What would President Reagan say?
By Chris Buckley Mon Jan 22, 9:09 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) - Blasting a satellite out of the heavens may have been China's blunt way of demanding a bigger say in space security, Chinese experts said on Monday, while voicing puzzlement about the apparent test and Beijing's long silence.
Chinese arms control specialists with military backgrounds told Reuters they did not know if China had indeed fired an anti-satellite missile on January 11 in what Washington last week called an alarming escalation of military rivalry in space.
Xia Liping, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) officer and professor at the Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies, said Beijing did not want an arms race in space. But the reported test may have been intended to push Washington toward international talks aimed at preventing a race, he suggested.
"The weaponization of space would be very dangerous; it could lead to a new arms race," said Xia, who stressed he had no firm knowledge of any test. "I would say, though, that in the history of arms control the rule is that the United States is willing to ban a military capability only when other countries possess it."
The Bush administration has announced plans to maintain U.S. dominance of outer space and prevent other states from threatening its satellites, vital nerves of commerce and security. But China is wary.
"Chinese officials believe the real purpose of U.S. space plans is not to protect U.S. assets but to further enhance U.S. military dominance," Hui Zhang, a researcher at Harvard University, wrote in a study recently issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (www.amacad.org).
Chinese textbooks and speeches show that the country's diplomats and military are worried that U.S. ambitions are leaving China vulnerable.
"The militarization of space will also become the focus of all military great powers' national security and development strategy," states a 2006 textbook on space weapons written by officers from China's Second Artillery Battalion, which wields the country's nuclear arsenal. "The flames and smoke of war will rise in a new battlefield -- space."
Chinese military writings also leave no doubt that the PLA has been studying how to directly counter U.S. plans, according to a compilation issued last week by Michael Pillsbury, a researcher close to the
Pentagon'
"There is an active group in China not only advocating the weaponization of space, but also putting forward specific proposals for implementation of a Chinese space-based weapons program," Pillsbury wrote in the study for Congress' U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (www.uscc.gov).
But China lags far behind the United States in space technology and does not want to divert its civilian space resources to military uses, said Teng Jianqun, a former PLA officer who now studies space policy at the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, a government-run think tank.
"China does not want to follow the United States into this," said Teng, who said he was skeptical about the reported test. "We need to sit down and work out the rules of the game to prevent this trend taking on a life of its own."
But if the January 11 blast was intended to wake up Washington and push for negotiations, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's silence about the claim is "baffling," said Xu Guangyu, another ex-PLA officer at the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association.
Chinese diplomats had yet to explain or deny the satellite test, even in private, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing senior Washington officials.
"I don't know whether the American reports about the satellite are true. It's odd and abnormal that they haven't said anything," Xu said of China's diplomats.
"If it is a negotiating chip, it's illogical not to come out and announce something. But a side-effect may be that it makes us sit down together and talk."
Yahoo News:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070122/ts_nm/china_satellite_security_dc
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Corporations Take on GLOBAL WARMING
"A diverse group of U.S.-based businesses andleading environmental organizations today called on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
The group said any delay in action to control emissions increases the risk of unavoidableconsequences that could necessitate even steeper reductions in the future.This unprecedented alliance, called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), consists of market leaders Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, PG&E, and PNM Resources, along with four leading non-governmental organizations – Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and World Resources Institute.
At a news conference today at the National Press Club, USCAP will issue a setof principles and recommendations to underscore the urgent need for a policy framework on climate change. The solutions-based report, titled A Call for Action, lays out a blueprint for a mandatory economy-wide, market-driven approach to climate protection. “The time has come for constructive action that draws strength equally from business, government, and non-governmental stakeholders,” said Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric. “These recommendations should catalyze legislative action that encourages innovation and fosters economic growth while enhancing energy security and balance of trade, ensuring U.S. leadership on an issue of significance to our country and the world.”
USCAP’s recommendations [visit http://www.us-cap.org/ClimateReport.pdf] are based on the following six principles:• Account for the global dimensions of climate change;• Recognize the importance of technology;• Be environmentally effective;• Create economic opportunity and advantage;• Be fair to sectors disproportionately impacted; and• Recognize and encourage early action.The principles and the recommendations outlined in A Call for Action are the result of ayear-long collaboration motivated by the shared goal of slowing, stopping and reversing the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the shortest period of time reasonably achievable.
