7 Common Website Redesign Mistakes

Obama Presses to Complete Free-Trade Deal With South Korea

2010-11-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

The agreement was signed in 2007 but requires approval by Congress, where Democrats have said they will not support it unless barriers to American exports of automobiles and beef are further reduced.

On Monday, the United States trade representative, Ron Kirk, and his Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-hoon, met in Seoul, where their aides have been in face-to-face talks since last week.

And as part of his 10-day trip to Asia, President Obama is scheduled to arrive in Seoul on Thursday to meet with President Lee Myung-bak and attend a two-day meeting with other leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers.

“Hopefully, by the time he comes we will have an agreement,” Mr. Lee said in an interview Saturday in Seoul. “We will send a very powerful and strong message about maintaining open markets and resist the trend toward protectionism.”

Mr. Lee said the agreement would help cement the 60-year-old alliance between the countries.

At the last G-20 leaders’ meeting, held in Toronto in June, Mr. Obama announced a goal of completing the agreement by the Seoul meeting and submitting it to Congress early next year. Mr. Obama, who was critical of such trade agreements when he ran for office, stopped short of calling for the deal to be renegotiated, but called for adjustments in areas like the auto provisions.

The Republican takeover of the House in the midterm elections added momentum to pending trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce support the trade agreements, as do financial services companies.

On Sunday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate, said that he had discussed the trade agreements with Mr. Obama, and mentioned them as a possible area of bipartisan cooperation. “The notion that we’re at each other’s throats all the time is simply not correct,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

An important exception to corporate support for the agreement is Ford, the only one of the big three Detroit automakers that has not gotten a bailout. On Thursday, Ford ran full-page ads in newspapers stating: “For every 52 cars Korea ships here, the U.S. can only export one there.”

While the agreement would lower or eliminate tariffs on cars in both countries, other barriers would remain, including emissions, mileage and safety requirements and tax and insurance rules that automakers and the United Automobile Workers union say discriminate against American cars.

“American-made cars can compete and win globally, but we can’t afford a future with more closed markets to American exports,” Ford said in the ad.

Chrysler has reservations about the agreement in its current form. General Motors, which owns a Korean automaker, Daewoo, has remained neutral.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the negotiators hoped to amend provisions that were “tilted against auto companies and autoworkers.”

The other major sticking point is beef. Shortly after taking office in 2008, Mr. Lee moved to relax restrictions on imports of American beef, which had been banned since 2003 because of concerns over mad cow disease. That led to protests in Korea, with scores of injuries.

South Korea now permits imports of beef from cattle younger than 30 months, which are the least likely to harbor the agent that causes the disease. But Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade, has called for lifting all restrictions on American beef exports.

Democrats have been skeptical of claims that the deal will create jobs. In a joint letter last month to Mr. Obama and Mr. Lee, 20 House members and 35 Korean lawmakers called for strengthening health, labor and environmental standards in the agreement, echoing concerns raised by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But neither government seems to want to revisit those terms.

Republicans broadly support the deal the Bush administration negotiated. “Not only does the Korean market offer excellent growth prospects for American firms, but a free-trade agreement with Korea will have huge foreign policy and national security benefits in Asia,” said Clayton K. Yeutter, who was the trade representative from 1985 to 1989, under President Ronald Reagan.

The United States had a $10.6 billion trade deficit in goods with South Korea last year, and supporters of the agreement say it would help close that gap. South Korea signed a free-trade agreement with the European Union last month, and business groups say the United States should complete the deal to remain competitive.

Han Duk-soo, the South Korean ambassador in Washington, who is trying to build support in Congress for the agreement, said in a recent interview that the imported share of the Korean auto market had risen substantially over the last decade and that the United States enjoyed a sizable trade surplus with his country in agricultural products.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.

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The Texas Tribune: Texas Considers Medicaid Withdrawal

2010-11-30T01:49:00.000-08:00

Far-right conservatives are offering that possibility in impassioned news conferences. Moderate Republicans are studying it behind closed doors. And the party’s advisers on health care policy say it is being discussed more seriously than ever, though they admit it may be as much a huge in-your-face to Washington as anything else.

“With Obamacare mandates coming down, we have a situation where we cannot reduce benefits or change eligibility” to cut costs, said State Representative Warren Chisum, Republican of Pampa, the veteran conservative lawmaker who recently entered the race for speaker of the House. “This system is bankrupting our state,” he said. “We need to get out of it. And with the budget shortfall we’re anticipating, we may have to act this year.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, estimates Texas could save $60 billion from 2013 to 2019 by opting out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, dropping coverage for acute care but continuing to finance long-term care services. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which has 3.6 million children, people with disabilities and impoverished Texans enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, will release its own study on the effect of ending the state’s participation in the federal match program at some point between now and January.

State Representative John M. Zerwas, Republican of Simonton, an anesthesiologist who wrote the bill authorizing the health commission’s Medicaid study, said early indications were that dropping out of the program would have a tremendous financial ripple effect. Mr. Zerwas said that he was not ready to discount the idea, but that he worried about who would carry the burden of care without Medicaid’s “financial mechanism.”

“Because of the substantial amount of matching money that comes from the federal government,” Mr. Zerwas said, “there’s an economic impact that comes from that. If we start to look at what that impact is, we have to consider whether it’s feasible to not participate.”

State Senator Jane Nelson, Republican of Flower Mound, who heads the Senate Public Health Committee, said dropping out of Medicaid was worth considering — but only if it made fiscal sense without jeopardizing care.

Currently, the Texas program costs $40 billion for a period of two years, with the federal government paying 60 percent of the bill. As a result of federal health care changes, Ms. Nelson said, millions of additional Texans will be eligible for Medicaid.

“I want to know whether our current Medicaid enrollees, and there certainly could be millions more by 2014, could be served more cost efficiently and see better outcomes in a state run program,” she said.

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U.S. Report Faults Christie, as Prosecutor, on Hotel Stays

2010-11-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

The report, by the department’s inspector general, examined travel expenses for all 208 people who served as a United States attorney from 2007 to 2009. It spoke of five who “exhibited a noteworthy pattern of exceeding the government rate and whose travel documentation provided insufficient, inaccurate or no justification for the higher lodging rates.”

While the report did not identify any prosecutors by name, the travel patterns of an official called “U.S. Attorney C” — the one “who most often exceeded the government rate without adequate justification” in terms of percentage of travel — match records about Mr. Christie that were released in the 2009 campaign for governor by his Democratic opponent, the incumbent, Jon S. Corzine.

As governor, Mr. Christie, who was the United States attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008, has pushed to cut government spending and waste, making him a rising star in the Republican Party.

The report cited stays in the $449-per-night Nine Zero Hotel in Boston and the $475-per-night Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. Both cost more than double the government rate for those cities. In all, Mr. Christie exceeded the lodging rate on 14 of 23 trips without adequate justification, billing taxpayers $2,176 in excess of the maximum normal rates.

A spokesman for Mr. Christie declined to comment on the report but pointed to several statements Mr. Christie made about his travel costs during the campaign.

“I had to go someplace for part of my job. We tried to get the government rate. We couldn’t. So my only alternative would have been to not go,” Mr. Christie said at a campaign stop at a diner in October 2009, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Mr. Christie declined to speak with the inspector general’s investigators. But his secretary at the federal prosecutors’ office told them that he would choose his hotel if he was familiar with the city. If he was not, she would seek a recommendation for a “decent” hotel at or near the site of a scheduled meeting. While she “routinely called hotels to seek the government rate,” when the cost exceeded that rate he would obtain a waiver, according to the report.

In several cases, the waiver documentation included a memorandum signed by Mr. Christie saying that a room within the government rate was unavailable. The secretary said the memorandums meant not that a cheaper hotel room could not be found, but that no such rooms fit the criteria of a “decent” hotel near a meeting site.

The report also noted the reimbursements Mr. Christie received for airport transportation costs. Rather than taking a taxi for the four-mile trip between his hotel and the Boston airport, he took a car service costing $236. A similar arrangement for a London trip cost $562.

Calling for a tightening of rules for waivers on lodging rates, the inspector general’s report also criticized some other unnamed former prosecutors.

Another United States attorney, for example, billed taxpayers for three weekend hotel stays at a city in his district, ostensibly to attend meetings booked there on Fridays and Mondays.

But he acknowledged that “at least some and possibly all of these weekend trips coincided with his son’s baseball tournaments, which were held in the same city as the satellite office.” Moreover, the hotel rooms cost two to three times the government rate.

The report concluded that “there was no justification for the U.S. attorney to be reimbursed for these weekend trips.”

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The Lede: Kill Americans, Says U.S.-Born Cleric

2010-11-29T01:56:00.000-08:00

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A frame of Anwar al-Awlaki from a newly-released video message downloaded from a jihadist Web site by SITE Intelligence Group.

Updated | 1:57 p.m. In a new video message posted on a jihadist Web forum on Monday, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric based in Yemen whose most inflammatory sermons were withdrawn from YouTube last week, said that the killing of Americans by Muslims requires no special sanction.

According to The Associated Press, Mr. Awlaki told jihadists in his latest, Arabic-language video: “Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans, fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils.”

