School to Prison Pipeline

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 9, 2007

The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She’s in! She’s out! She’s — whatever.

Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

This is an aspect of the justice system that is seldom seen. But the consequences of ushering young people into the bowels of police precincts and jail cells without a good reason for doing so are profound.

Two months ago I wrote about a 6-year-old girl in Florida who was handcuffed by the police and taken off to the county jail after she threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class.

Police in Brooklyn recently arrested more than 30 young people, ages 13 to 22, as they walked toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered. No evidence has been presented that the grieving young people had misbehaved. No drugs or weapons were found. But they were accused by the police of gathering unlawfully and of disorderly conduct.

In March, police in Baltimore handcuffed a 7-year-old boy and took him into custody for riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The boy tearfully told The Baltimore Examiner, “They scared me.” Mayor Sheila Dixon later apologized for the arrest.

Children, including some who are emotionally disturbed, are often arrested for acting out. Some are arrested for carrying sharp instruments that they had planned to use in art classes, and for mouthing off.

This is a problem that has gotten out of control. Behavior that was once considered a normal part of growing up is now resulting in arrest and incarceration.

Kids who find themselves caught in this unnecessary tour of the criminal justice system very quickly develop malignant attitudes toward law enforcement. Many drop out — or are forced out — of school. In the worst cases, the experience serves as an introductory course in behavior that is, in fact, criminal.

There is a big difference between a child or teenager who brings a gun to school or commits some other serious offense and someone who swears at another student or gets into a wrestling match or a fistfight in the playground. Increasingly, especially as zero-tolerance policies proliferate, children are being treated like criminals for the most minor offenses.

There should be no obligation to call the police if a couple of kids get into a fight and teachers are able to bring it under control. But now, in many cases, youngsters caught fighting are arrested and charged with assault.

A 2006 report on disciplinary practices in Florida schools showed that a middle school student in Palm Beach County who was caught throwing rocks at a soda can was arrested and charged with a felony — hurling a “deadly missile.”

We need to get a grip.

The Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union has been studying this issue. “What we see routinely,” said Dennis Parker, the program’s director, “is that behavior that in my time would have resulted in a trip to the principal’s office is now resulting in a trip to the police station.”

He added that the evidence seems to show that white kids are significantly less likely to be arrested for minor infractions than black or Latino kids. The 6-year-old arrested in Florida was black. The 7-year-old arrested in Baltimore was black.

Shaquanda Cotton was black. She was the 14-year-old high school freshman in Paris, Tex., who was arrested for shoving a hall monitor. She was convicted in March 2006 of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced to a prison term of — hold your breath — up to seven years!

Shaquanda’s outraged family noted that the judge who sentenced her had, just three months earlier, sentenced a 14-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson for burning down her family’s home. The white girl was given probation.

Shaquanda was recently released after a public outcry over her case and the eruption of a scandal involving allegations of widespread sexual abuse of incarcerated juveniles in Texas.

This issue deserves much more attention. Sending young people into the criminal justice system unnecessarily is a brutal form of abuse with consequences, for the child and for society as a whole, that can last a lifetime.

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The Boy in the Coffin

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 9, 2007

SEATTLE

Two years ago I drove to the town where I grew up to bury a boy I knew well enough to love but not enough to help. He was 17, my nephew, dead from a shotgun blast to the head fired by an acquaintance. They said it was an accident. My family had asked me to do a eulogy.

As we got closer to Spokane, I tried to imagine what I could say to my sister and her husband to ease the pain of losing their only son. Maybe something about the randomness of death, about remembering a young man and his charisma, a glow of life that would outlast this awful day.

The afternoon was warm and sunlit, which made it all the more incongruous filing into the church. There was an enormous crowd, mostly teenagers, including some of the reckless boys that my nephew had been hanging out with of late.

I strode to the front, my thoughts still a muddle, walking toward an open casket. When I looked inside and saw him — eyes closed, cheeks blushed, beautified in repose — I was overcome. The grief and incomprehension left me dizzy and wordless.

I had seen him last at a touch football game, Thanksgiving prior. He burned me on a long touchdown pass, striding just out of reach as he crossed the goal line. I couldn’t catch him then. Now I was too late.

All of us were.

At the start of the service, the priest, a Franciscan in simple robe and sandals in keeping with the poverty vows of his order, made us take one more look at the boy in the coffin.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

You put a young man in the ground on a spring day and it changes you forever. I came home feeling like I would never let my own children out of the house again. I came home convinced there was something toxic about our age and theirs — a collision of trash culture and children in adult bodies.

In the American West, we like to think we have more freedom. But we also have more of the fatal consequences of that freedom. Binge drinking, easy gun access, traffic fatalities, the proliferation of meth — those are among our regional trademarks.

A teenager in Wyoming is four times more likely to die of a traffic accident than a teenager in Washington, D.C. Seven of the top 10 areas in the country for underage binge drinking are in the West.

Growing up in Spokane, the biggest little city in Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington, I was immortal — especially when driving Saturday night on a dirt road at the edge of town. And then I lost my two best friends to the kind of careless hubris that was the mark of those Saturday nights — to two separate car accidents.

Much as I’d like to blame geography, it’s too easy. A child born today will live to be about 80 years old, on average. But the challenge is getting them through age 16, 17, 18, 19 — the most hazardous time of their lives. A kid with a car, a kid with a gun, a kid with a bottle — any one of those combinations is much more of a risk than a terror attack or a flu from China.

The law has been some help in this regard, and so has technology. Many states now restrict 16-year-olds from driving at night or with other teens. Other countries have raised the age at which a teenager can get a license to 18.

And Safeco Insurance Company has just unveiled a new device that allows parents to keep track of their teenagers at all hours while they’re driving — an electronic leash, of sorts, that transmits information about a car’s speed, location and other facts. By remote control, parents can even turn the ignition off.

It is the kind of device that seems, on its face, like a perfect safeguard. We are there, even when we aren’t.

These dangers are not new to our age, or theirs. But boomer parents have a dilemma unique to our generation. Do we lie about our own lives, to save a life now? Do as I say, not as I did.

Do we say: I got through it, by blind dumb luck, and so will you — have fun?

The minefield never scared me when I had to walk through it; it petrifies me now.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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Domestic Disturbances

By Judith Warner

June 7, 2007, 9:57 pm

End of (School) Year Frenzy

Tags: children, Holidays, school

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When sitters to their far-off homes hath fled,
When camp and health forms make my blood run cold
And all I want to do is lie in bed.
In me thou see’st the frenzied wide-eyed stare
Of one whose work time has been cut in two
And yet cannot resist the year-end snare
Of read-a-louds, teacher gifts, and hot glue.
In me thou see’st the envy, vile and green
Of those who smile while Spring turns into heat
Suiting up for tennis, Pilates, too
And sporting perfectly manicured feet.
This thou perceiv’st, all around me I hear
Others expressing their equal ill cheer.

I have, there’s no question, gone off my gourd. (That still scans.)

It always happens at this time of year.

In recent weeks, we’ve had two grade-parent cocktail parties, one all-school gala, a Spring Fling, three music recitals, a camp open house, a working moms’ lunch (missed it; had to work), two overnight camping trips, a “cereal breakfast,” an “authors’ tea,” a baby naming, a birthday party, a pool party, an end-of-year party and various teacher appreciation tidbits to buy, bake, embroider and accidentally burn in the oven. (“Mommy, how could you!”)

These are all, individually – burnt clay baby dragons aside – very nice things.

But taken together – and in the absence of my eight-hour-a-week student babysitter, back home for the summer in rural Pennsylvania – they can get to be a little bit much.

I know that you know what I mean.

