Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
A couple of days late for no good reason, tonight I'll really be making MTClient release candidate 1 available for download. But that's not what I'm ashamed of.
I'm about to go buy "Freddy vs. Jason." Oh, the humanity!
The Carnagie Endowment for International Peace has a report titled WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications that provides an honest and very interesting review of the truth behind the "facts" used to justify the second Iraq war.
First of all, it looks back to allow Americans to reach judgments about how our key players and institutions performed on the most important call that any government, any country, any people can make: whether to go to war. These key players include importantly, of course -- most importantly, the president and his advisors, but also the Congress, the intelligence agencies, the independent think tanks, like ourselves, and not least, the public itself. Did it understand the key questions, and did it demand and get straight answers?
Going to war is always momentous, but there is an added importance to that right now, because with no country or combination of countries on the planet able to oppose us, there is nothing, therefore, to hold us back. There is an historically unusual risk that we would be tempted to use our power unwisely. It has never been more important that as a nation we know when to go to war and when to strive to achieve our ends by other means.
We also looked back so that we can look ahead. We have sifted through masses of information and put broad arguments and assertions under the microscope of close analysis for the purpose of asking what worked and what didn't work, what was right, what was wrong, and what recommendations can we offer to make the future better.
The study has two very different parts to it. The first is the first comprehensive review of all the publicly available information regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that has been undertaken. And I'm talking here of the unclassified information, declassified information, corroborated press reporting, the results from the international inspections, administration statements, particularly in official documents and fact sheets and major speeches, and post-war result -- so both U.S. and international sources -- and an effort to put that mass of information into a single, coherent framework.
from The Awful Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
Kew Gardens is to join the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China as a modern wonder of the world.
The Royal Botanic Gardens in south-west London was recognised as a "unique cultural landscape" by the United Nations, which has given it World Heritage Site status.
The 132-hectare site contains some of the world's largest and most famous botanical glasshouses and historic buildings.
There are also gardens which the more than one million yearly visitors can enjoy.
Kew director Professor Peter Crane spoke of his delight after the decision by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
"Being awarded World Heritage Site status is hugely exciting for us.
"It is a stamp of approval that puts us in the company of the best of the best and it brings with it increased prestige and public awareness."
In-House Audit Says Wal-Mart Violated Labor Laws
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
n internal audit now under court seal warned top executives at Wal-Mart Stores three years ago that employee records at 128 stores pointed to extensive violations of child-labor laws and state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals.
The audit of one week's time-clock records for roughly 25,000 employees found 1,371 instances in which minors apparently worked too late at night, worked during school hours or worked too many hours in a day. It also found 60,767 apparent instances of workers not taking breaks, and 15,705 apparent instances of employees working through meal times.
Officials at Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, employing 1.2 million people at its 3,500 stores in the United States, insisted that the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took.
"Our view is that the audit really means nothing when you understand Wal-Mart's timekeeping system," said Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for communications. She said Wal-Mart did nothing in response to the audit, saying it always strives to comply with the law.
But missed breaks and lunches have become a major issue in more than 40 lawsuits charging Wal-Mart with forcing employees to work without pay through lunch and rest breaks, and several lawyers and former employees who have sued Wal-Mart said the audit only bolstered their cases. They said that many employees continued to complain of missing meals and breaks.
"Their own analysis confirms that they have a pattern and practice of making their employees work through their breaks and lunch on a regular basis," said James Finberg, a lawyer who has assisted several suits against Wal-Mart. "What this audit shows is against their own company policy and against the law in almost every state in which they operate."
Microsoft Changes Mind on Windows 98 Support
Reuters
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; 4:24 AM
AMSTERDAM -- U.S. software maker Microsoft said on Tuesday it would continue to offer support to customers who still own versions of its Windows 98 operating system, in a move aimed to sooth developing countries.
Extended Support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE had been scheduled to come to an end on Friday, January 16, while Windows Me support had been scheduled to end December 31, 2004.
The company has now decided to lengthen the Extended Support phase for Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millennium Edition (Me) through June 30, 2006.
It bit the bullet after it emerged that many users in developing countries who still rely on Windows 98 were confused about Microsoft's support guidelines. These were shorter for some Windows 98 products than for its more recent batch of Windows operating systems like Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Microsoft has come under pressure in recent years, particularly by authorities in developing countries, for its attempts to push customers into buying or subscribing to newer, expensive Windows and Office software versions.
Many countries have started to buy computers that run on the freely available Linux system, while others hang onto older Windows versions that have been paid for and still do the job.
Upstarts Upset the Tobacco Cart
States, Big Four Are Trying to Stunt Growth of Discount Cigarette Brands
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page B01
RICHMOND -- When Virginia tobacco farmer Mac L. Bailey started a cigarette manufacturing company 10 years ago, his business consisted of little more than a secret tobacco blend, a couple of hand-held rolling machines and a burning desire to take on the big tobacco companies that paid farmers like him a relative pittance for the lucrative product they grew.
"I saw years when I didn't have enough to pay my expenses," said Bailey, 60. "I looked at what the farmer was getting and what the big manufacturers were getting, and I said, 'That's too much money for the big guys.' "
Today, Bailey owns a private jet, and his company, S&M Brands of Keysville, Va., produces about 1 million cartons a month. The growth of discount cigarette companies such as Bailey's has reshaped the industry -- and led to an odd alliance between big tobacco companies and many of the states that sued them over the public cost of smoking.
Numerous states are considering or have adopted legislation aimed at increasing the price of discount cigarettes and protecting the market share of the "Big Four" tobacco companies -- Philip Morris, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and R.J. Reynolds. The Big Four are vowing a push this year in the Virginia General Assembly.
Anticipating the legislative onslaught, two small cigarette manufacturers incorporated in Virginia and a third in Oklahoma launched a legal counteroffensive Monday, filing a lawsuit in Louisiana federal district court. The suit charges that the new laws seek to unconstitutionally limit the companies' right to market their product. Bailey is not a party to the suit, but he said he will be following the case closely.
"States are aligning themselves with our competitors and trying to destroy us," said former Virginia attorney general Anthony Troy, who worked on the lawsuit and represents the Council of Independent Tobacco Manufacturers of Virginia. "That is not the American way of doing business."
But states such as Virginia, which is struggling with a budget deficit, have a powerful reason to go along with the Big Four: money.
In a settlement reached six years ago, major tobacco companies agreed to make annual payments to the states estimated at more than $235 billion over 25 years. Those payments are tied to the sales of the participating companies; if they lose market share, the states lose money.
"We need to guarantee a continuing flow of revenue that we use to help balance Virginia's budget and pay for health care and economic development in the tobacco-dependent regions," said Sen. Charles R. Hawkins (R-Pittsylvania), who plans to introduce legislation targeting the independents.
from A New Map of the Universe, With Advice From Einstein
By DENNIS OVERBYE
The filigreed pattern of clumps, knots and ribbons traced by that dust, theorists tell us, arose from microscopic, quantum irregularities in space-time left behind by force fields during the Big Bang and then amplified a gazillion times by the expansion of the universe and the slow rumbling of gravity.
For a cosmologist, this lordly view of the largest possible scale, in which we can see God's own brush strokes, might be the most fundamental and revealing map of the universe.
But that won't do for the rest of us who see everything we know and love and yearn for crammed vanishingly into a single insignificant pixel.
"Objects close to us may be inconsequential in terms of the whole universe but they are important to us," Dr. Gott and his colleagues write in a paper describing their map and posted on the physics Web site at arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310571.
How to do justice both to the grandeur and the complexity of the universe?
