Health Care Terror

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: July 9, 2007
=================

These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

“National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

I say conscience, because the health care issue is, most of all, about morality.

That’s what we learn from the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Health care reformers should, by all means, address the anxieties of middle-class Americans, their growing and justified fear of finding themselves uninsured or having their insurers deny coverage when they need it most. But reformers shouldn’t focus only on self-interest. They should also appeal to Americans’ sense of decency and humanity.

What outrages people who see “Sicko” is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system — sick people who can’t pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn’t a participant in her mother’s health plan won’t treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.

“Sicko” is a powerful call to action — but don’t count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they’re very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.

These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. “Sicko” plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly — the program now known as Medicare — would lead to totalitarianism.

Right now, by the way, Medicare — which did enormous good, without leading to a dictatorship — is being undermined by privatization.

Mainly, though, the big-money interests with a stake in the present system want you to believe that universal health care would lead to a crushing tax burden and lousy medical care.

Now, every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of universal care. Citizens of these countries pay extra taxes as a result — but they make up for that through savings on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs. The overall cost of health care in countries with universal coverage is much lower than it is here.

Meanwhile, every available indicator says that in terms of quality, access to needed care and health outcomes, the U.S. health care system does worse, not better, than other advanced countries — even Britain, which spends only about 40 percent as much per person as we do.

Yes, Canadians wait longer than insured Americans for elective surgery. But over all, the average Canadian’s access to health care is as good as that of the average insured American — and much better than that of uninsured Americans, many of whom never receive needed care at all.

And the French manage to provide arguably the best health care in the world, without significant waiting lists of any kind. There’s a scene in “Sicko” in which expatriate Americans in Paris praise the French system. According to the hard data they’re not romanticizing. It really is that good.

All of which raises the question Mr. Moore asks at the beginning of “Sicko”: who are we?

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” So declared F.D.R. in 1937, in words that apply perfectly to health care today. This isn’t one of those cases where we face painful tradeoffs — here, doing the right thing is also cost-efficient. Universal health care would save thousands of American lives each year, while actually saving money.

So this is a test. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can’t overcome those forces here, there’s not much hope for America’s future.

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Spineless on Sudan

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: July 9, 2007
====================

In May 2006, President Bush declared: “The vulnerable people of Darfur deserve more than sympathy. ... America will not turn away from this tragedy.”

Since then, Mr. Bush has turned away — and 450,000 more people have been displaced in Darfur. “Things are getting worse,” noted Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights campaigner in Sudan.

One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out.

In the last few months, Sudan’s government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan — which seems increasingly likely.

Within Darfur, aid groups have increasingly become targets, and in April alone three aid workers were shot and 20 were kidnapped, while hijackers tried to seize aid workers’ vehicles at a rate of almost one a day. As for African Union peacekeepers, seven of them were shot dead the same month — so they’re in no position to rescue aid workers.

The cancer has also been spreading into Chad and the Central African Republic, compounding each country’s intrinsic instability. Last month a 27-year-old French woman, Elsa Serfass, on her first assignment with Doctors Without Borders, was shot dead in C.A.R. as she drove through an area where militias had been burning villages. So Doctors Without Borders has had to suspend much of its work in the area.

Something similar is happening in eastern Chad. Mia Farrow, the actress — who has shown a toughness about genocide that no Western leader has — has just returned from her sixth visit to the region and says that eastern Chad now feels like Somalia.

“Pick-ups with machine guns bolted onto the rear and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets terrorizing people,” she told me. “No one knows who they are.” While Ms. Farrow was visiting the town of Abéché, an elderly guard at a U.N. compound there was killed and two people were badly beaten.

Then there’s rape. Ever since Sudan began the genocide, it has been using rape to terrorize populations of Africans — and then periodically punishing women who seek treatment on charges of adultery or fornication.

So far this year, at least two young women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. As Refugees International puts it in a new report: “The government is more likely to take action against those who report and document rape than those who commit it.”

Much of the news on Darfur has been a bit optimistic lately, because it has focused on recent flurries of international diplomacy. While it’s true that China is belatedly putting some pressure on Sudan to admit international peacekeepers, at the same time China continues to supply Sudan with the guns used to slaughter Darfuri children. China also just signed a 20-year agreement to develop offshore oil for Sudan, and in April China pledged “to boost military exchanges and cooperation” with Sudan.

Let’s hope that athletes who go to Beijing for the Olympics next year will wear T-shirts honoring the victims of the genocide that China is underwriting.

In the burst of diplomatic activity, one person who stands out is Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. Mr. Sarkozy is pushing to send a European Union force, including many French troops, to stabilize Chad and the Central African Republic. If they arrive by October, as planned, they just might pull those two countries back from the brink of collapse.

In contrast, Mr. Bush has been letting Darfur rhyme with Rwanda and Bosnia. For years, Mr. Bush’s aides have discussed whether he should give a prime-time speech on Darfur to ratchet up the pressure; he still hasn’t. Laura Bush just completed a four-nation swing through Africa, but she didn’t include a visit to any of the areas affected by the Darfur crisis.

Ultimately, the only way the genocide will end will be with a negotiated political settlement — but the only way to get that is to put much more pressure on Khartoum.

So how about if Mr. Bush invites Mr. Sarkozy — along with Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao and Hosni Mubarak — for a joint visit to Chad and C.A.R. to meet Darfuri refugees? Maybe Mr. Sarkozy could lend Mr. Bush and the others a little backbone.

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A Deal for the Public: If You Win, You Lose

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: July 9, 2007
=================

When Oklahoma’s attorney general decided to sue about a dozen poultry companies, saying they had polluted the state’s waterways with chicken manure, he did not turn to lawyers on his staff or hire an outside law firm that would bill in the usual way, by the hour.

Instead, Attorney General W. A. Drew Edmondson went into business with three plaintiffs’ firms, agreeing to pay them as much as half of any money they recovered from the poultry companies.

In courts around the nation, in cases involving tobacco, lead paint and guns, state attorneys general have been outsourcing government power to private lawyers. Business groups hate the development, in part because they would rather not litigate against sophisticated plaintiffs’ lawyers on a level legal playing field.

But the business groups make broader points as well.

“When someone who is exercising the state’s power stands to gain from that, it violates due process,” said Jay T. Jorgensen, a lawyer for one of the chicken companies. “If you got pulled over by a cop and the cop made more money if he gave you a ticket and less if he didn’t, no one would think that was fair.”

There is also the question of whether hiring lawyers by promising them a percentage of what they win — on contingency, in the legal jargon — violates the separation of powers.

