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The new American obsession is with deficit reduction; everybody is talking about it, wringing their hands with concern for debt levels. Many commentators are declaring that the near future will go down in the history books as the Age of Austerity.
Before I critique these campaigns, let me state clearly: I am not debating the validity of this issue. Too many smart folks are crying out about this, claiming that this is the road to national ruin. I am in no position to dispute that prognosis, nor am I doing it here.
My observation instead, is simply: don’t expect anything substantial to be done about this in the near future. Neither party has the backbone nor the honesty to legislate the sacrifices required. Plus, the American people are conflicted, and not supportive of anything that diminishes their own sacred cows, as opposed to the other fellow’s.
So let’s look at a partial list of some of the moves that might seriously reduce the deficit. For reasons of brevity, I’m exempting plans that cause a lot of noise and do little to adjust the bottom line. Cutting out the poet laureate might whet some people’s juices, but won’t do a thing to seriously reduce this massive problem.
End the tax deduction for mortgage payments, munching a substantial bite from the deficit, as advocated by the recent commission. Not even worth talking about. When I worked for the Chicago Urban League in the 1980s, they opposed most of Reagan’s fiddling with the tax code, favoring hitting the wealthy. But any attempt to cut back on this deduction brought howls from them, even when it was set up to only affect the rich. The message was clear: do not tamper with this bulwark of the middle class, in any way. Ever. Owning a house is the American dream.
Eliminate the tax cuts for those making over $250,000. The Republicans oppose this, because it would affect their constituency. But it would cut the deficit down substantially.
Cut Social Security benefits:
- advance the age when benefits accrue
- make the SS tax applicable to higher incomes
Fuhgeddaboutit. Neither party would touch this third rail in any serious cutback. Yet it would make the biggest dent in our bottom line.
Medicare: see above.
Cut military bases and weapons systems. A little of this is being done, but not enough. Every base has a local constituency, every program its lobbyists. There are no orphans here. Legislators from every party will fight to protect their constituents, and, especially, their contributors.
Enact a flat tax with no deductions whatsoever. For giving to charities? To the church? Eliminate tax breaks to Mother Theresa? To disabled children? The reality would be a flat tax with a few — just a few — select deductions. Some of these would be honorable, some sops to entrenched interests to get their congresspersons on board. It wouldn’t matter.
After we had opened that door, we’d get the creeping revisions. Every year a few more “justifiable” tax deductions would be added. Soon, we’d have a low tax rate, lots of exemptions even from that level, very little government income, and a deficit growing by enormous swaths. No matter the merits of this idea, its application in the real world will blossom the deficit more than Social Security.
Get out of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Now. Completely. This one would actually cause a sizable dip in the short-term figures. But war is a national security issue; tread carefully. Besides, no one cares. Notice how many outspoken politicians didn’t speak of this in 2010? Didn’t mention it at all? Everyone figures it’s winding down at its own pace. Not worth dabbling with.
Raise the tax on gas. And hurt the middle class. What about the folks unemployed, who have to drive for interviews? Remember, everybody has a car. DOA.
End some of the farm subsidies. How much do we pay to support tobacco growers? How much do tobacco companies contribute to politicians?
Massively cutting social programs. Right. Small programs for the poor will be cut; they already are. And make some folks cheer, but are like pennies to Goldman Sachs. I’m talking about the big programs. You know, the ones that affect millions of Americans. All of whom vote. Or will, after their benefits are eliminated.
End earmarks. Fully, definitively. Great idea. Only, it would have to be passed by politicians of all parties. The same folks who make hay from these measures. About as likely as a missile reaching Saturn next year.
Restore part of the estate tax. Bring it back up, and exempt everything below $3.5 million in inheritance. But after that Horatio Alger rules. This country blooms when people strive to get ahead, using their brains and their gumption. Not when daddy provides a free ride for life. Raise taxes? Are you crazy?
Institute a national sales tax. Taxes are off the table. Haven’t you heard?
My first point is this: neither party has the guts to actually tackle this problem in a serious, substantial way that really drops the deficit, rather than dosing us with verbiage.
My next point is even more important: neither party has the integrity to apply hardship in a fair manner, the only way this will work. Both sides want to hit the other side, but exempt their supporters. That won’t pass muster; any plan that doesn’t include every possible measure — both cuts and taxes — flat out isn’t serious; the problem is that big. The only chance for success would be for a program that called for mutual sacrifice, and then delivered it. And a mechanism, as well, that threw lobbyists of all kinds out the window. Obscene money cannot rule here. Patriotism, shared hardship, must.
Finally, none of this is in the slightest sense realistic until we develop a national consensus on the issue. Exit polls from November’s elections showed almost exactly the same percentage chose, as their top political priority, spending on the unemployed, as on reducing the deficit. These concepts are as far apart as is conceivable. The number of Americans solidly behind deficit reduction is not even close to the powerful majority that would be required. As an article in the New York Times put it, voters “have rewarded politicians who say they are worried about the budget much more than politicians willing to make specific benefit cuts and tax increases.” The piece quotes William Gale of the Brookings Institution, that, “whatever the eventual solution is…it will probably be something that is not politically feasible now.”
Thus, what is needed first is to build a new constituency. Politicians may be venal, but they’re not stupid. Until they have that kind of support, backing these ideas would be like slitting one’s wrists. Not something many people choose to do. After that, make both–the cuts and the tax measures–fair and across the board, and we might have a chance at really achieving something.
Till these things change, expect small, loud measures rich in symbolism, but meager in their actual impact. Be prepared for lots of talk. And lots of deficits.

This Blogger’s Books from
Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift
by Professor Robert A. Slayton
Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith
by Robert A. Slayton

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At the end of September, Congress adjourned in advance of the midterm elections without voting on one of the most important, popular, and bipartisan bills of the year: the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (S. 3307, The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act). Members of Congress quickly left Washington and headed home to campaign, leaving this critical legislation, which would provide nutritious meals for millions of America’s hungry children, incomplete on the Clerk’s desk.
Today, one in four of America’s children are either hungry or food insecure. These children do not receive the minimum amount of food to stay healthy, live a decent life, and have a chance to excel. Of the 19.4 million children receiving lunch assistance each school day, less than half receive breakfast assistance and just 11% access summer feeding programs. Compounding this problem, much of the food that children eat lacks nutritional quality. Nearly 17% of children under the age of 18 are considered obese. In the world’s most prosperous and industrious nation, it is unconscionable that so many children begin their school day and are tucked into bed at night without the basic sustenance needed to grow into healthy adults and pursue their dreams. We have a moral imperative to protect the most vulnerable among us, especially hungry children. As of now Congress has only temporarily extended funding for child nutrition programs at a level below what most experts feel is necessary. This level has made it impossible to help correct the problems currently facing hungry low-income children. During the lame-duck session, which begins November 15, Congress has the opportunity to ensure the continuity of these critical programs that ameliorate the problem of childhood hunger, expand their reach to enable greater numbers of qualifying families to receive food assistance, and enhance services so that more of the growing hunger and nutrition needs are met.
The bi-partisan Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, supported by a broad coalition of organizations, including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, must be the number one item on Congress’ agenda when it returns after the elections. Caring for those among us who have the least, especially our children whose healthy development will ensure they have a better future, should be above political or scheduling concerns.
The Senate-passed version of the bill (S. 3307) has the added funding needed and it must be passed by the House. The programs included in the bill clearly will make a difference in the lives of poor children in America. These programs will make positive changes in schools and nutrition programs across the country. There is not one Congressional district where children are not benefiting from these programs. Passing S. 3307 would help to reduce hunger and increase children’s access to healthy meals by expanding the supper program from 14 to all 50 states. The bill also authorizes grants to retain summer food program sponsors, improves and expands breakfast programs, and encourages states to develop comprehensive strategies to end child hunger. In addition, it would make progress against childhood obesity and improve the nutritional quality of meals by strengthening nutrition standards for all food sold in schools, providing schools with increased resources and training to improve meal quality, and supporting farm-to-school programs and school gardens.
The JCPA and our partners in the anti-hunger and faith communities are committed to working with Congress and the Administration to find additional ways to improve access to child nutrition programs and restore the cuts to SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) that are used to partially pay for this bill.
America’s most vulnerable, our poor and our children, are waiting for Congress to step forward and lead. It is simply inexcusable for us to continue to allow so many children to go hungry in this country of such great abundance. In September, as Congress was moving towards recess, many Jews were observing the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. During the day we read the passages from Isaiah in which the prophet asks the Jews of his time who are coming to the Temple for Yom Kippur, a fast day, if they know why they are fasting. Isaiah says unambiguously that we are fasting to ‘let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share our bread with the hungry and take the wretched poor into our homes.’ In the spirit of Isaiah’s words, let us break off the yoke of childhood hunger in this country. During the days prior to the mid-term elections, let those who seek office know that childhood hunger in America is not acceptable. Let us lend our voices to those who need us most and pass the child nutrition bill.
Rabbi Steve Gutow is the President of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. For more information and updates, visit jewishpublicaffairs.org and follow @theJCPA on Twitter.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Our schools are turning millions of normal children into dropouts and failures. This isn’t because of a few bad teachers or principals, but because the natural learning behaviors of children are routinely penalized instead of praised. Initiatives like “No Child Left Behind” and “The Race To The Top” won’t change this, because they don’t adequately take into account research about how children learn. As Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says, children have “enormous capability that they’re born with and often school takes it out of them.”
Our classrooms are based on outdated ideas, functioning like mid-20th century factories. Each child is offered an identical curriculum, like a car moving along an assembly line. However, children aren’t units of production and this approach is failing. Since 1970, the rate of high school graduation has declined, and the United States has fallen from first to twelfth among developed nations in education.
This is inexcusable given the well-documented research about what makes children effective learners. Contemporary neuroscience has confirmed the findings of Freud, Piaget, and Dewey: that children’s learning is largely dependent on inherent interest, emotional engagement, social interaction, physical activity and the pleasure of mastery.
These findings are ignored in traditional classroom approaches. If children are not interested, they won’t learn, but we don’t structure our schools to capture students’ individual interests. Instead, everyone studies the same texts at the same time. Teachers often reprimand children for failing to change gears with the rest of the class. Students are told to be quiet, sit still, and listen passively, when we know that social, emotional, and physical engagement enhance learning.
Freedom to make mistakes and benefit from them is the basis of intellectual growth. If researchers or entrepreneurs were forbidden to make errors, innovation would cease. But when teachers are required to prioritize standardized test preparation, children are necessarily taught that being wrong is unacceptable.
The traditional classroom needs an overhaul based on the findings of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than lecturing to passive observers, teachers should act as facilitators, introducing individual students to new concepts based on their interests and developmental state. Children should be free to move around and to choose when, for how long, and with whom they will work at each task. Instead of being told facts, children should learn by acting on instructional materials, experimenting and observing until answers are found.
Children need to experience themselves as emotionally engaged, triumphant problem solvers. This experience is, in part, what makes computer games addictive. As with video games, in an ideal classroom students should only go on to the next level after mastering the previous one, taking as long as they need to solve each problem, and staying with it as long as it holds their interest. The satisfaction of curiosity and the exhilaration of accomplishment are the inherent rewards of this approach.
While it may seem impossible to offer individualized, self-directed learning in public schools, it has already been done. The Montessori method which uses these approaches, has been successfully adopted by public school systems, including in inner cities. Students in these schools achieve equal or superior academic performance to children in traditional classrooms, and superior outcomes in social skills and engagement, at no greater per pupil cost. While this method isn’t a panacea, it provides one feasible, well-tested basis for developing teaching methods grounded in child development and cognitive neuroscience research.
Scientifically sound, individualized instruction should be our new educational standard. It’s time to shift our focus from administrative changes to fundamental classroom reforms that will truly make a difference. This is an urgent necessity – our children’s wellbeing and our economic and technological edge in the 21st century are at stake.
A version of this article first appeared in USA Today, Wednesday, 10 November 2010.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Even compared with some of the most hazardous jobs in the law enforcement field, game wardens face tremendous risk. Their job is also one of the most difficult, given that so few officers must police hundreds of millions of acres. The degree of difficulty is compounded because the potential victims of wildlife-related crime cannot speak, and there are so few potential witnesses to criminal acts committed in areas that are uninhabited or only sparsely so. Between all state and federal wildlife agencies, there are only about 8,000 officers — less than one quarter the number of police employed by the city of New York, which is all of 300 square miles.
Last Thursday night, Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Conservation Officer David Grove was on patrol near Gettysburg, Pa. Grove was arresting a man who he had seen spotlighting and then killing deer near a residential area. The alleged poacher, Christopher L. Johnson, 27, of Fairfield, Pa, shot and killed Grove in a gunfight, according to news reports. Johnson, who is now in police custody, is a convicted felon.
Pennsylvania Game CommissionWildlife Conservation Officer David Grove.
David Grove was described by those who knew him as a great friend, brother, son, and uncle — a man with “exemplary moral character,” who was “well-respected,” and “willing to do a lot of things to help without the need to be in the limelight.” They said he laughed often, but took his job very seriously.
An editor for The Gettysburg Times was working on a profile of David Grove before the fatal encounter occurred. The writer posed some questions for the story and Grove returned his answers Thursday, just hours before his death. One of the questions asked how he would like to be remembered. Grove responded, “That I did my job with enthusiasm and passion and that I treated people with the same respect that I would want to be treated with.”
Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues at the Pennsylvania Game Commission as they mourn this terrible loss.
At The Humane Society of the United States, we celebrate the heroic work of law enforcement personnel like David Grove. We run a nationwide anti-poaching program to help them with their demanding and dangerous work. Since our program began, we’ve offered more than $260,000 in reward funds on poaching cases, sponsored K9s that sniff out poachers, run anti-poaching public education campaigns, donated decoys and forensic equipment to state agencies, and much more.
We also believe that law enforcement deserves to have the best available anti-poaching laws at their disposal to deter would-be violators and bring those who wantonly exploit wildlife to justice. Wildlife criminals are an enemy of wildlife, animal advocates, and hunters, and our nation should exhibit little tolerance for the cruelty and mayhem they foster.
This post originally appeared on Pacelle’s blog, A Humane Nation.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