For Men's Designers, the Muse Is Only 13
By GUY TREBAY
FLORENCE, Italy — All men, at some level, are 13. Or so one might have concluded from the tone of Pitti Immagine Uomo, the big men's wear trade show held last week in Florence, which was a major center for Italian fashion until Milan stole the spotlight three decades ago.
If in most societies masculine rites of passage are organized around puberty and the onset of the reproductive years, in a materialistic culture, the transition to adulthood is best marked by the stirrings of an independent ability to select and consume. Americans enter a mature demographic cohort at 13, the age by which most marketers say that the buying patterns of a lifetime are formed.
My advice: you know what these idiots have to say, so don't bother buying the book.
AN END TO EVIL
How to Win the War on Terror
By David Frum and Richard Perle
284 pages. Random House. $25.95.
The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.
The book takes the instructive, prescriptive stance assumed by many conservative theorists in recent books, but it turns out to be less a reasoned effort to convince the unconvinced than a furious manifesto aimed at true believers. It is a screed that expends as much energy denouncing the State Department, Europe, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., Democrats, the foreign-policy establishment and even former President George H. W. Bush (the authors accuse him of trying "to prevent the Soviet Union from disintegrating"), as it does on denouncing terrorists and terror-minded states.
Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors' track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush." Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980's for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements.
The authors make some persuasive points about the disturbing role the Saudis have played in fomenting radical Islamist doctrine, the persecution of women in some Muslim countries and the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. But these points tend to be drowned out by their triumphalist boasts ("the United States has become the greatest of all great powers in world history"), their macho posturing and their willful, flame-throwing language. "There is no middle way for Americans," they write in the opening chapter. "It is victory or holocaust. This book is a manual for victory."
Discussing rulers like Fidel Castro and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they declare that "when it is in our power and our interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker." Of the United Nations, another one of their nemeses, they write, "The U.N. regularly broadcasts a spectacle as dishonest and morally deadening as a Stalinist show trial, a televised ritual of condemnation that inflames hatreds and sustains quarrels that might otherwise fade away."
Mr. Perle and Mr. Frum argue that America "should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington," and they assert that Iran is "the world's least trustworthy regime," ominously adding, "The regime must go."
Throughout "An End to Evil" they purvey a worldview of us-versus-them, all-or-nothing, either-or, and this outlook results in a refusal to countenance the possibility that people who do not share the authors' views about the war in Iraq or their faith in a pre-emptive, unilateralist foreign policy might have legitimate reasons for doing so. Instead, Mr. Frum and Mr. Perle accuse those who differ with their foreign-policy beliefs of failing to support the war against terrorism: of being cowardly, delusional or defeatist.
They write, "The determination of the State Department to reconcile the irreconcilable, to negotiate the unnegotiable, and to appease the unappeasable is an obstacle to victory." They argue that the C.I.A. is "an agency with very strong, mostly liberal policy views," and that those views have "again and again distorted its analysis and presentation of its own information." Of critics of the Patriot Act, they warn, "We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion; so determined to defend the right of privacy that we refuse to acknowledge even the most blatant warnings of danger."
In some cases the authors serve up questionable assertions with little or no effort to back them up. They write, for instance, that "a visitor who walked through Baghdad in June would scarcely know that the city had been bombed in March."
Neither the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that might have posed an imminent threat to America, nor the failure to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 seems to have given the authors pause. They argue that "even in the absence of stockpiles of weapons Saddam was known to have created, the threat from his programs was undeniable." And they claim that "Saddam expected to share" in Osama bin Laden's success in hitting the World Trade Center. In other cases the authors use selective anecdotes or redacted illustrations to try to make their points. The myriad problems America continues to face in Iraq - as well as a mounting death toll - are conveniently skirted, as are the continuing difficulties in Afghanistan.
The authors' canned summary of recent Middle East history barely mentions the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and later in the book they cavalierly dismiss suggestions that the creation of a Palestinian state might help calm passions in the Muslim world and strengthen friendly Arab governments. "This thinking is not completely wrong," they sarcastically comment. "If the United States were to denounce Israel as an illegal occupier of Muslim land, attack it, deport the Jewish population, and turn over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians, we might well enjoy some of the benefits listed above."
The Palestinian state envisioned by President Bush, they suggest, would be undermined by extremists, who "will denounce the ministate as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause" or "find some other pretext for refusing ever to make peace with Israel."
But while Mr. Perle and Mr. Frum are unrelentingly pessimistic about a prospective Palestinian state, they are downright Pollyanna-ish about the prospects for a democratic Iraq: "We liberated an entire nation, opening the way to a humane, decent civil society in Iraq - and to reform of the ideological and moral climate of the whole Middle East."
Such contradictions, combined with the volume's bullying tone and often specious reasoning, make for a strident, sophistical book, one unlikely to persuade anyone who doesn't already share the authors' super-hawkish views and self-righteous braggadocio.
Justices Allow Policy of Silence on 9/11 Detainees
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrest and detention of hundreds of people, nearly all Muslim men, in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Without comment, the court let stand a ruling by a federal appeals court here that had accepted the Bush administration's rationale for refusing to disclose either the identities of those it arrested, most of whom have since been deported for immigration violations unrelated to terrorism, or the circumstances of the arrests.
A complete list of the names "would give terrorist organizations a composite picture of the government investigation," a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a 2-to-1 ruling last June. "The judiciary owes some measure of deference to the executive in cases implicating national security," the majority said.
The dissenting judge, David S. Tatel, said the majority had "converted deference into acquiescence" by accepting a categorical secrecy policy without requiring the government to show why the names of those who had been cleared of terrorist connections could not be made public. Of the nearly 1,000 people arrested, the government eventually released the names of 129 against whom it brought criminal charges.
The Supreme Court's action on Monday brought an end to one of the biggest court cases related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Even though the justices gave no reason for declining to take the appeal, the development was undoubtedly a welcome one for the administration after several recent judicial setbacks.
Over the administration's opposition, the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear appeals on behalf of 16 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay and an American citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, confined to a naval brig in South Carolina, all designated "enemy combatants" by the government.
The case the court turned down on Monday had in fact been the occasion for one of those judicial setbacks when a federal district judge, Gladys Kessler, ruled in August 2002 in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups that the government had to disclose most of the names. This was the ruling that the appeals court overturned nearly a year later.
According to former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, "ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process [in the White House] that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas." O'Neill said he, along with former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Secretary of State Colin Powell – who shared his non-ideological approach – "were used for window dressing." O'Neill criticized the President for "signing onto strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through." White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan lashed out at O'Neill saying, "it appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results." But the President has articulated a different assessment of O'Neill's integrity. Announcing his nomination in December 20, 2000, President Bush said that when Paul O'Neill speaks, he "speaks with authority and conviction and knowledge." A month later, at his swearing in, the President said O'Neill "has earned a reputation as a straight shooter."
DISHONEST DEFICIT POSITION: O'Neill opposed the second round of Bush tax cuts because he believed "a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it." When O'Neill presented his concerns to Vice President Cheney, he was cut off. Cheney told him that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." This is a very different position on deficits than Cheney has expressed publicly. On September 13, 2003, Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press: "I am a deficit hawk. So is the President." Cheney added that "without question, we've got to make choices, we've got to have fiscal discipline on the rest of the budget."
