US ‘hate list’ DJ Michael Savage to sue Britain

Mr Weiner’s views have caused great offence in the US   A US radio talk show host say he will sue the British government for defamation after being placed on a list of people banned from entering the UK. Conservative political commentator Michael Savage, real name Michael Alan Weiner, is one of 22 people barred for fostering extremism or hate. He has described the Islamic holy book the Koran as “a book of hate” and questioned the existence of autism. Mr Weiner said he opposed violence and objected to being linked to murderers. He told his radio audience that he was intending to sue British Home Secretary Jackie Smith, who he described as the “lunatic … Home Secretary of England”. “To link me up with skin heads who are killing people in Russia, to put me in league with Hamas murderers who kill people on buses is defamation,” he said. In an article posted on his website, he said had did not advocate violence but “traditional values”. He wrote: “What does that say about the government of England? It says more about them than it says about me.” Public list Mr Weiner has caused offence in the US with his views on immigration, Islam and rape. He also angered the parents of children with autism by saying most cases were “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out”. He was once fired from cable news channel MSNBC for calling a gay caller to his show a sodomite who should “get Aids and die,” but later said he thought it had been a crank call. The UK has been able to ban people who promote hatred, terrorist violence or serious criminal activity since 2005, but the list was only made public for the first time this week. Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal and Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky are among the 16 named people named by the Home Office as being excluded in the five months to March. Also excluded are two leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang, the ex-Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Stephen ‘Don’ Black and neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe. The remaining six have not been named, as doing so would not be in the public interest, the government said.

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8035114.stm

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Britain Bans 16 for ‘Fostering Extremism’

The British government on Tuesday named 16 people who have been banned from entering Britain for “fostering extremism or hatred,” including Muslim extremists, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, a U.S. radio talk show host and a Kansas preacher.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for domestic security, said she decided to make the names public to show the kind of behavior that Britain is “not willing to have in this country.”

The list includes six Americans. Perhaps the most prominent is Michael Savage, a nationally syndicated conservative radio host who has made controversial remarks about immigrants and Muslims, such as urging Americans to “burn the Mexican flag on your street corner” and saying that “when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi.”

Smith told the BBC that Savage was “someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country.”

Savage reacted sarcastically.

“Darn! And I was just planning a trip to England for their superior dental work and cuisine,” he told the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

He added that he has not actually been to Britain in about two decades and has no plans to return, except perhaps to take Smith to court. “I want to sue the British home secretary for defamation, for linking me up with murderers because of my opinions, my writings, my speaking — none of which have advocated any violence, ever,” he said.

The Rev. Fred W. Phelps Sr. and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church also are unwelcome in the United Kingdom. The pair, who have picketed at funerals carrying placards with anti-gay slogans, are banned for “fostering hatred,” the Home Office said.

The other Americans on the list are Eric Gliebe, described by the Home Office as a distributor of “racist leaflets”; Abdul Ali Musa, a Muslim activist; and former Klan leader Stephen Donald Black.

“Coming to the U.K. is a privilege and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life,” Smith said in a statement. “Therefore, I will not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here.”

After suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s subway and bus system on July 7, 2005, the British government began barring entry to individuals who promote hatred, terrorist violence or serious criminal activity. In the last four years, 101 people have been excluded.

The 16 people named Tuesday are among 22 banned in the last five months; six were not named because it was not “in the public interest,” the Home Office said.

Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, skinhead gang leaders who were sentenced to prison in Russia last December for their part in 20 racially motivated murders, were banned. So, too, were Islamic preachers Amir Siddique, Safwat Hijazi and Yunis Al Astal.

Some British civil libertarians found the list puzzling.

“How are these people selected? There’s no process here, people aren’t accused of a specific crime. It’s deeply worrying,” said Padraig Reidy, news editor of Index of Censorship, a London periodical that campaigns for freedom of expression.

He added that the list is so “bizarrely eclectic” that “you have to wonder if there was a deliberate move to make it eclectic, as if to say it’s not Islamists being picked out.”

Asked whether a radio talk show host and a convicted murderer constitute similar threats to British society, a spokesman for the Home Office said that each individual “is looked at on a case–by-case basis” and that “names can drop off the list” if individuals “can prove they no longer hold extreme views.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/05/AR2009050500827.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Bailout Justice

I CAN imagine the Treasury secretary’s face turning pale as he is told by the attorney general that one of the financial institutions on government life support has been indicted by a grand jury. Worse, I can imagine the attorney general facing not too subtle pressure from the president’s economic team to go easy on such companies.

This situation is hypothetical, of course, but in March, the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, warned Congress that “the unprecedented level of financial resources committed by the federal government to combat the economic downturn will lead to an inevitable increase in economic crime and public corruption cases.” Yet no one has discussed the inherent conflict of interest that the government created when it infused large sums of money into these companies.

