Follow the Leader
We elected him to do the right thing—not take dictation.
By Anna Quindlen
Copyright by NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010
http://www.newsweek.com/id/232833
By the time the current political cycle is over, the term "populist" will have become a buzzword so misused and abused that it will be leached of all real meaning. The dictionary definitions refer to the agrarian political party of the late 19th century, then segue into the use of the term that modern politicians have learned to embrace: "a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people."
But what those people might be trying to say is not always clear. The explanations for the current "populist rage" are almost as various as those legendary blind men feeling different parts of an elephant: big government, big banks, unemployment, and a health-care plan that went (choose one) too far, too fast, not far enough, not fast enough. In fact, the Senate election results in Massachusetts, in which a Republican seized the seat held by Ted Kennedy for almost half a century and threw the Democratic Party into a monumental tizzy, was a classic toss-the-bums-out event, neither specific nor illuminating.
So at the moment the problem in Washington is us, not them, or at least how they try to figure us out. Good luck with that. One poll of former Obama supporters who abandoned the Democrats in Massachusetts showed that 41 percent of those who opposed the health-care plan weren't sure exactly why. If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they're going to need ordinary people to be wiser than that.
Social issues are easy: you're either for or against the death penalty, abortion, gay marriage. Economics are complex. Over and over again some Americans say they want lower taxes and smaller government. Yet somehow, in a recurrent bit of magical thinking, they also expect those things that taxes are used to pay for and that government delivers. The result is contradictory: vote down the school-board budget, then complain that Johnny can't read.
Another political buzzword, "productivity," has come to stand for the proposition that you can always do more with less. There's little evidence that that's accurate. And it's hard to believe that even the most zealous tea-party types would shrug philosophically if a bunch of kids died of E. coli because we hadn't hired enough food inspectors. The old dictum stands: you get what you pay for.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
EBay typos can save you money
EBay typos can save you money
By Craig Crossman, McClatchy
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
January 22, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/sc-ym-0131-ebay-typos-20100125,0,2036204.story
No matter how long you write, you will make typographical errors. The colloquial term is "typo," and anyone who uses a keyboard has more than likely made their fair share. Typos are a way of life, and some can be quite amusing. The ones that are just misspelled can be caught easily by the obligatory spell-checker. But sometimes a typo can itself be spelled correctly, and those are usually the slippery ones that often get by even the most eagle-eyed editor.
I caught one of my worst at the last moment. I was writing a review of a software product that would help summarize documents. I wrote: "If your secretary is too busty to tackle those documents, your computer may hold the answer." It's amazing how one letter "t" in the wrong place can spell disaster.
Take eBay, for example. It doesn't spell check its listings. So unless it's something really offensive or obscene, it remains the way it's posted. And therein lies a secret to finding some really great deals.
If a popular item is put up for auction, everyone is going to bid on it and snatch it up faster than you can spell " iPod." But what happens when a seller puts their "I-Pod" up for sale? Everyone is searching for the keyword "iPod" but anything else, including "eye-pod" (don't laugh, it's happened), will go unnoticed.
Chances are you would be able to buy that iPod for a song. The only problem is actually finding those misspelled items. You may be able to do some kind of general search on a few of the more common typos, but to find the really bad ones, you're going to need some help.
This is where Fat Fingers comes in. Its creator noticed that literally thousands of items were not selling because no one could find them. As he continued to search, he discovered some really great deals on which no one was bidding. The idea to create a Web site that searched for misspelled item names and typos on eBay listings quickly followed, and Fat Fingers was born.
The home page is really simple. Just type in the item for which you are looking and click the Find button. Fat Fingers goes through its constantly growing database of how people typically misspell search words and submits all into eBay. You can further refine your search via its Options. These check boxes let you include the correct spelling, restrict the search to only the Buy It Now auctions and just the auctions that use PayPal.
I typed in "iPod Nano" and found dozens of listings for iPod Nanos that were simply listed as "Pod" and "I POD." I also saw "Ipood Nano" and "I+pod Nino."
None of them would have turned up with a correct spelling search. But there they were. I also tried something with a more conventional spelling, "Emerald ring" turned up a beautiful "Emerlad ring" and a very nice "Emrald ring" with absolutely no bids on them. Looked like a deal to me.
Bottom line is that spelling mistakes can be a money saver for you on eBay. So before you get ready to make that big purchase, you might want to give Fat Fingers (www.fatfingers.com) a try. It's free, and who knows? Someone's typo just might spell success for you.
By Craig Crossman, McClatchy
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
January 22, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/sc-ym-0131-ebay-typos-20100125,0,2036204.story
No matter how long you write, you will make typographical errors. The colloquial term is "typo," and anyone who uses a keyboard has more than likely made their fair share. Typos are a way of life, and some can be quite amusing. The ones that are just misspelled can be caught easily by the obligatory spell-checker. But sometimes a typo can itself be spelled correctly, and those are usually the slippery ones that often get by even the most eagle-eyed editor.
I caught one of my worst at the last moment. I was writing a review of a software product that would help summarize documents. I wrote: "If your secretary is too busty to tackle those documents, your computer may hold the answer." It's amazing how one letter "t" in the wrong place can spell disaster.
Take eBay, for example. It doesn't spell check its listings. So unless it's something really offensive or obscene, it remains the way it's posted. And therein lies a secret to finding some really great deals.
If a popular item is put up for auction, everyone is going to bid on it and snatch it up faster than you can spell " iPod." But what happens when a seller puts their "I-Pod" up for sale? Everyone is searching for the keyword "iPod" but anything else, including "eye-pod" (don't laugh, it's happened), will go unnoticed.
Chances are you would be able to buy that iPod for a song. The only problem is actually finding those misspelled items. You may be able to do some kind of general search on a few of the more common typos, but to find the really bad ones, you're going to need some help.
This is where Fat Fingers comes in. Its creator noticed that literally thousands of items were not selling because no one could find them. As he continued to search, he discovered some really great deals on which no one was bidding. The idea to create a Web site that searched for misspelled item names and typos on eBay listings quickly followed, and Fat Fingers was born.
The home page is really simple. Just type in the item for which you are looking and click the Find button. Fat Fingers goes through its constantly growing database of how people typically misspell search words and submits all into eBay. You can further refine your search via its Options. These check boxes let you include the correct spelling, restrict the search to only the Buy It Now auctions and just the auctions that use PayPal.
I typed in "iPod Nano" and found dozens of listings for iPod Nanos that were simply listed as "Pod" and "I POD." I also saw "Ipood Nano" and "I+pod Nino."
None of them would have turned up with a correct spelling search. But there they were. I also tried something with a more conventional spelling, "Emerald ring" turned up a beautiful "Emerlad ring" and a very nice "Emrald ring" with absolutely no bids on them. Looked like a deal to me.
Bottom line is that spelling mistakes can be a money saver for you on eBay. So before you get ready to make that big purchase, you might want to give Fat Fingers (www.fatfingers.com) a try. It's free, and who knows? Someone's typo just might spell success for you.
Five myths about America's credit card debt
Five myths about America's credit card debt
By Robert D. Manning
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, January 31, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012902504.html
They're yuppie food stamps. They give new meaning to the question "paper or plastic?" And they're in everyone's wallet. Americans have nearly 700 million all-purpose bank credit cards, plus nearly 500 million retail store cards -- and they have transformed how we live and consume. Today, Americans are more dependent on credit than savings, a radical departure from the last major economic crisis, in the 1930s. Congress's effort to change that, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act signed by President Obama last spring, will go into effect in a few weeks. But it won't fix everything. Or maybe not much of anything. Here are the myths that muddle our understanding of how we've racked up so much credit card debt.
Middle-class American families have long depended on bank credit cards to manage their budgets.
1. Not true. Consumer credit originated with local merchants that offered "open book" credit to cement customer loyalty and increase sales. As major retail chains and malls replaced small shopkeepers in the 1950s and '60s, stores such as Sears and Montgomery Ward issued credit cards for the same reasons. But if you didn't like what Sears had to offer, you couldn't use its credit card anywhere else.
Universal or bank cards such as Visa or MasterCard were reserved for high- and upper-middle-income households. They were offered to reward the banks' best customers (after all, how many toasters could they use?) and served as loss leaders, as most cardholders paid off their monthly balances. Until the early 1980s, bank credit cards were a symbol of high social status, used mainly for convenience rather than because of need. This was the inspiration for the color-coded cards that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: Fiscally responsible "convenience" users wanted to be distinguished from less credit-worthy consumers with a platinum card.
More people have credit cards because companies got better at managing risk and began marketing to lower-income customers.
2. Mostly no. Credit card use expanded dramatically during the golden age of the industry -- beginning in the early 1980s -- because deregulation suddenly allowed high interest rates and penalty fees, and credit cards became a major engine of bank profits. In 1978, a Supreme Court decision effectively ended consumer interest-rate limits and the federal usury law. After the 1981-82 recession, industrial restructuring shifted demand for bank loans from manufacturing companies to individual households, and national banks aggressively pushed for more deregulatory policies, in line with the '78 decision. A 1996 Supreme Court ruling that ended state-regulated limits on credit card fees furthered that cause. Today, only nonprofit credit unions, as mandated by Congress, must abide by an interest rate ceiling of 15 percent.
As more and more people were preapproved for credit cards in the '80s and '90s, the "free" credit used by the most affluent households was subsidized by the high interest rates and penalty fees paid by the most financially distressed. A carefully guarded secret of the industry is that about a quarter of cardholders have accounted for almost two-thirds of interest and penalty-fee revenues. Nearly half of all credit card accounts do not generate finance and fee revenues.
Responsible cardholders will have to pay more to make up for the defaults of irresponsible consumers.
3. False. Although credit card companies are experiencing record default rates, irresponsible consumer borrowing is not the main culprit behind soaring interest rates and fees. Banks have suffered far more from mortgage foreclosures and home-equity loan defaults. Major banks encouraged their credit card divisions to relax their standards at the end of the financial bubble; more customers went deeper into credit card debt. Those customers were encouraged to refinance their mortgages, generating high fees for the banks. Banks then sold securities backed by credit card debt to institutional investors around the world. When the bubble burst in September 2008, banks could not sell these low-quality securities. They were stuck with poorly performing credit card portfolios.
For cardholders, the central problem is that the credit card industry's business model is fundamentally flawed; bankers want consumers to foot the bill for its reengineering through higher interest rates and fees. As deregulation gave rise to conglomerate financial institutions, credit cards continued to serve as marketing loss leaders for attracting higher-income cardholders (who typically paid off their monthly charges) by bundling them with other financial products such as loans, brokerage fees and insurance. With the recession, these other bank revenues have declined sharply, raising pressure on credit card companies to boost profits.
The credit card industry is so competitive that regulation is unnecessary.
4. Rather than a self-regulating and intensely competitive market of more than 5,000 issuers, the credit card industry is one of the most concentrated in the nation (and is increasingly being hit with allegations of monopoly practices). The top three issuers -- Bank of America, Citibank and Chase -- control more than 60 percent of outstanding credit card debt. Consumer choice has declined over the past 20 years as economies of scale for marketing, administration and customer service have led thousands of card issuers to cash out to the largest banks. And self-regulation has failed when it comes to weeding out the worst card issuers; Visa and MasterCard have dismal track records in disciplining their members.
The CARD Act finally protects consumers against the credit card industry's most abusive practices.
5. Yes and no. Although touted by the Obama administration as a major consumer achievement, the long-awaited CARD Act, which goes into effect Feb. 22, offers a mix of overdue protections and surprising omissions.
Some of the worst industry practices are prohibited, including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21 who don't have an independent source of income.
On the negative side, Congress stipulated a nine-month phase-in period for these regulations. For millions of Americans, especially those suffering from employment and income interruptions, this is too late. If you're in debt today, this bill doesn't help you. Companies already have jacked up interest rates, sharply reduced lines of credit, increased service fees and diluted the value of loyalty reward programs. These trends have brought consumer credit scores down, triggering higher borrowing costs and greater difficulty finding work.
But there is a silver lining to falling credit scores and fewer preapprovals for cards: More people are learning that when it comes to plastic, you can leave home without it.
Robert D. Manning is the author of "Credit Card Nation" and "Living With Debt." He was the editorial adviser to the 2007 documentary "In Debt We Trust" and is the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.
By Robert D. Manning
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, January 31, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012902504.html
They're yuppie food stamps. They give new meaning to the question "paper or plastic?" And they're in everyone's wallet. Americans have nearly 700 million all-purpose bank credit cards, plus nearly 500 million retail store cards -- and they have transformed how we live and consume. Today, Americans are more dependent on credit than savings, a radical departure from the last major economic crisis, in the 1930s. Congress's effort to change that, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act signed by President Obama last spring, will go into effect in a few weeks. But it won't fix everything. Or maybe not much of anything. Here are the myths that muddle our understanding of how we've racked up so much credit card debt.
Middle-class American families have long depended on bank credit cards to manage their budgets.
1. Not true. Consumer credit originated with local merchants that offered "open book" credit to cement customer loyalty and increase sales. As major retail chains and malls replaced small shopkeepers in the 1950s and '60s, stores such as Sears and Montgomery Ward issued credit cards for the same reasons. But if you didn't like what Sears had to offer, you couldn't use its credit card anywhere else.
Universal or bank cards such as Visa or MasterCard were reserved for high- and upper-middle-income households. They were offered to reward the banks' best customers (after all, how many toasters could they use?) and served as loss leaders, as most cardholders paid off their monthly balances. Until the early 1980s, bank credit cards were a symbol of high social status, used mainly for convenience rather than because of need. This was the inspiration for the color-coded cards that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: Fiscally responsible "convenience" users wanted to be distinguished from less credit-worthy consumers with a platinum card.
More people have credit cards because companies got better at managing risk and began marketing to lower-income customers.
2. Mostly no. Credit card use expanded dramatically during the golden age of the industry -- beginning in the early 1980s -- because deregulation suddenly allowed high interest rates and penalty fees, and credit cards became a major engine of bank profits. In 1978, a Supreme Court decision effectively ended consumer interest-rate limits and the federal usury law. After the 1981-82 recession, industrial restructuring shifted demand for bank loans from manufacturing companies to individual households, and national banks aggressively pushed for more deregulatory policies, in line with the '78 decision. A 1996 Supreme Court ruling that ended state-regulated limits on credit card fees furthered that cause. Today, only nonprofit credit unions, as mandated by Congress, must abide by an interest rate ceiling of 15 percent.
As more and more people were preapproved for credit cards in the '80s and '90s, the "free" credit used by the most affluent households was subsidized by the high interest rates and penalty fees paid by the most financially distressed. A carefully guarded secret of the industry is that about a quarter of cardholders have accounted for almost two-thirds of interest and penalty-fee revenues. Nearly half of all credit card accounts do not generate finance and fee revenues.
Responsible cardholders will have to pay more to make up for the defaults of irresponsible consumers.
3. False. Although credit card companies are experiencing record default rates, irresponsible consumer borrowing is not the main culprit behind soaring interest rates and fees. Banks have suffered far more from mortgage foreclosures and home-equity loan defaults. Major banks encouraged their credit card divisions to relax their standards at the end of the financial bubble; more customers went deeper into credit card debt. Those customers were encouraged to refinance their mortgages, generating high fees for the banks. Banks then sold securities backed by credit card debt to institutional investors around the world. When the bubble burst in September 2008, banks could not sell these low-quality securities. They were stuck with poorly performing credit card portfolios.
For cardholders, the central problem is that the credit card industry's business model is fundamentally flawed; bankers want consumers to foot the bill for its reengineering through higher interest rates and fees. As deregulation gave rise to conglomerate financial institutions, credit cards continued to serve as marketing loss leaders for attracting higher-income cardholders (who typically paid off their monthly charges) by bundling them with other financial products such as loans, brokerage fees and insurance. With the recession, these other bank revenues have declined sharply, raising pressure on credit card companies to boost profits.
The credit card industry is so competitive that regulation is unnecessary.
4. Rather than a self-regulating and intensely competitive market of more than 5,000 issuers, the credit card industry is one of the most concentrated in the nation (and is increasingly being hit with allegations of monopoly practices). The top three issuers -- Bank of America, Citibank and Chase -- control more than 60 percent of outstanding credit card debt. Consumer choice has declined over the past 20 years as economies of scale for marketing, administration and customer service have led thousands of card issuers to cash out to the largest banks. And self-regulation has failed when it comes to weeding out the worst card issuers; Visa and MasterCard have dismal track records in disciplining their members.
The CARD Act finally protects consumers against the credit card industry's most abusive practices.
5. Yes and no. Although touted by the Obama administration as a major consumer achievement, the long-awaited CARD Act, which goes into effect Feb. 22, offers a mix of overdue protections and surprising omissions.
Some of the worst industry practices are prohibited, including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21 who don't have an independent source of income.
On the negative side, Congress stipulated a nine-month phase-in period for these regulations. For millions of Americans, especially those suffering from employment and income interruptions, this is too late. If you're in debt today, this bill doesn't help you. Companies already have jacked up interest rates, sharply reduced lines of credit, increased service fees and diluted the value of loyalty reward programs. These trends have brought consumer credit scores down, triggering higher borrowing costs and greater difficulty finding work.
