Editorial NY TIMES
The Must-Do List
The Bush administration’s assault on some of the founding principles of American democracy marches onward despite the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections. The new Democratic majorities in Congress can block the sort of noxious measures that the Republican majority rubber-stamped. But preventing new assaults on civil liberties is not nearly enough.
Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.
It will require forceful steps by this Congress to undo the damage. A few lawmakers are offering bills intended to do just that, but they are only a start. Taking on this task is a moral imperative that will show the world the United States can be tough on terrorism without sacrificing its humanity and the rule of law.
Today we’re offering a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Many will require a rewrite of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an atrocious measure pushed through Congress with the help of three Republican senators, Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham and John McCain; Senator McCain lent his moral authority to improving one part of the bill and thus obscured its many other problems.
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Our list starts with three fundamental tasks:
Restore Habeas Corpus
One of the new act’s most indecent provisions denies anyone Mr. Bush labels an “illegal enemy combatant” the ancient right to challenge his imprisonment in court. The arguments for doing this were specious. Habeas corpus is nothing remotely like a get-out-of-jail-free card for terrorists, as supporters would have you believe. It is a way to sort out those justly detained from those unjustly detained. It will not “clog the courts,” as Senator Graham claims. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has a worthy bill that would restore habeas corpus. It is essential to bringing integrity to the detention system and reviving the United States’ credibility.
Stop Illegal Spying
Mr. Bush’s program of intercepting Americans’ international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant has not ceased. The agreement announced recently — under which a secret court supposedly gave its blessing to the program — did nothing to restore judicial process or ensure that Americans’ rights are preserved. Congress needs to pass a measure, like one proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, to force Mr. Bush to obey the law that requires warrants for electronic surveillance.
Ban Torture, Really
The provisions in the Military Commissions Act that Senator McCain trumpeted as a ban on torture are hardly that. It is still largely up to the president to decide what constitutes torture and abuse for the purpose of prosecuting anyone who breaks the rules. This amounts to rewriting the Geneva Conventions and puts every American soldier at far greater risk if captured. It allows the president to decide in secret what kinds of treatment he will permit at the Central Intelligence Agency’s prisons. The law absolves American intelligence agents and their bosses of any acts of torture and abuse they have already committed.
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Many of the tasks facing Congress involve the way the United States takes prisoners, and how it treats them. There are two sets of prisons in the war on terror. The military runs one set in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. The other is even more shadowy, run by the C.I.A. at secret places.
Close the C.I.A. Prisons
When the Military Commissions Act passed, Mr. Bush triumphantly announced that he now had the power to keep the secret prisons open. He cast this as a great victory for national security. It was a defeat for America’s image around the world. The prisons should be closed.
Account for ‘Ghost Prisoners’
The United States has to come clean on all of the “ghost prisoners” it has in the secret camps. Holding prisoners without any accounting violates human rights norms. Human Rights Watch says it has identified nearly 40 men and women who have disappeared into secret American-run prisons.
Ban Extraordinary Rendition
This is the odious practice of abducting foreign citizens and secretly flying them to countries where everyone knows they will be tortured. It is already illegal to send a prisoner to a country if there is reason to believe he will be tortured. The administration’s claim that it got “diplomatic assurances” that prisoners would not be abused is laughable.
A bill by Representative Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, would require the executive branch to list countries known to abuse and torture prisoners. No prisoner could be sent to any of them unless the secretary of state certified that the country’s government no longer abused its prisoners or offered a way to verify that a prisoner will not be mistreated. It says “diplomatic assurances” are not sufficient.
