Freakonomics: a (new) blog at the New York Times by Steven J. Drubner and Steven D. Levitt

(Note: all of the posts to this blog to date are reposted in this single post.)

August 7, 2007, 9:25 pm

Moving Day

By Stephen J. Dubner

After two and a half years of camping out at Freakonomics.com, after more than 1,300 posts and many thousands of reader comments, this blog is moving. From now on, we will reside here at NYTimes.com. If you are a new reader, welcome. If you are an old reader, know that you can still get here via our old URL, www.freakonomics.com. Whoever you are, thanks for stopping by. Starting now, there is also a separate — and revivified — website for our book, replete with excerpts, FAQ’s, reviews, and a gallery of international covers.

We are excited and flattered to be migrating to the Times — especially because I used to work as an editor and writer at the Times Magazine, and also because Freakonomics began as a Magazine profile I wrote about Levitt. For the past two years, we have also been writing a regular column for the Magazine, which is now freely available here. But don’t worry about homer-ism; because we are housed in the Opinion section, we can still poke fun at the Times when warranted, and we can still say nice things about blood rivals like the Wall Street Journal.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that we recently brought in a site editor, Melissa Lafsky, who’s been doing a great job. She makes sure all ourr typoes get fixxed, and helps curate the sort of content that makes sense for a blog like ours: reader-generated Q&A’s like this one and this one and this one, and Freakonomics Quorum discussions like this one about saving the African rhino.

You will see a number of other new features in the right column of the blog, including (finally!) a proper (sort of) blogroll, a streamlined “FREAK-est Links,” the old “Naked Self-Promotion” box, a new feature called “Stuff We Weren’t Paid to Endorse,” and even a video player, “FREAK-TV.” (Take a look at the inaugural video to see Levitt explain the value of blogging.) And yes, we will still be giving stuff away.

Hopefully you will find most of the changes for the better. If not, I am sure you will let us know: your suggestions and ideas are always welcome, via the contact information in the “About the Authors” box at top right. For those of you who read this blog via RSS, you will find that there is no longer a full feed, but rather a partial feed.

There’s another change you may notice right away: the protocol for commenting. We have written before about the science of commenting, and noted recently that certain posts receive a lot of comments.

The good news is that you no longer have to register with Wordpress to comment, a barrier that many of you disliked.

The bad news is that you have to conduct yourself in a relatively civil manner, according to these Times guidelines, and that all comments will be moderated.

Transgression of these guidelines is punishable by death, or by having your comment discarded, whichever comes first.

• Link
• Comments (43)
• E-mail This

August 7, 2007, 12:22 pm

No Comment(s)

By Stephen J. Dubner

For the next several hours, while this blog undergoes some rehabilitation — no, not that kind of rehabilitation; we are fine, thanks — comments will be shut down. If all goes well, this condition won’t last past nightfall (in New York)..

• Link
• Comments (3)
• E-mail This

August 7, 2007, 10:40 am

Bad Timing for These Two Hurricane Experts

By Steven D. Levitt

The 2005 Hurricane season was the most active and destructive in recorded history. The devastation from hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, and Wilma was powerful evidence that man-made global warming had triggered an onslaught of unforeseen consequences — at least, that was the way the media tended to portray it. Maybe I am wrong, but I think the current focus on global warming in this country would be much weaker had those hurricanes not hit landfall, or had they hit Mexico instead of the U.S.

The scientific community, however, never argued a strong link between global warming and hurricanes. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (8)
• E-mail This

August 7, 2007, 10:07 am

Why Spend Time on Second Life?

By Stephen J. Dubner

We got an e-mail the other day from a certain Sara in Chicago. She had a question about the virtual world Second Life, but it could be asked of many pursuits, virtual and otherwise. (Even though I’ve never visited Second Life, I have been thinking about this issue lately since I have become a gold farmer for my own kids, on Webkinz — although frankly, they are better than me at earning KinzCash.)

I like Sara’s question because, on some dimensions, the answer/s may seen obvious Read more …

• Link
• Comments (11)
• E-mail This

August 7, 2007, 9:29 am

This Blog: Almost Famous

By Stephen J. Dubner

If all goes as planned, I will be appearing on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., 8/8 — lucky in China!) at about 8:30 a.m. EDT to talk about this very blog, and to announce a fairly significant change.

Hope to see you there.

As one result of this change, comments on the blog will be temporarily suspended today, starting in early afternoon. Comments will return in short order.

• Link
• Comments (5)
• E-mail This

August 7, 2007, 9:11 am

And Today Is…

By Melissa Lafsky

On August 7, 1987, Lynne Cox swam the Bering Strait; no word on whether she was then asked to submit a urine test.

• Link
• Comment (1)
• E-mail This

August 6, 2007, 1:18 pm

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Street Gangs (But Didn’t Know Whom to Ask)

By Stephen J. Dubner

We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008.

Q: Do you think the HBO series The Wire gives an accurate portrayal of gang life? It is clear from the show (if it is as real as it seems) that traditional policing strategies are very ineffective.

A: I am a huge fan of The Wire. I actually watched Season Two with a group of high ranking gang leaders/drug dealers in Chicago, who desperately wished that the series producers would make a separate show about Chicago! Read more …

• Link
• Comments (14)
• E-mail This

August 6, 2007, 11:45 am

Yo! Yo! Yo-Yo!

By Stephen J. Dubner

A few months ago, I attended yet another blasé Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. This time, at least something good came of it. I met a guy named Weber Hsu, one of two young Merrill Lynch employees who left finance to start a yo-yo company, Yo-Yo Nation. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (10)
• E-mail This

August 6, 2007, 9:53 am

Lessons From the Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis?

By Steven D. Levitt

I grew up just a few miles from the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. We were a family that was terrified of heights. At least once a month, my father would mention how he thought a bridge over the Mississippi was going to collapse. We would be calling him Nostradamus today, except that his doomsday prediction was about a different bridge (the old Lake Street Bridge, for those who know the Twin Cities). In fact, when officials tried to demolish the Lake Street Bridge to make way for a new one, the first round of explosives proved inadequate — they had to bring in a second round to bring it down. So that bridge proved sturdy, despite my father’s premonitions.