After eight excruciating weeks, the Buffalo Bills finally crawled out of their winless hole with yesterday’s 14-12 victory over the Detroit Lions. No longer are we “the only winless team in the NFL.” Yes, it might only be one win, but we’re not holding on to that perfect record anymore, so everyone can feel free to show us some support anytime they’re ready. One win, eight wins, a win is a win–and we got one!
Sorry to disappoint you, though, my reaction wasn’t what you’d expect from me. I didn’t go crazy, didn’t jump around and didn’t really even yell. A quick clap and “yeah, boys!” and that was that. It might have been because I didn’t want to disturb the cat snoozing so adorably on my lap at the time, but it’s probably more accurate to say I knew we were going to win–I had a feeling ever since I turned down a ticket to experience it front and center.
Freddy J was without a doubt the standout performance, with 133 yards rushing, 37 receiving and two touchdowns. Just goes to show that he hasn’t lost last season’s spark. So far this season, he’s been dealing with top rated run defense paired with a lousy offensive line, which equals limited opportunity to produce dynamic numbers. I’m glad he finally got a chance to prove he’s still a dangerous force. A tip of the stiff arm to you, my boy.
I have to hand it to our defense, too. Their performance for the majority of the game continued to be an improvement from the beginning of the season. They’re not perfect yet (Why did Shaun Hill have time to brush his teeth, tie his shoe or take a piss?) but they held the Lions’ offense when it mattered. Like at the two point conversion that would have pushed the game into overtime. And by holding Detroit to 12 only points. And by recording another interception. Kyle Williams, Poz, Donte Whitner and Bryan Scott had a great game, flying out of nowhere to prevent Pettigrew and Burleson from picking up more yards. With guys like Williams and Poz who are clearly big, physical and capable, I’m just wondering why they’re not recording more game defining plays. Leodis McKelvin also threw his weight around…too bad that kickoff return got called back.
Ryan Fitzpatrick had a fair game as far as passing is concerned, finishing up with 146 yards, relatively low considering he’s recorded close to or more than 300 in recent weeks. He didn’t throw any interceptions, though, which is an improvement, he took some HARD hits, and did anyone see him plow into a Detroit lineman so his receiver could convert on third down? Now that’s what I call getting physical, you scrapper you.
My Lee only had two receptions for 52 yards, but they were flashy; a reminder that he remains one of the most underrated receivers, in my opinion at least. Stevie Johnson may not have had what the announcers considered an “explosive” game, but he contributed catches when Fitz needed him to. There’s no denying that trust those two have built up. Everyone drops balls…and it was raining. Roscoe’s presence was definitely missed, but Donald Jones who stepped in for him put forth a good effort.
Lindell had an uncharacteristically off day, missing a 41-yard FG, which he would typically make. Another low point: CJ Spiller left the game with a hamstring injury. Not great!
This week was encouraging. Hopefully, it will make the Bills even hungrier for a win than they were before. So Cincinnati, here they come!
GO BILLS!!!

Follow Alyssa Jung on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Lysssie

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As Congress goes back in session today for the final weeks of the 111th Congress, with the political mood of the country in uproar, it is essential that members and the leadership make legislative decisions based on our national, social and fiscal priorities that underscore democratic principles.
With the president’s announcement last week of the postponement of troop withdrawal from the impossible war in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014, at the cost of $190 million per day (according to a recent CRS report to Congress), one would call these priorities into question. These three additional years of war in Afghanistan will add more than $169 billion to the $365.5 billion we taxpayers have already forked over in this conflict.
In the coming days, the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Bill will be voted upon. The House has a bill would cost just $2.2 million per day ($8 billion over 10 years). A bargain at the price of feeding our nations needy children and providing for healthier food, cholesterol-free, plant-based and organic options, expanded nutrition programs and increased nutrition standards and education.
The whole 10-year child nutrition program proposed by the House of Representatives could be paid for with just 42 days worth of Afghanistan war spending.
And yet there are political forces in the Senate unwilling to pass such legislation, instead trying to force the House to accept the Senate’s watered-down bill. This is a grave mistake.
How is it that we can unquestioningly fund illegal war, but not feed our children? Where better to invest our tax dollars than in the health and vitality of our children?
Children are our future. Their health, education and well being should be the nation’s number-one priority. They are our nation’s number-one responsibility. The track of a child’s development into adulthood correlates directly to the health and vitality of the future of our nation and our world.
But today, the health and vitality of our nation is at risk because of preventable diseases caused by poor eating habits. A childhood-obesity epidemic is causing unprecedented rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems. Because of political inertia and corporate monopoly of our food supply, children face a future of heart surgery, dialysis, and other treatments needed for complications brought about by a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol. The long- and short-term health and economic costs will rock our families and our nation for decades to come unless we address the dietary behaviors that are directly causing this these health issues.
There is a tremendous opportunity to effectively and cheaply reverse the decline in public health by starting with the food we serve to children in schools. Sadly, the Child Nutrition Reauthorization process has brought to light our nation’s lack of commitment to our children’s health. The political stalemate in Congress over finding funding to feed our children healthy food is outrageous.
With the present overload of high-fat, high-cholesterol food, the artery walls of overweight children look more like those of an average 45 year old, according to a study presented at an American Heart Association convention. Yet neither the child, nor the 45 year old ever need to get to this point.
President Clinton recently explained that his decision to change his diet and go vegan was so that he could naturally — without drugs — clear his arteries, reverse his heart disease and have the added benefit of easily losing weight.
Only meat and dairy foods contain cholesterol whereas plant-based foods (whole grains, fruit, vegetables, legumes) have no cholesterol and are very low in saturated fat.
The House version of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Bill contains provisions that will enable schools to serve more healthy, plant-based foods. This is significant because diets rich in plant-based foods with little or no meat, dairy, poultry or fish, have been scientifically proven to prevent and also help reverse some of the most common and debilitating illnesses, the causes of rising healthcare costs and death in America today.
It is time to invest in our real national security, the health of our children! Congress must find the money to fund and pass the House version of the Child Nutrition Act, H.R. 5504. The stripped down Senate version simply will not do.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

It is not without a certain degree of sadness that I pen this article to urge embattled New York City Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) to set aside his ethics troubles and resign from the House of Representatives. Having spent the better part of 8 years working on Capitol Hill in the 1990s, I, like many Members of Congress and staff alike, grew fond of the Korean War hero and long time legislator.
And yet, having been under investigation for a number of years for allegedly violating the ethics rules of the House, Rangel finally had the opportunity to appear before his colleagues on the Committee of Standards and Conduct (Ethics Committee) to clear the air and his name. And he punted. Badly.
Putting his own reputation at risk is one thing: Members of Congress, like the public at large, are presumed innocent until proven otherwise in legal proceedings. But for Mr. Rangel, having put the reputation of the House of Representatives in question due to his own behavior and then walk out of his own ethics committee hearing this morning is nothing short of inexcusable. The Congressman claimed that he didn’t have enough time to obtain a lawyer and that being given only one week’s notice to prepare for today’s proceedings was somehow unfair.
What is truly unfair is that certain elected officials in Washington, D.C. have forgotten that it is We The People they were elected to serve. Competitive elections to the House of Representatives are now the exception rather than the norm. Even in aftermath of the Republican tsunami a few weeks back, the fact of the matter is that gerrymandered Congressional Districts almost always ensure that once a person is elected to Congress, he or she is almost always coming back.
Sadly, a few Members forget why it was they engaged in public service in the first place and begin to look out for their own best interests while preserving their hold on power. Following a distinguished 50-year career in the Army, as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and a Member of Congress, Rangel’s presence now tarnishes, rather than enhances the electoral body to which he was elected and the constituents he vowed to serve.
Sorry, Charlie. Despite all you’ve done, for what you’ve done in recent years and the myriad of ethics charges currently pending before you, the honorable option for you to exercise is to resign from the House of Representatives and maintain both your dignity as well as the House of Representatives to which you were elected to serve.
Ron Christie is Founder and CEO of Christie Strategies LLC, a full-service communications and issues management firm in Washington, D.C. A former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Christie is the author of the just published book, Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books).

