Alice Goldfarb Marquis, 79

(photo from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer/PBS)

Alice Goldfarb Marquis died while I was out of town and offline.

Alice had been a good friend to me over the years, ever since we met in the midst of the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s. She literally wrote the book on that subject: Art Lessons:Learning From the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding. Since then, she allowed me to publish her writings, including a serialization of her novel Brushstrokes and an essay on Marcel Duchamp in The Idler, a Web Periodical, and reprint essays on this blog. She visited while I taught in Moscow, speaking to students of "culturology" and "museology" at the Russian State Humanitarian University and to a general audience at the American Center. I particularly remember her taking me around the Frick museum in New York and to the Duchamp exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, seeing her collection of French political cartoons at the University of California, San Diego library, and generally enjoying her conversation, encouragement, and inspirational example. She was interested in new cultural developments. For example, Alice spoke at a panel about then-new Weblogs at the National Press Club that I organized in 2002, paying her own way to participate in a discussion of the medium with bloggers and journalists. She once explained that she didn't need government support, noting "I gave myself a grant" to write books. Alice had an independent spirit, a real curiosity, and encouraged the same. She had the intellectual discipline to write a number of significant books about art and culture that explained the museum world in an in-depth biography of Museum of Modern Art founder Alfred Barr that was banned from the New York's museum bookshop; the art market in The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics; government arts policy in Art Lessons, and the role of the critic Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg--contributions to our understanding of the structural, historical and personal dynamics underlying the development of American culture. A list of her writings may be found at AliceMarquis.com

Here's a link to her obituary in the San Diego Union Tribune. Disappointingly, I haven't seen anything in the NY Times yet, even though Alice had contributed op-ed columns to the paper, her books were covered in the book review section, and she wrote about the New York art world...so I thought this autobiographical essay from AliceMarquis.com might give a sense of her personality to readers. :

The question -- who makes taste in art -- has fascinated me since the 1970s and has resulted in most of my books. As a historian with – Yikes! -- thirty years' experience after a twenty-year career as a journalist, I like to delve into archives and papers, the rich, raw data beloved by historians, but I also love to interview people, coming face to face with the journalist's primary sources. The historian wants to find patterns and interpret events, while the journalist wants to tease out fresh information and vivid personalities. As a writer, the historian strives for accuracy, while the journalist yearns to hook the reader into an intriguing narrative. Pursuing these two closely related disciplines has been the great, central challenge of producing all my books.

I first became interested in the art-money nexus while researching my doctoral thesis, a biography of the artist Marcel Duchamp. A New York gallery was exhibiting some of Duchamp's "ready-mades," a snow-shovel, a urinal, a bicycle wheel, and other machine-made objects which the artist had simply selected and signed. These mundane items, immaculately polished, rested on elegant pedestals, even though they were not the originals but replicas crafted in Italy after Duchamp's death. And each one cost $25,000! Why?

The question reverberated in my head as I stood in the crystalline fall sunlight on Madison Avenue that November afternoon in 1976. It has lurked in the background of all the books that followed, which you can read about elsewhere on this web site.

A second question echoing through all these works concerns the extraordinary mingling of High Art and popular culture unique to the United States. How paradoxical it is that our fine arts emphasize European origins and connections, while our low arts captivate huge populations around the world. How ironic it is that the art forms native to this country -- particularly films, comics, and jazz -- spent so many years on the cultural margin, vilified as “kitsch,” not worthy of serious study.

Perhaps this dichotomy fascinates me because my own life began in Europe. I was born in Munich, Germany, and my family barely escaped the Nazis, arriving in New York two days before Christmas in 1938. As an eight-year-old, I was sent to a small class at P.S. 189 in upper Manhattan, where I learned enough English in a few months to enter the third grade. Eventually, I attended Hunter High School, an elite institution which I hated with all my being. Many mornings, I would ride the Fifth Avenue bus past 68th Street, where all the other Hunter students debarked, and continue on down to 42nd Street or to the Village.

Wandering through second-hand bookstores, sitting through classic films in fleabag theaters around Times Square, or sauntering through the Museum of Modern Art struck me as a far more profitable education than learning Latin declensions or dissecting The Mill on the Floss. Two years after graduation (which I did not attend), I was married and aboard a freighter for Europe. We stayed almost two years, as my husband worked at Stars and Stripes and I pursued free-lance writing. We returned to New York with $5 in our pockets and both found jobs at magazines.

Four years later, we achieved the journalist's dream -- a newspaper of our own. Our $5,000 in savings were sunk into a moribund weekly some fifteen miles down the coast from San Francisco and we were spending the early morning hours folding our first edition -- by hand. Its six pages should have been four, the subscriber list was a fiction drawn from the phone book, and the summertime fog somberly swirled as yet another creditor arrived to haul away the office furniture. But long rows of ticky-tack houses were rising in the hillsides around us; supermarkets and shopping centers appeared; and anxious trips to the local Bank of America branch yielded loans to upgrade equipment.

For a writer, the Pacifica Tribune offered an extraordinary opportunity. In five years, I covered earthquakes, murders, political meetings, sports, fires, accidents, shipwrecks, weddings, funerals, and parties. I also wrote advertising copy and letters to delinquent accounts. Between chasing the news there were photos to take, advertisers to charm, presses to run, papers to address, and bundles to haul to the post office.

When the newspaper was sold in 1959, we had a six-figure nest egg for another purchase. But first we traveled. For almost two years, we circled the globe, taking in the Orient, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. We spent eight weeks in India, flew above the Himalayas to Nepal, explored Afghanistan, drove for six weeks through the Soviet Union, and then headed north through Finland to Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost town in Europe. Back in the United States, we combed the Pacific States for another newspaper venture.

In 1961, we landed in the San Diego area, buying three twice-weekly newspapers, the Star-News publications, near the Mexican border. Here, too, tract houses were marching over the chaparral hills to the horizon. Here, too, there was a staff to cover the news -- and to run the press. I wrote more specialized features, but continued to take photos, teetering on a flimsy folding chair for a better angle the night before my son, John, was born. Full-time newspaper work appeared less attractive with a baby on board, so it was time to get some schooling. I enrolled at San Diego State University, majoring in fine art and minoring in history.

In 1966, degree in hand, I began teaching journalism and photography at a local high school. The work was too consuming to accommodate time I wanted to spend with my pre-schooler. After two years of teaching, I returned to San Diego State and in 1970 acquired an M.A. in Art History. The newspapers needed a cultural page, which I began producing every week. Soon, the assortment of book and cultural reviews written under various pseudonyms (including my favorite -- Horace Romanoff) to give the impression of a large staff turned in a more investigative direction. Most memorable was a series exposing the shoddy career of C. Arnholt Smith, an entrepreneur once named "Mr. San Diego of the Century" by the San Diego Union. He eventually was jailed for defrauding investors and depositors in his bank. This series won me the national award as Suburban Journalist of the Year in 1972; a revised version, "The Smith Who Knew Nixon: 'Mr. San Diego' Is in Trouble," was published in The Nation on September 24, 1973.

By then, another great wave of California growth had washed over us and a big newspaper chain proffered a great pot of money to sell out. The partnership which had carried my husband and me to considerable financial success was, however, not a good marriage. In 1972, we were divorced and a hasty re-marriage to Raoul Marquis ended in 1976. During that time, I began working on my Ph. D. in Modern European History at UCSD. I completed that in 1978, fortunate to have as my mentor the distinguished American historian, H. Stuart Hughes.

Since I had already had a career as a journalist and did not desperately need a salary, I decided to pursue my heart's desire -- to eschew teaching and concentrate purely on research and writing. However, I did teach a series of well-attended courses at the UCSD Extension on Makers of Modern Culture, History of 20th Culture, and Hitler and the Nazis.

* * *

As a person saved from the Holocaust by lucky flukes, I have a touch of 'survivor's guilt" and find myself anxious to repay the world -- and especially this country -- for being spared from extinction. Writing the kinds of books I have written and will write -- seems to be the best therapy for confronting these feelings. So far, the results of dealing with this relatively benign obsession are displayed elsewhere on this web site.

* * *

When not chained to the computer, I enjoy following media, films, popular culture, music, theater, and books. For fun, I make three-dimensional glass sculptures, sew unusual garments, invent recipes, and cultivate a garden. I am also a sports devotee: I try to do daily aerobics, love to go boogie-boarding in the Pacific Ocean, and long walks on Madison Avenue.

Travel is another passion. Here are some of the places where I have lived or visited: Munich, Germany, (birth) 1930-38; Paris and Darmstadt, Germany, 1949-51. Visited almost every state in the U. S. Traveled in every country in Western and Eastern Europe except Andorra and Liechtenstein; paid at least one visit to every country in the Western Hemisphere except Central America, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina; at least one visit to every country in Asia except Indonesia, Laos, and Outer Mongolia; at least one visit to every country in the Middle East, except Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, and the Gulf States; several trips to Africa, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt, and South Africa; spent a month traveling through China on my own in September 1985. Siberia resides in my fantasies ...

UPDATE: H-Net published this obituary on July 18, 2009.

On Deadline...

...for turning in my manuscript, so won't be blogging much until it's finished. Please stand by...