It is, after all, the legislature’s job to decide how to spend the state’s money. But an attorney general who promises a percentage of a recovery to a law firm is giving away state money without legislative approval.

“These arrangements rob the legislature of its right to control what is in the public interest,” said Paul M. Pohl, who represents defendants in lead paint suits in which governments are represented by lawyers who will be paid a percentage of what they win. “And the last people you want to have to decide what good public policy in your state is are contingency-fee lawyers from out of state. They’re like groups of locusts looking for the next wheat field.”

That perspective seems to be gaining traction. In May, President Bush issued an executive order forbidding contingency-fee arrangements at the federal level.

On the phone the other day, Mr. Edmondson said that how he paid his lawyers was a distraction from the serious issues in the suit. He controls every aspect of the litigation, he said, and personally argued important motions last month.

Mr. Edmondson added that the state could not afford to address the problem any other way. “We are over $10 million in litigation costs to date,” he said. “We simply lack the resources in the attorney general’s office to handle this.”

Asked if he had given any thought to hiring lawyers by the hour, he said, “With what?”

But Oklahoma is a government, with the power to tax and to borrow, and it does not have to turn to a private business to finance a lawsuit it says is in the public interest.

“We’re not going to ask the taxpayers of the state of Oklahoma to pay the lawyers,” Mr. Edmondson responded. “Our adversaries would like us to ask the legislature to choose between this litigation and increased funding for education, for mental health or for corrections.”

But that is not quite right. The taxpayers may pay either way.

Any recovery in the case belongs to the state’s taxpayers, but Mr. Edmondson has signed a contract to give a big chunk of it away.

It will not be clear whether he made a good deal or a bad one until the case is over. Paying lawyers by the hour can be awfully expensive, too, and that money is lost if the case goes south. But lawyers doing contingent-fee work for state governments have generally made out very well, particularly in tobacco cases.

Only a few courts have addressed the legality of government contingency-fee arrangements, and they have given mixed answers. In 1997, the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down a contingency-fee contract between the state’s attorney general and its lawyers in an environmental case. The next year, Maryland’s highest court upheld a similar contract in a tobacco suit.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court ducked the issue in a lead paint case last year, saying that it was not yet ripe to be decided but noting that it “implicates sensitive questions regarding the separation of powers in this state and the proper role of the constitutional office of the attorney general in relation to the exclusively legislative powers of the general assembly.”

In the chicken manure case, Judge Gregory K. Frizzell turned back a challenge to the contingent-fee contract last month, though he suggested that he might seek the views of the Oklahoma Supreme Court on the matter.

Not all state attorneys general have embraced contingent fees. In a speech to the American Bar Association, William H. Pryor Jr., who was then attorney general of Alabama, said they had an important role — in some cases. Contingent fees, he said, address “the need for poor persons with valid claims to have access to the legal system.”

“Governments do not have this problem,” Mr. Pryor, now a federal appeals court judge, continued. “The use of contingent-fee contracts allows governments to avoid the appropriation process and create the illusion that these lawsuits are being pursued at no cost to the taxpayers. These contracts also create the potential for outrageous windfalls or even outright corruption for political supporters of the officials who negotiated the contracts.”

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 9, 2007, 11:12 am

Doing the Math on Immigration

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: worth a click

============================================

• Judge Richard Posner feels that some aspects of immigration law are being caught up in a misunderstanding about how globalism and outsourcing really work. Writing on the Becker-Posner Blog, he continues:

  There is nothing in the definition of outsourcing to connect it to foreign commerce. But the current anxiety about outsourcing focuses on the outsourcing of software development and other high-tech services to foreign nations, particularly India, and hardship to American skilled American workers whose jobs are outsourced.

  Oddly, Americans who are opposed to free trade don’t mind as much when Americans buy from foreigners as when they hire them, though the effect is the same. If Microsoft purchases software from an Indian company, the effect on American jobs is no different than if it hires Indian software engineers to work for Microsoft in India–or, for that matter, in the United States. If the latter arrangement is preferred, it makes no sense for Congress to make it difficult for American companies to hire highly skilled foreigners to work in the United States. In any event, the harder it is to obtain visas for highly skilled foreigners, the greater the incentive to outsource production to those highly skilled foreigners in their native lands. So restricting visas seems a futile measure for trying to protect American high-tech jobs.

• Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York was well known for taking people to court as attorney general, but in his new job he seems to see the other side of the coin, as it were. “Perhaps to the disappointment of some of his lawyerly supporters, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer seems to be among those who recognize that the upward spiral in the cost of insuring doctors against malpractice is not just a figment of someone’s imagination,” notes Walter Olson at Point of Law.

  Olson cites a recent article in New York Business.com with some examples of coverage rates: a Long Island neurosurgeon will pay $309,000; a Brooklyn obstetrician’s cost, $173,000; a Westchester orthopedic surgeon’s coverage plan will cost $108,679.

  Olson also notes that Spitzer and insurance commissioner Eric Dinallo have appointed a commission to fix the problem.

• Walid Phares at Counterterrorism blog isn’t surprised by recent chatter that Hezbollah and other pro-Syrian forces in Lebanon may attempt a coup this summer. “The Syro-Iranian plan to crush Lebanon is not new. It. has been incrementally developing since the summer of 2005,” writes Phares. He continues:

  The Lebanese cabinet of Fuad Seniora is aware of this possibility, but it lost multiple opportunities, early on, to bring in the United Nations and a multinational presence on the Syrian-Lebanese borders and in the major cities. The Syro-Iranian axis took advantage of this to reinforce its own forces within Lebanon.

  The “axis” believes that the United States and its allies will be less-and-less capable of intervening by early 2008, hence during the summer-fall 2007 period we may see moves to gain more territory in Lebanon. The main issue now is the presidency of the republic. Elections are currently slated to take place in September. But current, pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud will try to postpone the elections as long as he can. The March 14 movement (opposed to the Syrian regime) will try to vote for its candidate — not yet selected — by late October/early November. The new president won’t be recognized by Hezbollah and its allies.

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THINK AGAIN: A blog at the NY Times by Stanley Fish

July 8, 2007, 8:32 pm

Clarence Thomas Is Right

Tags: Bong Hits 4 Jesus, Morse v. Frederick, student rights, Supreme Court

On June 25th the Supreme Court held in Morse v. Frederick that it was all right to discipline a high school student because he and some of his friends had unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school-sponsored event.

The facts are not in dispute. When the principal of the school, Deborah Morse, asked the students to take the banner down, one of them, Joseph Frederick, refused. He was suspended and his suspension was upheld by the school superintendent, who cited a board policy prohibiting any form of expression that “advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors.” Mr. Frederick then filed suit, alleging that his first amendment rights had been violated. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with him, but the Supreme Court reversed by a 5-to-4 vote, and held for Principal Morse.