DISHONEST TAX CUT RATIONALE: President Bush has been quick to say that his tax cuts are not unfairly skewed towards the wealthiest Americans. But according to O'Neill, behind closed doors the President admitted the opposite. When advisers presented the President with the tax cut (a plan that disproportionately benefits the wealthy), Bush said, "Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again." The President added, "shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" But, according to O'Neill, Karl Rove just kept repeating "Stick to principle. Stick to principle," and the mantra eventually won Bush over. Nevertheless, when Bush presented the tax cut proposal on January 7, 2003, he presented it as a tonic for the middle class. He said we "know that middle-income families need additional relief" from taxes in order to help them deal with "living paycheck-to-paycheck and never getting a chance to save for their children's education or their own retirement."
DISHONEST WAR RATIONALE: The plan to oust Saddam Hussein, according to O'Neill, was underway long before 9/11. O'Neill said that from the first day the President took office "we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country, and, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this' " Publicly, however, the President said that the Iraq war was prompted mainly because of 9/11. In a press conference shortly before the attack he said, "September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country....It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we're now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home."
WEAK ON CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: After Enron and other corporate scandals rose corporate governance to the forefront of the national policy debate "O'Neill and Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable." But, O'Neill reports, "Bush went with a more modest plan because 'the corporate crowd' complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency." The President, however, touted his reform package as tough on corporations, saying, "America is ushering in a responsibility era...and this new culture must include a renewed sense of corporate responsibility. If you lead a corporation, you have a responsibility to serve your shareholders, to be honest with your employees."
Which is the better avatar?
Bush Visits Neighbors No Longer So Friendly
A summit will highlight how views have changed in Latin America.
By Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writer
January 12, 2004
MONTERREY, Mexico — Three months after taking office, a deferential President Bush made his debut on the world stage by embracing — and charming — Latin America.
"I grew up in a world where if you treat your neighbor well, it's a good start to developing a wholesome community," he told his 33 counterparts at the Summit of the Americas.
Three years later, Bush is deeply unpopular in much of the region. Latin Americans view him as a distant neighbor at best — often at odds with them over security and trade policies, and aloof from their worst economic and political crises.
Just in case you didn't notice, I added a link to the report under discussion.
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."
It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.
"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.
His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.
Hip-Hop's Unlikely Voice
At 52, Shaping the Playlist for a Young Audience
By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01
LOS ANGELES -- Mary J. Blige, in thigh-high green stiletto boots, grinds her hips on stage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. "Got a jones in my bones," she sings over the band's jumpy hip-hop beat. "And it's all for you, babe. Can't leave you alone."
Six thousand young people are on their feet bouncing and pumping their fists. Twenty rows back, between two young black women, sits a redhead named Mary Catherine Sneed, an Alabama native raised on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She sways and nods demurely as the two teenage girls in front of her shake it. Later, after the lights come up, while she waits for the crowd to file out, Sneed turns to her assistant: "She was great. Every song is like a chapter in the life of Mary J. Blige."
Few in this crowd know how much this 52-year-old white woman's opinion matters: She controls what many of them hear when they turn on their radios.
As chief operating officer of Radio One Inc., a black-owned company based in suburban Prince George's County, Md., Sneed is one of the most powerful people in black radio. The company owns a fifth of the black stations in the country. Sneed, who likes to be called "M.C.," helps oversee the business side, supervising station managers, and the music side, supervising the program directors who decide what goes on the air. In most radio companies, those are separate jobs.
Most weeks she leaves home in Atlanta for one of the two dozen cities where Radio One owns 67 stations. This week in December is her L.A. week, and Sue Freund, general manager of KKBT-FM ("The Beat"), Radio One's local hip-hop station, is driving a steel-gray Land Rover through the office canyons of Wilshire Boulevard on the way to lunch. From the backseat, Sneed chats with the Beat's program director, Robert Scorpio, who decides, with advice from Sneed, what music to play.
She was not a fan of the first two singles -- "Flying Without Wings" and "Superstar" -- from Ruben Studdard, the black man who won the amateur-hour TV show "American Idol." The whiter network audience may have loved Studdard, but Sneed said his slow, crooning rhythm and blues singles are too mainstream for the station.
"I think they were trying to be mass appeal, but by being mass appeal they appealed to no one," she said. {grv}{grv}Those songs weren't urban enough." {grv}{grv}Urban" in the radio business means {grv}{grv}black." The rest of the album, she said, is a better fit.
Scorpio agrees. A 39-year-old white hip-hop fan, he is a veteran of black radio who was a morning DJ in Houston before leaving the air to program seven years ago.
After talking to Sneed, he adds Studdard's latest single, "Sorry 2004," with its more driving hip-hop beat, to the playlist. It becomes a hit. Sneed "definitely gets the whole urban vibe," he said later. "Not a lot of corporate people do."
Radio One's L.A. Story
The Los Angeles station, Radio One's first in the nation's entertainment capital, is especially important to the company. Radio One bought it three years ago from Clear Channel Communications Inc., the country's largest radio company. Federal competition regulations forced Clear Channel to shed the Beat after buying Dallas-based AMFM Inc. for $23 billion. Radio One's strategy is to buy struggling stations cheap and turn them around.
Sneed forced out the old general manager but kept on Ed Lover and Dr. Dre of the TV show "Yo! MTV Raps" for the morning show. They flopped. She replaced them with Steve Harvey, a black comedian and TV personality popular with black audiences. The ratings jumped.
Although Radio One is doing better than the industry as a whole during a nationwide advertising slump, last winter a drop in the ratings at the Beat and a few other Radio One stations began to worry investors. The company has run up debt, spending $1.6 billion recently buying radio stations, and needs a steady revenue stream to repay it. The stock price began to drop from $16 a share to $13 last summer. It closed Friday at $19.48 a share.
Sneed then fired the production director and afternoon DJ. She spent three weeks running the station when the new general manager took maternity leave during the summer. Arbitron Inc., which measures radio and TV audiences, is to release the latest ratings while she is in Los Angeles.
From Country to Hip-Hop
Sneed grew up in Huntsville, Ala., where she went to an integrated high school in the 1960s and then across the state to Auburn University. She joined the Pi Beta Phi sorority to fit in at school, but rarely showed up for meetings. When the sisters had to nominate someone to volunteer at the campus radio station, they picked Sneed. They thought it was punishment. She thought it was destiny.
"I went to the [radio station] meeting, and I was really over the sorority," she said.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, she programmed country music stations in Nashville and R&B, adult contemporary, pop and rock stations in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Then Summit Communications Corp., a small Atlanta-based radio chain, hired her as executive vice president, the second-highest executive in the company, which operated adult contemporary stations playing soft-rockers such as Phil Collins and Celine Dion.
"It was a big job to be a woman and vice president," Sneed said. "There just weren't girls in radio programming. It is still a position that is dominated by men."
At the same time, another woman was making her mark on radio. Cathy Hughes developed the "quiet storm" format -- heavy on slow, sensual rhythm and blues sung by soulful crooners like Luther Vandross -- at predominantly black Howard University's station in Washington. In 1980 she bought her own station, WOL-AM, for just under $1 million.
Now chairman of Radio One, Hughes made her son, Alfred C. Liggins III, chief executive. Liggins found Sneed in Atlanta in 1994 when he went to buy an Atlanta radio station from Summit.
Later that year Summit sold all its stations and Sneed, a separated single mother of one son, was looking for a job that would let her remain in Atlanta. Liggins wanted to expand Radio One beyond Washington and Baltimore. They started what was only the second all-rap radio station in a major market in the nation; the first was in New York. Sneed had never programmed a rap station before.
