Charlie Wilson's War and Pat Hingle, RIP

Don't read if you intend to see the movie, Charlie Wilson's War.

This Boston Globe editorial accurately summarizes a lesson which the creators of Charlie Wilson's War attempt to make.

Toward the end of "Charlie Wilson's War," a CIA officer played by the pitch-perfect Philip Seymour Hoffman cautions the Wilson character (played by Tom Hanks) not to be too sure they have done something glorious. To make the point, he tells the story of a Zen master who observes the people of his village celebrating a young boy's new horse as a wonderful gift. "We'll see," the Zen master says. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks a leg, everyone says the horse is a curse. "We'll see," says the master. Then war breaks out, the boy cannot be conscripted because of his injury, and everyone now says the horse was a fortunate gift. "We'll see," the master says again.

This is screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's way of warning against triumphalism. Yes, Afghan suffering at the hands of the Soviet invaders was atrocious, and the Soviets' defeat by Afghan mujahideen armed with US Stinger missiles ought to have been a humanitarian liberation. But the fighting among Afghan warlords that ensued opened the way for the fanatical Taliban to take power, for Al Qaeda to set up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, for the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and then for to the Bush administration's global war on terror, whose destabilizing effects are likely to extend far into the future.

I watched the movie recently and agree with the editorial's characterization of the Zen story's [see it here] intended message, but disagree with it's attempt to tie in all that followed to the US response to the Soviet's invasion. What's always missing from this type of analysis is the possible ramifications of never having responded to the Soviet invasion. So while the Zen story reinforces how future conditions will always affect our interpretation of past events, the logic behind the latest Zen / Tao / The Secret / Oprah / Dr Wayne-ish philosophical foray, also leaves a hole as wide and as deep as Al Gore's heated greenhouse pool enclosure, aka Al's Toke [Tennessee Ozone Killer Extraordinaire]. For example, I think it's easy to imagine that if the US never got involved in Afghanistan, there could be great resentment towards the US for that type of passivity. [FYI - see another great Hoffman scene from the movie].

By the way, you won't be surprised to learn that the real Charlie Wilson loved the movie. But you probably will be surprised to learn the following from Wilson:

... he loves the fact that the belly dancer he sent to the Middle East to woo Egyptian allies is lasciviously portrayed in the film by Tracy Phillips, the daughter of Dallas Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips.

"She sure as hell doesn't look like her daddy," Wilson said, "and you can put that down!"

Put another way, Bum Philip's genes are in that woman. Forget the covert Afghan war, that's the real shocker!

I thought of the movie and the Zen story when I read about the death of actor Pat Hingle [see his filmography], who was born in Miami. Hingle may be the actor we've most seen without knowing his actual name. My favorite of his roles was the Kansas track coach in the story of Billy Mills--the North American Indian who earned an Olympic gold medal--Running Brave. Read about Hingle's 'we'll see' moment from his life.

He earned rave reviews in "J.B." and was offered the title role in the film "Elmer Gantry," but then tragedy struck. Several weeks into the play's run, Hingle became caught in a stalled elevator in his apartment building. He lost his balance while trying to crawl out and fell 54 feet down the shaft. He sustained massive injuries, including a fractured skull, wrist, hip and leg, and several broken ribs. He also lost his little finger on his left hand.

Hingle spent much of the next year relearning how to walk, and the Gantry role went to Burt Lancaster.

"I know that if I had done Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done," he later told the New York Times. "I've had exactly the kind of career I hoped for."

Over the next 50 years, Hingle fashioned a career as a top supporting actor in film, television and theater. His TV credits include "Twilight Zone," "The Untouchables," "Route 66," "Gunsmoke," "The Fugitive," "Mission Impossible" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame." On television he's played J. Edgar Hoover, former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Col. Tom Parker (Elvis Presley's manager) and, in the miniseries "War and Remembrance," Adm. William F. "Bull" Halsey.

On the big screen, his films include "Hang 'Em High," "Sudden Impact" and "The Gauntlet" with Eastwood, as well as "Muppets From Space." He and Michael Gough, who played Alfred Pennyworth, were the only two actors to appear in the first four "Batman" films.

Can you identify your 'we'll see' moments? I can definitely list one. An aneurysm and stroke, following brain surgery, suffered by my Dad when I was 18. Many lessons which have served me well in life were learned as a result of that. Not the least of which were based on long talks with my Father about his youth, his memory of which was unimpaired, in contrast to other damage caused by the aneurysm.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charlie Wilson's Zen lesson

GLOBE EDITORIAL - January 4, 2008

TWO MESSAGES are appended to the end of "Charlie Wilson's War," the artful Hollywood flick about a hedonistic Texas congressman who in the 1980s raised covert funding for the Afghan mujahideen from $5 million to $1 billion, thereby helping to drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan and precipitate the implosion of the Soviet Union. An explicit moral of the movie comes from the real-life Wilson, who lamented that America did the right thing in Afghanistan but messed up "the endgame." Today there can be little doubt that Washington's brusque loss of interest in the fate of Afghanistan after the Soviets' withdrawal was a calamitous error.

But it is the second, more philosophical message that ought to be at the center of current debate about America's role in the world. This lesson, which the Bush administration has learned all too slowly, teaches the need for humility in those who make America's moves on a global chessboard - a virtue that seems almost totally absent from the patriotic posturing of the presidential candidates.

Toward the end of "Charlie Wilson's War," a CIA officer played by the pitch-perfect Philip Seymour Hoffman cautions the Wilson character (played by Tom Hanks) not to be too sure they have done something glorious. To make the point, he tells the story of a Zen master who observes the people of his village celebrating a young boy's new horse as a wonderful gift. "We'll see," the Zen master says. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks a leg, everyone says the horse is a curse. "We'll see," says the master. Then war breaks out, the boy cannot be conscripted because of his injury, and everyone now says the horse was a fortunate gift. "We'll see," the master says again.

This is screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's way of warning against triumphalism. Yes, Afghan suffering at the hands of the Soviet invaders was atrocious, and the Soviets' defeat by Afghan mujahideen armed with US Stinger missiles ought to have been a humanitarian liberation. But the fighting among Afghan warlords that ensued opened the way for the fanatical Taliban to take power, for Al Qaeda to set up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, for the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and then for to the Bush administration's global war on terror, whose destabilizing effects are likely to extend far into the future.

In a similar vein, Bush should have foreseen that the invasion and occupation of Iraq could become a strategic gift to Iran; that his pledge to foster democracy in the Muslim world while backing Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan would make America look hypocritical; or that his reluctance to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution to halt Israel's bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 would inflame anti-American feelings in the Arab world. These are the sorts of unintended consequences a Zen master would expect - and a president must try to anticipate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pat Hingle dies at 84; veteran actor was perhaps best known for 'Batman' role

From the Los Angeles Times - OBITUARIES

By Jon Thurber

January 5, 2009

Pat Hingle, the veteran actor with more than half a century of impressive work in theater, film and television who was perhaps best known to a generation of movie fans as Commissioner James Gordon in the first four "Batman" films, has died. He was 84.

Hingle died Saturday night of myelodysplasia, a type of blood cancer, at his home in Carolina Beach, N.C., according to Lynn Heritage, a cousin who was acting as a spokesperson for the family.

He wasn't a household name, but his solid, broad, hang-dog screen face became a household image. On film, he worked with stars ranging from Clint Eastwood to the Muppets. He was Sally Field's father in "Norma Rae" and Warren Beatty's in "Splendor in the Grass." He played the bartender who needles Marlon Brando about his former prize-fight style in "On the Waterfront," and he was the sadistic crime boss who terrorizes Anjelica Huston with a bag of oranges in "The Grifters."

Hingle had an illustrious Broadway career and was in the original casts of some of the great plays in American theater, including "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" and "J.B."

James Morrison, the actor who is best known now for his role as Bill Buchanan in the television series "24," was a friend of Hingle's and worked with him in a 1983 production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum.

"Only a chosen few had the body of work that he had," Morrison told The Times on Sunday. "The reason he stands out is that he had the humility and ease that made acting look easy."

Hingle was born Martin Patterson Hingle in Miami on July 19, 1924. He'd had one semester at the University of Texas when World War II broke out. He entered the Navy and served as an enlisted man on a destroyer in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to college but switched majors after observing that every pretty girl he saw was headed toward the university's theater department.

Over the next three years, he did 35 plays and found himself more comfortable in the theater than anywhere else.

He said two actors were responsible for his deciding to become a professional actor.

"There were the Gary Coopers and the Clark Gables, but they didn't really appeal to me," he told the Washington Post some years ago. "But in three weeks' time, I saw Walter Huston (Anjelica Huston's grandfather) and Hume Cronyn in about 10 movies and I saw that it was possible to play a wide variety of roles where there was no connections between one or the other; they weren't put in a slot . . . I saw what was possible."

After graduating in 1949, Hingle moved to New York and studied acting with Uta Hagen at Herbert Berghof Studios. He later was accepted into the prestigious Actors Studio.