But what, if anything, can we learn from the recent bridge collapse? Read more …

• Link
• Comments (22)
• E-mail This

August 6, 2007, 9:38 am

And Today Is…

By Melissa Lafsky

On August 6th, 1941, the U.S. government imposed a nightly curfew on gas stations to reduce fuel use in anticipation of entering World War II. By the way, oil sold at the time for an inflation-adjusted $12.75 a barrel.

• Link
• Comments (4)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 9:04 pm

A Barry Bonds Contest

By Stephen J. Dubner

Who will give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run?

The first person who correctly identifies the pitcher who winds up surrendering Bonds’s record-breaker will get a signed copy of Freakonomics.

One guess per comment, please.

And a related question: for all the talk about not wanting to be the pitcher who gives up Bonds’s 756th, would it really be such a terrible thing? Read more …

• Link
• Comments (105)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 1:30 pm

The FREAKest Links: Little Shop of Kidneys Edition

By Melissa Lafsky

Organ donation is heading from a bogus reality show to the big screen: An A.P. article reports that Paris Hilton has landed a role in the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, a so-called “horror rock” musical that’s “set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco.” Hilton will play the “fame-seeking daughter of Geneco’s owner,” played by Paul Sorvino. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (9)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 12:16 pm

Selling Coals in Newcastle

By Stephen J. Dubner

Not long ago, we took our kids to Hershey Park in Hershey, Pa. We stayed at the Hershey Lodge, which is an official Hershey Park hotel.

My 5-year-old daughter, Anya, had heard from a schoolmate that Hershey Lodge gave away free Hershey bars — big ones — whenever you wanted and as many as you wanted. My wife and I were pretty sure that this was 5-year-old wishful gossip — but, lo and behold, we were handed four candy bars when we checked in, and when Anya went back to the registration desk five minutes later and asked for another couple of candy bars, they obliged.

As you can imagine, acquiring free candy bars soon became the favorite and most common activity of our stay. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (10)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 11:24 am

Now I Know Who Buys the “Religion Is Bad” Books

By Steven D. Levitt

Yesterday I wrote a nondescript post on books that knock God.

It got more than 100 comments in a day — about as many as we have ever gotten on any post where we weren’t giving something away.

Now I know who buys these books: the same people who read this blog.

• Link
• Comments (27)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 9:54 am

Your Hedge Fund Questions, Answered

By Stephen J. Dubner

A few days ago, we solicited your questions for hedge fund manager Neil Barsky. As always, your questions were terrific, and so are Barsky’s answers, below.

One thing that surprised me, however, is that nobody asked Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones). This is probably a good indicator that journalists care a lot about the business of journalism — look at the thousands of column inches the Times and the Journal itself have devoted to the deal — but that nobody else really does.

Anyway, since I cared, I asked Barsky, and you’ll find his reply at the end of this hedge-fund Q&A. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (3)
• E-mail This

August 3, 2007, 9:00 am

And Today Is…

By Melissa Lafsky

On August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell succeeded in making the world’s first coherent telephone call. Little did he know that, less than 150 years later, more than a billion people worldwide would be surfing the Internet on phone lines and broadband.

• Link
• Comments (7)
• E-mail This

August 2, 2007, 12:30 pm

The FREAKest Links: Agnostic Doctors and Doomed Trekkers Edition

By Melissa Lafsky

Via the Chicago Sun-Times: A University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital survey of 1,260 doctors found that those who considered themselves atheist or agnostic were just as likely to provide care for patients with little or no health insurance than those who were religious — a departure from studies finding that religious people are more charitable towards the poor. Though with religion currently taking hits in the publishing world, perhaps belief in God isn’t what it used to be. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (8)
• E-mail This

August 2, 2007, 11:00 am

Cut God Some Slack

By Steven D. Levitt

A little more than a year ago I blogged about how every third book had the word “bullshit” in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with “bullshit” in the title.

Now, it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the stampede with Breaking the Spell. Richard Dawkins followed with the best-seller The God Delusion. Then came God the Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stanger and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Read more …

• Link
• Comments (162)
• E-mail This

August 2, 2007, 10:37 am

Free Book! (Not Ours.) Act Fast!

By Stephen J. Dubner

Tyler Cowen is giving away 15 copies of his new book, with a clever twist: you have to write in to Tyler on his Marginal Revolution blog and explain why you want his book, and why you want it for free.

Hurry! As I type this, Tyler already has 55 comments in one hour.

While he is a generous man, Tyler is also no dummy: sending out all those books to his lucky readers will also surely raise his book’s Amazon ranking. FWIW, here’s an earlier glance at his book.

• Link
• Comment (1)
• E-mail This

August 2, 2007, 10:17 am

Meet Newser.com

By Stephen J. Dubner

There’s a new news aggregator in town, called Newser.com, and from the quick look I gave it this morning, it immediately looks like one of the best I’ve seen. It summarizes the major news stories in a good paragraph or two, then provides prominent links to the major newspapers and wire services that did the original reporting, which makes the aggregating feel less parasitic and more … well … aggregating. Here, on PaidContent.org, is a brief story behind the Newser creators.

(Hat tip: Jim Romenesko.)

• Link
• Comments (3)
• E-mail This

Read full post and comments:
"Freakonomics: a (new) blog at the New York Times by Steven J. Drubner and Steven D. Levitt" >>

Poisonous Choices, Women at Risk

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: August 7, 2007

When the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act this spring, the ambivalently pro-choice public was largely quiescent, believing, as Congress had previously ruled, that the procedure was “gruesome and inhuman,” medically unnecessary, highly controversial in the medical community and so rare as to be little missed.

What’s clear, however, as the ban has become a reality, is that fetuses will be spared no brutality. Second trimester abortion is still legal and the most common method for it — dismembering a fetus inside the womb before removing it in pieces — is no less awful to contemplate than the outlawed procedure, in which an intact fetus’s skull was punctured and collapsed to ease its removal. But women are now more at risk. And doctors have been forced into a danger zone where they must weigh what they believe to be best medical practices against the need to protect themselves from the threat of prosecution.

This kind of ethical tightrope walk, this sort of judicial meddling into standard medical practices, is unprecedented — and poisonous. An article in this month’s volume of the trade journal Obstetrics & Gynecology treats the dilemma with a mocking tone. “At our recent Annual Clinical Meeting in San Diego, I asked several colleagues if they intended to make referrals to the Supreme Court. All said ‘No’ because the court is not available for telephone consultations and makes rounds infrequently,” it says.