This unique cooperation of business and environmental leaders is a clear signal tolawmakers that legislative action is urgently needed. This non-partisan effort was driven by the top executives from member organizations—companies with a combined marketcapitalization of more than $750 billion and environmental groups with more than one million members worldwide and global policy influence.
A Call for Action reflects a growing public concern about global warming. A recent TIMEmagazine/ABC News/Stanford University poll finds that a significant majority of Americans, about 85 percent, say they believe global warming is probably happening. An even larger percentage, 88 percent, say they think global warming threatens future generations. USCAP urges policy makers to enact a policy framework for mandatory reductions of GHG emissions from major emitting sectors, including large stationary sources and transportation, and energy use in commercial and residential buildings. The cornerstone of this approach would be a cap-and-trade program. The environmental goal is to reduce global atmospheric GHG concentrations to a level that minimizes large-scale adverse impacts to humans and the natural environment. The group recommends Congress provide leadership and establish short- and mid-term emission reduction targets; a national program to accelerate technology research, development and deployment; and approaches to encourage action by other countries, including those in the developing world, as ultimately the solution must be global.
“The Climate Action Partnership recognizes that the undertaking to address climate change is an enormous one, and should not be underestimated,” said Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute. “But enacting environmentally effective, economically sustainable and fair climate change law must be a national priority.” USCAP believes that programs to encourage efficiency and to promote cleaner technologies in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 enacted by the last Congress and supported by the President were a good step. However, they alone cannot get us to where we need to be on the climate change issue. A mandatory system is needed that sets clear, predictable, market-based requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
The group said any delay in action to control emissions increases the risk of unavoidableconsequences that could necessitate even steeper reductions in the future.This unprecedented alliance, called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), consists of market leaders Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, PG&E, and PNM Resources, along with four leading non-governmental organizations – Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and World Resources Institute.
At a news conference today at the National Press Club, USCAP will issue a setof principles and recommendations to underscore the urgent need for a policy framework on climate change. The solutions-based report, titled A Call for Action, lays out a blueprint for a mandatory economy-wide, market-driven approach to climate protection. “The time has come for constructive action that draws strength equally from business, government, and non-governmental stakeholders,” said Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric. “These recommendations should catalyze legislative action that encourages innovation and fosters economic growth while enhancing energy security and balance of trade, ensuring U.S. leadership on an issue of significance to our country and the world.”
USCAP’s recommendations [visit http://www.us-cap.org/ClimateReport.pdf] are based on the following six principles:• Account for the global dimensions of climate change;• Recognize the importance of technology;• Be environmentally effective;• Create economic opportunity and advantage;• Be fair to sectors disproportionately impacted; and• Recognize and encourage early action.The principles and the recommendations outlined in A Call for Action are the result of ayear-long collaboration motivated by the shared goal of slowing, stopping and reversing the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the shortest period of time reasonably achievable.
This unique cooperation of business and environmental leaders is a clear signal tolawmakers that legislative action is urgently needed. This non-partisan effort was driven by the top executives from member organizations—companies with a combined marketcapitalization of more than $750 billion and environmental groups with more than one million members worldwide and global policy influence.
A Call for Action reflects a growing public concern about global warming. A recent TIMEmagazine/ABC News/Stanford University poll finds that a significant majority of Americans, about 85 percent, say they believe global warming is probably happening. An even larger percentage, 88 percent, say they think global warming threatens future generations. USCAP urges policy makers to enact a policy framework for mandatory reductions of GHG emissions from major emitting sectors, including large stationary sources and transportation, and energy use in commercial and residential buildings. The cornerstone of this approach would be a cap-and-trade program. The environmental goal is to reduce global atmospheric GHG concentrations to a level that minimizes large-scale adverse impacts to humans and the natural environment. The group recommends Congress provide leadership and establish short- and mid-term emission reduction targets; a national program to accelerate technology research, development and deployment; and approaches to encourage action by other countries, including those in the developing world, as ultimately the solution must be global.
“The Climate Action Partnership recognizes that the undertaking to address climate change is an enormous one, and should not be underestimated,” said Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute. “But enacting environmentally effective, economically sustainable and fair climate change law must be a national priority.” USCAP believes that programs to encourage efficiency and to promote cleaner technologies in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 enacted by the last Congress and supported by the President were a good step. However, they alone cannot get us to where we need to be on the climate change issue. A mandatory system is needed that sets clear, predictable, market-based requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Monday, January 22, 2007
G.W. Bush’s Justification for Iraq
President Bush in response to a reporter’s questions in regards to the Iraq War said to paraphrase
“that after 9/11 he made a vow to protect the American people and that we would enter any nation that provided safe haven to terrorist, and that’s why we are in Iraq”.
