for instance, when parks, streets and public facilities such as libraries are built or renovated, or in new developments.
The department must draw up an implementation plan within a year.
''It's not impossible,'' said Nardi, lead county planner for the blueprint. ``It's a 50-year vision. We have to start somewhere. We have to start now.''
Where the planners started two years ago was with the county's vast but scattered system of parks -- the third-largest in the nation, with a $100 million budget and 250 parks and recreational facilities encompassing nearly 13,000 acres. The agency also manages 12,000 acres of publicly owned land designated as environmentally sensitive.
The county's premier parks -- including dazzling gems like Crandon Park on Key Biscayne and the Charles Deering Estate in South Miami-Dade -- are in many cases underused, often reachable only by car, and unevenly distributed. Some neighborhoods lack so much as a local playground.
In addition, public spaces often seem ill-designed or poorly placed. Nardi made reference to some examples: a tot-lot jammed next to a parking lot; an unshaded sidewalk along a retention pond.
The plan embraces the idea of interconnecting links as a way of reshaping the community, much as the famed Emerald Necklace of parks shapes the city of Boston. The blueprint identifies the rough location for new community centers and local parks in areas now lacking them. It also identifies publicly owned ecological lands, now largely inaccessible, that could serve as hubs of new Eco-Zones -- networks of small parks and greenways linked to surrounding neighborhoods.
It also delineates canals, paths and roadway corridors that would form a larger network of green and blue connections all across Miami-Dade.
In doing so, the parks department is coming full circle to its original 1929 mission to beautify local roadways, a time when the county's winter population peaked at just 143,000. Fifty years from now, that number could hit four million.
As the county grew, the department's mission rapidly evolved. Founding Superintendent A.D. Barnes oversaw the development of Crandon Park, Matheson Hammock and other regional parks that today form the backbone of the system. But relatively little parkland has been added during the past 25 years, even as suburban development exploded to the west, eating away at open space and stripping the landscape of shade.
One result, Kardys said, is that parks in western suburbs are focused on athletic fields, leaving outlying communities disconnected and isolated from natural areas more easily accessible along the coast.
But with land increasingly unavailable or unaffordable, the parks department had to develop a strategy other than building sprawling new regional parks, Nardi said. One solution increasingly being adopted across the country, partly in response to increasing demand for places to walk and bicycle, is the linear park or greenway -- a landscaped path, usually paved, that links parks or runs along roadways and waterways.
The aim is to reduce the need to drive while bringing attractive spaces and pathways closer to people.
''If they're designed properly, if you put the right stuff in place, they're going to use it,'' Kardys said. ``Everybody is oriented toward the car. It's the model we have followed for too long.''
The county's vast network of drainage canals, now typically gated or otherwise cut off from surrounding neighborhoods, also provides great opportunities, Nardi said, and not just for paths and watercraft, but also for mixed-use development on their banks, à la Amsterdam, that would attract people -- and thus users and security.
The plan suggests examples of where that concept could easily be applied, such as the Snapper Creek canal running behind Dadeland Mall.
Some of the first projects will cater to bicyclists, who have been among the plan's biggest supporters.
A key element is the loop that would link the county's two national parks by converting rocky canal and road rights-of-way to accommodate both bikers and hikers.
The county has set aside $4.5 million for the first 3.7-mile leg leading from Old Cutler Road to the entrance of Biscayne National Park, a route already popular with weekend cyclists. Work is expected to begin in the next few years.
The entire loop, estimated at $49 million, will likely need funding from a range of public and private sources, from the city of Homestead to the South Florida Water Management District and the National Park Service.
Everglades National Park Superintendent Dan Kimball already has staff studying whether a bike path could be extended into the park along its main road all the way to Flamingo. That would create a 60-mile trail from Biscayne Bay to Florida Bay, with stops to rest and eat along the way.
''One of the things we've always talked about is trying to get a seamless system of parks and protected areas,'' Kimball said. ``This really figures out a way of linking the two parks with gateway communities.''

Mutual Contempt The long history of the McCain-Obama grudge.