I know this because I hear the chorus of complaint all around me. Every day, on the school steps, on the phone, in the office, there is the gnashing of teeth, the exchange of grimaces: Surviving? Just barely. Can’t wait for it all to be over.

Chill, everyone, I want to say, with the horrific condescension of one who has confronted her demons and passed over to the other side. Don’t sweat all the silly stuff. Embrace it. Surrender to it. At the very least, consider it material. I’ve been doing that for the past couple of weeks. And, on the whole, it’s been working for me.

Of course, I didn’t start out at this level of Zen.

(I cannot reach any kind of level of Zen. I tried yoga nidra the other night and, when relaxation hit, I immediately burst into tears.

“What an overachiever!” the instructor cried. “The very first time – and she hits nirvana!)

I discovered it in a chance encounter with my two-doors-down office neighbor, David Brooks. Who, on or around May 8 (VE Day in Europe; D – for departure – Day for my sitter) had the misfortune to stop in the hallway right before school pickup time and ask how I was doing.

“I wake in the morning and go to bed at night stalked by a feeling of incipient failure!” I stopped hyperventilating long enough to almost scream.

He blinked for a moment, impassively.

“Some people thrive on that,” he said.

Yes, I thought, I’ve built an entire career in just that way.

So, after that, I started looking on the bright side. Less babysitting, more parent-involved activities, meant more time with my children. It meant more fun and more peace and more pleasant relaxation.

This focus on the upside lasted a couple of weeks, which was quite pleasant. Lately, though, I’m sorry to admit, a downside has also become clear. And that downside is this: more time with my children has meant my children are spending more time with me. The way upped Mommy-dosage has, I fear, started to reach a level of potential toxicity. The symptoms: they’re starting to act and talk and dress and think a lot like me.

“There’s a big ugly house.” Emilie now likes to provide real estate commentary as we drive around the neighborhood on what has become our daily supermarket run. (I forget the milk. I forget the orange juice or the paper towel. Sometimes, I drive away and forget the grocery bags.) “There’s a great big new one. Isn’t it tacky? And there” — pointing to some sad structure, smaller, even, than our own cute little house, “is a cute, cute little house.”

“The line, ‘I gotta work it’ has no meaning,” Julia now likes to tell anyone who will listen, every time Hanna Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” comes on the air. “It’s a cheap rhyme. Well, at least,” she then tells the dead silence, “that’s what my mom says.”

That makes me cringe. You want to teach your children by example. But what if the example you set is, well, maladaptive? A little bit sub-optimal? A little bit … weird?

I’ve spent a lot of time, in this period of extreme togetherness, taking the girls out for ice cream. You see, I’ve found it’s an excellent way to multi-function: put the leash on the dog, a helmet on Emilie, get out the razor scooter (Not a book, Julia; you don’t read while you’re walking. You Talk to Me About Your Day) and you mix exercise, a form of nutrition, care for the dog and meaningful connection.

Or, if you’re so inclined, you can just zone out.

I took Emilie alone one day while Julia was at a violin rehearsal. We walked to Ben and Jerry’s. We got ice cream, then sat on a bench. Emilie looked off one way, I looked off the other, and the dog closed his eyes in yet a third. Fifteen minutes passed in silence before a passerby sent us a quizzical look and I startled back into consciousness.

“Em,” I said.

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“DON’T INTERRUPT ME WHEN I’M STARING OFF INTO SPACE!” she shouted. And then, eyes fixed on a blank wall: “I never realized how interesting it is around here.”

Camp’s starting soon. It’s 9-to-5 childcare coverage, I think.

More’s the pity for me.

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HOME FIRES: five Iraq War veterans on their return to American life

By Sandi Austin

June 7, 2007, 9:30 pm

Signs: The Seed Is Planted

A strange feeling came over me as the C-130 landed at Fort Bragg, N.C. After 11 months in Iraq, I wasn’t scared any more, but it felt like the rest of America was.

I now live in Monterey, Calif., home of sea otters, sea lions, harbor seals, cypress trees, California oak trees, tourists, newlyweds and nearly-deads. I was working in a local restaurant, Taste Café, when a sweet, costume-jewelry-wearing-grandmother, sipping her cappuccino said, “Oh, I was so scared at the aquarium today.”

Thinking that she must have seen the new shark exhibit I replied, “Yeah, lots of teeth on that Great White, huh?”

She shook her head and said, “No, not the shark, dear, the terrorists.” I was looking around at all of the people at the aquarium and thought this could be a terrorist target as well.”

I wanted to reply, “Ma’am, there is no need to be afraid, no one is going to come into the aquarium and blow it up… enjoy the jellyfish, the penguins, and the giant tuna.”

It’s crazy to me the fear that seems to be growing inside Americans. It is as if a seed of poison ivy fell into a garden of tomatoes, corn, and peppers. From the moment the seed was planted it began taking over the rest of the garden.

This fear is planted as we read signs that shout “BEWARE,” as the media presents potential threats over and over again, and as small towns begin preparing evacuation plans against terrorist activity. I won’t fall into that trap. Having been in Iraq, I know what it’s like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like. Now that I am back on American soil, I don’t want to live in constant fear. I want to feel like I’m on vacation, worry free. Perhaps we should have fun living now, instead of focusing on the horrible things that “could” happen.

My stomach cringes as I approach the 20-minute wait to get through security. Mind you I have no problem waiting; lines are part of military life. The problem is all the signs glaring back at me while I wait. Their gory message blurts, “High Risk of Terrorist Attack,” “No Liquids, No Shoes, No Socks, No Jackets, No Toothpaste, or Water.” A seed is planted in all of our minds as we wait in line. Why don’t they say “No Knives, No Guns, No Machetes, No Num-Chucks, and No Tomahawks”? Now that is a sign that sends a message.

For a while I swore Proctor and Gamble had something to do with the increased level of security. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t see the purpose of getting everyone worked up over this so-called terrorist. I wish they would give this character a name, maybe give it a face. Perhaps I should include a drawing of the terrorist I think exists, the one who can create a bomb using the fluoride in the toothpaste and plastic water bottle. (I think we know him as MacGyver.)

I am now a four-binner … shoes, belt and jacket in one bin, backpack in another, computer out of backpack in the third, and purple carry-on stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fourth. So my thought is why don’t we all wrap ourselves in Saran wrap just to get through? Certainly would speed things up. Then again, an airport full of carefully wrapped, naked Americans could get a little scary!

I am almost dressed when the T.S.A. agent says “We will need to search this backpack.” Of course I’m thinking there is nothing in there besides the projector I had to carry for work. The agent reaches in and pulls out a bottle of Jason’s Deli water. I smile, laugh a little, and apologize. I’m sure she feels successful … job well done. That is one less water bottle on the plane! As I zip up my backpack, I decide to make sure I packed my iPod. I open the inside pocket and what do I see rubbing against the iPod … a bright and shiny, red-cased, 12-gauge round. This pack had been on a recent camping trip. I’ll say it once again. Thank god she found the water bottle.

I see this measure of security as another facet to make Americans feel safe, but safe about what? Something that “could” happen, something that we Americans should worry more about? Send out the message and it will be received. The Five Man Electrical Band — and more recently, Tesla — said it best: “Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs, blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind.”

After being home for three months, I was inspired to write the following song:

The Sign

Sitting on my rooftop, trying to find some peace.
Watch the people pass by.
Watch the old man try to make a buck but he’s still got no luck.
Puts his hand in his pocket and empty again.

Old man made his way down town to the local café.
Wasn’t looking for a drink, just a quiet place to think.
Then he saw a sign, sent shivers down his spine.
Said have no fear my friend, the end is near.