The Court’s discussion unfolds under the shadow of a 1969 case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the key sentence of which declared that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Not that students are free to say or express anything they like. The test, the Court said in Tinker, is whether the speech in question can be said to “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In 1969, students had worn black armbands signifying their opposition to the Vietnam War. Applying the test it had just formulated, the Supreme Court held that since no such disruption was documented, the speech was protected.

The majority opinion in Frederick, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, ducks the disruption issue and bases its holding on the school’s right and responsibility to educate “students about the dangers of illegal drugs.” After all, it reasoned, “Tinker is not the only basis for restricting student speech,” citing to Bethel School District v. Fraser’s declaration that “the constitutional rights of students in public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings” (1986).

The minority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, challenges on two points. By singling out speech about drugs as a proper object of regulation, the majority “invites stark viewpoint discrimination,” a constitutionally suspect disfavoring of a message simply because of its content. Moreover, the minority adds, it’s not at all clear what the message was or even that there was a message. Mr. Frederick asserted that he wasn’t advocating anything; the sign was meaningless; the only thing he intended (or hoped for), he said, was to get himself on television.

The majority ignores Frederick’s account of his own intention, and insists that it is enough that the interpretation of his intent by Principal Morse was “a reasonable one.” The minority replies that, “The beliefs of third parties, reasonable or otherwise, have never dictated which messages amount to proscribable advocacy.”

And so it goes, back and forth.

But Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t having any. He concurs with the majority in its holding for Principal Morse, but he rejects the context within which both the majority and the minority make their points. In short, he rejects Tinker and the idea that schoolchildren have any First Amendment rights at all. Why? Because “originally understood, the Constitution does not afford students a right to free speech in public schools.”

Thomas argues from both history and principle: “In the light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech’ encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools.” Early public schools, Thomas reports, “were not places for freewheeling debates or explorations of competing ideas.” Rather, schools were places where teachers “relied on discipline to maintain order.”

And this view of what properly goes on in public schools was confirmed in the rulings of state courts in Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina, California and Missouri, among others. It is only since Tinker — which, Thomas contends, “effected a sea change” in this area of law — that we have been troubled by talk of students’ speech rights. (One suspects that Thomas is uneasy about the expansion of First Amendment rights in general. As recently as 1942, in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Court was able to rehearse a paragraph-long list of forms of speech that did not rise to the level of constitutional notice. That paragraph could not be written today.)

Although Thomas does not make this point explicitly, it seems clear that his approval of an older notion of the norms that govern student behavior stems from a conviction about how education should and should not proceed. When he tells us that it was traditionally understood that “teachers taught and students listened, teachers commanded and students obeyed,” he comes across as someone who shares that understanding.

As do I. If I had a criticism of Thomas, it would be that he does not go far enough. Not only do students not have first amendment rights, they do not have any rights: they don’t have the right to express themselves, or have their opinions considered, or have a voice in the evaluation of their teachers, or have their views of what should happen in the classroom taken into account. (And I intend this as a statement about college students as well as high-school students.)

One reason that students (and many others) have come to believe that they have these rights is a confusion between education and democracy. It is in democratic contexts that people have claims to the rights enumerated in the constitution and other documents at the heart of our political system – the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, the right to determine, by vote, the shape of their futures.

Educational institutions, however, are not democratic contexts (even when the principles of democracy are being taught in them). They are pedagogical contexts and the imperatives that rule them are the imperatives of pedagogy – the mastery of materials and the acquiring of analytical skills. Those imperatives do not recognize the right of free expression or any other right, except the right to competent instruction, that is, the right to be instructed by well-trained, responsible teachers who know their subjects and stick to them and don’t believe that it is their right to pronounce on anything and everything.

What this means is that teachers don’t have First Amendment rights either, at least while they are performing as teachers. Away from school, they have the same rights as anyone else. In school, they are just like their students, bound to the protocols of the enterprise they have joined. That enterprise is not named democracy and what goes on within it – unless it is abuse or harassment or assault – should not rise to the level of constitutional notice or any other notice except the notice of the professional authorities whose job it is to keep the educational machine running smoothly.

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A Profile in Cowardice

By FRANK RICH

Published: July 8, 2007
=================

THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.

The timing of the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.

But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.

That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly in a bunker.

But if those die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar intelligence.

Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”

The president’s presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.

When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”

Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.

Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”

What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.

People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.

The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.

Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.

In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.

But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice. Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat.

Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of “Bring ’em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.

No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.

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Live Bad, Go Green

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: July 8, 2007
====================

Over dinner with friends in London the other night, the conversation drifted to global warming and whether anything was really being done to reverse it. One guest, Sameh El-Shahat, a furniture designer, heaped particular scorn on programs that enable people to offset their excessive carbon emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. “Who really checks that it’s being done?” he asked. And how much difference does it really make?

But then he hit on an ingenious idea: If people really want to generate money to plant trees or finance green power, why not have them offset their real sins, not just their carbon excesses? We started to play with his idea: Imagine if you could offset the whole Ten Commandments.

No, really, think about it. Imagine if there were a Web site — I’d call it GreenSinai.com — where every time you thought you had violated one of the Ten Commandments, or you wanted to violate one of them but did not want to feel guilty about it, you could buy carbon credits to offset your sins.

The motto of Britain’s Conservative Party today is “Vote Blue, Go Green.” GreenSinai’s motto could be: “Live Bad, Go Green.” That would generate some income.

Here’s how it would work: One day, you’re out in the backyard mowing the lawn and suddenly you covet your neighbor’s wife. Hey, it happens — that’s why “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is one of the Ten Commandments. No problem. You just go to GreenSinai.com and buy 100 trees in the Amazon or fund a project to capture methane from cow dung in India — and, presto, you’re free and clear.

Obviously there would be a sliding scale. Taking God’s name in vain or erecting an idol might cost you only a few solar water heaters for a Chinese village, whereas bearing false witness or stealing would set you back a pilot sugar ethanol plant in Louisiana.

As for adultery, well, I think that’s where the big money could be made. My guess is that we could achieve a carbon-neutral world by 2020 if we just set up a system for people to offset their adultery by reversing deforestation of tropical rain forests or funding mega wind and solar power systems in China and India.

O.K., O.K., more seriously, I raise this issue of carbon offsets because they’re symptomatic of the larger problem we face in confronting climate change: everyone wants it to happen, but without pain or sacrifice. On balance, I think carbon-offsetting is a good thing — my family has purchased offsets — if for no other reason than it directs resources toward clean technologies that might not have been funded and, therefore, moves us down the innovation curve faster.