But there is a silver lining to falling credit scores and fewer preapprovals for cards: More people are learning that when it comes to plastic, you can leave home without it.
Robert D. Manning is the author of "Credit Card Nation" and "Living With Debt." He was the editorial adviser to the 2007 documentary "In Debt We Trust" and is the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.
Recharging Your Cellphone, Mother Nature’s Way
Recharging Your Cellphone, Mother Nature’s Way
By ANNE EISENBERG
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31novel.html?hpw
A NEW solar cell that imitates Mother Nature’s way of converting sunlight to energy is making its debut in a variety of consumer products.
.
The technology uses a photosensitive dye to start its energy production, much the way leaves use chlorophyll to begin photosynthesis.
The dye-sensitized cells will be used to provide power for devices ranging from e-book readers to cellphones — and will take some interesting forms. For e-book readers, for example, the cells may be found in thin, flexible panels stitched into the reader’s cover. But such panels will also be housed in new lines of backpacks and sports bags, where they can recharge devices like cellphones and music players.
The technology, long in development, will work best in full, direct sunshine, said Dr. Michael Grätzel, a chemist and professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. But the cells will also make good use of dappled and ambient light, including the indoor light of fluorescent bulbs, he said.
Most photovoltaic cells are based on silicon or related inorganic materials, not dyes. Dr. Grätzel and an American colleague, Brian O’Regan, first reported on the new type of cell in the journal Nature in 1991, and Dr. Grätzel said that he and other colleagues had been working since then to refine the technology. Now G24 Innovations, a company in Campbell, Calif., that has licensed the technology, is using it to make solar panels at its plant in Cardiff, Wales, said John Hartnett, G24’s chief executive.
Some of the panels will be placed on covers designed as an accessory for Sony e-book readers, said Tobi Doeringer, the director of global sales at Mascotte Industrial Associates, a Hong Kong company that makes bags to carry cameras, phones, sports equipment, electronic games and other products.
Mr. Doeringer said the covers, costing about $99, would be available by March. The cover supplies the power via a plug in a cradle along its spine.
The panels will also be installed on tennis bags, backpacks and messenger bags that have battery chargers within, as well as on bicycle, golf, shopping and beach bags. Prices of the bags will typically range from $149 to $249, he said, depending on the materials and size of the bag. Owners can plug their phones and music players into the bag for recharging, using a USB cord.
Some bags are already available, including messenger bags from Tonino Lamborghini, a brand licensed and distributed by Mascotte. Others will be on the market by the end of the first quarter, he said.
The solar panels have 11 cells each, said Kevin Tabor, director of science and research at G24. Wiring goes from the panel to a battery pack in the bag, he said. It takes about six to eight sunny hours outside for the panel to fuel the recharger, he said, but longer indoors.
The performance of the dye-sensitized cells has improved steadily in the laboratory, Dr. Grätzel said. “Our dyes and electrolytes have changed,” he said, and the cells have become more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity.
Within the solar cell, the dye is painted in a thin layer on a porous titanium dioxide scaffold to collect light and, in a series of steps, create power.
AN Australian company, Dyesol, supplies materials to G24 Innovations and other companies developing dye solar cell technology, said Marc Thomas, the chief executive of Dyesol’s North American operations in Sacramento. Dyesol provides the dye, titanium pastes and the electrolytes for the thin-film technology, he said. Titanium dioxide is a common, inexpensive ingredient that is used, for example, to whiten toothpaste.
Mr. Thomas noted that Dyesol customers were planning to use the technology to prolong battery life in devices like wireless sensors and keyboards.
The cells draw on many surprising sources of light, he said, including some that offer the barest trickle. “We’ve even had a case where we have generated voltage from moonlight,” he said.
E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.
By ANNE EISENBERG
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31novel.html?hpw
A NEW solar cell that imitates Mother Nature’s way of converting sunlight to energy is making its debut in a variety of consumer products.
.
The technology uses a photosensitive dye to start its energy production, much the way leaves use chlorophyll to begin photosynthesis.
The dye-sensitized cells will be used to provide power for devices ranging from e-book readers to cellphones — and will take some interesting forms. For e-book readers, for example, the cells may be found in thin, flexible panels stitched into the reader’s cover. But such panels will also be housed in new lines of backpacks and sports bags, where they can recharge devices like cellphones and music players.
The technology, long in development, will work best in full, direct sunshine, said Dr. Michael Grätzel, a chemist and professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. But the cells will also make good use of dappled and ambient light, including the indoor light of fluorescent bulbs, he said.
Most photovoltaic cells are based on silicon or related inorganic materials, not dyes. Dr. Grätzel and an American colleague, Brian O’Regan, first reported on the new type of cell in the journal Nature in 1991, and Dr. Grätzel said that he and other colleagues had been working since then to refine the technology. Now G24 Innovations, a company in Campbell, Calif., that has licensed the technology, is using it to make solar panels at its plant in Cardiff, Wales, said John Hartnett, G24’s chief executive.
Some of the panels will be placed on covers designed as an accessory for Sony e-book readers, said Tobi Doeringer, the director of global sales at Mascotte Industrial Associates, a Hong Kong company that makes bags to carry cameras, phones, sports equipment, electronic games and other products.
Mr. Doeringer said the covers, costing about $99, would be available by March. The cover supplies the power via a plug in a cradle along its spine.
The panels will also be installed on tennis bags, backpacks and messenger bags that have battery chargers within, as well as on bicycle, golf, shopping and beach bags. Prices of the bags will typically range from $149 to $249, he said, depending on the materials and size of the bag. Owners can plug their phones and music players into the bag for recharging, using a USB cord.
Some bags are already available, including messenger bags from Tonino Lamborghini, a brand licensed and distributed by Mascotte. Others will be on the market by the end of the first quarter, he said.
The solar panels have 11 cells each, said Kevin Tabor, director of science and research at G24. Wiring goes from the panel to a battery pack in the bag, he said. It takes about six to eight sunny hours outside for the panel to fuel the recharger, he said, but longer indoors.
The performance of the dye-sensitized cells has improved steadily in the laboratory, Dr. Grätzel said. “Our dyes and electrolytes have changed,” he said, and the cells have become more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity.
Within the solar cell, the dye is painted in a thin layer on a porous titanium dioxide scaffold to collect light and, in a series of steps, create power.
AN Australian company, Dyesol, supplies materials to G24 Innovations and other companies developing dye solar cell technology, said Marc Thomas, the chief executive of Dyesol’s North American operations in Sacramento. Dyesol provides the dye, titanium pastes and the electrolytes for the thin-film technology, he said. Titanium dioxide is a common, inexpensive ingredient that is used, for example, to whiten toothpaste.
Mr. Thomas noted that Dyesol customers were planning to use the technology to prolong battery life in devices like wireless sensors and keyboards.
The cells draw on many surprising sources of light, he said, including some that offer the barest trickle. “We’ve even had a case where we have generated voltage from moonlight,” he said.
E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.
G.O.P. Hits Its Stride, but Faces Rifts Over Ideology
G.O.P. Hits Its Stride, but Faces Rifts Over Ideology
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/us/politics/31gop.html?hpw
HONOLULU — Republican leaders burst into applause here the other day as their luncheon speaker, Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii, shared the latest analysis by a Washington Congressional handicapper: The way things are heading, she read, “you can count on the Democratic majority in the House being toast this fall.”
But as the Republican National Committee ended its winter meeting here on Saturday, party leaders, if jubilant over a string of election victories and declining support for President Obama, were also questioning whether they could take full advantage of the opening Democrats had handed them.
At a moment of what appears to be great if unexpected opportunity, the Republican Party continues to struggle with disputes over ideology and tactics, as well as what party leaders say is an absence of strong figures to lead it back to power, from the party chairman to prospective presidential candidates.
From a sunny perch 5,000 miles from chilly Washington, the party leaders watched Republican members of Congress try to keep their balance as Mr. Obama sought to reclaim the mantle of reasonable bipartisanship in his State of the Union address on Wednesday night and his remarkable public debate in Baltimore with House members on Friday.
At stake, they knew, was the heart of the strategy they had pursued for the last year and had intended to carry into the midterm elections: remaining unified to block the White House at every turn, rallying the conservative base but leaving Republicans vulnerable to being portrayed as the obstructionist party of no.
“We have the wind at our back,” said Katon Dawson, the former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. “We just have to find our momentum.”
Over all, it is almost surely better being the Republican Party as the 2010 election approaches. The Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was a boost to party spirits and an opportunity to press the case that Mr. Obama had fundamentally misread the electorate.
But as the president was quick to point out, with a 41st vote in the Senate and the ability to block legislation through filibuster come pressure on Republicans to share in the political risks of making hard choices. “The responsibility to govern is now yours as well,” Mr. Obama said in his State of the Union speech, a message that was certainly heard by party leaders here in Honolulu.
Christopher C. Healy, the chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, said Republicans were justified in blocking what he described as a drastic overreaching by Mr. Obama. Still, Mr. Healy acknowledged that Republicans had to be careful about being seen as overly partisan and would now be under increasing pressure to offer a competing vision of governing.
“We can’t be just about saying no,” he said. “But we have not completed the transition yet from defeated incumbent party. We have to position ourselves as an alternative and create enthusiasm for our positions.”
Many of the obstacles facing Republicans were on display in Honolulu. The party chairman, Michael Steele, is an unsettling figure within his own party, as became clear when Ms. Lingle offered a public reprimand to party members for criticizing Mr. Steele, if anonymously, to reporters. “Please don’t do a rebuke in my home state of Hawaii, not to my friend Michael Steele,” she said, as her audience rustled with discomfort.
Republicans have expressed concern about Mr. Steele’s very high profile and often combative style, as well as his propensity to say intemperate things, like predicting that Republicans would not win the majority in the House this November.
Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, said he issued a plea similar to Ms. Lingle’s to party members in a private session. He said he was startled at how members were grousing about Mr. Steele, describing it as counterproductive when he was looking to make big gains in races for governor.
For his part, Mr. Steele defended his chairmanship and made clear that he intended to seek re-election when his term ended next year. “My style is not something you get used to very easily,” he said. “I know that.” This took place at a sometimes contentious news conference — “Get your facts right,” Mr. Steele instructed one reporter — that had Republicans wincing at this latest example of Mr. Steele’s sometimes unvarnished ways.
With Mr. Obama seeking to strike a different tone at the beginning of his second year in office, Republicans back in Washington were responding with conciliatory phrases, if not yet substantive compromises.
“We’re not always going to agree, but I think it did become clear in the conversation today with the president that there are issues and items that we do agree upon,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican House leader, said Friday after the session with the president in Baltimore. Mr. Boehner suggested that the two parties pull out of complicated legislation smaller items they could agree on and vote together on those.
But here in Honolulu, the strains within the party over conservative principles versus political pragmatism played out in a sharp and public way, especially as the party establishment struggled to deal with the demands of the Tea Party movement. Republican leaders succeeded in derailing a resolution proposed by conservatives, led by James Bopp Jr. of Indiana, which would have required candidates to agree to a list of conservative positions to get party support.
But the intensity of the divisions was put on display as Mr. Bopp and Bob Tiernan, the Republican chairman from Oregon, quarreled before reporters over whether the watered-down compromise had any real force.
Mr. Bopp insisted that it did, and Mr. Tiernan insisted that it did not, repeating himself and interrupting Mr. Bopp until Mr. Bopp turned to him and said, “Shut up!”
Mr. Steele, in an interview, disputed any suggestion that the Tea Party movement was a problem for his party. “I don’t see it as a rivalry,” he said. “What I’m saying is we want to be your partner in the same fight.”
In cases where contested primaries pit Tea Party candidates against establishment Republicans, Mr. Steele said he expected both sides to come together to support the victor.
“If a Republican incumbent or a Republican candidate is running and a Tea Party candidate is in the race and the Republican wins, my expectation is that the Tea Party guy is going to support the Republican,” he said. “Because we would support the Tea Party guys.”
But Dick Armey, a former House majority leader who has become a leader of the Tea Party movement, suggested that it might be unwise for the Republican Party to count on Tea Party support.
“This is not a situation where the grass-roots activists are saying, ‘What can we do to make ourselves attractive to the Republicans?’ ” he said. “It is ‘What can we do to help the Republicans understand what they must do to be attractive to us.’ ”
Considering it was the grass-roots movement that helped lift Scott Brown to victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, losing that source of support would be a setback Mr. Steele presumably would not welcome at what would seem to be such an auspicious moment for his party.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Baltimore.
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/us/politics/31gop.html?hpw
HONOLULU — Republican leaders burst into applause here the other day as their luncheon speaker, Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii, shared the latest analysis by a Washington Congressional handicapper: The way things are heading, she read, “you can count on the Democratic majority in the House being toast this fall.”
But as the Republican National Committee ended its winter meeting here on Saturday, party leaders, if jubilant over a string of election victories and declining support for President Obama, were also questioning whether they could take full advantage of the opening Democrats had handed them.
At a moment of what appears to be great if unexpected opportunity, the Republican Party continues to struggle with disputes over ideology and tactics, as well as what party leaders say is an absence of strong figures to lead it back to power, from the party chairman to prospective presidential candidates.
From a sunny perch 5,000 miles from chilly Washington, the party leaders watched Republican members of Congress try to keep their balance as Mr. Obama sought to reclaim the mantle of reasonable bipartisanship in his State of the Union address on Wednesday night and his remarkable public debate in Baltimore with House members on Friday.
At stake, they knew, was the heart of the strategy they had pursued for the last year and had intended to carry into the midterm elections: remaining unified to block the White House at every turn, rallying the conservative base but leaving Republicans vulnerable to being portrayed as the obstructionist party of no.
“We have the wind at our back,” said Katon Dawson, the former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. “We just have to find our momentum.”
Over all, it is almost surely better being the Republican Party as the 2010 election approaches. The Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was a boost to party spirits and an opportunity to press the case that Mr. Obama had fundamentally misread the electorate.
But as the president was quick to point out, with a 41st vote in the Senate and the ability to block legislation through filibuster come pressure on Republicans to share in the political risks of making hard choices. “The responsibility to govern is now yours as well,” Mr. Obama said in his State of the Union speech, a message that was certainly heard by party leaders here in Honolulu.
Christopher C. Healy, the chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, said Republicans were justified in blocking what he described as a drastic overreaching by Mr. Obama. Still, Mr. Healy acknowledged that Republicans had to be careful about being seen as overly partisan and would now be under increasing pressure to offer a competing vision of governing.
“We can’t be just about saying no,” he said. “But we have not completed the transition yet from defeated incumbent party. We have to position ourselves as an alternative and create enthusiasm for our positions.”
Many of the obstacles facing Republicans were on display in Honolulu. The party chairman, Michael Steele, is an unsettling figure within his own party, as became clear when Ms. Lingle offered a public reprimand to party members for criticizing Mr. Steele, if anonymously, to reporters. “Please don’t do a rebuke in my home state of Hawaii, not to my friend Michael Steele,” she said, as her audience rustled with discomfort.
Republicans have expressed concern about Mr. Steele’s very high profile and often combative style, as well as his propensity to say intemperate things, like predicting that Republicans would not win the majority in the House this November.
Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, said he issued a plea similar to Ms. Lingle’s to party members in a private session. He said he was startled at how members were grousing about Mr. Steele, describing it as counterproductive when he was looking to make big gains in races for governor.
For his part, Mr. Steele defended his chairmanship and made clear that he intended to seek re-election when his term ended next year. “My style is not something you get used to very easily,” he said. “I know that.” This took place at a sometimes contentious news conference — “Get your facts right,” Mr. Steele instructed one reporter — that had Republicans wincing at this latest example of Mr. Steele’s sometimes unvarnished ways.
With Mr. Obama seeking to strike a different tone at the beginning of his second year in office, Republicans back in Washington were responding with conciliatory phrases, if not yet substantive compromises.
“We’re not always going to agree, but I think it did become clear in the conversation today with the president that there are issues and items that we do agree upon,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican House leader, said Friday after the session with the president in Baltimore. Mr. Boehner suggested that the two parties pull out of complicated legislation smaller items they could agree on and vote together on those.
But here in Honolulu, the strains within the party over conservative principles versus political pragmatism played out in a sharp and public way, especially as the party establishment struggled to deal with the demands of the Tea Party movement. Republican leaders succeeded in derailing a resolution proposed by conservatives, led by James Bopp Jr. of Indiana, which would have required candidates to agree to a list of conservative positions to get party support.
But the intensity of the divisions was put on display as Mr. Bopp and Bob Tiernan, the Republican chairman from Oregon, quarreled before reporters over whether the watered-down compromise had any real force.
Mr. Bopp insisted that it did, and Mr. Tiernan insisted that it did not, repeating himself and interrupting Mr. Bopp until Mr. Bopp turned to him and said, “Shut up!”
Mr. Steele, in an interview, disputed any suggestion that the Tea Party movement was a problem for his party. “I don’t see it as a rivalry,” he said. “What I’m saying is we want to be your partner in the same fight.”