The government now has an extraordinarily high fiduciary duty to safeguard the stability and health of companies that received hundreds of billions of bailout money. At the same time, the Justice Department has the duty to indict a corporation if the evidence dictates such severe action — and an indictment is often a death sentence for a corporation. The quandary is obvious. How, then, does the Justice Department bring charges against a corporation that is now owned by the government?

The tsunami of corporate scandals that shook our economy in 2001 — Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and others — provides us with an instructive example. The Justice Department moved swiftly to bring corporate wrongdoers to justice. But we also learned that when dealing with major companies or industries, we had to carefully consider the collateral consequences of our prosecutions.

Would there be unintended human carnage in the form of thousands of lost jobs? Would shareholders, some of whom had already suffered a great deal, lose more of their investment? What impact would our actions have on the economy? We realized that we had an obligation to minimize the harm to innocent citizens.

Among the options we pursued were deferred prosecution agreements. These court-authorized agreements were not new but under certain circumstances offered more appropriate methods of providing justice in the best interests of the public as well as a company’s employees and shareholders. They avoid the destructiveness of indictments and allow companies to remain in business while operating under the increased scrutiny of federally appointed monitors.

In September 2007, for instance, the Justice Department and the nation’s five largest manufacturers of prosthetic hips and knees reached agreements over allegations that they gave kickbacks to orthopedic surgeons who used a particular company’s artificial hip and knee reconstruction replacement products. The allegations meant that the companies faced indictment, prosecution and a potential end to their businesses.

Think of the effect on the community if these companies had been shuttered: employees would have lost their jobs, shareholders and pensioners would have lost their savings and countless people in need of hip and knee replacement would have been out of luck, as these five companies accounted for 95 percent of the market. The Justice Department could have wiped out an entire industry that has a vital role in American health care.

Instead, the companies paid settlements to the government totaling $311 million. They agreed to be monitored by private sector individuals and firms with reputations for integrity and public service, with the necessary legal and business expertise and the institutional capacity to do the job. The monitoring costs were borne exclusively by the companies, saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars that could be then used for other investigations and law-enforcement priorities. (I was a paid monitor for one of these companies, Zimmer Holdings.) In these types of circumstances, a deferred prosecution agreement is clearly better for everyone.

The government must hold accountable any individuals who acted illegally in this financial meltdown, while preserving the viability of the companies that received bailout funds or stimulus money. Certainly, we should demand justice. But we must all remember that justice is a value, the adherence to which includes seeking the best outcome for the American people. In some cases it will be the punishing of bad actors. In other cases it may involve heavy corporate fines or operating under a carefully tailored agreement.

In 2001, we did not know the extent of the corporate fraud scandals. Every day seemed to bring news of another betrayal of trust by top executives of another company. But we learned that there was often a better solution than closing those companies. I believe that if we apply to this current crisis the lessons learned a few short years ago, we can achieve the restoration of trust in the financial system and the long-term vitality of the American economy.

John Ashcroft was the United States attorney general from 2001 to 2005.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/opinion/05ashcroft.html?ref=opinion

Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas

This is a relentless age we’re living in, a time when innovative solutions — or any solutions, for that matter — to our seemingly infinite problems seem in short supply.

So how do we come up with new ideas? How do we learn to think outside of normal parameters? Are the processes in place for doing so flawed? Do we rely too much on computer models? On consultants? On big-idea gurus lauding the merits of tribes and crowds or of starfish and spiders? On Twitter?

At the risk of sounding like a big-idea guru myself, I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.

That’s why I am so enamored with the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson, a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller. Johnson is a former urban planner, and his work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues.

In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous . . . [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”

A latent inventor, Johnson discovered his “ability” only at age 36 in 1974, when he was the editorial cartoonist for The Sierra Club Bulletin and the editor, Roger Olmsted, asked him to invent whimsical recreational vehicles. Olmsted asked for 16; Johnson gave him 109. “I had never invented anything before,” he told me in an e-mail recently, “because no one had ever asked me to invent anything!”

It would be ridiculous to suggest that the powers that be should do nothing but give in to their wild imaginations. But there’s something to Johnson’s explorations that warrants our attention. It may be, as the title of his 1984 book suggests, exactly “What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Everybody Else.”

As the 70-year-old told me last week, “America has been falling into a depression, a psychological depression, for many years. Yet this is a land of pioneer inventors. It annoys me that an untrained person like myself can think up products easily (in fact I usually spend energy ‘turning off’ the idea-generating machine just as psychics train themselves to turn off their capability) and yet the nation seems to sit helplessly passive and wait to be saved somehow.”

So maybe there are some lessons to be learned from Johnson.

Many of his musings are simply whimsical, existing primarily as a source of inspiration or delight. Others tackle very real issues, from environmentalism to alternative transportation to homelessness. Here, a look at both ends of the spectrum.

Every worker would appreciate the Nod Office (1984), an ingenious desk that can be transformed into a hidden sleeping chamber, perfect for late afternoon naps. Owning such a contraption remains for me a significant yet unrealized career goal.

Steven M. Johnson Nod Office.