Radio One began to grow just as white teenagers began mimicking West Coast rappers by throwing gang signs, wearing ultra-baggy jeans and cranking the music up to parent-deafening levels. Today hip-hop and R&B -- "urban music" -- are among the most popular formats with listeners ages 12 to 34, according to Arbitron. Nationwide, 348 stations play urban formats and in many large cities they compete directly with about 600 pop stations that play Top 40 hits, since Top 40 is no longer overwhelmingly white: Many Top 40 hits these days are rap songs. Recently eight of the top 10 singles in Billboard magazine were by rappers, including Outkast, Ludacris, Chingy and Jay-Z.
The gansta rap genre of hip-hop and rough images perpetrated by some rappers is part of what has become a billion-dollar industry that markets music, clothes and movies to young people of all races. From its roots as an urban black music form, rap has become an integral part of mainstream culture and is used to promote such products as Coca-Cola and Old Navy sweatshirts.
The fact that Sneed is white and has a 23-year-old son may have helped her get a feel for young people. The company said it gives local programmers lots of leeway, but every two weeks she has a conference call with program directors telling them which rappers flopped at the Source Awards in Miami and which songs record labels are plugging. To stay plugged in, she goes to concerts and clubs.
"Realistically speaking, you don't see that many white women in the 'hood," said Chris Bridges, a best-selling rapper who uses the name Ludacris and who was once a DJ at Radio One's Atlanta hip-hop station. "She would come to clubs and events right in the ghetto. That says a lot for the chief operating officer of the company."
Last year, the company earned $7 million on revenue of $336 million after losing $55 million on $277 million in revenue because of the billion-dollar station-buying spree in 2000 that vaulted the company into the big leagues. Liggins took the company public in 1999.
But everywhere it looks, Radio One is surrounded by giants more than twice its size. Its toughest competition in Washington is WPGC-FM (95.5), owned by New York-based Infinity Broadcasting Corp., a unit of Viacom Inc. that owns 185 stations. Radio One's R&B station, WMMJ-FM (102.3) and WPGC battle for the top market share. The Infinity station is slightly ahead.
Rebuking Critics
Soon the Land Rover is parked and Sneed is eating a chicken Ceasar salad at a Marie Callender's, a middle-market chain restaurant heavy on comfort food. She tells Freund and Scorpio a story about conservative TV pundit Bill O'Reilly berating white rapper Eminem for advocating the assassination of the president. "In hip-hop, 'dead presidents' means money," she said, throwing up her hands. "He just didn't get it. Come on, people!"
It is not just middle-age white conservatives who dislike the music. Lots of parents worry about songs celebrating guns and violence or demeaning women. And some rappers are not exactly role models. Unlike easy-listening stars, rappers tend to walk it like they talk it, and some have been shot and killed. Then there is the rabid consumerism, obsessed with "bling-bling" -- jewelry -- and expensive cars and clothes. Some rappers talk about the rough neighborhoods where they grew up while others offer views on subjects as diverse as politics to partying.
Sneed blows off the critics. "Until they listen and can have a conversation that lets me know that they actually spent some time monitoring what we are playing, we have nothing to talk about."
Late that night, Sneed's driver drops her and her 29-year old assistant for a meeting at Mr. Chow, an intimate celebrity hangout in Beverly Hills. Sneed steps out of the black Cadillac Escalade and is soon joking with a Geffen Records executive and his three assistants over champagne and lobster, chicken satay and shrimp dumplings. The conversation turns serious for a moment when the background music changes. The Geffen executive has secretly asked the restaurant manager to play young R&B singer Avant's new record so he could pitch it to Sneed.
"Sounds good," she said, but makes no promises.
As dinner progresses, there are lots of stories about hip-hop artists -- who is the hardest-to-work-with diva; who is known to carry a gun. "If you ever see that guy," the Geffen executive said, "you know he's packing an arsenal." Sneed laughs.
Then it is morning again in Los Angeles, in a conference room at the Beat offices on Wilshire, and the station manager and sales team gather around printouts of the latest Arbitron figures. The station manager passes a sheet to Sneed: The previous month the Beat ranked third in the market for the 18- to 34-year-old age group. It grabbed a respectable 3.3 rating, meaning that during any continuous 15-minute period 3.3 percent of Los Angeles listeners, or 343,000 people, were tuned in. The station gained ground on its competitor, an Infinity station, which leads the Beat but lost market share.
"Oh, God! OH MY GOD!" Sneed yelps. "That's freaking awesome!"
Once again, a Bush "compassionate conservative" initiative turns out to benefit businesses more than the ostensible subjects of the initiative.
Published: January 12, 2004
Every year Frank Romano has trouble hiring enough workers to fill the vacancies at his nursing home chain in Massachusetts, from $60,000-a-year nurses to $8-an-hour kitchen and laundry workers.
Not only are there not enough American-trained nurses available, said Mr. Romano, who hires 300 new workers a year, but hardly any Americans are willing to take the lowly, sweaty jobs in a nursing home's kitchen or laundry.
Mr. Romano has long savored one solution for such hiring woes: the federal government should make it easier to bring in workers from abroad.
Not surprisingly, he joined executives in many industries, including hotels, restaurants, hospitals, construction and agriculture, to applaud President Bush's new proposals to revamp immigration policy and to make it easier to hire foreign workers.
"Americans just don't want to take a lower-paying, entry-level job," said Mr. Romano, founder and owner of the Essex Group, a chain of 15 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, based in Rowley, Mass. "They will not apply for it. Last year, I had to spend close to $300,000 on help-wanted ads because it was such a struggle to find people to do the jobs we need done."
Mr. Bush's proposals would give renewable three-year visas to illegal immigrants already working in the United States as well as to foreign applicants who are newly hired for jobs here. But many unions and immigrant advocacy groups have denounced the plan, saying it would create a permanent, exploitable second-tier of workers who would never have the opportunity for permanent residency and full citizenship.
Mr. Bush's plan is an outline, and Congress is expected to add specifics when it takes up new immigration legislation. Under the plan, businesses would have to show that no Americans want the jobs available before they bring in temporary workers from abroad. Business wants that test to be minimal, with many embracing a White House proposal that businesses be allowed to hire foreigners if no Americans respond to job postings on Web sites.
Yeah, I know I shouldn't reuse a title, but it's so…appropriate…
No economic statistic is watched more closely as a gauge of the economic recovery's staying power - or of President Bush's prospects among voters - than the monthly employment numbers. Yet these numbers are failing to explain what is really happening to the nation's workers.
More people are working than have as yet been recorded in the official job count - the one compiled by Bureau of Labor Statistics that gets all the attention. But the official unemployment rate, in turn, greatly understates the number of people who would like to be working.
In December, for example, the nation's employers added 1,000 new jobs, a small number, but the unemployment rate plunged 0.2 percentage points, according to data released by the bureau on Friday. How could there be only 1,000 new jobs yet 300,000 fewer unemployed people, as the December numbers suggest?
The answer, economists say, is that the labor force has changed, and the official data no longer easily capture these changes, particularly the sharp rise in low-wage employment. The disparities in the numbers are giving politicians unusual leeway to make conflicting claims about the employment picture.
The Democratic presidential candidates, for example, heaped scorn on the Bush administration for the almost nonexistent job creation in December. The president, on the other hand, pointed to the drop in the unemployment rate, to 5.7 percent from 5.9 percent in November, as "a positive sign the economy is getting better." And the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, said in an interview that the official job count showing 1,000 new jobs in December was not accurate by itself.
"I view all economic statistics as imperfect," he said. "They have to be taken with a grain of salt."
In challenging the reliability of the official count, Mr. Mankiw sought to water down its message, which is that 2.3 million jobs have disappeared since President Bush took office in January 2001.
Christie Whitman, who is not the worst Republican, reminds her party that all that punditry noise about extremists taking over progressive politics applied to them first.