His break came in 1955 when Elia Kazan, one of the co-founders of the Actors Studio, cast him as the scheming son Gooper in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Two years later, Kazan cast him in William Inge's "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," which became a major Broadway hit and earned Hingle a Tony Award nomination. A year later, Kazan once again helped him land a role as the title character in "J.B.," the Archibald MacLeish play about the life of Job that won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Hingle was also in Arthur Miller's "The Price" in 1968.

He earned rave reviews in "J.B." and was offered the title role in the film "Elmer Gantry," but then tragedy struck. Several weeks into the play's run, Hingle became caught in a stalled elevator in his apartment building. He lost his balance while trying to crawl out and fell 54 feet down the shaft. He sustained massive injuries, including a fractured skull, wrist, hip and leg, and several broken ribs. He also lost his little finger on his left hand.

Hingle spent much of the next year relearning how to walk, and the Gantry role went to Burt Lancaster.

"I know that if I had done Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done," he later told the New York Times. "I've had exactly the kind of career I hoped for."

Over the next 50 years, Hingle fashioned a career as a top supporting actor in film, television and theater. His TV credits include "Twilight Zone," "The Untouchables," "Route 66," "Gunsmoke," "The Fugitive," "Mission Impossible" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame." On television he's played J. Edgar Hoover, former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Col. Tom Parker (Elvis Presley's manager) and, in the miniseries "War and Remembrance," Adm. William F. "Bull" Halsey.

On the big screen, his films include "Hang 'Em High," "Sudden Impact" and "The Gauntlet" with Eastwood, as well as "Muppets From Space." He and Michael Gough, who played Alfred Pennyworth, were the only two actors to appear in the first four "Batman" films.

To the end, Hingle preferred being in the theater.

"The stage is an actors' medium," he told The Times some years ago. "When the curtain goes up, there are those crazy actors. The story comes through them. The director can pull his hair in the back of the house and the producer and the playwright can cry on each other's shoulders. But there go those galloping actors."

Hingle's friend Morrison recalled him Sunday as a "great listener."

"The great actors have this and he taught me this. . . . You were the most important thing when you worked opposite him. He was present, right there, in his life and in his work. He was the most authentic man I've ever met."

Hingle is survived by Julia, his wife of 29 years; five children; 11 grandchildren; and two sisters.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-hingle5-2009jan05,0,4120812.story
jon.thurber@latimes.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

State of Minnesota -- Banana Republic?

If what is going on in Minnesota was happening in Florida, or God forbid, Miami, we would probably be fighting off efforts to drop us from the Union. John Fund from the WSJ has written often about election fraud, and I see his fingerprints on this WSJ Editorial about the Minnesota Senatorial election recount. An excerpt:

In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.

Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.

Editorial referenced is copied in full at end of post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Funny Business in Minnesota -- Every dubious ruling seems to help Al Franken

JANUARY 5, 2009

Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.

Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.

This disenfranchises Minnesotans whose vote counted only once. And one Canvassing Board member, State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, has acknowledged that "very likely there was a double counting." Yet the board insists that it lacks the authority to question local officials and it is merely adding the inflated numbers to the totals.

In other cases, the board has been flagrantly inconsistent. Last month, Mr. Franken's campaign charged that one Hennepin County (Minneapolis) precinct had "lost" 133 votes, since the hand recount showed fewer ballots than machine votes recorded on Election Night. Though there is no proof to this missing vote charge -- officials may have accidentally run the ballots through the machine twice on Election Night -- the Canvassing Board chose to go with the Election Night total, rather than the actual number of ballots in the recount. That decision gave Mr. Franken a gain of 46 votes.

Meanwhile, a Ramsey County precinct ended up with 177 more ballots than there were recorded votes on Election Night. In that case, the board decided to go with the extra ballots, rather than the Election Night total, even though the county is now showing more ballots than voters in the precinct. This gave Mr. Franken a net gain of 37 votes, which means he's benefited both ways from the board's inconsistency.

And then there are the absentee ballots. The Franken campaign initially howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. Counties were supposed to review their absentees and create a list of those they believed were mistakenly rejected. Many Franken-leaning counties did so, submitting 1,350 ballots to include in the results. But many Coleman-leaning counties have yet to complete a re-examination. Despite this lack of uniformity, and though the state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Coleman request to standardize this absentee review, Mr. Ritchie's office nonetheless plowed through the incomplete pile of 1,350 absentees this weekend, padding Mr. Franken's edge by a further 176 votes.

Both campaigns have also suggested that Mr. Ritchie's office made mistakes in tabulating votes that had been challenged by either of the campaigns. And the Canvassing Board appears to have applied inconsistent standards in how it decided some of these challenged votes -- in ways that, again on net, have favored Mr. Franken.

The question is how the board can certify a fair and accurate election result given these multiple recount problems. Yet that is precisely what the five members seem prepared to do when they meet today. Some members seem to have concluded that because one of the candidates will challenge the result in any event, why not get on with it and leave it to the courts? Mr. Coleman will certainly have grounds to contest the result in court, but he'll be at a disadvantage given that courts are understandably reluctant to overrule a certified outcome.

Meanwhile, Minnesota's other Senator, Amy Klobuchar, is already saying her fellow Democrats should seat Mr. Franken when the 111th Congress begins this week if the Canvassing Board certifies him as the winner. This contradicts Minnesota law, which says the state cannot award a certificate of election if one party contests the results. Ms. Klobuchar is trying to create the public perception of a fait accompli, all the better to make Mr. Coleman look like a sore loser and build pressure on him to drop his legal challenge despite the funny recount business.

Minnesotans like to think that their state isn't like New Jersey or Louisiana, and typically it isn't. But we can't recall a similar recount involving optical scanning machines that has changed so many votes, and in which nearly every crucial decision worked to the advantage of the same candidate. The Coleman campaign clearly misjudged the politics here, and the apparent willingness of a partisan like Mr. Ritchie to help his preferred candidate, Mr. Franken. If the Canvassing Board certifies Mr. Franken as the winner based on the current count, it will be anointing a tainted and undeserving Senator.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

Inauguration Journal - Day 4

Anthony Atwood's Inauguration Journal - Day 4

MONDAY 5JAN09: Reveille, Reveille. 0630. Today we take the tube because it is Monday, a work day and we are uncertain about traffic conditions and are going downtown. The subway stop is only two blocks away. The George Mason University campus is across the street from us. The subway is crowded. There is a beautiful blind girl on the subway sitting quietly with her dog at her feet. We wish her good morning and ask the dog’s name. It is a white retriever named Harris.

We get off the subway at our stop and emerge into the morning a block from our destination, a federal office building downtown. Military personnel of all branches are converging on the site. The AFIC is a joint command. This is a once-in-four-years activity, so the building is a loaner. It is split between the AFIC, on the lower two floors, and the PIC (Presidential Inaugural Committee) civilian folks on the upper floors. The civilian folks on the upper floors are in charge; the military presence below is there to help. All the Navy people from Saturday are there, as well as a couple hundred more new arrivals from the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. There are the typical scanners and checkpoints you find at most any government office building, manned by Capital Police. We are all herded into a theater in the building. We go through more check in. Much of it is repetition, what the Navy would call a “goat rope” (a paper chase). Everyone has their picture taken. We are told the badges will be ours to keep after I-Day.

The military has been part of inaugurations since the first one, when the Army served as escort to George Washington, the first president and former Commander-in-Chief, when he took the oath of office. With the exception of a few words, it is the exact same oath that all Members of Congress, federal judges and military officers take.

After more welcomes, briefs, and power points, we are split up into groups and begin to disperse through the building to our relative directorates. The groups go their separate ways to their individual assignments. We are not there to provide security, but rather, assistance in every other way possible to make I-Day work. Even under ordinary circumstances this would be something: a week of events capped by the inauguration with a quarter million people, including traditional ceremonies, prayer breakfasts, luncheons, capped by the swearing in of the new president, a parade through the heart of the city of some 13,000 (more than half of them military), a pass-in-review, 10 official balls, and miscellaneous hoopla. Given the first-time circumstances of the coming I-Day, there are many many many more attendees expected.

My assignment is in the Public Affairs shop, which has about fifty personnel. Of the original eleven I assembled with Saturday, only one lady CPO from Michigan is also in my office. She is to be my “battle buddy” during the mission. We are told to come in civilian clothes the next day, bringing our uniforms with us in garment bags.

The map on the wall of our office indicates our building is only a couple blocks from the Mall. A short walk to the Capitol itself. It will be nice to see that, but this day we are released about dusk, the daylight is gone, and we ride the tube back to Arlington quiet with our own thoughts. Taps. Taps. Lights out.

Read more!

Consensus Emerges - Cut Payroll Taxes

In our efforts to spot a consensus, please read the excerpt below from economist Edward Glaeser below. His views are endorsed by Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw, the most prominent free market economists still breathing.

