Ouster By the People

washingtonpost.com: By Robert Dallek

Polls showing President Bush's approval ratings in the 20s and 30s and a New York Times survey last month reporting that people across the country are eager for an end to the current administration suggest that this nation has a problem it's going to have to live with for the next 17 months -- a failed presidency that won't reestablish its credibility with a national majority.

The political argument against Bush's continuing tenure is not frivolous. There are good reasons to see him as a failed president whose remaining time in office will be unproductive at best and destructive to the country's well-being at worst. But given the constitutional rules by which the presidency operates, there is no serious prospect of removing him from office.


A fine solution would be a Nixon-style resignation, but anyone who thinks that Bush and Vice President Cheney would give in to such a demand is dreaming. With no serious threat of impeachment looming, Bush and Cheney can afford to dismiss calls for their departure as the outcries of political extremists.

Dallek, a well-regarded Presidential historian, goes on to recommend a Constitutional amendment allowing for a recall procedure. His argument strikes me as a bit thin (and underbaked) for a change of this magnitude--and too late to deal with our current crisis. Further, if Congressional leaders are too feckless to initiate an impeachment inquiry under current circumstances, it is hard to understand why they would play the initiating role required under Dallek's proposal. But let me give him the final words:

Such an amendment would compel presidents to think about public support or government by consensus throughout their time in office, rather than as they approached reelection, particularly during a second term, when they would otherwise have no reason to fear voter repudiation.

Obviously, this proposal is not going to affect Bush's tenure. But his presidency is a troubling lesson in the malaise that can settle over the country during the lame-duck period of a stubborn chief executive. The nation should be able to remove by an orderly constitutional process any president with an unyielding commitment to failed policies and an inability to renew the country's hope.

The faux originalism of Justice Clarence Thomas

Slate Magazine: By Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan

It may be too much to expect any individual justice to be perfectly consistent from year to year and across a diverse array of cases. But here we have two public-school cases, both involving the rights of students, and both decided within days of each other, with Justice Thomas writing concurring opinions in each case, concurrences that no other justices joined. Don't you think that someone, somewhere, might have asked Thomas: 'Um, so you ask what the Framers would have thought about speech in school but not what they would have thought about voluntary integration. Why not?'...

Justice Thomas is not sticking with his professed commitment to originalism, and is certainly not living up to his newfound reputation as the high priest of principled originalism.

His recent opinions instead suggest that Thomas will use originalism where it provides support for a politically conservative result, even if that support is weak, as it is in the student-speech case. But where history provides no support, he's likely to ignore it altogether. If his cheerleaders believe otherwise, they should try to reconcile his opinions in the two school cases on originalist grounds. ...

For someone lauded as the originalist's originalist, this is a pretty weak showing. For someone looking to advance a conservative political agenda, however, these three cases constitute a sort of trifecta: Curtail voluntary integration and student rights while boosting the rights of corporations. Not a bad couple of weeks.

There is a lesson here for liberals. In two of the three most important cases of the past term, Thomas was forced to abandon originalism—his version of it, anyway—in order to reach a politically conservative result. In the other, his originalist reasoning was weak at best. What this suggests is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, originalism may not be co-extensive with the Republican Party platform after all. It also suggests, as we've written elsewhere, that liberals ought to begin to take a closer look at text and history themselves.

Tom Tancredo's final solution

Slate Magazine: By Timothy Noah

Addressing 30 people at the Family Table restaurant in Osceola, Iowa, the presidential candidate and Republican House member from Colorado [Tom Tancredo] outlined his highly original position on homeland defense:

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Because that is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. But as I say, if I am wrong, fine. … I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent or you will find an attack. There is no other way around it. There have got to be negative consequences for the actions they take. That's the most negative I can think of." ...

The problem with this hypothesis is that it wasn't the first time this imbecilic bigot displayed an inability to distinguish the relatively small group of active Islamist terrorists (numbering at best in the thousands) from the significantly larger group of people who are Muslims but do not intend to attack the United States (approximately 1 billion, representing about one-sixth of the world population, a few million of whom live here in the United States).

Where does the Republican Party find these people, who votes them into office, and why? Tancredo's is, of course, one of the loudest and most offensive voices in the immigration debate as well.

Letters on Noah Feldman

New York Times:

Noah Feldman’s highly personal essay raises many issues with which the American modern Orthodox Jewish community grapples as we seek to be faithful to our ancient tradition while engaging with the modern world (July 22). But it is the difficulty of this challenge that makes a person’s choices so critical, and it is with many of Feldman’s choices that we disagree.

It was Feldman’s choice to send as clear a signal as he could, through his marriage, that he was rejecting fundamental principles of the community. His expression of surprise at the reaction of the community’s institutions, including his alma mater, where he was taught these principles, strains credulity....

Feldman’s own life seems to be a testament to what can happen when one loses the balance between engaging with modern culture and a core commitment to Orthodox tradition and continuity, which so many others continue to maintain with dignity and much fulfillment.

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb
Executive Vice President
Orthodox Union

Today's NYT Sunday Magazine contains an interesting selection of letters responding to the Feldman article. There is no doubt that intermarriage (without conversion by the non-Jewish partner) is an exceptionally painful topic for many within the Jewish community, perhaps particularly so within Orthodoxy. There can be little doubt that a person with Feldman's education would be well aware that his "out-marriage" would be ill-received, at least on an "official" level, by his (former?) modern Orthodox community. That recognized, Rabbi Dr. Weinreb's assertion that "It was Feldman’s choice to send as clear a signal as he could, through his marriage, that he was rejecting fundamental principles of the community" instrumentalizes a fundamental life choice in a fashion reminiscent of the ghetto (in this case, a voluntary rather than externally -imposed one), and strangely innocent of the ways of the heart in contemporary, open American society. The invocation by one letter-writer of Fiddler on the Roof (based on Shalom Aleichem's tales of Jewish life in the 19th century Pale) further reinforces this spatial and temporal displacement from our contemporary circumstances.

Might it be just possible that Feldman married for love, and not "to send ...a signal"?

Noah Feldman

I finally got to read Noah Feldman's piece on the dilemmas of modern Orthodoxy in the Sunday Times Magazine of two weeks back. I find the published Orthodox critiques of Feldman hyperbolic and inconsistent with a fair reading of the piece. In fact, I believe they mischaracterize both what Feldman said, and his likely intent in saying it. (I am not taking a position on certain highly specific accusations against Feldman and the Times pending further factual clarification.) For now, I've taken down my postings of excerpts from two of the critical pieces; perhaps I can return to consider why they characterize Feldman as they do. But not right away.

Long time readers will know that my own Jewish identification and sympathies are post-denominational, with strong ties to the havurah movement. My patterns of belief and practice are not modern Orthodox, although I certainly have friends and persons I admire within that stream of Judaism. Feldman's exploration of the dilemmas of modern Orthodox identity resonated strongly with me, and have salience for more liberal-minded Jews, although the particulars take different form (including parallel tensions with our more secular-minded friends and colleagues, some of whom approach any religious sensibilities as atavistic and incomprehensible in thinking persons of any intelligence). Frankly, I think this is one of the more sympathetic and persuasive pieces by Feldman that I've read.

Rich Pickings: Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death

Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death - New York Times: By Frank Rich

It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, “A War We Just Might Win,” by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued “at least into 2008.”

The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, “No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference” in Iraq if there’s no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as “analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of “Mission Accomplished.” ...

A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on “Meet the Press” last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views “into the mouths of soldiers.” ...

Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week’s sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don’t know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman’s cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.

But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army’s most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what “supporting the troops” means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.

It is an astonishment to me that one who has written so often on this topic can continue to summon up the resources of passion and cogency so brilliantly displayed by Frank Rich in this (and so many other) columns. Thank you to a great journalist.

Mea Culpa

New York Times: By Michael Ignatieff

Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way. ...

As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people. ...

The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.

But they must decide, and soon. ...

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence relies.

A prudent leader will save democracies from the worst, but prudent leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. Democratic peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and — what goes with both — a willingness to risk failure. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, men and women who have not led charmed lives, who understand us as we really are, who have never given up hope and who know they are in politics to make their country better. These are the leaders whose judgment, even if sometimes wrong, will still prove worthy of trust.