OLDWICK, N.J. — On May 5, 1996, when I was halfway through my first term as governor of New Jersey, there was a picture of me on the cover of this newspaper's Sunday magazine, accompanied by the headline, "It's My Party Too." I liked that message so much, I had it framed and hung it in my office in Trenton and, later, Washington. To moderate Republicans like me, that headline proclaimed our belief that there was still room for us in the party of Lincoln.
Now, almost eight years later, many moderate Republicans feel even less certain of their place in the party. When President Bush, arguably one of the more conservative presidents in recent history, is under attack from the right wing of the party for his proposal regarding immigration and migrant workers, is it any wonder moderates feel out of sync?
I have a book on heuristics…problem solving techniques…that, in explaining the need for such a book, gives a nice metaphor for racial positioning statements made by politicians and the like.
The problem with the way we're taught to solve problems is, the examples we're given to work on always come immediately after the necessary technique is demonstrated. To demonstrate the problem, the authors presented this triangle:
The problem is, prove the length of side AB plus the length of side BC is greater than the length of side AD plus the length of side DC, or
Racial pronouncements are easy to make because you know what they have to sound like. Racial gestures are easy to make because you know what they have to look like. But solving racial problems in situ is a mutha.
At any rate, this set of gestures was symbolically sufficient. Much better than Bush's propensity for picture with pickaninnies.
DES MOINES, Jan. 11 — The Democratic presidential contenders grappled on Sunday night with issues of race, taxes and national security in their final debate before next week's Iowa caucuses, getting in sharp jabs at one another on some of the most delicate questions in American politics.
Scrambling to sway undecided voters in the final days of the first presidential contest of 2004, eight of the nine candidates used a forum intended to address issues of special concern to blacks and Latinos to highlight their broad collective differences with Republicans. But under prodding from the two black candidates, they also squared off with one another.
…In one of the sharper exchanges of the whole campaign season, the Rev. Al Sharpton confronted Dr. Dean with what Mr. Sharpton described as the lack of minority officials in senior positions in Dr. Dean's administration as governor.
"Do you have a senior member of your cabinet that was black or brown?" Mr. Sharpton demanded, after Dr. Dean had earlier suggested that hiring more minorities was a key to racial understanding in America.
"We had a senior member of my staff on my fifth floor," Dr. Dean responded elliptically, in an apparent reference to the executive offices in Vermont.
"No, your cabinet!" Mr. Sharpton said. Dr. Dean responded quietly: "No, we did not."
"Then you need to let me talk to you about race in this country," Mr. Sharpton said.
Dr. Dean responded, moments later, "I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to civil rights in America."
At another point, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina lectured Dr. Dean on Southern sensibilities. Dr. Dean had just apologized again for saying last fall that he wanted to be "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags" in their pickup trucks. He declared that the flag "is a painful symbol to African-Americans."
Mr. Edwards countered that the flag was offensive "to all Americans."
P6: Mr. Edwards just dismissed a lot of votes.
Carol Moseley Braun, unfailingly cool and cordial in past debates, seemed roused by the bickering over race. Ms. Braun pivoted off Mr. Sharpton's exchange with Dr. Dean to ask why Mr. Gephardt, as House Democratic leader, had not pressed harder to protect affirmative action programs. And she demanded to know how Mr. Edwards could vote regularly with President Bush in Congress, yet attack Dr. Dean so readily.
"You voted for the Patriot Act," she said. "You voted to deploy the missile defense system. And yet you stand up here and call Howard a hypocrite. This is not right."
Ms. Braun was just as blunt with Mr. Sharpton, with whom she has long had a tense relationship, suggesting that he was stirring racial divisions before a national television audience.
"It's time for us to talk about what are you going to do to bring people together because people cannot afford a racial screaming match," she said. "We have to come together. We have to come together as one nation to get past these problems."
Mr. Edwards disputed the details of Ms. Braun's charge, saying, "Well, Carol, that was a great speech, but what you just said is not right." And Mr. Sharpton defended his decision to assail Dr. Dean's record on civil rights, declaring: "I want him to be accountable, since he brought up race. That's not racial hysteria. That is accountability."
The combined black and Hispanic population of Iowa in the 2000 census was roughly 5 percent of the state's total populace, meaning that from the candidates' viewpoint, parts of this debate were aimed as much at voters in South Carolina, which votes on Feb. 3, as at caucus-goers here.
I just watched Donovan McNabb shake off two guys, out-run the other pursuers, and drop a TD pass into Pinkston. He rushed for 36 yards personally during the drive.
I couldn't help but wonder if Rush Limbaugh just feels stupid or what.
P6 has been a bit quieter than normal this weekend because I've been playing with a new site design. It's got a bit more color and drama than the current design, and (this is the cool part) is a pure CSS design. No tables, and works correctly in Mozilla and IE6.
Next time a Libertarian equates taxation with slavery, let 'em know what the realities are.
UN opens slavery remembrance year
The United Nations has launched its International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery.
A ceremony was held in the Ghanaian port of Cape Coast, once one of the most active slave trading centres.
Unesco head Koichiro Matsuura, who is visiting the west African state, said slavery was a tragedy which had remained unrecognised for many years.
But one campaigning organisation cautioned that slavery had not been abolished completely around the world.
The Anti-Slavery International group is working with Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, to raise awareness in schools globally of the transatlantic slave trade, in a programme called Breaking the Silence.
2004 is also the bicentenary of the creation of Haiti, the first black independent state and a symbol of slaves' resistance.
'Door of no return'
Mr Matsuura said the history of the slave trade should take its full place in school textbooks around the world.
"By institutionalising memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of a tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognised, and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember," he said in a message for the year.
He added that, by remembering the tragic events, the UN wanted to express solidarity and commitment towards those who still did not enjoy basic human rights.
The old castle at Cape Coast, now a World Heritage site and one of Ghana's top tourist attractions, has a "door of no return", through which slaves boarded ships which took them away from their homes and families in Africa.
Mr Matsuura said it had once been a place where human degradation and misery were facts of everyday life.
Legacy
The contrast between then and now was very sharp, he said, but Cape Coast was full of reminders of the time when human beings were bartered, bought and sold, and then transported far away across the oceans.
Anti-Slavery International's Beth Herzfeld told the BBC that the trade should not be forgotten.
"When we talk about the transatlantic slave trade having a legacy, for instance, xenophobia and racism... that happened for the first time as the result of the transatlantic slave trade, and we are still living with those effects," she said.
"There's no question that the transatlantic slave trade not only affects British society today, but also affects society in the African communities from which people were taken."
Ms Herzfeld added that slavery still existed in most countries around the world, as many people were still, in effect, owned by others.
Chattel slavery, involving a class of hereditary slaves, still existed in parts of Africa, she said, and bonded labour remained common in South Asia.
And new forms of abuse have emerged recently, such as the trafficking of women and girls for the sex trade in Europe.
There is a strong sense of optimism in the African and Middle Eastern press at the news that the Sudanese Government has signed a wealth-sharing agreement with southern rebels.
One Sudanese paper says a fair spread of wealth is the only way to combat widespread poverty in the country.
A couple of Saudi papers see the deal as a major step towards lasting peace.
But a Kenyan daily says that more pressure must be exerted on the warring sides to bring peace talks to a successful conclusion.
"Fantastic news"
The agreement, which was signed in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, sets out how the two sides will share revenues following the 20-year civil war.
"A just distribution of wealth is what people are looking forward to, and expecting," says Sudan's Al-Ra'y al-Amm newspaper.
Most Sudanese, the paper notes, are "burdened by poverty and deprivation". Redistribution, it says, is the only way these problems can be tackled effectively.