But in truth, dealing with the ban is no laughing matter. You see, as it turns out, the Supreme Court didn’t just outlaw “partial-birth” abortions (known in the medical community as “intact dilation and extraction” or D & X,) when it upheld Congress’s ban. It criminalized any second trimester abortion that begins with a live fetus and where “the fetal head or the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

The big problem with this, doctors say, is that, due to the unpredictability of how women’s bodies react to medical procedures, when you set out to do a legal second trimester abortion, something looking very much like a now-illegal abortion can occur. Once you dilate the cervix — something that must be done sufficiently in order to avoid tears, punctures and infection — a fetus can start to slip out. And if this happens, any witness — a family member, a nurse, anyone in the near vicinity with an ax to grind against a certain physician — can report that the ban has been breached. Bringing on stiff fines, jail time and possible civil lawsuits.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, asserted that prosecution for accidental partial births won’t occur; there has to be “intent” for there to be a crime. But as doctors now understand it, intent could be inferred by the degree of dilation they induce in their patients. What, then, do they do? Dilate the cervix sufficiently and risk prosecution, or dilate less and risk the woman’s health? And if they dilate fully, how do they prove it wasn’t their intent to deliver an intact fetus?

This dilemma is the latest product of the awful algorithm that, in anti-choice rhetoric of the past few decades, has increasingly pitted the “interests” of the fetus against the health of the woman. It makes the true intent of the partial-birth abortion ban clear: the point is not (in the short term) to stop seemingly brutal fetal deaths, but rather to make all abortions as burdensome, as difficult and as emotionally and physically trying for women — and for doctors — as possible.

To escape having to choose between their patients’ interests and their own, physicians who perform abortions around the country now are taking steps to ensure that doctors won’t find themselves accidentally allowing a live fetus to be partially “born” in the course of a second trimester abortion. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other independent providers are now making it policy in abortions that could become legally risky for doctors to use digoxin — a cardiac drug — to kill the fetus up to one day in advance of the procedure. The upshot for women will be more time-consuming and costly abortion services, additional rounds of amniocentesis, more pain and more risk of infection.

And the outcome for the fetus won’t change.

Judith Warner is a contributing columnist for TimesSelect and a guest Op-Ed columnist. Bob Herbert is off today.

Read full post and comments:
"Poisonous Choices, Women at Risk" >>

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 6, 2007, 1:59 pm

And They Have a Warrant This Time

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Justice Department, National Security, wiretapping

While President Bush’s signing of the new wiretap law is the big news on the national security front, a lesser but related story is gaining a bit of attention on the Web.

Newsweek was first with the news: “The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of F.B.I. agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) ­ the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets … two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told Newsweek the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media.”

The apparent recipients of those leaks, which occurred shortly before the 2004 election, were two New York Times reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, although their article about the eavesdropping program was not published until late in 2005. So, who is Mr. Tamm, and why does this matter?

The Xsociate at All Spin Zone finds the timing suspicious:

Now I would have to agree with those who say this raid is about intimidating would be whistleblowers. … But I wonder if this week’s rush to amend FISA had more to do with the particulars of this incident than anything else. Consider that to prosecute any leakers, the administration would have to admit what they were doing for several years was in contravention of FISA. But now that they have what amounts to tacit approval of that activity from Congress, it will make prosecuting the squealers somewhat easier.

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report jumps in with a blunt observation. “First, whoever leaked word of the warrantless domestic surveillance,” he writes, “exposed an administration program that was against the law.” Benen continues:

Shining the light on illegalities shouldn’t be punished; it should be rewarded … Second, and just as importantly, there’s some irony in Bush’s Justice Department seeking to criminalize leaks ­ we are, after all, talking about a White House that leaks like a sieve, especially when it comes to national security. Just last week, the Bush gang was dishing to the NYT new details (that hadn’t even been disclosed to Congress) about the administration’s surveillance activities. Because the leak was intended to help defend Alberto Gonzales from perjury charges, the White House didn’t complain.

On the other hand, Mike “Gamecock” Devine at RedState, finds the report of the raid, well, encouraging. He writes: “This is huge news for those of us that have bemoaned the lack of any tangible evidence that the President was fighting back against the shadow liberal government in Washington beaurocracies that are willing for Americans to die at the hands of terrorists if it advances their political agenda, i.e. destroying Bush and getting a liberal appeaser back in the White House.”

Gabriel Schoenfeld at Commentary feels that the Tamm may not be the only one to feel the heat:

The New York Times had also broken the black-letter law. It had breached the provisions of Section 798 of Title 18, which make it a crime to publish classified information concerning the interception of communications intelligence. With the investigation making progress, the possibility remains that even if The New York Times is not indicted, its reporters­ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau ­might be called before the grand jury and asked to confirm under oath that Tamm, or some other suspect, was their source. That is what happened to a whole battalion of journalists in the investigation of Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame fiasco. If Risen and Lichtblau promised their source confidentiality, they might choose not to testify. That would potentially place them, like Judith Miller in the Libby investigation, in contempt of court and even land them in prison.

And P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters gleefully posits that comments apparently posted by Tamm on liberal Web sites may have led to his unmasking. He writes:

If it turns out that Thomas M. Tamm is the FISA leaker, then a good case could be made that … postings on the Web might have been his undoing. Ironically this would not be the first time a high government official illegally releasing top secret information revealed himself via web postings. Robert Hannsen, the F.B.I. agent convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia, raised suspicions about himself when he posted explicit information about his sex life on Internet chat rooms. Perhaps this FISA leak case will be the second time that Web postings would have been the undoing of a government official illegally releasing top secret information.

Speculation, to be sure. But as all of us who ply a trade on the Web know, even if the keyboard is mightier than the sword, it still cuts both ways.

Read full post and comments:
"The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop" >>

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 6, 2007, 9:06 am

So What?

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Democrats, media

While Hendrick Hertzberg finds the appeal of nostalgia at YearlyKos, other liberals simply find the deja vu repellent. “YearlyKos will add nothing to a much needed debate on the future direction of our country,” insists Nancy (The Hankster) Hanks. “The time for insurgence in the DP is over. Without a relationship to independent voters — left, center and right — YearlyKos will remain safely within the boundaries of the very partisan political culture that is responsible for the bad policy we are living with right now.”