Michael Ignatieff is a very intelligent and very eloquent man, and it was harder than usual to select excerpts (that is, to decide what not to select) from this piece. Ignatieff's was one of the voices that I listened to in the run-up to the Iraq war; he tries here to reflect upon and to learn from his mistakes of judgment in supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. It is a bit difficult to locate and generalize from his lessons in a fashion that applies as well to foresight as to hindsight, and that tells us more than not to trust leaders like W and his immediate cronies. It is not even clear, at least to this reader, how it applies to Tony Blair.

Ignatieff, at least, feels a responsibility to fess up and confront the bitter fruits of his earlier advocacy. Would that more of the folks running the Iraq War, and their customary retinue of ideological cheerleaders, felt some similar responsibility. The judgment of history is likely to weigh heavily on them, as well it should.

Books on Eisenhower, Marshall and MacArthur

New York Times Book Review: By Michael Beschloss

A lifelong Army man, Eisenhower had watched Marshall and MacArthur during their differences with Roosevelt and Truman. When he entered the White House in 1953, he was probably better schooled to know both the importance and the limits of military advice than any other president of his century.

Though the story does not appear in either book, in the late 1950s, Eisenhower’s generals — especially in the Air Force — were clamoring for a huge increase in the defense budget. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was declaring that his country was cranking out planes and nuclear missiles “like sausages” and would soon overtake the United States.

Knowing from secret intelligence that Khrushchev’s claims were a fraud, Eisenhower held down military spending. His fortitude opened him to charges from Senator John F. Kennedy and other politicians that he was tolerating a “missile gap” and leaving America undefended. But his decision probably meant the country was able to avoid the ruinous inflation that afflicted its economy in later years.

In case that does not persuade you of how important it is to have presidents with the wisdom and experience to know when, and when not, to take military advice, it is worth remembering that Ike Ike was the leader in 1954 who scoffed at warnings that the free world would be in peril unless we immediately went to fight in Vietnam.

California Restricts Voting Machines

New York Times:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California's secretary of state placed rigorous security conditions on voting equipment used in dozens of counties and limited the use of two of the most widely used machines statewide....

University of California computer experts found that voting machines sold by three companies -- Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems -- were vulnerable to hackers and that voting results could be altered.

Bowen said she had decertified the machines for use and then recertified them on the condition they meet her new security standards. When asked what would happen if the companies failed to do so, Bowen responded, ''I think they will.''...

The additional security requirements she imposed included banning all modum or wireless connections to the machines to prevent them from being linked to an outside computer or the Internet. Each machine that must be recertified also has a lengthy list of additional conditions it must meet, many of them highly technical.

She also required a full manual count of all votes cast on Diebold or Sequoia machines to ensure accuracy.

Bowen said the study revealed some vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to manipulate the systems ''with little chance of detection and with dire consequences.'' Her review also found that the machines posed problems for disabled voters.

Human organ transplant mediators nabbed on suspicion of tax evasion

Haaretz : By Eti Aflalo

Three suspects, including one lawyer, were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of dodging tax on income from mediating human organ transplants.

Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court Judge Mordechai Peled on Tuesday approved a Tax Authority request to arrest Yaron Yudokin, the manager of two companies that mediated human organ transplants and provided related services, among other things. Yudokin's alleged activities were based in China and the Philippines.

Hard to imagine that traders in human organs, of all people, might cheat on their taxes. What will the Chinese think?

Iran denounces Israel's 'horrific' human rights record

Haaretz : By The Associated Press

Iran denounced what it called Israel's horrific human rights record in a letter to the United Nations secretary-general while denying recent Israeli accusations of widespread rights abuses in the Islamic republic.

In the Iranian letter, obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday, the country's UN ambassador Mohammad Khazaee said his government would not respond to baseless allegations and distortions about the situation of human rights in Iran.

'Israel's futile attempt to raise allegations against others' human rights situation is nothing but a preposterous, and indeed tired, practice to distract the international community's attention from its shameful human rights record,' he said."

Repeating a historic failure

Haaretz: By Shlomo Avineri

What we are now seeing in the Gaza Strip - the inability of the two Palestinian factions to work together within an agreed-upon framework - is nothing but a repeat of this historic failure of the Palestinians. The current Palestinian excuse is that it is difficult to establish coherent political institutions in conditions of territorial fragmentation, refugees and Israeli occupation. All this is true, but irrelevant. Every national movement emerges in difficult conditions, which usually have to do with being under foreign rule. ... But this is the test of a national movement: whether it is able to transform a crisis into a historical moment of opportunity.

The Arab world as a whole does not excel at building institutions, and certainly not democratic ones. Thus far the Palestinian movement has not transcended this common Arab heritage. In the near future this will be its major test: If it does not become aware of the historical burden it is carrying on its shoulders and overcome it, the Palestinians' legitimate desire for independence will shatter on the rocks of the harsh internal reality that has accompanied their movement.

From a considerably longer article, citing chapter and verse.

Back to a corrupt occupation

Haaretz :By Amira Hass

"Under the auspices of what is called 'the peace process' between 1994 and 2001, and under the mantra of 'strengthening the Palestinian economy will advance peace,' many of the senior Fatah people and their circles hastened to make their personal fortunes. This might have been legitimate, of course, had the economic situation of a considerable part of the inhabitants of the occupied territories not become worse because of the Israeli restrictions on movement and had it not been a matter of money found for them in the coffers of Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, or in shadier ways.

All too often there was a direct correlation between the newly rich Palestinian's ties to members of a Palestinian security force and the latter's ties to the Israeli Shin Bet security service or senior people in Israel. Closeness of this kind (to senior Fatah members and the Shin Bet) provided movement permits, ensured 'family reunification,' and so on. These and other kinds of occupation-dependent protectionism led the Palestinians to make a connection between 'the peace process' and corruption.

The failures of 2006 and 2007 have not produced any proof, yet, that Fatah has learned the lesson. It has not distanced itself from protectionism and the system by which those close to the right people have convenient opportunities to get richer - in a sea of impoverishment.

As the Vision Fades, the Indignities Grow

New York Times: By KATIE HAFNER

As baby boomers grope their way through middle age, they are encountering the daily indignities that accompany a downward slide in visual acuity: trying to read a road map in a car at night; cellphones designed for 20-year-old eyes; the minuscule letters on a bottle of aspirin; nutrition information squeezed onto a bag of peanuts.

And unlike their parents and grandparents, they are not shy about expressing their displeasure, in some cases, taking matters into their own hands or prompting some companies to pay attention. ...

By their early 40s, many people are noticing the first symptoms of presbyopia, or “old man’s eyes.” As the eye ages, it is less able to take in light. At the same time, the lens inside the eye loses its flexibility. The result is blurred vision. ...

Craig Roessler, 60, a school superintendent in Silverton, Ore., said he prefers not to have to worry about losing his reading glasses and has devised a loose strategy. In addition to one pair of prescription reading glasses that he carries to work, he keeps eight or so pairs of inexpensive glasses scattered throughout his daily surroundings: two in his car, one in his golf bag, one in his desk drawer at the office and several around the house. He has also noticed that at the clubhouse of his golf club, a pair of reading glasses is tied to the computer terminal. ... And when reading glasses are not enough, out come the magnifying glasses and flashlights. ...

But Dr. Lewis has no such solution for the washing instructions on clothing labels. “You need an electron microscope to read them,” he said. ...

“There are efforts afoot to shift into next-generation technology, to produce more readable information, but it certainly isn’t happening overnight,” said Ray Bullman, executive vice president of the National Council on Patient Information and Education, a nonprofit organization based in Bethesda, Md.

Small print is not a new problem, Professor Bigelow, 62, pointed out. “The shapes of the letters in fonts such as Times Roman all derive from a set of complaints lodged by 14th-century scholars who wanted to read late in life,” he said.

Democrats Court Liberal Bloggers

New York Times:

CHICAGO (AP) -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton refused Saturday to forsake campaign donations from lobbyists, turning aside challenges from her two main rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination with a rare defense of the special interest industry.

''A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans, they actually do,'' Clinton said, drawing boos and hisses from liberal bloggers at the second Yearly Kos convention....