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Southern Lebanon to great fanfare last month, he did more than irk Israelis and the West who seek to diminish Iranian influence in the Levant. The visit served to underscore the increasing polarization in the broader region, placing the divergent views of Iran and the Arab states in stark contrast, with Syria in the middle. As a result, Syria is under newfound pressure. Can Syria afford to maneuver as an ally of Iran and its proxies and rick its central role in the Arab World? Or is it willing and/or able to change course and join the Arab world in blunting the expanding growth of Persian influence? Syria’s answers to these questions could shape the development of events in the Middle East in the near future, and especially between Israel and Lebanon.
Prior to Ahmadinejad’s visit, numerous developments in the past year indicated that Syria was on the rise, reasserting itself as a central player in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri, to the surprise of many, absolved Syria from any wrongdoing in the assassination of his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria and Saudi Arabia engaged in a rapprochement, with a highly publicized joint visit to Beirut, symbolizing a newfound partnership and tacit recognition of Syria’s renewed power in the Levant. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been seeking to improve U.S.-Syria ties and to jumpstart Syria-Israel peace talks. President Obama nominated a U.S. ambassador to return to Damascus earlier in the year, and numerous envoys and elected officials have travelled to Damascus for high-level talks with President Bashar al-Assad and his associates. Furthermore, Syria has expanded its economic ties with numerous nations, most notably France and Turkey, and has taken significant measures to liberalize its economy in an effort to invite foreign investment and prepare the economic infrastructure conducive to long-term growth. All the while, however, Syria has continued to work with Iran to provide Hezbollah with logistical and political support and delivered advanced missile systems to the extremist group, which is reportedly now in possession of more than 40,000 rockets and missiles.
After a year of progress, Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon may be a game-changing chapter for Syria. The visit has intensified Arab-Persian and Sunni-Shi’ah tension – already high after the United Nations tribunal on the assassination of Rafik Hariri, which implicates Hezbollah operatives and is likely as well to point the finger at Damascus for plotting it – sparking fears of renewed sectarian violence. To the Arab world, already vexed that the most influential states in their region -Israel, Iran and Turkey -are non-Arab states, Ahmadinejad’s trip provoked concerns that Syria’s influence in Lebanon is being surpassed by Iran and even by Hezbollah itself. That neither Syria nor Saudi Arabia could have stopped Ahmadeinjad’s visit at a time of deep concerns of renewed sectarian strife in Lebanon signifies how powerful and decisive Hezbollah has become in Lebanon. Furthermore, reports in the Saudi press deeply critical of Ahmadinejad’s visit illustrate the precarious nature of the game Syria is playing.
The renewed rift places Syria in a bind. As long as a pressured atmosphere remains – and the findings of the tribunal will strengthen, not dissipate this pressure – Syria will inevitably lose much of its maneuverability. It cannot continue its balancing act whereby it strengthens ties to the West and the Arab world, while simultaneously supplying Hezbollah and strengthening Iranian influence in Lebanon. Syria can no longer have it all. It stands to lose much of its gains unless it takes immediate corrective measures. Syria’s dilemma will become considerably more acute should there be a new round of violence between Israel and Hezbollah.
Warning signs suggest that it may be a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ a new war breaks out along the Lebanese-Israel border. In a recent farewell meeting with the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, outgoing Israeli Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin stated explicitly his concerns that the next war Israel faces could be much longer, and could lead to a wider conflagration, including Syria. It is likely that in any conflict with Hezbollah, Israel would seek to do no less than to wipe out Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons, as well as its infrastructure. By any military estimates Israel’s strategic objectives in a new war with Hezbollah will make the level of destruction inflicted on Lebanon in the 2006 war pale in comparison.
Facing the possibility such a bloody conflict, Syria has to make a choice: Will it enter into such a conflict to aid Hezbollah and open itself up to a direct military confrontation with Israel in which it will suffer a devastating blow? Or, will it turn its back on Hezbollah and Iran? That is, if Syria wants to maintain and further entrench its influence in Lebanon, it will have to choose sooner rather than later between Hezbollah or its larger interest in all of Lebanon. Syria could be forced to make this choice should an incident occur similar to the cross-border attack by Hezbollah that sparked the war in the summer of 2006. With Hezbollah significantly strengthened, whether Damascus could keep such an incident from occurring is also dubious.
Even more troubling is how Iran might come to the aid of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in the event of renewed violence, and how it would pressure Syria to come to their defense. Meanwhile, just as Saudi Arabia was tacitly supportive of Israel’s effort to wipe out Hezbollah in the war in the summer of 2006, Saudi Arabia would likely seek to use its improved ties with Syria to press it to remain on the sidelines of a new conflict. More still, Syria’s continued aid to Hezbollah could lead to an Israeli strike on Syrian targets utilized in the weapons supply line to Hezbollah, dragging Syria into a violent conflict. Faced with such a scenario, Syria’s balancing act will no longer be possible. If it does not find a solution to this dilemma before a new round of conflict begins, Damascus’ newfound influence and ties in the region will be undermined severely. It could be further marginalized by the international community at exactly the time it is seeking to strengthen its regional role as a power broker and emerge, for good, from its international isolation.
Critics argue that Syria is not facing such a dilemma. It has and will continue to play both sides of the coin in the Arab-Persian and Sunni- Shi’ah battle for influence in the region. Even more, some may argue that just as Syria stayed out of the 2006 Lebanon war, it would likely refrain from entering the conflict, thereby unleashing Israeli warplanes onto Syrian targets, regardless of any pressure to do so. But such arguments underestimate the state of the Iranian-Arab divide in the Middle East today and Syria’s increasingly dangerous balancing act. Arab fears of Iranian influence are precipitously. With Arab states eager to regain power in the region, which has been ceded to non-Arab actors, and with regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt expected to undergo leadership transitions in a few years, the Arab world is especially reticent about the expansion of the Iranian-proxy state in the Levant created by Hezbollah. But Syria’s continued aid to Hezbollah is enabling exactly just that. While Syria did not enter the 2006 war, the environment of the winter of 2010-2011 may prove to be much different. The brazen visit by Ahmadinejad suggests that Syria could become beholden to Iranian interests in Lebanon. As such, in the next conflict, Syria may find that it is unable to divorce itself from its long-time marriage of convenience with Hezbollah.
The visit of Ahmadinejad to Lebanon signaled an expansion of Iranian influence in the Levant, raised Arab concerns and further deepened the Arab-Persian and Sunni-Shi’ah struggle for influence in the region. Moreover, it has exposed the fallacy that Syria can continue to enjoy the fruits of its regional balancing act. Syria must now make a decision: continue to aid Hezbollah and entrench itself as a rouge state serving the interests of Iran, or play a more constructive role by ending its political and logistical support to Hezbollah and prevent any provocative action against Israel without necessarily severing its relations with Iran. This may seem farfetched, but it is not. Syria could have concluded a peace agreement with Israel in 2008 through Turkish mediation had former Prime Minster Olmert stayed faithful to the negotiated understanding. Damascus knows that its ultimate fortunes lay westward and its Arab brethren. Iran could not stand in the way then and it cannot stand in the way now.
Syria can no longer sit on the fence. If Damascus does not take this critical corrective measure now it could face a precipitous fall, and bring the prospects for peace and stability in the region along with it. This is exactly what Iran would like to see happen, which by no means would serve Syria’s mid or long-term strategic interests.
Please note a version of this article was published in the Jerusalem Post on 11/11/2010

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Over the past few years, I’ve traveled to university towns in the nation’s heartland numerous times. Although I’m an easterner by birth, I feel at ease in the plain states. But it wasn’t until I recently spoke at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers, that an observation about the Midwest suddenly jumped to the forefront of my brain. The dots connected.
Who had chosen the mascots at some of these big Midwestern schools? The gopher and some of its regional rivals seemed to be in a category better recognized as annoyances, pests or animals simply destined for road kill.
Let me just admit up front that I am NOT a sports person. My son and husband think it’s humorous to throw a team name at me and ask .. no, not where they are from. I’m more hopeless than that. They quiz me on what CATEGORY of sport it is. I’m about 75 percent.
But the mascot thing was way more interesting to me than the sports themselves. Gophers in Minnesota, Badgers in Wisconsin, the Wolverines in Michigan, (is that even a real animal or is it the Chihuahua of wolves?). Illinois State has the Red Birds, (decorative) Jay Hawks symbolized the University of Kansas and University of Ohio trumpeted the Buckeyes. How do you fight a nut, for pete’s sake? How do you even make that into a costume the spirit team can wear?
Nebraska’s Cornhuskers were perplexing but understandable. But who the heck wanted to go up against a team known for repetitive food preparation? I discovered the Foresters of Lake Forest College. They sounded like an industrious lot, clearing acreage and all, but that didn’t seem particularly competitive.
Where I come from back East, mascots are ballsy animals, spoiling for a fight. Tigers in Princeton, Yale had the Bull Dogs, Brown the Brown Bears and my personal alma mater, the Colgate Red Raiders.
Even small schools chose fighters like Bucknell’s Bison or the Bates’ Bob Cat, animals known for mixing it up. The list went on with spit and vinegar. But what had happened in the Midwest? Was this simply a case of the region’s good-natured and understated humility?
Personally, I liked the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. Finally, a mascot I could relate to. OK, so maybe it gave Irish descendants like me a bad name, as if we already didn’t have the drunken brawling stereotype to contend with. But in my opinion, a drunken fighter doing rope-a-dope still wins out over a badger, gopher, nut or an ear of corn.
When I investigated further, I found many other more appropriate competitive symbols: Braves and Indians, Warriors, Rebels, Marauders, Cavaliers, Cowboys, Crusaders , Knights and Privateers, Raiders and Rebels, Savages and Saxons, Spartans, Trojans and Vikings. There were also smaller but determined mascots, like Hornets and Yellow Jackets. Things you hit with a rolled up newspaper.
Scary bad guys like Devils and Demons proliferated. There were do-gooders too, teams with the Lord on their side; Saints and Bishops, Quakers, Cardinals and hearty Pioneers. I was confused by the Battling Bishops of Ohio Wesleyan. It seemed a little contradictory to be a man of the cloth and put up your dukes.
I personally liked the animals, especially the feline family. There were Tigers, Cats, Bob Cats, Lions, Panthers, Wildcats and then other fierce fighters like Bison, Eagles, Bears, Rams and Broncos. Pittsburgh State had the Gorilla, an animal not usually associated with Pennsylvania or steel.
One of the most perplexing mascots, however, was the “Blue Hose” of Presbyterian College. I prefer to think that this is about colonial stockings and not a garden implement, or worse, a glib sexual reference. This would probably be one of the few sweatshirts my daughter would NOT beg me to buy during a college campus visit.
Weather patterns like Cyclones, Hurricanes and Tornadoes were common. And added to that list of “difficult and uncomfortable mascot costumes” was simply the Green Terror at McDaniel College. The name conjured up images of plagues, nerve gas and Centers for Disease Control.
With a total right-brained lack of imagination, engineering schools, like RPI, and MIT came up with .. yes, “The Engineers,” battling rivals with pocket protectors, power strips and duct-taped glasses.
Faced with the complete list of college and university mascots, I began to see the reasoning in the Midwest decision to choose kinder, gentler animals. Maybe if you weren’t so full of yourselves, you’d actually psych out the opponent. Perhaps so many smaller schools picked giant-sized, bone-crunching Tomahawk wielding mascots out of a Napoleon complex. How humbling to be badly trounced if you are the Golden Eagles, Wildcats or Razorbacks. Better to low-ball the competitive expectation with, say the humble nature of a Badger, Cardinal or for heaven’s sake, a Buckeye. And then — WHAM — cut ‘em off at the knees.
It was the recent experience of running into my new friend Chip, one of the regulars at my local dog park, that drove home the importance of selecting an appropriate mascot. Usually hatless, he was wearing a baseball cap that said “COCKS” in giant stitching. I knew Chip was newly divorced, and as I moved closer for inspection, I wondered if Chip might fare better in the dating department if he just got a T-shirt and drew arrows pointing at his groin.
“That’s quite a hat,” I said, figuring I needed to tackle this head on.
“Yeah,” said Chip. “That’s my team.”
“Oh,” I said relieved, as I read the tiny print “University of South Carolina” above the cap’s brim and bent to pick up the steaming poop my dog had just deposited.
“What a, um, great hat, ” I said to Chip, instantly re-evaluating the wisdom of Midwestern mascots.
“Sure is,” he beamed.
Cross-posted on leewoodruff.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