Despite the fact that he was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, and educated in both the United States and Yemen, Mr. Awlaki has apparently renounced the American part of his identity, telling his Arab-speaking audience, “We are two opposites who will never come together.”

The message was discovered by SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization in Washington that tracks militant Web sites. (SITE, or the Search for International Terrorist Entities, was founded by Rita Katz, an Arabic-speaking Israeli researcher who was born in Iraq and now lives in Washington. A 2006 New Yorker profile of Ms. Katz looked at her work.)

The video carries no date, but it was apparently recorded before Yemen’s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with which Mr. Awlaki is associated, smuggled explosives onto two U.S.-bound cargo jets late last month, since, according to SITE, a brief excerpt from the 23-minute recording was posted online before the plot was uncovered.

SITE reports that the video was not released by the media arm of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and does not bear its logo.

YouTube has apparently stepped up the policing of its site to prevent users sympathetic to Mr. Awlaki from posting videos like this one. On Monday, the company deleted the account of a user not long after he uploaded a copy of the new message to the video-sharing site, and posted an ominous-sounding note explaining that the user “has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of our Community Guidelines.”

On Saturday a Yemeni judge ordered Mr. Awlaki’s capture, days after he was indicted for inciting the murder of a French oil company worker in Yemen’s capital.

On Monday, a federal judge will hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by civil libertarians who claim that the Obama administration does not have the right to order the targeted assassination of Mr. Awlaki and other suspected militants, Reuters reported.

Writing about the case in August, Jonathan Turley, a law professor in Washington, observed on his blog:

The lawsuit focuses on the reported kill order targeting U.S.-born cleric [Anwar al-Awlaki], who is reportedly hiding in Yemen. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed this interesting action, naming the President of the United States, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the secretary of the Department of Defense.
This could make for a very interesting case if the groups can establish standing, which is likely to be challenged by Attorney General Eric Holder. As usual, Congress has done little to explore the constitutionality of a president who claims the unilateral power to kill U.S. citizens upon sight.
If a President can unilaterally kill a U.S. citizens on his own authority, our court system (and indeed our constitutional rights) become entirely discretionary. The position of the Administration contains no substantial limitations on such authority other than its own promise to make such decisions with care.

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Names of the Dead

2010-11-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

The Department of Defense has identified 1,357 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans recently:

BRAGGS, Randy R., 21, Lance Cpl., Marines; Sierra Vista, Ariz.; First Marine Division.

EMRICK, Jordan B., 26, Staff Sgt., Marines; Hoyleton, Ill.; Seventh Engineer Support Battalion, First Marine Logistics Group.

REIFERT, Shane M., 23, Pfc., Army; Cottrellville, Mich.; 101st Airborne Division.

YOUNG, James C., 25, Specialist, Army; Rochester, Ill.; 863rd Engineer Battalion.

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At Legal Fringe, Empty Houses Go to the Needy

2010-11-27T21:33:00.000-08:00

There is just one problem: Mr. Guerette is not the owner. Yet.

In a sign of the odd ingenuity that has grown from the real estate collapse, he is banking on an 1869 Florida statute that says the bundle of properties he has seized will be his if the owners do not claim them within seven years.

A version of the same law was used in the 1850s to claim possession of runaway slaves, though Mr. Guerette, 47, a clean-cut mortgage broker, sees his efforts as heroic. “There are all these properties out there that could be used for good,” he said.

The North Lauderdale authorities, though, see him as a crook. He is scheduled to go on trial in December on fraud charges in a case that, along with a handful of others in Florida and in other states, could determine whether maintaining a property and paying taxes on it is enough to lead to ownership.

Legal scholars say the concept is old — rooted in Renaissance England, when agricultural land would sometimes go fallow, left untended by long-lost heirs. But it is also common. All 50 states allow for so-called adverse possession, with the time to forge a kind of common-law marriage with property varying from a few years (in most states) to several decades (in New Jersey).

The statute generally requires that properties be maintained openly and continuously, which usually means paying property taxes and utility bills.

It is not clear how many people are testing the idea, but lawyers say that do-it-yourself possession cases have been popping up all over the country — and, they note, these self-proclaimed owners play an odd role in a real-estate mess that never seems to end. Though they may cringe at the analogy, as squatters with bank accounts, these adverse possessors are like leeches, and it can be difficult to tell at times whether they are cleaning a wound already there, or making it worse.

Either way, Florida is where they thrive.

Many residents of the Sunshine State have grown accustomed to living beside a home left vacant for years. Now hundreds of these mold-filled caverns, their appliances long ago spirited off, are being claimed by strangers.

“There are all kinds of ways the people try to manipulate the system to their own financial gain,” said Jack McCabe, an independent real estate analyst with McCabe Research and Consulting. “And you are going to see it here because Florida is the capital of real estate fraud.”

Mr. Guerette, who now faces up to 15 years in prison, insists that his business is legitimate and moral. He said he got started last year, driving around working-class neighborhoods in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, looking for a particular kind of home: not just those with overgrown lawns and broken windows, but houses with a large orange sticker from the county reading “public nuisance.”

The stickers signaled owners out of touch: the county or city was unable to reach them.

Mr. Guerette filed court claims on around 100 of these properties, which appear to be in the process of foreclosure. Then he chose 20 that could be most easily renovated and sent letters to the owners and their banks — presumably overwhelmed — to make them aware of his plans.

Florida does not require notification. One state lawmaker tried and failed to close that loophole last year with a bill that never passed. But it hardly mattered. Nineteen of the owners and their banks did not respond, Mr. Guerette said.

So he set about fixing up the unclaimed properties. In some cases, he just mowed the lawn and replaced stolen air conditioners or broken windows; in other cases, like with Mr. Ferguson, he let tenants make improvements in lieu of rent.

At his peak last year, he said he managed 17 homes with renters, some of whom he found on Craigslist, others through a Christian ministry in Margate, Fla.

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The TV Watch: A New Bush, a Lot Like the Old One

2010-11-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

“The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low,” Mr. Bush told a surprised Matt Lauer on NBC on Monday night.

“I didn’t appreciate it then; I don’t appreciate it now,” he added fiercely. “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.”

There was something jarring about suddenly seeing George W. Bush on screen again and it wasn’t just déjà vu. It was more like running into a former spouse after many years: no matter how bitter or amicable the separation, that first reunion is disconcerting — the ex seems both eerily the same and weirdly diminished. Two years ago he left office with two wars raging and an economy in free fall, an embattled commander in chief with the lowest approval ratings of any modern president. Now Mr. Bush is offering himself up as a chatty president emeritus, sometimes defiant and other times cheerful, on a media blitz to promote his memoir, “Decision Points.”

It was a fascinating, at times disarming, performance, but also a confusing one: a plea for understanding from a president who says he doesn’t give a fig about popularity. At one point, Mr. Bush boasted that when an acquaintance told him his approval ratings were up, he retorted, “Who cares?”

In the hourlong NBC News special, Mr. Bush talked about himself with the blend of candor and self-serving boilerplate that almost all book-promoting celebrities master on a publicity tour.

He told the very personal story of how as a teenager he drove his mother to the hospital after she suffered a miscarriage, and discovered how “straightforward” she was when she showed him the remains of the fetus in a jar.

He also gave an example of how out of control he could be before he gave up drinking. “So, I’m drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad’s house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura’s there. And I’m sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad’s. And I said to her out loud, ‘What is sex like after 50?’ ”

When Mr. Lauer pressed him about his more critical decisions in office, Mr. Bush was both forthcoming and maddeningly opaque. He scoffed at the notion that he cared that critics viewed him as a puppet manipulated by his strong-willed vice president, Dick Cheney, then kept underscoring ways he had defied his No. 2, including by refusing to grant Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., a pardon after Mr. Libby was convicted of lying during the investigation into the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative. (Instead, Mr. Bush commuted his sentence.)

Mr. Bush ruefully acknowledged that he mishandled the Hurricane Katrina crisis, even writing a new script for his first trip to the disaster area. “I should have touched down in Baton Rouge, met with the governor, and, you know, walked out and said, ‘I hear you,’ ” he said. “And then got back on a flight up to Washington. I did not do that. And paid a price for it.”

But he refused to apply hindsight to the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Lauer asked him whether he would do the same thing again if he had known then what he knows now. Mr. Bush replied: “I, first of all, didn’t have that luxury. You just don’t have the luxury when you’re president.”

He added, “I will say definitely the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million people who now have a chance to live in freedom.”

It was a curious form of hedging from a president who prides on himself plain speaking.

There were other moments when Mr. Bush was defensive, but for the most part he looked more relaxed and unguarded than that at any time in his presidency, even chuckling about history’s final verdict. (“I hope I’m judged a success, but I’m going to be dead, Matt, when they finally figure it out.”) Throughout his tumultuous two terms, Mr. Bush rarely looked comfortable in formal interviews and news conferences.

This new book-tour persona harks back to his days as a presidential candidate, before the attacks of Sept. 11 and other crises curbed his breezy confidence and stiffened his demeanor.

Mr. Bush, who in the coming days will sit down with Oprah Winfrey and many other celebrity interviewers, says he wrote his book to give readers — and future historians — a sense of what his days in the White House were really like. Mostly, however, the NBC interview offered viewers a visceral reminder of what Mr. Bush was like before he entered the Oval Office.