But the danger, argues Michael Sandel, Harvard’s noted political philosopher, “is that carbon offsets will become, at least for some, a painless mechanism to buy our way out of the more fundamental changes in habits, attitudes and way of life that are actually required to address the climate problem.”

“If someone drives a Hummer and buys carbon offsets to salve his conscience, that is better than driving the Hummer and doing nothing,” added Mr. Sandel, author of “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.” “But it would be even better to trade in the Hummer for a hybrid. The risk is that carbon offsets will make Hummers seem respectable rather than irresponsible, and distract us, as a nation, from harder, bigger changes in our energy policy.”

People often refer to the current climate buzz as “a green revolution,” but the very term revolution suggests a fundamental break with past habits, attitudes and public policies. Yet, when you suggest a carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax — initiatives that would redirect resources and change habits at the scale actually needed to impact global warming — what is the first thing you hear in Congress? “Impossible — you can’t use the T-word.”

A revolution without sacrifice where everyone is a winner? There’s no such thing.

Katherine Ellison wrote a wonderful piece on this topic for Salon.com in which she quoted Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist, as saying: “Volunteerism doesn’t work. It’s about as effective as voluntary speed limits. No cops, no judges: road carnage. No rules, no fines: greenhouse gases. We’re going to triple or quadruple the CO2 in the atmosphere with no policy. I don’t believe offsets are just a distraction. But we’ll have failed if that’s all we do.”

There’s a saying at the Pentagon that “a vision without resources is a hallucination.” For my money, the green revolution today is still a hallucination.

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Phantom at the Opera

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: July 8, 2007
=================

WASHINGTON

Here are five things you might not know about John Edwards:

¶He never saw a single episode of “The Sopranos.”

¶He doesn’t like the opera, but his favorite musical is “Phantom of the Opera.”

¶His first date with Elizabeth was dancing at the Holiday Inn in Durham or Chapel Hill — he can’t remember which — sometime after which she made an ironclad rule that politicians should never dance.

¶He became a lawyer because as a kid he loved watching “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders” and “The Fugitive.” (Richard Kimble really needed a lawyer.)

¶His top sex symbol is a fellow North Carolinian, Andie MacDowell.

John Edwards has not written soulful poetry, like his old running mate John Kerry or his current rivals Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinich. And he says that “if I have a Saturday off, I’m not going to the ballet.”

His approach to culture tends to be geographic — lots of Southerners, especially North Carolinians — and thematic, embracing subjects that dovetail nicely with the campaign trope of Two Americas.

After Mr. Edwards told George Stephanopoulos that “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone was “a wonderful book,” Bob Novak jumped on him, claiming that he had chosen a book by a “radical” journalist “identified as a covert Soviet agent.”

I tell the Democrat that Poppy Bush drolly told the story about his ’64 Texas Senate race, when a John Birch Society pamphlet suggested that Barbara Bush’s father, the president of McCall Publishing, put out a Communist manifesto called Redbook.

He laughs and says of Bob Novak, “Wait till he finds out I also like Langston Hughes.”

“There was a really beautiful piece about African-Americans and rivers,” Mr. Edwards says. “And another one that starts something like, ‘My old man is a white old man, my mother’s black.’ I thought it was really well done.” Those are from Hughes’s poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Cross.”

Though he’s often compared to a Southern lawyer out of John Grisham, and he says he used to “blow through” Grisham novels, Mr. Edwards doesn’t read him much anymore. The literary character he is “inspired” to identify with is, of course, Atticus Finch.

He likes Kaye Gibbons’s novel “A Virtuous Woman.” “She’s from North Carolina,” he says. And he enjoyed “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier, another North Carolinian. “That was set in North Carolina,” he says. Right now he’s reading nonfiction, “The Race Beat,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, a chronicle of civil rights press coverage in the South.

He says the paintings in his house are by Southern artists, including North Carolinians named Joe Cave and James Kerr.

Asked about his Hollywood dream girl, natch, she’s a North Carolinian. “She’s in those skin commercials,” he says. “She was in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’ ” And his favorite actress is Glenn Close, who had to dub Andie MacDowell’s lines in her first big part, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” because her Southern accent was so thick.

Fave actors? Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. (Don’t tell Bob Novak.)

He doesn’t watch much TV, he says, except when his son Jack gets him to watch “Jimmy Neutron,” or Elizabeth gets him to watch “Boston Legal” and “Brothers & Sisters” (a show he likes).

He loves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who once defended the right of rich pols like him to talk about poor people. He says he’s seen his fellow Southern lawyer Fred Thompson on “Law & Order” a time or two when flipping channels to get to sports. “I’m a huge Tar Heels fan,” he says. “I know way too much about basketball and football.”

Movies? “ ‘Shawshank Redemption,’ ” he says. “I loved ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ‘Schindler’s List.’ And on a much lighter note, ‘Old School.’ ”

He may look like Bobby Sherman, but as a teen he liked the Allman Brothers, the Doors and the Stones. Now he plays U2, Springsteen and Dave Matthews on his iPod, “mostly compilations.” He says he’s not particularly fond of Celine Dion, whose “You and I” is Hillary’s insipid jingle.

Recalling his first date with Elizabeth, in law school, he says: “I was such a classy guy, I took her to the Holiday Inn to dance. It was loud. Elizabeth made fun of me for weeks for taking her there. Elizabeth thinks the two rules you always use in politics are: Don’t dance. And don’t wear hats.”

Especially not if you’ve got such a fabulous haircut to show off.

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A Quiet Escape on the Rivers, and an Endangered Species

River shacks are “representative of what I would consider the magic of
‘old time South Carolina.’ ” GOV. MARK SANFORD

By DAN BARRY

Published: July 8, 2007
=================

ON the LITTLE PEE DEE RIVER, S.C.

The boat moves through the murky river waters while swallow-tailed kites stir the evening sky and a little blue heron poses beside the cypress-lined shore, as if for Audubon. But these natural wonders only distract from the expedition’s purpose, which is to seek out a specific endangered species.

Shhh. There’s one now.

“River shack!” Chris Crolley, the boat captain, says, his tone a mix of awe and disgust. “There you go.”

His vessel gently sidles up to the specimen: a kind of raft made of planks and 55-gallon drums, some plastic, some rusting metal, and featuring two padlocked tool sheds made of plywood. The few homey touches include a foot-tall plastic picket fence, a small grill, a couple of buckets that might serve as toilets, and a ceramic frog or two. Keeping it moored is a long pole bolted to an ancient cypress.

This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures —
recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion —
with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water.