-Clyde Prestowitz, principal trade negotiator for Asia in the Reagan administration, writing in his The Betrayal of American Prosperity.
As Congress convenes for its lame duck session, Paul Ryan is poised to become a very important man. As the likely chairman of the House Budget Committee from January, he is determined — as he told the Financial Times immediately after the mid-term elections — to see America “turn the corner” by maintaining “a firm focus on restoring the basic foundations of growth: low taxes, sound and honest money; fair, predictable and reasonable regulations; and, of course, spending cuts and reforms.” “Mr. Obama,” he wrote, “must now move quickly to join the growing bipartisan consensus calling for at least a two year freeze on all current tax rates. He should also join us to address our shared concern with the unsustainable deficit… Our fiscal and economic problems have been decades in the making — a bad situation made much worse over the past two years [which is why the president should] enact the spending cuts proposed in House Republicans’ ‘Pledge to America’.”
“We face a choice,” Ryan said, “between an opportunity society with a safety net or a cradle-to-grave social welfare state.” Clearly he prefers the former.
Personally, I prefer the latter — but that is of no consequence because no such choice currently awaits us. What awaits us instead is the interesting conundrum of a Republican Party cutting taxes for the rich while decrying the scale of the federal deficit. What awaits us is a House Budget Committee chaired by a man committed to resolving our current difficulties by repeating the policies that created them. And what awaits us is a Congress preoccupied with the wrong kind of debt.
We certainly have a problem of debt.
Part of that debt problem is the gap between federal taxes and federal expenditures — a gap that opened up on the watch of a Republican president and congress, not a Democratic one. A federal surplus inherited in 2000 was squandered well before 2008 by the tax cuts now due to expire and by the financing of a war of choice. The federal spending is larger now because of the recession triggered by a financial collapse that also occurred while the treasury secretary was a Republican. So it is simply untrue, and entirely disingenuous, to talk of “a bad situation made much worse over the past two years”, if by that is meant to signal that the Obama stimulus package deepened the recession. It did not. Arguably, the package should have been larger, the better to lift the economy from recession more quickly and to speed the flow of tax revenue again. Companies are slow to hire now not because they are over-taxed or over-regulated. They are not hiring now because their CEOs lack confidence in demand, and they lack confidence in demand because other companies share that same lack of confidence. With private sector confidence low, demand can only be increased by more targeted public spending rather than by less. To cut the federal deficit in the long term, the last thing sensible policy requires is its cutting now.
But the main debt problem which currently besets the U.S. economy — the debt problem that keeps internal demand low — is not primarily a debt problem at the federal level, no matter what Paul Ryan claims or implies. It is a debt problem at the level of people’s personal finance. One of the “fiscal and economic problems decades in the making” to which Paul Ryan ought properly to refer, but which he does not, is the generalized stagnation of American hourly wages in the decades since Ronald Reagan was president, the intensification of American poverty over the bulk of that period, and the stellar rise in income and wealth inequality that has accompanied poverty and the lack of wage growth. One third of all Americans currently live on incomes that are within one tranche of the poverty level for their size of family. Indeed, the median income of average Americans has actually fallen in the last decade — down 4.8% according to the latest Census Bureau figures. The mass and generality of American consumers have maintained their living standards for the last quarter century not by paying “low taxes [in an economy based on] sound and honest money,” as Ryan would have it, but by working longer hours, sending more and more of their family members out to work, and by maxing out their credit cards. “Research shows that credit card debt in America has quadrupled since 1989 and increased 41 percent just since 2000. American now owes more over $1 trillion in credit card debt.” Money doesn’t come much less sound and honest than that.
The other debt problem that now besets the U.S. economy is debt at the international level. Over the last two decades we have become the global system’s consumer-of-last-resort. The U.S. began the post-war period (in 1945) as the global capitalist system’s major exporter and supplier of investment funds, as well as its major military protector. The military role remains and the dollar is still for the moment the global system’s major reserve currency; but U.S. export domination has entirely vanished. It is American debt, not American largesse, which now helps to sustain global economic growth. Our trade relationship with China is emblematic: a U.S. deficit that was a mere $10 billion in 1990 and $83 billion in 2000 has now soared to $268 billion in 2008 and $226 billion in 2009. In 2008, the United States main export to China was waste and scrap paper — some $7.6 billion worth — more than we exported in oilseeds and grains (but oilseeds and grains were the third largest category of goods we exported to them). So here we have the United States of America sending to China, a major trading partner, agricultural produce and waste, in exchange for manufactured goods and money loans. No wonder Arianna Huffington chose to call her latest best-seller Third World America because in many ways our trading patterns are beginning to resemble those of an imperial power in decline.
As we have argued before on this website, since World War 2 the United States has known two sustained periods of economic growth. Both were based on different social settlements. Each has something to tell us about how, and how not, to go forward.
The first period was that between 1948 and 1973. Abroad in those years the world was organized around a Cold War division and a nuclear stand-off. At home, prosperity was anchored in the spread of semi-automated production systems. Productivity per worker rose dramatically after 1948, as did the wages of unionized workers: north-eastern and mid-western wage militancy was crucial to the demand side of the 1950s economic equation. American manufacturing led the world, and blue-collar American living standards exceeded those of traditional middle class and professional families in Western Europe and Japan. Internal income inequality accordingly diminished: by 1970 average CEO compensation packages in Fortune 500 companies ran somewhere between 56 and 70 times higher than the median wage those companies paid. Throughout the bulk of that first growth period, the United States ran a balance of trade surplus (the world bought American goods) and a balance of payments deficit (dollars flowed out to keep global demand high), dollars distributed globally in no small measure through the placing of American military personnel abroad. It was a growth period book — ended by two wars — Korea at the outset, Vietnam at its end — military expenditure on the second of which eventually helped bring that first growth period to an end.
Twenty years later, the U.S. economy experienced a second prolonged period of growth, one that was momentarily slowed in the immediate wake of 9/11 but otherwise sustained from 1992 to 2008. There was no Cold War this time: rather initially a peace dividend and then the confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism that triggered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Afghanistan again. Productivity rose at home again as it had between 1948 and 1973, this time the consequence of computerization and the spread of new information technology. But there were no rising wages through strong trade unions in this second growth period; and no U.S. balance of trade surplus. Instead there was debt — increasingly foreign debt and personal debt — and there was greater income inequality Income and wealth distribution in this second growth period moved average CEO compensation packages in large corporations into a 200-400 percent ratio to median wage, depending on the state of the stock market, and helped fuel the credit bubble which broke so dramatically and with such serious consequences in September 2008.
Paul Ryan’s “Pledge to America” proposes to take us to a third growth period by replicating the inequalities of the second. That cannot do. What this economy now needs is a scale of change far more fundamental than simply token tax cuts and the closing of federal programs. What the economy now needs is a new growth trajectory whose underpinnings more resemble the first period of post-war U.S. economic growth than they do the second. At the very least, we need somehow to scale back our global role, restore our competitive manufacturing base, and return to a lower and more functional level of social inequality. A leading Republican figure from an earlier age has recently compared the United States to Rome. Given the force of that comparison, it is hard to avoid seeing Paul Ryan, for all his new found importance, as fiddling with tax cuts for the rich while the rest of America hurts. Our economic strength is eroding and a social time bomb is ticking beneath our feet, which is why it is time to put the fiddle away and begin a proper conversation whose seriousness matches the hour.
For more David Coates, read Making the Progressive Change: Towards a Stronger U.S. Economy, to be published by Continuum Books in 2011. Originally posted with full citations at www.davidcoates.net.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Music Unites is joining with ASCAP tomorrow night to present “ASCAP’s Night School: Publishing 101″ the first in a series of four workshop panels developed to educate songwriters, labels and others involved in the music industry. The evening will culminate with a special performance by Cantora Records artist Savoir Adore.
ASCAP has a long history of nurturing and developing songwriters and composers across all genres and at different levels of experience, and they offer a broad range of career development programs, tools and services to its members. One of the most popular opportunities for its members is the annual three-day ASCAP “I Create Music” EXPO in Los Angeles, which provides education and professional development to songwriters, composers and producers – and those that support them — at all stages of their careers.
“The goal of ASCAP’s Night School is simple… pass knowledge on to artists who need it, from the very people they need it from,” says Marc Emert-Hutner, ASCAP’s Director Pop/Rock and Film & TV Music. “We’re pleased to partner with Music Unites in helping to nurture the next
generation of songwriters.”
“As a charity that supports both emerging and established musicians across all genres of music, Music Unites felt that this partnership with ASCAP would help educate and empower the next generation of artists and industry executives by giving them the tools and resources to help get them to that next level which is even more important now than ever,” says Michelle
Edgar, Founder and Executive Director of Music Unites. “We’re also very excited to be holding this special kick off event at Norwood, which feels like home to Music Unites since it is where it all first began with our launch event for the charity back in April 2009 with Universal Motown’s Blue October and Tamarama.”
ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) is the U.S. Performing Rights Organization (PRO) owned and run by songwriters, composers and music publishers. PROs represent songwriters, composers and music publishers, and license and distribute royalties for the public performances of their members’ musical works. ASCAP represents the top names in music – from Neil Young to Jay-Z, from Beyonce to The Killers, from U2 to Kings of Leon – as well as emerging writers serious about their careers. ASCAP has representation arrangements with similar foreign organizations so that the ASCAP repertory is represented in nearly every country around the world where copyright law exists.
The topic of the first workshop in ASCAP’s Night School series will focus on music publishing and will feature a panel of executives led by Jake Ottmann (VP of Creative at EMI), Jeremy Yohai (Director of Writer Relations Downtown Music Publishing) and David Hoffman (Creative Director at Shapiro Bernstein), who will discuss:
-Why publishing companies are crucial to the life of the songwriter as a
source of income.
-What are publishing companies and what do they do?
-What is their day to day role for songwriters?
-How does someone get a publishing deal?
-What are the differences between the major and indie publishers?
-What are the different kinds of publishing deals out there?
The event will be held from 7:00pm – 10pm at Norwood Club, 241 West 14th St., New York, NY. Admission for each class is $20 and proceeds will benefit Music Unites.
ASCAP’s Night School: Publishing 101 is the first in a series of planned events designed to give artists face time with experts in a casual, intimate environment. Future workshops will focus on ways to raise money and empowering the independent musician on a number of aspects. The next class “DIY 101: Critical Insights on independent artists’ options for creating successful careers” will take place on November 30th at NYC’s Skyline Studios and will include panelists from Pledgemusic, Songtrust and Gigmaven.
The 6th annual ASCAP “I Create Music” EXPO will held April 28-30, 2011 at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. Visit www.ascap.com/expo for more information.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

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Democrat Charles Rangel walks out of ethics hearing