The fact of today is that this is reasonable justification for the USA being in Afghanistan but it has nothing whatsoever to do with our troops being in Iraq.
“that after 9/11 he made a vow to protect the American people and that we would enter any nation that provided safe haven to terrorist, and that’s why we are in Iraq”.
The fact of today is that this is reasonable justification for the USA being in Afghanistan but it has nothing whatsoever to do with our troops being in Iraq.
Friday, January 19, 2007
The God Experiments
“One Study revealed some overlap between the neural activity of self –transcendence and of sexual pleasure”. –Discover Magazine Dec. 2006, The God Experiments
I think this study deserve more resources. I certainly would volunteer as a subject. Science has now proven all my college rendezvous were not simply that but studies in uhh “religion”.
Comments welcome.
I think this study deserve more resources. I certainly would volunteer as a subject. Science has now proven all my college rendezvous were not simply that but studies in uhh “religion”.
Comments welcome.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Bush puts spy program under courts
"Bush administration puts spy program under court supervision
Source: Agence France Presse 01/18/2007
WASHINGTON, Jan 18, 2007 (AFP) -
President George W. Bush's administration put a controversial domestic spying program under supervision of a special court after months of sharp criticism over the eavesdropping.
Civil rights group had criticized the program, in which Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails between the US and abroad without a court warrant.
Despite legal challenges after the program was revealed in press reports in 2005, the government had insisted that the president could legally authorize the NSA to eavesdrop on international communications it believes involve terror suspects without seeking court approval.
But in a letter to the top Democrat and Republican of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday Bush would not renew the Terrorist Surveillance Program as it had found an effective and quick system to gain approval through an ultra-secretive court.
A judge from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders on January 10 authorizing the government to target international communications when there is probable cause that one of the individuals is an Al-Qaeda operative or from an associated terror organization, Gonzales said.
"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote.
"Although, as we have previously explained, the Terrorist Surveillance Program fully complies with the law, the orders the government has obtained will allow the necessary speed and agility while providing substantial advantages," he wrote.
"Accordingly, under these circumstances, the president has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," Gonzales wrote to Democrat Patrick Leahy, the committee's chairman, and the ranking Republican, Arlen Specter.
Bush had been re-authorizing the program every 45 days.
A federal judge had ordered a halt to the program in August, saying Bush had overstepped his authority, but an appeals court immediately suspended the ruling at the request of the NSA.
Leahy welcomed the Bush administration's announcement Wednesday.
"We must engage in all surveillance necessary to prevent acts of terrorism, but we can and should do so in ways that protect the basic rights of all Americans including the right to privacy," Leahy said in a statement.
"The issue has never been whether to monitor suspected terrorists but doing it legally and with proper checks and balances to prevent abuses," he said.
On the Senate floor, Specter cautiously welcomed the move and recalled that the administration had refused to reveal details of the program while he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee last year.
"I am glad to see that we may now have all of that resolved," Specter said, adding, however, "I want to know all of the details of this program."
"It is regrettable that these steps weren't taken a long time ago," he said.
"I would like to have an explanation as to why it took from last spring of 2005 and at least past December 16, when there has been such a public furor and public concern," Specter said.
Melissa Goodman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, a powerful group that challenged the surveillance program in court, said the new eavesdropping process was still too secretive.
"The Bush administration has conceded that there should be some judicial role on NSA spying on Americans, but unfortunately we still just don't understand enough about what's going on now," Goodman said.
"He's basically moved the program into a completely secret court," she said.
A senior Justice Department official, who requested anonymity in a teleconference with reporters, said orders issued by the secret court last 90 days and are "very closely" supervised by a judge.
But the official refused to disclose more details.
fc-lt/mac "
Source: Agence France Presse 01/18/2007
WASHINGTON, Jan 18, 2007 (AFP) -
President George W. Bush's administration put a controversial domestic spying program under supervision of a special court after months of sharp criticism over the eavesdropping.
Civil rights group had criticized the program, in which Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails between the US and abroad without a court warrant.