The freelance journalist Marc Cooper shows a little outrage. “Showing up to pander to the online activists (whatever that means) does not in itself make a revolution, nor necessarily even denote much of a shift of political gravity within the Democratic Party,” he writes on his blog. “That sort of paradigm shift requires more than a stiffening of the will of the Democrats. It also means that liberal blogs (especially after the Dems win the coming election) are going to have to show some real independence and not settle for being mere transmission belts of the party ‘communications’ apparatus.”

Read full post and comments:
"The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop" >>

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 3, 2007, 5:54 pm

At YearlyKos, (Sigh) No Naked Bloggers

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Democrats, Internet, media

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg is blogging from the liberal netroots gathering known as YearlyKos. Ezra Klein fears for his carefully crafted blogosphere niche. (“So should the rest of us retire? Compared to Hertzberg, we’re largely illiterates.”) Hertzberg’s initial reaction to the Kos Krowd: “I admit that I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked.”

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

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

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

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

Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum concedes that “there’s a lot” to Hertzberg’s interpretation, but he also thinks Hertzberg is missing something: “the netroots isn’t a bunch of kids. In fact, the age distribution is pretty normal.”

Drum adds, “What’s happening now isn’t a youth revolt, and it’s not powered by free love, free acid, or fear of being drafted. It’s powered by a lot of bog ordinary moderate liberals who have been radicalized by George Bush and the Newt Gingrichized Republican Party.”

Read full post and comments:
"The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop" >>

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 3, 2007, 12:50 pm

‘Hero’ Worship

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: afghanistan, Iraq, Sept. 11

We can’t all be heroes: Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks is perturbed by the post-9/11 habit of referring to everyone in uniform as a “hero.” “The empty rhetoric of heroism is everywhere these days,” Brooks writes. She adds:

Before you run me out of town on a rail, let me be clear: I respect the service and sacrifice of the troops. It takes guts to volunteer for the military. Injured service members deserve top-quality care, and the families of those killed deserve our deepest compassion. Soldiers, firefighters, police and many others accept risk and privation to serve the public, and we should be grateful.

But it’s a big mistake to mix up the idea of service — or the idea of sacrifice and suffering — with the idea of heroism.

Referring to every firefighter and every soldier as a “hero” obscures the feats performed by the truly heroic, Brooks suggests. She writes:

Take Jason Dunham, a 22-year-old Marine corporal who, in 2004, threw his helmet and then his body on top of an Iraqi insurgent’s grenade, saving the lives of the Marines around him. Dunham died of his wounds and became one of only two soldiers in the Iraq war to be awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States. But in a world where every service member is a “hero,” how many Americans have heard of Dunham’s fatal courage?

There are plenty of other genuine heroes whose names will never be recorded, like the utility workers described by a Cornell University research team: On 9/11, “they went into the flooded Verizon building just north of World Trade Center 6, risking electrocution in chest-deep water and kerosene to shut off the building’s massive circuit-breakers by hand.” But when each of the thousands of stockbrokers and secretaries in the World Trade Center qualifies for the “everyone’s a hero” award, why bother to identify those whose actions were unusually selfless?

Read full post and comments:
"The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop" >>

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

Praise From an Unlikely Source

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Barack Obama, Pakistan

The Wall Street Journal editorial page isn’t exactly a target constituency for a Democratic candidate in advance of the presidential primaries and caucuses, but a Journal editorial nearly swoons over Barack Obama’s statement [$] that, as president, he would target Al Qaeda in Pakistan if General Pervez Musharraf won’t: “Obama is taking heat from liberals and conservatives alike for his comment that he wouldn’t hesitate to send U.S. troops into Pakistan to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders. Actually, it’s the best thing we’ve heard yet from the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois.” The editorial adds:

Incidentally, Mr. Obama’s words — assuming they are sincere — indicate that as President he would have overruled former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who in 2005 is reported to have vetoed a U.S. commando raid into Waziristan on grounds that it might have destabilized Mr. Musharraf’s government. The Senator describes that decision as “a terrible mistake,” and anyone who wants to run to the right of Rummy on counterterrorism can’t be all bad.

(The editorial also embraces the “grown in office” cliché that conservatives usually denounce as a liberal term for Republicans who move to the left: “By distancing himself from his party’s pacifist wing, Mr. Obama is growing up as a candidate.”)

Read full post and comments:
"The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop" >>

Getting Iraq Wrong

Seeing Iraq as it is (at least through the window of an armored vehicle).

Photo: Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Published: August 5, 2007

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

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

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

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

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.” Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is.

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

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

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Few of us hear the horses coming. A British prime minister was once asked what made his job so difficult. “Events, dear boy,” he replied ruefully. In the face of the unexpected event, a virtuoso in politics must be capable of improvisation and appear as imperturbable as possible. People do want leadership, and even when a leader is nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the reassurance they deserve. Part of good judgment consists of knowing when to keep up appearances.

Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

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

But they must decide, and soon. Procrastination is even costlier in politics than it is in private life. The sign on Truman’s desk — “The buck stops here!” — reminds us that those who make good judgments in politics tend to be those who do not shrink from the responsibility of making them. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed.

In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success. Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better” captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the political art. Churchill and De Gaulle kept faith with their own judgment when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their willingness to wait for historical validation, even if far off, looks now like greatness. In the current president the same faith that history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.

Machiavelli argued that political judgment, to be effective, must follow principles more ruthless than those acceptable in ordinary life. He wrote that “it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.” Roosevelt and Churchill knew how to do wrong, yet they did not demand to be judged by different ethical standards than their fellow citizens did. They accepted that democratic leaders cannot make up their own moral rules, a stricture that applies both at home and abroad — in Guantánamo, at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. They must live and be judged by the same rules as everyone else.

Yet in some areas political and personal judgments are very different. In private life, you take attacks personally and would be a cold fish if you didn’t. In politics, if you take attacks personally, you display vulnerability. Politicians have to learn to appear invulnerable without appearing inhuman. Being human, they are bound to revenge insults. But they also have to learn that revenge, as it has been said, is a dish best served cold.

Nothing is personal in politics, because politics is theater. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel. It is a common spectacle in legislatures for representatives to insult one another in the chamber and then retreat for a drink in the bar afterward. This saving hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps.