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? Not ever. Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your “it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you something different.
I had that moment recently when it came to the American way of war. In the past couple of weeks, it could have been triggered by an endless string of ill-attended news reports like theChristian Science Monitor piece headlined “U.S. involvement in Yemen edging toward ‘clandestine war.’” Or by the millions of dollars in U.S. payments reportedly missing in Afghanistan, thanks to under-the-table or unrecorded handouts in unknown amounts to Afghan civilian government employees (as well as Afghan security forces, private-security contractors, and even the Taliban). Or how about the news that the F-35 “Joint Strike Fighter,” the cost-overrun poster weapon of the century, already long overdue, will cost yet more money and be produced even less quickly?
Or what about word that our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has officially declared the Obama administration “open” to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq after the announced 2011 deadline for their withdrawal? Or how about the news from McClatchy’s reliable reporter Nancy Youssef that Washington is planning to start “publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011”?
Or that bottomless feeling could have been triggered by the recent request from the military man in charge of training Afghan security forces, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, for another 900 U.S. and NATO trainers in the coming months, lest the improbable “transition” date of 2014 for Afghan forces to “take the lead” in protecting their own country be pushed back yet again. (“No trainers, no transition,” wrote the general in a “report card” on his mission.)
Or it could have been the accounts of how a trained Afghan soldier turned his gun on U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, killing two of them, and then fled to the Taliban for protection (one of a string of similar incidents over the last year). Or, speaking of things that could have set me off, consider this passage from the final paragraphs of an Elisabeth Bumiller article tucked away inside the New York Times on whether Afghan War commander General David Petraeus was (or was not) on the road to success: “’It is certainly true that Petraeus is attempting to shape public opinion ahead of the December [Obama administration] review [of Afghan war policy],’ said an administration official who is supportive of the general. ‘He is the most skilled public relations official in the business, and he’s trying to narrow the president’s options.’”
Or, in the same piece, what about this all-American analogy from Bruce Riedel, the former CIA official who chaired President Obama’s initial review of Afghan war policy in 2009, speaking of the hundreds of mid-level Taliban the U.S. military has reportedly wiped out in recent months: “The fundamental question is how deep is their bench.” (Well, yes, Bruce, if you imagine the Afghan War as the basketball nightmare on Elm Street in which the hometown team’s front five periodically get slaughtered.)
Or maybe it should have been the fact that only 7 percent of Americans had reports and incidents like these, or evidently anything else having to do with our wars, on their minds as they voted in the recent midterm elections.
The Largest “Embassy” on Planet Earth
Strange are the ways, though. You just can’t predict what’s going to set you off. For me, it was none of the above, nor even the flood of Republican war hawks heading for Washington eager to “cut” government spending by “boosting” the Pentagon budget. Instead, it was a story that slipped out as the midterm election results were coming in and was treated as an event of no importance in the U.S.
The Associated Press covered U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry’s announcement that a $511 million contract had been awarded to Caddell Construction, one of America’s “largest construction and engineering groups,” for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul. According to the ambassador, that embassy is already “the largest… in the world with more than 1,100 brave and dedicated civilians… from 16 agencies and working next to their military counterparts in 30 provinces,” and yet it seems it’s still not large enough.
A few other things in his announcement caught my eye. Construction of the new “permanent offices and housing” for embassy personnel is not to be completed until sometime in 2014, approximately three years after President Obama’s July 2011 Afghan drawdown is set to begin, and that $511 million is part of a $790 million bill to U.S. taxpayers that will include expansion work on consular facilities in the Afghan cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat. And then, if the ambassador’s announcement was meant to fly below the media radar screen in the U.S., it was clearly meant to be noticed in Afghanistan. After all, Eikenberry publicly insisted that the awarding of the contract should be considered “an indication… an action, a deed that you can take as a long-term commitment of the United States government to the government of Afghanistan.”
(Note to Tea Party types heading for Washington: This contract is part of a new stimulus package in one of the few places where President Obama can, by executive fiat, increase stimulus spending. It has already resulted in the hiring of 500 Afghan workers, and when construction ramps up, another 1,000 more will be added to the crew.)
Jo Comerford and the number-crunchers at the National Priorities Project have offered TomDispatch a hand in putting that $790 million outlay into an American context: “$790 million is more than ten times the money the federal government allotted for the State Energy Program in FY2011. It’s nearly five times the total amount allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts (threatened to be completely eliminated by the incoming Congress). If that sum were applied instead to job creation in the United States, in new hires it would yield more than 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers, and employ more than 13,000 in the burgeoning clean energy industry.”
Still, to understand just why, among a flood of similar war reports, this one got under my skin, you need a bit of backstory.
Singular Spawn or Forerunner Deluxe?
One night in May 2007, I was nattering on at the dinner table about reports of a monstrous new U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, so big that it put former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Disneyesque palaces to shame. On 104 acres of land in the heart of the Iraqi capital (always referred to in news reports as almost the size of Vatican City), it was slated to cost $590 million. (Predictable cost overruns and delays — see F-35 above — would, in the end, bring that figure to at least $740 million, while the cost of running the place yearly is now estimated at $1.5 billion.)
Back then, more than half a billion dollars was impressive enough, even for a compound that was to have its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of the above, not to speak of its own antimissile defense systems, and 20 all-new blast-resistant buildings including restaurants, a recreation center, and other amenities. It was to be by far the largest, most heavily fortified embassy on the planet with a “diplomatic” staff of 1,000 (a number that has only grown since).
My wife listened to my description of this future colossus, which bore no relation to anything ever previously called an “embassy,” and then, out of the blue, said, “I wonder who the architect is?” Strangely, I hadn’t even considered that such a mega-citadel might actually have an architect.
That tells you what I know about building anything. So imagine my surprise to discover that there was indeed a Kansas architect, BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri. Better yet, BDY was so proud to have been taken on as architect to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our era that it posted sketches at its website of what the future embassy, its “pool house,” its tennis court, PX, retail and shopping areas, and other highlights were going to look like.
Somewhere between horrified and grimly amused, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch, entitled “The Mother Ship Lands in Baghdad” and, via a link to the BDY drawings, offered readers a little “blast-resistant spin” through Bush’s colossus. From the beginning, I grasped that this wasn’t an embassy in any normal sense and I understood as well something of what it was. Here’s the way I put it at the time:
In other words, a U.S. “control center” at the heart of what Bush administration officials then liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or the “arc of instability.” To my surprise, the piece began racing around the Internet and other sites — TomDispatch did not then have the capacity to post images — started putting up BDY’s crude drawings. The next thing I knew, the State Department had panicked, declared this a “security breach,” and forced BDY to take down its site and remove the drawings.
I was amazed. But (and here we come to the failure of my own imagination) I never doubted that BDY’s bizarre imperial “mother ship” being prepared for landing in Baghdad was the singular spawn of the Bush administration. I saw it as essentially a vanity production sired by a particular set of fantasies about imposing a Pax Americana abroad and a Pax Republicana at home. It never crossed my mind that there would be two such “embassies.”
So, on this, call me delusional. By May 2009, with Barack Obama in the White House, I knew as much. That was when two McClatchy reporters broke a story about a similar project for a new “embassy” in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, at the projected cost of $736 million (with a couple of hundred million more slated for upgrades of diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan).
Simulating Ghosts
Now, with the news in from Kabul, we know that there are going to be three mother ships. All gigantic beyond belief. All (after the usual cost overruns) undoubtedly in the three-quarters of a billion dollar range, or beyond. All meant not to house modest numbers of diplomats acting as the face of the United States in a foreign land, but thousands of diplomats, spies, civilian personnel, military officials, agents, and operatives hunkering down long-term for war and skullduggery.
Connect two points and you have a straight line. Connect three points and you have a pattern — in this case, simple and striking. The visionaries and fundamentalists of the Bush years may be gone and visionless managers of the tattered American imperium are now directing the show. Nonetheless, they and the U.S. military in the region remain remarkably devoted to the control of the Greater Middle East. Even without a vision, there is still the war momentum and the money to support it.
While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the U.S. even notice that the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our embattled Raj is going great guns. Embassies the size of pyramids are still being built; military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be constructed; and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and coming home.
In the U.S., it’s clearly going to be paralysis and stagnation all the way, but in Peshawar and Mazar-i-sharif, not to speak of the greater Persian Gulf region, we remain the spendthrifts of war, perfectly willing, for instance, to ship fuel across staggering distances and unimaginably long supply lines at $400 a gallon to Afghanistan to further crank up an energy-heavy conflict. Here in the United States, police are being laid off. In Afghanistan, we are paying to enroll thousands and thousands of them and train them in ever greater numbers. In the U.S., roads crumble; in Afghanistan, support for road-building is still on the agenda.
At home, it’s peace all the way to the unemployment line, because peace, in our American world, increasingly seems to mean economic disaster. In the Greater Middle East, it’s war to the horizon, all war all the time, and creeping escalation all the way around. (And keep in mind that the escalatory stories cited above all occurred before the next round of Republican warhawks even hit Washington with the wind at their backs, ready to push for far more of the same.)
The folks who started us down this precipitous path and over an economic cliff are now in retirement and heading onto the memoir circuit: Our former president is chatting it up with Matt Lauer and Oprah; his vice president is nursing his heart while assumedly writing about “his service in four presidential administrations”; his first secretary of defense is readying himself for the publication of his memoir in January; and his national security adviser, then secretary of state (for whom Chevron once named a double-hulled oil tanker), is already heading into her second and third memoir. But while they scribble and yak, their policy ghosts haunt us, as does their greatest edifice, that embassy in Baghdad, now being cloned elsewhere. Even without them or the neocons who pounded the drums for them, the U.S. military still pushes doggedly toward 2014 and beyond in Afghanistan, while officials “tweak” their drawdown non-schedules, narrow the president’s non-options, and step in to fund and build yet more command-and-control centers in the Greater Middle East.
It looks and feels like the never-ending story, and yet, of course, the imperium is visibly fraying, while the burden of distant wars grows ever heavier. Those “embassies” are being built for the long haul, but a decade or two down the line, I wouldn’t want to put my money on what exactly they will represent, or what they could possibly hope to control.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch video interview with me on our “stimulus” spending abroad by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here.
[Note: For those still interested, some of the BDY sketches of the Baghdad embassy remain up at Antiwar.com. Click here to see them. And while I’m at it, let me make a heartfelt bow to Antiwar.com, without which TomDispatch research would truly be hell and, in particular, Jason Ditz, whose daily updates are must-read fare for me. Other crucial must-read sites for collecting war info include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Paul Woodward’s the War in Context, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Like many people who campaigned and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, the awareness of the tragic results of the choice of by me and others continues to haunt on the tenth anniversary of that disastrous election. While it was perhaps the most serious political misjudgment I have ever made, it is important to recognize why at the time it seemed to be a quite rational course of action. It is also important to recognize what both the Democratic Party as well as progressives who are tempted to support left alternatives to the Democrats can learn from it.
It should be emphasized at the outset that Nader did not cause George W. Bush to be elected president. Bush was not elected president. The election was stolen. In addition to the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that blocked the recount that would have provided Gore with a victory in Florida thereby giving him a majority of the electoral college, many hundreds of predominantly African-American voters — the vast majority of whom would have voted for Gore — were denied the right to vote because their names were similar to convicted felons who had been disenfranchised because of their crimes. It is also noteworthy that a 1996 crime bill pushed by then-Vice-President Gore dramatically increased the number of crimes considered felonies and thereby the number of convicted felons, the majority of whom in Florida are poor minorities who would have much more likely supported Gore over Bush had they (and the non-felons with similar names) been allowed to vote, thereby providing the Democratic nominee with a comfortable margin.
It is also important to emphasize that, even if Bush had fairly won Florida’s electoral votes, Gore received a solid majority of the popular vote nationally, out-polling Bush by more than a half million votes. Nader and the Green Party oppose the Electoral College and support presidential elections based upon a popular nationwide vote. Gore and the Democrats, by contrast, supported the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College system. It is ironic, then, that the Democrats continue to blame Nader and the Greens for Bush’s election that came as a result of an unfair electoral system that they supported and Greens opposed.
At the same time, there is little question that had Nader’s name not been on the ballot in Florida, enough Green voters would have probably cast their ballots Democratic instead, raising Gore’s margin over Bush high enough so that the Republicans could have not gotten away with the fraud that tilted the balance.
How Gore’s Politics Alienated the Democratic Base
This then raises the question as to why so many people like me, who previously and subsequently voted Democratic in presidential elections, chose to vote for the Green Party in 2000.
Many people have forgotten that before Al Gore became a progressive hero as the most visible leader of the movement to curb climate change — perhaps the biggest single issue of our day and for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize — he was widely-recognized as being on the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. As one of the three finalists in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Gore positioned himself clearly on the right, with Jesse Jackson on the left and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis — the eventual nominee — in the center.
Gore was one of the most ardent Democratic supporters of Reagan’s right-wing foreign policy agenda, supporting such dangerous and destabilizing Pentagon boondoggles as the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the Trident II, Cruise and Pershing missiles, all of which significantly raised the threat of nuclear war. He also supported U.S. funding and training of the Contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua and the murderous junta in El Salvador. In 1991, he was among the minority of Senate Democrats who supported the Gulf War. He was an outspoken supporter of a series of right-wing Israeli governments, opposing the Palestinians’ right to statehood alongside Israel or even allowing Palestinians into the peace process.
As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, his hawkish world view did not seem to wane. Even with the end of the Cold War, he supported increasing the already-bloated U.S. military budget. He was apparently ready to tear up the SALT treaty — negotiated by Nixon and Kissinger and long the foundation of nuclear arms control — in order to pursue a dubious missile defense strategy. He opposed human rights provisions for trade agreements and even for arms transfers. He opposed the treaty banning land mines. He supported laws that threatened jail and fines for Americans simply for traveling to Cuba. He defended the ongoing bombing of Iraq and the starving of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through draconian sanctions. He strongly supported efforts by the Word Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund to weaken environmental laws, consumer protection and labor rights in the name of “free trade,” and was the administration’s most visible advocate of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)
His positions weren’t much better on domestic issues. He opposed raising the minimum wage to match the cost of living. He not only supported the death penalty, but made it far more difficult for falsely convicted death row inmates to appeal their cases in federal courts. He supported the repeal of federal guarantees of assistance to poor children. He supported Federal Reserve policies of keeping wages low to prop up stock prices and taxing earnings from the stock market at lower rates than income from actual work. He supported the repeal of Depression-era banking regulations designed to protect small depositors and restrictions on derivatives that helped lead to the current financial crisis for which scores of Democrats were punished at the polls earlier this month. He supported the Defense of Marriage Act in an effort to prevent gay and lesbian couples from having equal rights. (Earlier in his career, he referred to homosexuality as “abnormal sexual behavior” and voted against a bill that would protect patients with HIV from discrimination.) Even on environmental issues, his record was mixed, supporting efforts to undermine the endangered species act, pushing for nuclear power, and supporting an increase in clear-cut logging of old growth forests.
While most of us who supported Nader did not expect to agree with the Democratic nominee for president on every issue in order to vote for him, the fact that Gore took positions which only a few years earlier would have been considered to be in the mainstream of the Republican Party was simply too much to bear.
When Gore received the Democratic presidential nomination in July of 2000, there was hope that he would try to reassure the party’s disillusioned base by choosing a more liberal vice-presidential running mate. Instead, he chose Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, who had the most conservative voting record of any Democrat in the Senate. Indeed, Lieberman was to the right of the Republican incumbent he defeated when first elected in 1988, quit the Democratic Party in 2006, and endorsed Republican senator John McCain for president in 2008. There was no reason to think that Gore’s appointments for cabinet posts and other key positions in his administration would be any better.
It cannot be stressed enough that had Gore instead embraced an even slightly more progressive agenda, he would not have lost so many Democratic voters to Nader. Rather than modify his positions more in line with the party’s more liberal base, however, Gore initially worked to keep Nader off the ballot in a number of states to prevent voters from even having the choice. And, while Gore was willing to debate Bush, the opponent on his right, he refused to debate his opponent on his left, apparently fearing how voters might react if they were able to compare his positions with those of the well-respected consumer advocate. In the final week of the campaign, recognizing that he was losing liberal voters to his Green Party challenger, Gore did shift the tone of his campaign somewhat to the left, spouting more populist themes. In those final days, polls showed he gained three percentage points, finally pulling slightly ahead of Bush, while Nader dropped from 6% to 3%.
But it was too little too late. So many of us were so disgusted with eight years of center-right governance of the Clinton Administration and the prospects of more under Al Gore, we just could not stomach voting Democratic, even though it was apparent that the election was very close. After eight years of bitter disappointment with Clinton and Gore in power in Washington, it felt cynical and self-defeating to once again vote for a lesser evil, which seemingly would only contribute to the downward spiral which was taking the Democratic Party further and further away from its progressive heyday with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. In many ways, then, Nader was a symptom, not a cause, of the large-scale alienation with Gore.
At the same time, few of us realized just how far to the right this country would go under George W. Bush. Many of us expected a more moderately conservative administration similar to that of his father. Indeed, Bush’s anticipated pick for Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in many ways more moderate that the hawkish Madeleine Albright, who served under Clinton, or any of Gore’s likely picks to lead the State Department. While the relatively weak Texas governorship did not offer many clues, there was little indication that the younger Bush would embrace the very neo-conservative agenda his father had rejected. Indeed, during the first eight months of the administration, the more moderate elements in the new Bush administration appeared to be winning out against the far right. That all changed on September 11.
Strategic Miscalculation
Back in 2000, it appeared to many of us that the only way to stop the ongoing rightward drift of the Democratic Party was to support a credible challenge from the left. History offered a number of examples, such as the way the strong showing of the Socialist Party in the 1932 election prompted the newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt, who originally ran as a fiscal conservative, to instead adopt the New Deal. There was some evidence at that time that the Green Party could have a similar effect.
During the 1990s, the Greens were a major player in New Mexico politics. By polling 10-15% in the 1996 election against Gore/Clinton-type Democrats, Green candidates sapped enough votes away from Democratic nominees to allow Republicans to win two House seats and the governorship. In response, the New Mexico Democratic Party moved well to the left: Fred Harris, the populist former Oklahoma Senator, became state party chair and focused on wooing the party’s liberal base. (Harris’ wife LaDonna, a prominent American Indian attorney, was the vice-presidential nominee of the progressive Citizens Party in 1980.) In 1998, the Democrats nominated solid progressives in the two house districts they had lost during the previous election cycle, causing the Greens’ share of the vote to shrink to well under 5%, resulting in the Democrats defeating the Republicans with far better candidates than they had nominated two years earlier.
Though developing a credible third party challenge on a national level is a greater challenge, many of us held on to the hope in 2000 that Nader would receive at least 5% of the vote nationally, thereby crossing the threshold that would provide the Green Party federal matching funds for the next election. In becoming a viable third party on a national level, there would be a solid base from which to raise issues being ignored by the two major parties: challenging the domination of our economy and politics by big business and corporate-led globalization, redirecting our bloated military spending to human needs, supporting single-payer health care, enacting meaningful campaign finance reform, making environmental protection a priority, ending capital punishment, stopping arms transfers to repressive regimes, opposing the Israeli occupation, etc. Fear that the Greens might get this 5% may have been what motivated the Democrats’ last-minute anti-Nader campaign even more than the fear that Nader votes might actually throw the election to Bush.
Unfortunately, following the debacle of the national election of 2000, rather than learn their lesson and move to the left, the Democrats moved still further to the right, with the majority of Democratic senators voting with their Republican counterparts in October 2002 to authorize the fraudulently-elected president with the unprecedented authority to invade an oil-rich country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United states. On the House side, most Democrats voted against authorizing the war on Iraq, but the most important Democratic leaders sided with Bush as well. Though the party not controlling the White House normally picks up seats in mid-term Congressional elections, as a result of this betrayal of the vast majority of Democratic voters who opposed the invasion, millions stayed home, resulting in the Republicans regaining control of the Senate and increasing their majority in the House.
Then, in 2004, as their candidate for president, the Democratic Party ended up nominating Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who – along with his running mate North Carolina senator John Edwards – were among the minority of Congressional Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq, an abomination which even Gore strenuously opposed. Not surprisingly, even with a far weaker showing by Nader or the Green Party, the Democrats lost again.
The Bottom Line
The reality is that, if one looks at voting as strategic choice, it almost always makes sense to vote Democratic.
There will always be people who can’t vote for certain Democrats on principle. I could never, for example, cast my ballot for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, because such people clearly have no respect for the most fundamental principles of the post-WWII international legal system or the U.S. Constitution and demonstrated a willingness to lie about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and sacrifice the lives of over 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for the sake of oil and empire. Despite what happened in 2000, then, I could not vote for John Kerry in 2004. Nor can I ever vote for Dianne Feinstein, my Democratic senator. Some people have higher thresholds, some lower.
One can also make the case that voting is a sacred right that should not be exercised for strategic reasons, but on moral principles alone. The suffragettes and civil rights advocates who risked their lives for the right to vote were not doing so simply to be able to cast their ballot for a lesser evil. There is a related argument that it is morally and psychologically damaging to compromise one’s principles by voting for someone whose policies you don’t agree with against someone whose policies you do believe in; that it is important to vote your hopes rather than your fears.
However, the idea that one can “teach the Democrats a lesson” by voting for a progressive third party or not voting at all and thereby allowing Republicans to win just doesn’t seem to work.
Also important is that fact that, though the differences between Democrats and Republicans may be relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, the power of U.S. government is so great that even small differences can make huge differences in the lives of many millions of people. Just ask the people of Iraq and other countries who have suffered so much as a result of those of us who thought we could “teach the Democrats a lesson” ten years ago. Those of us here in the United States who are relatively privileged and secure need to be sensitive about how our decisions effect those less privileged and more vulnerable, both those in this country and the billions of others around the world.
The reality is that, despite Gore’s failings and the fact that it seemed to make a lot of sense at the time, the world would have been a much better place had so many people like myself not supported Nader in his 2000 campaign. As journalist Robert Parry observed, a Gore presidency “would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored. It may be a bitter irony that the one major political accomplishment of America’s Green Party will be that it helped condemn the world to environmental disaster.”
So, as reluctant I was to say it, I strongly encouraged those in states and districts with close elections – if they could stomach it – to vote Democratic in the mid-term election earlier this month. Unfortunately, polls indicate that millions of voters who otherwise would have voted Democratic stayed at home or voted for minor parties. Right-wing Republican Mark Kirk won the Illinois Senate race with barely 48% of the vote due to the strong showing by Green Party nominee which ate into what would have otherwise been a victory for Democratic nominee Alexi Giannoulias. A number of House races were lost as a result of progressive challengers as well.
Unfortunately, the pundits are now pressuring the Democrats to “move to the center” rather than re-energize their base. Once again, “teaching the Democrats a lesson,” as appealing as the sentiment may be for progressive voters, simply work.
However one voted in the mid-term elections, it is critically important to fight like hell to make sure the remaining Democrats stop selling out to the militarists and the corporations. With only a few conscientious exceptions, Democratic officials have rarely led when it comes to progressive positions; they have generally had to be dragged kicking and screaming by their constituents. We were able to force many Democratic elected officials to move to the left on civil rights, Vietnam, Central America, nuclear power, women’s rights, South Africa, East Timor, globalization, Iraq, gay rights, and other issues.
And here is the difference: Democrats, if pressed sufficiently, can change.
Republicans, by contrast, are hopeless.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