Shooting at DC's Holocaust Museum

Heard about this story on WTOP radio in the car a few minutes ago, apparently happened just before 1 pm today...3 reported hurt: 2 shot, gunman and security guard; one bystander wounded by flying glass debris...No details on the gunman yet....streets and National Mall closed nearby.

UPDATE: Washington Post story at this link says:

A law enforcement source identified the gunman as James W. von Brunn, who is known to authorities as a white supremacist.

Sgt. David Schlosser, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, said the security guard and the gunman were the only two persons who were hit by gunshots. Initial reports said at least one other person sustained gunshot wounds.

He said the museum has been "completely secured and evacuated."

2nd UPDATE: Daily Kos has posted an interesting analysis from ThereIsNoSpoon:

Many on the Right have criticized the seemingly incongruous reaction of the media and the Left in general to the Islamist terrorist Arkansas recruiter killings vis-a-vis the Righist terrorist murder of Dr. George Tiller. The disparity of the reaction cannot be denied. It can be easily explained: abortion is an incredibly hot-button issue in America, and terrorist act of killing Dr. Tiller had more profound implications than the terrorist killings in Arkansas: after all, the recruiting station remains open for business, but the closure of Dr. Tiller's clinic is discouraging proof that sometimes, terrorism does work in achieving its ends.

But I will not shy away from either terrorist act. These acts are peas in a pod. They are not separate faces of terrorism, but two sides of the same terrorist coin.

Both Rightist and Islamist terrorist acts are equally evil, and equally newsworthy. Both are the desperate actions actions of individuals who feel falsely oppressed and powerless in a society that is leaving them and their bigoted, violent ideologies in the dust. But are ideologies of victimhood, predicated on the notion that only through violent martyrdom can the world's wrongs be rectified, and the cleansing apocalypse be brought to pass in the service of iron-fisted theocratic rule. Anyone who has read Neiwert's Eliminationists cannot help but be struck by the similarities between the teachings of the far Right, and the equally violent, chiliastic teachings of violent Islamist jihad. Both sides blame liberal "moral decay" and inclusive, multicultural respect for persons regardless of race, religion, gender for their plight. Rightist author Jonah Goldberg completes the circle: his book Liberal Fascism actually blames liberals for 9/11, under the premise that if we were not so friendly to women's right and LGBT equality, that the Islamists would not feel so violently upset with America.

Indeed, the similarities between Rightism and Islamism are striking. Like feuding members of an inter-denominational war, they appear on their surface to reserve their greatest anger for one another. But their real war is against progressive secular society, for which each side retains an enduring, searing shared hatred.

Both are deeply misogynist and anti-abortion, seeing women as objects to be controlled rather than equal citizens in society.

Both are deeply homophobic, killing gays when given the opportunity.

Both are deeply anti-Semitic over the longest course of their history. The temporary alliance of Rightists in the United States with neoconservative, pro-Israel lobbies in the shared interest of anti-Muslim warfare does not negate the long history of virulent anti-Semitism on the Right--an anti-semitism on full display in this morning's shooting.

Both are deeply theocratic, with the abiding belief that true moral order may only be imposed on society through religion allied with governmental power.

Both are deeply authoritarian, convinced of the necessity to levy increasingly harsh penalties for increasingly minor crimes in the name of "law and order."

Both are deeply violent, with a long history of terrorist acts.

Both are deeply opposed to gun control of any kind, feeling that the safest societies are those in which children walk the streets armed to the teeth.

Both advocate deeply aggressive and eliminationist foreign policy.

Both thrive on stoking a perception of continual victimhood by nefarious forces, in a desperate attempt to explain the failures of their own ideologies domestically, and to direct the anger of their most alienated citizens outward to engage in acts of terror.

Both societies, when allowed to rule as they wish, produce massive income inequalities and economic injustice.

The similarities are endless.

The fact is that most of the Western civilized world is slowly but surely leaving behind and moving beyond institutionalized cultures of misogyny, homophobia, theocracy, institutional violence, anti-Semitism, and eliminationism. The arc of history is long, but it does bend toward justice.

Both Rightists and Islamists feel left out of this world, and respond in similarly violent ways, against similarly innocent groups of people. They are mirror images of other, dedicated to the same ultimate anti-progressive goals. They only significantly differ in the names of the holy texts they misappropriate in the service of their aims.

And it is time we viewed them and the terrorist acts they spawn not as separate, distinct evils, but as mere facets of the same anti-progressive, anti-modern movement the world over.

American Trains--Faster in 1920s than Today...

Someone I know sent me Tom Vanderbilt's article in Slate about the decline in American train travel:

There is at least one technology in America, however, that is worse now than it was in the early 20th century: the train.

I have recently been poring over a number of prewar train timetables—not surprisingly, available on eBay. They are fascinating, filled with evocations of that fabled "golden era" of train travel. "You travel with friends on The Milwaukee Road," reads an ad in one, showing an avuncular conductor genially conversing with a jaunty, smartly dressed couple, the man on the verge of lighting a pipe. The brochure for the Montreal Limited, from an era when "de luxe" was still two words, assures travelers that "modern air-conditioning scientifically controls temperature, humidity and purity of air at all seasons."

But the most striking aspect of these antiquated documents is found in the tiny agate columns of arrivals and destinations. It is here that one sees the wheels of progress actually running backward. The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. Going from Brattleboro, Vt., to New York City on the Boston and Maine Railroad's Washingtonian took less than five hours in 1938; today, Amtrak's Vermonter (the only option) takes six hours—if it's on time, which it isn't, nearly 75 percent of the time.

"I don't want to see the fastest train in the world built halfway around the world in Shanghai," President Obama said recently, announcing an $8 billion program for high-speed rail. "I want to see it built right here in the United States of America." There is something undeniably invigorating about envisioning an American version of Spain's AVE, which whisks passengers from Madrid to Barcelona (roughly the distance from Boston to Washington) in two and a half hours at 220 mph and has been thieving market share from the country's airlines.

But Obama's bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration. Consider, for example, the Burlington Zephyr, described by the Saturday Evening Post as "a prodigious, silvery, three-jointed worm, with one stalk eye, a hoofish nose, no visible means of locomotion, seeming either to be speeding on its belly or to be propelled by its own roar," which barreled from Chicago to Denver in 1934 in a little more than 13 hours. (It would take more than 18 today.) An article later that year, by which time the Zephyr had put on the "harness of a regular railroad schedule," quoted a conductor complaining the train was "loafing" along at only 85 mph. But it was not uncommon for the Zephyr or other trains to hit speeds of more than 100 mph in the 1930s. Today's "high-speed" Acela service on Amtrak has an average speed of 87 mph and a rarely hit peak speed of 150 mph. (The engine itself could top 200 mph.)

What happened? I put the question to James McCommons, author of the forthcoming book Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service. As with most historical declines, there is no single culprit but rather a complex set of conditions. One reason is rail capacity. From the Civil War to World War I, the number of rail miles exploded from 35,000 to 216,000, hitting a zenith of 260,000 in 1930 and falling by 2000 to less than 100,000—the same level as in 1881. Capacity dropped because demand dropped—people moved to cars, and freight moved to trucks. Despite a World War II train boom fueled by troop movements and fuel rationing, trains have been on the decline since the late 1920s; as a 1971 New York Times article on the debut of Amtrak noted, "railroads asserted that, as an industry, they did not make a profit on passengers after [the] 1930s. They blamed buses, planes and autos and expensive union contracts that increased wage costs after 1919."

Less rail capacity (and rail quality) has coincided with a dramatic rise in freight traffic in recent years, owing in part to a buoyant economy and in part to trains' improving (and now superior) fuel efficiency to trucks—particularly as diesel fuel prices have risen. Despite recent infrastructure spending, bottlenecks are routine, as passenger trains typically yield to passing freight trains. (The recent economic downturn has cut freight traffic, leading to some chatter on rail Web sites about improved Amtrak performance times; one commenter noted, "#422 was running early the whole way ... so much so we sometimes had to sit and 'kill time' shy of reaching stations [so] as not to block main roads through towns.") Sharing rails with freight has a negative effect on passenger speeds for another reason: The rail systems are designed for slower freight trains. Except for the high-speed Acela in the Northeast (and a lone stretch in Michigan), Amtrak is limited to a top speed of 79 mph because to go above that would require all kinds of upgrades to signals, gates, crossings, and ties, among other things. (This Amtrak investigation of a 13-hour delay earlier this year catalogs the typical problems.) What's more, trains themselves can't run faster than 79 mph without "Positive Train Control," a sensor-based safety system that will be mandatory on all trains by 2015.

Hovering over all of these causal factors is a widespread societal shift that occurred, one that saw the streamliners of the 1930s eclipsed by the glamour of the jet age, as well as the postwar automobile boom and the building of the Interstate Highway System. Passenger trains lost their priority to freight, and there simply wasn't the same cultural imperative for speed and luxury on the trains (a condition rather unintentionally satirized in the schlock 1979 TV series Supertrain—the conveyance in question was atom-powered—whose magnate decried "the pitiful state of rail passenger travel in this country today"). Where the Twentieth Century Limited had once touted its trains as having a "barber, fresh and salt water baths, valet, ladies' maid, manicurist, stock and market reports, telephone at terminal [and] stenographer," Amtrak is now scrambling to simply equip itself with Wi-Fi—a technology already available on the bare-bones Bolt bus.