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Thrust Into the Glare by a Race She Wasn’t Running In

2010-11-26T19:51:00.000-08:00

Less than a year later, Ms. Bysiewicz, 49, has fallen from the top of Connecticut’s political world to its most uncomfortable depths, becoming fodder for comedians and a favorite chew toy for Republicans.

As the secretary of state, Ms. Bysiewicz has borne the brunt of the criticism over a series of voting mishaps that turned the election for governor into a national embarrassment.

But she has stood her ground, unwilling to take the blame for confusion over who won the excruciatingly close race. (On Monday, the Republican nominee, Thomas C. Foley, conceded to Dannel P. Malloy, the Democrat.)

As critics complained of missing ballots and possible fraud, Ms. Bysiewicz found herself being compared to another beleaguered secretary of state, Katherine Harris of Florida, who presided over the tumultuous 2000 presidential race recount there.

“This is not Florida,” Ms. Bysiewicz said in a telephone interview on Monday. “There are no hanging chads.”

She rejected suggestions that her political career was in peril, saying she planned to remain in public service. Those close to her say she is seriously weighing a bid in 2012 for the United States Senate seat occupied by Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent.

Whatever her plans, Ms. Bysiewicz seems taken aback by her current standing.

She had hopes of rising to higher office this year. In January, she gave up a bid for governor to run for attorney general after Richard Blumenthal, the current attorney general, decided to pursue the Senate seat Christopher J. Dodd intended to vacate.

But in May, four days before the state Democratic convention, Ms. Bysiewicz’s plans were foiled when the State Supreme Court ruled that she did not meet the requirements for attorney general because she had not actively practiced law for 10 years.

In one day, her hopes fell apart.

“It was stunning and it was disappointing,” she said. “I have moved on. I am looking forward to writing the next chapter.”

The daughter of a potato farmer and of the first tenured female law professor at the University of Connecticut, Ms. Bysiewicz became popular in Connecticut by pairing folksy sensibility with intellectual firepower.

She studied economics and history at Yale and attended law school at Duke. In her free time, she wrote a biography of Ella T. Grasso, the first female governor of Connecticut, published in 1984.

Ms. Bysiewicz cites Ms. Grasso, herself a former Connecticut secretary of state, as her inspiration for entering politics. She once said in an interview that she sometimes winked at a statue of Ms. Grasso outside the office of the secretary of state in Hartford.

Ms. Bysiewicz was elected to the state legislature in 1992 at 31, and six years later became secretary of state, despite the lack of an endorsement from the Democratic establishment.

She tried to place more public records online and crack down on illegal businesses. But wherever she went, she was criticized as overly ambitious and political.

Her enemies seized on that image this year when Ms. Bysiewicz became mired in a scandal over a state database of contact information that was used to send political mailings.

State lawyers ultimately decided not to pursue a criminal investigation into the matter.

“There’s this unbridled sense of ambition that goes unchecked,” said Richard Foley Jr., a former state Republican chairman, who is not related to the party’s candidate for governor.

Ms. Bysiewicz dismisses the characterization of her as a political opportunist and suggests it is sexist.

“If you’re a man and you are confident and you are ambitious and strong, then you are a statesman and a leader,” she said. “If you are a woman and you have those qualities, well, they have a not-so-flattering term for that.”

Still, she is not shy about promoting her accomplishments. She has been known to spend hours on the phone with potential donors until she receives a firm commitment. And the biography on the secretary of state’s Web site is a nearly 1,400-word homage that lists a lifetime of achievements, including her experience as a trainer of guide dogs for the blind.

Even as her ambition rankled fellow politicians, Ms. Bysiewicz’s background seemed to resonate with the public. She was elected secretary of state three times.

But she was again in the spotlight on Election Day after widespread voting problems.

Critics said she made the office of secretary of state appear partisan by calling the governor’s race for Mr. Malloy, the Democrat, before all the votes had been counted. And she was blamed for a shortage of ballots in Bridgeport, where poll workers severely underestimated turnout.

Ms. Bysiewicz attributed those troubles to the decentralized nature of the state’s elections and said she had no authority to intervene.

But after the swirl of media attention, she acknowledges she may need to rebuild her reputation. It remains to be seen whether she can steer her carefully planned career back on track.

“I was brought up on a farm, and I’ve learned that every opportunity that I’ve had in my life has come from hard work and persistence,” she said. “Things happen for a reason. We’ll have to see how life unfolds.”

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Records Fall at Auction of Contemporary Masters

2010-11-26T04:55:00.000-08:00

In addition to the usual crowd of dealers and collectors, Mr. Murakami was there (artists are rarely seen at auctions) as was Abdi Farah, the winner of “Work of Art,” the BRAVO reality television program where Simon de Pury, the chairman of Phillips and the evening’s auctioneer, was the artists’ mentor.

Those sightings were not the only reason it was an unusual evening for Phillips. In addition to inaugurating its uptown space, the boutique auction house was trying out a new program called “Carte Blanche.” Just as museums invite an outside curator to organize an exhibition, officials at Phillips plan to ask someone from the art world to put together one sale every season, and Monday’s was the first.

Philippe Ségalot, the debut outsider, was a fairly safe one to start with: Now a private dealer, he once ran Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department in New York, and has kept up his connections with collectors and artists, persuading them to both buy and sell some of their prized works.

It was a bifurcated evening, beginning with 33 lots orchestrated by Mr. Ségalot and ending with a less impressive group of 26 works assembled by Phillips’s own team. Mr. Ségalot’s part of the evening was a success, totaling $117 million, above its high estimate of $104.8 million. The second part brought just $19.9 million, below its low $23.6 million estimate. Still, the night’s total of $137 million is a huge number, considering that until now Phillips had never sold more than $59 million in one evening sale.

The biggest star of all was Warhol’s “Men in Her Life,” a 1962 painting based on an image of a young Elizabeth Taylor between husbands. Mr. Ségalot pried the work out of the private collection of the Mugrabi family, Manhattan dealers known for their vast holdings of Warhols.

Two telephone bidders tried to bring home the painting, which was expected to fetch around $50 million but ended up selling to an unidentified client of Mr. Ségalot’s for $63.3 million. It was the second-highest price ever paid for a Warhol, after the $71.7 million paid at Christie’s in 2007 for “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I),” from 1963.

The Warhol was the first test of a week filled with 1960s Warhols. Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday night features one of the artist’s famed paintings of a Coca-Cola bottle, and Christie’s on Wednesday evening has an important image of a Campbell’s Soup can.

(Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Phillip’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Another big star on Monday night was a Murakami sculpture, “Miss Ko2,” a six-foot-tall sculpture of a sassy cocktail waitress, which was estimated at $4 million to $6 million. Jose Mugrabi, the dealer who sold the Warhol, could not resist the urge to shop, paying $6.8 million.

Mr. Ségalot has championed the career of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan for more than a decade, and had two works by the artist in the sale. Adam Lindemann, a New York collector, was selling “Charlie,” a sculpture of Mr. Cattelan as a little boy riding a tricycle. The remote control toy/sculpture, which was expected to sell for $2 million to $3 million, rode into the salesroom before being claimed by a telephone bidder for $2.9 million.

And “Stephanie,” a naked bust of the model Stephanie Seymour, wife of the newsprint magnate Peter Brant (who was at the sale, although not bidding), from 2003, had an estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million; it was also bought by Mr. Mugrabi, for $2.4 million.

The sale had some particularly rare work in it, like “Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient),” nearly 200 pounds of individually wrapped blue cellophane candies with the word “Passion” on them, which Felix Gonzalez-Torres created in 1992. Estimated at $4 million to $6 million, it went for $4.5 million, a record for the artist at auction.

A cast aluminum sculpture by Thomas Schütte, “Grosse Geist No. 15,” an eight-foot-tall sculpture of a ghostly figure, sold to a telephone bidder for $3.6 million.

Among those items that went unsold in Mr. Ségalot’s sale were works by Mr. Koons, Steven Parrino and Paul McCarthy.

There were more disappointments. The second part of the evening — Phillips’s general sale — was helped by the energy from the first, but not enough. Among the casualties was another Koons, “Caterpillar Ladder” from 2003. Nobody met its $5.5 million to $7.5 million estimate. But “Sex at Noon, Taxes,” a 2002 painting by Ed Ruscha, brought $3.8 million or $4.3 million including fees, at its high $4 million estimate.

Afterward, Mr. Ségalot was trying to put some perspective on the evening. “There were some fantastic prices,” he said. “Still I was disappointed three works didn’t sell.” Then he paused and added: “Auctions are not a perfect science. I guess they’re always unpredictable.”

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The Choice: Restraint on Listing Activities

2010-11-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

As some high school seniors have already discovered, this year’s Common Application has up to a dozen spaces available for applicants to list their activities outside the classroom, including time spent working. For some go-getters, that’s probably not enough space — but for many others, it may be too much.

Which raises an obvious question: should an applicant stretch to fill those 12 lines?

The answer, say deans of admissions and the creators of the application itself, is a resounding “No.”