QUESTION
Dear Irene,
My 7-year-old daughter, soon to be 8, seems to be having some problems, and I am not sure how concerned I should be. I have two daughters; the younger one is 6. Even while writing this I am thinking, they are babies, but I do have concerns about my older daughter.
She doesn’t seem to have any close friends. She is in second grade, and no one ever invites her over, and there is no one she has invited over. When we go out in the community, kids know her, and say hi to her. She has labeled herself as a tomboy and seems intent on following that stereotype. Please believe this is nothing that we have put on her. I think that she is only trying to distance herself from her sister.
My 6-year-old is a social butterfly. The phone rings a lot for her, and she has been invited to several, small group sleepovers and parties. My older daughter only gets invited if the entire class is invited. She has never had a sleepover. She has latched on to my younger daughter and er friends.
She seems completely unaware of society’s rules, or does not care at all. I believe it is already affecting how the girls in her grade see her. I don’t want her to be something she is not, but I don’t want her to ostracize herself at such a young age. She is smart, creative, artistic, and sensitive, while my younger daughter is more “la, la, la.” Please advise on how I can help her, with out making her feel like something is wrong with her. Should I take her to counseling?
Signed,
Fran
ANSWER
Dear Fran,
Like adults, children differ in their interests and friendship styles. Some kids are people magnets; others prefer more alone time or time with siblings. All children, even siblings, differ from one another in the rates at which they mature.
If your daughter is happy and seems to be doing well in school, I’m not sure that anything is “broken” simply because she is a tomboy or because she likes playing with your younger daughter and her friends. Although she is chronologically older, since she is less outgoing by nature, she is probably picking up social skills from her younger sister (the social butterfly) that will serve her well.
Whenever a parent is worried about a child, it is prudent to talk to someone objective who has more experience with children that age than you do. In this case, I would ask for a meeting with your daughter’s teacher and see if she can allay your anxieties. I’m sure if she thinks something is wrong, she will let you know.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Irene
Have a question about female friendships? Send it to The Friendship Doctor.
Irene S. Levine, PhD is a freelance journalist and author. She holds an appointment as a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. Her recent book about female friendships, Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend, was published by Overlook Press. She also blogs about female friendships at The Friendship Blog and at PsychologyToday.com.

This Blogger’s Books from
Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend
by Irene S. Levine
Schizophrenia For Dummies
by Jerome Levine, Irene S. Levine

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“I’ve been fired a lot. I’m very proud of it,” says Darlene Hunt as she sips a decaf coffee, her red ringlet hair poking out from underneath a conductor’s hat. “I was [a writer on 90210] for half the first season and they brought in a new showrunner and I just got a call–along with several other people–that I was fired.”
On a warm October day, Hunt and I are finishing up lunch at Ford’s Fueling Station, around the corner from the Culver City office where Hunt, the creator of Showtime’s The Big C, is due to return in a few minutes to begin fleshing out the hit show’s second season with Jenny Bicks, the program’s showrunner.
“It’s funny because the woman who fired me I saw at a dinner hosted by People magazine for visionaries or whatever and she was in the valet line. The thing is, I’ve never been that passionate about writing on other peoples’ shows anyway because I feel like my voice is pretty strong. That’s the [voice] I want to write to, so believe me, I was happy to go. So, anyway I saw her in the valet line and I said, ‘[Hey!] You fired me!’ She was a little unnerved. She threw out a few excuses–contradictory excuses–about why she fired me but the truth is, I truly, truly was not bitter or angry at all. It was the best thing for me at the time.”
Hunt sets down her cup, her piercing blue eyes looking through me. “But for the record, when you fire someone, you should look them in the eye.”
Like Cathy, the lead character (played insuperably by Laura Linney) on The Big C, Hunt’s voice has a humorous midwestern frankness about it. Candid about her career and all of the stops along the way, the Northwestern University theatre graduate is remarkably open about all of the many hats she wears and how they all fit into an increasingly busy life: in addition to working on The Big C, Hunt is developing a pilot for Fox about a gay and straight best friend who are running a charity organization, a film with Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh and Julianne Robinson attached–and there are who two daughters, the second of which was born shortly after the writer’s room for The Big C was opened.
“I mean, thank God my show got picked up in cable because I can do anything for five months,” which is about the time it takes to produce a full season. Time is an important factor in Hunt’s life, not least because the character she’s created only has so long left to live and Hunt must weave together her life in a way that is compelling for viewers. Even now, on the eve of the season finale, Hunt is dismayed by critics who were upset that Cathy spends most of the first season hiding the fact of her terminal cancer from her family.
“I had a lunch with a cancer early on, when I was just starting to write the pilot, and he shared with me that he first got the news he didn’t want to tell anybody because he had to overcome these feelings of embarrassment and shame that he’d gotten cancer,” Hunt explains. “And just as far as storytelling goes, I like that idea to just give a little conflict for us to write against something, that she’s going through something that no one knows about. And on top of that, this particular person, Cathy, you know I think she wants to [keep it secret] because she feels that she’s given a lot of things away, rightly or wrongly, and I think she just wants to hold onto it for herself, like “I’m gonna keep this.”
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Hunt moved to Los Angeles in 1997 as to pursue a career as an actor, but her work as a stand up comedian while studying at Northwestern led her to performing as a stand-up comic in Los Angeles, working days at Yankee Doodle’s on the Santa Monica Promenade, and later, at Starbucks.
“I’ve had many, many crappy jobs,” she says dryly. “The thing about a crappy job is that you meet people. I mean, a guy I was working at Starbucks with was like, ‘Do you wanna be my improv partner for this TV show I’ve been asked to do?’ Like, sure! And also by having a crappy job, then you’re always inspired so that [in the future] you don’t have to have that crappy job.”
At night, she would perform as a stand-up comic, which brought her to both the Aspen and Chicago Comedy Festivals, and while it increased her profile, Hunt eventually found that stand-up to be less than rewarding. “I don’t think I ever got comfortable with the back and forth with the audience,” she explains. “I would memorize my script or performance and I would be a little nervous if I got heckled–like ‘Don’t heckle me, I’m not good at comebacks!’”
Still, she credits the experience for honing her writing and skills, as well as developing the point of view that would come across in her later work, like her first break into writing for television. “I did a promo for NBC and they called me and were like, ‘You’re really funny improvising, would you come in and write promos for us?’”
It was a story arch that would lead Hunt to write for Will & Grace, Good Morning, Miami, and 90210, while also working as an actress with credits on TV’s Greek and Hung, and in the films I Heart Huckabees and Idiocracy.
“I am [still an actor] as I am available,” Hunt says. “I mean, [to act on The Big C] would be a dream to just combine everything that I do. But the reality is that once you get a show up and running, it’s so exhausting and time-consuming that I’m not desperate to be on it. It would be hard wearing both those hats at the same time.”
Instead Hunt, and the team of six writers who work on The Big C, focus on creating the sharpest lines they can, “monitor[ing] the light and dark [moments] to make [the audience] laugh and cry in every episode.”
“From now on, I’m only having desserts and liquor,” Cathy announces, a line from the first episode oft repeated in promos and cocktail bars. “It was actually a different line in the pilot and one of our network executives, I think at a table read, said ‘I think we can come up with something funnier, Darlene,’ and I was like, ‘Oh! I love my line.’” And we came up with a line that gets quoted a lot more often.”
That refined frankness is something Hunt identifies with herself. “A lot of my mother-angst I sort of poured into [Cathy],” she explains. “For better or worse, I am trying to get better about saying what I think instead of writing about it later so there’s a lot of me.
There is also a lot of her in the show’s other unique, and slightly controversial, characters: Cathy’s homeless-by-choice, non-consumer brother, Sean (played by John Benjamin Hickey), is one.
“I tried to convince my husband at one point to be a non-consumer at one point and buy nothing new because I saw some families on the news who’d done that. And then I was like, ‘Well, maybe we can just do it for a month.’ And then I just forgot about it,” Hunt says. “I am concerned about the environment and I feel that his arguments are so valid and real and if we could just stop producing and tearing things up it’d be great. But then, you know, on the flip side I just go into Cathy-mode and think ‘whatever, who has the time [to be a non-consumer]?’”
“But the homeless thing really bugged people for a long time,” Hunt muses. “But I think because I knew somebody that who had a brother [who was non-consumer] it just wasn’t that strange to me that someone would choose to live on the streets.”
Reflecting one’s life and choices, is at the end of the day, the major theme of The Big C, and that is bound to court controversy in a 24-hour infotainment culture such as ours, but for Hunt that is part of what makes it also rewarding.
“I love going to The Big C’s Facebook page because the only people who go there love the show and, by and large, say nice things,” she jokes. But some of my favorite things that people said on there were, ‘I’m inspired.’ ‘It made me think about my life and I’m gonna make some changes.’”
I had a hand in that,” she says sincerely. “A little hand in somebody having a little light bulb moment.”
The season finale ofThe Big C airs tonight at 10:30 PT/9:30 CT on Showtime.