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Congress needs to completely overhaul the military prisons for terrorist suspects, starting with the way prisoners are classified. Shortly after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared all members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to be “illegal enemy combatants” not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions or American justice. Over time, the designation was applied to anyone the administration chose, including some United States citizens and the entire detainee population of Gitmo.
To address this mess, the government must:
Tighten the Definition of Combatant
“Illegal enemy combatant” is assigned a dangerously broad definition in the Military Commissions Act. It allows Mr. Bush — or for that matter anyone he chooses to designate to do the job — to apply this label to virtually any foreigner anywhere, including those living legally in the United States.
Screen Prisoners Fairly and Effectively
When the administration began taking prisoners in Afghanistan, it did not much bother to screen them. Hundreds of innocent men were sent to Gitmo, where far too many remain to this day. The vast majority will never even be brought before tribunals and still face indefinite detention without charges.
Under legal pressure, Mr. Bush created “combatant status review tribunals,” but they are a mockery of any civilized legal proceeding. They take place thousands of miles from the point of capture, and often years later. Evidence obtained by coercion and torture is permitted. The inmates do not get to challenge this evidence. They usually do not see it.
The Bush administration uses the hoary “fog of war” dodge to justify the failure to screen prisoners, saying it is not practical to do that on the battlefield. That’s nonsense. It did not happen in Afghanistan, and often in Iraq, because Mr. Bush decided just to ship the prisoners off to Gitmo.
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Prisoners designated as illegal combatants are subject to trial rules out of the Red Queen’s playbook. The administration refuses to allow lawyers access to 14 terrorism suspects transferred in September from C.I.A. prisons to Guantánamo. It says that if they had a lawyer, they might say that they were tortured or abused at the C.I.A. prisons, and anything that happened at those prisons is secret.
At first, Mr. Bush provided no system of trial at the Guantánamo camp. Then he invented his own military tribunals, which were rightly overturned by the Supreme Court. Congress then passed the Military Commissions Act, which did not fix the problem. Some tasks now for Congress:
Ban Tainted Evidence
The Military Commissions Act and the regulations drawn up by the Pentagon to put it into action, are far too permissive on evidence obtained through physical abuse or coercion. This evidence is unreliable. The method of obtaining it is an affront.
Ban Secret Evidence
Under the Pentagon’s new rules for military tribunals, judges are allowed to keep evidence secret from a prisoner’s lawyer if the government persuades the judge it is classified. The information that may be withheld can include interrogation methods, which would make it hard, if not impossible, to prove torture or abuse.
Better Define ‘Classified’ Evidence
The military commission rules define this sort of secret evidence as “any information or material that has been determined by the United States government pursuant to statute, executive order or regulation to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national security.” This is too broad, even if a president can be trusted to exercise the power fairly and carefully. Mr. Bush has shown he cannot be trusted to do that.
Respect the Right to Counsel
Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration allowed the government to listen to conversations and intercept mail between some prisoners and their lawyers. This had the effect of suspending their right to effective legal representation. Since then, the administration has been unceasingly hostile to any lawyers who defend detainees. The right to legal counsel does not exist to coddle serial terrorists or snarl legal proceedings. It exists to protect innocent people from illegal imprisonment.
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Beyond all these huge tasks, Congress should halt the federal government’s race to classify documents to avoid public scrutiny — 15.6 million in 2005, nearly double the 2001 number. It should also reverse the grievous harm this administration has done to the Freedom of Information Act by encouraging agencies to reject requests for documents whenever possible. Congress should curtail F.B.I. spying on nonviolent antiwar groups and revisit parts of the Patriot Act that allow this practice.
The United States should apologize to a Canadian citizen and a German citizen, both innocent, who were kidnapped and tortured by American agents.
Oh yes, and it is time to close the Guantánamo camp. It is a despicable symbol of the abuses committed by this administration (with Congress’s complicity) in the name of fighting terrorism.