In my regular column for The Times’s Education Life supplement, which will be published this weekend, I have attempted to disentangle the section of the Common Application devoted to extracurricular activities. It includes a request to applicants that they “briefly elaborate on one” activity or work experience in four lines or less — a question that can be as important, if not more so, than the list itself.

Here’s how Monica C. Inzer, the dean of admissions at Hamilton College in New York and a member of the Common Application board, put it:

We’d rather see depth than a longer list. I think students think we want well-rounded kids. We do. But we really want a well-rounded class. That could be lots of people who have individual strengths. Distinction in one area is good, and better than doing a lot of little things.

You can read a preview of the full article here. Meanwhile, this is probably as good an occasion as any to start a comment thread on the subject of extracurricular activities. Please use the box below to let us know your thoughts.

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The Choice: What's Gained, and Lost, In an Era of Virtual College Searches and Applications

2010-11-25T01:50:00.000-08:00

Reflections on a busy month on the admissions calendar, by Sue Biemeret, counselor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill.

How did technology become both my new BFF and my arch-enemy? I find myself lusting for any iGadget that I can afford, wouldn’t think of going on vacation without my Kindle, and tell students how lucky they are to be able to Google their college searches. Life is good and clean and quick and secure when it’s online.

But then I find myself longing for the feel of paper, miss the smell of musty college catalogs on my bookshelf and love reading college essays that are printed out.

Students send their applications to the new black hole of admissions – the Common Application Web site – and their transcripts zip off electronically at the press of a button (and the charge of a credit card). They may never speak to anyone along the way. Life is bad and messy and cumbersome and scary when it’s online.

The fact is, most students won’t apply to college today without going online. And that’s a good thing. I’m old enough to remember when they had to write away to get a college catalog to conduct their research. Weeks after sending that request, they’d get back a 275-page tome, where they could read all about a school’s mission, its goals, its many policies and procedures, and a detailed listing of every single course offered.

Students had to locate paper copies of their applications, complete them by neatly printing or typing — how many students today have ever even seen a typewriter, much less use one? — and then hope that the mailman would deliver them neatly and on time.

Today’s students can conduct their entire college search online. It’s wonderful! You can learn about internship opportunities, e-mail a department head to ask about a specific major, download and complete an application, submit your transcript and even learn of your admission decision all online. Students can access their college application account anywhere there’s an Internet connection, making the process portable and convenient. You can carry your entire academic future on a jump drive.

When technology works, it is pure music. However, when it doesn’t work, it is pure chaos.

What do you do when the “Details and Accomplishments” section of your Activities page on the Common App disappears? Or when your Docufide transcript doesn’t show up in your electronic file at Nirvana U? Whom do you call?

No one. You can’t talk to anyone about your online application. You can e-mail the support center and they’ll get back to you within 24 hours (except when they’re “experiencing an atypically high volume”) and then they can’t get back to you for several days. Like I said, it’s “The Sound of Music” when technology works, but it’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when it doesn’t.

On the one hand, all this technology has rewritten my job description. I have had to learn every detail about electronic applications (my online student alter-ego is an amazingly talented young woman, Leigh D. Gaga, who’s just about done with her Common Application) and I’ve had to learn all about pdf versus html transcripts.

But on the other hand, all this technology has reinforced and renewed my job description. Simply stated, my job is to help students make the best college choice they can. If my kids are going to succeed, I need to be the human element in this apply.com universe.

All I ask is that you be patient with me; I still snail mail my thank you notes.

To comment on this essay, please use the box below.

Ms. Biemeret is a post-secondary counselor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., and executive director of The Academy for College Admission Counseling, a nonprofit organization that provides graduate-level education on college counseling for counselors.

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Berenson Freed From Prison in Peru

2010-11-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

Filed at 2:02 a.m. EST on November 09, 2010

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Her parole restored, political activist Lori Berenson slipped out a prison's side door and back to freedom after serving three-quarters of a 20-year sentence for collaborating with leftist rebels in Peru.

The 40 year-old New York woman's legal troubles are not over, however, as Peru's top anti-terrorism prosecutor is trying to revoke her parole.

Berenson and her lawyer and husband, Anibal Apari, arrived by taxi at her apartment just after dark Monday.

"I will not be making any statements at this time," the bespectacled Berenson told reporters as she carried in a black backpack and a green shopping bag.

The couple's 18-month-old son, Salvador, awaited them at the apartment along with Berenson's mother, Rhoda, who had spirited the child out of the prison several hours earlier.

Apari told The Associated Press that Berenson planned to speak to news media but wanted to rest first.

Berenson was initially paroled in May. But an appeals panel returned her to prison in August on a technicality. The judge who first freed Berenson reinstated her parole on Friday.

The former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student must remain in Peru until her full sentence is served — unless President Alan Garcia decides to commute it.

Garcia has indicated he will not consider a decision until all of the legal issues in the case have been resolved.

The prosecutor, Julio Galindo, claims Berenson has not fully qualified for parole.

He says her case could establish a precedent for others convicted of terrorism-related crimes and that they, too, could go free.

"Our goal is to achieve the revocation" of Berenson's parole, Galindo said Monday. "This is a very sensitive matter for the country." He said an appeals court could decide in less than a month.

Many of Berenson's new neighbors protested vehemently the first time she was released but the neighborhood was peaceful Monday evening. Six riot police officers with shields took up positions at the entrance to her apartment building.

Berenson was arrested in 1995 and accused of helping the leftist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement plan an armed takeover of Congress. The takeover never happened, but prosecutors said that among other things, Berenson had helped the group to rent a safe house.

A military court convicted her the following year and sentenced her to life in prison for sedition, but after intense U.S. government pressure for a civilian trial she was retried in 2001 and sentenced to 20 years for terrorist collaboration.

Berenson was completely unrepentant at the time of her arrest but softened during years of sometimes harsh prison conditions, eventually being praised as a model prisoner.

In May, she apologized to Peruvians in a letter for any hurt she may have caused.

Yet she is viewed by many Peruvians as a symbol of the rebel violence that afflicted the nation two decades ago. Many people remain traumatized by the 1980-2000 conflict that claimed 80,000 lives. In that conflict, the fanatical Maoist Shining Path movement did most of the killing, while Tupac Amaru was a lesser player.

Berenson denies ever belonging to Tupac Amaru or engaging in violent acts.

In August, when she was returned to prison, Berenson said in an interview with three Lima-based journalists that her case had become a political football with presidential elections due in April.

___

Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.

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Flier Patience Wears Thin at Checkpoints

2010-11-24T00:17:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, representatives from the International Air Transport Association, the U.S. Travel Association, the Allied Pilots Association and British Airways have criticized the T.S.A., saying it adds intrusive and time-consuming layers of scrutiny at airport checkpoints, without effectively addressing legitimate security concerns.

The U.S. Travel Association, in fact, is worried that the more onerous screening process will discourage air travel.

“The system is broken, it’s extremely flawed and it’s absurd that we all sit back and say we can’t do anything about it,” said Geoff Freeman, executive vice president of the association. The group has convened a panel of transportation leaders to recommend a better way to balance security with a more efficient and honed screening process.

Travel industry representatives say they are primarily concerned that security procedures unnecessarily burden the vast majority of travelers and crew members. The government, they argue, should instead be using intelligence to develop a risk-based approach to screening passengers.

Specifically, they point to the new body scanners that are replacing metal detectors — which have raised privacy and health concerns, as well as prompted legal challenges — and the more invasive pat-downs, which have set off complaints about disrespectful treatment by agents.

“I think people want to say enough is enough, but they’re worried that they’re going to be perceived as weak on security,” Mr. Freeman said.

T.S.A. officials declined to discuss their checkpoint screening procedures, but sent an e-mail statement: “T.S.A. is a counterterrorism agency whose mission is to ensure the safety of the traveling public. To that end, T.S.A. deploys the latest technologies and implements comprehensive procedures that protect passengers while facilitating travel.”

But the growing chorus of complaints from travel industry leaders suggests that frustrations with policies on shoes, laptops, liquids and pat-downs may have reached a limit.

Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, said in a speech at an aviation security conference in Frankfurt last week that the airlines would like to see an overhaul of the checkpoint screening process — with a greater focus on finding bad people, rather than bad objects.

“Discouraging travelers with queues into the parking lot is not a solution,” Mr. Bisignani said in his speech. “And it is not acceptable to treat passengers as terrorists until they prove themselves innocent.”

Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, said the body scanners had resulted in longer lines because passengers had to take everything out of their pockets, not just coins and cellphones.

“Within the past year or so we’ve seen longer lines, and we’re concerned about the return of the hassle factor,” Mr. Lott said.

Although the T.S.A. used to track security line wait times and post that data on its Web site so travelers knew what to expect, the agency stopped publishing that information in 2008. It is now searching for a way to automate the process of collecting wait-time data, said Lauren Gaches, an agency spokeswoman, but does not know when it will resume sharing that information with the public.

Historical data posted on tsa.gov indicates that average peak wait times were about 12 minutes in 2006 and crept up to 15 minutes in early 2008. Since then, the T.S.A. has shifted to a system that tracks the percentage of passengers who wait 20 minutes or less to go through security, and says that 99 percent of travelers have waited less than 20 minutes in security lines in 2010.

But anecdotal feedback about security wait times varies widely depending on whom you ask.