Michael Crowley, The New Republic
Though they differ in many ways, John McCain and Barack Obama have one thing in common: Each sees the other as a posturing phony. When McCain talks about Obama on the stump, he trades his typical graciousness for sarcasm and contempt. When McCain lectured Obama about the future of Iraq last week, he did so with what The New York Times called "a tone of belittlement in his voice." McCain has also called Obamamania a swindle. "America is not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history," he said in Wisconsin last month. And he has huffed that "I don't seek the presidency on the presumption that I am blessed with personal greatness." After Obama issued a press release last May noting that conditions were still dangerous enough in Iraq that McCain had been forced to wear a "flack jacket" during a public tour of a Baghdad market, a McCain release taunted Obama for his inexperience, adding, "By the way, Senator Obama, it's a 'flak' jacket, not a 'flack' jacket." For good measure, an unnamed McCain aide drove home the point to the Politico, saying that "Obama wouldn't know the difference between an RPG and a bong."
Obama has swung back in similar, if somewhat milder, fashion. Noting that McCain had changed his position on the Bush tax cuts, Obama joked last month that "the Straight Talk Express lost its wheels." Later, he cracked in a Democratic debate that McCain "traded his principles for his party's nomination." Snickering at the idea that McCain is a scourge of lobbyists, Obama recently said that "he takes their money and has put them in charge of his campaign."
It's little wonder that Obama and McCain would be casting each other as fakers. At the core of each man's political identity is the image of a reformer determined to take on and reshape the corrupt culture of Washington, D.C. To Obama, McCain is a fixture of that system, one whose reform talk belies his debts to the GOP establishment and its lobbyist machine. McCain, meanwhile, sees Obama as an upstart self-promoter whose talk about reform isn't matched by a record of hard work to achieve it. "In a weird sort of way, they're fighting over a change-and-reform mantle from two ends of the same argument," says Dan Schnur, a former senior aide to McCain. And that was never more obvious than in a 2006 clash between the men, well before Obama was even a candidate. That episode revealed the importance of reform to both men, but also the pitfalls they're finding as they walk the high ground.

In February 2006, Washington was reeling from a wave of corruption scandals. Indictments had come down on Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and Republican Representative Duke Cunningham. Congress polices itself as willingly as a child cleans his room, but the scandals had jolted both parties into action. Democrats saw ethics reform as a partisan issue that could help win back the House and Senate that November. Republicans, meanwhile, battled furiously to cast corruption as a nonpartisan story about the culture of Washington, not just their party.
At the center of this frenzy were McCain and Obama. McCain had held months of committee hearings about the Abramoff scandal, which he capped with an ethics reform bill cracking down on congressional travel at lobbyists' expense, discounted trips on corporate jets, and his overriding pet obsession, earmark spending.
Obama, meanwhile, had been tapped by then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid as the Democrats' point man on ethics reform. Still several months from signaling a run for president, Obama was a perfect reform messenger--a Washington newcomer sullied by few past transactions with lobbyists. He had also co-sponsored a strong reform measure with Mr. Ethics himself, Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Obama had also led a lobbying reform push in the Illinois state legislature about a decade earlier (for which he was "literally hooted and catcalled" by colleagues, as one recently told The New York Times).
Senate Republicans had little genuine interest in clamping down on their Gucci-loafered friends. But they also knew feigning concern before the voters was a must. Democrats weren't interested in teaming up, rejecting overtures from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and instead holding their own rally for reform at the Library of Congress. So Frist chose his colleague Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania to develop an alternative bill that Republicans could tout. Santorum assembled a group of senators from both parties, among them John McCain. Though personally disliked by many of his GOP colleagues, McCain offered a gold seal of reform credibility thanks to his past battles on campaign finance and pork barrel spending.