While the mechanics of a payroll tax cut are simple, spending hundreds of billions wisely on infrastructure is hard. Currently, the federal government spends about $40 billion a year in transportation, and another $20 billion on other forms of infrastructure. There is a case for significantly increasing this amount. Our roads do need repairing, and it makes sense to invest more in a downturn when unemployment is high. But even doubling the current federal infrastructure expenditure, a vast increase, would represent only 8 percent of a $750 billion package.

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who should get the federal stimulus funds

By Edward L. Glaeser | January 5, 2009

BUFFETED by recession, our nation has elected a president determined to act. President-elect Obama's advisers have called for a vast stimulus package of $750 billion or more. But macroeconomic events should never lead us to toss out the first rule of prudent policy: fund projects only when benefits exceed costs. The Obama administration, therefore, faces the challenge of spending at least three quarters of $1 trillion at breakneck speed on sensible stimulus projects.

The difficulties inherent in this challenge explain why Keynesian fiscal policy has been out of fashion for decades. Until last year, the economic consensus was that monetary policy could smooth the business cycle with greater speed and less waste than countercyclical taxes or spending. Fiscal policy has made a comeback, not because its flaws have disappeared, but because the alternatives don't seem to be working. Yet, any macroeconomic benefits of the stimulus package will be easily undermined if stimulus funds are spent building bridges to nowhere.

What will minimize the risks of a fiscal fiasco? There are three plausible plans: new tax cuts for middle-income Americans; investing in infrastructure; and providing aid to states. Tax cuts can be implemented quickly and entail minimal waste, since the money shows up directly in people's pockets. The big problem with using the tax system to fight recession is that consumers don't necessarily spend the money. At least some may save, recognizing that current federal largesse will be offset by future taxes.

Perhaps the best way to avoid this problem is to target tax cuts toward lower-income Americans who are most likely to spend anything they get. The bulk of the fiscal stimulus could be used to radically reduce the Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by lower- and middle-income Americans over the next 18 months. A payroll tax cut should boost the economy by getting money in the hands of people who will spend it. The tax cut would also make work pay more for poorer Americans, and that should increase employment. Even if the tax cut doesn't end the recession, it would at least ease the downturn's burden on poorer Americans.

While the mechanics of a payroll tax cut are simple, spending hundreds of billions wisely on infrastructure is hard. Currently, the federal government spends about $40 billion a year in transportation, and another $20 billion on other forms of infrastructure. There is a case for significantly increasing this amount. Our roads do need repairing, and it makes sense to invest more in a downturn when unemployment is high. But even doubling the current federal infrastructure expenditure, a vast increase, would represent only 8 percent of a $750 billion package.

The country needs to invest steadily and wisely on infrastructure, not rush hundreds of billions of dollars out the door. Really expensive projects, like the Big Dig, can take many years to plan, permit, and build. Our roads require ongoing maintenance, not a big push. Moreover, fairness and economic efficiency dictate that infrastructure should generally be paid for by users, not general tax revenue. It is appropriate that gas taxes pay for federal highway aid. Using general revenues to build highways means more subsidies for carbon-emitting cars. The country should take infrastructure investment seriously, but infrastructure spending is unlikely to be sound stimulus.

There is a better case for direct aid to state and local governments. Many states, like Massachusetts, face balanced-budget rules that force spending to contract during a recession, just when that spending is most needed. Federal aid can offset the drops in local revenue and maintain spending levels on vital services like schools and police. Our children are an even more important investment than our roads.

The best way to make sure that a vast stimulus package doesn't turn into a federal boondoggle bonanza is for that money to go directly to private citizens and local governments. Reducing payroll taxes for middle- and lower-income people harkens back to the Jacksonian idea of small-government egalitarianism. Shoring up the balance sheets of state and local governments would help ensure that those governments don't make the downturn worse by cutting spending during a recession.

Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

Soccer - Chelsea is Less Generous

Soccer article by the Miami Herald's Santos Perez

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chelsea is feeling less generous

Posted on Sun, Jan. 04, 2009

BY SANTOS A. PEREZ

The winter transfer period began Thursday, and European clubs covet reinforcements for a second-half run at league titles or unloading expensive and expiring contracts.

Since purchasing Chelsea in 2003, Russian billionaire owner Roman Abramovich has spent extravagantly, and in the process he built a Premier League power.

Now Blues manager Luiz Felipe Scolari looks for continued support from Abramovich as Chelsea, currently second in the Premiership table, battles leader Liverpool and third-place Manchester United and Aston Villa.

But British media report Abramovich might not be as generous this time around, preferring that the club reduce payroll instead.

The move would signal a complete turnaround from an owner who paid a then-record transfer fee of about

$43 million for Andriy Shevchenko in 2006.

Inter Milan showed an interest in Chelsea forward Didier Drogba, who would reunite with former Blues manager Jose Mourinho. But the current Italian Serie A leader apparently will have to wait until next season to acquire Drogba.

With Drogba likely unavailable as an immediate transfer pickup, Inter Milan will pursue Newcastle United forward Michael Owen. Owen has an expiring contract and could sign elsewhere next season.

If Scolari, in his first season as Chelsea boss, convinces Abramovich to loosen the purse strings again, the reported transfer targets are strikers Luis Fabiano of Spanish-league club Sevilla, Wagner Love, currently with CSKA Moscow and Bayern Munich midfielder Franck Ribery.

But any efforts at landing Ribery would come at a high cost. Bayern Munich reportedly has placed a 60-million-pound transfer tag on the

25-year-old Ribery, who also is being coveted by Manchester United.

Arsenal is making a push for Zenit Saint Petersburg midfielder Andrei Arshavin of the Russian first division. The reported price on a possible Arshavin transfer ranges between $18 million and

$27.8 million.

The Gunners currently trail Liverpool by 10 points in the Premier League standings. Their first half performance has impressed manager Arsene Wenger, but the addition of a veteran like the 27-year-old Arshavin would further improve Arsenal's hopes at overtaking Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Aston Villa.

''We already have many young players so, if we buy, it will be somebody who is ready to play straight away,'' Wenger told the British media. ``A loan deal could also be a possibility.''

Arshavin also has caught the attention of new Real Madrid manager Juande Ramos. But the defending Spanish League champions, currently fifth in La Liga table, recently signed former Arsenal midfielder Lassandra Diarra and AFC Ajax striker Klaas Jan Huntelaar.

ETO'O LEADS BARCA

In the weeks leading to the Spanish League season opener last summer, Barcelona forward Samuel Eto'o was considered a likely departure. New Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola looked for a roster makeover in an effort to return Barca to the top of the league standings.

Ronaldinho and Deco didn't fit into Guardiola's plans and moved to AC Milan and Chelsea, respectively. Eto'o also seemed headed out of Spain.

But Guardiola retained Eto'o, and the move paid off. The Cameroon native has scored a league-leading

15 goals, helping Barca open a 10-point lead over Sevilla.

Considered a disruptive influence last season, Eto'o, 27, has become an exemplary team player. Guardiola recently rewarded Eto'o with a three-day break, but Eto'o ended it early and returned to team practices.

Guardiola's ability to fit Eto'o into a team structure and return Barca to league supremacy has won admiration from club president Joan Laporta.

''We thought things would go well because he knows more about football and about the club than just about anyone, plus, he's also from here as a home-grown player and manager,'' Laporta said of Guardiola on the team's website. ``We've only just started, really, and there's still some way to go. But we believe things are on the right lines.''

While Barcelona enjoys its current lofty status, defending league champion Real Madrid is in fifth place and

12 points behind Barcelona. A start of nine wins, five losses and three draws cost first-year manager Bern Schunster his job last month.

Ramos, who guided Tottenham Hotspur in 2007-08, replaced Schunster for the remainder of the season.

''All professionals dream of getting here, and it is impossible to say no,'' Ramos said recently in Spain's El Mundo newspaper. ``I have been at this for 20 years, and it has been very successful, but to reach a plateau like Real Madrid -- nothing eclipses that.''

This report includes material from Miami Herald wire services.

Read more!

Inauguration Journal - Day 3

Anthony Atwood's Inauguration Journal - Day 3

SUNDAY 4JAN09: Holiday Routine. Sunday has provided a good amount of sleep and a quiet morning. Looking out the window of the apartment house over a cup of coffee, across the river the most prominent sight standing up on the horizon are the spires of the National Cathedral. That is where I go.

The National Cathedral is one very large important church. Your steps echo in the vaulted nave going down into the underground chapels and cloisters. There are stained glass windows and tapestries of King David. There are church groups who come here from around the world and sing before the altar of God. The voices sound out of this world. The cathedral has the best acoustics in the land.

Coming back by surface streets though the bohemian neighborhood of Georgetown, there are a lot of folks out and about walking. I pass a bookstore, a “City Lights” kind of independent shop with a few rod-iron sidewalk tables out front where people are having espresso. The giant storefront window is entirely taken up by a huge poster of the iconic face of President-elect Obama, with a set jaw and a compelling expression.

Above the poster are these words: “Yes, we did.”