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Countering China, Obama Backs India for U.N. Council

2010-11-23T12:58:00.000-08:00

Mr. Obama’s announcement, made during a nationally televised address to the Indian Parliament, came at the end of a three-day visit to India that won high marks from an Indian political establishment once uncertain of the president’s commitment to the relationship. Even as stark differences remained between the countries on a range of tough issues, including Pakistan, trade policy, climate change and, to some degree, Iran, Mr. Obama spoke of India as an “indispensable” partner for the coming century.

“In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” he said during his speech in Parliament. “India has emerged.”

Mr. Obama’s closer embrace of India prompted a sharp warning from Pakistan, India’s rival and an uncertain ally of the United States in the war in Afghanistan, which criticized the two countries for engaging in “power politics” that lacked a moral foundation.

It is also likely to set off fresh concerns in Beijing, which has had a contentious relationship with India and has expressed alarm at American efforts to tighten alliances with Asian nations wary of China’s rising power.

But warmer ties between the United States and India, in the making for many years, come at a crucial time for Mr. Obama. He and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are headed to South Korea later this week for a meeting of the Group of 20, apparently in agreement on what is expected to be a significant clash between the world’s big powers over the United States Federal Reserve’s plan to boost the American economy by pumping $600 billion into it.

China, Brazil and Germany have sharply criticized the move by the independent Fed, which they see as intended to push down the value of the dollar to boost American exports. Germany’s finance minister equated the move to currency manipulation “with the help of their central bank’s printing presses.”

But at a Monday news conference, Mr. Obama defended the Fed’s move and won backing from Mr. Singh, who spoke about the United States’ critical importance to the global economy.

“Anything that would stimulate the underlying growth and policies of entrepreneurship in the United States would help the cause of global prosperity,” he said.

The good will between Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh, as well as the almost giddy reaction to the president and his wife, Michelle, in the Indian press, lent a glossy sheen to a United States-India relationship that is still evolving.

India remains deeply protective of its sovereignty, while the United States is accustomed to having the upper hand with its foreign partners. On Monday, Mr. Singh emphasized the need for the two countries “to work as equal partners in a strategic relationship.”

“For India, going back to the earliest days since independence, there has always been a very strong attachment to strategic autonomy,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, director of the South Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Americans throw around the word ‘ally’ with gay abandon.”

Mr. Obama arrived in India on Saturday bearing a big gift: his decision to lift longstanding export controls on sensitive technologies, albeit with some of the specifics still unclear. And the president also made several small-bore announcements about new collaborations between the nations on everything from homeland security to education, agriculture and open government.

Many Indian analysts said Mr. Obama had big shoes to fill, given the popularity here of his two predecessors. President George W. Bush is viewed with admiration, largely for his work securing a civil nuclear cooperation pact. And former President Bill Clinton, who in 2000 became the first American president to visit India in two decades, is fondly remembered for his gregarious personality and his own speech in Parliament, credited for reviving the relationship.

The headline moment of the trip was Mr. Obama’s announcement on the United Nations seat, even though the endorsement is seemingly as much symbolic as substantive, given the serious political obstacles that have long stalled efforts to reform membership of the Security Council.

All the major powers have said the post-World War II structure of the Security Council, in which the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China have permanent seats with veto power, should be changed to reflect a different balance of power. But it could take years for any changes to be made, partly because there is no agreement on which countries should be promoted to an enlarged Security Council.

The United States has promised to support a promotion for Japan and now India. China is viewed as far less eager for its Asian neighbors to acquire permanent membership in the Council.

But administration officials and independent analysts emphasized the significance of the president’s political message.

Ben Rhodes, a top foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama, said the endorsement was intended to send a strong message “in terms of how we see India on the world stage.” Meanwhile, in Washington, even critics who had blamed Mr. Obama for letting the relationship with India drift reacted with praise — and surprise.

“It’s a bold move — no president has said that before,” said Richard Fontaine, a former adviser to Senator John McCain who wrote a critical report of Mr. Obama’s India policy last month for the Center for New American Security. “It’s a recognition of India’s emergence as a global power and the United States’ desire to be close to India.”

But any outreach to India is bound to cause problems for Mr. Obama in Pakistan. In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry warned that Mr. Obama’s decision would further complicate the process of reforming the Security Council. Pakistan, the ministry said in a statement, hopes the United States “will take a moral view and not base itself on any temporary expediency or exigencies of power politics.”

For Mr. Obama, the Pakistan-India-United States nexus creates a delicate dance. The Obama administration is selling warplanes to Pakistan, a move viewed with suspicion here.

During his three-day visit, the president faced criticism for being too soft on Pakistan; during a question and answer session with college students, one demanded to know why he had not declared Pakistan a “terrorist state.” And even Mr. Singh, standing by the president’s side at a joint news conference Monday, reiterated India’s position that it could not have meaningful talks with Pakistan until it shut down the “terror machine” inside its borders.

But if Mr. Obama’s cautious language on Pakistan provoked initial unease, his speech at Parliament seemed to put the matter to rest when he called on the Pakistani government to eradicate “safe havens” for terrorism groups and prosecute the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed at least 168 people.

“Indians were keen to listen to two ‘p’ words,” said Rajiv Nayan, a strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. “Permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and, second, on Pakistan.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.

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Friendship Parallels a Strategic Partnership

2010-11-22T23:44:00.000-08:00

More than once during his three-day visit Mr. Obama called the relationship between India and the United States “the defining partnership of the 21st century.” But the relationship between the two men has evolved into something of a friendship as well. Mr. Obama has called Mr. Singh his guru, and on Monday Mr. Singh called Mr. Obama “a personal friend and a charismatic leader who has made a deep imprint on world affairs.”

The long and complicated relationship between the United States and India has veered from warm embrace long before independence to the uneasy frostbite of the cold war to the reconciliation of recent years, built on shared democratic and multicultural values and a desire to balance the influence of a rising China.

But even as broad historical forces have shaped the relationship, a personal bond appears to be forming between the leaders of the world’s two largest democracies, who developed an easy rapport in their numerous international meetings and have now given state dinners for each other on reciprocal visits.

“The personal equation is very important,” said Ronen Sen, who until last year was India’s ambassador to the United States.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a warm regard for India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. When the president went to India in 1959, the two visited villages together in a convertible, and Mr. Eisenhower was greeted by adoring crowds everywhere he went.

Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became prime minister in 1966, easily charmed President Lyndon B. Johnson that year on her first visit to the United States. He found the elegant, youthful woman irresistible, overstaying so long at a meeting at the home of Ms. Gandhi’s cousin that he had to be invited to dinner.

Mrs. Gandhi had notoriously noxious relations with President Richard M. Nixon. But when she and a newly elected President Ronald Reagan met in Cancún, Mexico, at a summit meeting on international development, they hit it off, to everyone’s surprise. Mr. Reagan invited Mrs. Gandhi for a state visit, and she took him up on it.

“In the height of the cold war, because of personal chemistry, India and the United States managed to create a thaw in their frozen relations,” said Lalit Mansingh, a former foreign secretary and ambassador to the United States.

The Hindu nationalist party of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s prime minister from 1998 to 2004, had a center-right ideology that fit well with that of President George W. Bush. The two men eventually began negotiating an agreement that would end India’s nuclear exile.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh cemented that deal in 2005.

“They got on extremely well,” said Mr. Sen, the ambassador to the United States at the time.

At first glance it seemed to be an unlikely bond between the informal, back-slapping Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh, a reserved academic 14 years his senior. But Mr. Bush’s deep interest in India impressed Mr. Singh, said officials who observed the relationship closely.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, an Indian journalist who has written a book about relations between the United States and India, said he, too, was surprised by the rapport between the two men and had asked Mr. Singh about it. Mr. Singh replied that he appreciated Mr. Bush’s straightforward nature. “He said he was a very warm and human person,” Mr. Datta-Ray said.

Mr. Singh set tongues wagging when he told Mr. Bush, after a White House meeting, “The people of India love you deeply.”

That Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh have found common ground is perhaps less of a surprise. Both are better at the intricacies of policy than at the glad-handing of politics. Both enjoy adulation on the global stage that seems to have eluded them at home. Mr. Obama arrived in New Delhi fresh from the “shellacking” that voters had dealt his party in a midterm election cycle.

Mr. Singh, a celebrated figure globally who was reappointed as prime minister when the Congress Party won parliamentary elections just a few months after Mr. Obama moved into the Oval Office, has faced harsh criticism at home for his handling of a crisis in Kashmir, rising food prices and perceived missteps in handling India’s archrival, Pakistan.

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The Choice: Application Inflation, and Extra Time on the SAT and ACT for Students with Disabilities

2010-11-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

The latest edition of Education Life, The Times’s quarterly supplement, will be published this weekend and, as always, there is lots of “news you can use” for college applicants and their families.

In an article published in collaboration with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hoover tackles the subject of “Application Inflation” — the efforts by highly-selective colleges to recruit record-breaking numbers of applicants every year, only to reject the vast majority of them.

“Although the tension between mission and marketing has long defined admissions,” Mr. Hoover writes, “many believe the balance has tilted too far toward the latter.” You can read the full article here.