In cases where contested primaries pit Tea Party candidates against establishment Republicans, Mr. Steele said he expected both sides to come together to support the victor.
“If a Republican incumbent or a Republican candidate is running and a Tea Party candidate is in the race and the Republican wins, my expectation is that the Tea Party guy is going to support the Republican,” he said. “Because we would support the Tea Party guys.”
But Dick Armey, a former House majority leader who has become a leader of the Tea Party movement, suggested that it might be unwise for the Republican Party to count on Tea Party support.
“This is not a situation where the grass-roots activists are saying, ‘What can we do to make ourselves attractive to the Republicans?’ ” he said. “It is ‘What can we do to help the Republicans understand what they must do to be attractive to us.’ ”
Considering it was the grass-roots movement that helped lift Scott Brown to victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, losing that source of support would be a setback Mr. Steele presumably would not welcome at what would seem to be such an auspicious moment for his party.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Baltimore.
Haiti Is Again a Canvas for Approaches to Aid
Haiti Is Again a Canvas for Approaches to Aid
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/world/americas/31reconstruct.html?ref=global-home
UNITED NATIONS — The fact that Haiti was mired in dysfunction well before the earthquake, despite having received more than $5 billion in aid over about two decades, is fueling a contentious debate on whether a grand reconstruction plan can finally fix the country or would be doomed to repeat previous failures.
One side argues that Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization, which would govern it and oversee its rebuilding. On the other extreme, minimalists fervently believe that years of failed, foreign-imposed aid projects underscore that this time Haitians need to develop and implement their own plans.
And in between are those who argue for a joint Haitian-international reconstruction agency to administer a kind of Marshall Plan.
Such is the scale of day-to-day demands now, however, that even medium-term reconstruction efforts seem distant. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist, proposed that boatloads of aid include at least one ship crammed with fertilizer to jump-start the planting season in March — the country desperately needs to grow more food and to encourage those fleeing the devastated capital to farm.
But there were no immediate takers in the official aid flotilla, leaving Mr. Sachs lobbying private shippers.
Indeed, the international aid effort is failing to meet the earliest goals pronounced by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
Mr. Ban said repeatedly that by the end of last week, the World Food Program and related organizations would have delivered food to one million Haitians; just half of the two million he said needed help. On Friday, the number fed stood at 600,000, well short of his goal.
“It has been slower than anyone hoped or expected,” said John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator.
Mr. Ban also promoted a cash-for-work program to help bring stability, with jobs clearing the rubble at $4 to $5 per day. The organization’s $575 million emergency appeal for Haiti included $41 million for that program, but by Friday the jobs program had attracted only $4.3 million in donations and had employed more than 12,000 Haitians out of an anticipated 200,000, the United Nations Development Program said.
The United Nations is supposed to excel as ringmaster during international disasters, but rebuilding Haiti may test its limits. Mr. Ban had appointed Bill Clinton as his special envoy to Haiti months before the earthquake, and the former president met some success in attracting outside investors with his “I honeymooned in Haiti and you should too” mantra. This year, Haiti had anticipated its first economic growth in years, projected to be 4 percent.
But there were still hurdles, not least that the country lacked basics like dependable electric and water supplies.
A donor conference last April attracted $402 million in pledges but only $61 million in actual payments, according to the United Nations.
Mr. Ban is expected to announce any day that Mr. Clinton will take on an expanded role in coordinating United Nations efforts to resurrect Haiti. Indeed, the former president’s high profile has fueled suggestions that he become the Haiti reconstruction czar.
Even before the earthquake, Mr. Clinton had been deflecting criticism that he was becoming a colonial proconsul, and at a news conference last Monday he emphasized the role for Haitians, saying, “In the end, it is their country and their future.”
He also compared the potential for change in Haiti to that in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where destruction by Hurricane Katrina became a catalyst for building better, environmentally sound housing.
But the $400 million the United States has already spent, with significantly more expected, has prompted calls for an expansive outside supervisory role.
“Is it too wild a suggestion to be talking about at least temporarily some sort of receivership?” Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, asked during hearings on Thursday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noting that Haiti risked slipping back into its old pattern of a few greedy families running the country.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, echoed that thought, adding, “I think something far more draconian than just us working behind the scenes to prod reforms and those kinds of things is going to be necessary.”
The three witnesses at the hearing demurred, noting that the United States had a mixed record in reconstruction efforts like rebuilding electric plants in Iraq. One of them, Dr. Paul Farmer, the deputy United Nations envoy and a founder of Partners in Health, which has been working in Haiti for more than 20 years, said that the long history of Washington overthrowing or blockading Haitian governments helped create the current dysfunctional government.
A blunter United Nations official derided the idea of a “Batman-like world plot” to swoop in to rescue Haiti’s future, particularly since the world would be likely to lose interest in a project that could well take a decade.
Some suggest that the reconstruction model might be Aceh, Indonesia, where after the 2004 tsunami a multidonor fund disbursed some $700 million, mostly to local projects, with an Indonesian, a World Bank representative and the European Union, the biggest donor, given one oversight vote apiece.
The problem with that model for Haiti, noted David Harland, a senior United Nations official on Latin America, is that the Aceh fund was a minor piece of a strong, wealthy Indonesian government. In impoverished Haiti, a wealthy development agency could well supplant a government just finding its feet economically.
“It is weird, it’s complicated, but they had a formula that was pulling them forward,” Mr. Harland said. “If you replace it with gleaming Swiss-watch machinery, I don’t think it will happen.” He noted that while reeling from the quake, Haitians had already managed to re-establish a cellphone network, get remittances flowing from relatives overseas and bring in produce from the countryside, all helping the country start ticking on its own.
Aid projects already planned had anticipated factory jobs sewing clothes jumping to 150,000 from 24,000 because of a deal giving 10-year, duty-free access to the American market. Experts believe such plans should move ahead, along with new plans for construction projects that would put tens of thousands of people to work. Many said creating jobs is much more important than outright aid, as the latter could foster dependency.
The debate on whether aid spurs development has been raging for years, and Prof. William Easterly of New York University is among those who argue for a minimalist approach to reconstruction with money disbursed to local governments parched for resources.
“I think the whole idea of the earthquake being an opportunity for foreigners to do more aggressive interventions is really problematic and objectionable,” he said in an interview, arguing for modest, homegrown plans. “We have tried basically everything in the book already in Haiti as far as grandiose plans, and those haven’t worked.”
Haitians themselves have mixed emotions. Staggering from the destruction, they both want foreign help and remain wary of its past.
But the central problem worrying them is how their own government, having so utterly failed to deliver services for decades, can muster the capacity, the knowledge, the will and the credibility needed for such a complex task, said John Miller Beauvoir, a 28-year-old Haitian.
Mr. Beauvoir founded an organization to get young people like himself more involved in civic affairs. He says nongovernmental Haitian organizations and successful Haitians living abroad should get a legal voice in allocating aid money. “If you don’t have a credible umbrella it is not going to happen,” he said. “Resources will end up being directed by small politics on the ground. I think we should bury the status quo under the rubble.”
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/world/americas/31reconstruct.html?ref=global-home
UNITED NATIONS — The fact that Haiti was mired in dysfunction well before the earthquake, despite having received more than $5 billion in aid over about two decades, is fueling a contentious debate on whether a grand reconstruction plan can finally fix the country or would be doomed to repeat previous failures.
One side argues that Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization, which would govern it and oversee its rebuilding. On the other extreme, minimalists fervently believe that years of failed, foreign-imposed aid projects underscore that this time Haitians need to develop and implement their own plans.
And in between are those who argue for a joint Haitian-international reconstruction agency to administer a kind of Marshall Plan.
Such is the scale of day-to-day demands now, however, that even medium-term reconstruction efforts seem distant. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist, proposed that boatloads of aid include at least one ship crammed with fertilizer to jump-start the planting season in March — the country desperately needs to grow more food and to encourage those fleeing the devastated capital to farm.
But there were no immediate takers in the official aid flotilla, leaving Mr. Sachs lobbying private shippers.
Indeed, the international aid effort is failing to meet the earliest goals pronounced by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
Mr. Ban said repeatedly that by the end of last week, the World Food Program and related organizations would have delivered food to one million Haitians; just half of the two million he said needed help. On Friday, the number fed stood at 600,000, well short of his goal.
“It has been slower than anyone hoped or expected,” said John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator.
Mr. Ban also promoted a cash-for-work program to help bring stability, with jobs clearing the rubble at $4 to $5 per day. The organization’s $575 million emergency appeal for Haiti included $41 million for that program, but by Friday the jobs program had attracted only $4.3 million in donations and had employed more than 12,000 Haitians out of an anticipated 200,000, the United Nations Development Program said.
The United Nations is supposed to excel as ringmaster during international disasters, but rebuilding Haiti may test its limits. Mr. Ban had appointed Bill Clinton as his special envoy to Haiti months before the earthquake, and the former president met some success in attracting outside investors with his “I honeymooned in Haiti and you should too” mantra. This year, Haiti had anticipated its first economic growth in years, projected to be 4 percent.
But there were still hurdles, not least that the country lacked basics like dependable electric and water supplies.
A donor conference last April attracted $402 million in pledges but only $61 million in actual payments, according to the United Nations.
Mr. Ban is expected to announce any day that Mr. Clinton will take on an expanded role in coordinating United Nations efforts to resurrect Haiti. Indeed, the former president’s high profile has fueled suggestions that he become the Haiti reconstruction czar.
Even before the earthquake, Mr. Clinton had been deflecting criticism that he was becoming a colonial proconsul, and at a news conference last Monday he emphasized the role for Haitians, saying, “In the end, it is their country and their future.”
He also compared the potential for change in Haiti to that in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where destruction by Hurricane Katrina became a catalyst for building better, environmentally sound housing.
But the $400 million the United States has already spent, with significantly more expected, has prompted calls for an expansive outside supervisory role.
“Is it too wild a suggestion to be talking about at least temporarily some sort of receivership?” Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, asked during hearings on Thursday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noting that Haiti risked slipping back into its old pattern of a few greedy families running the country.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, echoed that thought, adding, “I think something far more draconian than just us working behind the scenes to prod reforms and those kinds of things is going to be necessary.”
The three witnesses at the hearing demurred, noting that the United States had a mixed record in reconstruction efforts like rebuilding electric plants in Iraq. One of them, Dr. Paul Farmer, the deputy United Nations envoy and a founder of Partners in Health, which has been working in Haiti for more than 20 years, said that the long history of Washington overthrowing or blockading Haitian governments helped create the current dysfunctional government.
A blunter United Nations official derided the idea of a “Batman-like world plot” to swoop in to rescue Haiti’s future, particularly since the world would be likely to lose interest in a project that could well take a decade.
Some suggest that the reconstruction model might be Aceh, Indonesia, where after the 2004 tsunami a multidonor fund disbursed some $700 million, mostly to local projects, with an Indonesian, a World Bank representative and the European Union, the biggest donor, given one oversight vote apiece.
The problem with that model for Haiti, noted David Harland, a senior United Nations official on Latin America, is that the Aceh fund was a minor piece of a strong, wealthy Indonesian government. In impoverished Haiti, a wealthy development agency could well supplant a government just finding its feet economically.
“It is weird, it’s complicated, but they had a formula that was pulling them forward,” Mr. Harland said. “If you replace it with gleaming Swiss-watch machinery, I don’t think it will happen.” He noted that while reeling from the quake, Haitians had already managed to re-establish a cellphone network, get remittances flowing from relatives overseas and bring in produce from the countryside, all helping the country start ticking on its own.
Aid projects already planned had anticipated factory jobs sewing clothes jumping to 150,000 from 24,000 because of a deal giving 10-year, duty-free access to the American market. Experts believe such plans should move ahead, along with new plans for construction projects that would put tens of thousands of people to work. Many said creating jobs is much more important than outright aid, as the latter could foster dependency.
The debate on whether aid spurs development has been raging for years, and Prof. William Easterly of New York University is among those who argue for a minimalist approach to reconstruction with money disbursed to local governments parched for resources.
“I think the whole idea of the earthquake being an opportunity for foreigners to do more aggressive interventions is really problematic and objectionable,” he said in an interview, arguing for modest, homegrown plans. “We have tried basically everything in the book already in Haiti as far as grandiose plans, and those haven’t worked.”
Haitians themselves have mixed emotions. Staggering from the destruction, they both want foreign help and remain wary of its past.
But the central problem worrying them is how their own government, having so utterly failed to deliver services for decades, can muster the capacity, the knowledge, the will and the credibility needed for such a complex task, said John Miller Beauvoir, a 28-year-old Haitian.
Mr. Beauvoir founded an organization to get young people like himself more involved in civic affairs. He says nongovernmental Haitian organizations and successful Haitians living abroad should get a legal voice in allocating aid money. “If you don’t have a credible umbrella it is not going to happen,” he said. “Resources will end up being directed by small politics on the ground. I think we should bury the status quo under the rubble.”
Monday, January 25, 2010
The Bernanke Conundrum
The Bernanke Conundrum
By Paul Krugman
Copyright by The New York Times
January 23, 2010, 10:54 AM
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/the-bernanke-conundrum/?scp=2&sq=ben%20bernanke%20confirmation&st=cse
A funny thing happened on the way to the Bernanke confirmation: the vote in Massachusetts turned an easy coronation into a tough fight. And this isn’t one of those cases where everyone who knows something is on one side. Look at two of my favorite econobloggers: the very judicious Calculated Risk says “We can do better”, while Brad DeLong says, “Don’t block Ben.”
Where am I? Right now, I’m agonizing — which isn’t a place I ever expected to be, and not just because Bernanke hired me at Princeton.
The pro case is obvious: Ben Bernanke is a great economist, whose work on monetary economics has been a crucial guide to action in this crisis, and he applied his academic insights forcefully in 2008 and early 2009, helping pull the world back from the brink.
Against that are two factors. One is that he completely failed to see the trouble building as the housing bubble inflated — and no, it wasn’t one of those things nobody could have predicted, since a lot of reputable economists were warning almost frantically about the bubble. True, Bernanke’s failure to see what was right in front of his nose was shared by almost everyone at the Fed — but as I’ll explain in a moment, that’s actually part of the problem.
The second is that since the acute phase of the crisis came to an end, and especially since his renomination, Bernanke has seemed out of touch with the severe problems that remain. He hasn’t engaged in any self-criticism, at a time when we really need to know that policymakers can learn from their mistakes. He hasn’t been a strong voice for financial reform. And most important from my point of view, he has seemed deeply worried about defending himself against the inflation hawks, not at all concerned with the question of whether the Fed is doing all it should to fight catastrophically high unemployment. (It isn’t).
As I see it, the two things that worry me about Bernanke stem from the same cause: to a greater degree than I had hoped, he has been assimilated by the banking Borg. In 2005, respectable central bankers dismissed worries about a housing bubble, ignoring the evidence; in the winter of 2009-2010, respectable central bankers are worried about nonexistent inflation rather than actually existing unemployment. And Bernanke, alas, has become too much of a respectable central banker.
That said, however, what is the alternative? Calculated Risk says we can do better. But can we, really?
It’s not that hard to think of people who have the intellectual chops for the job of Fed chair but aren’t fully part of the Borg. But it’s very hard to think of people with those qualities who have any chance of actually being confirmed, or of carrying the FOMC with them even if named as chairman (which is one reason why this suggestion is crazy). Does it make sense to deny Bernanke reappointment simply in order to appoint someone who would follow the same policies?
And yet, the Fed really needs to be shaken out of its complacency.
By Paul Krugman
Copyright by The New York Times
January 23, 2010, 10:54 AM
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/the-bernanke-conundrum/?scp=2&sq=ben%20bernanke%20confirmation&st=cse
A funny thing happened on the way to the Bernanke confirmation: the vote in Massachusetts turned an easy coronation into a tough fight. And this isn’t one of those cases where everyone who knows something is on one side. Look at two of my favorite econobloggers: the very judicious Calculated Risk says “We can do better”, while Brad DeLong says, “Don’t block Ben.”
Where am I? Right now, I’m agonizing — which isn’t a place I ever expected to be, and not just because Bernanke hired me at Princeton.
The pro case is obvious: Ben Bernanke is a great economist, whose work on monetary economics has been a crucial guide to action in this crisis, and he applied his academic insights forcefully in 2008 and early 2009, helping pull the world back from the brink.
Against that are two factors. One is that he completely failed to see the trouble building as the housing bubble inflated — and no, it wasn’t one of those things nobody could have predicted, since a lot of reputable economists were warning almost frantically about the bubble. True, Bernanke’s failure to see what was right in front of his nose was shared by almost everyone at the Fed — but as I’ll explain in a moment, that’s actually part of the problem.
The second is that since the acute phase of the crisis came to an end, and especially since his renomination, Bernanke has seemed out of touch with the severe problems that remain. He hasn’t engaged in any self-criticism, at a time when we really need to know that policymakers can learn from their mistakes. He hasn’t been a strong voice for financial reform. And most important from my point of view, he has seemed deeply worried about defending himself against the inflation hawks, not at all concerned with the question of whether the Fed is doing all it should to fight catastrophically high unemployment. (It isn’t).