Now is a good time to articulate the rules of engagement for this journal. It is written and keyed in completely during off-duty hours, and done entirely on a private computer. The AFIC is aware that it is being created. It will conform to all the guidelines, norms and regulations that apply. Any value it may have is the result of the generosity of the American armed forces, the kindness of the Emmaus Brother* who is willing to share posting it, and to the inspiration of you who may read it. The flaws are all my own.

The spires of the cathedral glimmer in the dusk. Taps. Taps. Lights out.

Taps

"Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh -- Falls the night.

"Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

"Then good night, peaceful night,
Till the light of the dawn shineth bright,
God is near, do not fear -- Friend, good night."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* - I knew it was a mistake not to discuss my fees up front-JC

Read more!

Birthplace of Many a Miami Dolphins Fan

I was listening to the Herald sportswriter Santos Perez comment on La Descarga Deportiva radio show this past week. Perez noted the similarities between this year's Dolphin team and the 1970 team. The similarities include a new coach and dramatic turnaround in wins. Let's hope the similarities don't extend to a first round playoff loss. In 1970 it was to the Oakland Raiders, which I vaguely remember a Daryle Lamonica bomb that sealed our fate.

But there was nothing vague about the next Dolphins playoff game, Christmas evening 1971. There are few things that I can point to with accuracy and say, 'that's it, there's where it began.' But I can about becoming a fan of the Miami Dolphins. It was the first time I ever remember watching a sporting event where the result mattered beyond belief. I was twelve and got a headache. I've rarely had a headache since [sanksgot]. The only times I have every rooted against the Dolphins since was when Nick Satan was coaching here, for the unadulterated pleasure of watching his weasel excuses following defeats.

The article is from SI's Vault by John Underwood - January 03, 1972. An excerpt:

Somehow it would—must, surely, on Christmas Day—come to this. That the longest game in the history of American professional football would be decided by the smallest player on the field. That he would not be American-born at all, but a Cypriot, with an accent. That he would be a painter of neckties for profit, and uninhibited in his high good humor. A teller of outrageous jokes on himself, agreeable and gregarious. And cuddly. The people of Kansas City would see him there in the shadow of his Miami teammates and wonder, what is a Garo Yepremian ? Did the Dolphins get him for Christmas? And the answer would be that the Dolphins got him two years ago from Detroit , where he was hiding out in his basement painting ties, ashamed to show his balding head after being cut by the Lions. The Lions considered him a clown. And at 6:24 p.m. CST on Christmas Day the Dolphins gave him to the Kansas City Chiefs . Right between the uprights.

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Garo Yepremian's field goal beats Kansas City in overtime to set up a Miami-Baltimore confrontation in the AFC, while Dallas and San Francisco gun their way into an NFC shoot-out in Texas

Somehow it would—must, surely, on Christmas Day—come to this. That the longest game in the history of American professional football would be decided by the smallest player on the field. That he would not be American-born at all, but a Cypriot, with an accent. That he would be a painter of neckties for profit, and uninhibited in his high good humor. A teller of outrageous jokes on himself, agreeable and gregarious. And cuddly. The people of Kansas City would see him there in the shadow of his Miami teammates and wonder, what is a Garo Yepremian ? Did the Dolphins get him for Christmas? And the answer would be that the Dolphins got him two years ago from Detroit , where he was hiding out in his basement painting ties, ashamed to show his balding head after being cut by the Lions. The Lions considered him a clown. And at 6:24 p.m. CST on Christmas Day the Dolphins gave him to the Kansas City Chiefs . Right between the uprights.

The record will show that 82 minutes and 40 seconds after it began, the American Conference playoff between Miami and Kansas City was decided in Miami 's favor, 27-24, on a perfect 37-yard field goal off the left instep of little Garo's size-seven soccer boot (see cover). When it happened, MiamiQuarterback Bob Griese laughed out loud. He was standing on the sidelines, not watching the ball but the holder, Karl Noonan, and when Noonan raised his hands in triumph, Griese laughed, giddy in the final release of tension and fatigue. The game had gone five quarters-plus to sudden death (or sudden victory, as Pollyanna Curt Gowdy insisted on calling it on the TV), from a slug-colored unseasonably warm Missouri afternoon through nightfall. It had been played both crisply and sloppily, with consummate-skill and heartbreaking error. It had been dull and heavy, and then exquisitely exciting. And it went down ultimately to a lightning bolt and a laugh.

At the top, what it would seem to have proved beyond the elevation of the Dolphins to the AFC's best bet for the Super Bowl is that Miami 's foreign-born placekicker was better than Kansas City 's foreign-born placekicker, Jan Stenerud of Norway . Stenerud missed his chance to win it, Yepremian did not. As a result. Yepremian was at the center of a vortex of hilarity in the Dolphin dressing room, while Stenerud sat alone in his cubicle at the end of the world and said his failure was "unbearable." Yepremian said he felt bad for Jan, "but I feel good for me" because he had been disconsolate when Stenerud made the Pro Bowl and he, Garo Yepremian , the No. 1 scorer in all of pro football, did not.

What the record will not show, however, and what few of the 50,374 in Municipal Stadium appreciated, was another extraordinary contribution Yepremian made to Kansas City 's downfall. Some background is in order. Yepremian is 5'8". He weighs 170 pounds. Mostly from the kneecap down. When 260-pound blockers come his way, Garo has been known to sprint resolutely in the opposite direction. "I must protect them from my magnificent body," he says, but it is his life he is anxious to protect. It is unheard of for him to make a tackle. The Miami coach, Don Shula , does not really require it. Against Kansas City , Garo remained under no obligation. But with a minute and a half to play in the fourth quarter, he took a swipe at Ed Podolak that made it possible for Curtis Johnson to save the Dolphins . Miami , rallying for the third time, had made the score 24-24 on Griese's five-yard pass to Marv Fleming, and Yepremian kicked off. Podolak, who had an exceptional day (349 yards rushing, receiving and returning kicks), took the ball on his goal line, broke through the first wave of Miami tacklers and was suddenly at midfield and in the clear. Clear in a relative sense. Yepremian was still hanging around. He did not make contact with Podolak, but he did make the attempt and was, briefly, in the way. Having to veer off, even slightly, cost Podolak a vital step or two. From behind and the opposite side, Cornerback Johnson angled in hard, running Podolak out of bounds at the Miami 22. Four plays later, with 35 seconds to go in regulation time, Stenerud pushed his 32-yard field goal attempt to the right—"the worst thing that ever happened to me." Stenerud also missed a 29-yarder in the second quarter and had a 42-yard attempt blocked in the first overtime period.

But to get back to Bob Griese . Although he completed 20 passes for 263 yards (seven for 140 to the incomparable Paul Warfield ), and attacked in a skilled, surgical manner the bewildering scaffolds of zone and man-to-man coverage and irregular line splits Kansas City threw at him, what moves grown men like Larry Csonka and Shula to rhapsodize about Griese is a near-hidden thing. It is obscured partly because Griese himself does not reveal much of Griese—he is notorious for lingering in the shower till postgame interrogation has petered out—and partly because, in his cool self-confident way, he does not seem to require ego trips every game day to enjoy being a quarterback. The fact is that he would rather not throw 45 passes a game, as he did in 1969 the last time Miami played—and lost to—Kansas City. His best games this year, as he led the conference in passing, were those in which he threw fewer than 20 times. "He enjoys working within the system, being able to take advantage of an offense," says Shula . "He gets a kick out of calling the right play."

But what made Griese extra special this day was what had come before it, and what he had overcome. For four weeks he has been bothered by a very sore left shoulder, damaged against the Bears. For public consumption, he minimized the damage, and still does. Unable to lead properly when he threw and unable to follow through with his customary snap, his passing suffered. He threw behind receivers, he threw interceptions. Miami lost to New England and Baltimore . Even in a winning effort against Green Bay in the last regular-season game, Griese was not altogether right. The week of that game a friend unthinkingly clapped his shoulder and Griese recoiled in pain. But no one outside the Dolphin circle knew how much the injury was affecting him.

Griese's first pass against the Chiefs was underthrown. He had an indifferent first quarter. But then it began to come. Down 10-0, he found Warfield , in his inimitable fashion, out there bewildering the Chiefs ' Emmitt Thomas . By the third quarter Griese was as sharp as ever. On the drive to tie the score at 17-17 he hit on four straight passes. To tie it again at 24-24 he hit on six out of seven to four different receivers.

For the most part, Kansas City successfully shut off Miami 's big-back ground attack. The front four read well and clogged things up, and the linebacking was brutal. "It's one thing to run against a grizzly bear," said Csonka of Middle Linebacker Willie Lanier , "but when he's a smart grizzly bear...." So Griese threw more than he had intended, and his protection held up well. Three times he was hit hard, twice after passes, once on a scrambling run, and though he was slow getting up, it did not take him long to recover. He said the pain "jabbed him a little," but went away quickly. Griese not only threw a greater variety of passes than Lenny Dawson, the veteran Chief quarterback, he was also more effective because he was getting the ball to his favorite receiver, Warfield , whereas Dawson, inhibited by a swarming, deep-containing Miami zone, could not get to his favorite, Otis Taylor . Taylor caught only three passes for 12 yards.