Uganda's New Vision daily shares its excitement at the agreement. "This is fantastic news for Sudan, Uganda and the whole of Africa," it says.
"Everyone now seems to believe the final peace deal should be signed within a matter of weeks."
The paper says the deal will do much to strengthen Africa's reputation across the world. "The longest-running conflict on the continent is now almost over. This must surely help to improve Africa's negative global image in 2004."
Israel to take all Ethiopian Jews
The Israeli Government are to speed up the moving of the remaining 18,000 Ethiopian Jews to the Middle East.
However, the emigration of the Falasha Mura community would not start next week as had earlier been reported, says Israel's foreign ministry.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom admitted at the end of a two-day Ethiopia visit, that the issue was a complex one.
The Falasha Mura are the last remaining Jewish community in Ethiopia and have long been persecuted for their beliefs.
The last mass emigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel was in 1991.
There are around 80,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, many of them airlifted there during times of crisis.
Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, speaking alongside Mr Shalom, said a mass migration was not needed as Ethiopians were free to travel wherever they wished.
"The Ethiopian Government has no objection for the Ethiopian Jews to travel to Israel," he said, but added that "in today's Ethiopia, there is no need for an organised intervention as in the 1980s and 1990s".
The article has a link to the whole cartoon, which is pointed and on point.
Thus the Sunday, January 4 edition of the Washington Post exhibited a political fantasy so bizarre and without foundation, that it carried a disclaimer in the title. “Black Votes – No GOP Fantasy,” announced the headline to Jonetta Rose Barras’ opinion piece, which attempted to lend credibility to “the GOP's announced goal of winning 25 percent of the African American vote in 2004.” Barras then strung together the same flimsy set of false assumptions and contorted logic employed by other corporate hirelings to prove the absurd proposition that in order to retain Black loyalties Democrats must turn to the right.
Barras is, to put it bluntly, a hack for the bipartisan businessmen’s project to create the impression that political conservatism is on the rise among a “new” and “emerging” class of educated, upwardly mobile African Americans. It does not matter to corporate media – and certainly not to hustlers like Barras – that there is no evidence of such a phenomenon among the Black voting public. Big media’s mission is to create their own set of facts, treat them as if they are true, and convince the rest of us to act accordingly.
SCO approached Google about Linux license
SEATTLE (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc., the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement.
"Certainly if they're using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix, we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.
O'Neill: U.S. had Iraq plan early in '01
Ex-official calls moves 'a leap'
January 11, 2004
CRAWFORD, Texas -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends that the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq days after President Bush took office in January 2001--more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he described as the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.
"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.
The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Hussein could have undertaken an even larger strike against the United States.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But, he said, Hussein "was a threat to peace and stability before Sept. 11 and even more of a threat after Sept. 11."
O'Neill's interview was part of his effort to promote a new book about the first half of Bush's term, "The Price of Loyalty," for which O'Neill was a primary source.
The administration began sending signals about a possible confrontation with Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001.
In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush's national security adviser said the United States intended to have a more resolute military policy toward Iraq.
"Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration," Condoleezza Rice said at the time.
Yet Secretary of State Colin Powell said in December 2001, after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, that "with respect to what is sometimes characterized as taking out Saddam, I never saw a plan that was going to take him out."
According to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush administration began examining options for an invasion in the first months after Bush was inaugurated.
The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Hussein, CBS said.
"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked `secret' says `Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'
O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it," O'Neill said.
Spanglish moves into mainstream
Debate continues: Is it creative argot or corrupt speech?
By Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times, 1/11/2004
LOS ANGELES -- On a muggy Sunday afternoon at the Duenas, mariachi music jumped from a boombox on the concrete in the driveway. The roasted smells of "carne asada" lingered over a folding picnic table, like the easy banter between cousins.
"Le robaron la troca con everything. Los tires, los rines," a visiting cousin said.
Translation: "They robbed the truck with everything. The tires, the rims."
"Quieres watermelon?" offered Francisco Duenas, a 26-year-old housing counselor, holding a jug filled with sweet water and watermelon bits.
"Tal vez tiene some of the little tierrita at the bottom."
Translation: "Want watermelon? It might have some of the little dirt at the bottom."
When the Duenas family gathers for weekend barbecues, there are no pauses between jokes and gossip, spoken in English and Spanish. They've been mixing the languages effortlessly, sometimes clumsily, for years, so much so that the back-and-forth is not even noticed.
Spanglish, the fluid vernacular that crosses between English and Spanish, has been a staple in Hispanic life in California since English-speaking settlers arrived in the 19th century. For much of that time, it has been dismissed and derided by language purists -- "neither good, nor bad, but abominable," as Mexican writer Octavio Paz famously put it.
The criticism has done little to reduce the prevalence of Spanglish, which today is a bigger part of bilingual life than ever.
Now, it's rapidly moving from Hispanic neighborhoods into the mainstream. Spanglish is showing up in television and films, as writers use it to bring authenticity to their scripts and get racy language past network executives.
Marketers use it to sell everything from bank accounts to soft drinks. Hallmark now sells Spanglish greeting cards. McDonald's is rolling out Spanglish TV spots that will air on both Spanish- and English-language networks.
In academia, once a bastion of anti-Spanglish sentiment, the vernacular is studied in courses with names like "Spanish Phonetics" and "Crossing Borders." Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans published a Spanglish dictionary with hundreds of entries -- from "gaseteria" (which means "gas station") to "chaqueta" (for "jacket," instead of the Spanish word "saco"). Stavans said new Spanglish words are created all the time, altering traditional notions of language purity that remained strong a generation ago.
Growing up, "I was told in school that you shouldn't mix the languages," said Stavans, whose college plans to hold the first Conference of Spanglish in April. "There used to be this approach that if you use a broken tongue, you have a broken tongue. It's not about broken tongues; it's about different tongues, and they are legitimate. I think you're going to see a lot more of that."
The rise of Spanglish says a lot about the demographic shifts in California and other states with large Hispanic populations.
Migration movements are traditionally accompanied by the mixing of the native language with the newly acquired one. Within a generation or two, the old-country tongue -- whether Polish, Chinese, or Italian -- usually recedes.
But unlike immigrants from Europe and Asia, Hispanics are separated from their cultural homeland, not by vast oceans, but by the border with Mexico and the 90 miles between Cuba and the Florida Keys.
The Hispanic immigrant population is constantly replenishing itself. Meanwhile, Spanish-language media, such as industry giants Telemundo and Univision, continue to grow, meaning the immigrants' original language remains a force in the community.
Today, Spanglish is especially popular among young urban Hispanics who are US-born -- people like Francisco Duenas, who was raised in South Gate, Calif., lives near downtown Los Angeles, and works in an office in South Los Angeles. Spanglish, he said, allows him to bridge two cultures: the largely Spanish-speaking world of his parents and the English-language world of work and friends.
"I think this Spanglish, it's a way of saying, `Look, I can do both,' " Duenas said. "And I think here in Los Angeles particularmente, it's not necessary to speak just Spanish or English. No puedes describir la vida aqui (you can't describe life here) without speaking both."
As Spanglish spreads, academics and marketers are finding that it's much more complicated than simply forming sentences with both Spanish and English words.
The most basic part of Spanglish is "code-switching," in which someone inserts or substitutes words from one language into another. For instance, Spanglish might sound like "Vamos a la store para comprar milk." ("Let's go to the store to buy milk.")
A more complicated form of Spanglish involves making up words, essentially switching languages within a word itself. It can happen when a word or phrase is translated literally, like "perro caliente" for "hot dog." In other instances, Spanglish is created when an English word is Hispanicized, such as "troca" or "troque" for "truck."