As I see it, the two things that worry me about Bernanke stem from the same cause: to a greater degree than I had hoped, he has been assimilated by the banking Borg. In 2005, respectable central bankers dismissed worries about a housing bubble, ignoring the evidence; in the winter of 2009-2010, respectable central bankers are worried about nonexistent inflation rather than actually existing unemployment. And Bernanke, alas, has become too much of a respectable central banker.
That said, however, what is the alternative? Calculated Risk says we can do better. But can we, really?
It’s not that hard to think of people who have the intellectual chops for the job of Fed chair but aren’t fully part of the Borg. But it’s very hard to think of people with those qualities who have any chance of actually being confirmed, or of carrying the FOMC with them even if named as chairman (which is one reason why this suggestion is crazy). Does it make sense to deny Bernanke reappointment simply in order to appoint someone who would follow the same policies?
And yet, the Fed really needs to be shaken out of its complacency.
Moving Big Money
Moving Big Money
By Dennis Santiago
Copyright by The Hoffington Post
January 23, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-santiago/moving-big-money_b_434048.html
I have to say I've always had a fondness for the State of New Mexico. I envy them the fact that they got to keep Governor Bill Richardson for themselves after the last election cycle. It doesn't surprise me that this state would be one of the first to recognize that there might be a payoff to bringing its operating accounts back inside its borders so the money can more closely support intra-state needs. That's exactly what legislator Brian Egolf proposes to do. And so we see the transition of the Move Your Money concept beyond the small sums game into big money.
What's big money? Big money is essentially any sum over the FDIC insured amount of $250,000. That's the point where the failure of a bank could result in the loss of principal. Uninsured amounts are a lesser pig at the trough. Let's call that "tangible" risk. This encompasses many different kinds of monetary stakeholders. Sometimes it's huge, as in the case of New Mexico's $1.4 billion operations accounts. It also applies to high net worth individuals, churches, 501(c3) organizations, corporate, union and pension accounts and - yes indeed - other state and local governments.
Traditionally when you have a lot of money you get something called Unlimited Deposit Insurance. You pay - big surprise? - a fee either implicitly or explicitly to the custodians of such large accounts. But hey, if you're in this rarefied category you already know those fees are rising and in some cases may cease to be offered. The reason is of course because "real" insurance companies are no dummies. True, actuaries do have some of the oddest senses of humor on the planet, but they know their math and they know that continuing exposures to things like what's hidden beneath the "Temporary" Liquidity Guarantee Program (TLGP) and troubled Commercial Real Estate and Alt-A Option ARM Residential loan assets going deep into non-accrual are systemic plagues still lacking real vaccines. I've talked to a lot of bankers in the last three weeks and there's still a real danger out there that some banks are becoming unwilling REIT's. Solving that one's not for this installment though.
Did you know that churches typically amass between $1 to $3 million dollars each year? Let me translate that. "It's way over that $250K insurance limit." The money is used to fund operations and support civic and religious initiatives. In how many of those instances do you think the money gets deposited into one account? How often do you think a church evaluates the financial soundness and social justice implications of its monetary deployment profile? You'd be surprised.
501(c3) non-profits, unions and pensions are even bigger piles of money. $100 to $300 million dollars is not unusual. At the high end it's billions. These pools fund operating liabilities; meaning, the earnings from the principal are drawn into the entity operating accounts to perform what these organizations actually do in this world. The core principal stays in the hands of the custodian. It's juicy stuff. Traditionally that money went to the tallest most imposing granite tower on the block. That's who would be a custodian worthy of safeguarding such a princely sum. The fees for being the caretaker of such amounts can be lucrative. And what you get to do with these fantastic sums, OMG! Since the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act those towers have become mixtures of bank and casino. The exact proportions of the alchemy differ from glass house to glass house but this is the money that powers the gaming tables all the pundits decrying casino banking trill about.
Corporate deposits? You know you see all these 10-K's and Annual Reports talking in such glowing terms about sustainability and social investing. Isn't it about time you looked at how that cash and equivalents line item on your balance sheet can do more that be a piggy bank?
And every other government in this country should take a cue from New Mexico. The true economic benefit of money lies in the number of times you can get it to circulate locally. If those operating accounts took at least one or two more turns of the crank inside your borders before meandering off to the rest of the larger economy what will that do for your organ grinder?
So you could wait for President Obama to try to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act with a new name maybe starting with the letter V after battling through the legislative process and its attendant lobby ridden minefields, or you could move the money to create the effective outcome of such an act and change behavior patterns using "tangible" persuasion.
Which path do you think can make something positive happen faster? Think about it. What if all that money flitting back and forth in EFT transfers from Downtown to Midtown went to work on Main Street? If big money moved with the plural force of the American nation, do you think we'd still have 10% unemployment next time Santa visits? I'm just saying thinking out of the box like this is what we Yanks are good at.
Let me put some cream in that coffee for you. Moving that much money around, and it won't all go to small banks, a fair share will move into more stringently corralled accounts at big ones, will take professional quality diligence both in transition and on a going forward basis. There are firms that specialize in assisting just churches. There are others for corporations and governments. And, oh golly, doesn't everyone in the world of funds think they are the world's greatest financiers whether they are or not? Job opportunity people! Perk up already.
Pledge to Move Your Money!
By Dennis Santiago
Copyright by The Hoffington Post
January 23, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-santiago/moving-big-money_b_434048.html
I have to say I've always had a fondness for the State of New Mexico. I envy them the fact that they got to keep Governor Bill Richardson for themselves after the last election cycle. It doesn't surprise me that this state would be one of the first to recognize that there might be a payoff to bringing its operating accounts back inside its borders so the money can more closely support intra-state needs. That's exactly what legislator Brian Egolf proposes to do. And so we see the transition of the Move Your Money concept beyond the small sums game into big money.
What's big money? Big money is essentially any sum over the FDIC insured amount of $250,000. That's the point where the failure of a bank could result in the loss of principal. Uninsured amounts are a lesser pig at the trough. Let's call that "tangible" risk. This encompasses many different kinds of monetary stakeholders. Sometimes it's huge, as in the case of New Mexico's $1.4 billion operations accounts. It also applies to high net worth individuals, churches, 501(c3) organizations, corporate, union and pension accounts and - yes indeed - other state and local governments.
Traditionally when you have a lot of money you get something called Unlimited Deposit Insurance. You pay - big surprise? - a fee either implicitly or explicitly to the custodians of such large accounts. But hey, if you're in this rarefied category you already know those fees are rising and in some cases may cease to be offered. The reason is of course because "real" insurance companies are no dummies. True, actuaries do have some of the oddest senses of humor on the planet, but they know their math and they know that continuing exposures to things like what's hidden beneath the "Temporary" Liquidity Guarantee Program (TLGP) and troubled Commercial Real Estate and Alt-A Option ARM Residential loan assets going deep into non-accrual are systemic plagues still lacking real vaccines. I've talked to a lot of bankers in the last three weeks and there's still a real danger out there that some banks are becoming unwilling REIT's. Solving that one's not for this installment though.
Did you know that churches typically amass between $1 to $3 million dollars each year? Let me translate that. "It's way over that $250K insurance limit." The money is used to fund operations and support civic and religious initiatives. In how many of those instances do you think the money gets deposited into one account? How often do you think a church evaluates the financial soundness and social justice implications of its monetary deployment profile? You'd be surprised.
501(c3) non-profits, unions and pensions are even bigger piles of money. $100 to $300 million dollars is not unusual. At the high end it's billions. These pools fund operating liabilities; meaning, the earnings from the principal are drawn into the entity operating accounts to perform what these organizations actually do in this world. The core principal stays in the hands of the custodian. It's juicy stuff. Traditionally that money went to the tallest most imposing granite tower on the block. That's who would be a custodian worthy of safeguarding such a princely sum. The fees for being the caretaker of such amounts can be lucrative. And what you get to do with these fantastic sums, OMG! Since the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act those towers have become mixtures of bank and casino. The exact proportions of the alchemy differ from glass house to glass house but this is the money that powers the gaming tables all the pundits decrying casino banking trill about.
Corporate deposits? You know you see all these 10-K's and Annual Reports talking in such glowing terms about sustainability and social investing. Isn't it about time you looked at how that cash and equivalents line item on your balance sheet can do more that be a piggy bank?
And every other government in this country should take a cue from New Mexico. The true economic benefit of money lies in the number of times you can get it to circulate locally. If those operating accounts took at least one or two more turns of the crank inside your borders before meandering off to the rest of the larger economy what will that do for your organ grinder?
So you could wait for President Obama to try to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act with a new name maybe starting with the letter V after battling through the legislative process and its attendant lobby ridden minefields, or you could move the money to create the effective outcome of such an act and change behavior patterns using "tangible" persuasion.
Which path do you think can make something positive happen faster? Think about it. What if all that money flitting back and forth in EFT transfers from Downtown to Midtown went to work on Main Street? If big money moved with the plural force of the American nation, do you think we'd still have 10% unemployment next time Santa visits? I'm just saying thinking out of the box like this is what we Yanks are good at.
Let me put some cream in that coffee for you. Moving that much money around, and it won't all go to small banks, a fair share will move into more stringently corralled accounts at big ones, will take professional quality diligence both in transition and on a going forward basis. There are firms that specialize in assisting just churches. There are others for corporations and governments. And, oh golly, doesn't everyone in the world of funds think they are the world's greatest financiers whether they are or not? Job opportunity people! Perk up already.
Pledge to Move Your Money!
Haiti’s Homeless Are Short Hundreds of Thousands of Tents, Aid Groups Say/In Haiti, Many Amputees Have No Place to Go
Haiti’s Homeless Are Short Hundreds of Thousands of Tents, Aid Groups Say
By GINGER THOMPSON
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/world/americas/25haiti.html?hpw
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As officials focused Sunday on the Herculean task of this nation’s physical recovery — clearing the wreckage and setting up housing for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by an earthquake — desperate relatives of those still missing pleaded with the authorities not to give up the search.
With so many of this city’s buildings left in ruins and a public health crisis brewing from a failed sanitation system and a shortage of clean water, search and rescue efforts were winding down.
Across this devastated capital, demolition crews were razing buildings teetering dangerously close to collapse, and teams of American surveyors were expected to begin examining the stability of those structures left intact so that people whose homes were spared can move off the streets and businesses can go back to work.
International aid organizations said they had identified three sites to temporarily resettle the homeless. Brazilian teams have begun clearing a field in the Croix des Bouquets neighborhood for a tent city for some 10,000 people, according to Niurka Piñeiro, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, but it estimates the need at 100,000 tents for families of five, to assist 500,000 people.
Another temporary settlement will be established on Rue de Tabarre for the estimated 4,000 people now camped in squalid conditions on the grounds of the prime minister’s home. A third settlement will be built in the city of Léogâne. And French authorities have said that they will begin efforts to provide water and sanitation to several thousand people crowded in the Champ de Mars plaza downtown.
“Tents, tents, tents,” Ms. Piñeiro said. “That’s the word we want to get out. We need tents.”
The call for aid organizations to focus on shelter came 12 days after the quake, when an estimated 250,000 people were still living under pieces of scavenged tarpaulins, tin and bedsheets. With so many people lacking access to clean water and sanitation, illnesses are running rampant.
“We’re getting a lot of kids with diarrhea,” said Yveline Auguste, who is working at a Haitian hospital on behalf of Catholic Relief Services. So far the cases are generally mild enough to be treated with medicine at home, she said.
But Rick Bauer, a shelter expert for the international aid agency Oxfam, said that the temporary camps would work only if they were secure, their residents were working and the government offered a clear exit strategy.
“The camps must not become warehouses of people waiting for permanent homes that never materialize,” he said.
The Inter-American Development Bank has committed to building 10,000 houses in Léogâne, Ms. Piñeiro said, and further plans for permanent housing will be the focus of a United Nations donors’ conference in Montreal on Monday.
Still, the pivot from rescue to recovery met resistance from relatives of the missing, whose pleas not to give up hope were heard at funerals, demolition sites and displacement camps across the city.
Bulldozers were halted at the Collège du Canapé-Vert when one of the teachers reported getting a telephone message from someone believed trapped in the school’s ruins.
Capt. Christian Morel, leader of a French search team, said that four other teams had searched the school and found no signs of life. He said search teams had received frequent reports of texts or messages from those believed to be dead. But he speculated that either the messages were just now being transmitted as cellphone towers came back on line, or that they were the work of wishful thinking.
Nonetheless, he unleashed search dogs to go over the ruins of the school again. And again he came up with nothing.
That was not enough, however, to convince Madeline Dorville, whose husband, Oriol Randiche, was attending a teacher training program at the school when it collapsed. Tears wetting her cheeks, she said she would be tempted to throw herself in front of the waiting orange bulldozer if it resumed demolition work.
“How can we trust these kinds of decisions to a dog?” she said. “Dogs are not detectives or magicians.”
For others, the thought of starting a new chapter was all the more excruciating because they had not been able to properly close the last one.
“Can you imagine trying to say goodbye to your brother with his body still in the concrete?” asked Lindsay Soliman, 24, a law student who was conducting a funeral service with her family for her brother, Mikenley Soliman, 21. His body lay somewhere under the rubble of a home in the Carrefour district.
Ms. Soliman’s family decided that it was time for his funeral, which they held Sunday at a badly damaged house owned by the Roman Catholic Church, using a photo of him instead of his body.
Mikenley, a computer science student, “dreamed of America like no one,” his sister said. He was a Los Angeles Lakers fan and an aspiring computer programmer who planned to move to Maryland this year after attaining a United States residence visa.
He was watching a soccer game with three friends when the earth shook and the walls of the house fell in. None of the men made it out.
Steeve Hilaire, 27, a police officer and a cousin of Mr. Soliman’s, said he could not understand why the government was in such a hurry to begin clearing away the debris before recovering all who were lost.
“The bulldozers would be roaring if a government minister’s body or his relatives were under there,” he said. “But when it’s just a regular person, no one cares.”
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero, Deborah Sontag, Damien Cave, Marc Lacey and Ray Rivera.
In Haiti, Many Amputees Have No Place to Go
By RAY RIVERA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/world/americas/25amputee.html?scp=1&sq=haiti's%20amputees&st=cse
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In a tent serving as an acute-care ward on the grounds of this city’s biggest hospital, Jocelin François was sitting up in bed when a nurse went by, barking at him in French. Mr. François, whose left leg was amputated nearly to his knee after the earthquake on Jan. 12, threw out his arms and fell back on the mattress.
“She said I have to go home,” Mr. François, 26, said. “I don’t want to leave until I can walk. I am weak. I have no place to go.”
A doctor, sensing some confusion, intervened. “We’re not telling him he has to go home,” the doctor, Rose Antoine, 33, a native of Haiti who now lives in Pennsylvania, explained. “We’re only telling him that this is an acute ward and we need the bed. We’re trying to find a step-down unit where he can go to.”
Nearly two weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the immediate health crisis, which involved treating the injuries of people who were crushed by collapsing buildings and amputating damaged limbs, has begun to settle into a new phase.
This one is perhaps even more daunting: caring for thousands of post-operation trauma patients who are ready to leave the hospitals, but lack homes or families to go to. Many will require prosthetic limbs, frequent wound cleanings, bandage changes and months of rehabilitation.
As officials warn of possible outbreaks of infectious diseases from unsanitary conditions in hundreds of makeshift camps of people made homeless by the earthquake, they are also wondering where to send patients who have been treated for their injuries but require follow-up care.
“It’s very hard to send people home when they don’t have a house,” said Dr. Surena Claude, who is coordinating a commission appointed by President René Préval to respond to the health emergency. “This situation is causing so many problems, because the hospitals are full, and if this continues we will have no room.”
Early reports that there might be as many as 200,000 people who required amputations appear to have been exaggerated. At the University Hospital, Port-au-Prince’s largest hospital, which received the brunt of the casualties after the quake, surgeons have performed about 225 amputations, mostly in the first few days. Doctors Without Borders estimated that its doctors had performed 125 amputations in 12 centers across the country. Hundreds more have been done in other clinics and hospitals elsewhere; the total is more likely to have been a few thousand.
Still, this is a country that, even before the earthquake created so much devastation, could barely cope with the healthy. There will be thousands more who will need rehabilitation for a range of injuries, from broken hips and femurs to neurological disorders from head injuries.
Health officials are still in the earliest stages of determining how to deal with post-operative patients, even as new patients are coming to the hospitals with secondary infections as well as the usual array of emergencies.
Dr. Mirta Roses, director of the World Health Organization’s Pan-American region, said Sunday that all of the country’s remaining 48 hospitals were at full capacity, including 11 in Port-au-Prince. That does not include the many clinics that aid groups have created.
Health officials are dealing with another problem. With aftershocks still rattling the city, including another on Sunday, many people are afraid to be inside the hospitals but are also unwilling to leave the grounds, where they can get food and water and have access to care.
“Even their relatives want to be with them in the hospitals,” Dr. Roses said. She added that a solution would involve creating centers for ambulatory and post-operative care and persuading patients and their families to move there.