On February 1, McCain invited Obama to a meeting of Santorum's working group. Obama accepted, explaining in a press conference that day that he would let the Republicans there know that "I am prepared to work across the aisle and make some things happen." That evening, he joined several other attendees--including Republicans Trent Lott, Susan Collins, David Vitter, and Johnny Isakson, and Democrats Mark Pryor and Joe Lieberman--in Santorum's office. Munching on grapes and other finger food, the senators and their aides had what one participant described as a long and substantive discussion of arcane ethics issues, such as what exact price constitutes a proper reimbursement for travel on a corporate jet. One Democratic aide who attended another meeting with Obama on this subject calls him completely fluent in the topic and better informed than virtually all of his colleagues. But Santorum found Obama off-putting: After showing up late and receiving a "syrupy" welcome from McCain, Santorum says, Obama began preaching down to his colleagues. "He went on and on about how ethical his life is and how he does things more ethically than everybody and on and on and on," Santorum says. "And, when we tried to come back to substance, we heard more about how he does things. Which is all really interesting but not particularly productive in terms of trying to find common ground to get things done." (Though Santorum has obvious partisan reasons to bad-mouth Obama, his response suggests there could be limits to a President Obama's ability to charm D.C. Republicans.)
A day after attending the confab, Obama sent McCain a letter thanking him for the invitation but also indicating that he preferred a reform bill championed by Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders, which had no Republican sponsors.
McCain went ballistic. "I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere," he wrote back in a letter. McCain said Democratic leaders were simply using ethics as a political club in the fall elections, and he hinted that Obama had decided to carry Reid's water rather than negotiate a bipartisan bill. "I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us."
In McCainland, the episode had revealed Obama as a mere Democratic partisan masquerading as a bridge-builder. "There was all this chest-pounding about how he was going to reach across the aisle and work in a bipartisan manner to solve all America's problems," says former longtime McCain adviser John Weaver. "And up comes an issue which seems perfectly suited for him, and he met Senator McCain, who has correctly long been the champion of this ... [and] he decided for whatever reason he was going to take the more partisan position."
"It was evident to me from day one that Obama's instructions were to make sure this doesn't happen," Santorum adds. "I'm not blaming Obama here--he was Harry Reid's surrogate."

McCain had a point. Obama seemed to have chosen his party's interests over the bipartisan approach to reform he had touted--an interpretation conceded to me by another pro-reform Democrat close to the process. Though Obama was genuinely committed to the issue, in this case, with some Republicans pursuing bad-faith stall-tactic strategies, reform and true bipartisanship probably didn't go hand in hand. Nor was it likely that Obama, a newcomer to the Senate with presidential ambitions, was keen for Democratic leaders to see him as overly willing to deal with the enemy.
In the face of McCain's broadside, Obama kept his signature cool. The same day, he responded to McCain with a letter of his own saying that he was "puzzled" by his colleague's fiery response, as he intended the Democratic bill to be "the basis for a bipartisan solution." "I confess that I have no idea what has prompted your response," Obama calmly added.
Meanwhile, the episode revealed two essential qualities about McCain. One is his delicate sense of honor. McCain felt that Obama had committed the cardinal sin of insincerity by talking about bipartisanship and then retreating to the safety of his caucus. He was also clearly enraged that Obama had released his first letter to the press before McCain had had a chance to read it himself. (Obama's letter was actually e-mailed to reporters by Reid's office, fueling McCain's suspicions that Obama was acting as a partisan tool.) Moreover, Obama's first letter had also implied that McCain supported creating an ethics "task force," a Republican proposal widely viewed as a Potemkin stalling tactic; Obama, in other words, had doubted McCain's sincerity as a reformer, something the Arizonan could not countenance.
The other, less appealing, quality that McCain had exposed was his temper. McCain has long battled the charge that he employs a self-destructive anger--earlier this year, Mitt Romney compiled for the press a list of famous McCain outbursts. So McCain never sent Obama a letter in response, and, in public, he cooled his rhetoric. (Many people suggest that McCain's tempestuous chief of staff, Mark Salter, helped stoke the affair--or at least failed to save McCain from himself. "Sometimes it's not just John's temper, it's the staff's temper, too," explains Weaver, without naming names. "After that letter was sent, I threatened to take the 'send' button off the sender's computer.") The following night, February 7, "Hardball" host Chris Matthews described McCain's letter on his show as "brilliantly angry," but he also asked McCain twice whether "you stand by your letter." McCain said he did, but assiduously tried to resist the anger narrative. "I wasn't angry," he insisted.