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I usually hate gimmicky restaurants. Garlic ice cream at The Stinking Rose: Meh. Eating a bird with my fingers at Medieval Times: No, thanks. Dining in the dark: Maybe. Blind servers bring you food in a completely dark restaurant in order to heighten the receptivity of your other senses… better hearing, better touching, better tasting. A gimmick with a purpose: Intriguing.
I heard about it a year ago but scoffed at the prices. $100 for a three-course prix fixe seemed a little crazy, even for LA. But… the Groupon machine reeled me in. Marketing Trickery! Bah! They offered up a two-for-one deal that my frugal brain could rationalize. So, I called up my trusty dinner companion and went for it.
We walked into a weird empty bar that ached of loneliness like most empty bars usually do. The entrance to Opaque hid in the back, a tiny hostess at a podium the only clue. She sat us in a booth veiled in hanging beads and gave us a menu, a menu that robbed the restaurant of its credibility. I immediately spotted a grammatical error in the first paragraph. They meant to write ‘as’ but added an extra ‘s.’ Come on! Who doesn’t spot an ‘ass’ in their menu?
Letting it go (because that’s what I’m trying to do these days), we happily ordered our salad, entree, and dessert right there plus a glass of wine each. We then bid adieu to grammatical errors as Margarita, our server clad in all black and a pair of goggles, guided us through the darkness. I felt like I was entering a haunted house.
As soon as we sat down, I wanted to leave. The room was dark. Really dark — nary a crack of light from any tiny corner or doorway. Nothing. You can see nothing. My first thought: cockroaches! I have an unnatural fear of any bug that can survive a nuclear holocaust, and it killed me to not be able to flick on the light for a quick second to just check. I felt panic rising, and I wanted to jet out of there. But not only could I not run away in the dark, I wasn’t about to waste my Groupon.
The restaurant ran just like any normal one. Several people dined around us, but we had no idea where they were. Very quickly we realized that our other senses did hop into overdrive. I was aware of all the other voices and especially the music. It was upbeat house music, but I really thought a blind pianist would have rounded out the theme nicely.
The food was almost laughable. I am a vegetarian, and the one option for my kind was a plate of rigatoni in red sauce — it tasted just like my mom used to make by tossing boxed noodles with a jar of Ragu. For $100. Ha! I’m actually angry at the owner for getting away with this. If your sense of taste is heightened at this place, I don’t understand why they don’t place more importance on the things you’re tasting. The salads and the desserts were better, and we ate most of them with our bare hands. Salad is just too elusive to eat with a fork in the dark.
Ironically, the darkness was eye-opening. I noticed I was acting differently knowing nobody was watching. I slouched and sat with my forehead on the table just because it was comfortable. It’s very freeing to feel that nobody is judging you.
Margarita agreed. A bubbly little woman, she boisterously announced where she was putting our drinks and our plates and how she was pouring our water. Blind for 12 years, she said she loves working in the dark because there she feels she can truly be herself. Under normal circumstances, she’s hindered by all the eyes on her, watching to make sure she can step onto the bus or cross the street alone. There, in the dark, she can zip around and do anything, wrong or right, and nobody will know.
The darkness was also sexy. To truly take advantage of it, I only recommend visiting Opaque if you are interested in your dining partner (or if you like his personality but think he’s ugly). In order to share food, you have to use your hands to scoop a good bite onto the fork, reach out to feel his beard, outline his lips, and then actually feed him. It can get pretty erotic. I stopped at the beard petting, but I imagine some people get all 9 Weeks up in there.
Overall, I recommend the experience for a special occasion or a sexy date. Not a first date. Nobody is worth $250 on a first date. On the other hand, this is LA; I’m sure many girls are whisked away on private jets on first dates. Not me. But that’s ok. I have Groupons.
Total for two people: $150 ($250 without Groupon)
Opaque is at 2020 Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica
Opaque’s Website
Margarita, our lovely server.
The disappointing rigatoni.
Me trying to hide my scorn for grammatical errors in menus.

Follow Laurenne Sala on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/laurenne

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Climate
hawks are floundering after this year’s election. A climate bill couldn’t get through Congress even when it was controlled by the Democrats, thanks to Senate dysfunction and general
idiocy. Now, with the GOP and Tea Party ascendant, the chances of passing curbs on greenhouse gases anytime soon are zip to zilch.
So what now, the hawks are wondering?
For the moment, forget about carbon caps and start thinking about cervical caps — and the Pill, IUDs, and Depo-Provera.
Next week, a panel of experts will start meeting to determine whether health insurers should be required to cover the full cost of contraceptives. At issue is whether birth control is “preventive” medicine, which the new health-care law requires insurers to cover free of charge, without co-pays. The Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to make a final call on that question in August 2011.
Sounds like a no-brainer, but ultra-right-wing groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council are rallying in opposition, and they may have more allies in the newly conservatized Congress.
It should be obvious why climate hawks need to care about making birth control widely accessible: fewer unwanted pregnancies will mean fewer unwanted births (not to mention fewer abortions), and, ultimately, fewer greenhouse gases.
You might think birth control is already so prevalent in the U.S. that covering it fully under insurance wouldn’t make a difference. But you’d be wrong. Consider, for starters, that about half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned; that leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Cost can be a real deterrent to contraceptive use, even among women with health insurance, as the co-pays tend to cost $10 to $50 a month. 34 percent of women voters have struggled with the cost of prescription birth control, according to a recent poll conducted for Planned Parenthood. And a survey [PDF] conducted last year for the Guttmacher Institute found that 8 percent of American women sometimes didn’t use birth control in order to save money; that includes 18 percent of women on the Pill who used it inconsistently in order to reduce costs.
Even beyond the prospect of reducing CO2 emissions, there are great reasons for climate hawks to get involved in this fight. Stepping out of the climate/energy silo would help them forge alliances and generate goodwill with other progressive groups. Unlike conservatives, who are great at sticking together and pushing an overarching narrative, the left tends to splinter into little interest groups that don’t rally to support each other’s causes. Here’s one way to start changing that dynamic.
And this issue is a clear political winner. 88 percent of American voters support women’s access to contraception, according to a 2009 poll conducted by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. That includes 80 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of self-identified “pro-lifers.”
And on the specific question of insurance company coverage, the numbers are almost as high: 71 percent of American voters believe insurers should be required to fully cover prescription contraception, according to a Planned Parenthood poll, including 72 percent of Republican women and 77 percent of Catholic women (no matter what their bishops say).
Planned Parenthood is making a big push on this issue, along with other groups focused on women’s issues and reproductive health. Climate hawks should step outside their comfort zone and get on board.
Reprinted with permission from Grist.org.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Having written about animal remains last week and U.S. technology failures the week before, I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to write about anything scientific or technological this week. I feel that too much focus in one subject area can get boring — for me and my readers — and I’ve vowed not to do it.
I had every intention of holding firm to that vow, too. I honestly did, until I stumbled across a section of the BBC News website that had the three most incredible headlines I’ve ever read: “Cricket earns big testicles title,” “Super squid sex organ discovered” and “Uglier fish have ‘better sperm.’”
Now, seeing just one of those headlines by itself wouldn’t get me too excited. I’d read the story, sure, but I probably wouldn’t try to fashion a column out of it. But when you place those three headlines together, it makes it virtually impossible for me not to comment in some way.
It’s not that I’m necessarily fascinated by animal testicles and sex organs — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but, come on, if you don’t find those headlines hysterically funny, I’m probably not the columnist you’re looking for. Try George Will. I’m told he rarely discusses animal penises these days. I’m not saying he’s trying to run from his past or anything, but I’m not not saying it, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, back to cricket balls. I was a little shocked when I saw the headline saying that crickets have the world’s largest testicles, because I’ve held a cricket up next to mine, and I dare say they were larger than the entire cricket. Had I known there was a size competition going on and my rivals were going to be insects, I definitely would have entered.
Upon reading the story, though, I learned I would have lost handily. Apparently the competition measured testicles as a percentage of overall body mass, and one species of bushcricket had ones that made up nearly 14 percent of its weight. To put that in human terms, according to one of the researchers who weighed the testicles, “It’s like having testes the combined mass of 11 bags of sugar.”
That means, since I buy my sugar at CostCo, where the smallest bag is 50 pounds, that my testicles would have to weigh about 550 pounds to compete with those of the bushcricket. I don’t know what that would be as a percentage of my overall body mass, but it’s probably more than 14 percent.
Moving on to squid sex organs, the story talked about how scientists caught a male squid that was still alive when it was hauled onto the boat. The body of the squid was cut open, and then, according to one scientist, “We witnessed an unusual event.”
It seems the squid’s penis, which was only slightly elongated prior to the animal being sliced open, “suddenly started to erect,” eventually growing as long as the entire squid. As the story dryly noted, “The squid’s sexual agitation caught the researchers by surprise.”
You think? Because I’m not really sure. Why else would scientists deliberately slice open a squid while it was still alive? I’m guessing one of the scientists had heard that squids are the cephalopod equivalent of Marv Albert, into all sorts of weird, masochistic sex, and he wanted to see if it was true. Well, consider the rumors verified.
Lastly, let’s chat for awhile about fish sperm, shall we? Researchers in Australia did a study on guppies that found that drab ones had faster-swimming sperm than their brightly colored counterparts. The reason for this, the scientists theorized, was that the attractive ones expended their energy trying to look fancy, at the expense of their virility. A similar phenomenon can be seen in human metrosexuals.
The problem for the drab ones, though, was that they had a harder time attracting mates, a problem they solved by engaging in non-consensual or “sneak” mating — essentially raping the female guppies — a practice the scientists witnessed without trying to intervene or call the police.
So, to recap, scientists around the world have been weighing animal testicles, slicing open squids to ogle their penises, and condoning the rape of defenseless female guppies.
Thus, I issue this warning: If there are scientists living in your neighborhood, make sure their names are on a registry, and insist that they go door to door to alert everyone to their presence. We can’t be too careful with sexual deviants like that.
Todd Hartley supports mandatory minimum sentencing for all scientists. To read more or leave a message, please visit zerobudget.net.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In Puebla Mexico, the newly dubbed Ciudad de las ideas, (City of Ideas) the third annual Festival Internacional de Mentes Brillantes (International Festival of Great Minds) took place this past weekend. Along with two other theologians, I was assigned a daunting and fascinating task. On one side stood Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Michael Shermer – respectively, the biologist and scourge of religion, the science writer and the editor of Skeptic magazine, to argue about whether the universe has a purpose. In my corner of the sky were William Lane Craig, scholar and author, and Doug Geivatt, author and professor at Biola University. We said yes, they said no.
Now you might be thinking the proper answer is “no one can know.” That might be so, but none of us was willing to let it rest there. At first glance we could all agree that the universe has a purpose the way the kitchen has a meal — it offers the ingredients. You can make purpose in your life from the raw materials that the universe gives you. But the question was not plural — not, does the universe contains purposes, but does the universe have a purpose?
The festival brings together thinkers and writers from all over the world. How eclectic? At dinner the first night I sat across from David Buss, expert in human sexuality, Phil Zombardo, psychologist who has written extensively about evil and heroism and at my side was Henry Markram a scientist from Lausanne who is painstakingly building a computer model of the brain. He spoke captivatingly about the degree to which our senses are only the beginning of interpreting the reality we see; when someone receives a retinal transplant, they first see nothing, then white and only gradually, when the brain begins to interpret the signals, do they see shapes, colors – the world. So by recreating the brain, building it from the ground up, Markram and his team hope to understand how we see the world. There was much more to the conversation, but he stayed away from the purpose of the universe. We agreed that the brain, however, might be the universe’s way of understanding itself.
The festival is the remarkable brainchild of Andreas Roemer, who in addition to his other accomplishments is an entrepreneur of ideas. He succeeded in interesting Ricardo Salinas, the businessman who is one of the wealthiest men in the world, in his dream; not only did Salinas underwrite the festival, he attended all the events, including the meals, and appeared to be genuinely interested in the exchanges. It seemed to me an ideal collaboration of vision and resource.
And the “universe” debate? Everyone was vigorous but it was mostly high toned. It is true that Richard Dawkins (who had given a witty and combative talk the day before ridiculing religion) derided people of faith as childish and lazy, while scientists rolled up their sleeves to figure out the world, but it was in the larger context of religion being not thoughtful but wishful. He also, along with Shermer and Ridley, made the point that the ascription of purpose to the universe from our little corner could be seen as arrogant. (More in a moment on how the remarkable Sean Stephenson turned that argument on its head.) Shermer, characteristically forceful, gave practical advice on how to inject purpose into one’s life without the unnecessary illusion of religious belief. Ridley was urbane and persuasive, arguing that the existence of mystery was not equal to purpose and the fact that there are things we cannot explain certainly does not require God or faith to rush in and fill the gap.
Michio Kaku, the physicist and futurist, Amir Aczel, mathematician and writer, Jerry Friedman, Nobel laureate physicist and Daniel Schacter, cognitive scientist and memory expert, all weighed in. Essentially they argued no one could know, and it depended on how one defined purpose.
My own argument was first, that the universe is delicately poised on nothingness: change one of many cosmological constants by just a fraction and our world could not exist. Moreover, it is remarkable that the universe has laws we can actually grasp. Indeed, the very practice of science presupposes there is some purpose, aim or meaning to all this. How can we investigate or understand nonsense or meaninglessness? I also argued that reason is not the only tool for investigation of reality. Our most basic beliefs, whether life is worth living, should we trust, are the rock upon which our reason is built, not the product of it.
My compatriots, Craig and Geivett, hammered home the point that if there is a God the universe has a meaning, but if not, we would agree with our opponents that it was empty and doomed. They also carefully marshaled arguments for why God was the best explanation of the phenomenon of life. These included everything from the mystery of consciousness (how do you get self awareness if everything is just matter, stuff, the same as a rock) to C.S. Lewis’ claim that if we have yearnings that are not satisfied in this world, it is possible that is because this world is not the only one.
Sean Stephenson, a speaker at the conference who has struggled with tremendous physical disabilities in his life to work in The White House and become a renowned inspiration speaker, asked a question from the floor. Is it not arrogant, he said, to imagine that something as puny as a human being can have a purpose, but to assert that something as grand as the universe cannot? Nobody answered this powerful point and we were delighted to have such an eloquent ally.
Who won the debate? Well, you can judge it for yourself now that it is posted on the festival site and on You Tube. The short answer is – the audience. It involved people who care passionately, believe deeply and expressed their beliefs clearly. Bravo to the festival, its organizers and attendees. Universe aside, it more than validated its purpose.