Plunging headlong into the Internet era, all seven candidates fought for the support of the powerful and polarizing liberal blogosphere by promising universal health care, aggressive government spending and dramatic change from the Bush era.

Edwards received the loudest applause when he suggested his rivals were tinkering around the edges -- ''I just heard some discussion about negotiation, compromise'' -- rather than overhauling government. He said the nation needs ''big change, not small change.'' ...

The Kos convention is a sign of the times.

Gone are the days when candidates and political parties could talk to passive voters through mass media, largely controlling what messages were distributed, how the messages went out and who heard them. The Internet has help create millions of media outlets and given anyone the power to express an opinion or disseminate information in a global forum, and connect with others who have similar interests.

One thing most bloggers have in common -- regardless of their political leanings -- is an intense frustration with the political establishment, particularly in Washington. And so it was a convention dripping in irony when liberal bloggers welcomed the living symbols of the Democratic status quo -- seven presidential candidates.

An audience member asked the candidates whether they would hire an official White House blogger. Edwards said yes, ''and her name will be Elizabeth Edwards,'' his wife.

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel said the next president shouldn't hire somebody to blog. ''Do it yourself.''

Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency

New York Times Book Review: By Michael Crowley

But while [author Nigel] Hamilton is generally sympathetic to Bill Clinton as a well-meaning big thinker battered by manufactured scandals in “America’s infotainment coliseum,” he has far less sympathy for Hillary Clinton, whose hidden hand he identifies in most of the administration’s early failures. It was Hillary who fired the travel office staff, pushed Bill to choose Baird and Guinier, and, he writes, “unwittingly destroyed her husband’s chances of an easy launch as 42nd president” by meddling with his White House transition team. He casts her as domineering and volatile; the White House staff was “intimidated into servility by an activist first lady” determined to be a co-president. Her political tone-deafness would lead to a health care fiasco that nearly sank her husband’s administration.

Although it’s true that Hillary did the president few favors in his first term, Hamilton’s portrait deteriorates into the sort of cheap caricature one might find on Fox News, while offering virtually no testimony in her defense. Instead, he provides dubious anecdotes from sources of suspect credibility, like gossip-laden books by Gail Sheehy and the former F.B.I. agent Gary Aldrich. Only by consulting the endnotes will a reader know that a story about Hillary furiously berating Bill on the morning of his inauguration is drawn from an anonymously sourced account in Sheehy’s “Hillary’s Choice.” ...(Hillary Clinton, it’s worth noting, virtually disappears from the book once her husband’s fortunes turn, leaving readers to wonder whether she played any role in his recovery — or, if she did, whether Hamilton simply had no interest in complicating his dragon-lady portrait.)

In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich

New York Times: By GARY RIVLIN

MENLO PARK, Calif. — By almost any definition — except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley — Hal Steger has made it.

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. ...

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.” ...

Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry a vast majority of people living paycheck to paycheck.

But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more.

When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes. ...

Many of these millionaires have options, of course, beyond working hard to earn another $5 million to $10 million. A few even choose to jump off the golden treadmill.

That is what Mark Gage, 51, an engineer, and his wife, Meredith, did when they left the Bay Area in 2005 with $3 million or so in assets. They bought a house in Bend, Ore. — “a bigger, much nicer home with dramatic views” — and now Mr. Gage works only when the perfect consulting job presents itself....

“You look around,” Mr. Barbagallo said, “and the pressures to spend more are everywhere.” Children want the latest fashions their peers are wearing and the most popular high-ticket toys. Furniture does not seem up to snuff once you move into a multimillion-dollar home. Spouses talk, and now that resort in Mexico the family enjoyed so much last winter is not good enough when looking ahead to next year. Summer camp, a full-time housekeeper, vintage wines, country clubs: the cost of living bloats.

To Mr. Milletti, it all looks like a marathon with no finish line.

“Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent,” he said.

“You try not to get caught up in it,” he added, “but it’s hard not to.”

Talk about the two Americas!

Economics Books by Robert H. Frank

New York Times Book Review:By Daniel Gross

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” [Cornell Economics] Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way....

Frank urges fellow economists to look at numbers and data in relative terms, not absolute ones. ...The desire to avoid such relative deprivation drives consumption in a range of goods, especially those that Frank calls “positional goods” — things like housing and cars, in which differences in quality and size are readily visible. In buying bigger homes, faster computers and more powerful backyard grills, people are driven by the desire to be a part of a community and to keep up with the Joneses. ...

What does this societywide arms race for goods have to do with income inequality? Frank trots out sobering data. Between 1949 and 1979, the rising tide of the American economy lifted all boats more or less equally. In fact, the incomes of the bottom 80 percent grew more rapidly than the incomes of the top 1 percent, and those of the bottom 20 percent grew most rapidly of all. But since 1979, gains have flowed disproportionately to top earners. In an economy where the wealthy set the norms for consumption and people at every rung strain to maintain the consumption of those just above them, that spells trouble. In today’s arms race, the top 1 percent are armed to the teeth and everybody else is scavenging for ammunition. ...

The end result? Frank methodically presents data showing that the typical American now works more, saves less, commutes longer and borrows more to maintain what he or she views as an appropriate standard of living.

Oh, and it’s getting worse. Frank notes that “many of the forces that have been causing inequality to grow seem to be gathering steam.” Because the gains have been so lopsided — the richest 1 percent have seen their share of national income rise from 8.2 percent in 1980 to 17.4 percent in 2005 — even the merely rich are having to overextend themselves just to keep up. “As incomes continue to grow at the top and stagnate elsewhere, we will see even more of our national income devoted to luxury goods, the main effect of which will be to raise the bar that defines what counts as luxury.”

Frank’s elegant solution? A progressive consumption tax that would discourage those at the top from spending more, thus lowering the bar. ...

It's all our fault? How does that go?

The Road to Rightville - New York Times Book Review: By Stephen Metcalf

...In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring. But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative. The recent essay anthology “Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys” (Threshold Editions, $23) has given us liberals a chance to think about why, even in our calcifying stodginess, American conservatism remains a nonstarter for us, a stack of loyalty oaths we’d never be tempted to sign. ...

As reasons for choosing one political affiliation over another, this is up there with “I am as God made me.” As if to drive home the point, Starr, the deputy editor of The Weekly Standard, quotes the British poet Philip Larkin. Larkin the poet was an artist of the first rank, but Larkin the man was an infamously small-minded reactionary. He once told an interviewer, “I suppose I identify the right with certain virtues and the left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.” These essays are Larkinesque, but with all the heavily qualifying sardonicism stricken out. The left is knee-jerk and borderline depraved; the right is freethinking and decent. All very fair, no doubt. Lay this down as your given and the comforting solecisms flow forth unregulated. When the left is being idealistic, it is naïve, utopian, technocratic and meddling. When the right is being idealistic, it is idealistic. ...

As a sales pitch, the essays in “Why I Turned Right” are mostly a dud. But they offer a tantalizing clue as to how handsomely financed “fellows” at corporate-backed think tanks (a description that fits eight of the 13 contributors) manage to connect so unfailingly with a mass audience. From the evidence of this volume, their righteous anger at liberalism is not cynical. Not at all. Conservative pundit-intellectuals have locked into a magical frequency, one that remains occult to the left, connects with a large segment of the viewing and reading public, and comes from someplace very sincere. ...academia, or more properly the staggeringly uniform and unforgiving creed of ideological correctness against which almost every one of these writers sooner or later set his face.”

Young people tend to be politically unthinking, and liberal arts professors tend to be arrested young people. But many undergraduates, encountering the towering stupidity of college radicalism, tenured and otherwise, chose to be conservative, where conservative meant deferential to the past, appropriately awed by greatness, calm, courteous, skeptical and cautious. As Talleyrand immortally put it, “Above all, no zeal.” ... For them the primal scene of revulsion at the liberal mind-set stays forever fresh. “By virtue of its one-sidedness and extremism,” Stanley Kurtz writes, “the academy serves as a key generator of our polarized political and cultural battles.”

Here we near the answer to our riddle: how privileged college graduates, while fronting for the interests of corporations and the rich, speak the language of angry populism, and with such depth of conviction. ... “If high school had been an ape colony, we would have been those antisocial unattached males lingering on the fringes, envying the dominant males with their mates.”