Old man grabbed that sign, and he yelled these thoughts aren’t mine.
Raised his hands to the sky, years of rage fell from his eye.

He cried.

I’ll try to understand, what makes you think you can, change the way I see this world surrounding me.
I’ll try to understand, what makes you think you can, change the way I see, when you won’t listen to me.

Old man on the ground, hands on his head, mind racing round and around he cries.

I’ll try to understand, what makes you think you can, change the way I see, when you won’t listen to me.

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Candidates’ Tax Plans Are a Mystery

By FLOYD NORRIS

Published: June 8, 2007
***********************

Opportunities for real tax reform are rare. But when they do come along, something good can happen only if political leaders are prepared with a plan they can sell to a populace that knows the shortcomings of the present system but is suspicious of changes that may cost them money.

Otherwise, tax legislation ends up parceling out breaks — and sometimes punishments — based on some combination of quiet lobbying and loud grandstanding. The inevitable result is a more complicated, less logical system.

We are nearing a time of opportunity. George W. Bush will bequeath to his successor a tax system that everyone agrees must be changed by the end of 2010. It should be changed at least a year before that.

But if any of the presidential candidates are thinking seriously about the opportunities that will bring, they have kept the information to themselves. And that is a pity.

At the two presidential debates this week, there was almost no discussion of taxes.

Democrats seemed to agree that Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy should expire, but not those for the middle class, a group that has expanded to include people who make as much as $200,000 or $250,000. Republicans spent much more time discussing immigration and evolution, but one candidate did find time to denounce a Democrat, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for wanting to end the tax cuts.

We are in this mess — or this opportunity — because in 2001 and 2003, when Mr. Bush and a Republican Congress pushed through tax cuts, they wanted to make them as large as possible. For parliamentary reasons, and for budget arithmetic reasons, they allowed many of the cuts to expire at the end of 2010.

The result is that if nothing is done, tax rates will rise in 2011, and the estate tax, after being repealed for one year, will return to pre-Bush levels. Tax receipts of the government will soar.

The last real bipartisan tax reform was in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan persuaded Congress to pass a bill that lowered tax rates and eliminated lots of games that people had played to avoid paying the old high tax rates. It greatly simplified the tax code.

Congress was soon back to making it more complicated, passing provisions to benefit assorted industries and individuals and to encourage, or discourage, various types of economic behavior. The law is now more complex than ever.

There is no shortage of ideas for fundamental change. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has traveled around to promote what he calls a Fair Flat Tax Act, which is basically an attempt to go back to what Mr. Reagan enacted. It would get rid of many deductions — but save some of the more popular ones, like retirement savings accounts and mortgage interest — and have three tax brackets, of 15, 25 and 35 percent.

It would treat all income the same, ending preferential rates for capital gains and dividends, and, Senator Wyden says, would feature a tax form that anyone could fill out without help.

“People spend more on tax preparation than the federal government spends on higher education,” Senator Wyden said this week.

Another idea with some support is to lower income taxes and use a carbon tax, based on the amount of carbon used by a person or company, to both provide a major source of government financing and to help the environment. (“Tax waste, not wealth,” says the slogan.)

A consumption tax has its virtues as well. Michael J. Graetz, a Yale law professor and former Treasury official in George H. W. Bush’s administration, promoted a value-added tax — a national sales tax similar to that used in European countries — combined with an income tax that would apply only to those with very high incomes. His article promoting the idea was called “100 Million Unnecessary Returns.”

The 1986 tax act came after a long and detailed study at the Treasury, which was needed because there were sure to be details and unintended consequences of any proposal to be thought through before lobbyists began their attacks. And it came during Mr. Reagan’s second term, when he did not need to worry about re-election.

“It’s almost impossible to make tax reform happen unless a president is willing to tell people how broken the system is,” Senator Wyden said.

The risk now is that candidates will fear bad publicity — “She wants to raise taxes on regular people,” or “He wants to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction” — and will stick to vague platitudes until the election is over.

Then there will not be enough time to put together a comprehensive bill, and an opportunity will have been missed.

Instead, the country will get a warmed-over version of the arguments of the last few years, but no fundamental change.

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Lies, Sighs and Politics

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 8, 2007

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

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Reviving the Hamilton Agenda

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: June 8, 2007

These days there seem to be four schools of political economic thought. First, there are the limited government conservatives, who think taxes should be low and the state should be as small as possible. Second, there are the Hamiltonians, who believe in free market capitalism but think government should help people get the tools they need to compete in it.

Third, there are the mainstream liberals, who think government should intervene in small ways throughout the economy to soften the effects of creative destruction. Fourth, there are the populists, who believe the benefits of the global economy are going to the rich and we need to fundamentally rewrite the rules.

If you are reading this column, you’re keeping company with somebody in group No. 2. We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital. Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.

Just when it needs a more skilled work force, the U.S. is getting a less skilled one. This is already taking a bite out of productivity growth, and the problem will get worse.

We Hamiltonians disagree with the third group, the mainstream liberals, because their programs haven’t worked out. Retraining programs for displaced workers have flopped. Tax code changes to reduce outsourcing are symbolic. Federal jobs programs aren’t effective. Moreover, the high taxes you need to pay for these programs sap the economy. There’s now a pile of evidence showing that higher taxes mean reduced working hours. In the face of Chinese and Indian competition, we don’t need Americans working less.

We Hamiltonians disagree with the populists because we don’t find their storyline persuasive. The populists argue that global trade is creating a race to the bottom that is leading to stagnant wages and vast inequality. But when you look at the details, you find that most inequality is caused by a rising education premium, by changes in household and family structure, by the fact that the rich now work longer hours than the less rich and by new salary structures that are more tied to individual performance. None of this can be addressed by changing global trade rules.

The global economy radically decreased poverty and increased living standards. It’s crazy to upend this complex system to return to some nostalgic vision of a 1950s industrial wonderland.

When it comes to what Hamiltonians are actually for, two big themes stand out. First, the overall economy has to remain dynamic. The biggest threat is the looming wall of entitlement debt. We Hamiltonians would break the current campaign silence on the issue by raising the retirement age and tackling medical inflation to make Medicare affordable.

The second big theme is a human capital agenda. No one policy can increase the quality of human capital, but a lifelong portfolio of policies can make a difference.

Children do better when raised in stable two-parent families. Bigger child tax credits and increasing the earned income tax credit can reduce the economic strain on young families (and shift the tax burden to older, affluent ones). Extending government income support to young men in exchange for work would make them more marriageable.

Nurse practitioners who make home visits can stabilize disorganized, single-parent families. Quality preschool can help young children from those disorganized homes develop the self-motivation skills they’ll need to succeed.

The most important thing in a school is quality teachers. That means there should be merit pay for the best, and a change in the certification rules (we should allow more people into the profession and weed out the mediocre ones, regardless of their certification).

Senior citizen groups could mentor students to keep them emotionally engaged during college years. National service should be a rite of passage, forcing city kids to work with rural kids, and vice versa.

Middle-aged workers need portable pensions and health insurance so they can move and take risks. The immigration system should reward skills, like the college admissions system. The government should increase funding for basic research, especially in math, engineering and physics.

The list could go on. My goal here is merely to describe the different economic policy schools that are out there, and to emphasize my favorite, the one least represented by the current presidential candidates.

Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition. It can do some good when it helps people compete.