Ultimately, McCain and Obama defused the tension. As it happened, they were both scheduled to testify before a committee hearing on reform later that week. Obama cracked up the room by opening his testimony with a reference to "my pen pal, John McCain." It was an early glimpse of Obama's skill, so evident in the primaries, at shrugging off shots from his opponents. "It reminds me a bit of the way he has handled attacks from Hillary in the debates," says a Senate Democratic aide.
Before long, each man was back at work trying to reclaim the moral high ground. That March, the Senate voted on a broad reform bill that had come out of multiple committee hearings. It passed overwhelmingly, 90-8, but the bill was not nearly as tough as government-watchdog groups had hoped. Both Obama and McCain voted against it. Obama insisted any reform needed to restrict the use of corporate jets and also transfer ethics enforcement out of Congress and into a new separate commission. McCain, meanwhile, focused on earmarking, a subject dear to fiscal conservatives, and one he emphasized as he geared up his presidential campaign. ("The good news is there will be more indictments, and we will be revisiting this issue," McCain noted.)
That bill stalled in the House, and it wasn't until 2007 that the new Democratic majority passed reform into law. Though he still had qualms, Obama voted for it. McCain, however, held his ground. Each man got something he wanted. Obama issued press releases bragging that he'd played a central role in a major legislative feat. And McCain maintained a reformist high ground while dismissing the Democratic achievement as an empty gesture. Still, for all their talk of bipartisanship, neither man had demonstrated much of it.
All the more reason why both are determined to prove their reform bona fides. After the initial blowup the previous winter, Obama had assured reporters there would be no lasting hard feelings. "[M]oving forward," he said, "I think what's clear is there's probably more in common between myself and Senator McCain on a lot of this stuff than some of our other colleagues." But that may be precisely the problem. Small differences make for big fights.

Retail Retrenchment Hurts Malls
ANNE D'INNOCENZIO
The signs that smaller retailers are struggling are unavoidable at malls across America: "Going out of business" sales at many Wilsons Leather stores. "Up to 70 percent off" at KB Toys.
At the once-sizzling Paradise Valley Mall in Phoenix, the space once occupied by Bombay Co., the furniture chain that went bankrupt last year, is empty. Wilsons just finished liquidating its inventory. KB Toys, AnnTaylor and American Eagle feature bold posters advertising steep discounts.
"I don't think it brings much business when all these stores are closed," said Michelle Green, a sales clerk at Fred Meyer Jewelers.
Around the country, mall centers are starting to feel the recoil from a rapid expansion in recent years that allowed retailers to aim stores at almost every niche, from shoppers who wanted Talbots clothes for their children to those who craved Bombay's little wood tables.
Now, consumers who are closing their wallets amid rising gasoline prices and a housing slump are forcing specialty retailers to pare back their brands. While still healthy overall, mall centers in areas hardest hit by the housing downturn _ like Paradise Valley _ are suffering the most store shutdowns.
Retailers including AnnTaylor Stores Corp., Talbots Inc. and Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. have closed hundreds of stores so far this year. Gadget seller Sharper Image Corp. filed for bankruptcy protection last month and plans to shutter nearly half of its 184 stores.
That retrenchment, along with the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of catalog retailer Lillian Vernon Corp., marks the beginning of a wave of retail bankruptcies that's expected to go well beyond the home furnishings stores hurt by the housing malaise.
"This is economic Darwinism," said Dan Ansell, a partner at Greenberg Traurig LLP and chairman of its real estate operations division. "Those retailers and businesses that have a product that is desired by consumers will survive, and those who do not will not."
Unless the economy dramatically improves, Ansell believes retail bankruptcies this year could reach the highest level since the 1991 recession. More closings could leave gaping holes in the nation's retail centers, which have already seen average vacancy rates creep up to between 7 percent and 8 percent from 5 percent over the last six months, according to data from NAI Global, a commercial real estate services firm.
David Solomon, president and CEO of ReStore, NAI Global's retail division, expects the vacancy rate could hit 10 percent by the end of the year. Suzanne Mulvee, senior economist at Property & Portfolio Research, figures that vacancies could rise as high as 12.5 percent this year. Her figure includes retail spaces where tenants have defaulted on their rents.