To be genuinely humiliated is to know how to tap into the humiliations of others. Rejecting tout court a culture of cool that prevails against him, a certain sort of person turns to campus politics. Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed. ...

After I'm gone

Haaretz : By Marit Slavin

Prof. Tishbi [Professor Naftali Tishbi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem], given your unique field of endeavor, how do you relate to the concept of death?

'There are many aspects to the question of our attitude toward death, but in essence this is a cognitive problem that's related to our inability to accept that our consciousness, our inner self, will one day cease to exist. We accept the fact that this consciousness did not exist in the past and that it changes significantly in the course of our lives, but we have great difficulty accepting the fact of its disappearance in the future. Mainly, it's hard for us to accept this because we think our lives would thereby become meaningless and purposeless, more or less a waste of energy, because when it's over, it's over. This question takes on special significance when, on a daily basis, you're trying to understand the mechanisms by which biological information is processed and the fascinating transition between matter and intellect as it occurs in the nervous system. We perceive consciousness as an abstract, intellectual entity, but in fact it is fixed deep inside the brain in a concrete way.

'Even if we leave aside the issue of the disappearance of self-consciousness - which by definition is completely internal and private - we are left with a no less disturbing problem: the disappearance of our public self. That is, the complete cessation of our connections and relationships with other living people. It seems to me that the older we get, the more we fear our public death and the less we fear our private death. What I mean is that it becomes more important for us to preserve ourselves for other people who are important to us, than to preserve our sense of self-consciousness. Fortunately, this public death may possibly be postponed or prevented by technological means. I see it, this is the only kind of 'immortality' that can be seriously discussed."

What do you think will happen to humanity if it attains immortality?

"If you mean immortality in the naive sense, that is, an end to biological death, then in the same generation in which humanity discovers the possibility of such immortality, human society will cease to renew itself. The processes of life and death are inseparably interwoven on the axis of time and react to changes in their environment. Since the physical and biological environment is constantly changing, living creatures must also change and adapt themselves to it. This is the essence of evolution, a dynamic, ongoing process in which individuals, populations and biological systems continually adapt to the environment. The environment, then, is constantly changing, primarily because of the life within it.

"Immortality in the naive sense, therefore, means freezing and preserving what already exists, without renewal. All dynamic processes are halted. If that happens, we will become a society of adults that is not capable or interested in renewing or developing itself, a society in which there is no room for the young, in every sense. Is this what we really want? Have we really attained the ultimate model with which we want to be stuck? Will we ever reach that state? After all, when a biological system ceases to develop it's basically dead. In a changing environment we must make room for those who are better, more adapted to the new environment. Paradoxically, perhaps, stopping death is actually stopping life."

And if that is not enough for a lazy summer night, try this:

Even now the direction is clearly toward the reduced importance of the body, not only because technology is replacing the use of the body and muscles but also because it is heightening the senses and enhancing experience. It is improving upon, and will continue to improve upon, the body with its natural senses, by enhancing vision, hearing, touch, etc. The danger lies in an addiction to the enhanced virtual senses; that the perception of the world through the natural senses will seem meager and unsatisfying in comparison.

"Such direct enrichment of our world will enable us to use the computer to create a personal virtual world that in effect represents the sum total of our lives, and in which we'll be able to wander. At the same time, we'll also be able to wander around in our real world. And thus a total blurring will take place between the biological and virtual bodies. If such a significant part of our experiential world is to be found in our virtual part, then the moment there's a copy of it, the dream of preserving our world of experiences after our death will come true. That will bring us closer to the immortality of the soul.

Shabbat shalom.

After collapse, millions in legal claims likely

The Star Tribune: By Chris Serres and Matt McKinney,

The state's liability is limited by law to $1 million, regardless of how many people were injured.

A larger payout would be possible if the state DOT had an insurance policy, but it doesn't, according to Robert McFarlin, an assistant to the commissioner of the Department of Transportation.

None of the people involved in the bridge's construction or design could be sued successfully, said attorney Robert King, of the Lommen Abdo law firm in Minneapolis. State law generally places a six-year statute of limitations on a lawsuit against contractors, he added. 'You have to figure out what the triggering event was,' said Mark Kulda, spokesman for the Insurance Federation of Minnesota. 'If this was a faulty design or a faulty construction technique, then many of the claims are probably time barred.'

Given those limitations, attorneys likely will focus on the private entities involved in the bridge's maintenance, particularly if state and federal investigators find that private firms bear any of the blame for the collapse.

Didn't take long to start in on the legal issues presented by a major disaster. It rarely does.
Do these comments suggest that the law is too generous in awarding damages, as some would have it?

Jewish activists learn the art of the 'meet and greet'

Jerusalem Post:

Welcome to the Red Arrow Diner in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire. This local landmark has taken on national significance as presidential candidates small and large make their quadrennial pilgrimage, or at least pit stop, to this homiest of down-home eateries, trying to woo voters from the tiny state whose first-in-the-nation primary has played an outsized role in selecting the presidential nominees for the two major parties.

On Wednesday afternoon, it was Mitt Romney's turn....And if the candidate had come with a prepared pitch - in Romney's case, for Americans to provide a "surge of support for our troops" in Iraq to accompany the surge in forces there - the diners had come prepared with pointed questions.

One wanted to hear about cuts in military spending, another wanted to know about benefits for retirees, and four wanted to get Romney to back the agenda of the American Jewish World Service.

An organization that applies the Jewish teaching of tikkun olam, or healing the world, to help the developing world, AJWS dispatched three young people to spend the summer in New Hampshire training residents to push candidates on three issues: Darfur, HIV/AIDS prevention and universal education.

Their training includes information about the organization and its three major advocacy issues, but it also includes tips on how to get the candidates' attention in crowded diners and ask quick questions that, ideally, get concrete commitments to which they can then be held accountable.

At the Red Arrow, AJWS tag-teamed Romney to get him talking about HIV/AIDS, and whether he would commit to spending $50 billion dollars to combat the disease. ...

For Stacey Schwartz, a New Hampshire resident and a 33-year-old mother of a three-year-old who also underwent AWJS training, participating in the process is the most important thing.

"I absolutely feel I have an obligation to use my voice, to speak up, if I have access to all the candidates, to use my access to candidates," she said while trying to keep her daughter, Rachel, from making a mess of a piece of chocolate cake taking over a dinner dish. ...

Then she found out about AWJS through her rabbi and learned how to position herself better and how to get the candidate's attention. She wanted to use her Jewish upbringing, where she had learned the value of asking "Why" to ask about issues such as Darfur where the victims were powerless and voiceless.

"I not only found my voice. I found out how to use my voice, and that's what I want to teach my daughter," she said.

RIP: Rabbi Sherwin Wine

Cleveland Jewish News.com:

"The memory of a good person is a blessing.”

So reads the home page of The Society of Humanistic Judaism (SHJ)‘s website. The site is now dedicated to Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, founder of the movement, who was killed in an auto accident July 21 while vacationing in Morocco.

Wine devoted his life’s work to the principles of Humanistic Judaism, says Roberta Feinstein, executive director of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations (CSJO), a Cleveland based organization that emphasizes Jewish culture and ethics. ...Humanistic Judaism celebrates Jewish history and culture without invoking God. One of its tenets, according to the SHJ website, purports that humans “possess the power and responsibility to shape their lives independent of supernatural authority.”

Wine was raised in a traditional home and ordained as a Reform rabbi in 1956. But according to a JTA article, the self-professed atheist felt ill-suited reciting prayers to a God in whom he did not believe.

In 1963, Wine took what Feinstein believes was a “courageous step” when he established the world’s first Humanistic synagogue, The Birmingham Temple in Farmington Hills, Mich. Wine went on to help found the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969; the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, which trains Humanistic rabbis, in 1985; and the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, the movement’s international umbrella. ...

The rabbi was vilified by his contemporaries after it was discovered that his congregation had eliminated the word “God” from its services. (For example, “You shall love the Lord your God” became, “We revere the best in man.”)