Hawkings to ride Vomit Comet
Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who authored the best-selling book, "A Brief History of Time," soon will experience a brief history with weightlessness.
Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, plans to go on a weightless flight on April 26, officials at the flight operator said Thursday.
The flight, operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based space tourism and entertainment company, will take off and return to a landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.
"As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience first hand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment," Hawking said in a statement.
The modified Boeing 727 generally soars to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunges 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth.
Zero Gravity CEO Peter Diamandis said assistants will be onboard to help Hawking.
"The key thing here is that weightless and personal spaceflight is something available to everyone, even someone like Prof. Hawking," Diamandis told The Associated Press. "This something that almost everyone can now experience."
Zero Gravity will pick up the bill, which normally is $3,750. The company also plans to have two seats on the flight auctioned off by two charities.
The company began offering the flights in 2004.
Last year, Hawking publicly spoke of his desire to go into space and made an appeal to Sir Richard Branson, whose company, Virgin Galactic, is building a suborbital spaceship that could be flying passengers as early as 2009.
Branson has decided he will personally finance Hawking's ticket into space — a flight that would normally cost $200,000.
"He's one of the greatest physicists of all time," Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told AP earlier this year.

Pat Trembee's Day!

Today is Pat Trembee's 47th birthday. He is a psychologist for Contra Costa County, California. He has a associate degree in psychology and is attending Contra Costa Community College to further his education. He lives with Clark Attaway, his companion of 28 years!

Pat has lived a tough life; getting past alcohol, angst, and long term family troubles. He is a kind generous and at time cynical man, but always he is honest and without guile.

He has been a dear friend since 1978. All of us at Audiea wish him all the best!

Happy Birthday Pat!

S.F.'s Castro district faces an identity crisis: As straights move in, some fear loss of the area's character
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer

To walk down San Francisco's Castro Street -- where men casually embrace on sidewalks in the shadow of an enormous rainbow flag -- the neighborhood's status as "gay Mecca" seems obvious.
But up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood's many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather.
The integration of gay and straight is increasingly evident not only in the Castro District but across North America, from Chicago to New York City to Toronto, where urban revitalization is bringing new residents at the same time some gays are settling in other parts of cities or the suburbs -- such as the East Bay.
But some gay and lesbian residents of the Castro are worried that the culture and history of their world-famous neighborhood could be lost in the process, and they have started a campaign to preserve its character. The city, meanwhile, is spending $100,000 on a plan aimed at keeping the area's gay identity intact.
Heterosexuals "are welcome as long as they understand this is our community," said Adam Light, a leader in the Castro Coalition, a group formed eight months ago to address the shifts in the neighborhood in recent years.
In San Francisco, the line between the Castro and nearby Noe Valley has blurred, said Aldo Congi, a San Francisco native and vice president of McGuire Real Estate who has sold property in the city since 1979. In the 1970s, the gay revolution in the Castro was shocking to straight people, including him.
"There used to be demarcation, where straight families would want to be in Noe and gay families or couples in the Castro," Congi said. "I think it's much more integrated now. I don't think there's any question about that."
While evidence of the change is largely anecdotal, estimates based on census data from 2000 and 2005 show that San Francisco and other major cities in the United States are losing gay and lesbian couples, while Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose gained couples, according to a UCLA demographer.
The Castro's gay and lesbian residents need to be actively involved in neighborhood planning if they want to see the area maintain its identity, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chair of the School of Public Affairs and Urban Planning at UCLA.
"It's very difficult to stop change," she said. "But you can try to direct it in ways that you like as opposed to ways that you hate."
San Francisco's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community also is helped by its storied history. Thousands of gays and lesbians came to the city at the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement in the late 1960s, settling first in the Haight, where they fixed up Victorian homes. In the 1970s and '80s, many of them moved over the hill to the Castro, where there was less crime.
"I think the only gay neighborhood that is going to survive is the Castro," said Don Reuter, a New York writer who has spent the past seven months documenting the status of gay enclaves in 12 U.S. cities. "In every city this is going on. We're unraveling. Our gay neighborhoods are unraveling," he said.