Despite legal challenges after the program was revealed in press reports in 2005, the government had insisted that the president could legally authorize the NSA to eavesdrop on international communications it believes involve terror suspects without seeking court approval.
But in a letter to the top Democrat and Republican of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday Bush would not renew the Terrorist Surveillance Program as it had found an effective and quick system to gain approval through an ultra-secretive court.
A judge from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders on January 10 authorizing the government to target international communications when there is probable cause that one of the individuals is an Al-Qaeda operative or from an associated terror organization, Gonzales said.
"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote.
"Although, as we have previously explained, the Terrorist Surveillance Program fully complies with the law, the orders the government has obtained will allow the necessary speed and agility while providing substantial advantages," he wrote.
"Accordingly, under these circumstances, the president has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," Gonzales wrote to Democrat Patrick Leahy, the committee's chairman, and the ranking Republican, Arlen Specter.
Bush had been re-authorizing the program every 45 days.
A federal judge had ordered a halt to the program in August, saying Bush had overstepped his authority, but an appeals court immediately suspended the ruling at the request of the NSA.
Leahy welcomed the Bush administration's announcement Wednesday.
"We must engage in all surveillance necessary to prevent acts of terrorism, but we can and should do so in ways that protect the basic rights of all Americans including the right to privacy," Leahy said in a statement.
"The issue has never been whether to monitor suspected terrorists but doing it legally and with proper checks and balances to prevent abuses," he said.
On the Senate floor, Specter cautiously welcomed the move and recalled that the administration had refused to reveal details of the program while he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee last year.
"I am glad to see that we may now have all of that resolved," Specter said, adding, however, "I want to know all of the details of this program."
"It is regrettable that these steps weren't taken a long time ago," he said.
"I would like to have an explanation as to why it took from last spring of 2005 and at least past December 16, when there has been such a public furor and public concern," Specter said.
Melissa Goodman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, a powerful group that challenged the surveillance program in court, said the new eavesdropping process was still too secretive.
"The Bush administration has conceded that there should be some judicial role on NSA spying on Americans, but unfortunately we still just don't understand enough about what's going on now," Goodman said.
"He's basically moved the program into a completely secret court," she said.
A senior Justice Department official, who requested anonymity in a teleconference with reporters, said orders issued by the secret court last 90 days and are "very closely" supervised by a judge.
But the official refused to disclose more details.
fc-lt/mac "
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Family and Politics
Political
Family roles, myths seize a bigger stage in new politics
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle 01/17/2007
Change is stressful for any family, the experts say. Marriage, job loss, the birth of a child, divorce, a relative moving in or out, a kitchen remodel -- anything can shift the dynamics, alter delicate balances of power, forge new behaviors, new metaphors, new pathways of negotiation. When the family has 300 million members and is fighting a war half a world away that most of them don't believe in, the problems and challenges multiply madly.
Ever since America underwent its major home makeover in the midterm elections last fall, there's been plenty of sorting out and labeling of the new players and products. Much of it, interestingly, has taken on the forms and metaphorical trappings of family dynamics.
Nancy Pelosi's election as speaker of the House may have been the logical culmination of a political career, but it was also carefully marketed for the values that Pelosi brought to the job as a daughter, wife, mother and grandmother. Every Pelosi photo op, it seemed, had more children of all ages in it than the previous one. Over in the Senate, incoming freshmen Jon Tester (a Montana rancher) and Jim Webb (an ex-Marine and former secretary of the Navy from Virginia) were emblematic of the brawny new "Alpha Male Democrats," as the New York Times dubbed them, flinty Marlboro men minus the cigarettes. The new majority party was cannily having it both ways, as a family that blended warmth and toughness, maternal wisdom and a healthy measure of testosterone.
At the country's most famous home address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., President Bush has been behaving more and more like a man in need of some serious family counseling. His cherished "surge" of 21,500 American troops in Iraq had pundits flinging out competing images of dysfunction. Several said it was like a couple trying to save a doomed marriage by having a baby. As for the administration's growing pique with the intractable Iraqis themselves, Maureen Dowd mused recently that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and new Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte regard them as "irksome" cousins who have overstayed their welcome or ungrateful children who "leave the playroom a mess."