The Winner of Britain's Election Is...

The UK Independence Party.

Never heard of them?

They're anti-EU.

Anti-immigration.

Libertarian.

Winston Churchill is their mascot.

Just elected 13 British Members of the European Parliament with at "just say No" campaign...

Website here: http://www.ukip.org.

Simulated Driving Better Than Videogame

IMHO, at any rate, because you get a practical takeaway in driving improvement, in addition to a sort of "Death Race 2000" virtual reality experience...

Here's a link to James Mennie's story about my college classmate Dr. Pierro Hirsch's new and improved high-tech computer-simulation for driver's education--based on flight simulators--from the Montreal Gazette.:

The VS500M car simulator is $75,000 worth of hardware that will take you where you want to go without your ever having to leave the room.

A trio of screens provide the driver with a 180-degree view on any number of driving horizons - urban, rural, snow filled or drizzling. A pair of smaller screens duplicate the blind spots that none of the drivers hurtling past on the highway outside seem to check, and the seat, dashboard and steering column tell you that somewhere out there there's a Pontiac Sunfire that's missing some parts.

"Pull onto the side of the highway," Hirsch suggests, as the screen lights up to display a tree-lined stretch of autoroute. "You'll feel the gravel under your tires."

Actually, you feel in it the steering wheel and in the simulator platform, the force feedback part of the ride.

But even if it feels like the real thing, how much of a favour are you doing a driving student by closeting him or her in a controlled environment when, sooner or later, they'll have to steer a course, so to speak, through the real world?

"The reality of this simulator is sufficient for teaching," Hirsch says. "What a difference - I can focus, I'm not looking at the road, I'm looking at (the student's) behaviour and I'm correcting minute behaviour that I would have missed in a car because I couldn't possibly be paying attention to every movement of their hand or their foot."

Virage president Rémi Quimper designed flight simulators for CAE before starting Virage four years ago (the prototype for the VS500M was put together in the basement of his home).

He says that five years ago, he and some fellow engineers at CAE began looking into whether road-level simulations could be produced cost effectively and serve the needs of driving schools.

"By the 1990s, flight simulators, which had been developed at first for their cost effectiveness, were being used because of their effectiveness as teaching tools. ... You could reproduce situations with a flight simulator that you couldn't on an actual aircraft," he said, "And I thought that the same thing would happen in (the driving education) industry, that a better tool was needed to support that learning experience."

Virage has seen its simulators used by research centres examining the effects of sleep deprivation and distraction on driving reflexes, and by rehab centres preparing victims of head injuries for their return to the road (a version of the simulator modified for train truck drivers is also up and running).

There's also a deal in the works to offer specialized training on the simulators to drivers of such emergency vehicles as squad cars and ambulances.

Van Cliburn Winners Announced

The winners have been announced in the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. It's a tie for the gold medal, my favorite pianist made it all the way to share first prize...

JUNE 7, 2009, FORT WORTH, TEXAS--Tonight, the Van Cliburn Foundation announced the winners of the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The announcement, made by Van Cliburn during the Awards Ceremony at the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, was the culmination of seventeen exciting days of extraordinary music making.

The 2009 Cliburn winners are:

Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medalists (tie for first):
Mr. Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan)
Mr. Haochen Zhang, 19 (China)

The First Prize includes the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medal; a cash award of $20,000; international and national concert tours for the three seasons following the competition, coordinated by the Van Cliburn Foundation in conjunction with IMG Artists Europe; a CD recording on the harmonia mundi usa label; performance attire provided by Neiman Marcus; and a contribution toward domestic and international air travel on American Airlines during the three-year tour.

Mr. Tsujii and Mr. Zhang were the two youngest pianists in the 2009 Competition.

The last time that the Cliburn Competition awarded a tie for the gold medal was in 2001, to Stanislav Ioudenitch and Olga Kern.

Final Round for Van Cliburn Piano Competition

Today's the last day of the 2009 Cliburn Piano Competition, and you can watch it online here:

www.cliburn.tv/client.aspx

Here's the press release:

Nobuyuki Tsujii [NOTE: my favorite] takes the stage first on the last day of the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He opens with Beethoven's challenging "Appassionata" Sonata in F minor, Op. 57.

Following that, the youngest player in this competition, Haochen Zhang, who turned nineteen on Wednesday, plays Prokofiev's 2nd Piano Concerto.

The final performer of Cliburn 2009, Di Wu will perform Rachmaninoff's beloved Piano Concerto No. 3.

All six finalists are vying for the gold medal, which guarantees three years of concert bookings around the world. Over 300 U.S. engagements will be shared by the 2009 winners, collectively valued at more than $1,000,000 in performance fees. The six will be professionally managed for the next three years by the Van Cliburn Foundation.

The U.S. recital debut of the 2009 Cliburn gold medalist will be July 23 at the Aspen Music Festival.

The judges will retreat to Bass Performance Hall's Green Room following Ms. Wu's performance to deliberate on the final outcome. You can compare your opinion with the jury's by voting online at www.cliburn.tv.

The Cliburn 2009 winners will be announced at 5:00 p.m. (CDT) during the Awards Ceremony.

You can follow the performances live at www.cliburn.tv and also view archived performances, interviews, and much more.

Who Wrote Obama's Cairo Speech?

According to today's Wall Street Journal, it was 31-year old Benjamin Rhodes.

The speech was drafted by Ben Rhodes, a 31-year-old White House speechwriter who has specialized in foreign affairs, and reflected consultations with several outside experts on Islam and the region. Aides say Mr. Obama rewrote sections of the address. In its rhetorical style and breadth, the speech was reminiscent of Mr. Obama's address on race during the presidential campaign last year.

(Blogger Archbishop Cranmer posts a link to Rhodes pre-speech briefing for the press in Saudi Arabia, here) And who is Ben Rhodes? The Oracle of Google tells us he used to work for Congressman Lee Hamilton on the 9/11 Commission:

About Benjamin Rhodes

Ben Rhodes has been the Special Assistant to President Lee H. Hamilton at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars since June 2002, and is also a freelance speechwriter based in Washington, D.C. He worked closely with President Hamilton through his tenure as Vice-Chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission), focusing particularly on policy recommendations and process matters. He is the author, with Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, of Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, forthcoming from Knopf in August 2006. Previously, he taught and worked in local politics in New York City.

Here's a link to Carol Lee's May 19 profile on Politico.com:

Rhodes fits in well with the Obama team. On the flight home from Europe, Obama led his staff in giving him a round of applause. And when The Economist published the speech Obama delivered in Prague, the president told his personal assistant to make sure Rhodes got an autographed copy of the magazine.

“He really understands the president’s voice,” said Axelrod. “They’ve got a great mind-meld on these issues.”

Part of the reason for that is in a framed photograph Rhodes keeps in his office: There’s Rhodes, McDonough, Obama and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, one of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy figures, in August 2007.

Rhodes had just earned a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when he was offered a job as a writer for Hamilton in 2002. A Manhattan native, Rhodes went on to write the Iraq Study Group Report and help draft policy recommendations for the 9/11 Commission, which Hamilton co-chaired.

Rhodes keeps in regular contact with Hamilton, who said Obama has thanked him “for making Ben available.”

Rhodes said Hamilton still reviews Obama’s major foreign policy addresses.

“We run most of the big foreign policy speeches by him,” he said. “Just kind of like, ‘What do you think of this?’”

Here's a link to what Rhodes himself had to say about 9/11 in a 2007 article found on the Project for a Secure America website:

9/11 has brought with it some new terminology, most notably “war on terror” which has taken a tendency to make war on nouns (prominently, “poverty” and “drugs”), and shifted it to making war on a tactic. Now we have “Islamofascist” - too young to have a dictionary definition, but prominent enough to merit mention by the President (and a wikipedia definition).

Islamofascism represents a bunch of things, including linking the fight against terrorism to the fight against Hitler. The Hitler thing is a little strange, but pretty clearly represents a desire to recall the victory of WWII and to cast those who disagree with tactics in the war on terror as appeasers. Beyond their both being violent and hating Jews, I’m at a bit of a loss on equating a stateless terrorist network to the Third Reich, particularly since there cannot be any clear “victory” - any occupation of Berlin or Japanese surrender - against people who have no capitol or sign no surrender agreements. But that’s a topic for another day…

The more dangerous part, I think, is conflating groups with different aims. What do the Iranian government, Hizbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, and Islanmist movements from Indonesia to Kashmir to Chechnya to London have in common? A lot less than we’re making them out to have in common if we slap a big old “Islamofascist” label on them. They may all be bad, but you don’t approach a nationalist or separatist movement in the same way that you approach an apocalyptic jihadist movement (and certainly not a government). And the argument doesn’t even hold that they are all adherents to the same ideology of radical Islam - one need only look at Iraq to know that Iran’s ayatollahs don’t march in lockstep with Sunni terrorists.

Much more could be said about this, but the bottom line is conflation hasn’t served us that well. Whether it was “al Qaeda and Iraq” or the “axis of evil” - what made for simplifying, rousing, and self-congratulatory rhetoric has translated awkwardly into policy. And this is not just a habit of this Administration or this conflict. You could go back a little farther and find that conflating a Vietnamese nationalist movement with Soviet imperialism was a stretch as well.