But among friends and family, we also cut one another some slack. We fill in one another’s sentences. What we mean matters more than what we say. No such mercies occur in politics. In public life, language is a weapon of war and is deployed in conditions of radical distrust. All that matters is what you said, not what you meant. The political realm is a world of lunatic literalism. The slightest crack in your armor — between what you meant and what you said — can be pried open and the knife driven home.

In private life, we pay the price of our own mistakes. In public life, a politician’s mistakes are first paid by others. Good judgment means understanding how to be responsible to those who pay the price of your decisions. Edmund Burke, when first elected to the House of Commons, told the voters of Bristol that he would never sacrifice his judgment to the pressure of their opinion. I’m not sure my constituents would be happy to hear this. Sometimes sacrificing my judgment to theirs is the essence of my job. Provided, of course, that I don’t sacrifice my principles.

Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment. It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America’s foreign policy serves God’s plan to expand human freedom. Ideological thinking of this sort bends what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity” to fit an abstract illusion. Politicians with good judgment bend the policy to fit the human timber. Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.

In my political-science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgment meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed. Resisting the popular isn’t easy, because resisting the popular isn’t always wise. Good judgment in politics is messy. It means balancing policy and politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy — often yourself.

Knowing the difference between a good and a bad compromise is more important in politics than holding onto pure principle at any price. A good compromise restores the peace and enables both parties to go about their business with some element of their vital interest satisfied. A bad one surrenders the public interest to compulsion or force.

Measuring good judgment in politics is not easy. Campaigns and primaries test a candidate’s charm, stamina, money-raising ability and rhetorical powers but not necessarily judgment in office and under fire.

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

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

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

Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.

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

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

Read full post and comments:
"Getting Iraq Wrong" >>

Goodbye, George and John

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: August 7, 2007

Names matter. People named Dennis and Denise are disproportionately likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence or Laurie are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. People named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis, and people named Georgia are disproportionately likely to move to the state that served as home in “Gone With the Wind.”

As Brett Pelham of State University of New York at Buffalo has shown in dozens of different ways, people are drawn to professions, places and people that remind them of themselves. A thing as seemingly superficial as a name can influence, even if slightly, the course of a whole life (which is why I’ve named my own children President, Laureate and Hedge Fund Manager).

Nevertheless, I didn’t become aware of the true import of names until I read Laura Wattenberg. She has taken her obsession with names — which in other hands could be regarded as an eccentricity — and has transformed it into a window on American society.

On her blog, The Baby Name Wizard, Wattenberg tracks the rise and fall of naming fashions. One of her mega-observations, which isn’t that surprising, is that we are living in the age of the long tail when it comes to naming our kids. In 1880, just 10 names — William, John, Mary, George, etc. — accounted for 20 percent of all babies. Now those 10 names account for just 2 percent of American babies.

Name conformity peaked around World War II. Since then parents have been more and more likely to seek out the unusual. “Across regions, races and classes,” Wattenberg writes, “many thousands of American parents are united by a common bond: their mutual determination to be nothing like each other.”

This observation is merely a jumping-off point. Between 1890 and 1920, as America was urbanizing, parents gave names that were paved with gold, Wattenberg observes. Girls were often named after gems — Amber, Ruby, Jewel and Opal.

In the 1950s, some surge of naming testosterone produced a lot of swaggering male names ending in the letter K: Jack, Mark and Frank, not to mention Rock, Dirk and Buck. But over the past few decades, K has moved to the front of names: Kyle, Kaitlyn and Kayla. “If any letter defines modern American name style, K is it,” Wattenberg notes.

The most astonishing change concerns the ending of boys’ names. In 1880, most boys’ names ended in the letters E, N, D and S. In 1956, the chart of final letters looked pretty much the same, with more names ending in Y. Today’s chart looks nothing like the charts of the past century. In 2006, a huge (and I mean huge) percentage of boys’ names ended in the letter N. Or as Wattenberg put it, “Ladies and gentlemen, that is a baby-naming revolution.”

Wattenberg observes a new formality sweeping nursery schools. Thirty years ago there would have been a lot of Nicks, Toms and Bills on the playground. Now they are Nicholas, Thomas and William. In 1898, the name Dewey had its moment (you should be able to figure out why). Today, antique-sounding names are in vogue: Hannah, Abigail, Madeline, Caleb and Oliver.

In the late 19th century, parents sometimes named their kids after prestigious jobs, like King, Lawyer, Author and Admiral. Now, children are more likely to bear the names of obsolete proletarian professions, Cooper, Carter, Tyler and Mason.

Wattenberg uses her blog to raise vital questions, such as should you give your child an unusual name that is Googleable, or a conventional one that is harder to track? But what’s most striking is the sheer variability of the trends she describes.

Naming fashion doesn’t just move a little. It swings back and forth. People who haven’t spent a nanosecond thinking about the letter K get swept up in a social contagion and suddenly they’ve got a Keisha and a Kody. They may think they’re making an individual statement, but in fact their choices are shaped by the networks around them.

Furthermore, if you just looked at names, you would conclude that American culture once had a definable core — signified by all those Anglo names like Mary, Robert, John and William. But over the past few decades, that Anglo core is harder to find. In the world of niche naming, there is no clearly identifiable mainstream.

For the past few decades, the White House has been occupied by George, William, George, Ronald, James and Richard. Those pillars are crumbling. Pluralism is here.

Read full post and comments:
"Goodbye, George and John" >>

The Substance Thing

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 6, 2007

Two presidential elections ago, the conventional wisdom said that George W. Bush was a likable, honest fellow. But those of us who actually analyzed what he was saying about policy came to a different conclusion — namely, that he was irresponsible and deeply dishonest. His numbers didn’t add up, and in his speeches he simply lied about the content of his own proposals.

In the fifth year of the disastrous war Mr. Bush started on false pretenses, it’s clear who was right. What a candidate says about policy, not the supposedly revealing personal anecdotes political reporters love to dwell on, is the best way to judge his or her character.

So what are the current presidential candidates saying about policy, and what does it tell us about them?

Well, none of the leading Republican candidates have said anything substantive about policy. Go through their speeches and campaign materials and you’ll see a lot of posturing, especially about how tough they are on terrorists — but nothing at all about what they actually plan to do.