Politics isn't just personal anymore. It's about the ability to place and define yourself as part of a family, an embracing social structure with a larger unifying purpose. Bush, who rode to power seven years ago on a family-values tailwind that repudiated Clintonian laxness and turpitude, has become the image of a man alone, clinging fast to his failed policy as he teeters on the brink of full-fledged divorce from a Democratic-controlled Congress, from public opinion and even from his own party. Bush in 2007 is a baleful, solitary figure to contemplate.
The English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) would have understood this purposeful mingling of politics and family perfectly. In a long stream of novels, plays, short stories and nonfiction, the author of "Cakes and Ale," "The Razor's Edge" and "Of Human Bondage" returned again and again to the theme of marriage and divorce as forums of power, money, deception, self-delusion and self-assertion. It was politics, in other words, in the most elegant and elemental way.
Maugham is a minor writer who seemed destined for obscurity 40 years after his death. But he's undergoing a timely 21st century rediscovery. His play "The Constant Wife," a 1926 comedy of manners about a woman declaring her economic and erotic freedom from a faithless husband, was revived by the American Conservatory Theater in 2003 and on Broadway in 2005. Now ACT has another Maugham-on- marriage play up and running; "The Circle" (1921) continues through Feb. 4. A fine film adaptation of Maugham's 1925 novel "The Painted Veil," starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as an unhappily married couple facing each other down during a cholera outbreak in China, is in theaters.
Seen one way, "Veil" is the more serious, overtly political work. Played out against the menace and human suffering of cholera, with the dramatic Chinese mountainscape as a backdrop, the story has a kind of bleak, tragic grandeur. "This is going to get much worse," Walter (Norton) warns Kitty (Watts) at one point, as the ravages of disease, the gruesome realities of 1920s medicine, the corrosion of English colonialism and the couple's loveless marriage and barren living conditions eat away at them.
"The Circle," by contrast, seems blithely, hermetically sealed. Cocooned inside a luxurious house in Dorset, the characters dress for luncheon, quibble over card games and idly debate the authenticity of an antique chair. Crisis arrives in the form of an older couple who return to England 30 years after an adulterous escape to Italy. Time has turned them into weary comic caricatures of impassioned lovers. One (Kathleen Widdoes) is fat and frivolous; the other (Ken Ruta) is a bitter old man with ill-fitting dentures. The closest thing to a political plotline involves a sexless cold- fish husband (James Waterston as Arnold) whose only real concern about his pretty young wife's plan to leave him is what effects a scandal might have on his future in Parliament.
But Maugham, a homosexual who spent 12 miserable years as a married man, didn't need a larger external world to enhance his subject. Marriage was a minefield in its own right, a realm of treachery, vanity, smiling malice, glimmers of altruism and kindness and acres of stifling suffocation. The power of both "The Painted Veil" and "The Circle" flow from that single source, albeit along different streambeds. Politics, for Maugham, was fundamentally personal, and the personal intrinsically political.
"I did not marry you because I loved you," he once wrote his wife, Syrie, in a letter, "and you were only too well aware of it." That's a line that's repeated, with chilly frankness, by the adulterous Kitty to her husband in "The Painted Veil."
"The Circle," expertly directed by Mark Lamos, moves in a lighter and more satiric vein. But the comedy is shot through with a deep skepticism about romance, marriage and family. "I owe everything to my father," says Arnold, referring to a man (Philip Kerr as Clive) who dismisses his ex-wife as "tinsel" and now amuses himself with women in their 20s. Later on, when Clive schemes to save Arnold's marriage by endorsing the infidelity of his son's wife, the deceit backfires without his realizing it. The lovers and manipulators alike are captives of their own illusions.
Late in "The Painted Veil," Kitty and Walter finally forgive each other their failings and are granted a single night of authentic physical passion. Shortly after that, one of them is dead. But it's finally not Maugham's suave cynicism about human affairs that seems attuned to our own family-inflected politics of the moment. It's his clear-eyed realism about the stories people tell themselves and the damage they can do. "It was silly of us to look for qualities in each other that we never had," Walter tells Kitty. That cautionary line hovers over the film and reaches out to us directly.