Hey, Ben...when I lived in Moscow in 2004-2005, they showed programs on TV about the Soviet role in Vietnam. They still do, including a Russia Today interview with the Soviet army veteran who said he shot down John McCain from December, 2008:

A retired Red Army Lieutenant who fought in Vietnam has confessed to shooting down the plane of defeated presidential candidate, John McCain. Colonel Yuriy Trushechkin told Russia’s Moskovsky Komsomolets he had no regrets about downing the future Senator’s aircraft back in 1967.

Journalists from Russia’s most popular tabloid paper found the veteran in a St Petersburg hospital.

Trushechkin said he still hated John McCain and wasn’t at all sorry for what he had done all those years ago. He added he was very happy that McCain didn’t make to the White House.

“He always hated the Russians. He knew that it was our rocket that downed his plane,” Trushechkin said.

The veteran makes no secret of Soviet involvement in the Vietnam War. He was 28 years old when he came to the Asian country to fight against the U.S. together with local soldiers. He served as an officer in missile guidance for the communist North Vietnamese.

Here's a link to New York City's Collegiate School (class of '96) alumni profile that tells us Rhodes is a graduate of Rice University as well as NYU's fiction writing program...and this item from the Huffington Post makes one wonder...:

As it turns out Fox News and the Obama campaign are bound by blood. David Rhodes, Fox News' senior VP of newsgathering, is the older brother of Ben Rhodes, one of the speechwriters responsible for Obama's orotund oratory.

Cong. Jim Leach to Head National Endowment for the Humanities

Real Clear Arts: Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture has the scoop (ht ArtsJournal):

As I predicted here on May 14, President Obama has nominated former Republican Congressman Jim Leach, of Iowa, as the new chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The announcement was just made by the White House.

It didn't say much more than that. Just a brief quote from the President:

I am confident that with Jim as its head, the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue on its vital mission of supporting the humanities and giving the American public access to the rich resources of our culture. Jim is a valued and dedicated public servant and I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead.

Leach strayed from orthodoxy and endorsed Obama last summer. Since leaving Congress in 2007, he's taught at Princeton University and has been the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He's basically viewed in Washington as a good guy, and -- as I said a few weeks ago -- the only drawback with the choice is that Leach had his eye on bigger jobs, such as ambassador to China or a financial job...

Jacqueline Trescott's Washington Post story here.
Daily Princetonian story here.

Arkansas Army Recruiting Murder Generates Controversy

IMHO, Gary Bauer's call for President Obama to denounce the murder of US Army recruiter William Long in Little Rock, Arkansas might have "curb appeal" with the general public:

WASHINGTON, June 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer on Wednesday called on President Barack Obama to be as diligent in protecting and defending the American military as he is in reaching out to Arab nations. Bauer's statement came on the heels of the murder of Army recruiter William Long who was killed this week by a Muslim convert who said he was targeting military locations among other sites, according to media reports.

The president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families made the following statement:

"Private William Long was murdered in cold blood this week. The 24-year old Army recruiter was mowed down outside the Army recruiting station where he worked by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe. Muhammad wounded another soldier, Private Quinton Ezeagwula. The jihadist had recently returned from Yemen, where he studied under an Islamic scholar who apparently forgot to tell him that his new faith was a 'religion of peace.' Muhammad had been under investigation by the U.S. Federal Task Force on Terrorism. How did he get his weapons and commit these crimes when he was under investigation?

"The sound you heard after this terrorist attack was silence. President Obama, who immediately condemned the murder of abortionist George Tiller on Sunday, still has not - more than 24 hours later - said one public word about the cowardly attack on these soldiers. The U.S. Justice Department, which sent federal marshals yesterday to guard abortion centers, has sent no one to guard our military recruitment offices, even though more than 100 of those offices have been attacked in recent years.

"Big Media, which is doing its best to link the killing of George Tiller to the mainstream pro-life movement, is going out of its way to assert that there is no evidence that Abdulhakim Muhammad had any connection to Muslim groups. The few exceptions where there is coverage only prove the rule. For the mainstream media, this is a non-story.

"The American media are failing to fulfill their responsibility to bring all the facts to the American people, even facts that don't fit the media's worldview. As for the president, he is the commander-in-chief. He is responsible for the wellbeing of our men and women in uniform. His silence in the face of this brutal attack is shameful. I call upon the president to apply as much energy in engaging the world in defense of America and our military men and women as he spends in apologizing for America and in reaching out to those who hate America and wish our destruction. And I also ask that the president give the same protection to our soldiers in recruiting centers as he is now giving to abortion centers."

Van Cliburn Competition Now in Final Round

You can watch it here: http://www.cliburn.tv/client.aspx.

The six finalists are (in alphabetical order):

Mr. Evgeni Bozhanov, 25 (Bulgaria)
Ms. Yeol Eum Son, 23 (South Korea)
Mr. Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan)
Ms. Mariangela Vacatello, 27 (Italy)
Ms. Di Wu, 24 (China)
Mr. Haochen Zhang, 19 (China)

Each pianist will perform two concerti of his/her choice with the acclaimed Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of renowned American conductor James Conlon. Each finalist will also perform a fifty-minute solo recital of works not performed in previous rounds.

The Final Round will be held Wednesday, June 3 through Sunday, June 7, and every concert will feature three artists. There will be one concert on June 3, 4, and 5 beginning at 7:30 p.m., and two concerts on June 6, beginning at 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. On June 7, the final day of the competition, the concert will begin at 1:30 p.m. The Awards Ceremony will follow at 5:00 p.m.

Robert Spencer on Obama's Cairo Speech

In The American Thinker, he suggests this text:

I have offered you America's outstretched hand. In doing so I have followed a path blazed by my predecessors. But that gesture of conciliation has never been reciprocated. And so now, even as my good will is still extended to you, I must act more realistically.

Pakistan and other Muslim countries will not receive another penny of American aid unless and until they demonstrate - in a transparent and inspectable fashion - that they are working against, not abetting, the forces of the global jihad. This will include instituting comprehensive nationwide programs to teach against the jihad doctrine of Islamic supremacism, teaching that Muslims and non-Muslims must live together as equal citizens on an indefinite basis, without any attempts by Muslims to subjugate non-Muslims as inferiors under the rule of Islamic law.

I trust you will understand that we cannot continue to fund the cutting of our own throat.

Afghanistan and Iraq must immediately guarantee the equality of rights of women and non-Muslims, or American arms will no longer devote themselves to keeping regimes in power that do not guarantee those rights.

I will call upon Israel to make no further territorial concessions. The withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 demonstrated only that such concessions whet, rather than sate, the appetites of Islamic jihadists for more concessions. The assumption that territorial concessions will bring peace ignores not only recent history, but also the stated goal of the jihadist movements arrayed against Israel: the destruction of the Jewish state.

That state is an American ally - a more reliable one than any Islamic state has ever been. And we will do whatever is necessary to preserve and defend that ally.

Our hand is outstretched, but we are not unrealistic about the nature of the world. The animus between us is as much, if not more, the result of the doctrines of jihad and Islamic supremacism as it is a result of American policy. I am telling you today that we understand this, and will be acting accordingly. Ultimately a policy based on realism will be much better for both of us than policies based on the fantasies and half-truths that have hitherto prevailed..

Steven A. Cook: US Democracy Aid to Egypt Makes Things Worse

From Newsweek International (ht MESHnet):

Given the intransigence of Mubarak's regime, the United States would receive the best return on its investment if it shifted its Egypt aid back to technical areas like agriculture, pre- and postnatal health and disease prevention—a particularly pressing need in a country with the highest incidence of hepatitis C in the world. Polls have shown that Egyptians hate being lectured to by outsiders, and there is no better way to win hearts and minds than to help ensure the health of babies born in the desperately poor neighborhoods of Cairo. As surveys and focus groups consistently demonstrate, if people in the Arab world want anything from America, it's the kind of technical assistance that makes a tangi-ble difference in their daily lives. And a healthier, wealthier and better-educated Egyptian population is more likely to start demanding personal and political freedoms—the kind of demands that may, someday, actually lead Egypt to democratize and sustain it when it does.

Reducing the emphasis on democracy-promotion programs will also significantly reduce tensions between Washington and Cairo that sharpened under President Bush. For all of its shortcomings, Egypt remains a critically important U.S. ally. Cairo has been very helpful (albeit discreetly) in efforts to fuel and supply U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Obama administration will need Mubarak onboard as it launches a diplomatic effort to forge Palestinian-Israeli peace.

The United States can and should play a constructive role in encouraging change in Egypt and the Middle East. But a lighter touch, and initiatives that actually help people, will serve everyone's interests better than fuzzy preaching about democracy promotion—and programs unlikely to produce much change.

After Air France 447 Tragedy, Remembering TWA 800...

Sincere condolences to the families affected by the tragic disappearance of Air France 447 en route from Rio to Paris. The mystery brings to mind controversy over the mysterious 1996 crash of TWA 800--also heading to Paris, from JFK. The matter was officially closed, but is still the subject of litigation many years later, as one can see from Ray Lahr's website. The NTSB declared it an accident due to faulty wiring in 2000, but Lahr still seems to hold the crash of TWA 800 was due to a missile...and his case, H. Ray Lahr v. National Transportation Safety Board, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency. Dedicated to revealing the truth by making government records available for public review under the Freedom of Information Act, continues to wend its way through US courts. Among other skeptics of the official version was the late Pierre Emil George Salinger, former Press Secretary to President John F. Kennedy.