Just where the sudden popularity of code-switching will end is a matter of debate. Jim Boulet Jr., executive director of English First, a lobbying group opposed to bilingual education and which has railed against Spanglish, thinks the boom is a fleeting trend. He and other critics see Spanglish as a form of slang, not a new language.
"There's always been some form of that," he said. "At one point it was Yiddish, then the black urban slang, and now Spanglish is the new `in' thing."
But while academics try to break down Spanglish to understand how it is used, others say it's a code so spontaneous that it's impossible to fully unravel.
It's "a state of mind," said San Diego cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, whose nationally syndicated strip "La Cucaracha" includes code-switching. "It's the schizophrenia of trying to deal with two worlds in one."
First-generation Hispanics roughly between the ages of 14 and 28 represent the fastest-growing youth demographic, according to the US Census Bureau.
A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
Iraqis of African Descent Are a Largely Overlooked Link to Slavery
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01
BASRA, Iraq
The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she sensed it was an insult.
Abd. Slave.
"The way they said it, smiling and shouting, I knew they used it to make fun of me," said Youssef, recounting the childhood story from her living room couch.
"I used to get upset and ask, 'Why do you call me abd? I don't serve you,' " Youssef said.
Unlike most Iraqis, whose faces come in shades from olive to a pale winter white, Youssef has skin the color of dark chocolate. She has African features and short, tightly curled hair that she straightens and wears in a soft bouffant. Growing up in Basra, the port city 260 miles southeast of Baghdad, she lived with her aunt while her mother worked as a cook and maid in the homes of one of the city's wealthiest light-skinned families.
In the United States, Youssef's dark skin would classify her as black or African American. In Iraq, where distinctions are based on family and tribe rather than race, she is simply an Iraqi.
The number of dark-skinned people like Youssef in Iraq today is unknown. Their origins, however, are better understood, if little-discussed: They are the legacy of slavery throughout the Middle East.
Historians say the slave trade began in the 9th century and lasted a millennium. Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa to Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East.
"We were slaves. That's how we came here," Youssef said. "Our whole family used to talk about how our roots are from Africa."
Though centuries have passed since the first Africans, called Zanj, arrived in Iraq, some African traditions still persist here. Youssef, 43, a doctoral candidate in theater and acting at Baghdad University's College of Fine Arts, is writing her dissertation about healing ceremonies that are conducted exclusively by a community of dark-skinned Iraqis in Basra. Youssef said she considers the ceremonies -- which involve elaborate costumes, dancing, and words sung in Swahili and Arabic -- to be dramatic performances.
"I don't complain about being called an abd, but I think that's what provoked me to write this, perhaps some kind of complex," said Youssef, who began researching and writing about the practices of Afro-Iraqis in 1997, when she was studying for a master's degree. "Something inside me that wanted to tell others that the abd they mock is better than them."
A Long History
In the 9th century, as today, Basra was a major trading city on the Shatt al Arab waterway, which empties into the Persian Gulf. With date plantations in need of laborers, Arab leaders turned to East Africa -- Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, Sudan, Tanzania and Malawi, and Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania that gave the Zanj their name.
"By the 9th century, when Baghdad was the capital of the Islamic world, we do have evidence of a large importation of African slaves -- how large is anyone's guess," said Thabit Abdullah, a history professor at York University in Toronto.
Besides working on plantations, Abdullah said, some African slaves were soldiers, concubines or eunuchs. Arabs also enslaved Turks and other ethnic groups as high-ranking army officers and domestics.
Unlike in the United States, slaves in the Middle East could own land, and their children could not be born into slavery. In addition, conversion to Islam could preclude further servitude because, according to Islamic law, Muslims could not enslave other Muslims.
Even though Islam teaches that all people are equal before God, Abdullah said that medieval Arab slave owners made distinctions based on skin color. White slaves, known as mamluks, which means "owned," were more expensive than black slaves, or abds.
To protest their treatment, Zanj slaves working in the fields around Basra staged a revolt against Baghdad's rulers that lasted 15 years and created a rival capital called Moktara, believed to have been located in the marshlands of southern Iraq. By 883 the Baghdad army had finally put down the revolt. "This slave rebellion is so important to the history of slavery in Iraq because after that, no one wanted to take a risk by trying plantation-style slavery again," Abdullah said. Slavery continued until the 19th century, but dark-skinned Iraqis never again organized as a group to make political demands.
In a country that revolves around religion rather than race, the term "abd" may be used by light-skinned Iraqis in a matter-of-fact way to describe someone's dark complexion. Dark-skinned Iraqis say the word may or may not be considered an insult, depending on how it is used and the intent of the speaker.
"We use the word abd in the black community," said Salah Jaleel, 50, one of Youssef's cousins. "Sometimes I call my friend 'abd.' Of course he knows that I don't insult him, because I'm black also, so it's a joke. We accept it between us, but it is a real insult if it is said by a white man."
In many ways, the low visibility of dark-skinned Iraqis has been a blessing. During his 35 years in power, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party government killed and tortured thousands of people based on ethnic and religious affiliations. Ethnic Kurds in the northern reaches of the country, and Shiite Muslims -- particularly the so-called Marsh Arabs -- living in the south all suffered. The dark-skinned Iraqis were spared Hussein's wrath.
'Proud of This Color'
Awatif Sabty, 47, is ambivalent on the subject of skin color. A secretary at Basra Agricultural College, she is more apt to talk about Hussein's wrongdoing than about her own caramel-colored skin or her marriage to a lighter-skinned man, Salah Mousa, 47.
Her mother was disappointed in her choice. Her husband's mother objected to the union. Sabty said Mousa's family even tried to intimidate her with threatening phone calls. Now she shakes her head and dismisses it all as long-ago history.
"Objections and barriers exist, but in the end it's all solved," she said in her soft voice, smiling.
Her middle-class home in Basra's Abbasiya district has painted concrete walls and two televisions and is immaculate. Sitting on a couch draped in white protective cloth, Sabty explained that intermarriages like hers are common in Iraq: "We don't have a problem with color, and we don't deal with someone based on color."
For instance, she said, her older sister married a light-skinned Iraqi and has a daughter with blond hair. Her brother married a dark-skinned woman and their child is dark-skinned. Sabty's two young children have olive complexions and straight, shiny hair, showing no trace of Sabty's caramel coloring.
Suddenly she paused. "In the coming generations we will have fewer dark-skinned children, and this pains us," she said. "We are proud of this color because people of this color are a minority in Iraq. Maybe DNA will bring us the color again."
Hashim Faihan Jimaa, 78, is more concerned with survival than color. He has no income and lives with his ailing wife, Dawla Shamayan, 68, who recently had gall bladder surgery.
Jimaa says he believes in the African-inspired healing ceremonies. He used to participate many years ago when they were more frequent; the number of ceremonies has decreased since the start of the U.S. occupation because of fear of performing outside.
"These came from Africa and they are very important to us, the abds," he said. Just as he used the Arabic word for slave to refer to himself, Jimaa sometimes referred to light-skinned Iraqis using the term for a free person.
His wife, sitting across from him with about a dozen of their children and grandchildren, gingerly suggested that perhaps his grandfather or another relative had been slaves from Africa.
Jimaa glanced down at the back of his dark-brown hand. "You can't depend on someone's color, because maybe a black man married a free woman and the children will come out lighter than me," he said. To seal his argument, he pointed to his caramel-colored daughter and then his granddaughter, who was darker than her mother.