Separately, Abigail Sullivan Moore passes along the latest advice on the testing accommodations for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Perseverance pays,” she writes, in an article well worth examining in full.

If you’ve got comments on either of these subjects, you can post them here, using the box below.

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For NASA, Closer Looks at Mercury and Mars

2010-11-21T23:08:00.000-08:00

In space, though, NASA will have a less contentious time pursuing its science missions.

Planetary scientists will finally get their first extended look at Mercury. After a trip of six and a half years through the inner solar system, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft will finally pull into orbit around Mercury on March 18.

The spacecraft has zoomed past Mercury three times, its camera photographing about 98 percent of the surface. Its other instruments have collected intriguing data regarding the magnetic field and the tenuous atmosphere of molecules that are blasted off the planet’s surface by the Sun’s radiation.

But each of those fly-bys lasted just hours, while the orbital phase of the mission will go on for at least a year. That will allow Messenger to gather enough data to identify elements and minerals in the rocks on Mercury and to observe changes in the atmosphere and magnetic fields as the Sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle emerges from its quiet period.

“We’ve got the instruments to do that, but we need time in orbit,” said Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator of the mission.

Most intriguing is what Messenger will find when it peers into craters near Mercury’s poles. The day side of Mercury reaches 800 degrees Fahrenheit, but within the shadows of the polar craters, where the Sun never shines, temperatures are thought to be around minus 300 degrees.

That means there could be large deposits of water ice on Mercury. Radar measurements from Earth have already given suggestions of water, but some scientists believe that the deposits could instead be sulfur or silicates, which could produce the same radar results.

“We hope to have great fun,” Dr. Solomon said.

On the space shuttle front, NASA hopes to launch Discovery for a final time at the end of this month, carrying supplies to the International Space Station. In February, the shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to make the same trip, bringing up the final piece of the station, a particle physics experiment known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And then, finally, the space station, already occupied for a decade, will be complete.

At that point, the six people living there will be able to focus more on what is to be the primary mission for the next decade: a zero-gravity science laboratory. So far, experiments on the station have produced a stream of interesting but not Earth-shaking results, and many scientists criticize the $100 billion cost as money that could have been better spent on research on Earth.

Julie A. Robinson, the program scientist for the space station, said that was unfair, akin to criticizing a 20-year-old for all the time and cost of parenting and college and not yet living up to his or her career potential.

“That’s exactly where the space station is,” Dr. Robinson said. “The fact is, we’ve done relatively little research on the space station.”

But now, more attention will turn to whether the experiments — which include growing crystals, studying the bone loss experienced by the inhabitants, and looking at how combustion occurs differently without gravity — pay off for the investment.

On Mars, scientists will be looking to NASA’s once-and-future rovers, including vehicles that landed there nearly seven years ago and may or may not have life left in them.

The vigil continues for the Spirit, the rover that may already be dead. Trapped in sand, it fell silent this year when its solar panels could no longer produce enough electricity as the Martian winter approached and days shortened. The Spirit will probably never move again, but could still prove valuable as a stationary science outpost.

The hope is that the rover was able to conserve enough energy to keep its heaters running and that, as the days lengthen again, it will revive and get back in touch with Earth.

“At some point, you start to worry when you haven’t heard from it,” said John Callas, the project manager.

If the Spirit is still silent come March and April, when its solar panels should be producing the greatest amount of energy, then hope will start fading. Still, the mission has already been a remarkable success for a machine that was designed to last only three months.

Meanwhile, the other rover currently on Mars, the Opportunity, should be nearing its next destination, a huge crater named Endeavour, by the end of next year. It has been on a three-year drive covering about a dozen miles.

If the Opportunity survives that long, it will be able to investigate terrain that is deeper — and hence, older — in Mars’s past.

NASA’s next Mars rover, Curiosity, is to blast off late in 2011. Technical difficulties during its development have delayed the launching for two years, but it is expected to get to Mars about eight months after liftoff, providing planetary scientists with the most detailed exploration to date of the Martian surface.

The size and weight of a small S.U.V., Curiosity dwarfs the Opportunity and Spirit rovers. Its instruments include a laser that will vaporize pieces of rocks and then identify minerals from the colors in the resulting smoke.

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Political Memo: Tax Cut Timing Is Proving Problematic for Democrats

2010-11-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

That is what many Democrats are asking.

By dint of calculation and miscalculation, after mixed messages and missed signals, President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders delayed debate until before the midterm elections. They dared Republicans to fight for extending the tax cuts for the rich and, in so doing, “hold hostage” those for the middle class. But it was Democrats who blinked as their ranks splintered in the heat of a worsening electoral climate, and they delayed any vote until after the elections.

Now, with the tax cuts due to expire Dec. 31, the debate finally commences next week in a lame-duck session, with Democrats weakened, Republicans emboldened by the election results and the tepid economy continuing to provide some argument against letting rates rise even for the highest income levels.

For every election since the Bush tax cuts became law in 2001 and 2003, a central plank of Democrats’ campaign platforms has been to repeal them for high-income brackets — to pay for other programs, like expanded health care, or to reduce budget deficits.

By Mr. Obama’s election, however, the financial system had nearly collapsed and the economy was in recession. He and Congressional Democrats quietly decided to let the Bush tax cuts remain in place for income above $250,000 for couples, and $200,000 for individuals, until their scheduled expiration at the end of 2010.

The economy’s continued slow growth largely explains why ending those tax cuts, which apply to about 2 percent of Americans, proved easier said than done for Democrats. But other factors also explain their vacillation this year, including a crowded legislative agenda, the worsening political headwinds and, perhaps most of all, Democrats’ chronic insecurity about dealing with tax issues.

A year ago this month, political and economic advisers at the White House first held a series of meetings on what to do about the tax cuts in the coming year. There was no consensus; advisers would shift positions with time and circumstances.

And a vicious circle took hold, according to interviews over past months with Democrats in the administration and Congress: Mr. Obama largely deferred to Democratic leaders — the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was among those in tough re-election races — while Democrats looked to the president to take the lead and make the case against extending the tax cuts for high incomes.

Mr. Obama’s budget early this year called for permanently extending the tax cuts except on high incomes, but administration officials signaled to Democrats that he could support a short-term extension of one or two years. That would reduce deficit projections and, the officials reckoned, provide an impetus for overhauling and simplifying the tax code before the middle-class tax rates expired again.

In February, Democrats believed the issue was effectively settled when they passed and Mr. Obama signed the so-called pay-go law, for “pay as you go,” requiring that the cost of new spending or new tax cuts be offset by spending cuts or tax increases of equal value to avoid adding to annual deficits.

Among the law’s major exceptions: The tax rates for income up to $250,000 could be extended without offsetting savings, at a cost of roughly $3 trillion over 10 years. Not so for rates on higher income. The fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats persuaded liberals to support the pay-go bill partly by arguing that Republicans could not find the $700 billion needed to offset a long-term extension of top rates.

The tax issue remained on a backburner month after month as Democrats were preoccupied with the health care law, the overhaul of financial regulations and other issues. Still, the administration remained confident that the House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ultimately would block any extension of the top rates.

But by summer, with the recovery stalled and more of them on handicappers’ endangered lists, House Democrats refused to vote on the tax cuts before the Senate did. They feared they would endure Republicans’ charge that they had voted to raise taxes on some small businesses, only to see the legislation languish in the Senate like other bills had.

Ms. Pelosi informed the White House of the House Democratic position. At a meeting before Congress recessed for August, to the surprise of others, Mr. Reid assured her and Mr. Obama that the Senate would vote in September to extend only the middle-income rates.

But when Congress returned, party pollsters and consultants battled over the right course, each side interpreting polling data to its advantage.

One camp believed, as Stan Greenberg and James Carville wrote in a Sept. 15 memorandum, that “Democrats Should Want This Tax Cut Debate.” They argued that it would define the election as a choice between Democrats for the middle class and deficit reduction, against Republicans for Wall Street and more debt.

Another camp countered that in an already bad year, Democrats were especially vulnerable to the “tax and spend” label. As the pollster Mark Mellman summed the argument in an interview, “An election that’s dominated by the tax issue is a bad election for Democrats everywhere, anywhere and always.”

By then several moderate Senate Democrats who were not up for re-election — Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — had expressed opposition to letting the top rates expire because of the economy’s fragility. That suggested Senate Democrats could not muster the 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, further unnerving Democrats struggling for re-election.

Several, including Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Patty Murray of Washington, implored Mr. Reid not to force the debate. He agreed. All three won re-election.

The day after the election, Mr. Obama said he was open to compromise with Republicans.

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Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Faces Struggle in Congress

2010-11-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

The murky picture on Capitol Hill comes even as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said for the first time that he would like to see the Senate vote to authorize the repeal before the end of the year, and a not-yet-released Pentagon survey of active-duty forces and their families shows that the majority do not care if gay men and women serve openly, which the policy forbids.

The new commandant of the Marine Corps does care, and he was swiftly rebuked after making unusual comments about troops’ sleeping arrangements over the weekend.

In the meantime, a federal appeals court in California is considering whether the ban is constitutional.

The possibility that Congress will not act this year has further aggravated tensions between gay rights groups and President Obama, who campaigned on a promise to allow gay men and women to serve openly.

There are two main forces working against repeal on Capitol Hill.