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The Opinionator: Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

June 7, 2007, 6:03 pm

You Win-Lose Some

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: worth a click

• Indochina vs. Iraq: Andrew Sullivan reads today’s New York Times op-ed by Peter Rodman and William Shawcross and concedes that he is “caught short” by the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq: “Will we condemn more innocents to death by staying or by leaving? Would the short term costs of leaving be high but the long-term costs of staying higher? These are largely questions not susceptible to definitive answers.” But in the end Sullivan concludes that withdrawal is the worst option, except for all the others. He writes:
  

  On the morale front, it’s increasingly clear that whatever propaganda advantage al Qaeda gets from US withdrawal (and we’d be fools not to acknowledge they’d get a big lift) must be balanced against the massive propaganda disadvantage we sustain by continuing a doomed occupation. My sense is that al Qaeda has more to gain in the short-term from a US withdrawal; but in the long term, al Qaeda is better served by a continuing and doomed American occupation. Strategically, the balance seems to me to favor withdrawal to the Gulf states and the Kurdish-Turkey border.

• Politics imitates “Family Circus”: The new No. 4 candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to the rankings done by Marc Ambinder and Chuck Todd for National Journal is No One. (OK, it’s not Not Me, but it’s close enough.)

• During the war in Iraq, can presidential candidates still be “insurgents” who “surge”? The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta writes of the word “insurgent” at Tapped, “Every time I write that word I feel uncomfortable, because I hate using the same word to describe American political contenders, especially a Democrat who is already being appallingly confused for a terrorist, and the people attacking American forces in Iraq.”

• Only some laws were meant to be broken, apparently: “Note that most of the folks who are so furious about ‘amnesty’ when it comes to peasants who broke the law to escape poverty and oppression have no problem forgiving rich Washington lawyers who broke it to cover up for their political cronies,” writes UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community, an academic group blog.

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June 7, 2007, 6:03 pm

You Win-Lose Some

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: worth a click

• Indochina vs. Iraq: Andrew Sullivan reads today’s New York Times op-ed by Peter Rodman and William Shawcross and concedes that he is “caught short” by the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq: “Will we condemn more innocents to death by staying or by leaving? Would the short term costs of leaving be high but the long-term costs of staying higher? These are largely questions not susceptible to definitive answers.” But in the end Sullivan concludes that withdrawal is the worst option, except for all the others. He writes:
  

  On the morale front, it’s increasingly clear that whatever propaganda advantage al Qaeda gets from US withdrawal (and we’d be fools not to acknowledge they’d get a big lift) must be balanced against the massive propaganda disadvantage we sustain by continuing a doomed occupation. My sense is that al Qaeda has more to gain in the short-term from a US withdrawal; but in the long term, al Qaeda is better served by a continuing and doomed American occupation. Strategically, the balance seems to me to favor withdrawal to the Gulf states and the Kurdish-Turkey border.

• Politics imitates “Family Circus”: The new No. 4 candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to the rankings done by Marc Ambinder and Chuck Todd for National Journal is No One. (OK, it’s not Not Me, but it’s close enough.)

• During the war in Iraq, can presidential candidates still be “insurgents” who “surge”? The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta writes of the word “insurgent” at Tapped, “Every time I write that word I feel uncomfortable, because I hate using the same word to describe American political contenders, especially a Democrat who is already being appallingly confused for a terrorist, and the people attacking American forces in Iraq.”

• Only some laws were meant to be broken, apparently: “Note that most of the folks who are so furious about ‘amnesty’ when it comes to peasants who broke the law to escape poverty and oppression have no problem forgiving rich Washington lawyers who broke it to cover up for their political cronies,” writes UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community, an academic group blog.

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June 6, 2007, 4:43 pm

Down by the Dumpster

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, Republicans

Drew Cline, the editorial page editor of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, files an on-the-scene report from the “activists’ corral” outside last night’s Republican presidential debate, where the turnout by Brownback supporters was, to put it politely, unimpressive. Cline writes on his Union Leader blog:

Waaaaay back in the back, between a large green Dumpster and the row of port-a-potties, was a small contingent of Sam Brownback supporters. The Huckabee supporters were in front of the Dumpster. I asked some of the Brownback folks what they were doing back there, and they said they guessed they didn’t get there early enough. When I said that no one could see them from the road, they shrugged and mumbled something about not wanting to jostle for a spot up front. If that’s the sort of effort they’re going to put into this campaign, Brownback will drop out before Mike Gravel.

Not only did Mike Huckabee manage, savvily, to position his supporters in front of the Brownback-blocking Dumpster, but the former Arkansas governor has also turned in three consecutive debate performances that impressed the pundits. But charm and wit aren’t enough to mount a serious presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, at his The Fix blog, provides a post-debate anecdote that helps explain why most political reporters think Huckabee, despite his supporters’ smart Dumpster positioning, hasn’t built a credible campaign organization.

“Can Huckabee capitalize on his strong showings? We’re skeptical,” Cillizza writes. “Why? A colleague pointed out that as our e-mail inboxes were being flooded by cherry picked positive reviews for the Big 3, there was nothing from Huckabee. Nuff said.”

Huckabee did manage to make Cline’s cut of serious candidates, however. After the debate, Cline proposed voting four of the 10 Republican candidates off the island, and Huckabee wasn’t one of them. (Brownback was.) Cline writes in another post on his blog:

Gilmore, Brownback, Paul and Thompson simply did not deserve to be there. You can be as conservative as Reagan, but if you don’t have the charisma, charm or leadership skills to compete on the world stage, then you will not make an effective President, much less presidential candidate. These guys failed to show that they have any ability to lead the nation. It would’ve been a better debate without them.

– Chris Suellentrop

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June 6, 2007, 4:43 pm

Down by the Dumpster

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, Republicans

Drew Cline, the editorial page editor of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, files an on-the-scene report from the “activists’ corral” outside last night’s Republican presidential debate, where the turnout by Brownback supporters was, to put it politely, unimpressive. Cline writes on his Union Leader blog:

Waaaaay back in the back, between a large green Dumpster and the row of port-a-potties, was a small contingent of Sam Brownback supporters. The Huckabee supporters were in front of the Dumpster. I asked some of the Brownback folks what they were doing back there, and they said they guessed they didn’t get there early enough. When I said that no one could see them from the road, they shrugged and mumbled something about not wanting to jostle for a spot up front. If that’s the sort of effort they’re going to put into this campaign, Brownback will drop out before Mike Gravel.

Not only did Mike Huckabee manage, savvily, to position his supporters in front of the Brownback-blocking Dumpster, but the former Arkansas governor has also turned in three consecutive debate performances that impressed the pundits. But charm and wit aren’t enough to mount a serious presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, at his The Fix blog, provides a post-debate anecdote that helps explain why most political reporters think Huckabee, despite his supporters’ smart Dumpster positioning, hasn’t built a credible campaign organization.

“Can Huckabee capitalize on his strong showings? We’re skeptical,” Cillizza writes. “Why? A colleague pointed out that as our e-mail inboxes were being flooded by cherry picked positive reviews for the Big 3, there was nothing from Huckabee. Nuff said.”

Huckabee did manage to make Cline’s cut of serious candidates, however. After the debate, Cline proposed voting four of the 10 Republican candidates off the island, and Huckabee wasn’t one of them. (Brownback was.) Cline writes in another post on his blog:

Gilmore, Brownback, Paul and Thompson simply did not deserve to be there. You can be as conservative as Reagan, but if you don’t have the charisma, charm or leadership skills to compete on the world stage, then you will not make an effective President, much less presidential candidate. These guys failed to show that they have any ability to lead the nation. It would’ve been a better debate without them.

– Chris Suellentrop

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une 6, 2007, 9:28 am

Dawn of the B-List Republicans

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, Republicans

Blitzed again? The Republicans debated last night, and Wolf Blitzer won again, suggests another “Talk Clock” infographic from Chris Dodd’s campaign.