As the myths of the Bush era dissolve and America moves to remake itself, we need to think more carefully than ever about the qualities we see -- or think we see -- in our leaders. The American family is a warm and inviting notion, and politicians are eager to invoke the rhetoric and images that surround it. Whatever stories we decide to believe, from Congress and the presidential candidates lining up to run in 2008, let's hope we'll do it with our eyes, ears and minds wide open. "
Family roles, myths seize a bigger stage in new politics
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle 01/17/2007
Change is stressful for any family, the experts say. Marriage, job loss, the birth of a child, divorce, a relative moving in or out, a kitchen remodel -- anything can shift the dynamics, alter delicate balances of power, forge new behaviors, new metaphors, new pathways of negotiation. When the family has 300 million members and is fighting a war half a world away that most of them don't believe in, the problems and challenges multiply madly.
Ever since America underwent its major home makeover in the midterm elections last fall, there's been plenty of sorting out and labeling of the new players and products. Much of it, interestingly, has taken on the forms and metaphorical trappings of family dynamics.
Nancy Pelosi's election as speaker of the House may have been the logical culmination of a political career, but it was also carefully marketed for the values that Pelosi brought to the job as a daughter, wife, mother and grandmother. Every Pelosi photo op, it seemed, had more children of all ages in it than the previous one. Over in the Senate, incoming freshmen Jon Tester (a Montana rancher) and Jim Webb (an ex-Marine and former secretary of the Navy from Virginia) were emblematic of the brawny new "Alpha Male Democrats," as the New York Times dubbed them, flinty Marlboro men minus the cigarettes. The new majority party was cannily having it both ways, as a family that blended warmth and toughness, maternal wisdom and a healthy measure of testosterone.
At the country's most famous home address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., President Bush has been behaving more and more like a man in need of some serious family counseling. His cherished "surge" of 21,500 American troops in Iraq had pundits flinging out competing images of dysfunction. Several said it was like a couple trying to save a doomed marriage by having a baby. As for the administration's growing pique with the intractable Iraqis themselves, Maureen Dowd mused recently that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and new Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte regard them as "irksome" cousins who have overstayed their welcome or ungrateful children who "leave the playroom a mess."
Politics isn't just personal anymore. It's about the ability to place and define yourself as part of a family, an embracing social structure with a larger unifying purpose. Bush, who rode to power seven years ago on a family-values tailwind that repudiated Clintonian laxness and turpitude, has become the image of a man alone, clinging fast to his failed policy as he teeters on the brink of full-fledged divorce from a Democratic-controlled Congress, from public opinion and even from his own party. Bush in 2007 is a baleful, solitary figure to contemplate.
The English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) would have understood this purposeful mingling of politics and family perfectly. In a long stream of novels, plays, short stories and nonfiction, the author of "Cakes and Ale," "The Razor's Edge" and "Of Human Bondage" returned again and again to the theme of marriage and divorce as forums of power, money, deception, self-delusion and self-assertion. It was politics, in other words, in the most elegant and elemental way.
Maugham is a minor writer who seemed destined for obscurity 40 years after his death. But he's undergoing a timely 21st century rediscovery. His play "The Constant Wife," a 1926 comedy of manners about a woman declaring her economic and erotic freedom from a faithless husband, was revived by the American Conservatory Theater in 2003 and on Broadway in 2005. Now ACT has another Maugham-on- marriage play up and running; "The Circle" (1921) continues through Feb. 4. A fine film adaptation of Maugham's 1925 novel "The Painted Veil," starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as an unhappily married couple facing each other down during a cholera outbreak in China, is in theaters.
Seen one way, "Veil" is the more serious, overtly political work. Played out against the menace and human suffering of cholera, with the dramatic Chinese mountainscape as a backdrop, the story has a kind of bleak, tragic grandeur. "This is going to get much worse," Walter (Norton) warns Kitty (Watts) at one point, as the ravages of disease, the gruesome realities of 1920s medicine, the corrosion of English colonialism and the couple's loveless marriage and barren living conditions eat away at them.
"The Circle," by contrast, seems blithely, hermetically sealed. Cocooned inside a luxurious house in Dorset, the characters dress for luncheon, quibble over card games and idly debate the authenticity of an antique chair. Crisis arrives in the form of an older couple who return to England 30 years after an adulterous escape to Italy. Time has turned them into weary comic caricatures of impassioned lovers. One (Kathleen Widdoes) is fat and frivolous; the other (Ken Ruta) is a bitter old man with ill-fitting dentures. The closest thing to a political plotline involves a sexless cold- fish husband (James Waterston as Arnold) whose only real concern about his pretty young wife's plan to leave him is what effects a scandal might have on his future in Parliament.