In fact, I suspect that the real reason most of the Republicans are ducking a YouTube debate is that they’re afraid they would be asked questions about policy, rather than being invited to compare themselves to Ronald Reagan.

But didn’t Rudy Giuliani just announce a health care plan? No, he vaguely described a tax cut proposal that he says would do something good for health care. (Most experts disagree.) But he offered no specifics about how the plan would work, how much it would cost or how he would pay for it.

As Ezra Klein of The American Prospect has pointed out, in the speech announcing his “plan” — and since no policy document has been released, the speech is all we have to go on — Mr. Giuliani never uttered the word “uninsured.” He did, however, repeatedly denounce “socialized medicine” or some variant thereof.

The entire G.O.P. field, then, fails the substance test.

There is, by contrast, a lot of substance on the Democratic side, with John Edwards forcing the pace. Most notably, in February, Mr. Edwards transformed the whole health care debate with a plan that offers a politically and fiscally plausible path to universal health insurance.

Whatever the fate of the Edwards candidacy, Mr. Edwards will deserve a lot of the credit if and when we do get universal care in this country.

Mr. Edwards has also offered a detailed, sensible plan for tax reform, and some serious antipoverty initiatives.

Four months after the Edwards health care plan was announced, Barack Obama followed with a broadly similar but somewhat less comprehensive plan. Like Mr. Edwards, Mr. Obama has also announced a serious plan to fight poverty.

Hillary Clinton, however, has been evasive. She conveys the impression that there’s not much difference between her policy positions and those of the other candidates — but she’s offered few specifics. In particular, unlike Mr. Edwards or Mr. Obama, she hasn’t announced a specific universal care plan, or explicitly committed herself to paying for health reform by letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire.

For those who believe that the time for universal care has come, this lack of specifics is disturbing. In fact, what Mrs. Clinton said about health care in February’s Democratic debate suggested a notable lack of urgency: “Well, I want to have universal health care coverage by the end of my second term.”

On Saturday, at the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, she sounded more forceful: “Universal health care will be my highest domestic priority as president.” But does this represent a real change in position? It’s hard to know, since she has said nothing about how she would cover the uninsured.

And even if you believe Mrs. Clinton’s contention that her positions could never be influenced by lobbyists’ money — a remark that drew boos and hisses from the Chicago crowd — there’s reason to worry about the big contributions she receives from the insurance and drug industries. Are they simply betting on the front-runner, or are they also backing the Democratic candidate least likely to hurt their profits?

All of the leading Democratic candidates are articulate and impressive. It’s easy to imagine any of them as president. But after what happened in 2000, it worries me that Mrs. Clinton is showing an almost Republican aversion to talking about substance.

Read full post and comments:
"The Substance Thing" >>

Putting the Government’s Words in the Doctor’s Mouth

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: August 6, 2007

Carol Kling had an abortion in 1982, when she was 22. Testifying before a state legislative committee in South Dakota a couple of years ago, she said she would not have made that choice had she understood what she was doing.

“I did not realize that this fetus was a human being,” Ms. Kling said. “I felt it was just tissue. It was reinforced by our culture and by the clinic, but if I had known the truth I never would have had that abortion, and I’d have a daughter today.”

Ms. Kling said her abortion led her to drinking, depression, divorce and thoughts of suicide.

South Dakota, an innovator in abortion legislation, responded to testimony from Ms. Kling and others with a law that requires doctors there to tell women seeking abortions that they “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Ms. Kling seemed sincere about her confusion, though it is a little hard to accept the idea that she did not realize she was extinguishing a life or that the statement required by the law would have changed her mind.

Her testimony did fit neatly with a shift in the strategy of groups opposing abortion, which now justify efforts to limit or ban it by focusing not only on fetal life but also on the consequences for the women involved. The South Dakota law is called, tellingly, the Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Act of 2005.

That new rhetoric also figured in the Supreme Court’s April decision upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

“The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority.

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,” he added, “it seems unexceptional to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.”

South Dakota’s solution — to mandate a set of disclosures — stops short of Justice Kennedy’s, which was to uphold a ban on an abortion procedure on the apparent theory that women cannot sort things out for themselves even with full information.

But there is, according to the federal courts that have so far blocked the South Dakota law, a constitutional flaw in how the state seeks to go about informing women of its views. The problem with the law, the courts said, is that it would hijack the doctor-patient relationship.

“The South Dakota statute,” Judge Karen E. Schreier of Federal District Court in Rapid City, S.D., wrote in issuing a preliminary injunction in 2005, “requires abortion doctors to enunciate the state’s viewpoint on an unsettled medical, philosophical, theological and scientific issue — that is, whether a fetus is a human being.”

A divided panel of the federal appeals court in St. Louis affirmed that decision last year, and the full appeals court will soon issue its decision. Judging from the oral argument in April, which is available on the court’s Web site, www.ca8.uscourts.gov, the court may well uphold the law.

South Dakota can, of course, say what it likes about abortion. “If the state wants to have a billboard, good for the state,” Timothy E. Branson, a Minneapolis lawyer who represents Planned Parenthood in its challenge to the law, said in an interview. Indeed, as lawyers for South Dakota said in a brief last year, the state publishes pamphlets and maintains a Web site setting out its position (www.state.sd.us/applications<240>/ph17abortioninfo).

Lawyers for the state say it is also entitled to make doctors into its publicity agents, though that is not how they put it.

“The point,” Lawrence E. Long, the state attorney general, wrote in a brief to the appeals court this spring, “is to require abortion providers to do a better job at what they should already be doing. That is, they should provide their patients with an accurate description of what they are aborting.”

The Supreme Court has said that doctors performing abortions may be forced to convey truthful information, and not only about medical issues. In 1992, the court upheld a Pennsylvania abortion law that required doctors to tell their patients that they might be eligible for child support if they decided to carry their pregnancies to term.

But other cases say the government cannot force anyone to disseminate ideological messages.

At the argument in April, John P. Guhin, a lawyer for the state, said doctors could paraphrase the required disclosures, which must be made in writing and signed by the patient on every page. He suggested that doctors could also express their disagreement, though the law requires them to certify that their patients have understood the disclosures. Should there be questions, doctors must answer them in writing. Failure to follow the procedures is a crime.

It is all awfully convoluted, which is probably the point. Had Ms. Kling been confronted with this disclosure process, she might well have decided to forgo her abortion. The question, though, is whether she would have done that because she had more information or because South Dakota succeeded in erecting a roadblock to a constitutional right.