Among the non-moderators on the stage, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney received roughly twice as much time as each of the other candidates. But Atlantic blogger Matthew Yglesias thinks the “B List” comported itself well, despite the paucity of air time. “To me, a shockingly large and diverse group of B List Republicans — Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and even in their ways Paul and Thompson — are more impressive than the official ‘big three,’ ” Yglesias writes. “They all seemed to me to come much closer than Giuliani, McCain, or Romney to be coming at things from a principle[d], coherent point of view. The top contenders are all ‘Reagan! Terror! Bush! Terror! Reagan! Terreagan!’ and weirdly busy running away from their actual records.”

Among the so-called “B List,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee seems to be the candidate with the most potential for garnering, if not an A-minus, then maybe a B-plus from political-theater critics. Marc Ambinder, an associate editor at The Atlantic who has a new blog with the oddly descriptive title “A Reported Blog on Politics,” has caught Huckabee Fever: “Three debates, three worthy performances for Huckabee,” Ambinder writes. “Unfortunately, none of these debates have been widely broadcast in Iowa, and Huckabee’s organization seems [incapable], as of yet, of harnessing his hard work during the debates.”

Another “second-tier” candidate, Rep. Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, said during the debate that immigrants should cut all ties with their country of origin when they come to the United States. Time magazine’s Ana Marie Cox deduces, “Tancredo wants to outlaw St. Patrick’s Day.”

What about the A list? Former House majority leader Dick Armey still doesn’t like any of them. “I’m of the same opinion now that I was before the debate,” writes Armey, who is guest-blogging at Swampland. “The eventual winner of the Republican nomination is probably not in the field right now, and sadly, neither are many of the issues.” Unanswered in Armey’s post: Which non-candidate does he support, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich?

— Chris Suellentrop

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June 5, 2007, 5:34 pm

Hillary’s Iowa Problem

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, Hillary Clinton, Iowa

Is Iowa a more sexist place than the rest of America? Linda Lantor Fandel, the deputy editorial page editor of The Des Moines Register, fears that it is, and that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is suffering because of it.

A Des Moines Register poll conducted in January “found that only 55 percent of Iowans think the country is open to choosing a woman as president,” she notes. (Polls that ask what your neighbor thinks are considered a more reliable indicator of prejudice than a direct question, because people are presumed to be reluctant to confess their own chauvinism.)

In the May 20 Des Moines Register poll of likely caucus-goers, Clinton places third in Iowa, after John Edwards and Barack Obama. “Maybe Clinton’s standing here has nothing to do with sexism,” she writes. “But maybe it does. After all, what does explain why Iowa has never elected a woman governor, why Iowa has never sent a woman to Congress, or how Clinton is faring? In interviews with women in the Iowa Legislature for an essay I wrote earlier this year, many had run into outright gender discrimination in their campaigns.”

She concludes, “[M]y gut feeling, based on living in Iowa more than 20 years, is that there’s a lingering prejudice that women should not stake out too high a profile.”

On the other hand, too much can be made of a state’s historic prejudices. After all, no woman had won a statewide election in New York before Hillary Clinton’s victory in her 2000 Senate race.

– Chris Suellentrop

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June 5, 2007, 9:26 am

Creation Differences

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: evolution, Sam Brownback

Robert T. Miller, an assistant professor at the Villanova University School of Law, says that part of Sam Brownback’s New York Times op-ed on evolution is “obviously wrong.” But Miller does not object to Brownback’s evaluation of the science. Instead, he opposes the Kansas senator’s “general observations on the relationship between faith and reason,” which Miller believes are “worrying.” Miller writes at On the Square, the First Things blog:

For some people, of course, it’s a matter of faith that God created the world in six days about six thousand years ago; but it’s nevertheless knowable by natural science that this is not the case. Similarly, many people believe in faith that God exists, but Catholics hold (and Senator Brownback is a Catholic) that this proposition can be known by reason in philosophy. Hence, the subject matters of faith and reason in part overlap.

The distinction between faith and reason, correctly understood, is based not on a difference in subject matter but on a difference in epistemological warrant, that is, on the kinds of reasons a person may have for assenting to a particular proposition.

Miller adds, “Senator Brownback, as I said, is a Roman Catholic, but his view of faith and reason is not the one generally upheld in the Catholic tradition.” He explains:

It’s right that natural science doesn’t tell us anything about values, meaning, and purpose, but philosophy surely can, and it’s just ridiculous to think that human reason, as in Shakespeare, doesn’t teach us about suffering or love. To relegate normative questions to the realm of faith would be to deny the existence of an objective morality knowable by human reason — and in this way the virtues, natural law, and human rights become indistinguishable from whatever putative divine commands any crackpot may say he has lately received. This is not a view that anyone, especially someone involved in public life, should want to defend.

Last week, U.C.L.A. law professor Eugene Volokh, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, examined (but did not answer) the question, “Does it matter that Sam Brownback doesn’t accept the theory of evolution?”

– Chris Suellentrop

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Floyd Norris: Notions on High and Low Finance

June 7, 2007, 12:23 pm

Housing With Higher Rates

Wall Street wizards have been expecting higher long-term interest rates for a couple of years, but some now seem surprised they are arriving. The yield on the 10-year United States Treasury note climbed above 5 percent today, and there have been rises in most other countries as well. Maybe China is less willing to buy American and European bonds. Maybe there is something else.

It is instructive that the housing market in many regions, if not in Manhattan, cracked before long-term interest rates went up. The ad campaign run by the National Association of Realtors proclaiming that now is a good time to buy a house may have to be amended to drop the claim that mortgage interest rates are at record lows.

A housing market that was reeling before rates went up may have further to fall. Home builder shares have fallen 6 percent over the past few days, but remain well above where they were last summer, when long-term rates were about where they are now but before there was real evidence that the housing market was tumbling.

June 4, 2007, 4:05 pm

Taxes and Stock Options

A Senate hearing on Tuesday will examine the fact that many companies get a much bigger tax deduction for their employee stock options than they report on their income statements to shareholders. Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, thinks this is costing the Treasury a lot of money.

That is arguable at best, given that the executives who cash in those options pay a lot of taxes on the profits.

But there is still a case for changing the law. Now employees do not pay taxes on options until they cash them in, and then the company gets an identical deduction. If the option expires worthless, the company gets no deduction, and the employee has no profits on which to pay taxes.

Here is an alternative. Tax the employee on the value of the option when issued. Then, when the option is exercised, or expires worthless, the employee would have a taxable gain (or loss) equal to the difference between the value when issued and the value when exercised.

The company would get a tax deduction for the value of the option, which, as I argued in my column last week, would give the company an incentive not to low-ball the value.

But there is another virtue to that idea. Assume that the companies that are the most successful are the ones whose share prices go up the most. (I know, that is not always the case, but there must be some correlation.) The companies that are struggling end up getting no tax deduction for the options they hand out, while the companies that are making the most money get huge deductions. That part of the tax law is regressive: Your company pays more taxes if it does badly than if it does well.

With normal forms of compensation, when the company makes the payment it knows what the tax deduction will be. For options it does not.

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The Middle Eastern Imperative

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 6, 2007

NEW YORK

On the 40th anniversary of Israel's capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, at a time when a Middle East peace appears more distant than ever, world leaders gathering for the G-8 summit have an obligation to move beyond tired formulas that have become an excuse for inaction.

Endless self-justification on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, combined with an abject lack of leadership from the White House, have produced a paralysis that comforts the radicals in both camps and so threatens the viability of a two-state solution.

I know Washington is one-crisis town - and that crisis is Iraq. I know the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert is weak. I know the Palestinian national movement is lacerated by the battles of Fatah and Hamas. I know the Bush administration is beleaguered. Plenty of reasons there to say this is no time for a new initiative.