Jimaa's wife and others continued to probe Jimaa's answers. He grew exasperated. "I have nothing to do with Africa, I don't know where it is or even what it is," Jimaa said. "But I know that my roots are from Africa because I am dark-skinned."
Few local government leaders in Basra, some of whom were selected by the U.S.-led occupation authority, are dark-skinned. In Hakaka -- a poor neighborhood of 600 families, about 100 of them dark-skinned -- town council members elected last August vowed to make changes. All of the eight council members are light-skinned.
"People applied to be members, and no one black applied," said council President Abdullah Mohammed Hasan, 54, in the narrow sandwich and snack shop that serves as the council's headquarters. Hasan has two wives, one of them dark-skinned.
"They have good manners and are very easy to deal with," Hasan said of dark-skinned Iraqis. "It would be better if they were members."
Youssef, the doctoral candidate, grew up in Hakaka. When she was a child her family did not have much money, but the modest neighborhood was clean. Now it lacks a septic system and reeks of waste because there is no garbage pickup.
Youssef goes back at least once a month to see her 74-year-old father, who sometimes needs her help because of his failing eyesight. She also visits with her brother, Sabeeh Youssef, and his family.
Sabeeh Youssef, 47, dropped out of school early to help support the family. He works fixing broken lighters since losing his job at an oil company in 1989. But he is a self-taught carpenter, capable of carving elaborate antique cars and miniature ships. He proudly showed the objects lining the walls of his modest home, which lacks running water.
He would love to have his own shop, "but I don't have the materials and I don't have the money to buy them," he said, as his daughter Duaa Sabeeh, 5, grew restless in his lap.
"I'm very happy and proud of my sister," he added. "She did the things that I couldn't do, or that my father couldn't do. She did it."
A Link to Africa
Each time Thawra Youssef returns to Hakaka, well-dressed in pressed clothes and a loosely draped black head scarf, she looks like a queen visiting for a day among the poor families in house clothes, who hover at their doorways and call out to Youssef by name.
"I don't feel like a stranger here," she said one day, stepping carefully to avoid the sewage as eager children followed her. "I have something deep inside of me that is connected to the local Basra ceremonies. I can't abandon them."
The practices, she said, came from "the motherland where we came from: Africa."
In her dissertation, Youssef mentioned seven open fields in and around Basra where ceremonies take place. The field in the Hakaka section is a dusty, hard-packed courtyard with houses clustered around it. Drums, tambourines and other instruments are stored in a closet. Youssef said that only a local leader named Najim had a key. Youssef had to seek his permission to write about the ceremonies.
Najim declined to talk about them.
In her dissertation Youssef describes a song called "Dawa Dawa." The title and words are a mix of Arabic and Swahili. The song, which is about curing people, is used in what Youssef calls the shtanga ceremony, for physical health. Another ceremony, nouba, takes its name from the Nubian region in the Sudan. There are also ceremonies for the sick, to remember the dead and for happy occasions such as weddings.
"The ceremonies are our strongest evidence of our African identity," she said.
Youssef said she was raised to be a proud Iraqi and Muslim, but that her mother also stressed the family's roots in Kenya. Her grandfather and his relatives came from Africa through slavery, her mother said.
"I knew that the word abd was used to refer to black people, and I know that it was something embarrassing that my mother was working in a white person's house," Youssef said. "I remember that if their son hit me, I couldn't even push him. So that hurt me, that stuck in my mind."
When she was 9, her mother sent her to stay with an aunt, Badriya Ubaid. She lived in a more upscale neighborhood and was the lead singer in the nationally acclaimed band Om Ali.
"My aunt, she was the first one pushing me to study," Youssef said. "She said, why do we let them say that black people can only do dance and music? Why don't we show them that they can be an important part of the community, that they can study? She wanted me to answer this question."
In college and graduate school, as she studied theater and dance, Youssef also sang with Om Ali. If someone said that the dark-skinned Iraqis were only good for entertainment, Youssef said, her aunt was quick to point out that her niece was in graduate school studying for an advanced degree. When Ubaid died, Youssef sang regularly in the band but quit in 1999 to pursue her doctorate full time.
Youssef also danced with a local arts troupe. She found the moves reminiscent of the dances in the ceremonies. She wrote her master's research on body movement, and when it was time to pick a topic in 2000 for her dissertation, she decided to look at her community's healing ceremonies.
"It's not only going to give ideas about dark-skinned people, it will give an idea about our inherited ceremonies, which we have to protect," said Youssef. She wants to teach and to publish her work in a book.
"The most important thing is that I started it," said Youssef. "People will come after me, God willing."
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
Why the Next Pope Needs to Be Italian
By ROBERTO PAZZI
ERRARA, Italy--For years Vatican specialists in Italy have, in delineating the uncertain features of John Paul II's successor, been fueled by a silent question: will the new pope be Italian? Why, one might ask, should Italy hope for an Italian pope, given the almost universal praise for the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla?
The origins of this question go back in time and deserve examination. I was watching on that unforgettable Roman evening of Oct. 16, 1978, when, on the state television network, RAI, which was still broadcasting in black and white, the newly elected pope appeared: a foreigner, Polish. I confess that, once I'd got over my surprise, like many of my fellow Italians I felt a certain bitterness, because my country had lost its last universal sign of power. Although today Romano Prodi, as president of the European Commission, in part makes up for that loss, it's not the same. The archetype from which the pope descends is that of the imperial Caesar, while Mr. Prodi's charge covers a merely political body that is still being defined and is, besides, limited to Europe.
…so that I don't.
nna, a 22-year-old graduate student in Manhattan, said she remembers clearly how she was introduced to one of New York's sauciest underground social scenes. It was via an instant message from a stranger who had seen her personals ad online at Nerve.com. A local promoter of erotic events called One Leg Up was organizing a party in a TriBeCa loft on the theme of the film "Moulin Rouge," her suitor wrote, and he wanted to know if Anna would be interested in going "with me and my hot tattooed girlfriend." Anna mulled her reply, then fired off an e-mail message.
"I was like, `Yeah, dude, I'll check that out,' " she recalled.
To gain entry, Anna first had to send an erotic essay and a photo of herself to One Leg Up's founder, a husky-voiced, 33-year-old proselytizer for sexual experimentation who goes by the name Palagia. Anna made the cut, was given the party's location and a pass phrase — "untie my corset" — and on a chilly night last year donned fishnet stockings and high heels and headed out to her first sex party.
The gathering was awkward at first, she said, but at 12:30 a.m., a gong rang, signifying that guests should strip to their underwear, and things soon began to heat up. Anna said she spent most of the evening entwined with a couple she had just met — not the one that invited her — and besides the minor annoyance of having to locate all her clothes at the end of the night, she said the experience lived up to her expectations. She has since been to 15 similar parties in Manhattan, and though just a year above the legal drinking age, counts herself a full-fledged member of what insiders refer to simply as "the lifestyle."
Her take on the scene is uncomplicated: "I think sex is cool and people should have a lot of it," she said.
The idea of swinging may evoke an image of middle-aged, ennui-riddled suburban couples of the 1970's — think of key parties and the movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." But among a certain adventurous younger crowd in Manhattan these days, swinging — or at least a high-velocity form of sexual exploration that resembles swinging, but for the dearth of actual spouses (many participants are shy of marrying age) — is thriving with a twist. Unlike the dismal, failed swinging attempt in "Carnal Knowledge," in which two husbands make a surreptitious deal to seduce each other's wives, the younger scene is driven largely by women — many of them erotic-party promoters who use the Internet as both a marketing tool and a screening aid, to keep their crowds enticingly attractive and to keep paying customers coming back.