Anyone who ever left the house without eating breakfast will appreciate his dashboard toaster oven. (Another feature, the Automobile Snack Conveyer, allows you to deliver that toast to your kid in the back seat.)

Steven M. Johnson Automobile Snack Conveyor.

Yet there’s a darker side to Johnson as well, as evidenced by this much more recent exploration, drawn in 2009, of office cubicles: these are now used not just for afternoon siestas but to offer working seniors, unable to retire in this economy, a much-needed place to rest.

Steven M. Johnson Sleep-in cubicles for seniors.

In Johnson’s oeuvre, nothing gets to exist if it doesn’t have at least two functions: the skylight uses solar energy to cook the dinner, for instance, and the exercise bike operates the washing machine (cleaning clothes and toning the wearer’s muscles simultaneously).

Steven M. Johnson Sky-Light Oven.

Steven M. Johnson Hide-a-Shower.

“Accessories with a purpose,” drawings from 1991, include such then seemingly silly items as “hands-free phones” and “pouchpants” (a tragically unflattering variation on what would become the still tragically unflattering fanny pack). A very small apartment might house the Hide-a-Shower, a sofa that can be upended for bathing. Murder on the upholstery, no doubt.

Steven M. Johnson Grindplay.

Johnson has even done a series of drawings on how not to invent: here, a radio powered by a coffee grinder (2005). Other bizarre explorations include adjacent commodes in an exploration of Toilets for Immodest Times. And the Cigaire smoke hood, which redirects cigarette smoke from the smoker’s mouth into a stylish helmet, a variant of which Johnson actually saw at an inventors’ convention in 1989.

Steven M. Johnson Self-shortening sedans.

Transportation figures prominently in Johnson’s work, much of it showcased in his second book, “Public Therapy Buses” (1991). Again, many of his concepts are simply cute and clever, like the self-shortening sedan with its adjustable bumper (combines the stability of a larger car with the parking convenience of a tinier one), or the View Cab (puts some power back in the hands of the drivers of compact cars).

Steven M. Johnson View Cabs.

Other Johnson transportation ideas do move increasingly, if not entirely, toward practicality, like the clever albeit cumbersome Bike Vest:

Steven M. Johnson Bike Vest

A golf-cart-meets-treadmill contraption seems to predate the Segway.

Steven M. Johnson Treadarounds.

Some of his transit concepts begin to address tangible issues. Automobile Abandonment Zones intuit the very contemporary possibility of commuters fleeing gridlock for a nearby train, willingly relinquishing their keys to Abandonment Officers.

Pedaltrains posit the intriguing concept of combining two car alternatives: bicycles and public transit.

It was nearly 20 years ago, in “Public Therapy Buses,” that Johnson predicted that shopping malls would be given over to mega-malls for consignment and thrift items. He was pretty on-target with concepts like Landfill Surprise: The Quality Trash Store.

Steven M. Johnson Landfill Surprise: The Quality Trash Store.

And his Neighborhood Sharing Booths, designed to provide food, water and clothing from kiosks on neighborhood lawns, seem eerie predictors of the current reality of foreclosed subdivisions.

Fans of prefab can appreciate flexible housing concepts like “Rooms Added a Piece at a Time” and “Homes Purchased by the Room,” while builders of gated communities, tongue firmly out of cheek, clearly missed the intended irony of Johnson’s “Double-Walled Communities,” in which “developers gain approval from planning departments to build double-walled communities for wealthy executives,” or his “Monitowers” — staffed towers in subdivisions that feature surveillance cameras.

What fascinates me about Johnson is his ability to riff on anything, from a sort of frivolous contraption called a brief skate (yes, a briefcase that morphs into a skateboard — perfect for today’s unemployed boomers) to a wholly prescient formed concept like Oakville, a gasoline-and-diesel-engine free city that features a freeway for electric cars and bicycles, and a medieval-like perimeter wall that keeps polluting cars out. He can be so out there as to make one think he shouldn’t be taken seriously until you realize just how serious his thinking can be.

To be sure, there’s no small amount of goofiness in Johnson’s creations, but deeper exploration into his decades of inventions show not only a complex and intuitive mind but real visionary tendencies. His mental process? It’s one he describes as “Mix-’N-Match, outrageous extrapolation, speeded-up thinking, random/lateral thinking (which comes close to the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep where some claim inspired inventions and scientific inventions come through), and so forth.”

He writes of avoiding his desk when inventing, avoiding the connotations of serious endeavor, of earning a living. “I wish instead,” he writes, “to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.” Which seems, to me, about the right strategy for our times.

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Full article and photos: http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/searching-for-value-in-ludicrous-ideas/

German Court Bans Very Long Names

Germany is renowned for fighting inflation, but the battle extends beyond money and into the realm of names. In a split decision on Tuesday, the German Constitutional Court upheld a ban on married people combining already-hyphenated names, forbidding last names of three parts or more.