Mr. Crolley and others on his bobbing boat examine the unoccupied structure the way a clutch of botanists might study an unusual plant. They marvel at both the cheap construction — “This is on the lower end of nice,” someone says — and the audacity of its appearance here on the scenic, public Little Pee Dee River, a few miles from the small town of Hemingway.

But this particular shack defies easy classification because it has not one but two sheds. Mr. Crolley, 36, so familiar with these waters that he is sometimes called Aquaman, pauses in thought before looking up from under his floppy hat and giving name to the subspecies before him. “Duplex,” he says triumphantly.

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water.

The law has angered people like John Hilton, 21, a college student who has spent years building and refining a river shack on Lake Marion with a few friends. “There’s 90 55-gallon drums floating it,” he says. “It has a tin roof, screened-in porches, and is made with treated lumber.”

True, he says, he and his friends do not own land or water rights. And true, their river shack is analogous to some buddies plunking down a Home Depot shed on a public beach and calling it their own. “But I don’t see it fair to bring that concern up after all these years of them being legal,” he says.

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

Mr. Moore, 28, peers from under his own floppy hat as he sits in the back of Mr. Crolley’s 18-foot boat, now churning north in search of more specimens. Mr. Crolley is a naturalist whose company, Coastal Expeditions, explores and celebrates the South Carolina coast. He tends to call out the scientific classification for every animal and tree he sees, and, like Mr. Moore, he detests river shacks.

They come upon a cluster of river shacks with no one home, a kind of hamlet, really. Here is a cute white cottage on the water — literally. And here is a structure that appears to be the Versailles of river shacks, with electric lights, an air conditioner, a stainless steel grill large enough to cook a whole pig, a —

“Is that a satellite dish?” Mr. Crolley asks, incredulous. “Yes it is.”

The boat moves on, its passengers struggling with mixed feelings of outrage and envy. Soon an abandoned river shack appears on the horizon, and then another, and then another, victims of the swampy environment and neglect. All that is left of one are some Styrofoam pontoons, looking like faux ice floes. Another is flipped upside down, its only visitor the river, streaming through two broken windows.

No human comment is necessary. A flock of white ibises glides past. A jumping fish makes a splash. And a river in old time South Carolina carries on.

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In a Corner of the Woods, Teenagers Escape From the Trials of Military Life

At a session for children of service members held at Camp Deer Run
in upstate New York, discussions of stress and fear were balanced
by activities like a ropes challenge course,
intended to build self-esteem and teach teamwork.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 8, 2007
==================

PINE BUSH, N.Y.

“I don’t want this to sound rude,” said Alicia Jade Geurin, who is 13. Rude was the last word that came to mind. “But civilian kids just don’t understand. You say your dad’s away, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s O.K.’ They think it’s like being away for a week on a business trip. That’s what’s so cool about this camp. You don’t have to say a word, and everyone still understands how you feel.”

At Camp Deer Run in the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains last week, the 59 teenage campers, all with parents in the military, could take on the Eagle’s Nest ropes challenge course, scale the rock climbing wall, wander down by Plattekill Creek.

They could also listen to a soldier just back from Iraq describe what it was like there and hear his family talk about the impact of the deployment on them. Along with other fare (excellent paella with kosher chicken the other day), they could sample military M.R.E.’s. They could literally share war stories or, their common ground established from the day they arrived, use the time to get away from it all.

The camp sessions, known as Operation Purple, last one or two weeks and are organized by the National Military Family Association. This was one of the camps held at 34 locations in 26 states, serving close to 4,000 children for free across all the military branches. But the really striking number is a different one: 155,000. That’s about how many children have a parent serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the association. That’s an awful lot of kids under an awful lot of stress.

“One of the favorite comments I heard was from a 15-year-old boy who said, ‘People don’t realize that we serve too,’ ” said Kuuipo Ordway, a behavioral health care consultant for the camps. Which is not to suggest a cadre of mopey kids pining for distant parents. Instead, a visitor gets two contradictory impressions: how unnaturally mature and self-sufficient some of them are, and how much of a quiet burden others seem to carry.

In the first category, you could put Alicia, who lives at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and whose dad recently returned from a tour with the military police in Afghanistan. With the élan of a gung-ho cadet, she seems on a different planet from many of her pampered peers in the MySpace/iPod/Abercrombie generation.

“Two parents have responsibilities, and if one isn’t there, whatever they can’t do, you have to do,” she said matter-of-factly. “But if you know you don’t have Mommy around to hug every night, or Daddy, you learn to be self-sufficient. I know I can go anywhere, introduce myself, I’m not going to be someone sitting in the corner. I love the military life. I love it.” She wants to be a marine.

But for others the anxiety, even in the green repose of the woods, is almost palpable. You can hear it in the questions they ask of visiting service personnel from Iraq, some sort of playful (How big are the spiders? How often do you get to wash your socks?), some as playful as a hand grenade (Have you ever killed anyone? What is it like when a bomb goes off? Are you really sorry when you miss your son’s soccer game?).

For those with a parent in Iraq, like Elizabeth and James Darney of Virginia and Chris Seger of Kingston, the stress is particularly acute. So ask Elizabeth about a military career, and she says no, thanks. Too hard on the family. Chris has it all figured out: Study accounting at Pace University and open a pizzeria.

A lot of the challenges addressed by Operation Purple seem like the problems of modern life, but amplified: divorces and blended families on top of deployments abroad. But Ms. Ordway, the psychologist, says this moment is particularly tough on military kids. Deployments are longer and less certain, and there is a nonstop din of gruesome war coverage. There are more older soldiers, with older kids at more complicated times in their lives, and many parents are returning with grievous injuries or, increasingly, with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s not likely that a week or two in the woods will solve all that, but if it shows kids there are others in the same boat, if they get to ask questions they can’t ask anyplace else, maybe that’s a start.

Up on the ropes course, snug in a harness, was Samantha Santiago, Alicia’s pal. Over the past two years or so, her grandmother died of cancer, her mother served in Germany for more than a year as a nurse, and her parents divorced after her mother’s return. Samantha, who wants to join the Navy, clambered along ropes ending at a platform 35 feet above the ground. From there, the goal was to end the exercise with “the leap of faith,” jumping from the platform toward a bell hanging from the cable.

With the other kids hollering encouragement from below, she hesitated. Then she jumped, and for a fleeting moment, Samantha Santiago flew.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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A Board That Knows Two Words: No Sale

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: July 8, 2007
======================

IT is the kind of takeover bid that shareholders dream of, with a suitor offering a healthy premium and the potential for postmerger success. So why is the target’s board dead set against it?