But Maugham, a homosexual who spent 12 miserable years as a married man, didn't need a larger external world to enhance his subject. Marriage was a minefield in its own right, a realm of treachery, vanity, smiling malice, glimmers of altruism and kindness and acres of stifling suffocation. The power of both "The Painted Veil" and "The Circle" flow from that single source, albeit along different streambeds. Politics, for Maugham, was fundamentally personal, and the personal intrinsically political.
"I did not marry you because I loved you," he once wrote his wife, Syrie, in a letter, "and you were only too well aware of it." That's a line that's repeated, with chilly frankness, by the adulterous Kitty to her husband in "The Painted Veil."
"The Circle," expertly directed by Mark Lamos, moves in a lighter and more satiric vein. But the comedy is shot through with a deep skepticism about romance, marriage and family. "I owe everything to my father," says Arnold, referring to a man (Philip Kerr as Clive) who dismisses his ex-wife as "tinsel" and now amuses himself with women in their 20s. Later on, when Clive schemes to save Arnold's marriage by endorsing the infidelity of his son's wife, the deceit backfires without his realizing it. The lovers and manipulators alike are captives of their own illusions.
Late in "The Painted Veil," Kitty and Walter finally forgive each other their failings and are granted a single night of authentic physical passion. Shortly after that, one of them is dead. But it's finally not Maugham's suave cynicism about human affairs that seems attuned to our own family-inflected politics of the moment. It's his clear-eyed realism about the stories people tell themselves and the damage they can do. "It was silly of us to look for qualities in each other that we never had," Walter tells Kitty. That cautionary line hovers over the film and reaches out to us directly.
As the myths of the Bush era dissolve and America moves to remake itself, we need to think more carefully than ever about the qualities we see -- or think we see -- in our leaders. The American family is a warm and inviting notion, and politicians are eager to invoke the rhetoric and images that surround it. Whatever stories we decide to believe, from Congress and the presidential candidates lining up to run in 2008, let's hope we'll do it with our eyes, ears and minds wide open. "
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Jack's Stance on Iraq
"The Honorable John P. Murtha's Speech on the War in Iraq - The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region."
Popular Vote Movement Makes Headway
"Source: Associated Press Newswires 01/16/2007
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - A movement to essentially junk the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the nationwide popular vote is making some headway in states large and small -- including, somewhat improbably, North Dakota.
The National Popular Vote movement is aimed at preventing a repeat of 2000, when Democrat Al Gore lost despite getting more votes than George W. Bush.
Backers are asking states to change their laws to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.
A bill to do that was introduced last week in the North Dakota Legislature, even though it could reduce the political influence of small states like North Dakota.
"Its strength is, it is what the people want," said one of the sponsors, Rep. Duane DeKrey, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "It kind of takes out that system where the person who gets the most votes doesn't necessarily win."
John Koza, a Stanford University professor who is one of the idea's principal advocates, said lawmakers in 47 states have agreed to sponsor the plan this year. It was introduced last year in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York and California, where the Legislature approved the measure only to have Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto it.
Backers say it would help bring a national focus to presidential campaigns.
Koza said the current system encourages parties to focus on a few contested "battleground" states -- Ohio and Florida, in recent years -- and exaggerates the significance of issues important to those states.
"Why is the rest of the country interested in Cuba? It's a couple of million people, we don't trade with them, and it's certainly been no military threat for 40 years," Koza said. The reason, he said, is that Florida is a battleground state.
In presidential elections, the American people are not voting directly for a candidate. Instead, under a system created by the founding fathers out of a fear of mob rule, voters choose slates of "electors," who in most cases are expected to cast their ballots for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.
Each state has one elector for every member it has in the House and Senate, a formula that gives small states a somewhat larger vote than population alone would dictate.
There have been other attempts to change the Electoral College system, but all of them foundered. They were aimed at amending the Constitution, an often drawn-out process that requires approval by Congress and ratification by at least 38 states.
This plan would be accomplished instead through an agreement among the states. It would not take effect unless adopted by state legislatures representing a majority of electoral votes.
Robert Hardaway, a University of Denver law professor and Electoral College expert, warned that the proposed interstate compact may need approval from Congress to be legal. In any case, it is "a terrible idea," Hardaway said.
In a close presidential election, recounts would be demanded "in every precinct, every hamlet in the United States," he said. "The practical problems are absolutely enormous."