Even in the best of circumstances, it can take four to six months for a person who has had a traumatic amputation to function again, Dr. Steven R. Flanagan, medical director of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, said in a telephone interview. The Rusk Institute has a team in Haiti.
“What they really need to worry about in Haiti is infectious complication, so if you have an amputation of a leg or arm, that wound is subject to infection,” Dr. Flanagan said. “And clearly they don’t have all the medicines they need down there.”
Dr. Claude, of the presidential commission, said the government was well aware of the situation.
“Unfortunately, a solution is not yet found,” he said. Even when one is found, he said, logistics in this rubble-choked country will continue to be a problem.
The hope is that access to medicines and care will be eased greatly when the government carries out plans to build giant tent cities across Port-au-Prince and the vicinity, but that could take weeks.
At University Hospital, which is next to a nursing school that collapsed, killing about 50 students, Mr. François was relieved to learn that he did not have to leave immediately. He said he did not know if his relatives died in the earthquake, and that they did not know that he survived.
Outside the tent, a giant post-operative ward has been created in a grove of mango and oak trees, with low-slung tarps strung over patients’ beds. The ward, known as “the forest,” is filled with many patients who did not want to be inside the hospital. The doctors do not know how many patients are there, because they have been too busy to count.
In the United States, many of these patients would already be home, receiving outpatient care, said Dr. Michael Marin, chairman of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who is volunteering here with the International Medical Corps, the group coordinating relief efforts at the hospital.
Here, many of the patients cannot return home. “The only place they have to go is the forest,” Dr. Marin said.
By GINGER THOMPSON
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/world/americas/25haiti.html?hpw
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As officials focused Sunday on the Herculean task of this nation’s physical recovery — clearing the wreckage and setting up housing for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by an earthquake — desperate relatives of those still missing pleaded with the authorities not to give up the search.
With so many of this city’s buildings left in ruins and a public health crisis brewing from a failed sanitation system and a shortage of clean water, search and rescue efforts were winding down.
Across this devastated capital, demolition crews were razing buildings teetering dangerously close to collapse, and teams of American surveyors were expected to begin examining the stability of those structures left intact so that people whose homes were spared can move off the streets and businesses can go back to work.
International aid organizations said they had identified three sites to temporarily resettle the homeless. Brazilian teams have begun clearing a field in the Croix des Bouquets neighborhood for a tent city for some 10,000 people, according to Niurka Piñeiro, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, but it estimates the need at 100,000 tents for families of five, to assist 500,000 people.
Another temporary settlement will be established on Rue de Tabarre for the estimated 4,000 people now camped in squalid conditions on the grounds of the prime minister’s home. A third settlement will be built in the city of Léogâne. And French authorities have said that they will begin efforts to provide water and sanitation to several thousand people crowded in the Champ de Mars plaza downtown.
“Tents, tents, tents,” Ms. Piñeiro said. “That’s the word we want to get out. We need tents.”
The call for aid organizations to focus on shelter came 12 days after the quake, when an estimated 250,000 people were still living under pieces of scavenged tarpaulins, tin and bedsheets. With so many people lacking access to clean water and sanitation, illnesses are running rampant.
“We’re getting a lot of kids with diarrhea,” said Yveline Auguste, who is working at a Haitian hospital on behalf of Catholic Relief Services. So far the cases are generally mild enough to be treated with medicine at home, she said.
But Rick Bauer, a shelter expert for the international aid agency Oxfam, said that the temporary camps would work only if they were secure, their residents were working and the government offered a clear exit strategy.
“The camps must not become warehouses of people waiting for permanent homes that never materialize,” he said.
The Inter-American Development Bank has committed to building 10,000 houses in Léogâne, Ms. Piñeiro said, and further plans for permanent housing will be the focus of a United Nations donors’ conference in Montreal on Monday.
Still, the pivot from rescue to recovery met resistance from relatives of the missing, whose pleas not to give up hope were heard at funerals, demolition sites and displacement camps across the city.
Bulldozers were halted at the Collège du Canapé-Vert when one of the teachers reported getting a telephone message from someone believed trapped in the school’s ruins.
Capt. Christian Morel, leader of a French search team, said that four other teams had searched the school and found no signs of life. He said search teams had received frequent reports of texts or messages from those believed to be dead. But he speculated that either the messages were just now being transmitted as cellphone towers came back on line, or that they were the work of wishful thinking.
Nonetheless, he unleashed search dogs to go over the ruins of the school again. And again he came up with nothing.
That was not enough, however, to convince Madeline Dorville, whose husband, Oriol Randiche, was attending a teacher training program at the school when it collapsed. Tears wetting her cheeks, she said she would be tempted to throw herself in front of the waiting orange bulldozer if it resumed demolition work.
“How can we trust these kinds of decisions to a dog?” she said. “Dogs are not detectives or magicians.”
For others, the thought of starting a new chapter was all the more excruciating because they had not been able to properly close the last one.
“Can you imagine trying to say goodbye to your brother with his body still in the concrete?” asked Lindsay Soliman, 24, a law student who was conducting a funeral service with her family for her brother, Mikenley Soliman, 21. His body lay somewhere under the rubble of a home in the Carrefour district.
Ms. Soliman’s family decided that it was time for his funeral, which they held Sunday at a badly damaged house owned by the Roman Catholic Church, using a photo of him instead of his body.
Mikenley, a computer science student, “dreamed of America like no one,” his sister said. He was a Los Angeles Lakers fan and an aspiring computer programmer who planned to move to Maryland this year after attaining a United States residence visa.
He was watching a soccer game with three friends when the earth shook and the walls of the house fell in. None of the men made it out.
Steeve Hilaire, 27, a police officer and a cousin of Mr. Soliman’s, said he could not understand why the government was in such a hurry to begin clearing away the debris before recovering all who were lost.
“The bulldozers would be roaring if a government minister’s body or his relatives were under there,” he said. “But when it’s just a regular person, no one cares.”
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero, Deborah Sontag, Damien Cave, Marc Lacey and Ray Rivera.
In Haiti, Many Amputees Have No Place to Go
By RAY RIVERA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/world/americas/25amputee.html?scp=1&sq=haiti's%20amputees&st=cse
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In a tent serving as an acute-care ward on the grounds of this city’s biggest hospital, Jocelin François was sitting up in bed when a nurse went by, barking at him in French. Mr. François, whose left leg was amputated nearly to his knee after the earthquake on Jan. 12, threw out his arms and fell back on the mattress.
“She said I have to go home,” Mr. François, 26, said. “I don’t want to leave until I can walk. I am weak. I have no place to go.”
A doctor, sensing some confusion, intervened. “We’re not telling him he has to go home,” the doctor, Rose Antoine, 33, a native of Haiti who now lives in Pennsylvania, explained. “We’re only telling him that this is an acute ward and we need the bed. We’re trying to find a step-down unit where he can go to.”
Nearly two weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the immediate health crisis, which involved treating the injuries of people who were crushed by collapsing buildings and amputating damaged limbs, has begun to settle into a new phase.
This one is perhaps even more daunting: caring for thousands of post-operation trauma patients who are ready to leave the hospitals, but lack homes or families to go to. Many will require prosthetic limbs, frequent wound cleanings, bandage changes and months of rehabilitation.
As officials warn of possible outbreaks of infectious diseases from unsanitary conditions in hundreds of makeshift camps of people made homeless by the earthquake, they are also wondering where to send patients who have been treated for their injuries but require follow-up care.
“It’s very hard to send people home when they don’t have a house,” said Dr. Surena Claude, who is coordinating a commission appointed by President René Préval to respond to the health emergency. “This situation is causing so many problems, because the hospitals are full, and if this continues we will have no room.”
Early reports that there might be as many as 200,000 people who required amputations appear to have been exaggerated. At the University Hospital, Port-au-Prince’s largest hospital, which received the brunt of the casualties after the quake, surgeons have performed about 225 amputations, mostly in the first few days. Doctors Without Borders estimated that its doctors had performed 125 amputations in 12 centers across the country. Hundreds more have been done in other clinics and hospitals elsewhere; the total is more likely to have been a few thousand.
Still, this is a country that, even before the earthquake created so much devastation, could barely cope with the healthy. There will be thousands more who will need rehabilitation for a range of injuries, from broken hips and femurs to neurological disorders from head injuries.
Health officials are still in the earliest stages of determining how to deal with post-operative patients, even as new patients are coming to the hospitals with secondary infections as well as the usual array of emergencies.
Dr. Mirta Roses, director of the World Health Organization’s Pan-American region, said Sunday that all of the country’s remaining 48 hospitals were at full capacity, including 11 in Port-au-Prince. That does not include the many clinics that aid groups have created.
Health officials are dealing with another problem. With aftershocks still rattling the city, including another on Sunday, many people are afraid to be inside the hospitals but are also unwilling to leave the grounds, where they can get food and water and have access to care.
“Even their relatives want to be with them in the hospitals,” Dr. Roses said. She added that a solution would involve creating centers for ambulatory and post-operative care and persuading patients and their families to move there.
Even in the best of circumstances, it can take four to six months for a person who has had a traumatic amputation to function again, Dr. Steven R. Flanagan, medical director of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, said in a telephone interview. The Rusk Institute has a team in Haiti.
“What they really need to worry about in Haiti is infectious complication, so if you have an amputation of a leg or arm, that wound is subject to infection,” Dr. Flanagan said. “And clearly they don’t have all the medicines they need down there.”
Dr. Claude, of the presidential commission, said the government was well aware of the situation.
“Unfortunately, a solution is not yet found,” he said. Even when one is found, he said, logistics in this rubble-choked country will continue to be a problem.
The hope is that access to medicines and care will be eased greatly when the government carries out plans to build giant tent cities across Port-au-Prince and the vicinity, but that could take weeks.
At University Hospital, which is next to a nursing school that collapsed, killing about 50 students, Mr. François was relieved to learn that he did not have to leave immediately. He said he did not know if his relatives died in the earthquake, and that they did not know that he survived.
Outside the tent, a giant post-operative ward has been created in a grove of mango and oak trees, with low-slung tarps strung over patients’ beds. The ward, known as “the forest,” is filled with many patients who did not want to be inside the hospital. The doctors do not know how many patients are there, because they have been too busy to count.
In the United States, many of these patients would already be home, receiving outpatient care, said Dr. Michael Marin, chairman of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who is volunteering here with the International Medical Corps, the group coordinating relief efforts at the hospital.
Here, many of the patients cannot return home. “The only place they have to go is the forest,” Dr. Marin said.
O’Brien Will Leave ‘Tonight Show,’ NBC Says/O’Brien Undone by His Media-Hopping Fans
O’Brien Will Leave ‘Tonight Show,’ NBC Says
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/21/business/AP-US-TV-Conan-Leno.html?scp=5&sq=O%92Brien%20Will%20Leave%20%91Tonight%20Show,%92%20NBC%20Says%20&st=cse
NEW YORK (AP) -- NBC says it has reached a deal with ''Tonight'' host Conan O'Brien for his exit from the show, allowing Jay Leno to return to the late-night program he hosted for 17 years. The deal is worth a reported $44 million.
Network spokeswoman Allison Gollust confirmed the deal early Thursday but did not offer any other details. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that O'Brien will get $32 million and that the network agreed to pay his staff $12 million in severance.
The announcement comes seven months after O'Brien took the reins from Leno.
O’Brien Undone by His Media-Hopping Fans
By BILL CARTER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/business/media/25conan.html?scp=1&sq=O%92Brien%20Will%20Leave%20%91Tonight%20Show,%92%20NBC%20Says%20&st=cse
Conan O’Brien made a triumphant exit from NBC Friday night, accompanied by one of the most impressive outpourings of support by younger viewers that any late-night host had ever seen — and Mr. O’Brien was effusive in his thanks for their backing.
Conan O’Brien’s show was also available on Hulu, and in clips elsewhere. Though clearly popular, he suffered in the ratings.
But he might have said: Where were you when I needed you?
In the tumult that surrounded NBC’s late-night shake-up last week, one thing was certain: If even a small fraction of the additional younger viewers who flocked to Mr. O’Brien’s show last week had turned up regularly in his earlier ratings results, he would almost surely still be hosting “The Tonight Show.”
Instead, for most of this past fall, Mr. O’Brien struggled to command the young viewers he needed to counter a falloff in overall audience numbers.
While he began to drop behind his chief late-night competitor, David Letterman on CBS, among total viewers, it was more alarming to NBC that Mr. O’Brien was not consistently beating Mr. Letterman in several important advertising-sales demographic groups — viewers 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. (He did beat Mr. Letterman virtually all the time in the 18-to-34 group.)
But to NBC’s surprise and disappointment, Mr. O’Brien fell behind his predecessor, Jay Leno, even among those 18-to-34 viewers, the group expected to be his core constituency. (From his start in June through the end of 2009, Mr. O’Brien averaged 716,000 viewers in that age group, down from the 759,000 Mr. Leno averaged the previous six months.)
Several television researchers said in interviews that this outcome might have been easily predicted, not because Mr. O’Brien does not appeal to younger viewers — he clearly does, as evidenced by the large numbers he attracted for his closing shows — but because regularly assembling those young adult viewers in significant numbers in the late-night hours has become a daunting, if not impossible, task.
“The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” said Jack MacKenzie, the president of the millennial strategy program for the research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.
Compounding the problem, said a senior research executive for another company, was the fact that Mr. O’Brien was especially appealing to young men. “And that group doesn’t watch television very regularly,” said the executive, who asked not to be named because his business competes with NBC.
Instead of watching Mr. O’Brien most nights, Mr. MacKenzie said, those young viewers have been watching everything from similar shows like “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, to cartoons on the “Adult Swim” franchise on the Cartoon Network, and the ever-present array of sports and sports news on ESPN and its sister channels.
In comparison with the 719,000 viewers in the 18-to-34 group that Mr. O’Brien had been averaging, Stephen Colbert on his “Colbert Report,” in the same six- month period in 2009, averaged 746,000 viewers ages 18 to 34. The cartoons on “Adult Swim” — mostly “Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken” — averaged 619,000 of those viewers. ESPN from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., with varied programs that included both live sports events and editions of the highlights show “Sports Center,” averaged 614,000 viewers in that group.
And dozens of other cable channels took other slices of the under 35 viewers.
“What you’ve seen in recent years is increased spending by all these cable channels for original programming,” Mr. MacKenzie said. “And besides having a double revenue stream of subscription fees and advertising, the cable channels have the luxury of targeting specific audiences. Broadcasters don’t.”
Fans of sports, for example, were watching ESPN many nights instead of Mr. O’Brien; and cartoon lovers were hooked on “Adult Swim.”
But even all the competition on cable did not represent the total distraction for young viewers that Mr. O’Brien had to contend with. The senior research executive pointed to outside attractions like video games that vie for the attention of young, especially male, viewers. And CBS executives have in the past identified the growing tendency of owners of digital video recorders to use the time after late local newscasts to play back programs recorded earlier that night or on previous nights.
A spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research pointed to a study the company released last year that cited the peak hours for DVR playback. The late-night hours showed the highest percentage of playback outside the prime-time hours, with about 7.6 percent of playback taking place from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m.
As an executive from one of NBC’s rival networks put it: “Conan didn’t just have to worry about Letterman; he had to worry about ‘House.’ People are playing back episodes of shows like ‘House’ in late night.”
Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.
Mr. MacKenzie added that NBC did Mr. O’Brien no favor by moving Mr. Leno to the 10 p.m. hour this fall. “That meant there was a show very similar in style to his on the air before him,” he said.
In his run on “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Leno managed to attract the largest audiences in virtually every age group, though his ratings too showed signs of falling off in his later years on the show. But his was always the first show of the late-night talk variety on NBC each night, Mr. MacKenzie.
That will happen again when Mr. Leno returns to “The Tonight Show” on March 1. But Mr. MacKenzie had some words of caution for NBC.
“A generational switch is coming,” he said. “The baby boomer audience that has mostly been the Leno audience is going out. The Conan audience is becoming more influential — even if they aren’t watching television the same way the previous generation did.”
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/21/business/AP-US-TV-Conan-Leno.html?scp=5&sq=O%92Brien%20Will%20Leave%20%91Tonight%20Show,%92%20NBC%20Says%20&st=cse
NEW YORK (AP) -- NBC says it has reached a deal with ''Tonight'' host Conan O'Brien for his exit from the show, allowing Jay Leno to return to the late-night program he hosted for 17 years. The deal is worth a reported $44 million.
Network spokeswoman Allison Gollust confirmed the deal early Thursday but did not offer any other details. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that O'Brien will get $32 million and that the network agreed to pay his staff $12 million in severance.
The announcement comes seven months after O'Brien took the reins from Leno.
O’Brien Undone by His Media-Hopping Fans
By BILL CARTER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/business/media/25conan.html?scp=1&sq=O%92Brien%20Will%20Leave%20%91Tonight%20Show,%92%20NBC%20Says%20&st=cse
Conan O’Brien made a triumphant exit from NBC Friday night, accompanied by one of the most impressive outpourings of support by younger viewers that any late-night host had ever seen — and Mr. O’Brien was effusive in his thanks for their backing.