The bid in question is a nearly $400 million offer that AirTran Holdings, the discount airline with headquarters in Orlando, Fla., is making for the Midwest Air Group, based near Milwaukee. While Midwest’s stockholders are jumping up and down for the deal, its directors have staunchly rejected it. As a result, some Midwest shareholders wonder whether the board is performing its duty to the company’s owners or acting instead to benefit a management with whom it has long been associated.

Timothy E. Hoeksema has been chief executive of Midwest since 1983 and is also chairman of its board.

Some shareholders say their concerns begin with the fact that the Midwest directors refused for six months even to meet with officials of AirTran to hear their proposal. The board has not appointed a special committee to look at the bid. The company also has a poison pill in place to thwart a takeover.

“I don’t think management wants to sell the company at any price to anyone and I think the board has been supporting management,” said Joe Leonard, chief executive and chairman of AirTran. “It has been extremely unusual for the board not to hear what we have to say. We have said we were willing to pay for additional value if they could show that the value is there.”

Last month, at Midwest’s annual meeting, its shareholders rose up, booting out the three Midwest directors up for re-election and replacing them with AirTran’s nominees. Only then did Midwest’s directors agree to sit down with AirTran officials. That meeting will be on July 16.

AirTran said it first approached Midwest with a merger proposal more than four years ago. Rebuffed, it returned in 2005, and again last fall. Confronted with opposition from Midwest’s board, AirTran has raised the price on its most recent bid three times. The offer now stands at $9 in cash and 0.5842 shares of AirTran stock, equal to $15.43 at Friday’s close.

Midwest’s shares closed last week at $14.93. The AirTran deal reflects a 65 percent premium to Midwest’s stock price the day before last fall’s offer was publicized; it is set to expire on Aug. 10.

Before the AirTran offer came along, Midwest’s stock languished in the single digits, reflecting a string of losses at the company. Midwest was not alone in its difficulties — most airlines have shown losses in recent years. The company turned a $5.4 million profit in 2006.

AirTran says the merger would result in increased departures for the combined airline, an expansion of Midwest’s hubs and new markets. It would also bring 1,100 new jobs to Milwaukee, Midwest’s main hub.

But Midwest says the merger is not in the best interests of the company’s shareholders or the employees because it does not reflect the value of a strategic plan recently put in place by Midwest’s management.

“The board spent a lot of time and resources evaluating the AirTran offer and consistently concluded that it underrepresents the long-term value of the company,” said Carol N. Skornicka, Midwest’s general counsel and secretary. “The offer was so substantially inadequate the board did not engage in negotiations.” Ms. Skornicka declined to make Midwest directors available for interviews.

But Mr. Leonard said he is not persuaded that the Midwest board has responded properly to the offer. “In a normal merger-and-acquisition transaction, the board would appoint a special committee of independent directors,” he said. “They referred it to the governance committee. It has nothing to do with M. & A., but it does have as chairman Dave Treitel, who has been advising the company for a number of years.”

Mr. Treitel, a Midwest director since 1984, is chief executive of Simat Helliesen & Eicher, an aviation consulting firm that has worked for Midwest in recent years.

Midwest shareholders certainly seem fed up with the nine-member board. More than two-thirds of the votes at the annual meeting were cast against the Midwest directors who were up for re-election. With the exception of a new board member in 2006, there had not been a board change at Midwest since 1997. The new directors nominated by AirTran are not affiliated with it.

More Midwest directors might have lost their seats in the recent election if not for the fact that membership on the company’s board is staggered, meaning that only a few directors stand for election each year. In general, shareholders do not like the staggered terms for directors because that makes it difficult to oust an entire board that is seen as not performing.

Midwest’s outside shareholders have also resoundingly supported a tender offer for the company’s stock that AirTran started earlier this year. Almost two-thirds of the shares held by outside investors have been tendered.

Still, regardless of the shareholders’ support for the offer, a merger cannot happen without the board’s approval, Ms. Skornicka said. “Under Wisconsin law a board can consider other stakeholders, it can consider the interests of customers as well as employees,” she said. “While those things are difficult to quantify, they can impact the decision of the board.”

By agreeing to hear the AirTran proposal later this month, Midwest’s directors are by no means expressing an interest in negotiating, she said.

Mr. Hoeksema is undoubtedly less than eager to sell the company because he might lose his job as chief executive, a post that earned him $1.25 million in 2006. Mr. Hoeksema would also not receive an enormous windfall if Midwest changed hands — possibly giving him more of an incentive to hang on to his job so he can keep drawing a paycheck.

Documents show that if a change in control had occurred last December, Mr. Hoeksema would have received $2.6 million from a key executive employment agreement. Based on current prices, he would also get roughly $3.6 million when options and restricted stock vested as a result of a deal done around $15 a share. Not bad, but it is a far cry from the tens of millions and more that many other chief executives have received when their companies were sold.

Ms. Skornicka said Mr. Hoeksema’s relatively small payout in a merger reflected the modest compensation paid by the company in line with its industry and size. She said the payout played no role in the board’s response to the deal.

It will be interesting to see how Midwest’s newly configured board responds to AirTran’s offer.

“The shareholders who tendered their shares are saying, ‘I want you, the Midwest board, to remove the obstacles so I can get my money,’ ” Mr. Leonard said. “The shareholders didn’t vote out of ignorance. They’ve seen our plan, they’ve seen the Midwest plan and they knew what they were voting for when they tendered their shares.”

Certainly Midwest’s shareholders have spoken, and plainly. Now it becomes a matter of whether the Midwest board is listening.

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A Girl’s Fear and Loathing

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 7, 2007

In a column earlier this week I wrote about a cop who grotesquely abused his power by invading a high school classroom in the Bronx because a girl had uttered a curse word in a hallway. Not only did the cop handcuff and arrest the girl in a room filled with stunned students and a helpless teacher, but he arrested the school’s principal, who had attempted to reason with the officer.

The principal was suspended from his job immediately after the arrest in February 2005, but was reinstated when the charges — bogus from the very beginning — were eventually dropped. Still, the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, defended the police officer’s action, telling reporters at the time, “The principal was simply wrong.”

As I continued to look into this case, it became clear that police officials were trying to withhold important information about the officer, Juan Gonzalez. In response to a question, a spokesman for Commissioner Kelly said that Officer Gonzalez, now 29, had been placed on modified duty and that his gun and shield had been taken away.

But why? Despite repeated requests, the department would not say.

Then I found out through other sources that Officer Gonzalez had gotten into trouble for stalking, kissing and otherwise harassing a 17-year-old girl at another high school in the Bronx. The girl, extremely upset over the unwanted advances, notified school authorities and they notified the Police Department.

The Police Department confirmed this yesterday.