Online: Related documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com /adamliptak.

Read full post and comments:
"Putting the Government’s Words in the Doctor’s Mouth" >>

Sarkozy Surfs the U.S.A.

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 5, 2007

NEW YORK

Of all the tradition-trampling surprises of the Sarkozy administration - the proper term because its model is American - none has been bolder than the French president's decision to forsake the charms of the Côte d'Azur and vacation in the United States.

In a little more than two months, Nicolas Sarkozy and his governing cohorts have called for a "rehabilitation of money," urged the French to work rather than think, cited rap music lyrics as showing the "taste of the young for success," abolished the traditional Bastille Day presidential address, and mocked the 35-hour week.

François Mitterrand, who hewed to the regal interpretation of the Fifth Republic's highest office, once opined that "a president must know how to be bored." Advice lost on Sarkozy, for whom action is the essence of politics. He has been such a whirl of activity that diplomats at the Quai d'Orsay have taken to observing that he has "a nuclear reactor in his belly."

Even, it seems, while on vacation. Here is the French president, a few days into his lakeside holiday in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, jogging down a forest trail, chatting to journalists, swimming, cavorting, strutting his stuff.

Mon Dieu! So much for "la France profonde," the deep or essential France with which former presidents felt they must commune in their summer breaks.

When De Gaulle headed for his beloved Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing went fishing in the Auvergne, and Mitterrand sojourned at Latché or with his mistress in Gordes, and Jacques Chirac stayed at the summer presidential residence in the Fort of Brégançon, they were making statements about their power: its roots, its latitude and its eternal essence.

Goodbye to all that. The world has moved on. Brands replaced mysticism. France got globalized. Sarkozy is not about to pretend otherwise. His aim is to shake his country from tired habits. Any means are good.

Over the past quarter-century or so, I have clung to my youthful Francophilia. But it has been tried. I grew tired of the stultifying politics that posed Gaul as some grandiose counterweight to Anglo-Saxon hegemony; lost my patience with French portrayals of the United States as the land of cruel cowboy capitalism; became exasperated with the hypocrisy of Parisian hand-wringing about high unemployment; and laughed out loud at French notions of rolling back globalization.

As a result, Sarkozy feels like a breath of fresh air. Clearly I am not alone in believing his taboo-breaking is salutary: the French president's approval ratings are soaring. They are about double those of President George W. Bush, who may find time to see Sarko this month, if the two men ever get off their exercise bikes. With some coaching from Tony Blair, Sarkozy has intuited that politics these days is about style. Economic power lies with central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe. Military power is constrained by mutually assured destruction and the 24-hour news cycle. What remains are image, perception and identity.

Sarkozy is signaling many things: the passage of power from a Cold-War fashioned gerontocracy to a 50-something generation, the possibility of France exerting influence through modern magnetism rather than aloofness, the end of a form of presidential power that consisted of balancing rather than acting, and the shredding of debilitating nostrums about the United States.

Of course, some people are complaining, including the Socialist deputy, René Dosière, who wants to know how Sarkozy can afford the lakefront estate of Michael Appe, a former Microsoft executive.

But I suspect Sarkozy has got it right in his Microsoft vacation option. He and his wife, Cécilia, are playing the Kennedy card. They know more than 900,000 French people head for the United States every year. They recognize the draw of America's glamour. They are breaking barriers of silence the French were ready to break.

The Sarko effect will not last forever. Consider how Gordon Brown's bushy-browed seriousness now seems welcome merely because it is not the grinning charm of Blair. Political shelf lives have shrunk in the age of round-the-clock exposure.

The French will want to see results, first in overcoming high unemployment, but also in the extension of French global standing. Ending taboos has been heady. But the political "rentrée" of September may be arduous.

Still, Sarkozy has what it takes to outmaneuver the opposition. He has already ensured the creation of a new course at the Sorbonne: the semiotics of presidential vacations. That, I suspect, will be the least of his achievements.

Read full post and comments:
"Sarkozy Surfs the U.S.A." >>

Kentucky Politics, Served With a Helping of Ribs at an Annual Barbecue

Gov. Ernie Fletcher criticized his rival’s stance on gambling
during the Fancy Farm, Ky., picnic on Saturday,
saying, “I don’t subscribe to Steve Beshear’s math and science program
that teaches children only to count to 21.” Photo by Josh Anderson for The New York Times

By IAN URBINA

Published: August 6, 2007

FANCY FARM, Ky., Aug. 4 — They came for the barbecue pork and the roasting of rivals.

The crowd of more than 5,000 gathered under a sweltering Western Kentucky sun for the 127th annual Fancy Farm picnic on Saturday as Democrats and Republicans took turns on stage taunting each other with mocking skits and sarcastic speeches.

Republicans sent a man dressed as Moses into the audience looking for the Ten Commandments, which they said Democrats took out of the schools and courthouses. Democrats started a chain gang marching alongside the stage to poke fun at a hiring scandal and a series of indictments that clouded much of the Republican governor’s first term.

In part a fund-raiser for the local Catholic parish, the raucous event marks the unofficial kickoff of a campaign season here that promises to be one of the feistiest in years.

Cloaked in the smoky smell of 19,000 pounds of pork and mutton being barbecued, the event was held on the grounds of St. Jerome Catholic Church in Fancy Farm, a Western Kentucky town of 2,100 residents that got its name for its many elegant farms.

The afternoon’s highlight was a rousing performance from a rejuvenated Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who just over a year and a half ago was under indictment, had approval ratings in the 20s and had lost the backing of most of his party and Mitch McConnell, the state’s senior United States senator.

Staging a striking comeback, Mr. Fletcher (pictured right), the first Republican governor in the state in more than three decades, saw the corruption charges against him dropped last August and won more than 50 percent of the votes in the May primary. On Saturday, he smiled contentedly as Mr. McConnell took the stage to speak on his behalf as he seeks a second term as governor.

“Ernie Fletcher does stand for Kentucky and that’s why he’s going to have another four years as our governor,” said Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who had helped Mr. Fletcher win his first term but quickly had distanced himself when the governor was indicted.