In Chicago, the core gay neighborhood has moved farther from the urban center as real estate prices have risen. Most gay and lesbian people who own homes now live on the northern edge of the city, said filmmaker Ron Pajak, who is documenting the history of the city's gay community.
A district of gay nightclubs in southern Washington, D.C., is being demolished to make room for a new stadium. And in Toronto, high-rise condos are replacing parking lots in the Gay Village, and more heterosexuals are moving into the neighborhood.
"You can't tell people where to live, and people are making all sorts of decisions," said Kyle Raye, Toronto's first openly gay city councilman who has represented the Gay Village area since 1991. "The lines are blurred; even the police love working (during gay pride events). There are significant social changes that have occurred."
Still, gay and lesbian residents in San Francisco are trying to draw lines around the Castro. Last week, the city began taking bids from consultants to create a plan to guide development of at least nine major properties and vacant lots on Market Street.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the area and is leading the city planning process, sees the effort as a "community visioning process" that will include the creation of smaller units of affordable housing for young people and the elderly.
"I think we can do things in the next four to five years that will sustain us for the next 40," Dufty said.
He also wants development that will create spaces for community institutions such as Theater Rhinoceros, which bills itself as the city's "queer theater," and organizations that assist people who have HIV and AIDS. But his biggest goal is to create a permanent home in the neighborhood for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives, along with a museum.
"People from around the world go to the Castro, and there is precious little they can access to know our history," he said.
That history was not a factor when Rachel Beckert and her husband decided to move their family to a flat on Eureka Street in the heart of the Castro three years ago.
"The only thing that meant anything to me was the area would be nice," said Beckert on a recent day, as she watched her son and daughter ramble through the playground at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center a block from the center of the Castro Street shopping district. Eureka Valley is the historic name for the neighborhood that once had many Irish and German residents, some of whom still live there.
Beckert's brother, sister-in-law and their children moved into the flat below them. They picked the neighborhood for its location, safety and proximity to shopping -- attributes that attract many.
At first, Beckert wondered if her family's presence would provoke a backlash from gay and lesbian residents, but she says they have been friendly. She rejects suggestions that families like hers should live in other neighborhoods.
"You could also say this neighborhood used to be full of families," she said, adding that neighbors on both sides of her building lived in the Castro before it became a gay enclave.
The blocks surrounding the recreation center and the Beckerts' home have the highest concentration of gay and lesbian residents in the Castro -- as high as 95 percent, according to an estimate based on 2000 census data by Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks demographic data of gays and lesbians. According to the estimate, the proportion of gay and lesbian residents ranges from about 80 percent to 30 percent elsewhere in the area.
Using census data to look at population shifts over time is more difficult. Between 2000 and 2005, same-sex couples in San Francisco declined by about 5 percent, Gates estimates. The rate was 2 1/2 times that of heterosexual couples.
The trend is also apparent in Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Houston, Detroit and Austin, Texas, according to the estimate. The population of same-sex couples in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, meanwhile, appeared to increase during the period -- San Jose by 34 percent, Oakland by 14 percent and Berkeley by 8 percent.
Along Castro Street, merchants are seeing another trend: high turnover among shops as business owners struggle to afford rents that are among the highest in the city.
"We need to find and attract new businesses to the neighborhood," said Paul Moffett, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro. "They may not be gay-owned, but the bottom line is we want a vibrant, successful and healthy business community. Whether gay, Chinese, African American or owned by women, it doesn't matter."
Perhaps the central question expressed in community forums about the future of the Castro is whether gays and lesbians should assimilate into mainstream culture as they gain acceptance -- or maintain a separate place.
"Having a specific neighborhood politicians can point to, can go to and shake hands or kiss lesbian babies, has really solidified the gay vote, our political muscle," said longtime community activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca at a forum in November.
He said places that are free from anti-gay violence and discrimination are important refuges. But other people believe anti-gay sentiment will fade over time.
San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau chief Joe D'Alessandro, who lives in the Castro with his gay partner and their six children, said he thinks gay enclaves marginalize the people who live there. He said the gay community in his previous home of Portland, Ore., a city without a historically gay neighborhood, is a model because gay and lesbian residents comfortably live in the mainstream.
"They do not live in a ghetto," D'Alessandro said, "and I think they're stronger because of it."
Castro forum on gay neighborhoods