The encounter with the girl occurred in September 2005 outside Truman High School. The girl, questioned at a hearing by a lawyer representing the city, said she had just left the school and was on her way to a bus stop when Officer Gonzalez, in uniform, walked up to her.

He let her know that he had been watching her, and he followed her as she tried to walk away. He asked to see her school program, which lists, among other things, a student’s classes and schedule. She handed it to him.

According to the girl, the officer said, “It doesn’t have what I’m looking for.”

She said that when she asked what he was looking for, he replied, “Your address.”

The girl said Officer Gonzalez began touching her as they were passing another school. “He started touching my hair,” she said, “and pulling it all towards one side to touch my neck.” She backed up against a wall, she said, and the officer leaned over her, pressing his arms against the wall.

“I wasn’t looking at him,” the girl said. “I was turning my face away, and he touched my face and put my face to look directly towards, at him. He said, ‘Why can’t I look at him?’ And he touched my waist and pulled me closer to him, and he kissed me on my cheeks.”

The girl said, “I tried to push him away, but I couldn’t. So I had to duck under his arms.”

Officer Gonzalez followed her as she resumed walking toward the bus stop. He suggested they go out on a date. The girl said she told the officer, “I don’t think so.”

Then, she said, he told her what a powerful man he was, how he had kicked down doors and even arrested a high school principal.

This week, even as I continued asking questions about Officer Gonzalez’s status, the Police Department gave him back his gun and his badge and put him back on patrol.

It was a wildly irresponsible decision. Parents across the city should be warned about this officer.

Over the past several weeks I have heard one credible story after another of police officers ruthlessly harassing, and frequently arresting, youngsters who have done nothing wrong. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly seem to be in denial about this problem, which is widespread. There is an astounding reluctance to criticize or properly discipline police officers, no matter how egregious their conduct.

The big losers are the good kids who are treated like criminals by bullies and predators masquerading as New York’s finest. Other losers are the many cops who routinely take their crime-fighting mission seriously, but are undermined by these lowlifes in blue.

Jonathan Moore, a civil rights lawyer who represents the girl harassed by Officer Gonzalez, said his client had agreed, with “some hesitation,” to my request to tell her story in a column. She is still afraid, he said, that Officer Gonzalez will “track her down and cause her harm.”

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A-Rod and Me

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: July 7, 2007

The 10-year-old girl waited in line two hours for the most gifted man in baseball, Alex Rodriguez, to sign the children’s book he had just written. When at last she got his autograph, my daughter hurried home and read every word — taking the lessons to heart.

It was called, “Hit a Grand Slam!” For a man now so reviled in many parts of the baseball world, his life story was sympathetic and sad, Dickensian with a Latin twist. A-Rod talked about throwing up on the school bus, getting dumped by the first girl he fell for and the father who walked out on them.

“Dad’s coming back, you’ll see,” he said to his sister, but Dad never came back. “I still can’t understand how a parent could abandon a family.”

By book’s end, he is rich beyond measure, the best young player in the game, and has a best friend for life, Derek Jeter. But A-Rod tells children that life is not about money or fame.

“It’s not all about the Benjamins,” he sums up. It’s about friendship, character, playing honorably. “If an injury suddenly ends my career tomorrow, I want people to like me for what I have inside.”

My daughter still has her A-Rod poster up in the now-empty bedroom, dating to his days as a Seattle Mariner. But nearly 10 years later, we are having trouble fitting A-Rod into the dissonant home we keep in our hearts for star athletes. Try as we might, it’s hard to separate the player on the plasma screen from the baseball card next to the kid’s pillow.

Tuesday is baseball’s All-Star Game, and the leading vote-getter from fans was Rodriguez, the Yankees’ third baseman. He’s having a year for the ages, setting an American League record for the most home runs in April, and leading all of baseball in homers. And in last night’s win, his home run tied him with Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff on baseball’s career list.

But A-Rod’s character has never looked more haunted. Everyone knows politicians are scum and film stars are ditzy. As for athletes, well — children, in any case, still expect something more.

And as much as A-Rod now begs for his privacy, it’s his fault that we got involved with him. He invited us, and our kids, to like him for what he has inside. He asked us to look at him as a man, not a hitting machine.

At least Barry Bonds said people should not hold him up as a role model. Give him credit for that. But his advice is too late for all the 15-year-olds buying vitamin “supplements” to get ripped like Barry, the human asterisk.

In less than a decade, Rodriguez has gone from A-Rod to Pay-Rod to A-Fraud to Stray-Rod. Each dimension downward came with a story, a character twist, that may outlive the numbers.

As the Mariner who made the major leagues before his 19th birthday, he looked as if he had been created by Michelangelo. Coaching Little League, I told my kids to watch him move, to emulate his sweet swing, and to listen to what he said off the field.

A lasting image for Mariner fans was A-Rod with his arm around a crying Joey Cora after the amazing 1995 season ended just short of a World Series bid. It began to unravel when Pay-Rod emerged. He signed the richest contract in baseball, and left Seattle for — arrgghhh! — Texas. Turned out, it was about the Benjamins.

With the Yankees, all it took were a couple of Bush League plays — swatting a ball out of a pitcher’s mitt at first base, yelling at opposing infielders under a fly ball — for A-Fraud to surface.

More troubling was the breakdown of his friendship with Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop and designated Good Guy, and the strange episode with the stripper, captured in the tabloid headline, “Stray-Rod.” He’s married, of course, and is a father as well.

In that children’s book, he said having a friend like Jeter, was “more valuable than gold.” An athlete can survive crass acts. Ted Williams spit on Red Sox fans, several times, but more people remember that he left the game to serve as a fighter pilot.

I’ll leave it to A-Rod’s therapist, whom he credits with helping him immensely, to sort his demons. But please — no more children’s books, no more invitations to share the soul-ride.

Athletes build their legends for marketing purposes; it comes with collateral damage, on both sides.

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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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 6, 2007, 5:24 pm

The People Have Spoken, and He’s Broke

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: worth a click

• Murder on the Straight Talk Express: Who or what is killing John McCain’s presidential campaign? Drew Cline, editorial page editor of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, agrees with the received wisdom that the Arizona senator’s presidential bid isn’t conservative enough for Republican primary voters. But Cline sees “poetic justice” in McCain’s money-raising problems. He writes on his Union Leader blog:

  So after a series of stances unpopular with the G.O.P. base, McCain, the one-time front-runner, finds his political support, as reflected in campaign donations, drying up. People are not donating to him because they don’t support his positions on several important issues.