But in the end the call that Griese used to beat Kansas City was not a pass at all, but a run. A "Csonka special," he said later. "Zonk likes it, and we hadn't used it, and it seemed like the right time." Miami had possession on its 35 in the second overtime. Jim Kiick had just run for five yards. The call was "roll right, trap left." A misdirection play, against the flow. Kiick and Griese flow to the right, Csonka takes a step up, then comes back against the grain. Doug Crusan cleared out the defensive end, and Csonka followed Tackle Norm Evans and Guard Larry Little into the hole. "I got hold of Larry's pants," said Csonka. "He's faster than I am, and I had to hold on to keep up."

Csonka was to the Kansas City 36 before Safety Jim Kearney dragged him down. Griese now worked the ball carefully down to the 30 and into the middle of the field, and Shula ushered in Yepremian and Noonan. "You gave me beautiful position," Garo told Griese afterward. "Perfect. I knew if it was less than 50 yards I would make it." And, of course, he did.

"I knew we would win because last night I was very good at cards," Yepremian said. "I say, 'When I win at cards, we win.' " No team should be considered complete without a Garo Yepremian .

"And now," said the littlest Dolphin of them all, "I am hoping Baltimore will win, so we can play them again and show them some sunshine."

The next day, in the dreary mud and rain of Cleveland , Yepremian's sunshine dream came true, for the Colts simply smothered the Browns 20-3.

Reviewing the Dolphins ' astonishing progress before their game, Shula had said, "This team, hard as it has worked, deserves to go farther than the Chiefs ." Now, to go farther, the Dolphins do not have to go far—in fact, around the corner to the Orange Bowl to meet an opponent they know like a neighbor, one they love to hate.

The Colts won convincingly, John Unitas consuming time and sapping confidence with his probing passes (13 for 21 and 143 yards) and loosing Running Backs Don Nottingham , who was in for injured Norm Bulaich, and Tom Matte to punish Cleveland with body blows.

The Baltimore defense—those friendly undertakers Bubba Smith , Mike Curtis , Ted Hendricks , et al.—intercepted three passes, blocked two field goals, dropped Quarterback Bill Nelsen four times and generally made a dark day in Cleveland that much darker for the Browns . By this time the Dolphins were home in Miami , watching on TV, and Unitas gave them a refresher course on what he is all about. On the second Colt possession, following the first of Bubba's blocked field goals, Unitas took his team 93 yards in 17 plays. The drive ate up eight minutes before Nottingham , who gained 92 yards in 23 carries overall, plowed across from the one.

After the first of two Rick Volk interceptions, Nottingham darted seven yards for the second Baltimore touchdown, and two Jim O'Brien field goals wound up the scoring for the Colts .

Curtis had said before the game, "We're just pure team. When it's all over, and if we played well, you're not able to pick out any one man and say he's responsible."

Yepremian aside for the moment, the same could be said for the Dolphins , and on Sunday two pure teams ought to produce pure mayhem. In the past two years they've played four times, and each has won twice. Heck, the game won't be just for the AFC title, it's for the championship of the block.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

Regularly Scheduled Inspiration

It may seem odd to consider inspiration 'regularly scheduled,' but that's one of the practical benefits the web can provide. Here are two sources which deliver plenty of inspiration. They both are free and easy to subscribe to:

1. The Daily Gospel
2. TED - Inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers. I was especially moved by the one by Nicholas Negroponte: Bringing One Laptop per Child to Colombia. The most striking sentence in his talk; There are 1 billion children in the world and 50% do not have electricity at home or at school.

Read more!

Inauguration Journal - Day 2

Anthony Atwood's Inauguration Journal - Day 2

SATURDAY 03-JAN09: 0630. Reveille, reveille. All Hands turn to. We collect in the lobby. Slow motion by some on account of jet lag. All of us in dress blues, standard Navy garb for reporting in, and stressed because of the nature of the mission. The Navy cop knows the streets, we will follow her. Saddle up and mount up. Our lady cop led the way in her jeep. Her license plate reads SPIDER WN. So we followed Spiderwoman through the quiet streets. Day breaking as we crossed the Potomac River into Washington. A cold morning. The city in the dawn is majestic. Stately pillars and monuments and an air of history.

The Washington Navy Yard is on the river, a gaggle of old brick buildings and cobblestones, decorated with ivy, rows of old cannons and anchors, surrounded by a red brick wall. A destroyer, USS Berry, is berthed alongside. The Navy Yard is as old as the city, and the Marine Corps barracks there is “The Oldest Post.” Assembled is the team of 3 officers, 15 Chief Petty Officers, and 70 junior enlisted personnel. We join 50 Regulars and Reservists who have been in place for awhile. A day of check in and briefings and powerpoints. Team is now at strength, 125.

This Navy component is a small part of the AFIC (Armed Forces Inaugural Committee) of over 1,000 Joint Service: Army, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and National Guard. On “I Day” (Inauguration Day), 7,000 more will be on hand.

This is the 56th Presidential Inauguration of the United States in a row, a record for the continuous peaceful transfer of power unmatched in this world. This country, despite its flaws, its sins and its shortcomings, is a remarkable place anyone can be proud of. All of us are alive to the importance of these events, even the dullest is aware this is significant. After we were dismissed we go running around to pick up uniform odds and ends for I-Day.

Back to lodgings to crash. Taps. Taps. Lights out.

Read more!

Cuba Bias Quantified

Over at the Babalu Blog, Henry Gomez does not complain about bias, he quantifies it. Please check out the blog [you will need to scroll down] for the application of the criteria to the various news stories about Cuba.

Here is the actual criteria analyzed:

+10 Points for mentioning that the Castro regime has outlasted 10 U.S. presidential administrations

+10 Points for mentioning Cuba's "healthcare advances"

+10 Points for mentioning Cuba's "educational/literacy advances"

+10 Points for referring to either Raul or Fidel Castro as "president"

+10 Points for mentioning U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro

+10 Points for mentioning U.S. embargo as a possible source for Cuba's disastrous economy.

+10 Points for mentioning Cuba's "doctor diplomacy"

+10 Points for using the word "dictator" in connection with Batista and not in connection with the Castro brothers

BONUS: +10 Points for referring to the U.S. embargo on Cuba as a "blockade".

Now for the negatives.

-10 Points for use of the word "communist"

-10 Points for mention of political prisoners

-10 Points for any mention of possible human rights abuses in Cuba

-10 Points for each mention of the lack a particular freedom (assembly, political speech, movement, etc.)

-10 Points for any favorable mention of Cuban exile community

-10 Points for use of any of the words liberty, freedom or democracy

-10 Points for any reference to firing squads

-10 Points for referring to communist CDRs as neighborhood spy organizations

Read more!

Pero Che, Say It Ain't So-derbergh

The film director of the Ocean's movie series thinks profits are a bad thing. What's next, 'Spielberg denounces move away from realism!' Jeez, no wonder Andy looked upset.

For those interested in seeing the truth about the Cuban regime exposed, let us give thanks to the likes of Mary Anastasia O'Grady, who wrote recently in her regular column about the Americas in the Wall Street Journal:

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh's personal revulsion with profits, the "methodology" that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a "homicidal idea of justice," Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental," Che spoke these words: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine."

The results of Che's utopian agenda aren't much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their "morality" on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba's privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims -- artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience -- would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

Ms O'Grady can be thanked at O'Grady@wsj.com.

Fortunately, she is not alone. Please read Carlos Eire -- an excerpt:

Che has four different sorts of admirers: communists, anti-Americans, the poor, and the affluent. That he should be loved by the first three groups is no mystery: Anti-Americans and communists love Che because he is one of their own. The poor desperately need to believe in some redemption from their misery, even in a messianic figure. But why do the affluent need Saint Che? The answer is as simple as it is awful: because of bigotry.

Let's face it: If Che's affluent admirers really believed in his cause, they would move to Cuba, or become revolutionaries in their own country. But they don't, and that says a lot about them.

Saint Che allows white North Americans and Europeans to apply a horribly unacceptable standard of leadership to Latinos that they would never accept for themselves. Through their idolization, these admirers express their feelings of superiority while they delude themselves into thinking that they are in solidarity with the poor. Affluent Latin Americans who love Che, such as Benicio del Toro, the actor who portrays him and praises him are not racists, of course. But they are "useful idiots," as Lenin liked to say.

Any way you look at it, those who idolize Che are to be pitied or feared.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara--But it makes no films about the Cuban resistance movement

DECEMBER 29, 2008

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film "Che," like Jesus Christ.

"Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn't," Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn't into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it's no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and "Che" is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara's life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba -- the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely -- remains the untold epic of our time.