Conan O’Brien’s show was also available on Hulu, and in clips elsewhere. Though clearly popular, he suffered in the ratings.
But he might have said: Where were you when I needed you?
In the tumult that surrounded NBC’s late-night shake-up last week, one thing was certain: If even a small fraction of the additional younger viewers who flocked to Mr. O’Brien’s show last week had turned up regularly in his earlier ratings results, he would almost surely still be hosting “The Tonight Show.”
Instead, for most of this past fall, Mr. O’Brien struggled to command the young viewers he needed to counter a falloff in overall audience numbers.
While he began to drop behind his chief late-night competitor, David Letterman on CBS, among total viewers, it was more alarming to NBC that Mr. O’Brien was not consistently beating Mr. Letterman in several important advertising-sales demographic groups — viewers 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. (He did beat Mr. Letterman virtually all the time in the 18-to-34 group.)
But to NBC’s surprise and disappointment, Mr. O’Brien fell behind his predecessor, Jay Leno, even among those 18-to-34 viewers, the group expected to be his core constituency. (From his start in June through the end of 2009, Mr. O’Brien averaged 716,000 viewers in that age group, down from the 759,000 Mr. Leno averaged the previous six months.)
Several television researchers said in interviews that this outcome might have been easily predicted, not because Mr. O’Brien does not appeal to younger viewers — he clearly does, as evidenced by the large numbers he attracted for his closing shows — but because regularly assembling those young adult viewers in significant numbers in the late-night hours has become a daunting, if not impossible, task.
“The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” said Jack MacKenzie, the president of the millennial strategy program for the research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.
Compounding the problem, said a senior research executive for another company, was the fact that Mr. O’Brien was especially appealing to young men. “And that group doesn’t watch television very regularly,” said the executive, who asked not to be named because his business competes with NBC.
Instead of watching Mr. O’Brien most nights, Mr. MacKenzie said, those young viewers have been watching everything from similar shows like “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, to cartoons on the “Adult Swim” franchise on the Cartoon Network, and the ever-present array of sports and sports news on ESPN and its sister channels.
In comparison with the 719,000 viewers in the 18-to-34 group that Mr. O’Brien had been averaging, Stephen Colbert on his “Colbert Report,” in the same six- month period in 2009, averaged 746,000 viewers ages 18 to 34. The cartoons on “Adult Swim” — mostly “Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken” — averaged 619,000 of those viewers. ESPN from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., with varied programs that included both live sports events and editions of the highlights show “Sports Center,” averaged 614,000 viewers in that group.
And dozens of other cable channels took other slices of the under 35 viewers.
“What you’ve seen in recent years is increased spending by all these cable channels for original programming,” Mr. MacKenzie said. “And besides having a double revenue stream of subscription fees and advertising, the cable channels have the luxury of targeting specific audiences. Broadcasters don’t.”
Fans of sports, for example, were watching ESPN many nights instead of Mr. O’Brien; and cartoon lovers were hooked on “Adult Swim.”
But even all the competition on cable did not represent the total distraction for young viewers that Mr. O’Brien had to contend with. The senior research executive pointed to outside attractions like video games that vie for the attention of young, especially male, viewers. And CBS executives have in the past identified the growing tendency of owners of digital video recorders to use the time after late local newscasts to play back programs recorded earlier that night or on previous nights.
A spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research pointed to a study the company released last year that cited the peak hours for DVR playback. The late-night hours showed the highest percentage of playback outside the prime-time hours, with about 7.6 percent of playback taking place from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m.
As an executive from one of NBC’s rival networks put it: “Conan didn’t just have to worry about Letterman; he had to worry about ‘House.’ People are playing back episodes of shows like ‘House’ in late night.”
Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.
Mr. MacKenzie added that NBC did Mr. O’Brien no favor by moving Mr. Leno to the 10 p.m. hour this fall. “That meant there was a show very similar in style to his on the air before him,” he said.
In his run on “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Leno managed to attract the largest audiences in virtually every age group, though his ratings too showed signs of falling off in his later years on the show. But his was always the first show of the late-night talk variety on NBC each night, Mr. MacKenzie.
That will happen again when Mr. Leno returns to “The Tonight Show” on March 1. But Mr. MacKenzie had some words of caution for NBC.
“A generational switch is coming,” he said. “The baby boomer audience that has mostly been the Leno audience is going out. The Conan audience is becoming more influential — even if they aren’t watching television the same way the previous generation did.”
The Great Tea Party Rip-Off
The Great Tea Party Rip-Off
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17rich.html
Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.
Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist at The Daily News in New York, Stanley Crouch, even stood up for the archaic usage of “Negro.” George Will defended Reid from charges of racism as vociferously as Democrats did. Al Sharpton may have accepted Reid’s apology, but for once there’s no evidence that he ever cared enough to ask for one. So who, actually, was the aggrieved party here? What — or who — was really behind this manufactured race war with no victims?
It would be easy to dismiss the entire event as a credulous news media’s collaboration with a publisher’s hype for a new tell-all-gossip 2008 campaign book, “Game Change,” which breathlessly broke the Reid “bombshell.” But this is a more interesting tale than that. The true prime mover in this story was not a book publicist but Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader as punishment for his “racism.”
Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox. His actions in this incident offer some hilarious and instructive insights into what’s going on in the Republican hierarchy right now as it tries to cope not just with our first African-American president but with a restive base embracing right-wing tea-party populism that loathes the establishment in both parties. And though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.
A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.
Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”
Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him. They are. He loves to play head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for expenditures over $100,000.
On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.
His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own. As many suspected at the time, her 2008 campaign wardrobe, like the doomed campaign itself, was just a preview of coming attractions: she would surely dump the bother of serving as Alaska’s besieged governor for a lucrative star turn on Fox News. Last week she made it official.
Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.
The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.
Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions. Such rumbling about the movement’s being co-opted by hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox last Tuesday to tell Bill O’Reilly that she would recycle her own tea party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right: the tea party movement is being exploited — and not just by marketers, lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most prominent leaders.
Tea partiers hate the G.O.P. establishment and its Wall Street allies, starting with the Bushies who created TARP, almost as much as they do Obama and his Wall Street pals. When Steele and Palin pay lip service to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don’t call for any actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial crisis. They’d never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect health insurance for the tea partiers who’ve been shafted by hard times. Their only economic principle beside tax cuts is vilification of the stimulus that did save countless jobs for firefighters, police officers and teachers at the state and local level.
The Democrats’ efforts to counter the deprivation and bitterness spawned by the Great Recession are indeed timid and imperfect. The right has a point when it says that the Senate health care votes of Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were bought with pork. But at least their constituents can share the pigout. Hustlers like Steele and Palin take the money and run. All their followers get in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt. Or a ghost-written self-promotional book. Or a tepid racial sideshow far beneath the incendiary standards of the party whose history from Strom to “macaca” has driven away nearly every black American except Steele for the past 40 years.
Recommend
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17rich.html
Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.
Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist at The Daily News in New York, Stanley Crouch, even stood up for the archaic usage of “Negro.” George Will defended Reid from charges of racism as vociferously as Democrats did. Al Sharpton may have accepted Reid’s apology, but for once there’s no evidence that he ever cared enough to ask for one. So who, actually, was the aggrieved party here? What — or who — was really behind this manufactured race war with no victims?
It would be easy to dismiss the entire event as a credulous news media’s collaboration with a publisher’s hype for a new tell-all-gossip 2008 campaign book, “Game Change,” which breathlessly broke the Reid “bombshell.” But this is a more interesting tale than that. The true prime mover in this story was not a book publicist but Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader as punishment for his “racism.”
Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox. His actions in this incident offer some hilarious and instructive insights into what’s going on in the Republican hierarchy right now as it tries to cope not just with our first African-American president but with a restive base embracing right-wing tea-party populism that loathes the establishment in both parties. And though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.
A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.
Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”
Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him. They are. He loves to play head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for expenditures over $100,000.
On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.
His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own. As many suspected at the time, her 2008 campaign wardrobe, like the doomed campaign itself, was just a preview of coming attractions: she would surely dump the bother of serving as Alaska’s besieged governor for a lucrative star turn on Fox News. Last week she made it official.
Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.
The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.
Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions. Such rumbling about the movement’s being co-opted by hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox last Tuesday to tell Bill O’Reilly that she would recycle her own tea party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right: the tea party movement is being exploited — and not just by marketers, lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most prominent leaders.
Tea partiers hate the G.O.P. establishment and its Wall Street allies, starting with the Bushies who created TARP, almost as much as they do Obama and his Wall Street pals. When Steele and Palin pay lip service to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don’t call for any actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial crisis. They’d never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect health insurance for the tea partiers who’ve been shafted by hard times. Their only economic principle beside tax cuts is vilification of the stimulus that did save countless jobs for firefighters, police officers and teachers at the state and local level.
The Democrats’ efforts to counter the deprivation and bitterness spawned by the Great Recession are indeed timid and imperfect. The right has a point when it says that the Senate health care votes of Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were bought with pork. But at least their constituents can share the pigout. Hustlers like Steele and Palin take the money and run. All their followers get in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt. Or a ghost-written self-promotional book. Or a tepid racial sideshow far beneath the incendiary standards of the party whose history from Strom to “macaca” has driven away nearly every black American except Steele for the past 40 years.
Recommend
Lady BlahBlah
Lady BlahBlah
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opinion/16blow.html
I have often accused Sarah Palin of having more fight than strategy in her. But I must concede that her decision to become a contributor to Fox News is a shrewd one. Touché, Barracuda.
Here’s why:
1. She’s made for television.
She’s telegenic. She’s never speechless. She has a gift for talking a lot while saying nothing. And, she has one of the best poker faces in the game — smiling and winking while bobbing and weaving, spouting all manner of nonsense to conceal when she’s nonplussed.
2. There’s no better fit than Fox.
It’s a friendly forum in which to hone her sound bites, learn to parry tough questions and answer easy ones, and to bone up on, well, pretty much everything. Sure, she’ll flub some facts, and she’ll take a drubbing for it. But beating up on her often backfires. The more she takes a punch and cheerfully recovers, the stronger she appears.
And, if she decides to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and all indications are that she will, this perch will give her another leg up on her Republican rivals. She continues to command the spotlight while they dance in the dark.
3. The timing is impeccable.
There is now a bubbling discontent on the right and, in particular, among whites, which is aimed at President Obama.
According to an analysis of New York Times and CBS News polls, Obama has the lowest approval rating among whites at the end of his first year in office than any president in the 30 years that The Times and CBS News have collected such data. And the gap between Obama and the others is significant, ranging from 10 to 36 percentage points.
Furthermore, a Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, found that most whites think that Obama’s first year as president has been mainly a failure. A plurality of whites even said that Obama has been a worse president than George W. Bush.
If indeed being Negro-lite made Obama palatable to white voters, as Senator Harry Reid was spanked for saying, that charm has worn off. Whites are now fuming at him.
Palin’s chipper visage, baseless certitude, utter obliviousness and unwavering belief in her own destiny make her an ideal vessel for this mounting white discontent. It’s perfect: blind faith meets blinding frustration. For an image of what this looks like, simply recall her rallies from the previous election.
(For the record, according to the Nielsen Company, more than 95 percent of the viewers of the Fox News Channel are white.)
This move could put Palin in a much better position to become the Republican nominee. The race for the nomination may not be given to the slick or to the strong, but to this fame monster who seems to have the stamina to endure until the end. (Sigh.)
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
Recommend
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opinion/16blow.html
I have often accused Sarah Palin of having more fight than strategy in her. But I must concede that her decision to become a contributor to Fox News is a shrewd one. Touché, Barracuda.
Here’s why:
1. She’s made for television.
She’s telegenic. She’s never speechless. She has a gift for talking a lot while saying nothing. And, she has one of the best poker faces in the game — smiling and winking while bobbing and weaving, spouting all manner of nonsense to conceal when she’s nonplussed.
2. There’s no better fit than Fox.
It’s a friendly forum in which to hone her sound bites, learn to parry tough questions and answer easy ones, and to bone up on, well, pretty much everything. Sure, she’ll flub some facts, and she’ll take a drubbing for it. But beating up on her often backfires. The more she takes a punch and cheerfully recovers, the stronger she appears.
And, if she decides to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and all indications are that she will, this perch will give her another leg up on her Republican rivals. She continues to command the spotlight while they dance in the dark.
3. The timing is impeccable.
There is now a bubbling discontent on the right and, in particular, among whites, which is aimed at President Obama.
According to an analysis of New York Times and CBS News polls, Obama has the lowest approval rating among whites at the end of his first year in office than any president in the 30 years that The Times and CBS News have collected such data. And the gap between Obama and the others is significant, ranging from 10 to 36 percentage points.
Furthermore, a Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, found that most whites think that Obama’s first year as president has been mainly a failure. A plurality of whites even said that Obama has been a worse president than George W. Bush.
If indeed being Negro-lite made Obama palatable to white voters, as Senator Harry Reid was spanked for saying, that charm has worn off. Whites are now fuming at him.
Palin’s chipper visage, baseless certitude, utter obliviousness and unwavering belief in her own destiny make her an ideal vessel for this mounting white discontent. It’s perfect: blind faith meets blinding frustration. For an image of what this looks like, simply recall her rallies from the previous election.
(For the record, according to the Nielsen Company, more than 95 percent of the viewers of the Fox News Channel are white.)
This move could put Palin in a much better position to become the Republican nominee. The race for the nomination may not be given to the slick or to the strong, but to this fame monster who seems to have the stamina to endure until the end. (Sigh.)
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
Recommend
Mona Noriega seeks aldermanic post
Mona Noriega seeks aldermanic post
by Tracy Baim
Copyright by The Windy City Times
January 20, 2010
http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=24469
Long-time Latina lesbian activist Mona Noriega is seeking appointment by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley to the 1st Ward aldermanic seat vacated by Manny Flores. The appointment could come as early as this week.
Flores has been nominated by Gov. Pat Quinn to be chief of the Illinois Commerce Commission. Flores reportedly has a replacement ( his chief of staff, Raymond Valadez ) in mind for Daley, but with the next city elections in 2011, the appointment would last a short time before the ward's residents vote again.
Noriega is a well-known and liked community activist who has worked on LGBT and Latina issues since the late 1970s. She has been a volunteer, board member and staff member for a wide range of groups serving individuals across the region. She co-founded the Lambda Legal Midwest Office with attorney Pat Logue in 1993, and two years later co-founded the important Latina lesbian group Amigas Latinas.
"This is a moment I've dreamed about for a long time," said Latino gay activist Robert Castillo, who was lobbying for Noriega at Saturday's Equality Illinois gala. "We as Latino/a LGBTs have spent years supporting, endorsing, volunteering for and campaigning for straight Latino/a candidates. It was only a matter of time before we would seek our rightful place at the table. I, along with many others in the Latina/o community, believe that now is the right time to do so and we are thrilled to have such an extremely qualified candidate in Mona. The City Council could have its first Latina Lesbian alderman. How amazing that would be! "
"Last night, everyone I spoke to was very excited," Noriega said Sunday. "They're excited about larger representation. This is not a criticism of Manny Flores. It is about the larger picture, about people wanting to be heard. This represents an opportunity to have another gay person in office, respectful of gays, Latinos, women, of everyone." 44th Ward Ald. Tom Tunney is still the city's only openly gay alderman.
For the past week, Noriega has been speaking with numerous gay and Latino activists and politicians about the possibility of her appointment to the post, as well as the potential of running for the position in 2011. She said if she does not get the appointment, her decision to run in 2011 for alderman would be informed by the person Daley selects to replace Flores, and if they can represent a diverse voice in the City Council.
"I want this post because, first, I want good government, with everyone represented. Second, because I was prompted by people calling me to say 'please do this,'" Noriega said. "The alderman's job is not glamorous. It is about real issues, basic issues, like making sure the system works for everyone." She said this includes issues of safety, the environment, and affordable housing.
"I have a history of bringing people together," Noriega said. "When different types of people come together, they create a better vision than any one person can do. That may sound idealistic, but it's how things happen."
Born and raised in Chicago, Noriega's father was Mexican and her mother Irish. She raised two children and is partners with another long-time community activist, Evette Cardona. Both women are in Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. They hosted a campaign event for Mayor Daley at their home during his last election.
Noriega's experience includes:
-- Co-founder and later Director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Midwest Regional Office.
-- Co-founder, Amigas Latinas in 1995, a group still serving the needs of Latinas.
-- Co-chair and later staff member for the original 2001 bid for the Gay Games coming to Chicago in 2006.
-- Former assistant publisher of Windy City Media Group ( publisher of Windy City Times ) .
-- Publisher of lesbians of color chapbooks in the 1980s.
-- Co-founder of Chicago's International Women's Day dances.
-- Member of LLENA, a lesbian Latina organization in the 1980s.
-- Former marketing staff for the Chicago Park District's Garfield Park Conservatory,
-- And involvement with Affinity Community Services, Lesbian Community Care Project, the Girl's Best Friend Foundation board, the National Society of Hispanic MBAs, and the Horizons Community Services' Community Leadership Council.
Noriega has a bachelor's degree from Northeastern Illinois University, an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she is a student in the Public Administration Ph.D. program at U of I.