One is the simple matter of the Congressional calendar. There will be very little time in the lame-duck session that begins next week for the Senate to vote to authorize the repeal of the policy and reconcile its measure with a version passed by the House.

The other obstacle is in the concerns of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee. Although Mr. McCain has said in the past that he would consider authorizing a repeal of the law once the Pentagon review was complete, he faced a challenge from the right in his recent re-election fight and campaigned, in part, on a promise to preserve the 17-year-old law that requires service members to keep their sexual orientation secret. Mr. McCain, 74, a naval aviator who was shot down and imprisoned in Hanoi in the Vietnam War, has continued to press against repeal.

Mr. McCain and other Senate Republicans blocked consideration of a defense bill in September that included a provision allowing repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and in recent days he has been in negotiations with Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, on whether the “don’t ask, don’t tell” provision should be stripped from the bill entirely.

The White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, issued a statement saying the administration opposed stripping the provision from the annual military policy bill and remained committed to ending the ban.

Gay rights groups have said that if that occurs, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would be difficult if not impossible this year and even more unlikely in 2011, when Republicans will be in control of the House.

The Pentagon is due to make public a report of how to carry out a repeal — including the survey of its active-duty forces — on Dec. 1, which could create momentum for repealing the ban. But the Senate may run out of time, given urgent issues including the expiring Bush-era tax cuts and a spending measure to keep the federal government running.

The chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force have all expressed some reluctance about ending the ban, as has the former commandant of the Marine Corps, but the comments of the current commandant, Gen. James F. Amos, are the most vivid to date.

In comments to reporters in California this weekend, General Amos said that ending the ban in the middle of two wars would involve “risk” for Marines, who, unlike other service members who generally have private quarters, share rooms to promote unity. “There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women — and when you talk of infantry, we’re talking our young men — laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers,” said General Amos, 63. “I don’t know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that’s what we’re looking at. It’s unit cohesion, it’s combat effectiveness.”

General Amos and the other armed service chiefs are reviewing a draft of the Pentagon survey.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen effectively rebuked General Amos when he told reporters in Melbourne, Australia, “I was surprised by what he said and surprised he said it publicly.” Admiral Mullen, who supports repeal, also called General Amos on Sunday night to speak directly with him about the comments, said General Amos’s spokesman, Maj. Joseph M. Plenzler. Major Plenzler said he did not know the tone of the call or specifics about the conversation.

Mr. Gates, in his own comments to reporters en route to security and diplomatic talks in Australia, said, “I would like to see the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but I’m not sure what the prospects are and we’ll just have to see.”

On Capitol Hill, Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said Mr. Reid remained committed to the repeal.

“He, of course, can’t do it alone,” Mr. Manley said. “The senator needs Republicans to at least agree to have a debate on this issue, a debate he firmly believes the Senate should have.”

Gay rights groups said that they would continue to pressure Mr. Obama to push the Senate to act. “Obama’s central promise to the gay community was to get this law repealed,” said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues. “If he can’t deliver on this, one way or another, through repeal or court action or executive order, all bets are off.”

Mr. McCain and Mr. Levin did not provide any details about their discussions of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the defense bill.

Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said in a statement on Monday that “Senator Levin has been discussing with the Defense Department when the report relating to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, due to the secretary of defense on Dec. 1, will be made available to Congress and the public, and he has also been discussing with Senator McCain how to proceed.”

Most Democrats support the repeal and at least one Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, already voted in favor of authorizing the repeal in committee proceedings.

Mr. Reid could try to bring the defense bill to the floor under an open amendment process, a move that Republicans presumably would not block but that would mean committing a large block of time to debate. In that case, opponents of repeal would not be able to pass an amendment stripping it out of the bill.

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Gay Couples Begin Attack on U.S. Marriage Law

2010-11-20T11:33:00.000-08:00

The problem is that while Ms. Pedersen is legally married to Ann Meitzen under Connecticut law, federal law does not recognize same-sex unions. So a health insurance matter that is all but automatic for most married people is not allowed for them under federal law.

Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen plan to file a lawsuit Tuesday against the government in an effort to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing marriages of same-sex couples.

They are plaintiffs in one of two lawsuits being filed by the legal group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a gay rights legal organization based in Boston, and by the American Civil Liberties Union.

A similar challenge by the gay rights legal group resulted in a ruling in July from a federal judge in Boston that the act is unconstitutional. The Obama administration is appealing that decision.

The two new lawsuits, which involve plaintiffs from New York, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, expand the attack geographically and also encompass more of the 1,138 federal laws and regulations that the Defense of Marriage Act potentially affects — including the insurance costs amounting to several hundred dollars a month in the case of Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen, and a $350,0000 estate tax payment in the A.C.L.U. case.

The civil liberties union filed suit on behalf of Edith S. Windsor, whose spouse, Thea C. Spyer, died last year of aortic stenosis. The two women, New Yorkers who had been together for 44 years, married in Toronto in 2007. New York officially recognizes same-sex marriages performed in other states. Had the two been man and wife, there would have been no federal estate tax to pay.

“It’s just so unfair,” said Ms. Windsor, who is 81.

Taken together, said Mary Bonauto, the director of the Civil Rights Project for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the cases show same-sex couples “are falling through the safety net other people count on.”

Traditionally, Ms. Bonauto noted, the federal government has left the definition of marriage to the states. “The federal government has respected those determinations, except in the instance of gay and lesbian couples marrying,” she said. The result, she said, is a violation of constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

In the Massachusetts case earlier this year, the Justice Department defended the Defense of Marriage law, and is likely to do so again as the two new cases move forward. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Tracy Schmaler, said, “The Justice Department has a longstanding tradition of defending acts of Congress when they are challenged in court.”

The new cases, however, could increase the pressure on President Obama to act on his repeated promises to support gay rights. Mr. Obama has called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, saying it is discriminatory. But he has also said he supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage. Last month, however, at a meeting with liberal bloggers, he said he had been thinking “a lot” about that position, saying, “Attitudes evolve, including mine.”

Five states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriages to be performed, but 31 states have passed laws blocking them. The issue continues to echo politically. Last week, Iowa voters removed three of the Supreme Court justices who had participated in a unanimous decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Maggie Gallagher, the chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes same-sex marriage, said court challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act showed that gay rights advocates “continue to push a primarily court-based strategy of, in our view, inventing rights that neither the founders nor the majority of Americans can recognize in our Constitution.”

To Ms. Pedersen, the question is one of justice. She and Ms. Meitzen, who married in 2008, have been together in Connecticut for 12 years. Ms. Meitzen, a social worker, has had health problems, and Ms. Pedersen, a civilian retiree from the Department of Naval Intelligence, tried to enroll her spouse in the federal employee health benefits program — a move that would save them hundreds of dollars a month.

Both women had been married before, to men, and have grown children. The fact that the law values one of their marriages over another is a source of consternation, Ms. Pedersen said.

“If we were heterosexual, we wouldn’t be talking today, because we would have the benefits,” Ms. Pedersen said. “I would just like the federal government to recognize our marriage as just as real as everybody else’s.”

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Prescriptions: This Week's Health Industry News

2010-11-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

Gatherings of insurance executives and public health doctors this week will be looking at possible changes to the health care overhaul from dramatically different perspectives.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group representing nearly 1,300 companies who insure more than 200 million Americans, holds its fall forum Monday through Wednesday in Chicago. The keynote address on Wednesday morning comes from Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee and an outspoken opponent of parts of the legislation.

Governor Bredesen, who made his fortune years ago founding the insurance company HealthAmerica, has recently pressed his argument that the law would give insurers a powerful incentive to drop their company health-insurance policies for employees. In a conclusion challenged by supporters of the plan, he says companies would direct those workers to government-subsidized policies in the individual markets starting in 2014.

Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, will talk about what the midterm elections mean for health care. Mr. Ornstein is an often liberal voice in a generally conservative think tank. He wrote in The Times last week that gridlock will be the theme of the new Congress and “confrontation will be the order of the day.”

The insurance group follows this with a two-day conference on preparing for state insurance exchanges — something that some governors are trying to stop.

The American Public Health Association is holding its annual meeting in Denver this week with the theme, “Social justice: a public health perspective.” This group, representing more than 12,000 doctors, nurses, administrators and other health workers, strongly supported the health care legislation.

In industry news this week, Pfizer will present data Wednesday at the American College of Rheumatology meeting in Atlanta on its experimental pill tasocitinib for rheumatoid arthritis. The company says its twice-daily pill, which could compete with more expensive injectable drugs, met two out of three primary endpoints in the first of six late-stage clinical trials. It improved symptoms and activity but not the remission rate.

The data was reported last week. “There’s no question it’s beneficial against arthritis,” Dr. Roy M. Fleischmann, principal investigator in the Pfizer-sponsored study and a clinical professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said in an interview Friday. “Then you think about the risks.”

The risks are primarily from higher cholesterol. Dr. Fleischmann said they are manageable. “It’s not perfect, but it’s got a really good benefit-risk ratio,” he said.

Other health-industry news may emerge from a symposium on obesity sponsored by the American Society of Bariatric Physicians Wednesday through Sunday. The meeting focuses on developing bariatric practices.