UPDATE: Today's Le Figaro (France) discusses the possibility of a bomb with an Air France pilot:

INTERVIEW - Contacté par lefigaro.fr, un pilote d'Air France estime qu'une panne électrique générale causée par un foudroiement est peu probable.

Un Airbus A330 de la compagnie Air France qui assurait la liaison Rio de Janeiro- Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle a disparu au dessus de l'Atlantique lundi matin. Il transportait 228 personnes, dont 73 passagers français. Sur lefigaro.fr, un pilote d'Air France qui a souhaité garder l'anonymat évoque l'hypothèse d'un attentat ayant provoqué l'explosion de l'avion.

Air France affirme que l'appareil a connu une panne de circuit électrique. Quelles sont les conséquences d'une telle panne à bord d'un avion ?

Il y a cinq sources d'énergie électrique à bord d'un appareil. Pour qu'il y ait une panne totale, il faudrait que ces cinq sources ne fonctionnent plus. Lorsque tout tombe en panne, une batterie prend de façon transitoire et partielle le relais, ainsi qu'un moteur qu'on utilise généralement au sol. Une sorte d'éolienne est déclenchée pour générer de l'électricité. Pour que le commandant de bord n'ait plus aucune capacité à piloter l'avion, il faudrait que toutes ces sources d'électricité soient endommagées. Ça me paraît difficile.

Un foudroiement, comme évoqué par le ministre en charge des Transports Jean-Louis Borloo, ne pourrait donc selon vous pas provoquer une telle panne générale ?

Je ne dis pas ça, mais je me demande comment on peut savoir qu'il y a eu un foudroiement. Ce que l'on sait, c'est qu'il y a visiblement eu une forte turbulence puis des problèmes électriques. On peut ensuite associer les deux, mais de là à dire qu'un foudroiement est à l'origine de tout cela… Dans l'histoire de l'aviation, on ne connaît pas aujourd'hui de cas de foudroiement qui aboutisse à la perte d'un avion.

Un expert brésilien a émis l'hypothèse d'un amerrissage en plein océan. Cette hypothèse est-elle réaliste ?

Pour que l'avion puisse amerrir, il doit être pilotable. Et pour être pilotable, il faut qu'il y ait un peu d'électricité. Et s'il y a de l'électricité, il y a possibilité d'envoyer un message. Entre le moment où vous planez et celui où vous vous posez sur l'eau, il va s'écouler près d'une demi-heure. Cette possibilité est donc peu probable… En réalité, ce qui est à peu près sûr, c'est qu'on ne saura jamais ce qui s'est réellement passé. L'avion se trouvait au-dessus de l'Atlantique. S'il a explosé en plein vol, il y a des débris dispersés sur dix kilomètres de diamètre…

Vous parlez d'une explosion. Est-ce qu'un attentat aurait pu causer une panne électrique générale ?

Absolument. On peut très bien imaginer qu'une bombe a provoqué une dépressurisation de l'appareil, et que l'avion prenne du temps à se démonter en morceaux. De même, ça peut carrément être une grosse bombe qui a fait exploser tout l'avion, ce qui expliquerait que l'appareil n'a pas eu le temps d'envoyer un signal d'alerte.

Someone anonymous on Craigslist agrees with the French pilot:

AIR FRANCE PLANE BROUGHT DOWN BY BOMB (Financial District)

Reply to:pers-hrkp8-1201217577@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-06-02, 9:26AM EDT


The Air France flight from Brazil to Paris was brought down by a bomb, but authorities are not publicly admitting it yet. Wreckage found in the ocean shows a damage pattern consistent with a bomb blast in the cargo hold.

Friends in intellligence and US DoD have confirmed this, and links to al-Qaeda or a related group are being investigated at this time.

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 1201217577

Amil Imani on Democracy v Liberty

From AmilImani.com:

Unfortunately, there are about one and a half billion people deeply entrenched in many democracies, including the United States, who are enemies of democracy and devotees of Ummahism –the Islamic theocracy, theocracy of the kind that rules in places such as Saudi Arabia – a Sunni version—and Iran – a Shi’a’ version. It is a fact that in Islamic societies liberty is dead. The individual is a vessel of the state and the state is the executor of the suffocating Sharia law.

Less my warning be seen as the unwarranted rants of an alarmist, all one needs is to observe what is already happening in these newly Muslim-invaded lands. Sharia law is already in effect in many places in Europe. Significant numbers of indigenous Europeans are either fleeing to other lands or are so hopeless regarding their way of life that they refrain from having children. Even in the United States and Canada, the bulging Muslim populations are more and more aggressively pressing for adoption of the Sharia law.

Demographic changes in a democracy play a critical role in shaping the society. For example, only a couple of hundred thousand Muslims lived in the U.S. only two decades ago. By 2008, the number has swelled to seven to nine million. Once the numbers are wedded to the deep pockets of the Wahhabi and Shi’a paymaster, the fate of freedom is in serious jeopardy.

Ali Alyami on Obama's Cairo Speech

From FamilySecurityMatters.org:

Autocratic Arab regimes as well as their supporters and financial beneficiaries in the West and elsewhere, argue that free elections in the Arab world would bring religious extremists and anti-democratic elements into power. They use Hezbollah and Hamas as examples of what Arabs would do if they were free to elect their representatives. In reality, extremists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia gained prominence due to the regimes’ oppressive policies, embezzlement of public wealth and politics of nepotism. Most Arabs and Muslims, especially youth, women, businesspeople and religious minorities, loath religious extremism, and the strict implementation of Sharia law in Saudi Arabia in particular. The overwhelming majority of Saudis and Egyptians are not extremist Wahhabis or members of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists.

The success of the President’s visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt will depend on his understanding of the root causes of problems in the Arab world, and his willingness to refute the decades’ old and well rehearsed excuses the Arab regimes have used to manipulate every American president for the last sixty years. President Obama must recognize that the Arab-Israeli conflict has nothing to do with the multitude of problems plaguing Arab societies: oppression of women, poverty, terrorism, religious extremism and intolerance.

Yes, there are anti-American sentiments among many Arabs; however this is mostly caused by U.S. Administrations’ support for Arab despots, rather than America’s support for Israel as Arab regimes and their controlled media want the world to believe.

Many people understand and can appreciate the problems President Obama faces, but few would applaud him for supporting autocratic Arab regimes whose policies and institutions are responsible for problems in the U.S. President Obama can serve his country best by steering its support away from undemocratic regimes and reach out to modern and pro-democracy Arab men and women who are able and willing to propel their societies to a better and safer future. Sixty years of supporting autocratic Arab regimes has only brought extremism, terrorism and 9/11. The choice for President Obama is very clear: continue policies that have failed or put forward a plan that will serve the best interest of the U.S. and its democratic values.

Cliburn Piano Competition Now in Semi-Finals

As Tony the Tiger used to say, "It's g-r-r-r-r-eat!" You can watch online at http://www.cliburn.tv/client.aspx. Or YouTube has a Van Cliburn Channel with highlights. Since I can't listen on my local NPR station or watch on PBS, I sure am glad the Van Cliburn Foundation is webcasting it all...

Michael Holman on Dambisa Moyo

From the Financial Times Arena blog:

Of course aid corrupts. The evidence is there, from Congo to Kenya. And who can doubt that most aid to Africa does not work: a greater percentage of Kenyans today live in poverty than at independence some 45 years ago, despite billions of dollars of foreign assistance.

But the consequences of aid are more insidious and more damaging than the pro-aid lobby realises. It undermines the expectations of citizens, and erodes the management capacity of the state. And it destroys the social contract that is at the heart of governance. In return for citizens’ loyalty, expressed in the form of paying tax and defending the state when called on, the citizen expects the provision of basic services: roads, water, clinics and schools.

It is precisely these areas in which foreign non government organisations are most active. If you want a road re-graded, books for your school, drugs for the clinic, or a well for water, you lobby an NGO, for it is more likely to deliver.

The result: the responsibility of the state is diminished, its management capacity ossifies and withers … and the social contract is eroded to the point of collapse. And every year some 100,000 foreign “experts” flock to Africa to administer a system that fails the very people it is supposed to help; and every year some 60,000 of Africa’s best and brightest officially emigrate.

Aid to Africa: not only mad and bad, but dangerous to receive!

Michael Holman is a former Africa editor of the FT

Catholic League Chief Rooting for Sotomayor Confirmation

Writes Stephen Waldman on Beliefnet.org (ht Huffington Post). He quotes this email from Bill Donahue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights:

"I like the fact that she is not brandishing her religion. I do not want Catholic judges to rule as Catholics but as judges. I am all for Catholic legislators having a Catholic-informed opinion, but a judge has a different charge. Unless something pops that we don't know about, I am not going to oppose her. Indeed, the experiences I had working with the Puerto Rican community lead me to quietly root for her."

IMHO, that's as good as a blessing from the Cardinal...

UPDATE: Another endorsement from Donahue, in The Washington Times:

"If the Republicans are smart, they would not fight this one," he told The Washington Times in an interview...