From NY Times
The Way We Live Now: Narrowing the Religion Gap?
By GARY ROSEN
Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.
Strange, no? It’s not hard to envision Clinton and Obama among the faithful. She is a lifelong Methodist and self-described “praying person,” and he belongs to a church where some years ago he found himself (in his own words) “kneeling beneath that cross” in submission “to His will.” Both slip easily into the earnest, humble-of-the-earth mode of liberal God talk.
But McCain and Giuliani? You somehow imagine them fidgeting during the hymns and checking their watches. The senator is an Episcopalian, the former mayor a Catholic, but neither man, you have to think, would be caught dead in a Bible-study group or could possibly declare, à la George W. Bush, that his favorite philosopher is “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the piety primary, the Democrats win hands down.
None of this is likely to reverse the “religion gap” in our politics — that is, the fact that regular churchgoers identify by a wide margin with the G.O.P. Come election time, the personal religiosity of the Democratic candidates won’t matter nearly as much as the positions they take in all the drearily familiar theaters of the culture war. What a matchup between churchgoing Democrats and secular-minded Republicans may supply, though, is welcome moderation in our debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. God knows, both sides of the ideological divide have fundamentalists in need of taming.
On the right, the culprits are familiar, having become stock characters in our politics. In his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain called them “the agents of intolerance,” singling out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. For a taste of their views, you can visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America (C.W.A.), which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from C.W.A.’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in Hell.”
A number of observers on the right, including Jeffrey Hart of National Review, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and the blogger Andrew Sullivan, have performed a service lately by denouncing the G.O.P.’s pact with such authoritarian bullies. But the problem can be exaggerated. Whatever their private views, most of today’s big-time social conservatives speak in public as faith-based policy wonks, not as preachers of fire and brimstone. Consider James C. Dobson, the controversial founder of Focus on the Family. In a recent article titled “Two Mommies Is One Too Many,” he objected to the impending parenthood of Mary Cheney and her partner. The core of his argument? What he trumpets as “more than 30 years of social-science evidence” showing that children do best with a married mother and father.
Is Dobson persuasive about the supposed evils of gay parenthood? Not to me. But the case he makes is based on an asserted set of facts — facts that are open to challenge and dependent on neither revelation nor church writ. Yes, he also avers in passing that traditional marriage is “God’s design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth,” and this is probably what motivates him. But is there anything wrong with so frankly religious a premise? Does it somehow disqualify his arguments?
Here is where the dogmatists of the secular left come in. Looking to fend off Bible-toting conservatives, the philosopher Richard Rorty argued more than a decade ago that in a modern democracy, faith should be a strictly private matter and has no place in public discussion. Traditional religion, he wrote, is a “conversation stopper,” a source of values before which nonbelievers can be only mum. The same rigid divide informs a recent manifesto “in defense of science and secularism” signed by such academic luminaries as Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Edward O. Wilson. They urge the country’s political leaders “not to permit legislation or executive action to be influenced by religious beliefs.”
So categorical a rejection of faith in the public square is impossible to reconcile with our political traditions, of course. It sweeps away not just today’s social conservatives but also abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Dr. King without the almighty? Unthinkable. Conceding the extremism of his earlier view, Rorty himself has backtracked. Citizens should feel free to speak as believers, he now suggests, so long as they don’t simply “cite authority, scriptural or otherwise.”
It’s a reasonable standard. After all, very few of us, whether religious or secular, can easily articulate our views about fundamental things. On questions of human dignity and human ends, we tend to sputter and assert, setting out propositions that are difficult to justify to those who don’t share them. Invoking secular values like “autonomy” or “self-realization” can be just as much of a “conversation stopper” as appealing to the Bible. What we owe one another are concrete explanations, grounded in terms we might hope to share.
Can the rising field of presidential hopefuls move beyond the collision of orthodoxies to which we have grown accustomed? Maybe in some small way, if only because of the peculiarities of the personalities involved, but even that would be progress. At our present cultural moment, it is hard to think of a more edifying prospect than a campaign that will feature a running debate between churchgoing Democrats and vaguely impious Republicans.
Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary.