Other rabbis also didn’t take kindly to Wine’s refusal to recite the Shema, the basic Jewish proclamation of faith in the oneness of God. “He (Wine) stepped right out and said, ‘I don’t believe in these words,’” says Feinstein. “That was amazingly brave.”

RIP: Chris Schwartz of Krakow

:

"Chris Schwarz, founder and director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, has died. Schwartz, 59, died Sunday of prostate cancer in his Krakow apartment.

Schwarz, a London native whose father was Jewish, founded the museum in April 2004. It was a cornerstone of the rebirth of Jewish culture in Krakow's Kazimierz district, where hundreds of thousands of Jews lived before World War II.

With his modern approach to exhibitions and to depicting Jewish life, as well as an emphasis on education, the museum became a hit with locals, as well as Polish Jews and Jews from abroad."

We visited this small but delightful museum, met and chatted with Chris Schwartz, and greatly admired his work. We had no idea he was ill. We do hope that his legacy will continue.

Naked comes a blogger--NOT

The Opinionator - New York Times Blog: By Chris Suellentrop

The equivalent of the blogosphere in the 1960s and 1970s, [The New Yorker’s Hendrik] Hertzberg says, was the “underground press.” Hertzberg attended several of “the ramshackle underground-press convocations that took place from time to time.” The fashionable look there was decidedly not normal: “The stereotypical look then was rock roadie or medieval wizard for men, groupie or earth mother for women.” Hertzberg adds:

"On my bathroom wall I have a photograph taken at one of these underground-press convocations. It shows a crowd of a hundred or so undergrounders in a discussion circle. I’m in the middle, in shaggy haircut, Lennonish eyeglasses, and turtleneck, earnestly making some point (probably about the need to avoid alienating the great mass of Americans). And, sure enough, if you make allowances for a certain number of extravagant mustaches and batik prints, the crowd does look kind of normal, most of it. Except that three of the young women listening (somewhat skeptically, I have to admit) are stark naked.

"No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically."

What explains the new bourgeois left? Hertzberg’s theory: Because Vietnam was, “as Bob Dole might say, a ‘Democrat war,’ ” there was only one way to protest it. “You had to go to the left of the Dems,” he writes, “and if you hadn’t happened to have already acquired a moral/political compass, you might keep going till you ended up at the feet of Chairman Mao. This war is an all-Republican affair...

Court Rules Against F.B.I. in Raid on Lawmaker

New York Times: By David Stout

The agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation violated the Constitution when they viewed legislative papers in Mr. Jefferson’s Capitol Hill office, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled, citing a principle that goes back hundreds of years, to the time of all-powerful English monarchs.

Accordingly, we hold that the congressman is entitled to the return of all legislative materials (originals and copies) that are protected by the Speech or Debate clause seized from Rayburn House Office Building...

The F.B.I. raid on Mr. Jefferson’s office was the first time a federal lawmaker’s office was searched in a criminal investigation. The incident ignited a debate that cut across party lines, with several members of Congress complaining that the executive branch was intruding on their domain.

Today’s ruling seems unlikely to derail the prosecution of Mr. Jefferson, who was indicted on June 4 on 16 felony counts charging that he put his office up for sale in hopes of reaping hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from nearly a dozen companies involved in oil, communications, sugar and other businesses, often for projects to be carried out in Africa. ...

The appeals court emphasized that the Speech or Debate Clause, while a formidable shield for lawmakers, is not an absolute one. The shield “does not extend beyond what is necessary to preserve the integrity of the legislative process,” and it “does not prohibit inquiry into illegal conduct simply becomes it has some nexus to legislative functions,” the court said, quoting Supreme Court language from a 1972 ruling.

There is not a lot of litigation concerning the "Speech or Debate Clause". I worked on one such, Davis v. Passman (concerning alleged sex discrimination by a Congressman against a female employee), while a law clerk; the case ultimately found its way to the Supreme Court.

So the question of the day: does the Speech or Debate clause protect The Dick (in his quasi-legislative capacity as President of the Senate) if he keeps illicit cash in his human-sized office (or residence) safes? (Rep. Jefferson apparently kept nearly $100,000 cash cooled in his home freezer--allegedly the proceeds of bribes.)

Poll: Too Much Celeb Scandal Coverage

New York Times: NEW YORK (AP)

Celebrities behaving badly? If you don't care, you have company.

The vast majority of Americans believe there is too much news coverage of celebrity scandals, and most blame the media for the attention paid to the stars' trials and tribulations, a new survey has found.

Nearly nine out of 10 adults said celebrity scandals receive ''too much'' news coverage, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Only 2 percent said the subject receives ''too little'' coverage, and 8 percent said scandals get the ''right amount'' of press.

The survey also found that 54 percent of those who say celebrity news coverage is excessive blame news organizations. Around one-third of those surveyed found the public at fault for paying attention and 12 percent said the public and the media both are to blame.

Truth About Tillman ... Murder's Not 'Friendly Fire'

Huffington Post: By RJ Eskow

Once again, the Administration is pulling the old magician's trick of misdirection, this time in the Pat Tillman case. And once again, the press is falling for it. Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers focused on 'what they knew and when' -- to borrow the Watergate phrase -- rather than the core issue at the heart of the Pat Tillman matter, which is this:

Pat Tillman was almost certainly murdered, and fratricide is not 'friendly fire.'

Yet a Google News search on the terms 'Tillman' and 'friendly fire' yielded 1,044 hits today, all from the last 24 hours. That's after the facts behind the fratricide are widely known - and after a number of clues that suggest the entire command structure, from the White House on down, concealed a murder from the public and took no steps to investigate it.

There's your story....

I have not been following this story with great care. Eskow puts many of the (post-fratricide) pieces together in compelling, and chilling, form. Read it.

Giuliani's Health Care Plan: Making Him A Stronger Candidate?

The Huffington Post: By John Harwood:
Harwood's suck-up column on Giuliani's non-plan for health care contains nothing of interest (much like the plan itself). I did like this comment by a reader, identified as DMuhl:

The day after his Rochester speech, I walked into my cigar store hangout in New York, and there was Rudy Giuliani enjoying a cigar and strategizing with an aide. He's a regular, so it's no surprise to see him there, but it was the first time I'd seen him since he announced he's running for president. I couldn't let the moment pass.

After his meeting he did some glad-handing with the rest of us, joked about how he has to hang out his apartment window when he smokes a cigar, then headed to the back of the store. I followed him. I told him I'd heard what he said about single payer health insurance, and I totally disagreed. He said, 'That's okay, you can disagree.' Before he could walk past me, I told him that my brother was a doctor with the VA, and he supported a single payer system. I added that the VA provided preventitive [sic] care that was comparable to the private sector, but at a cost of 30% less than private insurance. He mumbled something about how it would be nice if there was a demand for that (I had no idea what he meant). As he headed for the door, I told him I pay $664 a month for health insurance just for myself. Before I could finish the sentence, he was on the street. The thing is, he left in such a hurry, he forgot to pay for his cigars. A salesman had to chase him down and bring him back to the store to settle up. I told the salesman he should've let him go, and called the New York Post.

And Giuliani is supposedly one of the more "moderate" Republican candidates. What a horror.

Freak Amusement Park Accident Severs Girl's Feet

New York Times Blog: By Patrick J. Lyons

Your stomach falls out at the thought of it: a 13-year-old girl is happily enjoying an amusement-park ride one minute, and is grotesquely injured the next.

It happened late Thursday afternoon at a Six Flags park in Kentucky, on one of those tower-drop rides. Something - perhaps a snapped cable, it isn’t clear yet - suddenly whipped across the girl’s shins and severed both her feet.

UPDATE: Bill Clary, a spokesman for the Kentucky Division of Regulation and Inspection, which has oversight over amusement parks, said this afternoon that a frayed cable on the ride snapped and hit the girl’s legs. That agrees with what witnesses have told CNN...

But there’s no denying the public’s morbid fascination with such stories, or the news media’s, especially at a time like the end of June, when school is letting out and jubilant children are pouring into the nation’s theme parks to start the summer off with a bang.

The very essence of an amusement-park ride is imitation danger: getting to enjoy all the adrenaline-pumping thrill of a seemingly life-threatening experience without risking any real harm, testing one’s courage and mettle when the price of falling short won’t be worse than a red face and maybe a lost lunch.