..."I am looking at this pool of likely competitors, and, far and away, Sotomayor is the best candidate," he said.

According to Donohue's column on the Catholic League website, it may be that he supports Sotomayor because she is Catholic:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments today on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court:

When John Roberts was nominated to be on the high court, Senator Dick Durbin told CNN that he considered it fair game to probe Roberts about his Catholicism. Durbin released a glowing statement yesterday on Sotomayor that never mentioned her religion. When Roberts was questioned by Senator Arlen Specter and Senator Dianne Feinstein, they both asked him whether he agreed with President John F. Kennedy about separation of church and state. Neither even mentioned Sotomayor’s religion in their respective statements yesterday.

When Roberts was nominated, Dahlia Lithwick, legal analyst for Slate, said, “I wouldn’t underestimate the influence of his religion”; when Samuel Alito was nominated, Lithwick said that “People are very, very much talking about the fact that Alito would be the fifth Catholic on the Supreme Court if confirmed.” Yesterday, Lithwick posted a lengthy piece on Sotomayor that never mentioned her religion. When Roberts was nominated, NPR’s Nina Totenberg said that his wife was “a high officer of a pro-life organization. He’s got adopted children. I mean, he’s a conservative Catholic.” Yesterday, she simply mentioned that Sotomayor attended Catholic schools without ever raising it as an issue. When Roberts was nominated, journalist Adele Stan noted his religion and said, “Rome must be smiling.” Yesterday, in her positive assessment of Sotomayor, she never mentioned her religion.

What’s going on? Are liberal Catholics Catholic? Obviously not, at least according to liberals. After all, if Sotomayor were known as a practicing Catholic, those who fretted over Roberts and Alito would have called 911 by now. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, however, put their worst fears to rest yesterday when he said of the Puerto Rican jurist, “I believe she was raised Catholic.” If this is true, then the telling verb “raised” would explain why liberals like Sotomayor—she’s one of those Catholics they can trust. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

Why I Like the Internet...

Blogger John Lester found a post written by yours truly four years ago about a tour of Mosfilm movie studios, and linked to it on his Russian-themed blog just a few days ago...so I discovered that Mosfilm has setup a very nice website, in English, in the meantime. Still no individual Universal Studios-style tours available, yet...

My Post on President Obama's Open Government Dialog

From the National Academy of Public Administration's Open Government Dialog (ht FOIABlog):

To Make FOIA Work, Costs of Non-Disclosure Must Be Greater than Benefits
lajarvik a few seconds ago

Charge agencies daily substantial penalties for each day past statutory deadlines on FOIA request, this may be done by executive order, I believe. Charges should come from overall budget of agency, not FOIA department. Failure to answer FOIA requests by government officials should also be punished by individual reprimands and other administrative sanctions. These guidelines could be worked out by OPM across all agencies to be fair and reasonable--and to provide reasonable incentives for agencies to disclose whenever possible (rather than deny access, now the CYA default).

Why Is This Idea Important?

Right now, the only penalty in a FOIA case for non-compliance is the award of legal fees to the requester...the lawyer's time is worth money under statue, the agency's time is worth money (reasonable fees may be charged for search and copies), yet the requester's time is not worth money. But information, especially time-sensitive information, has value--and often the requester has a time value for the information. Information in 20 days may be worth more than information in 2 years, especially regarding matters of public interest that affect policy. If information may only be revealed after the issue is moot, especially in controversial matters, what was the point of FOIA in the first place? Any official doing a cost/benefit analysis right now must calculate that the risk of disclosure outweighs the risk of denial. That calculus must change for FOIA to become more effective.

Washington Post: A Granddaughter Returns to Her Lost Shanghai Home

Maureen Fan's memoir, in today's Washington Post style section makes for interesting reading:

I come from a family of architects, and so the buildings matter to us. My grandfather was one of the most prominent architects in Shanghai, and designed the Nanking Theater, now the Shanghai Concert Hall; the Rialto, Astor and Majestic movie theaters; the YMCA building on Xizhang Road South; numerous university buildings and private residences; and the Railway and Health ministries in the southern city of Nanjing. But the buildings that drew me most were the ones my family once lived in.

In particular, I kept returning to the house at 1292 Huaihai Rd., the last house my grandfather Robert Fan (or Fan Wenzhao) owned before he left China in 1949, just as the Communists took power. He and my grandmother lived here with their four children, including my father, and a handful of servants.

I first visited this house in 1986, just after college, and again in 2002. I stand before it now, trying to read the history of my family in its sprawl.

My father and mother are also architects, retired from their San Francisco practice since the 1990s. I'm a journalist, raised in suburbia with only an academic understanding of China until I came back in 2005 to study Mandarin and work as a correspondent for The Washington Post.

Fifty years after he left, my father came back to the house he lived in on Huaihai Road, but he refused to go inside. He stood on the sidewalk staring at the house, his eyes red. He didn't want to change the meaning it held from his childhood.

You can also watch a video:

Washington Times: How to Deal with North Korea

From today's Washington Times editorial:

American policymakers would be wise to remember U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, passed a week after the 2006 nuclear test. The resolution strongly condemned the North Korean nuclear test and imposed extraordinary financial sanctions. It called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear programs and authorized member states, including the United States, to intercept ships bound for North Korea to inspect them for nuclear components.

The United States also can take action under the 2006 North Korea Nonproliferation Act, which authorizes punishing foreigners trading in nuclear and missile technology with North Korea.

So far, the United States and other countries have failed to press North Korea to the limit of these U.N. measures, preferring diplomacy over action. This has only served as a means for North Korea to pursue its nuclear ambitions while the West mouths empty words.

This issue is not limited to the Korean peninsula. North Korea has emerged as the world's leading nuclear proliferator state. The "axis of evil" is alive and well despite the loss of Iraq as one of its charter members. North Korea and Iran have had a long-standing cooperative relationship in nuclear and missile technology.

As is well known in the intelligence community, Iranian technicians were present during North Korea's 2006 nuclear test. North Korean nuclear specialists were covertly videotaped at the secret Syrian nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in September 2007. The reactor reportedly was underwritten by Iran as a means of carrying out nuclear-weapons development outside the country, thus evading the United Nations and other inspection regimes. Iranian missile experts were in North Korea helping prepare for the April 2009 missile launch, and according to Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper, they brought a letter for Kim Jong-il from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserting the importance of mutual cooperation on missile programs, euphemistically referred to as "space technology."

Iran seems to be using North Korea as a platform for nuclear-weapons research and development, keeping away from prying eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Israel's reach. Recent reports of nuclear cooperation between Iran and Venezuela raise the specter of the evil axis extending into the Western Hemisphere.

North Korea has demonstrated a dogged immunity to sanctions. It already is one of the poorest countries in the world, and there are few remaining economic levers at the world's disposal. The communist leadership is willing to pay any price, bear any burden to become a nuclear power, regardless of the cost to its economy or the suffering of its people.

If the six-party talks are to mean anything, China must become more active by restricting fuel and electricity exports to North Korea and ending economic support.

President Obama should order the U.S. Navy, acting under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, to inspect all shipping in and out of North Korea. Measures also should be taken to inspect all aircraft and ground transport. If more resolute action is not taken, North Korea will hold a knife to the throat of the world - forever blustering demands into its frightened ear.

Bronxite Nominated to Supreme Court

No Bronx cheers, this time! According to the Huffington Post,Judge Sonia Sotomayor grew up in the South Bronx. My aunt Lucy lived on Southern Boulevard for 50 years, and we used to visit her there, until she moved to Co-Op City, also in the Bronx . My father worked at Albert Einstein Medical School next to Jacobi Hospital in the Northeast Bronx. We lived in the West Bronx, in Riverdale, during most of my childhood. Although I was born in Manhattan, I was raised in the Bronx, attending classes at P.S. 24 & J.H.S. 141. I can say that while Manhattanites may be more sophisticated and Brooklynites tougher, Bronxites have a special quality not found elsewhere--they are from the Bronx!

You find a list of famous Bronxites on the New York Public Library website, here (it includes people born or who lived in the Bronx). One of my favorite authors is on the list:

Wouk, Herman: grew up in Hunts Point in the 1930s and 40s. His service in the Navy in World War II provided some basis for his great novel, "The Caine Mutiny," and for the later "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance." His experiences in The Bronx, however, provided memorable scenes in two other novels, "City Boy," and "Inside Outside." With a great productive output, Herman Wouk is considered a major American novelist today.

Now, Bronxite Sonia Sotomayor has been nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States--another good sign from the Obama administration.

The NY Daily News has more on the Bronx angle, here.

Dambisa Moyo: How Jeffrey Sachs Keeps Africa Down

In today's Huffington Post, Dambisa Moyo obliquely accuses Jeffrey Sachs of racism in his approach to African aid:

We also know that there is no country -- anywhere in the world -- that has meaningfully reduced poverty and spurred significant and sustainable levels of economic growth by relying on aid. If anything, history has shown us that by encouraging corruption, creating dependency, fueling inflation, creating debt burdens and disenfranchising Africans (to name a few), an aid-based strategy hurts more that it helps.