Part of the problem, according to Mulvee, is that more retail space is coming to the market just as consumer demand is falling. Another 130 million square feet of retail space will become available this year, she predicts, on top of last year's 143 million. That is well above the average 100 million square feet added per year earlier in the decade.
As a result, markets like Phoenix, which had a retail boom, are expected to see the most dramatic increases in vacancies. Phoenix's rate is expected to more than double to 10 percent by the end of 2009 from 4.4 percent late last year, according to Property & Portfolio. In Kansas City, Mo., rates could rise to almost 17 percent by the end of 2009 from last year's 13.5 percent. In San Antonio, experts say the figure may hit 20.5 percent next year from last year's 17.4 percent.
Still, Solomon doesn't think the situation will be as dire as in 1991, when the savings and loan crisis hurt the entire country. Experts also say merchants are weathering downturns better because of new systems to control inventory and costs.
Nevertheless, consumers are seeing fewer stores that focus on specific niches, like apparel for women baby boomers or clothing for surf fans. That would differ from 17 years ago, when it was the department stores that felt the major shakeup as leveraged buyouts and fierce competition led to the demise of names like Carter Hawley Hale Stores and Woodward & Lothrop. But there's one common theme: the power of national discounters like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which helped seal the eventual demise of regional discount chains last time around. Now, the discounters' clout is hurting consumer electronics stores like CompUSA, which is closing most of its stores, and Circuit City Stores Inc., which posted dismal holiday sales.
Christina Avila, shopping at the Oak Park Mall in Kansas City, Mo. _ which had more than half a dozen store vacancies _ said she's cutting back because of the economy and spending more at places like Wal-Mart and Target.
"I'm more interested if they have clearance items," she said.
Michele Lipovitch of Phoenix said she only goes to the Paradise Valley mall twice a month.
"We have two kids. I have credit card debt I'm trying to pay off," said Lipovitch. "It's kind of scary because we keep hearing that it looks like we're going into a recession."
The industry pullback follows several years of rapid expansion and experimentation with a range of new store formats as retailers enjoyed robust consumer spending fueled by rising home values. But the sharp spending drop has made stores rethink how to expand their businesses.
Jewelry retailer Zale Corp. announced more closings last month, meaning it now plans to shutter almost 5 percent of its stores by the end of July. In January, Pacific Sunwear said it will close all 154 remaining Demo stores, which sell urban fashions. AnnTaylor is shutting down 13 percent of its stores and delaying a new store concept aimed at women boomers, while Talbots is closing its 78 children's and men's apparel stores to focus on its core middle-aged female customer. Macy's also has said it will close nine stores.
And Wilsons The Leather Expert is closing a majority of its 260 mall locations.
Analysts say they're watching to see if Circuit City closes any stores after posting a third-quarter loss and cutting its full-year profit outlook. Analysts also expect more store cutbacks at Sears Holdings Corp., which operates Kmart and Sears stores.
Some shoppers are not going to miss the casualties.
"They have nice clothes, nice urban wear, but their prices (are) a little high," said Tasha Burts, 35, of Demo at the Dolphin Mall west of downtown Miami. She walked out empty-handed.
Mall operators Taubman Centers Inc. and Simon Property Group say their top tenants _ the department stores and other big chains that anchor most shopping centers _ are in good financial shape.
Bill Taubman, chief operating officer of Taubman Centers, predicts more store closings and bankruptcies than last year, but doesn't think they will reach historic highs.
That will still mean a more limited selection for consumers, who until a few months ago had a plethora of choices, particularly when it came to furniture. Recent home furnishings casualties included Bombay and Levitz Furniture, which filed for bankruptcy in November and has been liquidating its inventory. Clothing stores, in a malaise since consumers see fashion spending as discretionary, could see widespread closures this year.
While the industry overall is experimenting less with new formats, Janet Hoffman, managing partner of the North American retail division of Accenture, expects the mood to be temporary.
"There is this undying belief in the retail industry that they have an idea that will work," Hoffman said, citing Abercrombie & Fitch Co.'s new lingerie chain Gilly Hicks. "A year or 18 months from now you will see new ones at play."___
Associated Press Writers David Twiddy in Kansas City, Mo., Terry Tang in Phoenix and Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami contributed to this report.