A Franklin County grand jury investigation into the governor’s administration had returned 29 indictments, concluding that Mr. Fletcher had approved a “widespread and coordinated plan” to skirt state hiring laws so political supporters could be rewarded with jobs. The governor had been charged with criminal conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination, but the charges were later dropped in an agreement with prosecutors. Mr. Fletcher then issued pardons for everyone else who had been charged or could be charged.

Mr. Fletcher focused his speech on Saturday on Steve Beshear, his Democratic opponent in the Nov. 6 general election. Mr. Beshear, a former lieutenant governor and former attorney general, hopes to pay for his proposed education and health care initiatives by amending the Kentucky Constitution to allow limited casino gambling, and for the past six weeks Mr. Fletcher has made the issue the focus of debate.

As Republicans tossed casino chips written with “Don’t gamble on Steve Beshear” into the crowd, Mr. Fletcher warned that increased crime, divorce rates and bankruptcies would come with expanded gambling in the state.

“I don’t subscribe to Steve Beshear’s math and science program that teaches children only to count to 21,” Mr. Fletcher said.

Mr. Beshear (pictured right) countered with a few shots of his own.

“Senator McConnell, it’s only taken you a year but I’m glad you finally remembered Ernie’s name,” Mr. Beshear said.

As the state attorney general, Mr. Beshear wrote in 1981 that Kentucky schools must remove the Ten Commandments from classrooms in keeping with a United States Supreme Court decision.

“I obeyed the law,” Mr. Beshear said. “As governor, I’ll obey the law, and wouldn’t that be a great change, too.”

He added what he said his father, a Baptist preacher, had always told him about the Ten Commandments: “It’s not so important where they hang but it sure is important that you try to live by them.”

“And if this administration had been living by them,” Mr. Beshear added, “they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in today.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Fletcher has fueled his political rebound with advertisements referencing the indictments and depicting himself as the bookish young boy taunted by schoolyard bullies.

“Day after day he took it,” says a narrator in one of the advertisements. “Didn’t flinch because fighting is not his way. But he got where he was going. He held his head high.”

Jumping to an image of Mr. Fletcher in the governor’s office, the narrator then says that he stayed focused on the job and got things done for Kentucky.

But Mr. Fletcher has not put his troubles behind him entirely.

Last week, the state’s Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Mr. Beshear, and the organization cited the pardons made by the governor as part of the reason.

Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans by roughly three to two in the state, and while one in three Democrats crossed party lines and voted for Mr. Fletcher in 2003, many had been partly motivated by a corruption scandal involving the previous governor that Mr. Fletcher had promised to clean up.

Stacy Neitzel contributed reporting.

Read full post and comments:
"Kentucky Politics, Served With a Helping of Ribs at an Annual Barbecue" >>

Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: August 6, 2007

Frustrated by the genocide he is tolerating in Darfur, President Bush has suggested to aides on occasion that maybe the U.S. should just send troops there.

He alluded to that when he told a woman in Tennessee who asked him about Darfur: “The threshold question was: If there is a problem, why don’t you just go take care of it?” Mr. Bush was talked out of the idea by Condi Rice, who told him that the U.S. just couldn’t start another war in a Muslim country. So, as Mr. Bush told the questioner: “I made the decision not to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Darfur.”

That was the right decision. The Sudanese regime would use our invasion as a rallying cry against infidels and make the crisis harder to resolve.

But the upshot was that Mr. Bush, lacking a military option, hasn’t taken up other options. He seems genuinely appalled by the horrors of Darfur — he raises them regularly with foreign leaders, even when aides haven’t put them on his talking points — yet he has done little, apparently because he doesn’t know quite what to do. So here are some practical suggestions.

First, the administration should invest far more energy toward seeking a negotiated peace between rebels and government — the only long-term solution to the slaughter. Instead, the diplomatic focus has been on U.N. peacekeepers, and they are a terrific addition but not a solution in themselves.

The preliminary step is for the rebels to form a united negotiating front, and they are now meeting in Tanzania to do so. The U.S. desperately needs to assist that process to the hilt.

Second, we should back an international appeal for Sudan to release Suleiman Jamous, an elder who is one of the best hopes for uniting the rebel factions and leading them to peace.

Third, we need to work with other countries to insist that Sudan stop importing tens of thousands of Arabs from neighboring countries to repopulate those areas where it has slaughtered the local population. These new settlements seal the demographic consequences of genocide, outrage the survivors and make peace harder to achieve.

Fourth, we need to increase intelligence coverage over the area, and release occasional satellite photos so that Sudan knows it is being watched. Releasing a photo of the beleaguered Gereida camp, for example, would reduce the chance that Sudan will slaughter its 130,000 occupants.

Fifth, Mr. Bush can join Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in the trip they have discussed to Chad. They should also publicly invite the leaders of China and Egypt, two countries that are critical to pressuring Sudan, to join them.

Sixth, the U.S. can quietly encourage Muslim leaders to push for peace. Malaysia’s prime minister, who is also the head of a group of Islamic countries, has prepared a peace proposal, and Saudi Arabia is interested in helping.

Seventh, Mr. Bush can use the bully pulpit. He can give a prime-time speech or bring Darfuri refugees to the White House for a photo-op.

Eighth, the U.S. should begin contingency planning in case Sudan starts mass slaughters of people in camps, or in case Sudan resumes its war against its south. If the former, we could secure camps and create a corridor to bring survivors to Chad; if the latter, we should arm South Sudan and perhaps blockade Port Sudan.

Ninth, we need to work much more with China, which has the most leverage over Sudan. The goal should be to get China to suspend arms transfers to Sudan until Khartoum makes a serious effort at peace.

Tenth, we can work with France to stabilize Chad and Central African Republic. President Sarkozy is pushing for European peacekeepers to rescue both countries after Sudanese-sponsored proxy invasions, and he deserves strong support.

Finally, we should work with Britain and France to enforce the U.N.’s ban on offensive military flights in Darfur. At a minimum, we should seek U.N. sanctions for Sudan’s violations. In addition, when Sudan bombs a village, we can afterward destroy one of its Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter bombers that it keeps in Darfur.

Many aid workers disagree with this suggestion, for fear that Sudan will retaliate by cutting off humanitarian access. But after four years, I think we need to show President Omar Hassan al-Bashir that he will pay a price for genocide. And he values his gunships and fighter bombers in a way he has never valued his people.

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

Read full post and comments:
"Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur" >>