It was not the first time the court was forced to weigh in on the subject of names, which are regulated start to finish, fore to family, here in Germany. This time, it was a Munich couple who decided to challenge the constitutionality of a 1993 rule limiting the names of married people to a single hyphen and two last names.

Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim, a Munich dentist, wanted to take the last name of her husband, Hans Peter Kunz-Hallstein, to become Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein. The case brought Germany’s minister of justice before the court in Karlsruhe for oral arguments in February to defend the ban on what the Germans call “chain names.”

By a vote of five to three, the court refused to budge, ruling that ballooning names “would quickly lose the effectiveness of their identifying purpose,” and declined to overturn the law on the grounds that it infringed on personal expression.

In a telephone interview, the couple’s lawyer, Rüdiger Zuck, said his clients had no comment on the ruling, but added, with what sounded distinctly like a note of resignation, “The Germans are old-fashioned.”

Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children’s names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jürgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that “the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”

That responsibility is often tested in court. In 2003, an appellate court ruled that a boy could not be named “Anderson,” because it was a last name in Germany. And the Constitutional Court ruled in 2004 to limit the number of forenames a child could have, capping at five the number a mother could give her son, to whom she had tried to bequeath the 12-part “Chenekwahow Tecumseh Migiskau Kioma Ernesto Inti Prithibi Pathar Chajara Majim Henriko Alessandro,” to protect the child.

Germany’s economy minister found professional success despite bearing the lengthy name Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, a name as aristocratic as it is long. Although, when he was appointed to the job, a practical joker sneaked the name “Wilhelm” into his Wikipedia entry for good measure, an error that promptly spread to numerous media reports, including one on the front page of Bild, the country’s largest newspaper.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world/europe/06germany.html?scp=1&sq=long%20names&st=cse

Charges Seen as Unlikely for Lawyers Over Interrogations

An internal Justice Department inquiry into the conduct of Bush administration lawyers who wrote secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations has concluded that the authors committed serious lapses of judgment but should not be criminally prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on a draft of the findings.

The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask that state bar associations consider possible disciplinary action, including reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said.

The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said it is possible the final report might be subject to revision, but they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.

The draft report is described as very detailed, tracing e-mail messages between Justice Department lawyers and officials at the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the questions it is expected to consider is whether the memos reflected the lawyers’ independent judgments of the limits of the federal anti-torture statute or were skewed deliberately to justify what the C.I.A. proposed.

At issue are whether the Justice Department lawyers acted ethically in writing a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2007. The main targets of criticism are John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and Steven G. Bradbury, who as senior officials in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel were the principal authors of the memos.

The opinions permitted the C.I.A. to use a number of interrogation methods that human rights groups have condemned as torture, including waterboarding, wall-slamming, head-slapping and other techniques. The opinions allowed many of these practices to be used repeatedly and in combination.

Several legal scholars have remarked that in approving waterboarding — the near-drowning method that President Obama and his aides have described as torture — the Justice Department lawyers did not cite cases in which the United States government had prosecuted American law enforcement officials and Japanese interrogators in World War II for using the procedure.

In a letter made public on Monday, the Justice Department advised two Democratic senators on the Judiciary committee, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, that the former department lawyers who wrote the opinions had until Sunday to submit written appeals to the findings.

The draft report on the interrogation opinions was completed in December and has provoked controversy within counterterrorism circles, which has intensified since last month when the Obama administration disclosed four previously secret opinions written from 2002 and 2005, which for the first time detailed the approved procedures.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/us/politics/06inquire.html?hp

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Bush Officials Try to Alter Ethics Report

Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.

Representatives for John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, subjects of the ethics probe, have encouraged former Justice Department and White House officials to contact new officials at the department to point out the troubling precedent of imposing sanctions on legal advisers, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

The effort began in recent weeks, the sources said, and it could not be determined how many former officials had reached out to their new counterparts.

A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush’s departure, recommends disciplinary action, rather than criminal prosecution, by state bar associations against Yoo and Bybee, former attorneys in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, for their work in preparing and signing the interrogation memos. State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer’s license to practice or impose other penalties.

The memos offered support for waterboarding, slamming prisoners against a flexible wall and other techniques that critics have likened to torture. The documents were drafted between 2002 and 2005.

The investigation, now in its fifth year, could shed new light on the origins of the memos. Investigators rely in part on e-mail exchanges among Justice Department lawyers and attorneys at the CIA who sought advice about the legality of interrogation practices since been abandoned by the Obama administration.

Two of the authors, Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, and Yoo, now a law professor in California, had a Monday deadline to respond to investigators.

Miguel Estrada, an attorney for Yoo, said, “As a condition of permitting me to represent Professor Yoo in this matter, the Department of Justice required me to sign a confidentiality agreement. As a result of that agreement, there’s nothing I can say.”

Maureen Mahoney, an attorney for Bybee, also cited the confidentiality requirement in declining to comment.