The group is led by Dr. Eric C. Westman of Duke University, coauthor of “The New Atkins for a New You,” who was recently interviewed about low-carb diets by my colleague Tara Parker-Pope.

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U.S. Sets New Rules for Packages on Cargo Planes

2010-11-19T09:06:00.000-08:00

The new measures, which were put in place as of Monday, are intended to prevent a repeat of a cargo plot last month. In that plot, printer cartridges packed with explosives were sent from Yemen via express-mail companies, with the intent of blowing up planes headed to the United States.

Security officials remain concerned that larger toner and ink cartridges present a hazard, because explosives could be hidden inside. The ban, which also was adopted on Monday in Canada, applies only to cartridges that weigh at least one pound — typically cartridges for office printers and copy machines. The ban affects checked baggage and carry-on luggage, and will be in place on certain all-cargo flights.

The broader new air cargo requirement imposed Monday applies to international mail packages as well as other packages that are deemed high risk. Airlines or cargo companies that want to put packages onto United States-bound flights must inspect the item, either by visually checking it or using a scanning device like an X-ray machine, Homeland Security officials said.

They would not define what would make a package high risk, but industry officials said the directives included certain shipments from countries where terrorists were known to operate or deliveries from an unknown shipper, like an individual who dropped it off in person at an express mail office.

All air cargo shipments from Yemen to the United States will continue to be banned, as they have since shortly after the bombs were intercepted on Oct. 29. But officials announced on Monday that they were adding Somalia to the list, based on concern about terror groups operating there.

Homeland Security officials made clear that more changes were imminent, including most likely a demand that airlines and cargo companies provide detailed advance cargo manifests before cargo planes take off for the United States.

That information is typically required only four hours before an international arrival, which means it is too late for American authorities to use computer systems to evaluate who sent the package, what is in it and where it is going, to automatically select items for detailed inspection before departure.

Homeland Security officials acknowledged Monday that many cargo shipment offices at airports around the world, particularly those handling all-cargo flights, did not have advanced tools like explosive trace detection machines or bomb-sniffing dogs. As a result, they will have to rely on visual inspections, which can miss items like explosives hidden in sealed packages.

The officials said they would push airlines and cargo companies globally to improve their screening equipment, investing in devices now used primarily for passenger planes, so they have a better chance of finding any hidden cargo bombs.

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The Lede: The Perils of Presidential Dancing

2010-11-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

As my colleague Heather Timmons reports, video of Michelle Obama dancing with Indian children during a state visit has won hearts in India. “Twice in two days,” The Times of India reported, “the First Lady demonstrated in Mumbai that she could swing to desi beats with the best of them, pulling off matkas and jhatkas [dance moves involving swaying hips] like a seasoned performer.”

While Mrs. Obama was widely praised, her husband got only lukewarm reviews for his tentative foray onto the dance floor at one school. To be fair, though, Mr. Obama might have been watching his steps, mindful of how hard it can be to look presidential while simultaneously busting a move.

Somewhere in the back of every president’s mind, when stepping onto the dance floor in front of the cameras, there must lurk a fear of really getting lost in the moment and suffering the fate of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, whose global image never quite recovered from these few seconds of unbridled boogie during his 1996 re-election campaign:

After Mr. Yeltsin’s death in 2007, the Guardian looked back fondly on his unforgettable performance and suggested, on the basis of video evidence, that he was, at least, a better dancer than many of his fellow world leaders, including Yasser Arafat, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Prince Charles and Saddam Hussein. (If readers know of other examples of spectacularly good, or bad, dancing by world leaders, please submit your links in the comment thread below.)

That Mr. Obama can dance — or at least that he could before he became President Obama — we know because he was far less shy during the 2008 campaign, as this video of his appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show reminds us:

Then again, if history is any guide, President Obama could be more willing to cut loose on the dance floor if he manages to get re-elected in 2012. That, certainly, seems to have been what happened during the second term of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Liberated from the fear of attack ads, during his last years in office Mr. Bush threw himself into everything from African dance to Saudi tribal rhythms and even a little soft shoe:

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The Texas Tribune: For State’s G.O.P., Now Flush, Risks on the Horizon

2010-11-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

It’s been more than 25 years since either party had a supermajority in the Texas House, but the Republicans are on the lip of it.

The status upgrade matters far beyond bragging rights. It forces new strategies for the legislative session in January and will ripple into the 2012 election. When a party wins everything, as the Republicans have in Texas this year, it gets almost everything its way. It also has everything to lose.

The rules at the Capitol are set up to make some sorts of legislation more difficult to pass. It takes two-thirds of the House, for instance, to tap the state’s Rainy Day Fund, which is expected to top out at $9 billion this year. With a biennial shortfall estimated at $20 billion, give or take $5 billion, scrounging budget writers and state leaders are already warning lawmakers not to use all of the Rainy Day money. Not to worry: The conservative supermajority is more likely to make drastic cuts than to make withdrawals from the savings account.

It takes two-thirds to pass amendments to the State Constitution on to voters. Those same scroungers have talked about legalizing casino gambling or at least slot machines, and the resulting taxes and fees could raise $1 billion or more for the state treasury.

The current political maps for the Texas House were designed to elect up to 90 Republicans — on a good day. In 2002, the first election after the current district boundaries were drawn, Texans put 88 Republicans in the House. Since then, they’ve dropped to 87, then 81, and then — when Barack Obama was running for president and Democrats turned out in droves —to just 76. One of those Democrats has since switched parties, so the partisan divide before last Tuesday’s election was 77 to 73.

The most optimistic forecasters hoped that this year, when Mr. Obama’s stratospheric disapproval rating in Texas sent Republicans flocking to the polls, the G.O.P. would get back to that 2002 high-water mark. They blew right past it, taking 22 seats held by Democrats and getting within spitting distance of one more. Even if a recount in that race goes the incumbent Democrat’s way, the new breakdown will be 99 Republicans and 51 Democrats — one vote short of two-thirds. The last time either party had such an overwhelming advantage was 1984, when Democrats had 111 members.

Tuesday’s results will color the issues expected to dominate the session: budget and redistricting. Conversations about new taxes, fees and other revenue streams that might help balance the budget could be stifled. The Republicans are positioned to draw redder political maps, based on something closer to their current numbers than to the near-even split in the lower chamber two years ago. And it will be easier for proponents of nativist immigration legislation to win passage of bills that have been blocked in previous years.

The election moved the pendulum to the right, shifting the ground under Speaker Joe Straus, Republican of San Antonio, and possibly removing a moderate check on the Senate. In 2009, the House locked over voter ID legislation that had been passed by the Senate. The change in the House probably makes that sort of tempering effect impossible this time.

That’s where the risk lies for the Republicans. Budget cuts are sometimes more popular in theory than in practice, and the state’s shortfall is too big to manage with trimming — it will require hacking and slashing to make things balance. Drawing maps for a Republican majority won’t be difficult, but it will be difficult to assure all 99 incumbents that their spots are safe. And (this is one the Democrats nurture, but have never been able to back up with actual results) the immigration and related issues could motivate Hispanics in Texas, who don’t vote in proportion to their numbers in the adult population.

Mr. Straus has moved quickly to grab the votes of the newly elected. A dozen and a half of the Democrats defeated on Tuesday night were pledged to vote for him for a second term as speaker. Less than 24 hours after the polls had closed, he announced he had pledges from at least 128 of the 150 members.

Mr. Straus, originally elevated by Democrats and a dozen renegades from his own party, thinks he can win his leadership post again even if the House breaks tradition and holds the election in the Republican caucus.

Is it going to be different now? Sure, he said. “It’s clearly going to be a lot more conservative.”

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Kidnapping Testimony In Utah Trial

2010-11-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

“He said he was taking me hostage, for ransom,” Ms. Smart told jurors on Monday, the first day of testimony in the trial of Brian D. Mitchell, who is accused of kidnapping her from her bed in 2002 and holding her for nine months.

Ms. Smart’s mother, Lois Smart, testified earlier that she hired Mr. Mitchell, a homeless street preacher, to do handyman work.

Mr. Mitchell’s lawyers said he was influenced by escalating mental illness and extreme religious beliefs that made him think he was doing God’s bidding.

Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 when she was kidnapped and is now 23, described the kidnapping. She had left a kitchen window open because her mother had burned potatoes at dinner.

“I remember him saying that I have a knife to your neck, don’t make a sound, get out of bed and come with me or I will kill you and your family,” she said.

Ms. Smart said she and Mr. Mitchell hiked three to five hours up a hill to a campsite, where Wanda Eileen Barzee, his now-estranged wife, told her to take off her pajamas and underwear and put on a robe or “she would have the defendant come in and rip them off,” she said.

Ms. Smart said Mr. Mitchell married them by pulling a sentence from the traditional Mormon marriage ceremony. “He said, ‘What I seal on this earth will be sealed to me in the hereafter, and I take you to be my wife,’ ” she said.

She said he then forced her to the ground and raped her.

She could not flee because he chained her to a table.

Parker Douglas, a public defender, did not dispute the facts but took issue with the prosecution’s allegation that Mr. Mitchell planned the kidnapping.

“His life here is marked by an intense idiosyncratic set of beliefs,” Mr. Douglas said.

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