Israelis have become very adept at saying we have no interlocutor; we face a Hamas movement bent on our destruction; we withdrew from Lebanon and got Hezbollah; we withdrew from Gaza and got daily rockets; and we know what the Palestinians say about us in their school textbooks.

Palestinians have grown slick about telling Israel and the West that you told us to hold an election and we did; you told us to form a democratic government and we did; you know that government represents over 90 percent of the Palestinian people; and yet you will not talk to us.

Such endless, and fruitless, finger-pointing suggests there's limited point in trying again to tackle this bottomless pit of a conflict.

But time is running out on both sides. Palestinians are not served by an impasse because their 59-year struggle for a national homeland is getting hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists using the mirage of Palestine to further a war to the death with the West.

As Dennis Ross, the former U.S. negotiator in the region, told me: "A national conflict you can solve, a religious one you cannot."

Israelis are not served because their dream of a stable Jewish and democratic state, imbued with the moral values of Judaism, depends on getting out of the West Bank, where the Arab demographic tide is against them. Only thus will the corrosive influence of the 40-year experience of lording over another people be terminated and a Jewish democracy assured.

So what to do? The first requirement is American leadership of the intensity displayed by Henry Kissinger in his 1970s shuttle diplomacy. Somebody - Condoleezza Rice, or Tony Blair after he leaves office - has to knock heads together day after day. A 30-day sojourn in the area would be a start.

The second requirement is for the United States to call in chips from its Arab allies. It should get far more leverage from the Riyadh Arab initiative, which reiterated the offer of recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to 1967 borders.

The rise of Shiite Iran has not turned moderate Sunni Arab states into Zionists, but it has readied them for an accommodation with Israel. The fact that most of the Arab world no longer questions Israel's existence represents what Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S ambassador to Israel, called "a cosmic shift."

Rice should exploit this shift. She must prod Arabs to aid Fatah against Hamas and reinforce Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Short of recognition, high-level visits or the opening of business offices in Israel could signal Arab support for a genuine peace process. Egypt must stop smugglers getting weapons to Hamas in Gaza.

The third requirement is to get substantive talks going between Olmert and Abbas. The we-can't-talk-because-of-Hamas canard has to be overcome. Israel's partner in past peace talks has been the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abbas heads the PLO and Hamas is not a constituent member. Bingo.

These talks, overseen by the United States with other Quartet members (Russia, the EU, the United Nations), should center on achieving a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank by the end of the Bush presidency. That is ambitious. Only ambition will move things.

A Palestinian state can exist short of a final settlement - and should. The frontiers of the United States have changed since it came into being; so have Israel's. Statehood is the first step to responsibility.

Short of finality, but beyond current trivia, there is room for inventiveness in the name of Israeli dignity, now compromised by power, and Palestinian dignity, now compromised by powerlessness.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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Where’s EuroArnold?

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 7, 2007

As long as President Bush does not give German Chancellor Angela Merkel another one of those surprise neck rubs, the Group of 8 meetings should settle into cautious choreography on how to bring down the planet’s fever and reduce global inequities.

But one other leader from the world’s major industrial powers should have been invited to this week’s summit at Heiligendamm — the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

While Mr. Bush angered his fellow world leaders this week with yet another foot-dragging proposal on climate change, the governor has been working his own brand of international diplomacy on the issue and leading by example. And he has shown that in politics, and not just bodybuilding, it’s possible to be re-inflated — this time without the steroids.

Some people still think of California as a land of sunbaked barbarians, killing kilowatts in their hot tubs and spewing greenhouse gases from gridlocked freeways. But California, where America goes for rehab and reinvention, is no still-life in decay.

Only a handful of states use less energy, per capita, than California. No state has committed to such a broad change in lifestyle and environment. And no state has tried so consistently — even having to defy the federal government — to get to where the world wants to be on slowing climate change. California is what the rest of the nation could have been had not Vice President Cheney disparaged conservation as a wimp issue for the virtuous, choosing to perforate more public land in a last-gasp stumble for fossil fuels.

Not all of this is Arnold’s doing. An audacious plan to reduce auto emissions was enacted a year before he won the governor’s race in 2003. But despite enormous pressure from automakers, the governor has fully backed the measure and threatened to sue the federal government for the exemption California needs to move ahead. He went a step further when he signed a law committing California to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. And last week he was in Canada, making climate goal agreements with two provinces while blasting his own government for failing to show any leadership.

Home to one in eight Americans, with an economy bigger than Canada, California has global swagger — and the governor is starting to use it. The state is further along than any other country on this issue.

“The power influence we have is the equivalent of a nation, or even a continent,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said last week in British Columbia.

Some industry executives have cried a Salton Sea of tears over having to comply with all the new initiatives. Hybrids, hydrogen cars, engines running on salad dressing — how’s General Motors supposed to fend off bankruptcy with innovation?

But other corporations view the opportunity to serve one of the world’s largest auto markets as a potential motherlode.

Check into any college lab in California, from the gilded interiors of Stanford to the mobile-home campuses in Riverside County, and you find a frenzy of experiments on how to light, heat, cool and transport ourselves without wrecking the globe. You find the same thing up the entrepreneurial ladder, from garages in Salinas to kids in flops at Google headquarters.

The Governator himself is a fascinating hybrid. Two years ago, his approval rating was at Bushian levels, just above 30 percent. Then he had a California epiphany — Eureka! He embraced universal health care, edgy capitalism and market-based environmentalism, while vowing to keep taxes low. Now he is the most popular major politician in California.

But to some fellow Republicans, he is a traitor, a product of all that Kennedy compounding with his wife, Maria Shriver. Rush Limbaugh called him “a sellout.” But it took a former Mr. Universe to do what no significant Republican had yet to do: he said Mr. Limbaugh was “irrelevant.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger, the policeman’s son from a small town in Austria, has morphed into his logical political fit: EuroArnold, at home in the pragmatic politics of Tony Blair or Mrs. Merkel.

It would have been intriguing to have him in Germany this week, showing the rest of the world that not all Americans are in the last century on the big issues of the day. And, of course, he’s one of the few Americans who’s used to wearing a Speedo without blushing.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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Repression by China, and by Us

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 7, 2007

BEIJING

I’d meant to focus this column on a Chinese woman whose battle for justice has led the police to arrest her more than 30 times, lock her in an insane asylum, humiliate her sexually, shock her with cattle prods, beat her until she is crippled and, worst of all, take away her young daughter.

The case of Li Guirong, a graying 50-year-old who now hobbles on crutches, reflects China at its worst — government by thuggery. But each time I start this column, I feel that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have pulled the rug out from under me. Do I really have the right to complain about torture or extra-legal detentions in China when we Americans do the same in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba?

I keep remembering a heated conversation I had in Yunnan Province when I lived in China years ago. I reproached an official for China’s torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and he retorted that China was fragile and had lost hundreds of thousands of lives in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. “If you Americans ever faced the threat of chaos, you would do just the same,” he said.

“Impossible!” I replied.

Yet I owe him an apology, for he has been proven right. The moment we did feel a threat, after 9/11, we held people without trial, and beatings were widespread enough that more than 110 of our prisoners died in custody in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.

Our extrajudicial detentions and mistreatment of prisoners are wrong in and of themselves. But they also undercut our own ability to speak against oppression and torture around the world.

If I protest here about the abuse of Ms. Li, Chinese officials will simply say that we Americans are hypocrites who should clean up our own house before we go around pointing fingers. But let me protest anyway.