If Mr. Del Toro's "Christ" comment is foolish, it's nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh's explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when "you make profit the point of everything," the movie director told Politico.com. Che's "dream of a classless society, a society that isn't built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology."

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh's personal revulsion with profits, the "methodology" that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a "homicidal idea of justice," Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental," Che spoke these words: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine."

The results of Che's utopian agenda aren't much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their "morality" on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba's privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims -- artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience -- would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, "with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience."

Among Castro's captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel's deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades -- aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents -- have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White -- wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience -- still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn't silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unmasking Che the Idol

December 22, 2008


National Book Award winner Carlos Eire, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and later the honor of having as my podcast guest, has an op-ed in Spanish in El Diario La Presa, La nostalgia del Che. Here's the article translated into English:


Che the Idol

For those of us who lived through the Cuban Revolution there are two Ches: the real one we knew, and the false idol venerated by millions on earth.

The real Che was a hypocrite who lived very comfortably in a mansion while he preached revolution and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of my fellow countrymen. Some of his victims were my relatives. This Che dismissed human rights as "archaic bourgeois details.” He also herded tens of thousands of Cubans into concentration camps. To top it all off, he didn't really help the poor and oppressed: instead he impoverished everyone, and set himself up as lord of all.

Che the idol is a totally different man: a noble crusader for justice, a sensitive idealist, even a martyr and saint. Ironically, Che the idol generates lots of cash for capitalists who imprint his image on all sorts of merchandise or make films about him.

How did Che the killer become Saint Che?

Because lies are often more attractive than the truth. We human beings have an innate need for heroes, prophets, and saviors, and since genuine ones are in short supply, we eagerly embrace those constructed for us.

Che has four different sorts of admirers: communists, anti-Americans, the poor, and the affluent. That he should be loved by the first three groups is no mystery: Anti-Americans and communists love Che because he is one of their own. The poor desperately need to believe in some redemption from their misery, even in a messianic figure. But why do the affluent need Saint Che? The answer is as simple as it is awful: because of bigotry.

Let's face it: If Che's affluent admirers really believed in his cause, they would move to Cuba, or become revolutionaries in their own country. But they don't, and that says a lot about them.

Saint Che allows white North Americans and Europeans to apply a horribly unacceptable standard of leadership to Latinos that they would never accept for themselves. Through their idolization, these admirers express their feelings of superiority while they delude themselves into thinking that they are in solidarity with the poor. Affluent Latin Americans who love Che, such as Benicio del Toro, the actor who portrays him and praises him are not racists, of course. But they are "useful idiots," as Lenin liked to say.

Any way you look at it, those who idolize Che are to be pitied or feared.

As Paul Berman said a few years ago when another movie sainting Che came out, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time."

Fausta Wertz also blogs at faustasblog.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

La Descarga Deportiva

For a good sports talk show which focuses heavily on local sports, I highly recommend La Descarga Deportiva--weeknights at 6pm on AM radio 670. Frequently the introductory banter between the regular callers and the hosts--Jerry del Castillo and Pepe Campos, El Decano de los Deportes and El Chamby, respectively--are enough to make me laugh. Unfortunately, while bilingual, it's mostly Spanish.

Here's a recent exchange I heard on the program:
Caller: I used to be down on the Marlins owner, Loria. But no more.
Host [Jerry del Castillo]: Glad to hear it.
Caller: I wish him a great 2009.
Host: [Suspiciously] Care to explain the shift?
Caller: I figure if he has a great year, the Marlins will trade him.

Read more!

The Problem with Unions

From a macro-level by Richard Posner:

Current union hostility to immigrant workers is consistent with the unions' former hostility to blacks and women--which is to say, to workers willing to work for a wage below the union wage. And by raising labor costs, unions accelerate the substitution of capital for labor, further depressing the demand for labor and hence average wages. Union workers, in effect, exploit nonunion workers, as well as reducing the overall efficiency of the economy. The United Auto Workers has done its part to place the Detroit auto industry on the road to ruin.

From a micro-level by Pajamas Media:

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to labor relations for assistance. As a twenty-five-year-old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The labor relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can the United Auto Workers Survive? Posner

One of the reasons for the insolvency of the Detroit automakers (General Motors, Chrysler--and Ford, which appears to be insolvent too, despite its denials) is that their workers are paid higher wages, and receive much more generous benefits paid for by their employer, than the workers employed at the automobile plants, mainly in the South, owned by Toyota, Honda, and other foreign manufacturers. The total wage and benefit bill for the Detroit automakers is about $55 per hour, compared to $45 for workers in the foreign-owned plants, and the difference is plausibly ascribed to the fact that the Detroit automakers are unionized and the "foreign transplants" not. (The comparison excludes retiree benefits, a very large cost of the Detroit companies, but not an hourly labor cost.) This difference may seem small, considering that labor is only about 10 percent of the cost of making a car, but many of the workers at the companies that supply parts to the automakers (and the parts represent about 60 percent of the total cost of manufacturing the vehicle) are also represented by the United Auto Workers. Anyway, since the foreign transplants have other competitive advantages over the Detroit automakers, the latter can hardly afford to have even slightly higher labor costs.

When the auto bailout bill was being debated in Congress in November (ultimately it was voted down), Senator Corker said that he would support the bill if it conditioned the bailout on the Detroit automakers' reducing their workers' wages and benefits (to which the union would have to agree) to the level at the foreign-owned plants, as well as conform work rules to the work rules in those plants. The significance of the work rules must not be underestimated. As is common in unionized firms, the United Auto Workers has successfully negotiated not only for wages and benefits for the workers they represent but also for rules governing what tasks the workers can and cannot perform, how many workers must be assigned to a particular task, the order in which workers are to be laid off (usually it is in reverse order of seniority, because older workers tend to be stronger supporters of unionization than younger ones because the latter have better alternative employment prospects and so don't worry as much about job security) in the event of a reduction in demand for the firm's products, methods of discipline, and so forth. These work rules, collectively "featherbedding," make it difficult for a firm to optimize its use of labor, and, like the higher wages and benefits that unions obtain, add to the firm's labor costs relative to those of its nonunion competitors. A December 16 blog by Rand Simberg, http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/detroits-downturn-its-the-productivity-stupid/, presents a shocking picture of how work rules impair productivity at automobile plants at which the workers are represented by the United Auto Workers.

The goal of unions is to redistribute wealth from the owners and managers of firms, and from workers willing to work for very low wages, to the unionized workers and the union's officers. Unions do this by organizing (or threatening) strikes that impose costs on employers. For employers are rationally willing to avoid those costs at a cost (provided it is smaller) of higher wages and benefits and restrictive work rules. Because the added cost to the employer of a unionized work force is a marginal cost (a cost that varies with the output of the firm), unionization results in reduced output by the unionized firm and, in consequence, benefits nonunionized competitors. Unless those competitors are too few or too small to be able to expand output at a cost no higher than the cost to the unionized firms, unionization will gradually drive the unionized firms out of business.

Unions, in other words, are worker cartels. Workers threaten to withhold their labor unless paid more than a competitive wage (including benefits and work rules), but unless their union is able to organize all the major competitors in a market, the cartel will be eroded by the entry of nonunionized firms, which by virtue of not being unionized will have lower labor costs. The parallel to producer cartels is exact--workers are producers.

We are seeing this process of erosion of labor monopolies at work in the automobile industry. The market share of the Detroit automakers has shrunk steadily relative to that of the foreign "transplants" and with it the number of unionized auto workers--they are fewer by a third or more than they were in 1970. If the Detroit automakers will be forced to liquidate unless they can bring their labor costs down to the level of the foreign transplants, the UAW will be out of business either because the Detroit automakers liquidate or because, as a result of union concessions, the workers will no longer be getting anything in exchange for the dues they pay the union.

I don't think there's much to be said on behalf of unions, at least under current economic conditions. The redistribution of wealth that they bring about is not only fragile, for the reason just suggested, but also capricious, as it is an accident whether conditions in a particular industry are favorable or unfavorable to unionization. By driving up employers' costs, unions cause prices to increase, which harms consumers, who are not on average any better off than unionized workers are. Unions push hard for minimum wage laws and for tariffs, both being devices for reducing competition from workers, here or abroad, willing to work for lower wages. Current union hostility to immigrant workers is of a piece with the unions' former hostility to blacks and women--which is to say, to workers willing to work for a wage below the union wage. And by raising labor costs, unions accelerate the substitution of capital for labor, further depressing the demand for labor and hence average wages. Union workers, in effect, exploit nonunion workers, as well as reducing the overall efficiency of the economy. The United Auto Workers has done its part to place the Detroit auto industry on the road to ruin.

There is also a long history of union corruption (though not in the UAW). And some union activity (though again not that of the UAW) is extortionate: the union and the employer tacitly agree that as long as the employer gives the workers a wage increase slightly above the union dues, the union will leave the employer alone.