Perhaps that is why this kind of incident tugs at the mind so strongly, in a world where accidents of other sorts claim young lives and limbs every day to scant public notice. When pretend danger proves to be real danger, for us or especially for our children, we feel not only frightened but betrayed.

The amusement industry winces at the attention paid to these accidents, of course, and on a statistical level they have a point - serious injuries and deaths caused by amusement park rides are pretty rare, and the reputable park operators go to considerable trouble and expense to keep them that way.

Still, they happen, and they resonate - to the point that elaborate web sites are devoted to tracking them, like www.rideaccidents.com and an accident page on Theme Park Insider, which also includes a list of safety tips for parkgoers. ...

Amusement park accidents are a fixture of Torts courses, particularly regarding the tort doctrine of "assumption of the risk" (also a feature of much individual tobacco litigation). Interesting aspects of this story include the juxtaposition of perceptions of risk ("imitation danger" and "testing one’s courage and mettle") with statistical evidence of the rarity of serious injuries and the feeling of betrayal when such an accident actually occurs.

I'll leave it at that, since I may want to return to this incident in future teaching (and perhaps exams...) in my Torts classes...

How did Oscar, the death-sensing cat, nose his way into an elite medical journal?

Slate Magazine: By Daniel Engber

...In fact, the popular press accounts of Oscar the Cat provide more scientific analysis than the original journal article—they quote animal behavior experts who speculate on how he might accomplish his feat. Dosa tells us only that 'Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die' and that he's 'presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents' by nuzzling them during their last few hours of life. That's a lot of pre-death nuzzles, but we don't know Oscar's success rate—does anyone keep track of the number of times he nuzzles people who don't die? And we can't separate out causes, effects, and correlations. (As Jay Leno said the other night, 'Anyone stop to think maybe these patients are allergic to cats?')

It wouldn't be that amazing if Oscar really could tell when someone's about to die. After all, we're not that bad at figuring it out ourselves. Since Dosa's essay was published, other researchers have argued that the cat might be using its acute sense of smell to detect a patient's organs shutting down. But you don't need a superhuman nose to suss out the bouquet of death. Kidney or liver failure can cause waste products or acids to build up in the bloodstream, and patients with these conditions sometimes have a noxious or sweet aroma on their breath. ...

In an e-mail, a NEJM representative explained the decision to run Dosa's piece: "From time to time, we publish such personal narratives by physician writers." But this isn't just a personal narrative—it's a piece of magical realism that has been taken for science. If doctors really can use household pets as a diagnostic aid, let's find some genuine research on the subject.

Barry Bonds Not Certain He'll Be Present For His 755th Home Run

The Onion :

SAN FRANCISCO—Barry Bonds added his voice to the chorus of criticism surrounding his inevitable breaking of the all-time home-run record Monday, saying he was 'so sick and damn tired' with the constant comment that he himself may not be present for the feat. 'Hank Aaron, Bud Selig, all these guys making a big deal over whether or not they'll be in the stands when Bonds finally does it—I think I'm starting to know how they feel,' Bonds said. 'Hell, I don't even like the guy that much. If the team allows me to sit that one out, I just might.' Bonds admitted that he would, however, watch the historic moment on television, albeit with the sound off.

Sounds right to me.

Change the Debate in 2008

Another Rabbi Joke

Divinity is in the Details:

One Saturday morning, a mother went into the bedroom to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready to go to the Synagogue, to which he replied : 'I'm... not... going.'

'Why not?' she asked sternly.

'I'll give you two good reasons,' he said. 'One, they don't like me,
and two, I don't like them.'

His mother replied:

'I'll give YOU two good reasons why you MUST go to the Synagogue.
ONE you're 54 years old, and TWO, you're the Rabbi...'

Rabbi Joke

Divinity is in the Details:

An older Rabbi is moving on and giving advice to the newly hired Rabbi who is fresh out of school. The older fellow gives all sorts of pointers from how to manage conflict on the board to which tunes are preferred for Adon Olam. Lastly, before heading to Florida the retiring Rabbi says 'Take these three envelopes, they are the most powerful gift I can give you. If you ever have a problem you aren't sure you can solve, open an envelope. Be judicious in your use of these. They will tell you how to move forward but increase in power. Use other options first.'

Years go by and things go well for the the new rabbi. But over several months tensions reach a fever-pitch in discussing intermarriage. Unsure what to do after having tried most ways of framing the issue the Rabbi opens envelope #1: inside he finds a 3x5 card with the following written neatly on it:

Name a Committee.

The Rabbi quickly complies and the committee makes a recommendation several months later. It isn't universally loved but it works.

Another few years go by uneventfully but eventually the issue of whether to hire a gay youth group advisor develops. There are enormously strong feelings and the Rabbi opens envelope #2:

Call for a Community Meeting. Facilitate it Carefully.

By some miracle this works. A conclusion is reached and though it isn't truly a consensus, for the dissenters, feeling heard is enough to help them feel comfortable staying around.

Some years go by and this time the conflict is very bad. There is a near brawl between members of the old and new guards over a wide variety of issues. The Rabbi creates a committee to study the problem, calls a townhall meeting, and pretty much does everything the Rabbi can think of. None of it works. In a moment of anguish and frustration, the Rabbi finally opens envelope #3:

Write Out a New Set of Envelopes.

This comes from the blog of a young friend, himself the son of a prominent rabbi (also a longtime friend). I've been around long enough to know the joke, and the one that follows, but I put them in the category of oldies but goodies and post them here. Some readers may find them of contemporary relevance.

Implant boosts activity in injured brain

Nature:

Brain function has been improved in a patient who was in a minimally conscious state, by electrically stimulating a specific brain region with implanted electrodes. The achievement raises questions about the treatment of other patients who have been in this condition for years, the researchers say.

Patients in a minimally conscious state, often the result of severe brain trauma, show only intermittent evidence of awareness of the world around them. Typically, they are assumed to have little chance of further recovery if they show no improvement during their initial 12-month rehabilitation programme.

In the latest case study, neuroscientists describe how they implanted electrodes in the brain of a 38-year-old man who had been in a minimally conscious state for more than six years following a serious assault. By electrically stimulating a brain region called the central thalamus, they were able to help him name objects on request, make precise hand gestures, and chew food without the aid of a feeding tube...

Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, and his colleagues chose the patient because they believed his condititon was due to impairment of the arousal system, and that despite considerable damage to his cerebral cortex, many essential areas were preserved.

"There will be a subset of patients who are responsive to this approach," says Schiff. But he adds that patients with different brain injuries may not benefit from electrostimulation. "Not every patient in a minimally conscious state will fit this profile," Schiff says, and it is difficult for neurologists to identify those patients who will show recovery.

Nevertheless, the case shows that many patients currently seen as beyond hope of rehabilitation might benefit from the results of further research. ..."Although based on a study of only a single patient, it suggests that DBS may be adapted to benefit at least some patients in the minimally conscious state. And it emphasizes that improvements can be made by patients even long after an injury.

"Although we do not know precisely which brain connections are important, we may expect that some specific connections must be intact for DBS to have a beneficial effect."

Wow!

Haul out the qualifiers: the study was of one patient; the patient's status was "minimally conscious" and not "persistent vegetative state"; the subject's cortex showed capacity for activity. etc. There is still much to learn about the nature of the subset of patients potentially responsive to this intervention. There is an enormous risk that a result of this sort will be hyped and overgeneralized for political purposes and will stimulate unrealistic near-term hopes likely to be disappointed.

All that said, this report serves as a critical reminder of the tendency of some, including physicians and scientists, to overstate their knowledge of what is not possible--a tendency perhaps particularly in evidence in the domain of brain function. Much is not understood, and the lack of knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of "lack". Some of the neurologists who have been prominent in public controversies over the definition of death (particularly advocates of "higher brain" or "higher function" proposed definitions) or the poorly framed "right to die" have been, uh, imprecise in acknowledging the limits of their (and our collective) expertise, and others (mostly non-physicians) have played fast and loose in their formulations, dropping critical qualifications and making unwarranted generalizations in support of their advocacy positions. There is a professional bioethics literature on these issues, and some scholars have long made the point that discussions of impaired brain function must be scrupulous in their honesty and candor about the limits of our knowledge and prognostic abilities.