It is true that interventions such as the Marshall plan in Europe and the Green Revolution in India played vital roles in economic (re)construction. However, the key and (often ignored) difference between such aid interventions and those plaguing Africa today is that the former were short, sharp and finite, whereas the latter are open-ended commitments with no end in sight. The problem with an open-ended system is, of course, that African governments have no incentive to look for other, better, ways of financing their development.

Mr Sachs knows this; how do I know? He taught me while I was studying at Harvard, during which he propounded the view that the path to long-term development would only be achieved through private sector involvement and free market solutions.

Perhaps what I had not gleaned at that time was that Mr. Sachs' development approach was made for countries such as Russia, Poland and Bolivia, whereas the aid- dependency approach, with no accompanying job creation, was reserved for Africa.

Mr. Sachs chooses to ignore that relying on aid at a time when the United States is facing 10 percent unemployment rate and Germany (another leading donor) could contract by as much as 6 percent, is a fool hardy strategy. The aid interventions that Mr. Sachs lauds as evidence of success are merely band aid solutions that do nothing to lift Africa out of the mire -- leaving the continent alive but half drowning, still unable to climb out on its own.

Yes an aid-funded scholarship will send a girl to school, but we ought not to delude ourselves that such largesse will make her country grow at the requisite growth rates to meaningfully put a dent in poverty. No surprise, then, that Africa is on the whole worse off today than it was 40 years ago. For example in the 1970's less that 10 percent of Africa's population lived in dire poverty -- today over 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than US$2 a day.

There is a more fundamental point -- what kind of African society are we building when virtually all public goods -- education, healthcare, infrastructure and even security -- are paid for by Western taxpayers? Under the all encompassing aid system too many places in Africa continue to flounder under inept, corrupt and despotic regimes, who spend their time courting and catering to the demands of the army of aid organizations.

Like everywhere else, Africans have the political leadership that we have paid for. Thanks to aid, a distressing number of African leaders care little about what their citizens want or need -- after all it's the reverse of the Boston tea-party -- no representation without taxation.

Some Thoughts On Memorial Day...

From Wikipedia:

Memorial Day formerly was observed on May 30. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) advocate returning to this fixed date,... The VFW stated in a 2002 Memorial Day Address:

“Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed a lot to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.[3]”

Since 1987, Hawaii's Senator Daniel Inouye, a World War II veteran, has repeatedly introduced measures to return Memorial Day to its traditional date.

New NASA Chief Vietnam and Four-Time Space Shuttle Vet

The BBC reports that Charles Bolden is both a war hero--Naval aviator, Annapolis graduate, trained in Pensacola--and an astronaut...in addition to being the first African-American nominated to head the troubled US space program. Another good sign from the Obama administration. Here's what the BBC had to say:

Maj-Gen Bolden grew up in segregated South Carolina and flew on more than 100 combat sorties in Vietnam. He joined Nasa in 1980 and is a veteran of four space shuttle flights, commanding the mission that launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in 1990.

He inherits the space agency at a critical time in its history. In 2004, President George W Bush instigated ambitious plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020, necessitating the replacement of the shuttle by a new space vehicle. However, the new Ares-Orion vehicle is not expected to be ready until 2015. So for five years after the shuttle's retirement in 2010, American astronauts will be dependent on Russia to fly them into orbit on their space capsule, Soyuz.

In addition, some of Nasa's biggest science programmes are over-budget. This month, the White House ordered a sweeping review of Nasa's manned spaceflight strategy.

Official NASA biography here:http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/bolden-cf.html

Van Cliburn Competition Blog

The Ft. Worth, Texas piano competition is underway, and being covered by it's own blog, here: http://www.cliburn.org/blog/ There's also a live video webcast available, here: http://dev.cliburn.tv/client.aspx. Plus a YouTube Channel, here: http://www.youtube.com/vancliburnfoundation.

Huffington Post: Intellectuals Protest Incoming UNESCO Chief

The intellectuals are Bernard Henri-Levy, Claude Lanzmann, and Elie Wiesel, according to the Huffington Post, which published their manifesto opposing UNESCO's selection of Egyptian abstract painter and culture minister Farouk Hosny today:

Who declared in April 2001: "Israel has never contributed to Civilization in any era, for it has only ever appropriated the contributions of others" -- and added almost two months later: "the Israeli culture is an inhumane culture; it is an aggressive, racist, pretentious culture based on one simple principle: steal what does not belong to in order to then claim its appropriation"?

Who explained in 1997, and has repeated it since in every way possible, that he was the "archenemy" of all attempts to normalize his country's relations with Israel?

Or who, as recently as 2008, responded to a deputy of the Egyptian parliament who was alarmed that Israeli books could be introduced into the Alexandria Library: "Burn these books; if there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you"?

Who said in 2001 in the newspaper Ruz-al-Yusuf that Israel was "aided" in its dark intrigues by "the infiltration of Jews into the international media" and by their diabolical ability to "spread lies"?

To whom do we owe these insane declarations, this anthology of hate and error, and this frenzy of conspiracy theories?

To Farouk Hosny, the Egyptian Minister of Culture for the past fifteen years and undoubtedly the next Director General of UNESCO if nothing is done before the May 30 deadline for nominating candidates to stop his apparently unstoppable march to one of the most important posts of cultural responsibility on the planet.

Even worse: the words that we just cited are only a few -- and not even the most nauseating -- of the innumerable declarations of the same tenor that punctuate the career of Mr. Farouk Hosny over the past fifteen years and that, consequently, precede him as he aspires, even today, to a role on a worldwide scale.

The evidence is there: Mr. Farouk Hosny is not worthy of this role; Mr. Farouk Hosny is the opposite of a man of peace, dialogue, and culture; Mr. Farouk Hosny is a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds. There is only little, very little time left to avoid committing the major mistake of elevating Mr. Farouk Hosny above others to this eminent post.

We thus call on the international community to spare itself the shame that would be the designation, already all but claimed by the candidate himself, of Mr. Farouk Hosny to the post of Director General of UNESCO.

We invite all countries dedicated to liberty and culture to take the initiatives necessary to avert this threat and avoid the disaster that would be his nomination.

We invite the Egyptian President himself, in remembrance of his compatriot Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who must be spinning in his grave right now -- we invite him, for the honor of his country and as an heir of his great civilization, to become aware of the situation, and, with all urgency, to disown his minister and withdraw his candidacy.

UNESCO has certainly made other mistakes in the past -- but this particular abuse of authority would be so great, so abominable, so incomprehensible. It would be an obvious provocation so transparently contrary to the proclaimed ideals of the UN that UNESCO would not recover.

There is not a minute to lose in order to prevent the irreparable.

We must, without delay, appeal to everyone's conscience to keep UNESCO from falling into the hands of a man who, when he hears the word "culture," responds with a book burning.

Claude Lanzmann
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Elie Wiesel


Translated from the French by Sara Phenix.

Wall Street Journal on Sri Lanka's Victory Over Tamil Tigers

I never understood why the US and the so-called "international community" insisted that Tsunami aid be funneled to the Tamil Tigers, thus reviving a moribund terrorist movement a few years back. We visited Colombo in 2003 and saw the roadblocks, heard of the 60,000 dead in the civil war, visited the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy where terrorists had machine-gunned worshippers. The Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing, were trained by the PLO and supported by the USSR, and for a while by India (there is already a Tamil state in India). When the Soviet Union collapsed, it looked like the end...but instead so-called "humanitarian" NGOs and Western governments rushed to their support in the wake of the Tsunami... and prolonged a horrible civil war until its end (we hope) a few days ago by a decisive and crushing military attack.

Strangely, even the Wall Street Journal doesn't seem to understand that the West is partly responsible for the problem, that ongoing negotiations with the Tamil Tigers just made matters worse. Crushing them--and backing the Sri Lankan government--should have been PLAN A, not PLAN B, IMHO. Nevertheless, the paper has the only halfway reasonable commentary that I've read to date, so here's an excerpt from today's editorial:

How Sri Lanka got here is worth recounting. The island's conflict started in 1983. After Sri Lanka's independence from Britain, the ethnic Sinhalese majority pursued many discriminatory policies against the Tamil minority: a Sinhala-only language policy, preferences for Sinhalese in university admissions and government hiring, and the exclusion of Tamils from the police.

The war quickly became more about Prabhakaran's determination to form an independent Tamil state under the exclusive control of his Marxist Tigers than about those Tamil grievances. The Tigers killed many moderate Tamil politicians who would have been willing to cooperate politically with Colombo.

Prabhakaran made extensive use of suicide bombers -- including a teenage girl who blew herself up to assassinate former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 -- and relied heavily on child soldiers. Sri Lanka's conflict has claimed 70,000 lives by most counts. It should have been clear early on that government negotiation would go nowhere with such a committed killer.

Mr. Rajapaksa, elected in 2005, put an end to the "peace process" with Prabhakaran and focused on winning the military fight. In 2007, with the help of a Tiger splinter group, the government subdued the Eastern Province; the first elections were held there last year. The fighting then moved to the North. It has not been cheap or easy. Military spending in the 2009 budget is $1.7 billion, 5% of GDP and 20% of the government's budget.

Colombo also learned lessons from its earlier failures. The military improved its training in counterinsurgency tactics, and Colombo invested the resources to enable the army to hold territory it won. Moves by the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries to freeze Tiger fundraising among the Tamil diaspora helped weaken the Tigers. Mr. Rajapaksa wisely ignored international calls for a ceasefire as he got closer to victory, including threats from the Obama Administration to block $1.9 billion in International Monetary Fund aid money.