Ald. Flores "has been a steadfast supporter of the LGBT community and I expect that his support will carry over into his new position," Castillo said. "I am proud that as a Latino elected official, he never wavered in his support of our community and I want to publicly thank him being such a strong ally. While I am sad to see him go, his departure brings an opportunity for the Latino/a LGBT community to seek to fill his vacancy with an openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender Latino. Imagine that-a place at the table!"
The 1st Ward is an odd J-shaped mix of neighborhoods, located on Chicago's Northwest Side. Its northernmost point is Belmont Avenue, bounded on the west by the Kennedy Expressway and on the east by Damen. The middle portion is from California to Western, and the base is Ohio, bounded partly by Leavitt, Hoyne and Greenview.
by Tracy Baim
Copyright by The Windy City Times
January 20, 2010
http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=24469
Long-time Latina lesbian activist Mona Noriega is seeking appointment by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley to the 1st Ward aldermanic seat vacated by Manny Flores. The appointment could come as early as this week.
Flores has been nominated by Gov. Pat Quinn to be chief of the Illinois Commerce Commission. Flores reportedly has a replacement ( his chief of staff, Raymond Valadez ) in mind for Daley, but with the next city elections in 2011, the appointment would last a short time before the ward's residents vote again.
Noriega is a well-known and liked community activist who has worked on LGBT and Latina issues since the late 1970s. She has been a volunteer, board member and staff member for a wide range of groups serving individuals across the region. She co-founded the Lambda Legal Midwest Office with attorney Pat Logue in 1993, and two years later co-founded the important Latina lesbian group Amigas Latinas.
"This is a moment I've dreamed about for a long time," said Latino gay activist Robert Castillo, who was lobbying for Noriega at Saturday's Equality Illinois gala. "We as Latino/a LGBTs have spent years supporting, endorsing, volunteering for and campaigning for straight Latino/a candidates. It was only a matter of time before we would seek our rightful place at the table. I, along with many others in the Latina/o community, believe that now is the right time to do so and we are thrilled to have such an extremely qualified candidate in Mona. The City Council could have its first Latina Lesbian alderman. How amazing that would be! "
"Last night, everyone I spoke to was very excited," Noriega said Sunday. "They're excited about larger representation. This is not a criticism of Manny Flores. It is about the larger picture, about people wanting to be heard. This represents an opportunity to have another gay person in office, respectful of gays, Latinos, women, of everyone." 44th Ward Ald. Tom Tunney is still the city's only openly gay alderman.
For the past week, Noriega has been speaking with numerous gay and Latino activists and politicians about the possibility of her appointment to the post, as well as the potential of running for the position in 2011. She said if she does not get the appointment, her decision to run in 2011 for alderman would be informed by the person Daley selects to replace Flores, and if they can represent a diverse voice in the City Council.
"I want this post because, first, I want good government, with everyone represented. Second, because I was prompted by people calling me to say 'please do this,'" Noriega said. "The alderman's job is not glamorous. It is about real issues, basic issues, like making sure the system works for everyone." She said this includes issues of safety, the environment, and affordable housing.
"I have a history of bringing people together," Noriega said. "When different types of people come together, they create a better vision than any one person can do. That may sound idealistic, but it's how things happen."
Born and raised in Chicago, Noriega's father was Mexican and her mother Irish. She raised two children and is partners with another long-time community activist, Evette Cardona. Both women are in Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. They hosted a campaign event for Mayor Daley at their home during his last election.
Noriega's experience includes:
-- Co-founder and later Director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Midwest Regional Office.
-- Co-founder, Amigas Latinas in 1995, a group still serving the needs of Latinas.
-- Co-chair and later staff member for the original 2001 bid for the Gay Games coming to Chicago in 2006.
-- Former assistant publisher of Windy City Media Group ( publisher of Windy City Times ) .
-- Publisher of lesbians of color chapbooks in the 1980s.
-- Co-founder of Chicago's International Women's Day dances.
-- Member of LLENA, a lesbian Latina organization in the 1980s.
-- Former marketing staff for the Chicago Park District's Garfield Park Conservatory,
-- And involvement with Affinity Community Services, Lesbian Community Care Project, the Girl's Best Friend Foundation board, the National Society of Hispanic MBAs, and the Horizons Community Services' Community Leadership Council.
Noriega has a bachelor's degree from Northeastern Illinois University, an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she is a student in the Public Administration Ph.D. program at U of I.
Ald. Flores "has been a steadfast supporter of the LGBT community and I expect that his support will carry over into his new position," Castillo said. "I am proud that as a Latino elected official, he never wavered in his support of our community and I want to publicly thank him being such a strong ally. While I am sad to see him go, his departure brings an opportunity for the Latino/a LGBT community to seek to fill his vacancy with an openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender Latino. Imagine that-a place at the table!"
The 1st Ward is an odd J-shaped mix of neighborhoods, located on Chicago's Northwest Side. Its northernmost point is Belmont Avenue, bounded on the west by the Kennedy Expressway and on the east by Damen. The middle portion is from California to Western, and the base is Ohio, bounded partly by Leavitt, Hoyne and Greenview.
10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S.
10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S.
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/ct-dirty-hotels-story,0,4952170.htmlstory
We didn't pick 'em -- but the travelers' reviews of these places on TripAdvisor.com were so bad, they made a list. Here's their top 10 dirtiest spots.
1. Heritage Marina Hotel, San Francisco, Calif.
2. Days Inn Eureka/Six Flags, Eureka, Mo.
3. Tropicana Resort Hotel, Virginia Beach, Va.
4. Super 8 Virginia Beach/At the Ocean, Virginia Beach, Va.
5. Quality Inn, Stroudsburg, Pa.
6. New York Inn, New York City, New York
7. Parisian Hotel & Suites, Miami Beach, Fla.
8. Capistrano Seaside Inn, Capistrano Beach, Calif.
9. Desert Lodge, Palm Springs, Calif.
10. Continental Oceanfront Hotel South Beach, Miami Beach, Fla.
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/ct-dirty-hotels-story,0,4952170.htmlstory
We didn't pick 'em -- but the travelers' reviews of these places on TripAdvisor.com were so bad, they made a list. Here's their top 10 dirtiest spots.
1. Heritage Marina Hotel, San Francisco, Calif.
2. Days Inn Eureka/Six Flags, Eureka, Mo.
3. Tropicana Resort Hotel, Virginia Beach, Va.
4. Super 8 Virginia Beach/At the Ocean, Virginia Beach, Va.
5. Quality Inn, Stroudsburg, Pa.
6. New York Inn, New York City, New York
7. Parisian Hotel & Suites, Miami Beach, Fla.
8. Capistrano Seaside Inn, Capistrano Beach, Calif.
9. Desert Lodge, Palm Springs, Calif.
10. Continental Oceanfront Hotel South Beach, Miami Beach, Fla.
LaDonna Redmond pushes obesity battle on Chicago's West Side
LaDonna Redmond pushes obesity battle on Chicago's West Side
By Dawn Turner Trice
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
7:52 a.m. CST, January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-trice-0125-20100124,0,6373898.column
In her late 20s, LaDonna Redmond, who's now 45, had bariatric surgery that dropped her weight from 340 pounds to 210 pounds.
When she and her husband had their son 11 years ago, she gained about 30 pounds, which she didn't lose. Eighteen months later, the family added a daughter and Redmond gained more weight, which she didn't lose.
"I think people looked at me and said, 'She's a big girl," said Redmond, who is 5 foot 10 and, at her heaviest, was 350 pounds. "As you get older, your back and knees start to hurt. I started to not feel as vibrant. I didn't have the energy."
Over the last decade, Redmond has made a name for herself converting vacant lots in West Side food desert communities into urban farm sites that offer fresh fruits and vegetables. As a Kellogg Foundation Fellow, she has been a staunch advocate of food justice and has lectured about equal access to sustainable foods around the country and in Europe.
Redmond started along this path after her son was diagnosed with severe food allergies and she had to learn how to feed him. But somewhere along the way, she acknowledged that her own eating habits and health had fallen into disarray.
"I was known as the big black woman from the West Side of Chicago with the African clothes," she said laughing. The clothing "was a way to stand out in the crowd and hide the weight. It's acceptable to be a large black woman in our community."
In 2006, Redmond was invited to participate in the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago's Children, at Children's Memorial Hospital. The consortium brings together organizations and individuals to confront obesity.
"I never liked the word obesity," said Redmond. "But I kept reading reports about obesity and the high risks of heart disease and diabetes in children, and it started me thinking about my own weight. How could I be an advocate for healthy food access and food justice if I'm overweight?"
She said she wasn't aspiring to an unrealistic image of thinness. She simply wanted to be an authentic messenger and become healthy.
Through the consortium, she was discussing studies with researchers trying to figure out the degree to which a child's weight was determined by heredity, environment and culture.
"I knew I didn't want my children to be obese," she said. "One study said my daughter would have a 90 percent chance of being obese as an adult if my husband and I were obese." At the time, her 6-foot-2 husband was about 420 pounds.
Despite the uncertainty of the research, she had a case study in her own home. Her son, who was much thinner than the rest of the family, was allergic to shellfish, peanuts and dairy products, so his diet was significantly different from his parents' and sister's.
"For him, I had to pay attention to processed meats and whether foods were prepared on the same machinery as peanuts," she said. "He ate more fresh fruits and vegetables. But the rest of us could eat as much meat, cheese and processed foods as we wanted."
She had worked hard to protect her son from potentially dangerous foods, and she decided to do the same for the rest of the family.
"In 2007, we started shifting our priorities," she said. "We went to Weight Watchers. We went to the YMCA. I hired a personal trainer. He made me write down what I was eating and prepare healthy meals for the entire family."
Just over a month into her new regimen, Redmond lost 15 pounds, and that inspired her to keep going. The family moved from the West Side to a place that promoted a more active lifestyle. She purchased exercise equipment for her home.
Ironically, at the same time that she started to lose weight, some of her food justice supporters began to question whether she still could be a credible advocate.
"I didn't live in the community anymore," said Redmond, who now lives in the South Side's Woodlawn neighborhood. "I didn't wear African clothes. That was my credibility? Not what I was talking about, but how I looked?"
Redmond is now down to 215 pounds; her husband weighs about 300. Her personal goal is 170.
Redmond's work these days includes finding ways to convey the message of a healthy diet and lifestyle to the younger, hip-hop generation.
"African-Americans have a food culture," she said. "We've heard that the soul food diet is bad for you. But we have to find the redeeming qualities in it and build on that so that our food and culture more than sustain us, but keep us healthy and
dtrice@tribune.com">alive."
dtrice@tribune.com
By Dawn Turner Trice
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
7:52 a.m. CST, January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-trice-0125-20100124,0,6373898.column
In her late 20s, LaDonna Redmond, who's now 45, had bariatric surgery that dropped her weight from 340 pounds to 210 pounds.
When she and her husband had their son 11 years ago, she gained about 30 pounds, which she didn't lose. Eighteen months later, the family added a daughter and Redmond gained more weight, which she didn't lose.
"I think people looked at me and said, 'She's a big girl," said Redmond, who is 5 foot 10 and, at her heaviest, was 350 pounds. "As you get older, your back and knees start to hurt. I started to not feel as vibrant. I didn't have the energy."
Over the last decade, Redmond has made a name for herself converting vacant lots in West Side food desert communities into urban farm sites that offer fresh fruits and vegetables. As a Kellogg Foundation Fellow, she has been a staunch advocate of food justice and has lectured about equal access to sustainable foods around the country and in Europe.
Redmond started along this path after her son was diagnosed with severe food allergies and she had to learn how to feed him. But somewhere along the way, she acknowledged that her own eating habits and health had fallen into disarray.
"I was known as the big black woman from the West Side of Chicago with the African clothes," she said laughing. The clothing "was a way to stand out in the crowd and hide the weight. It's acceptable to be a large black woman in our community."
In 2006, Redmond was invited to participate in the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago's Children, at Children's Memorial Hospital. The consortium brings together organizations and individuals to confront obesity.
"I never liked the word obesity," said Redmond. "But I kept reading reports about obesity and the high risks of heart disease and diabetes in children, and it started me thinking about my own weight. How could I be an advocate for healthy food access and food justice if I'm overweight?"
She said she wasn't aspiring to an unrealistic image of thinness. She simply wanted to be an authentic messenger and become healthy.
Through the consortium, she was discussing studies with researchers trying to figure out the degree to which a child's weight was determined by heredity, environment and culture.
"I knew I didn't want my children to be obese," she said. "One study said my daughter would have a 90 percent chance of being obese as an adult if my husband and I were obese." At the time, her 6-foot-2 husband was about 420 pounds.
Despite the uncertainty of the research, she had a case study in her own home. Her son, who was much thinner than the rest of the family, was allergic to shellfish, peanuts and dairy products, so his diet was significantly different from his parents' and sister's.
"For him, I had to pay attention to processed meats and whether foods were prepared on the same machinery as peanuts," she said. "He ate more fresh fruits and vegetables. But the rest of us could eat as much meat, cheese and processed foods as we wanted."
She had worked hard to protect her son from potentially dangerous foods, and she decided to do the same for the rest of the family.
"In 2007, we started shifting our priorities," she said. "We went to Weight Watchers. We went to the YMCA. I hired a personal trainer. He made me write down what I was eating and prepare healthy meals for the entire family."
Just over a month into her new regimen, Redmond lost 15 pounds, and that inspired her to keep going. The family moved from the West Side to a place that promoted a more active lifestyle. She purchased exercise equipment for her home.
Ironically, at the same time that she started to lose weight, some of her food justice supporters began to question whether she still could be a credible advocate.
"I didn't live in the community anymore," said Redmond, who now lives in the South Side's Woodlawn neighborhood. "I didn't wear African clothes. That was my credibility? Not what I was talking about, but how I looked?"
Redmond is now down to 215 pounds; her husband weighs about 300. Her personal goal is 170.
Redmond's work these days includes finding ways to convey the message of a healthy diet and lifestyle to the younger, hip-hop generation.
"African-Americans have a food culture," she said. "We've heard that the soul food diet is bad for you. But we have to find the redeeming qualities in it and build on that so that our food and culture more than sustain us, but keep us healthy and
dtrice@tribune.com">alive."
dtrice@tribune.com
Area home sales up for 6th month - U.S. home sales plunge nearly 17% in December after tax credit deadline extended
Area home sales up for 6th month - U.S. home sales plunge nearly 17% in December after tax credit deadline extended
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
10:40 a.m. CST, January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-chicago-home-sales,0,1278819.story
Sales of existing homes in the Chicago area recorded a sixth month of year-over-year improvement in December, giving more validation to the notion that the local housing market may finally be stabilizing.
The Illinois Association of Realtors reported Monday that there were 5,752 existing single-family homes and condos sold in December, a 33 percent increase from the 4,320 homes sold in December 2008.
Increased sales in the year's second half meant that for the year as a whole, sales slipped only 0.2 percent form 2008, to 69,290 homes sold in the Chicago area.
Prices are still down substantially for a year ago. The December 2009 median price in the Chicago area was $183,000, down 10.4 percent from a year ago. On a year-over-year basis, the effect of foreclosures and short sales sent the median home price down 18.3 percent to $196,000. The median price means half the homes were sold for more and half for less.
Among the eight counties in the Chicago area, several reported significant gains in sales volume. In Cook County, for instance, December sales jumped almost 43 percent from a year earlier while the median price dipped 10.7 percent, to $183,000.
Likewise, month-over-month sales gains were 21.5 percent in Lake County; 19.1 percent in DuPage County; 31.6 percent in Kane County; 46.3 percent in McHenry County; 18.8 percent in Will County; 12 percent in Grundy County; and 9.3 percent in Kendall County. DeKalb County was the only county to see sales fall -- 15 homes sold there in December, compared to 56 in December 2008.
Many observers had thought that December's numbers would be lackluster because first-time homebuyers rushed to get purchases closed before a Nov. 30 tax credit deadline. The program has since been expanded and extended until the spring.
In Chicago, sales of single-family homes and condos rose 39.8 percent to 1,768 sales and the median price fell 10.6 percent to $210,000. That meant for the year, Chicago homes sales were down 7.4 percent to 19,401 homes sold. The median price for the year was $225,000, a 22.4 percent decrease from 2008.
The local market may not continue its positive trends past the first quarter, however. Illinois' unemployment rate reached 11.1 percent in December, above the national rate, and the state has recorded 24 months of job declines since Decenber 2007.
The Obama administration is studying how to better help the unemployed keep their homes, rather than have them fall into foreclosure if they are no longer able to meet their mortgage payments.
mepodmolik@tribune.com
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
10:40 a.m. CST, January 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-chicago-home-sales,0,1278819.story
Sales of existing homes in the Chicago area recorded a sixth month of year-over-year improvement in December, giving more validation to the notion that the local housing market may finally be stabilizing.
The Illinois Association of Realtors reported Monday that there were 5,752 existing single-family homes and condos sold in December, a 33 percent increase from the 4,320 homes sold in December 2008.