The legal analysis on interrogation prepared by a third former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven G. Bradbury, also was a subject of the ethics probe. But in an early draft, investigators did not make disciplinary recommendations about Bradbury.

In a separate effort to counterbalance the draft report, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip wrote a 14-page letter before they left office this year. They described the context surrounding the origins of the memos, written at a time when officials feared another terrorist strike on American soil.

Both Mukasey and Filip were dissatisfied with the quality of the legal analysis in the wide-ranging draft report, sources said. Among other things, the draft report cited passages from a 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation and cast doubt on the effectiveness of the questioning techniques, which sources characterized as far afield from the narrow legal questions surrounding the lawyers’ activities. The letter from Mukasey and Filip has not been publicly released, but it may emerge when the investigative report is issued.

A person who has spoken with both Mukasey and Filip said yesterday that neither had been solicited to approach new department leaders about the ethics report.

Late Monday, Assistant Attorney General Ronald W. Weich wrote senior congressional Democrats to offer an update about the status of the ethics investigation, which is being conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Weich told Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden “will have access to whatever information they need to evaluate the final report and make determinations about appropriate next steps.”

Authorities did not signal in the letter when or in what form the report will be released. The biggest holdup had been that the content of the interrogation memos was classified, but the documents were released last month by the Justice Department. Sources said the highly anticipated report could emerge as soon as this summer.

Mary Patrice Brown, new chief of the Justice Department ethics office, told an audience of lawyers last night that her preference is toward “transparency” and releasing investigative reports on a case-by-case basis, depending on the “severity” of the misconduct and the public’s interest.

Any disciplinary findings about the former Justice lawyers could energize calls within Congress and among left-leaning interest groups for criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized the interrogations and for an independent congressional inquiry into the origins of the practices.

In an interview yesterday, Durbin said it was too early to call for a special prosecutor or another congressional probe.

But, he said, many important questions remained unanswered. “It’s a question of responsibility. In this chain of command, how far up did it go?”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/05/AR2009050502219.html?hpid=topnews

Seeking a Hollywood Ending in Sacramento

The governor, at a health forum, has been pushing six budget initiatives in a May 19 referendum.

It has been a while since hordes of bedazzled constituents lined up outside pancake breakfasts in rural California to get a peek at their governor. The magazine covers once decorated with his butterscotch-hued visage have been replaced with images of the president, or, in recent days, swine.

Those convivial cigar breaks with lawmakers in the tent outside his office are now part of Sacramento history.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mere name once stirred calls for lifting the constitutional ban on foreign-born presidents, is facing the most difficult period of his political career.

His approval rating is in the 30s, his state is broke and the policy celebrations of the past have been replaced with scenes like one recently in Los Angeles in which Mr. Schwarzenegger stood on a sweltering patio at a senior housing center trying to persuade a small group of voters to back a slate of budget-related ballot measures needed to keep California solvent.

If the measures do not pass on May 19 — and polls show them to be unpopular — California will be forced to deal with tens of billions of dollars in new budget gaps. Politically, it has become a do-or-die moment for the Republican governor, whose own party has largely abandoned him, to the point that Mr. Schwarzenegger says he is considering endorsing a Democrat in the 2010 race to succeed him.

Perhaps the ultimate indignity: Mr. Schwarzenegger has the sympathy of Gray Davis, the Democrat he ousted as governor in the recall election of 2003, when the state was mired in another budget morass and Mr. Davis was blamed for it. “I told him during the transition, you need two things to be successful,” Mr. Davis said. “You need rain in the north and a strong economy. And there is nothing you can do about either one.”

If any of this pains Mr. Schwarzenegger or makes him fret about the future, he has not indicated it. But he seems cured of his desire to be in public office.

Barred by term limits from running for governor again, Mr. Schwarzenegger said he had no intention to run for the United States Senate, as previously rumored; indeed the mere mention of the office in an interview here seemed almost to offend him.

“I’m not going to do that, no!” he said. Once he leaves office, Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would continue to take up environmental causes and election reform as well as dabble in body building and, if the right scripts come his way, acting.

“I always tell my wife, ‘I’m not switching this thing out for that; I’m just adding,’ ” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “I read body building magazines, I read the movie magazines and I read the political magazines, so I cover myself.”

Early in his first term, he tried to use the ballot process to get tougher rules for teachers’ tenure, restrict political activity by unions, cap state spending and redraw legislative districts, all with the goal of reining in the power of elected Democrats and the public employee unions. But organized labor, most notably the teachers’ union, lobbied hard for the measures’ failure.

Now, he is again seeking to cap state spending — with a tax increase thrown in — and make changes to the lottery system. He also wants to move dedicated pools of money away from programs for the mentally ill and children into the general fund to plug large budget holes — actions that require voter approval and were part of a budget deal with lawmakers last month.

This go-round, the governor’s ballot efforts come with the blessing of some of the public employee unions. “These are different times,” said Gale Kaufman, a Democratic political consultant whose clients include the California Teachers Association. “He still has an amazing capacity to believe that he can sell anything to voters. I think that is a remarkable quality.”