Retinal Implant Restores Limited Sight to Blind

From Forbes

FRIDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say a new high-tech implant is restoring at least some sight to people blinded by eye disease.
The device -- known as the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System -- is an updated and more powerful version of an electronic retinal implant that has been the subject of ongoing clinical trials since 2002.
Speaking in San Francisco on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the device's developers announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had recently granted approval for a new clinical trial of the technology.
The prototype artificial retina used an array of 16 electrodes surgically inserted into a diseased eye to function as light-sensitive surrogates for damaged retinal photoreceptor cells.
Implants of this original configuration were able to give six blind patients the limited ability to distinguish light, perceive motion, and identify general shapes and objects.
The second generation retinal prosthesis will be fitted with 60 electrodes -- an increase that the researchers say will offer the blind the opportunity to acquire higher-resolution sight.
"Our work to date with our retinal prosthesis has exceeded all expectations we had, and we are very excited and look forward to the results from our 60-channel implant," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Humayun, a professor of ophthalmology with the Doheny Eye Institute in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, San Francisco.
He said that clinical trials of the newest generation of retinal prosthesis will begin later this year.
The technology is being targeted at both young and elderly patients blinded by either retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration. Approximately 25 million people, six million in the United States alone, have lost most or all of their vision to such diseases, a figure Humayun said researchers expect will double by 2020.
The term "retinitis pigmentosa" (RP) refers to a number of hereditary eye diseases characterized by the slow deterioration of retinal receptor cells, known as rods and cones. Such cells are key in capturing and translating light into an electrical pulse, which the brain then interprets as an image.
Usually striking early in life, the condition most commonly results in the uncorrectable loss of peripheral vision and color perception.
By contrast, macular degeneration (MD) involves damage to the center of the retina and the loss of central vision, rendering the patient unable to focus clearly on objects straight ahead. Over time, reading, driving, and face recognition are all severely impaired by this incurable disease, which has no known cause and is most common among the elderly. By some estimates, more than 10 million Americans are currently afflicted with the illness.
Both the original and current versions of the retinal implants, each manufactured by study co-sponsor Second Sight Medical Products, are designed to communicate with an external camera and computer.
The implant patient is outfitted with a pair of glasses rigged with a video camera. The camera records incoming visuals and transmits the sights by wire to a customized computer for processing. The data is, in turn, sent wirelessly directly to the implant, whose electrodes decode the message into an electrical impulse that can be directed to the brain for visual interpretation.
The second-generation study will focus on patients over the age of 50 who once had healthy vision before contracting either RP or MD.
The researchers expressed enthusiasm about the new device's prospects, noting that this suped-up version will bring also faster implant and recovery times, because it is just one-quarter the size of the original model.
However, Dr. John Loewenstein, an associate chief of ophthalmology with the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, cautioned that even these cutting-edge technologies cannot promise anything like complete eyesight.
"This is by no means a slam-dunk, in the sense that it will provide true vision in the way we usually think about it," said Loewenstein, who is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and involved in similar work.
"I don't want to denigrate the work, and this is a beginning," he said. "But the retina's electrical transmission process is very sophisticated, and we simply don't yet understand the language well enough to simulate it."
Loewenstein added that he has seen no evidence to suggest that electrode technology is yet poised to replicate the retina's complexity.
"When we put those electrodes in and stimulate the retina, people can see spots of light," he explained. "But we have not yet succeeded in translating those spots of light into true images. The analogy is to a scoreboard with individual light bulbs lined up to make up a '1' or a '2' or an 'A' or a 'B'. A person with normal vision can interpret all the bulbs as a whole to construe a letter or number. And we have all hoped, naively, that we could mimic this ability with a prosthesis. But, so far, it just hasn't worked out that way."
Jim Weiland, a member of Humayun's research team and an associate professor of ophthalmology, agreed there are many obstacles on the path toward full sight restoration. But he remains optimistic.
"Yes, it's true that how we stimulate the retina to convey useful information is still an open question," Weiland acknowledged. "So, this device is not something that's going to replace the natural vision that you and I have. But I do expect that there will be some benefit that a completely blind person may derive from this device, in terms of providing some ability to make out imagery and navigate about."
"Of course, this benefit has to be proven in a trial," added Weiland. "We think we're on the right road. But we still have a lot of work to do."