Increased sales in the year's second half meant that for the year as a whole, sales slipped only 0.2 percent form 2008, to 69,290 homes sold in the Chicago area.
Prices are still down substantially for a year ago. The December 2009 median price in the Chicago area was $183,000, down 10.4 percent from a year ago. On a year-over-year basis, the effect of foreclosures and short sales sent the median home price down 18.3 percent to $196,000. The median price means half the homes were sold for more and half for less.
Among the eight counties in the Chicago area, several reported significant gains in sales volume. In Cook County, for instance, December sales jumped almost 43 percent from a year earlier while the median price dipped 10.7 percent, to $183,000.
Likewise, month-over-month sales gains were 21.5 percent in Lake County; 19.1 percent in DuPage County; 31.6 percent in Kane County; 46.3 percent in McHenry County; 18.8 percent in Will County; 12 percent in Grundy County; and 9.3 percent in Kendall County. DeKalb County was the only county to see sales fall -- 15 homes sold there in December, compared to 56 in December 2008.
Many observers had thought that December's numbers would be lackluster because first-time homebuyers rushed to get purchases closed before a Nov. 30 tax credit deadline. The program has since been expanded and extended until the spring.
In Chicago, sales of single-family homes and condos rose 39.8 percent to 1,768 sales and the median price fell 10.6 percent to $210,000. That meant for the year, Chicago homes sales were down 7.4 percent to 19,401 homes sold. The median price for the year was $225,000, a 22.4 percent decrease from 2008.
The local market may not continue its positive trends past the first quarter, however. Illinois' unemployment rate reached 11.1 percent in December, above the national rate, and the state has recorded 24 months of job declines since Decenber 2007.
The Obama administration is studying how to better help the unemployed keep their homes, rather than have them fall into foreclosure if they are no longer able to meet their mortgage payments.
mepodmolik@tribune.com
Making Sense of the New Political Anger
Making Sense of the New Political Anger
By SAM TANENHAUS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/weekinreview/24tanenhaus.html?hpw
Like so many good narratives, political stories often unfold along simple lines but invite multiple, at times conflicting, interpretations.
And so it happened last week. First came the upset victory by Scott Brown, a Republican, in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, widely deemed a populist uprising and symbolized by the mile-weary pickup truck that became a feature of Mr. Brown’s campaign.
Only two days later, the Supreme Court, in a more sweeping ruling than many expected, undid the bipartisan campaign finance reform of 2002, freeing corporations, labor unions and other organizations to spend unlimited sums at election time.
President Obama, taking up his own newfound populist theme, said the decision favored “powerful interests” that threaten to "drown out the voices of every day Americans.”
Republicans countered that Democrats also have their moneyed backers — in Hollywood as well as in the drug companies that support Mr. Obama’s imperiled health-care reform bill.
Either way, the two surprises highlighted a widening divide in American politics, exemplified by the Tea Party brigades who helped engineer Mr. Brown’s victory and also by liberals who have been voicing their disillusionment with the first year of the Obama presidency.
The post-partisan consensus that seemed possible a year ago has given way to a curious harmony of dissent — as both sides denounce government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. But in fact, two different protests are under way. One, most visible on the left, is rooted in traditional populism that favors increased government. The other, on the right, springs from a purist strain in American politics that distrusts government altogether.
During the Great Depression, populist sentiments were captured by figures like Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, who mounted a national campaign for old-age pensions; the idea helped shape the Social Security Act.
The period’s most gifted populist politician, Huey P. Long, spoke movingly of the “criminal” farm foreclosures he had seen as a boy in rural Louisiana, and advocated that all Americans received a “homestead allowance” and guaranteed annual income. Contrast this with the televised eruption by Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who is often said to have spawned the Tea Party movement early last year. In his widely replayed rant, Mr. Santelli vented his ire not at bailouts of Wall Street firms or the Detroit auto makers, but rather at Mr. Obama’s plan to assist homeowners unable to pay their mortgages.
“This is America,” Mr. Santelli said. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
A parallel dislike of the elite animates both populism and purism. But the two find that elite in different places. Populists deplore the rich, for instance the corporate executives now reaping large bonuses. Purists dislike the governing class — politicians who readily abandon core principles and strike deals with the other side.
Thus, purist rebellions have repeatedly been directed at elites within the Republican Party — whether the “me-too” centrists of the 1950s and 60s or the “Republicans in Name Only” under assault today.
In times of disarray, Republican leaders have drawn on insurgents, who refresh the party’s principles and supply it with grassroots energy. But the purists don’t always reciprocate. Mr. Brown’s election seemed to offer the prospect of a truce, since Tea Party activists and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had joined forces to secure his win.
But the Massachusetts election could be a special case — a battle whose timing may have upended President Obama’s health care campaign by snatching away a seat the Democrats had held for nearly six decades. In places where conservatives are more entrenched — in Florida and Colorado, for instance — Tea Party insurgents and established Republicans remain at odds, quarreling over candidates and platforms.
This conflict recalls the tensions that arose during the conservative movement’s first truly successful insurgency — the drive to nominate Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Then, too, grassroots activists, including members of the John Birch Society — a group as extreme in its day as the “birthers” are in 2010 — declared war on the Republican establishment, “a small group of secret kingmakers," as Phyllis Schlafly described them in her election-year manifesto “A Choice Not an Echo.”
Movement conservatives “want to mass the nation’s conservative strength in one party,” the political scientist James MacGregor Burns observed of the Goldwater crusade. “They do not really care which party, but at this point the G.O.P. seems the best vehicle for their hopes.”
Goldwater lost the general election, but the insurgents gained control of the party, and their efforts at purification eventually succeeded when Goldwater’s heir Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. “Me-too” Republicans, many from the East Coast, either were marginalized or left the party altogether.
The result was the more ideologically unified party still intact in 2010, most obviously in Congress, where House Republicans have formed a rigid bloc and Senate Republicans have made the threat of a filibuster their instrument of obstruction — further honed, no doubt, by Scott Brown’s victory on Tuesday.
And yet, even though they have steadily opposed Mr. Obama, these same Republicans are now under assault. The new insurgents accuse them of complicity with the administration in big-spending, big-government ways.
How did this happen? One explanation is that with so few moderates left, the only plausible targets for angry purists are conservatives tainted by the occasional heresy — someone like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who voted to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor, or Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who endorsed Mr. Obama’s stimulus package.
An added complication is that it is increasingly difficult to say precisely where private life ends and government begins. The two have become so deeply, and at times confusingly, interrelated that is now possible to be both for and against big government, sometimes at the same moment.
A memorable example occurred last summer when Bob Inglis, a House Republican from South Carolina, drew the ire of insurgents at a town hall meeting. One voter angrily told him, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Mr. Inglis replied, “Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.” At the time, this incident was widely cited as a sign of public ignorance about health care. But it can be interpreted differently — as a reflection of the helplessness many Americans feel at a time of growing dependency on a growing government: one that gives health-care coverage, and can take it away or reduce its benefits.
The most conservative recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both presided over expansions of the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Bush, in particular, angered many purists with spending programs like his massive prescription-drug bill.
In such an environment, it is no surprise that neither party commands much loyalty. Populists are losing patience with Democrats even as purists wrangle with Republicans.
Mr. Brown seems acutely aware of this. In his victory speech he credited the will of “the independent majority.” Whether such a majority exists is another question.
Looking back at the Great Depression, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that even in that period of profound political and economic crisis, Americans held fast to “the desperate inner conviction that somewhere an answer could be found.” It is in that pursuit, perhaps, that populists and purists can find common ground.
By SAM TANENHAUS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/weekinreview/24tanenhaus.html?hpw
Like so many good narratives, political stories often unfold along simple lines but invite multiple, at times conflicting, interpretations.
And so it happened last week. First came the upset victory by Scott Brown, a Republican, in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, widely deemed a populist uprising and symbolized by the mile-weary pickup truck that became a feature of Mr. Brown’s campaign.
Only two days later, the Supreme Court, in a more sweeping ruling than many expected, undid the bipartisan campaign finance reform of 2002, freeing corporations, labor unions and other organizations to spend unlimited sums at election time.
President Obama, taking up his own newfound populist theme, said the decision favored “powerful interests” that threaten to "drown out the voices of every day Americans.”
Republicans countered that Democrats also have their moneyed backers — in Hollywood as well as in the drug companies that support Mr. Obama’s imperiled health-care reform bill.
Either way, the two surprises highlighted a widening divide in American politics, exemplified by the Tea Party brigades who helped engineer Mr. Brown’s victory and also by liberals who have been voicing their disillusionment with the first year of the Obama presidency.
The post-partisan consensus that seemed possible a year ago has given way to a curious harmony of dissent — as both sides denounce government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. But in fact, two different protests are under way. One, most visible on the left, is rooted in traditional populism that favors increased government. The other, on the right, springs from a purist strain in American politics that distrusts government altogether.
During the Great Depression, populist sentiments were captured by figures like Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, who mounted a national campaign for old-age pensions; the idea helped shape the Social Security Act.
The period’s most gifted populist politician, Huey P. Long, spoke movingly of the “criminal” farm foreclosures he had seen as a boy in rural Louisiana, and advocated that all Americans received a “homestead allowance” and guaranteed annual income. Contrast this with the televised eruption by Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who is often said to have spawned the Tea Party movement early last year. In his widely replayed rant, Mr. Santelli vented his ire not at bailouts of Wall Street firms or the Detroit auto makers, but rather at Mr. Obama’s plan to assist homeowners unable to pay their mortgages.
“This is America,” Mr. Santelli said. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
A parallel dislike of the elite animates both populism and purism. But the two find that elite in different places. Populists deplore the rich, for instance the corporate executives now reaping large bonuses. Purists dislike the governing class — politicians who readily abandon core principles and strike deals with the other side.
Thus, purist rebellions have repeatedly been directed at elites within the Republican Party — whether the “me-too” centrists of the 1950s and 60s or the “Republicans in Name Only” under assault today.
In times of disarray, Republican leaders have drawn on insurgents, who refresh the party’s principles and supply it with grassroots energy. But the purists don’t always reciprocate. Mr. Brown’s election seemed to offer the prospect of a truce, since Tea Party activists and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had joined forces to secure his win.
But the Massachusetts election could be a special case — a battle whose timing may have upended President Obama’s health care campaign by snatching away a seat the Democrats had held for nearly six decades. In places where conservatives are more entrenched — in Florida and Colorado, for instance — Tea Party insurgents and established Republicans remain at odds, quarreling over candidates and platforms.
This conflict recalls the tensions that arose during the conservative movement’s first truly successful insurgency — the drive to nominate Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Then, too, grassroots activists, including members of the John Birch Society — a group as extreme in its day as the “birthers” are in 2010 — declared war on the Republican establishment, “a small group of secret kingmakers," as Phyllis Schlafly described them in her election-year manifesto “A Choice Not an Echo.”
Movement conservatives “want to mass the nation’s conservative strength in one party,” the political scientist James MacGregor Burns observed of the Goldwater crusade. “They do not really care which party, but at this point the G.O.P. seems the best vehicle for their hopes.”
Goldwater lost the general election, but the insurgents gained control of the party, and their efforts at purification eventually succeeded when Goldwater’s heir Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. “Me-too” Republicans, many from the East Coast, either were marginalized or left the party altogether.
The result was the more ideologically unified party still intact in 2010, most obviously in Congress, where House Republicans have formed a rigid bloc and Senate Republicans have made the threat of a filibuster their instrument of obstruction — further honed, no doubt, by Scott Brown’s victory on Tuesday.
And yet, even though they have steadily opposed Mr. Obama, these same Republicans are now under assault. The new insurgents accuse them of complicity with the administration in big-spending, big-government ways.
How did this happen? One explanation is that with so few moderates left, the only plausible targets for angry purists are conservatives tainted by the occasional heresy — someone like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who voted to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor, or Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who endorsed Mr. Obama’s stimulus package.
An added complication is that it is increasingly difficult to say precisely where private life ends and government begins. The two have become so deeply, and at times confusingly, interrelated that is now possible to be both for and against big government, sometimes at the same moment.
A memorable example occurred last summer when Bob Inglis, a House Republican from South Carolina, drew the ire of insurgents at a town hall meeting. One voter angrily told him, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Mr. Inglis replied, “Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.” At the time, this incident was widely cited as a sign of public ignorance about health care. But it can be interpreted differently — as a reflection of the helplessness many Americans feel at a time of growing dependency on a growing government: one that gives health-care coverage, and can take it away or reduce its benefits.
The most conservative recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both presided over expansions of the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Bush, in particular, angered many purists with spending programs like his massive prescription-drug bill.
In such an environment, it is no surprise that neither party commands much loyalty. Populists are losing patience with Democrats even as purists wrangle with Republicans.
Mr. Brown seems acutely aware of this. In his victory speech he credited the will of “the independent majority.” Whether such a majority exists is another question.
Looking back at the Great Depression, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that even in that period of profound political and economic crisis, Americans held fast to “the desperate inner conviction that somewhere an answer could be found.” It is in that pursuit, perhaps, that populists and purists can find common ground.
Financial Times Editorial Comment: US healthcare reform falls ill
Financial Times Editorial Comment: US healthcare reform falls ill
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: January 24 2010 19:49 | Last updated: January 24 2010 19:49
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f666ffda-091f-11df-ba88-00144feabdc0.html
Last week’s loss in Massachusetts has stunned the Democratic party and caused panic. One likely consequence is that healthcare reform – Barack Obama’s signature initiative – will go down to defeat. This is a reform that the US badly needs, and which is decades overdue. Must the effort be abandoned?
Democrats could press on if they chose. The loss of their super-majority in the Senate is not decisive. The party still controls the House of Representatives. If the House simply passed the bill which the Senate has already approved, the measure could go directly to the president’s desk.
But many Democrats in the House do not like the Senate bill. Liberals find it too timid. Moderates in swing districts, worried about November’s midterm elections, find it too radical, and fear it will lose them votes. The party is not being forced by parliamentary arithmetic to abandon this measure; out of lack of conviction, it is choosing to surrender.
The Democrats are looking at other options. As they know, these are likely to yield little or nothing of meaningful reform. This project has an all-or-nothing aspect. You cannot insist on guaranteed availability of insurance coverage, for example, without an individual mandate to buy insurance: this would cause premiums to soar. Then, in turn, the mandate requires subsidies. Once you start to cherry-pick the Senate bill, it will unravel. The president and his party seem ready to let this happen.
Of course, the Democrats must show they are listening to voters. It would be wrong to pretend that the Massachusetts result had not happened. But popular opposition to healthcare reform is easy to misinterpret.
Though they ended up with a decent proposal, Mr Obama and his Democratic allies made a remarkable hash of getting there. The process was gruesome and the marketing was non-existent. Voters have reason to be confused and fearful, and this is driving the polls. But there is no solid opposition to change. Mr Obama, after all, was elected on the promise of comprehensive healthcare reform.
Sadly, it now looks too late for the president to exercise the leadership that was missing this past year – in guiding the effort, in uniting his own party around a plan, and above all in assuring the public that it all made sense. Despite everything, Mr Obama came close to his goal, but close will not do. This defeat, if it happens, will be a momentous failure and a bitter disappointment.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: January 24 2010 19:49 | Last updated: January 24 2010 19:49
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f666ffda-091f-11df-ba88-00144feabdc0.html
Last week’s loss in Massachusetts has stunned the Democratic party and caused panic. One likely consequence is that healthcare reform – Barack Obama’s signature initiative – will go down to defeat. This is a reform that the US badly needs, and which is decades overdue. Must the effort be abandoned?
Democrats could press on if they chose. The loss of their super-majority in the Senate is not decisive. The party still controls the House of Representatives. If the House simply passed the bill which the Senate has already approved, the measure could go directly to the president’s desk.
But many Democrats in the House do not like the Senate bill. Liberals find it too timid. Moderates in swing districts, worried about November’s midterm elections, find it too radical, and fear it will lose them votes. The party is not being forced by parliamentary arithmetic to abandon this measure; out of lack of conviction, it is choosing to surrender.
The Democrats are looking at other options. As they know, these are likely to yield little or nothing of meaningful reform. This project has an all-or-nothing aspect. You cannot insist on guaranteed availability of insurance coverage, for example, without an individual mandate to buy insurance: this would cause premiums to soar. Then, in turn, the mandate requires subsidies. Once you start to cherry-pick the Senate bill, it will unravel. The president and his party seem ready to let this happen.
Of course, the Democrats must show they are listening to voters. It would be wrong to pretend that the Massachusetts result had not happened. But popular opposition to healthcare reform is easy to misinterpret.
Though they ended up with a decent proposal, Mr Obama and his Democratic allies made a remarkable hash of getting there. The process was gruesome and the marketing was non-existent. Voters have reason to be confused and fearful, and this is driving the polls. But there is no solid opposition to change. Mr Obama, after all, was elected on the promise of comprehensive healthcare reform.
Sadly, it now looks too late for the president to exercise the leadership that was missing this past year – in guiding the effort, in uniting his own party around a plan, and above all in assuring the public that it all made sense. Despite everything, Mr Obama came close to his goal, but close will not do. This defeat, if it happens, will be a momentous failure and a bitter disappointment.
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