Polls show that five of the six budget-related measures are trailing with voters. The sixth measure, which would bar legislators and state officers from getting a pay raise when there is a budget deficit, has the support of 72 percent of those polled by the California Field Poll.

The governor has spent much of the last month behind the scenes asking Hollywood executives and others for money to help pay for the campaign to pass the ballot measures, while he has let firefighters and teachers do much of the face-to-face campaigning on behalf of the measures. It is a jarring turnaround from the previous effort, when Mr. Schwarzenegger was the star of the campaign and the same firefighters and teachers were his enemies.

If the effort succeeds, and California scrapes out of yet another budget mess, it would further allow the governor to pursue his final goals of health care for all Californians and some sort of answer to the state’s intransigent water supply issues. Add to that his success in getting a law passed that curbs emissions of heat-trapping gases in the state, and the passage last fall of a ballot measure on redrawing legislative districts, and Mr. Schwarzenegger would wind down his tenure in Sacramento on a high.

“Then he will leave office having as much impact as any governor in a generation,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a former adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

If the ballot measures do not pass, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger will have to contend with something less than historic success, a place he is not accustomed to. His environmental legislation and redistricting coup will save him from serious comparisons to Jesse Ventura, the other celebrity turned governor, who left Minnesota’s Capitol in a blast of mutual ill will with voters, but Mr. Schwarzenegger’s legacy hangs a great deal on how his final 18 months in office go.

The governor, in the interview in his office, admitted to some letdowns. “You know how strong ideology is here, and that kind of thing really surprised me and was also disappointing,” he said.

But when you are independently wealthy, congenitally cheerful and popular outside your own state, the political realities of Sacramento are often not enough to bring you down.

“I don’t really have a plan, because we don’t know what the next 18 months will bring and I don’t want to think that much about it,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “I like not having a safety net. I like the risk of not knowing. But I will be involved in all kinds of great things.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/us/06arnold.html?_r=1&hp

Distant Neighbors

The most pressing task facing all countries in the world today is to restore global economic growth as soon as possible. Yet it is worrisome to note that the surge of trade protectionism has made the prospects of the already fragile world economy even worse.

China and the European Union, two major economies and stakeholders in the world, should take a responsible attitude and demonstrate their common, clear commitment against trade protectionism at the second China-E.U. high-level economic dialogue.

Trade liberalization is the engine of economic growth. It has served as a strong propeller of economic globalization and benefited people around the world. On the contrary, trade protectionism — featuring the pursuit of benefits for one country at the expense of others — will only lead to retaliation. It serves the interest of no one.

The world economy paid a heavy price for the prevalence of trade protectionism during the Great Depression in the 1930s, which led to the contraction of global trade by two thirds. We should make sure that the same mistake is not repeated.

Europe is the birthplace of free trade theory, and the E.U. is the product of successful free trade practices. The removal of trade barriers promoted formation of a single European market and enhanced development and prosperity in Europe. As a result, the E.U. has grown into the largest economy in the world today.

China is firmly committed to reform and to opening up. Since its accession to the World Trade Organization, China’s market has become much more open and its trade greatly liberalized. The current overall tariff level of China is only 9.8 percent. Its average tariff on industrial products is only 8.9 percent, the lowest among all developing countries. Its tariff on imported agricultural products is only 15.2 percent, which is not only lower than other developing countries but also far below that of many developed countries.

The openness of China’s trade in services has reached a level close to that of an average developed country. China has taken steady steps to improve its market economic system and legal system. In particular, it has made remarkable progress in intellectual-property rights protection, product quality and food safety, environmental protection and labor security. China has also taken concrete actions against trade protectionism — the Chinese government recently sent Chinese enterprises on procurement missions to Europe and the United States.

The economies of China and the E.U. have much to offer each other and our two-way trade holds a huge potential. The E.U. is now China’s largest trading partner and China is the second largest trading partner of the E.U.

China and the E.U. should make full use of the platform presented by the high-level economic dialogue to strengthen communication and cooperation and jointly oppose trade protectionism. This would better enable us to tackle the current crisis and promote economic recovery and growth. It would also reinforce the trend of economic globalization and facilitates a further growth of two-way trade.

The two sides should work actively to put in place the agreement reached at the G-20 summit in London, promote early, comprehensive and balanced outcome in the WTO Doha round negotiations and uphold an open, fair and equitable international trading regime. An early conclusion of the Doha round is of symbolic significance to curbing protectionism.

The two sides should further open markets to each other. China will continue to lower the threshold for market access, improve trade and investment environment and encourage Chinese enterprises to increase procurement and imports from Europe.

We hope the E.U. will relax restrictions on the exports of high-tech products to China, enhance cooperation with China on the development and application of clean energy, new energy and renewable energy and support cooperation among our small and medium-sized enterprises. Meanwhile, our two sides should step up efforts to update the E.E.C.-China Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement.