Lloyd Omdahl, a former University of North Dakota political science professor, state tax commissioner and Democratic lieutenant governor, called the measure ingenious. But he was skeptical the GOP-controlled Legislature would embrace it.
"Republicans in North Dakota would see no benefit from this, because they almost always get the electoral votes," Omdahl said.
Had the compact been in force in 2000, North Dakota's three electors would have had to support Gore, even though Bush carried the state with 63 percent. Since 1900, only three Democratic presidential candidates have carried North Dakota -- Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, in 1964.
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political science professor and director of the school's Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, warned the proposal would reduce the influence of small states and lead candidates to spend more time campaigning in voter-rich California, New York and Texas.
However, Jacobs said dissatisfaction with the Electoral College system is growing, even in states that may benefit from the current setup.
A lot of Americans "don't like the Electoral College system. They find it to be out of step with expectations about democracy, expectations that our founding fathers did not necessarily share," he said.
"I think time has seen an evolution of a different way of seeing things, a different norm, in which we expect the president to be popularly elected."
------
On the Net:
National Popular Vote:
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/npv/
Electoral College:
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/index.html
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - A movement to essentially junk the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the nationwide popular vote is making some headway in states large and small -- including, somewhat improbably, North Dakota.
The National Popular Vote movement is aimed at preventing a repeat of 2000, when Democrat Al Gore lost despite getting more votes than George W. Bush.
Backers are asking states to change their laws to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.
A bill to do that was introduced last week in the North Dakota Legislature, even though it could reduce the political influence of small states like North Dakota.
"Its strength is, it is what the people want," said one of the sponsors, Rep. Duane DeKrey, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "It kind of takes out that system where the person who gets the most votes doesn't necessarily win."
John Koza, a Stanford University professor who is one of the idea's principal advocates, said lawmakers in 47 states have agreed to sponsor the plan this year. It was introduced last year in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York and California, where the Legislature approved the measure only to have Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto it.
Backers say it would help bring a national focus to presidential campaigns.
Koza said the current system encourages parties to focus on a few contested "battleground" states -- Ohio and Florida, in recent years -- and exaggerates the significance of issues important to those states.
"Why is the rest of the country interested in Cuba? It's a couple of million people, we don't trade with them, and it's certainly been no military threat for 40 years," Koza said. The reason, he said, is that Florida is a battleground state.
In presidential elections, the American people are not voting directly for a candidate. Instead, under a system created by the founding fathers out of a fear of mob rule, voters choose slates of "electors," who in most cases are expected to cast their ballots for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.
Each state has one elector for every member it has in the House and Senate, a formula that gives small states a somewhat larger vote than population alone would dictate.
There have been other attempts to change the Electoral College system, but all of them foundered. They were aimed at amending the Constitution, an often drawn-out process that requires approval by Congress and ratification by at least 38 states.
This plan would be accomplished instead through an agreement among the states. It would not take effect unless adopted by state legislatures representing a majority of electoral votes.
Robert Hardaway, a University of Denver law professor and Electoral College expert, warned that the proposed interstate compact may need approval from Congress to be legal. In any case, it is "a terrible idea," Hardaway said.
In a close presidential election, recounts would be demanded "in every precinct, every hamlet in the United States," he said. "The practical problems are absolutely enormous."
Lloyd Omdahl, a former University of North Dakota political science professor, state tax commissioner and Democratic lieutenant governor, called the measure ingenious. But he was skeptical the GOP-controlled Legislature would embrace it.
"Republicans in North Dakota would see no benefit from this, because they almost always get the electoral votes," Omdahl said.
Had the compact been in force in 2000, North Dakota's three electors would have had to support Gore, even though Bush carried the state with 63 percent. Since 1900, only three Democratic presidential candidates have carried North Dakota -- Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, in 1964.
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political science professor and director of the school's Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, warned the proposal would reduce the influence of small states and lead candidates to spend more time campaigning in voter-rich California, New York and Texas.
However, Jacobs said dissatisfaction with the Electoral College system is growing, even in states that may benefit from the current setup.
A lot of Americans "don't like the Electoral College system. They find it to be out of step with expectations about democracy, expectations that our founding fathers did not necessarily share," he said.
"I think time has seen an evolution of a different way of seeing things, a different norm, in which we expect the president to be popularly elected."
------
On the Net:
National Popular Vote:
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/npv/
Electoral College:
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/index.html
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