  If McCain’s campaign fails to recover, it will be poetic justice of a sort. The man who waged war on the people’s right to express themselves through their financial support for particular candidates for office and who does not believe that donations are the result of ideological support will see his campaign wither and die for a lack of ideological support expressed through campaign donations.

• The U.C.L.A. public policy professor Mark Kleiman, writing at the academic group blog, The Reality Based Community, notes that Fred Thompson “was a White House mole on the Senate Watergate staff” in the 1970s. Thompson divulged his leaks to the White House in his 1975 Watergate memoir, “At That Point in Time,” and the Boston Globe recently re-reported the story. The story, Kleiman suggests, “says something truly horrible about Thompson’s character.”

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 6, 2007, 9:30 am

McCain Campaigns Vainly in the Plains

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, John McCain, Republicans

“John McCain is in trouble in Iowa and nationally,” writes Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen. “He and his campaign seem flat. They lack the sparkle they had in 2000. Support for an unpopular war and immigration bill is hurting, and there’s talk he’ll have to fold.”

What happened? “McCain’s decline reflects a flawed campaign strategy,” suggests The New Republic’s John Judis. “He set out to become the ‘Republican establishment’ candidate.” Unfortunately, the Republican establishment didn’t like him. “As his poll and fund-raising numbers illustrate, this strategy appears to have failed,” Judis writes. “McCain has not been able to alter his image sufficiently to attract conservative donors or voters. Unlike, say, Mitt Romney, McCain has not been able to perform an ideological makeover.” Judis adds:

The absence of conservative support has left McCain as the candidate of independents and moderates, as he was in 2000. But McCain has had to divide this vote with Giuliani and, in the Northeast, with Romney. Most revealing is a Survey USA poll last month of California Republicans, where McCain trailed Giuliani by 32 to 19 percent, Thompson also at 19 percent. McCain bested his 19 percent share among voters who identified themselves as moderate or liberal, were pro-choice, were convinced that the threat of global warming was real, supported same-sex marriage, favored stem-cell research, and didn’t own a gun. Oh yes, he was also favored by 24 percent of Republicans who had voted for Kerry in 2004. Unfortunately, Giuliani did somewhat better among these voters, while he and Thompson did much better than McCain among the more conservative voters.

McCain’s disappointing money-raising so far this year, combined with his campaign’s overspending and overstaffing, should be judged as a management failure on McCain’s part, says Philip Klein on the staff blog of The American Spectator. Klein writes:

All three Republicans have argued that restoring fiscal discipline and making the government run more efficiently would be one of their primary goals as president, so I think it’s fair to look at how they are managing their campaign bank accounts as part of the overall analysis of how they would run the country. I’m probably more sympathetic to McCain than a lot of my fellow conservatives, but thus far his money management skills leave something to be desired. Let’s see if he can turn things around.

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One Man’s Plea for Mercy, With a Recent Precedent in Mind

Frederick Lake, 54, waving his passport, with his son, Brandon, 9, in their home in Brooklyn.
Mr. Lake is facing deportation to Jamaica over a 1991 robbery conviction.

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 7, 2007

If official mercy comes back into fashion, thanks to the clemency that President Bush granted this week to a former member of his administration who was headed to prison, it won’t be a moment too soon for Frederick Lake, a resident of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, for most of the last 20 years.

Mr. Lake has been to prison and finished his time; he was convicted in the 1989 robbery of a payroll company, and now faces deportation to Jamaica. From the moment of his arrest, he has insisted that he is not guilty. “I didn’t do this thing,” he said. “I wasn’t in the country.”

Now he has applied to Gov. Eliot Spitzer for a pardon, which is a legal cousin of clemency. A pardon erases the conviction from the records — and in Mr. Lake’s case would spare him from deportation — while clemency reduces a sentence, but does not eliminate the conviction.

Mr. Spitzer, in office only since January, is new to the exercise of official mercy. It has largely fallen into disuse, in New York and elsewhere.

Over the last 25 years, New York’s governors have granted fewer and fewer pardons or commutations of sentences. Perhaps they could find no one worthy of it, though the number of prisoners has grown fourfold. More likely, they feared TV ads saying that they were easy on criminals, or they fretted that one of those shown mercy would commit another crime.

The only person pardoned in New York since 1990 was the comedian Lenny Bruce, cleared in 2003 by Gov. George E. Pataki of “using foul language in public,” as state officials put it. At that point, Bruce was a safe bet to cause no further trouble for any governor: he had been dead for 37 years.

On Monday, President Bush granted clemency to I. Lewis Libby Jr., an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted of lying to a grand jury — a single thread in the web of untrue stories that were spun to justify the Iraq war. At age 56, Mr. Libby was about to go to prison for 30 months, until Mr. Bush stepped in and declared that the sentence was “severe” and “excessive,” considering Mr. Libby’s public service and the hardship to his family. He is probably as safe a bet for Mr. Bush as Mr. Bruce was for George Pataki.

Mr. Lake, 54, is the father of children ages 8 and 9. He has heart disease and diabetes. Before going to prison for six years, he worked at night, cleaning aircraft at Kennedy Airport, and ran a car-repair business during the day.

In turning to Governor Spitzer for a pardon, Mr. Lake is asking not just for mercy, but also for the justice that he and his lawyers, John D. B. Lewis and Claudia Slovinsky, say they were unable to get in court.

“I’m here laying in the bed, thinking, when is I.N.S. going to come for me?” he said. “What about my children? My whole life is crumbling for something I never did.”

On May 18, 1989, a payroll company in Inwood, on Long Island, was robbed of $103,000 by a short, stocky man wearing an earring. Some months later, Mr. Lake passed along a money order that had been stolen in the robbery. At a trial in 1991, three people identified him as the stickup man, though he did not have a pierced ear and is close to 6 feet tall.

Mr. Lake, a legal resident of the United States, produced airline tickets and passenger manifests from Jamaica Air showing that “F. Lake” flew from Miami to Kingston, Jamaica, on May 12, 1989 — a week before the robbery — and then back to the United States on Sept. 29, 1989.

On his passport, the stamps matched the dates on the tickets.

“The truth is swimming on top of the water,” Mr. Lake said.

Prosecutors in Nassau County challenged his alibi by calling to the witness stand a Jamaican immigration official, who testified that he could not find a landing card filled out by Mr. Lake, a requirement for anyone entering the country. Later, a judicial inquiry in Jamaica found grave inaccuracies in the official’s testimony and said that if the jury relied on it, Mr. Lake had been the victim of a “serious miscarriage of justice.”

“Whenever I talk about this, it tears me up,” Mr. Lake said. “The medical care in Jamaica, that will be the finish of me. My son says, ‘Daddy, why are you crying? Are they going to put me in the casket with you?’ ”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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