The two sides should work in a cooperative spirit and properly resolve trade differences and disputes. Each side needs to take proper care of its own interests. Yet, more importantly, both sides should accommodate the concerns of the other, taking into full account national conditions and their stage of development, and steadily broaden the scope of our common interests.

We should strengthen dialogue and consultation, refrain from taking protectionist measures and avoid politicizing trade issues. China hopes that the E.U. will evaluate the conditions of the Chinese economy in an objective and unprejudiced manner and recognize China’s full market economy status as soon as possible.

Trade liberalization was, is and will continue to be the only way to global economic prosperity. The Chinese side is ready to work with the E.U. and take effective measures to oppose trade protectionism, promote better growth of China-E.U. trade and jointly move the world economy out of the current difficulties at an early date.

Wang Qishan is vice premier of the State Council of China.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/opinion/06iht-edwang.html?ref=global

Roman Hruska Lives!

The push to replace Justice Souter with someone mediocre.

Remember Roman Hruska? If so, you’re older than we are. Hruska, a Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in 1954 and retired in 1976. His 1999 New York Times obituary took note of his lone famous utterance:

It was his defense of President Richard M. Nixon’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Tallahassee, Fla., that brought him some uncomfortable celebrity in 1970.

Liberal Democrats had mounted a strong campaign against Judge Carswell, a member of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida, contending that he was too “mediocre” to deserve a seat on the nation’s highest court.

When Senator Hruska addressed the Senate in March 1970, speaking on Judge Carswell’s behalf, he asked why mediocrity should be a disqualification for high office.

“Even if he were mediocre,” Mr. Hruska declared, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”

The Democrats gleefully jumped on Mr. Hruska’s argument, reducing it to “What’s wrong with a little mediocrity?”

Last week Justice David Souter let it be known that he intends to retire this summer, giving President Obama his first Supreme Court nomination. There has been talk that Obama will look for a “liberal Scalia”–i.e., someone with unyielding principles and verbal flair. But some politicians and observers have other ideas, as the Associated Press reports:

“I would like to see more people from outside the judicial monastery, somebody who has had some real-life experience, not just as a judge,” said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will hold hearings when Obama makes his nomination.

At least Carswell was a judge! Leahy seems to want not a liberal Scalia but a liberal Joe the Plumber. The president is making similar noises, according to another AP dispatch:

Obama pledged Friday to name a Supreme Court justice who combines “empathy and understanding” with an impeccable legal background to succeed liberal David Souter, whose abrupt retirement announcement set off speculation the next justice could be a woman, a Hispanic or both. . . .

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives,” said the president.

So here we have Obama, the great intellectual president, pooh-poohing “abstract legal theory” and speaking reverently of “the daily realities of people’s lives.” Probably this is just phony populism, but in case it isn’t, one Nell Scovell of the lefty glossy Vanity Fair puts forward a name: Anita Hill, a law professor at Brandeis University.

Scovell damns Hill with faint praise, describing her as “reasonably young” and “smart.” If Hill has made any notable contribution to the practice or study of law, Scovell doesn’t mention it. As far as we are aware, Hill’s only accomplishment of note is to have complained publicly about a former boss.

That ex-boss, who ironically is now a Supreme Court justice himself, has described Hill as a mediocre employee. But hey, we can’t have all Brandeises. There are a lot of mediocre judges and employees and Brandeis professors. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little understanding of the daily realities of their lives?

James Taranto, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124145651417883981.html

Specter On Cancer

The real story on medical research.

Arlen Specter’s post-Republican media tour has supplied more than a few moments of toe-curling embarrassment, none more so than the Senator’s weekend pronouncement that his former party’s priorities killed Jack Kemp.

“As a matter of principle, I’m becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats’ approach,” Mr. Specter told Bob Schieffer of CBS on Sunday. “And one of the items that I’m working on, Bob, is funding for medical research. . . . If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”

The poor taste here includes making a political weapon of Mr. Specter’s own battle with Hodgkin’s disease. But to the extent that he was trying to make a serious policy argument, his cheap shot deserves a reality check.

Presumably Mr. Specter was referring to funding for the National Institutes of Health, which now accounts for the vast majority of federal support for biomedical research. Between 1994 and 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress or the White House or both, NIH biomedical R&D spending more than doubled in real terms, jumping to $25 billion in 2003 from about $10 billion in the early 1990s. During the Bush years, it fell slightly after that, though holding relatively constant as a share of discretionary spending.

Criticizing the modest budget reduction to $23 billion in 2007 (in constant dollars) is thus a little like condemning K2 for not being Mount Everest. Still, Mr. Specter is right to note his consonance with the “Democrats’ approach,” which equates federal funding alone with medical innovation. NIH projects are valuable, but they are far from the only or even main reason that the U.S. is the world leader in new and better treatments for killers like cancer.