The government now faces a potential humanitarian crisis in housing, feeding and clothing the more than 200,000 Tamil civilians who have fled the fighting. Sri Lanka has to more fully address the political grievances of moderate Tamils and ensure that there are economic opportunities for all Sri Lankans. After decades of socialism, several rounds of liberalization have since paved the way for 6% to 8% annual growth even amid a civil war.

As Colombo starts to grapple with those post-conflict problems, everyone else can take note: Thanks to a strategy of defeating the insurgency, Sri Lanka is now in a position to talk seriously about peace and economic growth. When negotiating with terrorists doesn't work, Plan B is defeating them.

More on Sri Lanka from the BBC website, which describes how Western aid to Tamil Tigers has affected "hearts and minds" of the Sinhalese:

Beijing has provided huge stocks of weapons to Sri Lanka in the last few years, at the same time as it has been building a new deep water port on the island's southern coast.

It has not gone unnoticed that China's oil supplies from the Middle East pass through the waters of the Indian Ocean, along the sea lanes just south of Colombo.

Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict has lasted nearly three decades

And now that China has helped Sri Lanka defeat the Tamil Tigers, it may be looking to call in a few favours, as it slowly extends its influence across the region.

All this at a time when the Sri Lankan authorities are casting around for new friends.

They have bitterly resented Western criticism of their conduct of the war.

Suggestions that the treatment of civilians demands an investigation into possible war crimes are angrily rejected.

Those who speak out are quickly condemned, no matter who they are. A few days ago an effigy of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was burnt outside the British High Commission in Colombo.

"Tamil Tiger Headquarters" said the graffiti spray-painted onto the wall.

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens has some reasonable points to make about Sri Lanka in Slate:

I also became vaguely aware that, behind the general litany of Tamil complaints and grievances, many of them justified, there was another force altogether. It was referred to in rather hushed tones as "the Tigers," and its sympathizers could often be detected by their habit of referring not to Sri Lanka or even to Ceylon but to "Eelam": the name of a future Tamils-only state. Unwittingly, I was present during the early stirrings of this organization—which had a good deal of support, as irredentist and ultra-nationalist movements so often do, among the diaspora. There are many high-earning communities of Tamils in other countries of the British Commonwealth as well as in Europe and North America, and their support was a major contributing factor to the duration of Asia's longest insurgency or (if you prefer) civil war: one that may possibly just have ended.

Even if you add the two recognized Tamil populations of Sri Lanka together, they do not amount to even one-fifth of the overall population. But at the height of their desperado militancy, a decade or so ago, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, controlled perhaps one-third of the country's territory, including the Batticaloa-Trincomalee coastline in the east and the Jaffna peninsula in the north. There was never any possibility that the Sinhala parties, or indeed many of the urban Tamils, would accept such a fait accompli. Nor was there any chance that China and Pakistan would allow such an obviously strategic island, with its former Royal Navy harbors and ports, to become partitioned in favor of a minority with such strong links to India.

Under the leadership of the late Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE enormously overplayed its hand. It established a dictatorship in the areas it controlled and recruited both child-soldiers and suicide-bombers. One of the latter even assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991: a truly suicidal thing to do, given the need of the Tamils for Indian sympathy. The hardening of Sinhala sentiment, the inevitable splits and defections that arose from the Jonestown style of Prabhakaran, and, perhaps above all, the acquisition of warplanes and other materiel from China and Pakistan eventually gave traction to the central government in Colombo. Deciding to fight as a conventional army that belonged to a separate state, the LTTE has now been defeated as a conventional army, and its state has ceased to exist. Not since the British defeated the Malayan Communists, who were too much restricted to the Malay Chinese population, in the 1940s and 1950s, has any major Asian rebellion been so utterly defeated.

There remains, as there always did, the question of the Tamil population itself. It doesn't seem overwhelmingly likely that Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's victorious regime, currently engaging in a spasm of triumphalism, is in the strongest position to offer a hand to the civilian Tamil leadership. But it would be a very agreeable surprise if it did.

It's just not true, as some liberals tend to believe, that insurgencies, once under way, have history on their side. As well as by nations like Britain and Russia, they can be beaten by determined Third World states, such as Algeria in the 1990s and even Iraq in the present decade. Insurgent leaderships often make mistakes on the "hearts and minds" front, just as governments do, and governments are not always stupid to ban the press from the front line, tell the human rights agencies to stay the hell out of the way, and rely on the popular yearning for law and order. It can also be important to bear in mind, as in Sri Lanka became crucial, that majorities have rights, too.

Did You Ever Want to Play Like a Cuban Drummer?

Now you can learn percussive secrets of the Pearl of the Antillies, from Agustin Blazquez's latest music video, available on YouTube: Rafael Clave Behind The Scenes

Daniel Pipes on Today's Obama-Netanyahu Summit

From DanielPipes.org:

Some predictions: (1) Iran being Netanyahu's top priority, he will avoid a crisis by mouthing the words "two-state solution" and agreeing to diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority. (2) Democrats too will be on their best behavior, checking their alienation through Netanyahu's visit, momentarily averting a meltdown. (3) Obama, who has plenty of problems on his hands, does not need a fight with Israel and its supporters. His move to the center, however tactical, will last through the Netanyahu visit.

Short term prospects, then, hold out more continuity than change in U.S.-Israel relations. Those concerned with Israel's security will prematurely breathe a sigh of relief – premature because the status quo is fragile and U.S. relations with Israel could rapidly unravel.

Even a lack of progress toward a Palestinian state can prompt a crisis, while an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure contrary to Obama's wishes might cause him to terminate the bond begun by Harry Truman, enhanced by John Kennedy, and solidified by Bill Clinton.

Jeremy Gerard: Margo Lion Behind Rocco Landesman NEA Choice

According to this article on Bloomberg.com, the choice of Rocco Landesman resulted in part from $500,000 in campaign contributions raised by an adunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts:

When President Barack Obama announced his plan to nominate Rocco Landesman as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I figured Margo Lion had a hand in it. So I called her up.

Lion, a Broadway producer, shares an office with Landesman, the loquacious, combative owner of five Broadway houses called Jujamcyn Theaters.

More to the point, she’d joined the Obama bandwagon early, raised more than $500,000 for the candidate and helped shape his arts agenda. She was well-situated to put forward Landesman, 61, for the NEA slot. He’s a brilliant choice.

“The president said, ‘Let’s find a game changer,’” Lion told me. “I didn’t have long-held plans, it wasn’t a strategy. But Rocco’s an unusual leader. He combines an impressive intellect, bravery and humor with a talent for getting the best out of people.”

Margo Lion's website provides more background:

Margo Lion was a member of President Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee and served as Co-Chair of his Arts Policy Committee during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Margo produced the Barack on Broadway fundraiser on September 9, 2007 and the Women for Obama Central Park Rally on February 2, 2008.

Here's a link to a campaign letter from Lion and George Stevens about Obama's arts policy goals: http://margolionltd.com/affiliations/letter_from_margolion_georgestevens.pdf. A glance at Wikipedia tells us that Ms. Lion's first major hit was the musical adaptation of John Waters' Hairspray and that she hails from Charm City--Baltimore, Maryland...

Memo to President Obama: Use Federal Stimulus Funds to Bury Urban Power Lines

TO: The President
FROM: LJ
RE: Using Stimulus Funds to Bury Power Lines
DATE: May 18, 2009

The night before last, a big thunderstorm knocked down some trees that cut power to our urban block in the Nation's Capital. We were without power for some 10 hours before repair crews fixed the problem. The experience reminded me of complaints from participants in a seminar that I teach for families of international diplomats. Every year, some of the foreigners posted here express shock and dismay that their power goes out during storms in Washington, DC. Europeans and delegates from the former Soviet block simply cannot believe that the richest and most powerful country in the world allows its capital to suffer power cuts and blackouts "like a third-world country." I used to just shrug my shoulders and repeat the mantra that "burying power lines is very expensive..."

However, given the massive spending on the stimulus package and the need to create jobs in the USA, it would seem to me that there would be no better time than right now for the Obama administration to announce a federal program to bury power lines in urban areas. These are jobs that can't be moved to China or India, and the benefits will be felt as soon as residents of Washington, DC no longer need to stock up on candles and flashlights every time there is a bad weather forecast.

Furthermore, from a national security point of view it would seem to be a no-brainer that buried power lines are less subject to disruption from terrorism than those hanging on flimsy telephone poles. Needless to say, if climate change predictions are correct, increasingly severe weather would result in more power outages affecting above-ground transmission wires. Not to mention the disruption power cuts cause to the disabled dependent on electrically-powered medical equipment.

Burying power lines with stimulus funds would create jobs, improve national security, and enhance the quality of life in urban areas. At the same time, the latest FiOS and other high-tech connections could be installed, providing infrastructural improvements requisite for the industries of tomorrow where people are living today, perhaps lowering electricity rates in the bargain..Last but not least, it would no doubt help improve the image of America in the hearts and minds of diplomats posted here from around the world.

To those who say it can't be done, let us remind them of your campaign slogan: "Yes, we can!"