None of this, of course, answers the question of what level of certainty is necessary to resolve issues of public policy, at the bedside, in courts, or in legislative and regulatory arenas. That is not primarily a scientific question.

The original abstract from Nature follows:

Widespread loss of cerebral connectivity is assumed to underlie the failure of brain mechanisms that support communication and goal-directed behaviour following severe traumatic brain injury. Disorders of consciousness that persist for longer than 12 months after severe traumatic brain injury are generally considered to be immutable; no treatment has been shown to accelerate recovery or improve functional outcome in such cases1, 2. Recent studies have shown unexpected preservation of large-scale cerebral networks in patients in the minimally conscious state (MCS)3, 4, a condition that is characterized by intermittent evidence of awareness of self or the environment5. These findings indicate that there might be residual functional capacity in some patients that could be supported by therapeutic interventions. We hypothesize that further recovery in some patients in the MCS is limited by chronic underactivation of potentially recruitable large-scale networks. Here, in a 6-month double-blind alternating crossover study, we show that bilateral deep brain electrical stimulation (DBS) of the central thalamus modulates behavioural responsiveness in a patient who remained in MCS for 6 yr following traumatic brain injury before the intervention. The frequency of specific cognitively mediated behaviours (primary outcome measures) and functional limb control and oral feeding (secondary outcome measures) increased during periods in which DBS was on as compared with periods in which it was off. Logistic regression modelling shows a statistical linkage between the observed functional improvements and recent stimulation history. We interpret the DBS effects as compensating for a loss of arousal regulation that is normally controlled by the frontal lobe in the intact brain. These findings provide evidence that DBS can promote significant late functional recovery from severe traumatic brain injury. Our observations, years after the injury occurred, challenge the existing practice of early treatment discontinuation for patients with only inconsistent interactive behaviours and motivate further research to develop therapeutic interventions.

Repo: The Genetic Opera

Variety.com :

After spending most of the year living a soap opera, Paris Hilton will be part of a real opera this fall.

Hilton has joined Alexa Vega and Paul Sorvino in the cast of 'Repo! The Genetic Opera,' a full-blown musical thriller co-financed by 'Saw' makers Twisted Pictures and Lionsgate."...

Hilton will sing in a futuristic thriller framed around musical numbers that range from opera to rock. The setting is 2056, when a plague nearly destroys the human race and survival is dependent upon being able to finance a pricey organ transplant.

Hilton plays a daughter of the organ transplant magnate (Sorvino) who is the villain of the piece.

"This movie has become my life," said Bousman. "I have auditioned at least 30 actresses for this role -- Paris came in and owned it. She is this role."

See, I told you terrible things would happen if we commercialized a trade in organs for transplantation.

Thanks to blog.bioethics.net for the pickup--Variety is not on my usual rounds.

Ketchup is a vegetable, and it gets health coverage

New York Times: By Nicholas Kristof

When I planted new Douglas fir seedlings on my land, care for the young trees was also subsidized. So America provides health care for tree seedlings but not for millions of children.

Maybe uninsured American children who can’t get adequate health care could masquerade as cotton plants or cornstalks. Then the farm bill would shower them with money and care.

This nice line by Kristof deserves its own posting.

I’m Ripping You Off

I’m Ripping You Off - New York Times: By Nicholas D.Kristof

What’s especially dispiriting is how quickly the House Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi have tumbled from idealism to cynicism. The Democrats had promised reform — but then the House leaders worried that scrapping welfare for farmers might hurt the re-election prospects of some newly elected Democrats. So they killed the reform proposals (which are backed by many rank-and-file Democrats).

But as a former farm kid myself, let me say what a lot of farmers and ranchers are too polite to say: Farm subsidies are a cancer on rural America itself. The subsidies have raised land costs, driving out small farmers and undermining the family farm by encouraging consolidation.

The benefits overwhelmingly go to producers of just five crops — wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice — with livestock producers mostly left out. The majority of payments go to commercial farmers who earn more than $200,000 annually, while 95 percent of farmers get little or no benefit from the farm bill. That’s why my friends from my F.F.A. days speak contemptuously about those who make a living “farming the government.”"

I don't know beans about farm policy, but all I read suggests that existing policies do not line up very well with the values that support family farming in America. And this is one of many domains in which Congressional Democrats, newly restored to majority status, are rapidly falling back into bad old habits. There is the view of the apocryphal non-voter "that voting just encourages them." Given the alternative, I can't go that far, but some days are pretty discouraging. Today's report that Dems are rushing to enact a bill to legalize some warrantless surveillance activities out of fear of being branded "soft on terrorism" doesn't help. The Administration has apparently responded to calls for oversight of potential abuses of this new legislative authority by assigning the task to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

That is not a joke from The Daily Show, although it sure sounds like one.

Kristof concludes this way:

There is a familiar trajectory when a political party takes power. At first, it brims with ideals. Then it makes compromises to stay in power. Finally, it becomes devoted simply to staying in office. Can Ms. Pelosi really have compressed this downward spiral into just six months?

Announcing a (Further) Change in Comments Policy

My "experiment" with a "looser" posting policy has brought me to the following conclusion: the benefits of allowing anonymous (albeit moderated) posting (a slight increase in submitted postings) have not outweighed the negatives. (Postings on Jewish/ Middle East topics seem to attract particularly uncivil comments from anonymous sources, and in my experience to date, anonymous comments rarely advance the substantive discussions I would like to encourage.) More generally, perhaps somewhat contrary to web convention, I think comments are more worthy of taking seriously when someone takes responsibility for making them. Accordingly, I am turning off the anonymous comment option, and those wishing to comment will have to register. Let me know if anyone has trouble doing so.

Why Harvard Is Smarting

WSJ.com: By CRAIG KARMIN and GREGORY ZUCKERMAN

Harvard University's endowment fund has graduated some of the most sought-after money managers in the hedge-fund world.

Now one of those stars is teaching Harvard a lesson of its own.

In the past month, the university lost about $350 million through an investment in Sowood Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm founded by Jeffrey Larson. Mr. Larson managed Harvard's foreign-stock holdings until 2004, when he left to set up Sowood, which recently lost more than 50% of its value amid bad bond investments....

While $350 million is a relatively small hit for the $29 billion Harvard endowment, the nation's largest, it highlights the risks as colleges nationwide embrace nontraditional investments such as hedge funds and private equity. Investments like these are less regulated than more traditional options, and often engage in the risky practice of investing borrowed money in hopes of amplifying their returns.

Along with Yale University -- where the roughly $18 billion endowment has achieved annual returns of about 17% in the past decade -- Harvard was among the first universities to embrace such alternative investments. The goal is to seek good returns that don't move in tandem with stock and bond markets, thereby giving diversity to the overall portfolio.

The strategy worked particularly well in the 2000-2002 period, when hedge funds generally did a much better job than other investments in protecting their clients' money from losses in the aftermath of the dot-com stock bust. ...

Harvard Management Co., which manages the endowment, has long been viewed as one of the nation's more successful and trailblazing investment-management firms. It boasts an annualized return of 15.2% in the past 10 years through June 2006. That compares with an 8.9% median return for endowments and foundations over that time period, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.

As Harvard's returns grew, so did its money managers' paychecks, which soared into the millions of dollars a year. That sparked controversy among alumni and others associated with the university, who argued that investment managers shouldn't be paid better than the school's Nobel Laureate professors, or its deans.

Mr. Larson's $17.3 million in payments in 2003 from Harvard were among the large salaries that drew complaints from alumni several years ago.

In 2005, Mr. Meyer and some of his top staff left the university amid complaints about their pay. ...

Nationwide, university endowments continue to show a greater risk appetite than pension funds and other large institutional investors. The top 53 university endowments, with nearly $217 billion in assets, have invested about 18% of their money in hedge funds, according to data provider HedgeFund Intelligence. The average public pension fund has only about 5% in hedge funds.

Kevin Lynch, a managing director at consulting firm RogersCasey, says there are at least two good reasons why universities have more readily welcomed hedge funds and private equity. Unlike public or corporate pension plans, which make annual payouts to beneficiaries, endowments have longer-term investment horizons, and therefore are more comfortable with the fact that alternative investments generally require investors to stay in for years.