Ms. Li’s story began in 1994, when her husband was badly injured in a fall in the state-owned coal mine where they both worked. Rather than pay medical care and disability, the mine fired him.

Ms. Li protested to local officials — and then the mine fired her as well. So she made a series of trips to Beijing to appeal for help from the central government — but each time the police just rounded her up and sent her back to her native Jilin Province.

Twice the local police sentenced her to a labor camp. The first time, she was imprisoned for a year for trying to tell her story to a British journalist. The second time, she was imprisoned for 18 months for escalating her protests and trying to contact government leaders.

Local officials once had her stripped naked in front of male police officers and strapped down to a bed in a mental hospital, where they gave her injections of drugs that for a time left her in a stupor.

Another time, she was beaten and kicked so badly that she is still unable to walk without crutches. But the worst outrage, she says, is the targeting of her children.

The authorities threatened to deny her eldest daughter, Wang Lingli, a place in university, although in the end she scored so brilliantly on her college entrance exams that the officials backed off. Ms. Wang, who confirms her mother’s story, is now looking after her severely disabled father and is about to graduate from university — but only if she can pay $2,850 she still owes in college fees.

As for the younger daughter, now 12, the authorities carted her off to an orphanage. That just breaks Ms. Li’s heart. I brought two of my own children when I interviewed Ms. Li, and she told me how much she missed her own little girl as she held my daughter and wept and wept.

The United States must stand up against such human rights abuses around the world — and our first step should be to clean up our act.

Our own equivalent of Ms. Li is Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who has been held in Guantánamo for more than five years. He still suffers from painful injuries that he apparently received in beatings while in American custody.

The U.S. government has never offered a hint of evidence that he is anything but a journalist. Indeed, Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say that the interrogators have offered to release him immediately if he will spy on Al Jazeera.

So, Mr. Bush, give prisoners like Mr. Hajj their rights — and give America back its moral authority to speak up for human rights around the world.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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HOME FIRES: five Iraq War veterans on their return to American life

By Lee Kelley

June 6, 2007, 9:43 pm

Then and Now

I spent almost a year in the Sunni Triangle. I somehow avoided the hundreds of mortar attacks on my base, the I.E.D.s on some of the most dangerous roads in Iraq, the R.P.G. fired at my convoy. It’s the path of the ages I feel I’ve traveled, where able bodied Americans go to war for their country, either by choice or not, and the best way to illustrate my journey is with a simple then and now. It is a desert full of memories I can conjure up, and every grain of sand is in ultra-sharp focus like a 7-megapixel photo.

Then: I had been happily married for seven years. The most sacred things in my life were my family, my marriage, my children, and my dreams. This was the war of my generation and I wanted to do my part. I was in charge of tactical communications for a battalion of 600 soldiers, but sometimes I was called upon for other missions. One day I found myself conducting a search for an Al Qaeda weapons cache on a farm near Ramadi. The helicopters landed and we jumped out. I ran through a swirling dust cloud with my weapon pointed at the chest of the man who walked out of his doorway when he heard us land. I didn’t know if he was hostile yet. I couldn’t take the chance. I was yelling at the interpreter, and the interpreter was yelling at the man. Two hours later, the farm had been searched and we were kicking a soccer ball with the man’s son. There was no weapons cache. And no one was hurt. It was still a good mission because we narrowed our search.

That same night I boarded another helicopter to go on emergency leave. I was flying to New Orleans just weeks after Hurricane Katrina to visit my mother, who had been struggling with breast cancer. I had received a Red Cross message that same morning. My soldiers tried to talk me out of going on the mission, but I refused to back out. I compartmentalized those personal emotions until the mission was complete.

Once there I helped my dad get the house and property cleaned up. Water damage had left everything in a horrible mess. I’ll never forget the wisdom and wetness in my mom’s eyes the last time I saw her. I had been there for weeks and she was still holding on. My leave could not be extended anymore. I had to go back to Ramadi. We both knew it was the last time our eyes would meet. And it was. She passed five weeks later. My wife and kids were still back in Utah, where the marriage I left behind was struggling to survive as well. These are the pictures hardest to look at in my high-def recollections. And these are the pictures that need no well-intended caption scribbled on the back because they are burned into my memory.

I returned to Iraq, an anonymous face in the window of a plane, flying across the Atlantic in the middle of the night, and threw myself into the work. Things got worse back in Utah and at that point I gave up on trying to save my marriage. My own home was no longer a healthy environment. My only concern then was for the kids. I honestly thought I might lose my mind to frustration, helplessness, and anger. When my tour was over and I finally got back to Utah, I had been gone for 17 months. I had lived and worked in close proximity to violence and death for a year. Over 80 soldiers in my brigade were killed in combat. Hundreds more were injured. Two soldiers in my battalion were killed. I prayed for them. I thanked God that none of the 18 soldiers in my communications section were killed, and that I was unharmed. It felt positively blessed to be home in one piece. Now my kids needed their daddy. Overnight, I changed my focus completely and put every ounce of energy into facing new challenges. The transition was immediate. I had no choice.

Now. When I first returned to Utah I felt that my very soul had been scrubbed raw by sustained emotional overload. I was equidistant between two extremes and the balance could go either way. Darkness or Light. Depression or Joy. I could see no grey, only black and white. I was on the cusp of major life changes on many levels and they scared me. I was drinking too much and nothing felt the same. My marriage had failed and faded like a Polaroid left out in the sun. My mom was gone. And I hadn’t yet begun to understand how much the war had affected me.

The kids kept me busy, yes, but they kept me grounded too. I have to be strong and stable for them. I have gladly cared for the kids since the day I got off that plane. I was granted full custody in the divorce and have been a single dad for 10 months, working 40 hours a week while raising my two kids (7-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy) with very little help. I’m not complaining, but the adjustments have been intense. I am becoming an expert in the art of parenting and personal sacrifice, and my kids are worth it.

So far, I volunteered in my daughter’s classroom, taught both kids to swim, and threw them very cool birthday parties. We’ve spent holidays together. We’ve gone to movies, plays, amusement parks, Disney on Ice, and the circus. Also, after nine years with the same woman I’m “single” again, so I’ve started dating a little. It’s much more complicated now. I have been writing quite a lot, working on multiple projects, and I have a literary agent. I don’t remember the last time I had a bad day. I am settling into a renewed optimism, a fresh interest in all facets of life and ambition.

Before I went to Iraq I was not in the habit of sharing my personal life with complete strangers, and I’m still not. But through my blog, and forums such as this one, I’ve come to realize that it’s good to talk about these things to those who want to listen because I know I am not the only soldier facing adversity. In fact, I feel very lucky indeed.

For months I was bitter and confused, but after deep consideration, and with the unconditional support of a very small circle of family and friends, the image of a still pond behind the hurricane won over my intention, rather than the fury of the storm itself. Forgiveness seemed possible. Grief less painful. I sat alone the other night at a lookout point above the Salt Lake Valley. It is a spot I visit whenever I can. It was dusk and the mountains looked like the painted shadows of mountains, silhouetted by the light behind them. I thought about the last couple of years, as I do often. And I was once again amazed by the momentum of the sun when it struck the horizon, and the way time heals these invisible scars, slowly braiding solace back around a broken heart.

War and life have penned this harsh new narrative, but I am home now. And I am learning.

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BASIC INSTINCTS: behavior on two, four, six and eight legs

By Richard Conniff

June 5, 2007, 5:23 pm

More Useless Knowledge

When army ants are sweeping across the forest on one of their massive predatory raids, potholes tend to slow them down. And just the other day, British researchers revealed how these hard-charging creatures deal with the impediment: Individual ants fling themselves down and bridge the potholes with their bodies. In fact, the volunteers seem to size-match themselves to the holes they choose to plug. And when the army has tramped across their backs, they get up, dust themselves off, and head home to join the communal feast.