There may be, I grant, cases in which unionization reduces an employer's labor costs. If there is deep mutual antipathy between workers and employers, perhaps breaking out in violence--with strikebreakers beating up strikers and strikers beating up scabs and sit-down strikers destroying company property--there may be benefits from interposing an organization independent of the employer between employer and workers, and from creating (as the National Labor Relations Act has done) a civilized mode of resolving labor disputes. But in cases in which union organization is mutually beneficial, the employer will invite the union to organize its workers. I am sure the Detroit automakers would very much like to disinvite the United Auto Workers.

Unions do provide some services that are valuable to employers, such as grievance procedures that check arbitrary actions by supervisory employees; and union-negotiated protection of senior workers can benefit their employer by encouraging them to share their know-how with new workers, without having to fear that by doing so they will be sharing themselves out of a job. But these are measures that an employer who thinks they will reduce his labor costs can take without the presence of a union.

Micky Kaus, another blogger who is an expert on the automobile industry, attributes much of the problem with the UAW to the procedures that govern labor relations in unionized plants. "The problem...is the American adversarial labor-management negotiating system, in which reasonable people doing what the system tells them they should do wind up producing undesirable results. Just as negotiating over work assignments means factories adjust too slowly to generate continuous efficiency improvements (which often involve constantly changing work assignments) negotiating ponderous 3 year contracts (in which Gettelfinger [the UAW's president] must extract every possible concession to please the members who elected him) means contracts adjust too slowly to save the companies from failure if market conditions change...[T[he $14 wage scale for new hires [to which the UAW agreed several years ago] hasn't had an impact because nobody new is being hired by the UAW's employers, who are shrinking, not growing. The obvious alternative to cutting the pay of nonexistent future workers would be to cut the pay of existing current workers--but they are the people the system tells Gettelfinger he needs to please." www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/ (Dec. 26, 2008).

The unions strongly supported the Democrats in the last election and are looking for payback. I do think that there are good economic reasons for keeping the Detroit automakers out of bankruptcy until the current depression hits bottom and a recovery begins--until then the shock to the economy would be too great (see my post of November 16)--and that will keep the UAW alive for a while. But if it resists making substantial concessions to the automakers, hoping that the President and Congress will force the automakers' bondholders to make the necessary concessions or that the taxpayer will be forced to subsidize the automakers indefinitely, the union will be playing a game of chicken that may end in its destruction rather than merely in its continued shrinkage as the industry shrinks. The auto bailout is deeply unpopular with the public and the UAW's stubbornness may reinforce the impression that unions are dinosaurs slouching toward extinction.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detroit’s Downturn: It’s the Productivity, Stupid

There has been a lot of finger-pointing about who has put the American auto industry in a ditch, sending it hat in hand to the taxpayers’ ostensible representatives in Washington. There seems to be a broad consensus that Detroit’s problems were caused by inept and arrogant management, unimaginative car design, poor quality — though this has improved somewhat over the past couple of decades — and overpaid union workers. While there is less agreement on how much to weigh each of these factors, only the latter is attributed to the UAW. There also seems to be some dispute over what their compensation actually is, but most agree that it’s uncompetitive with the foreign transplants, largely in the south, though Honda builds cars in Ohio. Of course, the fact that the non-union companies are in the south has resulted in predictable accusations that southern Republicans are playing politics and trying to destroy the union to the benefit of their home-state companies — ignoring the fact that General Motors has a plant in Tennessee, the home state of the most prominent bailout opponent, Senator Bob Corker.

The UAW is seen to have been the winner of the current round because, while the Senate Republicans held up the Congressional bailout to them (though it should be noted that their votes weren’t necessary to pass it — only to provide political cover to the Democrats, who had sufficient Republican votes to push it through), the White House capitulated and seems on the brink of offering them the money anyway.

But almost all of the discussion, when it comes to UAW culpability, has been on wages. The even larger issue, though, is the elephant in the room that seemingly no one discusses, even when given a political opportunity. For instance, I saw a “debate” on Fox News recently in which the Democrat defending the union said that it was partly management’s fault because of the poor quality of the cars, and the Republican failed to respond. And it’s not like people are unaware of it, at least people familiar with the industry. The issue isn’t wages — though those are a problem — so much as work rules. UAW work rules, which have evolved over the many decades since the passage of the Wagner Act, are the biggest reason that General Motors is uncompetitive with its non-union American counterparts.

What are work rules? They are agreements negotiated in the contract between management and the union covering how the employees are to be classified, how many breaks they get, how much time off they get, who can do which jobs, how discipline is to be enforced, etc. The goal of the rules is not to enhance productivity or production quality. It is to provide opportunities for featherbedding, increase numbers of (overpaid) jobs for union workers, and minimize how much they have to actually work. This is important because it’s at least in theory possible that the industry could be making money even at current wages, if they could be provided with the flexibility to increase worker productivity. When you blame management for the quality and cost problems in the auto industry, first consider stories like this:

As a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.

To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard-earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short-sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long-term sustainability.

The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. …

I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours’ pay. They could easily load one-third more rail cars and still maintain their union-negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should “not be naive.”

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to labor relations for assistance. As a twenty-five-year-old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The labor relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired … that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.

These are anecdotes, but there are too many of them, not just from her, but from many, to be merely anecdotal.

I grew up in Flint and my father was a GM executive. During college, I worked summers on the factory floors of AC Spark Plug and Fisher Body. As an (involuntary) member of the union, I could certainly see the benefits. At the age of twenty, I had one of the best jobs of my life for a few weeks.

Why?

Union rules.

I was in theory responsible for keeping parts flowing through the entire plant. They ran on little slidewalks, like you walk on in airports, far above the floor. There were gates to divert them to the proper lines, and tables where they would congregate and fill when lines were down, like reservoirs with dams. There was a robot that I could command to pull pallets off a rack and replenish the tables. And, as one might imagine, there were lots of things that could go wrong.

A breaker might trip on the robot. A gate might jam, causing the reservoir to fill and the parts line to be depleted, making the workers below unable to complete the assembly of an oil filter. And when these things happened, what was I supposed to do? If a breaker tripped, I was supposed to put in a repair ticket for an electrician. If a gate jammed, I was supposed to put in a ticket for a pipefitter — it may even have been a special subclassification for an assembly-line upper-level pipefitter. If a belt jammed, I was supposed to requisition a machinist, any of whom might be busy on other jobs. Or outside, taking a nap in their van. While waiting for them to arrive, assembly lines, perhaps even the entire plant, would be shut down, costing thousands of dollars a minute with workers sitting around unable to assemble the product.

I was an engineering student who had been tearing down and putting cars back together my whole life. I knew how to turn on a breaker. I knew how to unjam a pneumatic gate. The supervisor and I had an implicit agreement. I would ignore the rules and keep the plant running, and he would let me do whatever I wanted up on the catwalk, by myself. Most of the time I read or studied or even napped, while working sixteen-hour shifts at double time, but keeping one eye on all of the mirrors that showed progress or problems on the parts flow. When something went wrong, I fixed it, instead of putting in the repair ticket. Only once, when I napped a little too long and a line dried up, the supervisor came up and woke me. I still fixed the problem much faster than it would have been fixed had we waited for the skilled tradesman to show up, and he had no problem. As I said, it was a great job and all because of union rules.

But as someone interested in business and free markets, I could also see that this could not go on, when the foreign competition was becoming very appealing. When something can’t go on, eventually it doesn’t. That’s where we are today.

And the rules don’t just affect productivity — they affect quality as well. When you can’t discipline employees for being absent without leave, when you have to bring in unfamiliar workers to fill in for them, when you’re missing half your plant during hunting season — yes, the stories about avoiding buying cars built on Monday or Friday in the fall are true — you can’t expect to put out a quality product, regardless of how well or poorly designed it is. You particularly can’t expect to do so when the union rules put all responsibility for quality and production on management, but give them no authority to manage the workers and provide the workers with no incentive to build a quality product if they lack the personal pride to do so. Volumes have been written about Japanese management style and worker teams and consensus, but even if GM/Ford/Chrysler management had wanted to do so, there was no chance of it with the UAW mindset. And as sometime auto industry (and union) observer Mickey Kaus has pointed out, this was not just an unintended consequence of work rules — it was the goal.

I’m not unsympathetic to the workers. As noted above, I was one. It’s a terrible, mind-numbing job. The reason that I was up in that loft was that I spent the first couple of weeks on the line, where I watched a woman assembling filter after filter, like an automaton, and wondered how she did it for hours. My job was to load the parts on the line from a bin to feed her efforts, and I quickly figured out I could just put the parts on one at a time at the same rate she built it and work continually, but that if I quickly filled it all the way to the back — like the beginning of the checkout roller in a grocery line — I had about forty-five seconds before I had to do it again and could read a couple of pages of a book. The supervisor observed me and shortly after I was promoted upstairs.