Most of the advances in biotechnology and pharmacogenomics that are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of disease are occurring in America. One reason is a research environment that is less centralized, more competitive, tolerant of risk and richer in cash — public, yes, but especially private. Between the 1990s and mid-2000s, more than four times as much medical venture capital was invested in the U.S. than in the European Union.

Another explanation is that the profits available in U.S. markets allow companies to cover the costs of converting the ideas gleaned from basic research into workable commercial medicines. To a large extent, patients in Western Europe, Canada and Japan — which set strict caps on spending for medical technology — are free-riding off the more open U.S. health-care system.

Democrats are now hoping to import those same models state-side. Nationalized health care inevitably results in large government bureaucracies that try to contain costs by restricting access to new therapies by limiting or denying payment or even restricting what doctors are allowed to prescribe. Yet the freedom, innovation and quality of health systems are all closely meshed, and the tragedy of “universal” health care will be the medicines that are never developed at all.

Mr. Specter will probably end up voting for all that. And since he joined his new party purely out of political self-interest, the least he can do in the meantime is to leave cancer patients out of it.

Opinion, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124148321037185537.html

GOP Tries to Dig Out of Its Hole

If you’re trying to figure how bad things are for Republicans, consider this: More Americans say they are conservatives than say they are part of the Republican Party — which is supposed to be, after all, the party of conservatives.

That picture emerges from deep inside the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The numbers there show the extent of the woes facing today’s Republican Party — woes that came into sharp relief last week with the defection of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democrats.

Yet the numbers also suggest the GOP might be able to start climbing out of its hole, which is precisely what some party leaders are trying to do by launching a new effort to reach out to the grass roots across the country.

In the Journal/NBC News survey, just 31% of those polled called themselves Republicans. That’s down from 37% eight years ago. More important, a larger share of Americans now call themselves Democrats than Republicans in every region of the country, including the South, which the GOP likes to think of as its remaining bastion. Democrats also outnumber Republicans in every age group. In sum, the view of the Republican Party that emerges is the very picture of a minority party.

At the same time, there are many potential Republicans out there. Of those surveyed, 35% called themselves conservatives — as opposed to 24% who called themselves liberals — and four in 10 of those self-identified conservatives identified themselves as something other than a Republican.

Meanwhile, Democrats are getting the majority of liberals and twice as many moderates as the GOP, as well as a good slice of those self-identified conservatives. Perhaps not surprisingly, the conservatives the Republicans are failing to win over are far more likely to identify themselves as “somewhat conservative” than “very conservative.

These numbers suggest that, as Republicans tell themselves repeatedly, this still is basically a center-right nation, which should be good news for their party. Clearly, though, Republicans are having trouble luring back potential followers in the middle of the spectrum.

“People want some hope, and they want to understand where the country is going,” says Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House. He has just launched a new effort, called the National Council for a New America, which is going to send party leaders fanning out across the country to talk and listen. “Our party,” he says, “has to do a much better job of connecting.”

The first question for Republicans to ask, of course, is how they got into this situation in the first place. Obviously, the 2008 election showed the toll that an unpopular war in Iraq and an economy in decline had taken on the party.

Yet since the election, Republican problems have, in some ways, compounded. President Barack Obama’s popularity is winning him at least the tentative backing of many Americans who have doubts about his policies. A striking 30% of those surveyed said they like Mr. Obama personally but disapprove of many of his policies.

At the same time, economic anxiety has left many Americans who usually want limited government prepared to accept more government activism right now. That makes things trickier for the party that is more inclined to argue for government restraint.

The best sign of that: Republicans are the ones getting hammered in public opinion for the lack of bipartisanship in the era of Obama. Americans are twice as likely to say Republicans, rather than Mr. Obama, are to blame for being too stubborn in dealing with the other side.

This drives Republicans on Capitol Hill crazy because they think the Obama outreach across the aisle has been more advertised than real. Still, those numbers suggest Republicans suffered damage early this year from the big argument over an economic-stimulus package, during which they came to be seen more as opposed to what the Democrats were doing than in favor of any alternative approach.

That is precisely the situation Rep. Cantor is trying to change. He has organized Republican leaders from Congress, a few Republican governors and party elder statesmen Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush to sponsor town-hall meetings and online forums with voters in search of what the group calls “common-sense conservative solutions” on the economy, energy, health care and national security.

“Essentially what we did was put this group together to put us in a position where we can go out across the country and listen,” says Rep. Cantor.

He and other party leaders are trying to turn around two trends that are causing them problems. Inside the GOP, some think the party’s first step should be to winnow itself down by wishing farewell to moderates such as Mr. Specter, so those who remain can speak with a more ideologically pure conservative voice. Outside the party, they have to combat the Democrats’ portrayal of them as the “party of no.”

On the first point, Rep. Cantor says: “There’s no question that we want to be an inclusive party.” On the second, he says, “If we’re not going to agree, in any given instance, we have an obligation to offer alternatives.” Inclusive and positive, then, are the goals. On both fronts, Republicans have some distance to travel with the public.

Gerald F. Seib, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124148235158185407.html