This Blogger’s Books from
Why Faith Matters
by David J. Wolpe
Teaching Your Children About God: A Modern Jewish Approach
by David J. Wolpe

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Women have broken through some of the hardest glass ceilings. We’ve had women explore the depths of outer space, a woman run for President of the United States, and we’ve had a woman serving as Speaker of the House, a position that is just two heartbeats away from the Presidency. Many consider politics as one of the last bastions of the boys club and thankfully — although slowly — women are finally making real inroads.
But there is another boys club that until recently many people either didn’t know about or talk about. It came as a big shock to me to discover that gender inequality still prevails in the medical sciences when it comes to research and treatment of some illnesses. I consider myself a well-informed person, but I only became aware of this fact when learning about women and heart disease, and I was stunned.
Heart disease is the number one killer of women in our country, more than all cancers combined. Today, heart disease kills more women than men. When I started to think about this, it was not surprising. More women are taking on the stresses of juggling household demands, of being wife, mother and breadwinner. All of these modern day strains add to higher blood pressure, lack of physical activity, quick and unhealthy food choices, and weight gain — all major contributors to heart disease.
Despite the statistics, for years, most of the medical community has been treating our mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and friends inadequately because they based their treatment protocols on research outcomes done mostly on male patients. Cardiologists treating women certainly intended to provide their patients with quality care, but they could only depend on the research that was available and known to them.
In 1991, Dr. Bernadine Healy, the first woman director of the US National Institute of Health, studied the gender bias in the treatment of coronary heart disease. Termed the Yentl syndrome (a surprising coincidence), the study revealed that “once a woman showed that she was just like a man by having severe coronary artery disease, she was then treated as a man would be.” This would make sense if women’s hearts were biologically the same as men’s hearts — but they aren’t! And because of the biological differences, heart attacks present differently in women than they do in men. Instead of the classic attack — clutching a painful chest — women often have indigestion and fatigue. Plus, women are more likely than men to develop micro-vascular disease, which affects the heart’s smallest arteries.
We can no longer afford to naively assume that this is only a man’s disease — it’s now a woman’s epidemic. We may be almost 50 years behind in our research knowledge that informs diagnosis and treatment regimens for women with heart disease, but we are finally starting to close that gap. The Women’s Heart Center at Cedars Sinai Medical Institute is helping to lead the way in this effort as one of few institutions in the country on the cutting edge of this research. The Center is led by Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, a Harvard Medical School graduate. Dr. Merz has published over 180 scientific publications and more than 200 abstracts and has received numerous awards recognizing her as one of the field’s leading experts on preventive cardiology, women’s heart disease and mental stress. It was clear to me that I had to get involved when I heard that this brilliant woman was doing lifesaving work that would ultimately impact women all over the world — right in my own backyard!
But it’s all of our responsibilities to be advocates on this issue and to demand that gender inequality, especially when it comes to life and death issues, is not acceptable. This is a call to action and I hope you all will join me in supporting the new and vital work that is being done on women’s heart health. If you want to learn more, visit: CrowdRise.com/barbrastreisand

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

US citizens generally dictate things from overseas be “Americanized” before they’ll accept it, from turning Ringu into The Ring, to turning the Red Baron into a frozen pizza! Opting for something that needs no translation, the guy behind The Pan-American.
Inspired by the wide-ranging cultural/culinary influences of his parents, the Agua Dulce dude dedicated his latest endeavor to exclusively continental flavors, serving tastes from “Havana to New Orleans” and “the Yukon to the Yucatan” in a Miami Vice-steezed space rocking tropical wooden shutters in a Caribbean aqua hue, a sparkling tiled bar, and a magenta & lime LED-lit wall sporting Braille-like bumps, which begs the question: who cares how Braille is lit?
Incorporating different regional flavors into each dish, apps kick off with white northern/turtle bean soup w/ pickled red onion & Canadian bacon, mint-/thyme-seasoned lamb meatballs with chipotle yogurt dip, and mint-horseradish Mojito-sauced Gigante shrimp that’re grilled then chilled (so feel free to season ‘em with some Guantam-Old Bay). Mains follow suit, with lunchtime sandos including a lime-herb mayo’d take on the BLT that replaces the B with chicken cracklings, pickled okra shrimp po’ boys, and a Kentucky bourbon ham/roasted pork Cuban Club; dinner, meanwhile, involves blue-corn-crusted monkfish tacos, buttermilk battered fried chicken w/ saffron-scented chorizo rice, and a bone-in Tomahawk rib-eye sided with scalped scalloped vegetables.
Should you need brunching options, they’re covering the bases with Caribbean squash pancakes w/ VT maple syrup and Canadian bacon, and the oxtail & jalapeno-cheese cornbread Pan-American Benedict, which counter-intuitively betrayed its muffins because they were English.
Soft opens this week: 202 Mott St, btwn Spring and Kenmare; Nolita; 212.925.9225

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Sunday’s New York Times, focused on national deficits, introduces its section on Social Security with the statement that, “Social Security is projected to run a deficit by 2015…” There follows a menu of Social Security proposed reductions to avert such a dreadful outcome. You’ll be relieved to hear that the statement is incorrect. But, then you’ll be concerned that the media, deciders and opinion makers and the public, used to depending upon the Times for solid information, will consider the budget debate with that major distortion in mind.
The facts: In 2015, the Social Security trustees’ latest report projects program outlays will exceed Social Security payroll tax revenues slightly. But Social Security has two other dedicated income streams. In 2015 one source — taxes on the benefits received by high earners — just about cancels that difference. The third stream — interest on money borrowed by the Treasury from the Social Security Trust fund — would add $154 billion in revenues. So, official projections for 2015 show Social Security generating a surplus of $151 billion.
Some pooh-pooh that interest owed by Treasury as IOUs. But IOUs (more formally called “bonds” or “debt obligations”) are what public and private trust funds hold. And among those securities, U.S. Treasury obligations are bought by other nations’ central banks and private investment funds because U.S. Treasuries are so highly valued around the world. Those Treasury obligations came into the Social Security Trust Fund because, since 1983, Treasury borrowed the portion of Social Security income left over after the program paid all benefits when due. Those surpluses and the taxes from high earners were a purposeful part of the 1983 Social Security legislation, designed to provide a long-term cushion for the program and to assure the public that Social Security was socking away funds to supplement payroll tax revenues when needed.
Those surpluses now total some $2.5 trillion and will grow to about $4.2 trillion by 2024 enabling the payment of full benefits through 2037. .
Social Security participants have already paid for those benefits. So any Treasury borrowing is, not to pay for Social Security, but to repay the borrowing from the Social Security trust fund; that was used largely to pay for the unfunded Iraq and Afghanistan wars and offset the Bush tax cuts. But for that borrowing, income and corporate taxes would have been higher and/or U.S. payments for non-Social Security activities would have been smaller.
It would seem fair that the beneficiaries of those wars — certainly not the men and women who waged them, nor their families — but rather the contractors who made out like bandits (which some were) and the general public and corporations spared higher taxes — should replace those funds. That’s an entirely different allocation of future burdens than cutting Social Security as so widely proposed in discussions of deficit reduction.
The New York Times’ error was not some minor or a technical glitch but a mistake that distorts the whole exercise the Times put before its readers to decide how to reduce projected deficits.
Polls repeatedly show popular support for modest increases in the payroll tax, proposals absent from the Times budget exercise. One very gradual change starting in 2015, after the recession is over, would increase the payroll tax by one-twentieth of one percent for both employees and employers for twenty years. That boost would banish more than two-thirds of Social Security’s small long-term shortfall. In combination with raising the taxable amount of wages to its historic level, would make Social Security solvent for 75 years. Both poll very favorably.
Preserving, and indeed improving, Social Security should be a top domestic priority. Social Security, the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program, is the mainstay of our retirees, providing the largest source of retirement income. The recession decimated private pensions and savings devices like 401(k)s and IRAs, making Social Security even more vital to seniors, the disabled and their families — over 50 million people.
It makes no sense for Republicans to adamantly insist on extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, at the cost of $4 trillion, while reducing the most important income support program for the rest of the population. And despite reassurances that current Social Security recipients would be unaffected, reducing cost-of-living adjustments, COLA, starting in 2012, is a central feature of such reductions
We should not permit the specter of future deficits to further distract our attention and efforts from the most urgent problems millions of Americans already face — the lack of jobs and work income, the loss of millions of homes to foreclosure, and the huge but avoidable non-benefit costs of our health care non-system.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com