Yes, I can understand why they want to get paid a lot to do that kind of work. I wouldn’t do it for less. Right now, I wouldn’t even do it for what they make. But there are a lot of people in this country that do exactly that kind of work or worse, and get paid a lot less — a lot less even than the non-unionized auto workers in the south. And because I didn’t like what I was getting paid for what I was doing, I sought better work and pay, by improving myself and getting an education. Ultimately, while there are some people who may not be capable of that, I suspect that many of them are not as discontented as I would be to perform a repetitious job each day. And because people who could do other, more interesting, more challenging, even more productive things were making so much easy money in the shop, I suspect that over the years both Michigan and the nation has lost a lot of productivity by not providing them with incentives to go out and do them, rather than being a shop rat all their lives.

The auto workers and I grew up in a golden era that it was unrealistic to think could continue. They were so well paid and unproductive, not because the market valued their labor at their wages and their product at its prices, but because they had a foot on the throat of the industry management, thanks to the imposition of the government via the Wagner Act and the NLRB. When each contract came up for renewal, they could single out one company, use the strike funds accumulated from workers at all the companies, and literally threaten to kill it. The next strike, they could do the same to the next one, continually imposing new rules, benefits, and restrictions that strangled the entire industry slowly instead of cleanly killing one company at a time. Remember that too when you blame management for all the problems.

Some have claimed that the only goal of the Republicans was to break the union. Well, if that — or at least breaking the work rules — wasn’t one of the goals, it should be, because there is no saving this industry without doing so in some form. After all, the union played a major role in breaking it. If we could do so, the Wagner Act, a relic of the Depression and New Deal, should be repealed or at least revised as well. Unfortunately, with the party and mindset that passed it over seventy years ago once again in power in Washington, they seem much more likely to dramatically worsen it and spread the infection to the rest of American industry.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!

Inauguration Journal - Day 1

Anthony Atwood's Inauguration Journal - Day 1

This is the three-week journal of my experiences as a Navy Reservist sent to Washington, DC, on temporary active duty in support of the Presidential Inauguration, January 2 through January 23.

Friday morning, January 2nd, sunny and mild. A busy morning. My flight to Washington was at noon and there were many loose ends. Christmas and New Year’s were just over. There were Xmas lights in the bougainvilleas outside. I left them up.

I got to Miami International Airport at mid-morning. The Sky Caps at the curb helped me with my gear. I traveled heavy: a sea bag, garment bag with newly dry cleaned uniforms, a Little Martin traveling guitar slung over my shoulder, and a laptop. The time was favorable; I stopped in for a minute at the Armed Forces Servicemen’s Center off the main concourse. A USO-like lounge for military people passing through. A clean well-lighted place with coffee, Danish and racks to fall out on; it is the labor of love of some great local retired military, and a blessing for the military traveler.

Time and I marched on, passenger screening was smooth. My three seat row of travelers include two ladies; a young nursing student returning to Connecticut. A widow returning to Fairfax. I dozed in the middle seat and when we began out descent into the Washington area said a rosary, counting it off on my fingers. They work as well as beads. When it was complete I opened my eyes just in time to see out the window the Washington’s Monument and the stately buildings of the mall. We landed at National Airport that minute. As soon as we touched down my cell phone went off. It was Mr. Allan McElhiney, an elderly WWII Navy veteran and Ft Lauderdale historian. He told me his pal, retired Colonel Leo Gray, a Tuskegee Airman was going to the Inauguration and would be contacting me. If you don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen were, just click here.

Arriving at Ronald Reagan National Airport: a cold crisp 36 degrees. Sunny. I picked up my rental car. I got to our lodgings in Arlington before nightfall. It is an extended-stay place a bit like a self-service hotel. The Navy contracted a block of rooms. They are two-bedroom apartments, furnished. Wonderful accommodations, practically the best I’ve ever had, and certainly they beat one sandbagged dugout that comes to memory. My roommate is already onboard. He is a Chief Journalist in the Reserve, a photographer’s mate. In normal life he is a teacher also, from Clearwater, FL. Tomorrow morning we are to report in blues to the Washington Navy Yard across the river. I walked around and got a haircut. Others are filtering in to quarters, a dozen are scheduled altogether. A Chief Yeoman from Los Angeles, she also a teacher. A lady Chief Master at Arms (a Navy cop) from Virginia Beach has driven in. We have three vehicles and plan to caravan. Eleven arrive. The others are all Chief Petty Officers (senior Navy non-coms). I am a Chief Warrant Officer (a junior commissioned officer, the only one) so have some nominal responsibility. I pass the word we will meet in the lobby at “O’dark hundred,” 6:30 am, and go from there.

There seemed a bit of hopeful expectancy at the airport and on the streets on the way in, and all of us Navy people are just delighted and amazed to be part of this, and keenly aware of the singular nature of it all. The rooms have cable, we watch a scary movie “I Am Legend.” Deplorable. And so to bed.

Read more!

Book Reading Resolution - 20,000 TLA per Week

TLA - total lateral area of a book.

In a recent WSJ article, Karl Rove disclosed that President Bush had read 95 books in 2006, 51 books in 2007 and 40 books in 2008. I was amazed by the discipline which those numbers reveal.

This is not meant as a partisan defense of Bush, i.e. maybe he's not as dumb as you think. While I think intelligent people can look at Bush and see a failed presidency, those who look at him and see an actual idiot, low IQ, are just an example of people who allow their partisan views to affect their judgment.

Getting back to the reading. That type of commitment to reading can be inspirational. Whatever one may think of the person who holds that office, it is difficult to justify that our own lives and jobs are busier than that of the Presidency. Along those same lines, one of my partially read/listened to books from last year was The Reagan Diaries, revealed a similar type of discipline in keeping a diary throughout his White House tenure which greatly impressed historian Douglas Brinkley.

The article includes another interesting idea, measuring the reading by the book's 'Total Lateral Area' [TLA]. That makes a lot of sense. While the number of words is the best standard, rarely is that an easily available figure. Whenever I've considered making a book a week commitment in the past, I've always figured I'd weasel-out with some Oprah-lite nonsense just to make my numbers at some point, i.e. week 2. TLA seems like a good way to avoid that type of skewing which smaller books encourage--we're all about incentives here at 2TG.

Let's use 2 books I read this year as an example:

1776 by David McCullough
11.0" tall
X 6.5" wide
X 1.0 text size - 1.0 for standard 11 pt font found in most hardcover books.
X 296.0 reading pages - meant to exclude footnotes and index
---------------
TLA = 20,807
===============

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
8.25" tall
X 6.5" wide
X 1.0 text size
X 270.0 reading pages
---------------
TLA = 12,251
===============

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bush Is a Book Lover - A glimpse of what the president has been reading

DECEMBER 26, 2008

By KARL ROVE

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can't catch up. And for the third year in a row, I'll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It's about books.

It all started on New Year's Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year's resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who'd gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, "I'm on my second. Where are you?" Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." The president jumped to a slim early lead and remained ahead until March, when I moved decisively in front. The competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book's pages -- its "Total Lateral Area."

Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.

We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction's unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.

At year's end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he'd lost because he'd been busy as Leader of the Free World.

Mr. Bush's 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900," James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," and Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower." Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton's "Next," Vince Flynn's "Executive Power," Stephen Hunter's "Point of Impact," and Albert Camus's "The Stranger," among others.
About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.

Fifty-eight of the books he read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports.

To my surprise, the president demanded a rematch in 2007. Though the overall pace slowed, he once more came in second in our two-man race, reading 51 books to my 76. His list was particularly wide-ranging that year, from history ("The Great Upheaval" and "Khrushchev's Cold War"), biographical (Dean Acheson and Andrew Mellon), and current affairs (including "Rogue Regime" and "The Shia Revival"). He read one book meant for young adults, his daughter Jenna's excellent "Ana's Story."

A glutton for punishment, Mr. Bush insisted on another rematch in 2008. But it will be a three-peat for me: as of today, his total is 40 volumes to my 64. His reading this year included a heavy dose of history -- including David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," Rick Atkinson's "Day of Battle," Hugh Thomas's "Spanish Civil War," Stephen W. Sears's "Gettysburg" and David King's "Vienna 1814." There's also plenty of biography -- including U.S. Grant's "Personal Memoirs"; Jon Meacham's "American Lion"; James M. McPherson's "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" and Jacobo Timerman's "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number."

Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.

The reading competition reveals Mr. Bush's focus on goals. It's not about winning. A good-natured competition helps keep him centered and makes possible a clear mind and a high level of energy. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he's curious. He reads about the tasks at hand, often picking volumes because of the relevance to his challenges. And he's right: I've won because he has a real job with enormous responsibilities.

In the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader.

There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one. Like so many caricatures of the past eight years, this one is not only wrong, but also the opposite of the truth and evidence that bitterness can devour a small-minded critic. Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them, and is intellectually engaged by them.

For two terms in the White House, Mr. Bush has been in the arena, keeping America safe and facing down enormous challenges, all the while acting with dignity. And when on Jan. 20 he flies from Washington to Texas one last time, he will do so as he arrived -- with friends and a book nearby.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more!