Happy Birthday, Mom

I love you, and I'm glad to have you around.
I won't reveal your age, but I am happy this gets Blog post #1400!

Saudi Arabia Says It May Meet Israel

New York Times: By HELENE COOPER and DAVID S. CLOUD

JERUSALEM, Aug. 1 — Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said Wednesday that his country would consider attending President Bush’s planned Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the fall, which would put Saudi officials publicly at the same table as their Israeli counterparts for the first time since 1991.

But Saudi officials said a precondition of its attendance was that the conference tackle the four big “final status” issues that had bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979: the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced to flee their homes in Israel, mostly before or during the 1948 war; the status of Jerusalem; the borders of a Palestinian state; and the dismantlement of Israeli settlements in the West Bank....

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said later on Wednesday during meetings with Ms. Rice, who flew to Jerusalem after the talks with the Saudis in Jidda, that Israel welcomed the Saudi comments. But in a sign that the Saudi precondition may not be so easy to meet, she added that sometimes “it’s not wise to put the most sensitive issues out first. ...

If Saudi officials do sit down with the Israelis, it will be the first time they have both attended public talks about Israeli-Palestinian peace since the Madrid conference in October 1991. Saudi Arabia, which is the birthplace of Islam, does not recognize Israel, although Saudi officials have also urged the Bush administration to push hard to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli peace issue. There have been some unconfirmed reports of other contacts between Israeli and Saudi officials, including earlier this year.

A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’

New York Times: By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.

Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.

That student... had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom....

Ms. Geiger ...characterized her actions as part of a “standard procedure” of “encouraging teachers to support students’ efforts to achieve academic success.”...

No, the issue is more what this episode may say about the Department of Education’s vaunted increase in graduation rates. It is possible, of course, that the confrontation ... was an aberration. It is possible, too, that Mr. Lampros is the rare teacher willing to speak on the record about the pressures from administrators to pass marginal students, pressures that countless colleagues throughout the city privately grumble about but ultimately cave in to, fearful of losing their jobs if they object....

“It’s almost as if you stick to your morals and your ethics, you’ll end up without a job,” Mr. Lampros said in an interview. “I don’t think every school is like that. But in my case, it was.”...

According to Mr. Lampros’s records, she missed one-third of the classes, arrived late for 20 sessions, turned in half the required homework assignments, failed 11 of 14 tests and quizzes, and never took the final exam.

...[The student's] mother spoke on her behalf. “My daughter earned everything she got,” she said. Of Mr. Lampros, she said, “He needs to grow up and be a man.”

From Michigan [following his resignation], Mr. Lampros recalled one comment that [the student's mother] made during their meeting about why it was important for [her daughter] to graduate. She couldn’t afford to pay for her to attend another senior prom in another senior year [which would have been her third].

Every lawyer learns (in my case, during my judicial clerkship) not to draw firm conclusions after hearing only one side of a case. But Samuel Freedman, a journalist I am inclined to trust, provides extraordinary detail on the specifics. It is a sad tale.

If we are to attract highly qualified teachers to the profession, and to retain them (without deadening them), we need to pay some heed to their academic standards and sense of integrity.

Attention Authors: Be afraid, very afraid.... especially if you write about the Saudis and their support of terrorism

History On Trial: By Deborah E. Lipstadt

Whenever David Irving's libel case against me comes up someone inevitably asks: How could he sue you in the UK? I explain that my book was bought and published by Penguin UK and therefore he could drag me into a UK court.

Turns out that now the reach of UK libel laws has been greatly extended. It's a frightening development. In an earlier post I wrote about Rachel Ehrenfeld and how she was sued for libel by the Saudi Khalid bin Mafouz for writing that he had supported terrorism. ...

Now the Saudis have silenced another book. This one is by J. Millard Burr, a former relief coordinator for Operation Lifeline Sudan, U.S. Agency for International Development, and Robert O. Collins, professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

They have written a number of books on Darfur and Sudan. Their most recent book, Alms for Jihad was published by Cambridge University Press. [Since their book was published in the UK, their case is closer to mine than Ehrenfeld's.]

The authors explore how, in the words of Michael Rubin, writing in the New York Sun:

The Saudi royal family played a pernicious role, founding and promoting charities to spread militant Sunni Islam, not only as an inoculation against resurgent Shi'ism from revolutionary Iran, but also to radicalize the Muslims in Europe and America.

The British lawyers for Khalid bin Mahfouz and his son Abdulrahman bin Mahfouz wrote Cambridge University Press saying they intended to sue the Press and the authors for defamation against their clients.

Cambridge University Press contacted the authors,and they provided detailed material in support of their claims made in Alms for Jihad.

Nonetheless, Cambridge University Press decided not to contest the argument and next week they will apologize in court.

As Rachel Ehrenfeld has just written to me in an email: "Get a copy of “Alms of Jihad” before it’s banned..." ...

Bin Mahfouz apparently has amassed a number of judgements by default, in other words the case was not tried on its merits. Everyone just caves, pays a fine, and gets out of Dodge as fast as they can.

Cambridge Press had pretty deep pockets but it too folded. If I were a reporter writing about this I would see what connections it has with the Saudis... That would be interesting to know.

And now I return to the main point: Why isn't this pattern of silencing by the Saudis of authors who are critical of them been the topic of an article in the mainstream press?

There are important legal precedences here, especially in the Ehrenfeld case, and a disturbing pattern of silencing of criticism by the Saudis.

University Endowment News

Inside Higher Ed:

Harvard University’s endowment lost about $350 million in the last month because of poor performance by a hedge fund led by a former senior endowment manager at the university, The Wall Street Journal reported. The fund, Sowood Capital Management, recently lost more than half of its value. While $350 million is more than many colleges have ever had in their endowments, there won’t be cries of financial exigency coming from Cambridge. Harvard’s endowment is worth about $29 billion.

I wonder what it looks like after last week's downturn?
I guess that takes care of my contributions for the past 35 years, and the next several thousand.

Wasn't there a ruckus about compensation to Harvard's in-house endowment managers a few years ago? Did it make cosmetic sense to move them out, and compensate at (short) arm's length?

Has anyone published a comparison of returns on endowment covering the elite private schools and the publics with significant endowments? One reads about especially handsome performance by Yale and Princeton (esp. after big market reversals). I guess with rewards come risks.

Va. Supreme Court denies appeal challenging school's coed swtich

Daily Press (Newport News, VA): By MICHAEL FELBERBAUM (AP)

RICHMOND, Va. - A three judge panel of Virginia Supreme Court on Tuesday denied an appeal challenging a decision by the former Randolph-Macon Woman's College to admit men.

Earlier this month, lawyers for a group of students at the Lynchburg school challenged the coed status of the college asked the state's high court to grant an appeal of the lawsuit. The group had said the school breached an implied contract with students when its governing board decided to admit men.

College officials have said the decision to admit men after 116 years was largely a financial one. The school officially changed its name to Randolph College on July 1 as it prepares to admit 67 men in the fall....

An appeal of a second lawsuit by a group of seven students and donors, which claims the school's board can't use the college's assets to benefit men, is still pending.

That suit, also dismissed in January, claims the school is a "non-stock, charitable corporation" that accepted donations during a time when its mission was to educate women.

It was a triumph a generation ago when formerly all male institutions "broke" donative provisions limiting benefits to (often white) males. This?

It's not the principle of the thing, it's the price we're haggling about?

Inside Higher Ed:

The dispute and negotiations over a proposed gift to rename the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health have largely focused — at least in public — on the ethics of naming a college for a corporation. But e-mail records obtained by The Des Moines Register suggest that the size of the proposed gift may also have been a factor. Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield offered $15 million to have the college named for the company, an idea that faculty members first objected to but have since agreed to reconsider. One e-mail quoted by the newspaper, from the college’s dean, noted that other schools of public health had been named (for individuals) based on gifts of $25 million to $50 million, much more than Wellmark was proposing. “The deans I consulted all indicated that an offer of $15 million would be embarrassingly small and significantly undervalue our college,” wrote the Iowa dean, Jim Merchant.

Cantor Josef "Yossele" Rosenblatt