They wrote off resilient Rudy a little too soon
Andrew Sullivan
It tells you something about the state of the American right that Rudy Giuliani is having a very hard time deciding whether to run for the Republican nomination in 2008. He either has the highest ratings of the plausible candidates among Republican voters, or near the highest.
His image will for ever be fused with the heroism of the response to 9/11. His legacy is the ravishing revival of New York City in the 1990s. Nobody doubts his effectiveness as a manager, or the charisma he brings to the political arena. No other Republican has his star power. And yet he has been inching only tentatively towards a real decision, and still hasn’t pulled the lever.
There are various plausible explanations for Giuliani’s equivocation. Some argue that the New York tabloids are sitting on a pile of sleaze to be hurled in his general direction once he hits the truly big time. It’s plausible. You don’t get to turn New York City around without knowing and persuading many unsavoury urban characters. It would not be a shock to discover that some of that rubbed off.
He’s also making a small fortune in the consultancy business and the speaking circuit — money he’d forfeit in a presidential run and clients who might not like the public scrutiny involved. Besides, he’s already a hero. Why ruin it with a campaign that would only expose all his faults, errors and flaws?
All of these factors might be at play in Giuliani’s mind. But the lukewarm response to him from the party’s base cannot be a plus. Here’s a quote of last week from a key leader of the religious right, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council: “He’s the frontrunner but it’s kind of like here in DC, you drive over the Potomac [river] at night and it looks beautiful but if you get down near it you certainly wouldn’t want to take anything out of it and eat it. It’s polluted; it’s got problems.”
A more elevated expression of the base’s discomfort came from Terry Jeffrey last week. Jeffrey is an editor at Ronald Reagan’s favourite journal, Human Events and wrote a column for National Review, the leading conservative magazine, that politely described Giuliani as anathema to conservatism.
You might well rub your eyes. Giuliani is for low taxes, law and order (often at the expense of civil liberties) and strong defence. As a prosecutor, he went after white-collar crooks like Michael Milken and Marc Rich as well as mafia hoods. He has a sterling antiterrorist record. In 1995 he famously ejected the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from a concert at the Lincoln Center in New York because Arafat had not been formally invited. “Maybe we should wake people up to the way this terrorist is being romanticised,” Giuliani explained.
You’d think this record would count as “conservative”. You’d think this colourful, capable, intelligent man would be the Republican party’s dream candidate. He was Time magazine’s person of the year in 2001. He has been called “America’s mayor”.
After a presidency criticised for incompetence, Giuliani is a details-oriented, results-driven manager. Seconds after his inauguration, Americans would feel safer.
But read Terry Jeffrey’s ideological indictment: “Giuliani’s positions on abortion and marriage disqualify him as a conservative because they annihilate the link between the natural law and man-made laws. Indeed, they use man-made law to promote and protect acts that violate the natural law.”
Giuliani’s heretical positions on abortion and marriage are as follows: he believes that abortion should be legal and that gay couples should be able to enter civil unions (but not civil marriage). The evangelical base of the Republicans believes that any civil recognition of gay couples is an attack on the family and that any defence of the right to a legal abortion is anathema.
For good measure, Giuliani is also fine with embryonic stem-cell research and mellow on immigration. So he would be to the right of David Cameron (he’d shoot a hoodie before he hugged one), but he is far too far to the left for the vocal elements of the Republican base.
Then there’s the personal life. Giuliani has been married three times. He divorced his second wife while having an affair with a staffer whom he then married. It got ugly for a while. Worse: during his estrangement from his second wife, he lived in the house of a gay couple who were friends. He has also dressed in drag on several occasions. You can YouTube a clip of him in full drag being courted by Donald Trump in a department store. New Yorkers loved it. But it doesn’t go down too well in South Carolina.
Or does it? The polling is extremely clear: Giuliani, for all his heretical tendencies, is still ahead of every other Republican candidate. Moreover, a recent Gallup poll found only 23% of Republican voters deeming him “unacceptable” compared with 41% saying the same for John McCain. The salient question to ask is: if Giuliani is so abhorrent to conservatives, why is he polling so well?
We don’t know the answer to that yet. It’s hard to gauge a campaign’s viability before it has begun. My view is that the managers and spokesmen of the base may be misreading the real mood of the evangelical rank and file. They’re more pragmatic than their leaders. If Hillary Clinton is the alternative, many Republicans will overlook Giuliani’s social moderation.
Moreover, there is a growing sense even among hardline conservatives that they may have overreached badly these past few years. Their stridency on abortion, gays, stem-cell research and end-of-life issues has begun to lose them many voters in the suburbs, the Midwest and the Mountain West. They are worried that the thumping loss in the midterm elections of 2006 was not a blip but the turning of a tide against them.
If they believe that, maybe Giuliani is the perfect antidote. Maybe he could rid the Republicans of their metastasising image as a Southern, intolerant and corrupt machine, and rebuild a more national and inclusive Republican party.
Or maybe, of course, his candidacy could be the final coup de grâce for a coalition already sinking under its own divisions. We don’t know yet — and neither does Rudy. So we wait for him, as he waits for others, and as the 2008 campaign waits for no one.