In other useless news, a researcher at the University of South Florida reports that the fastest tongue on Earth belongs to a giant palm salamander from Central America. The salamander fires its tongue like an arrow, using energy stored by stretching elastic fibers in its mouth. This is bad news for nearby insects.

But it’s wonderful news to me. Over the course of this month, I’m writing a series of columns about the quirky nature of behavior in both the human and animal worlds, and from time to time you will notice that the two worlds have a way of overlapping for me. The topics will range from my own hapless feelings of un-schadenfreude (see the first column in the series, which ran on Monday) to the idea of buying local as a remedy for global warming. The series is called “Basic Instincts” because I believe that what we think of as our highest human behaviors are often deeply rooted in animal biology.

I didn’t have any such idea in mind when I first started writing about behavior years ago. To be honest, I was just having fun. It seemed to me delightful to live in a world where, for instance, certain beetles have evolved to do handstands on the dunes of the Namib Desert, using their backs to catch and collect the precious mist drifting in off the Atlantic. (They actually have grooves on their backs to guide the water down to their mouths.)

The human beings who study such things often proved entertaining, too. I once spent time in the field with a brilliant researcher whose methods occasionally included humming to a spider (some spiders recognize their prey by sound). He also tended to pick up spiders with his fingers, commenting, for instance, that “when squeezed gently on the abdomen” one such spider “produced a strong, somewhat disagreeable odor reminiscent of … lampyrid beetles and canned string beans.”

I can’t quite place the smell. But I came to love the arcane details of animal behavior in part because they often seemed so splendidly useless. And useless knowledge is a precious thing. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love” puts it, knowledge does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true.” The character (based on the poet A.E. Housman) concedes that useful knowledge is fine, too, “but it’s for the fainthearted.”

Well, O.K., I sometimes also feel fainthearted. So I should add that useless knowledge often has an insidious way of leading people in useful directions. Charles Darwin, for instance, wasn’t looking for anything in particular when he collected finches in the Galapagos; it was years before it dawned on him that they were the key to understanding evolution by natural selection. And in recent decades, it’s been hard to miss how useless knowledge about the behavior of animals has begun to provide surprisingly useful insights into the behavior of human beings.

Not so long ago, science treated the two worlds as largely separate. Anthropomorphism — attributing human thoughts and feelings to animals — was a cardinal sin. This taboo was “anthropodenial,” according to the primatologist Frans de Waal, a way of preserving the special status of Homo sapiens. Over the past few decades, though, scientists have haltingly come to acknowledge that animals often respond to the world much as we do, and that we behave in many ways much like animals. Our behaviors aren’t separate. They’re just different points along a continuum.

And that realization has helped encourage what I think of as zoomorphism, the practice of using animal behaviors to explain what makes humans tick. A few years ago, for instance, researchers discovered that macaque monkeys have special neurons in their brains enabling one individual to mirror the actions of other monkeys. Useless knowledge. But scientists soon found that humans have mirror neurons, too, and they appear to be a key to understanding behaviors like empathy, emotional contagion and autism.

It can seem unsettling at first when distinctly human behaviors turn out to have a common heritage with that of other animals. Maybe that’s because of the misguided impression that the lives of animals are exclusively nasty, brutish and short. But zoomorphism just as often leads in the opposite direction. For instance, Frans de Waal was once watching chimpanzees when he noticed two male combatants resolve their hostilities with an embrace. In the old days of anthropodenial, scientists would have dismissed that “a post-conflict interaction.” But de Waal said it was a reconciliation. It was the beginning of the recognition that the way humans speak and respond to a phrase like “I’m sorry” isn’t just a social nicety. It’s a part of our deep biological heritage.

When it comes to behavior, whether on two, four, six or eight legs, I still love useless knowledge. But I’m no longer sure any such thing exists.

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Can He Unleash the Force?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: June 6, 2007

In mythic tales from “Superman” to “Star Wars” to “Spider-Man,” there comes a moment when the young superhero has to learn to harness his powers. That’s the challenge Barack Obama faces now.

Clearly, the 45-year-old senator is blessed with many gifts. He can write and talk, think and walk, with exceptional grace and agility.

When he wants to, Mr. Obama can rouse the crowd to multiple ovations, as he did yesterday when he talked with a preacher’s passion about the “quiet riot” of frustration of blacks in this country, on issues like Katrina, in a speech before black clergy at Hampton University in Virginia.

But often he reverts to Obambi, tentative about commanding the stage and consistently channeling the excitement he engenders. At times, he seems to be actively resisting his phenom status and easy appeals to emotion. When he should fire up, he dampens. When he should dominate, he’s deferential. When he should lacerate, he’s languid.

Futilely, he chafes at the notion that debates and forums are rituals for showing a sense of command with a forceful one-liner, a witty takedown or a “shining city on a hill” moment. He keeps trying to treat them as places where he can riff, improvise, soothe, extrapolate or find common ground. He skitters away from the subtext of political contests, the need to use your force to slay your opponents.

In the first two Democratic debates and Monday night’s forum on faith, Hillary Clinton commanded the stage, just like a great squash player dominates the T. The woman radiated more authority than the glamour boys flanking her — and she did it despite the pressure of having a few new books published with salacious and unflattering nuggets about her.

In the South Carolina debate, Senator Obama was — absurdly — taken by surprise when Brian Williams asked the requisite Dukakis question designed to elicit manly passion: How would he respond if Al Qaeda hit two American cities? The senator ignored the visceral nature of the question and rambled on cerebrally about natural disasters, working with the international community and about how he would have to see if there was “any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.”

He was already told that it was Al Qaeda in the question, and “potentially,” “some” and “dismantle” are not the sort of fast-and-furious words the moment required. A bit later, he doubled back to say he would hunt down terrorists, but it was too late.

In the New Hampshire debate Sunday night, Mr. Obama again missed his chances. Hillary is the one he needs to unseat, but he treads gingerly around her. He seems afraid of a repeat of that moment last December, as the clamor for him to run was building, when he touched her elbow and winked at her on the Senate floor, and she kept walking. He called a friend afterwards, stunned at her icy behavior.

Instead, he wasted his time tangling with Dennis Kucinich in the first debate and slapping back John Edwards in the second.

When Hillary admitted that she had not read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting to authorize the president to go to war, Senator Obama had a clear shot. The woman who always does her homework did not bother to do her homework on the most important vote of her Senate career because her political viability was more important than the president’s duplicity: She felt that, as a woman, she could not cast a flower-child vote if she wanted to run for president. At this fateful moment, she was thinking more of herself than her country. As someone who has been known to tailor the truth to accommodate her ambition, she looked away while W. was doing the same.

Mr. Obama let the opportunity for a sharp comment pass. He made an oblique one, without mentioning her name, noting that former Senator Bob Graham said that the N.I.E. was one of the reasons he voted against the war authorization.

He missed another chance when Hillary said at the beginning of the debate that she believed “we are safer than we were” before 9/11, even though the Democrats won Congress with the opposite argument last fall, and even though the Iraq war has clearly made the world more dangerous than ever.

The next day, after reflecting on the matter overnight, the Obama campaign sent out a rebuttal to Hillary’s ridiculous claim, citing reports showing that radicalization in the Muslim world and terrorism are spreading rather than diminishing. The belated memo was blandly addressed to “Interested Parties.” But by then the only thing that was interesting was why it took Obambi so long.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s Web site blared the headline “In Command” linking to “raves” of her confident debate performance.

The Boy Wonder cannot take over the country unless he can take on Wonder Woman.

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