MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Leaving your children, your family to escape an abusive husband would be a heart-wrenching choice for any mother. Now, imagine being a Muslim woman, seeking shelter in a foreign country, where you have no one and you barely speak the language.
NPR's Jamie Tarabay reports on a refuge for Muslim women in Baltimore.
JAMIE TARABAY: Alone, yet together, three women gather in a kitchen trying to make the most of another meal away from home.
Ms. ASMA HANIF (Muslima Anisah): In Iraq they don't have high cholesterol, right? This is going to kill us.
Unidentified Woman: This is Mediterranean food.
Ms. HANIF: It's going to kill us. No, there, see - look, all of the oil. Yes.
TARABAY: Standing a safe-enough distance from the splattering oil is Asma Hanif. She's the head of this household. She's talking to a Muslim woman, short, dark hair, originally from Kurdistan. For her safety, we can't give her name. She says she'll never go back to the man she was forced to marry when she was 15 years old.
Unidentified Woman: Me, no. Me never go back. Never. Right now, I'm really happy. Yeah, I'm happy.
TARABAY: She says her marriage was so bad - her husband's beatings so severe -she had no choice but to get out, even if it meant leaving her three children behind. She left without knowing where to go. She slept in her car for a month. Eventually she bought a plane ticket and somehow ended up at this shelter.
Unidentified Woman: It's very good. It's helping me. It's helped because it's food, it's house, you know, it's everything.
TARABAY: Now she's in this cozy kitchen, joking with the other women about how differently meatballs are cooked around the world. Another Muslim woman, from Chad, is frying potatoes and her version of meatballs on the stove. It's a cheery scene that quickly unravels. Suddenly, the Kurdish woman breaks down.
Ms. HANIF: Look at me. You never have to go. I'm here, we're here together. Okay.
TARABAY: Hanif adjusts her lavender headscarf and takes a deep breath. She hugs the Kurdish woman while they both cry. The women here say the tears flow almost every day. Hanif feels it because she knows firsthand what it's like to be on the street after leaving a home filled with abuse.
Ms. HANIF: One of the main things that I like people to know is that those of us who are here, we're not bums.
TARABAY: It's a sanctuary in more ways that one. This house is an escape. For Muslim women, it's something more, a place where they can live and pray without having their faith questioned too.
Ms. HANIF: My biggest problem was that if you send a Muslim woman to be counseled or in a shelter that's run by Christians, then what the people say is -is that the reason why you're being beat is because of that religion. We do not want Islam to be the focal point of domestic violence.
TARABAY: Indeed, domestic violence knows no religion, but not all shelters are sensitive to Muslims, Hanif says.
Ms. HANIF: There may be situations such as, there would be men that would be were there, or maybe there wasn't any place for them to pray, or maybe there was an issue with the food.
TARABAY: Here, people take their shoes off at the door. There's no pork in the kitchen. And a section at the front of the house is marked for prayers.
Ms. HANIF: Sisters have, you know, congregational prayer because, you know, as Muslims, we pray five times a day.
TARABAY: Hanif is a nurse by trade, not a social worker. Running a battered women's shelter wasn't part of her plan. But over the years, she treated dozens of abused Muslim women at a health clinic. One memory sticks out: a woman who came to her with a broken jaw.
Ms. HANIF: One of the Muslim women and she had her, you know, like, her jaw was, you know, was wired. And I remember her saying that now she could lose some of the weight that she'd been wanting to lose because she had to suck her food through a straw. And we didn't inquire any more about it. We kind of laughed with her, and yet she had been beaten. And we - and I remember us doing nothing about it at all.
TARABAY: But not long after that, she did. Almost 12 years ago, Hanif set up this home in a residential neighborhood in Baltimore. And she lives here even though she has three grown children. Hanif is African-American, but most of the women she takes care of are immigrants.
Ms. HANIF: They have nowhere to go. The society doesn't want them. Their family doesn't want them, and the men who beat them doesn't want them.
TARABAY: But helping all these women and hearing their terrible stories has taken a toll on Hanif.
Ms. HANIF: I hear their voices in my head. They're crying. And it wears on my soul. And I tell people, I used to be a happy-go-lucky, smiling person, and now I carry a lot of sorrow.
TARABAY: Hanif said she's not trained to do this, but does it anyway. She does it for the voices of all those women she's been able to help and those she couldn't.
Jamie Tarabay, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Here's a question for book lovers: Is it possible to love books too much? Writer Allison Hoover Bartlett says yes in her new book about book obsession. It's called "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much," and it tells the true story of two very different men who are both deeply obsessed with books. One is a prolific thief, the other is the persistent antiquarian book dealer who sent him to jail.
NPR's Howard Berkes reports.
HOWARD BERKES: The rare book section in Ken Sanders' brick storefront in downtown Salt Lake City feels reverent. Maybe it's the stained glass windows between the stacks. Maybe it's Sanders himself, a man with a long gray and white scraggly beard who tenderly pulls his personal favorite from the shelf.
Mr. KEN SANDERS (Antiquarian Bookseller): When I was 14 years old, our grandparents took my little brother and I on a trip to California. And I begged Pop to take me to Bertrand Smith's Acres of Books, 240 Long Beach Boulevard, Long Beach, California. And I bought, not this copy, but I bought this folio edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," with engravings by Gustave Dore.
BERKES: Sanders carefully and quietly turns the pages of a treasure, pausing for the lavish illustrations with each verse of Poe's poem. Books have been his passion and profession since that first rare book buy four decades ago.
Mr. SANDERS: I would certainly be the last person to deny that I'm obsessed with books. If you want to say I'm obsessed with book thieves, as well, I probably won't argue that point either.
BERKES: One book thief in particular attracted Sanders' laser focus, a polite solicitous, boyish-looking Californian named John Gilkey. He's the central character in "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much." And he admits he stole credit card numbers while working at Saks Fifth Avenue to help finance a book buying binge. Gilkey was 29 years old in 1997 when he stole his first rare books with bad checks. In her book, Allison Hoover Bartlett sums up Gilkey's obsession this way.
Ms. ALLISON HOOVER BARTLETT (Author, "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much"): If I had to reduce him to a sentence, I'd say that Gilkey is a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity. That any means of getting it would be fair and right. And that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.
BERKES: This was a central theme in three years of interviews conducted while Gilkey was in and out of prison for kiting checks, violating parole and stealing rare books.
Ms. BARTLETT: He told me he wanted to have a fine gentleman's library, and he'd have a big oak desk with a globe on it, and he would wear a smoking jacket. So there's this idea that the world would see him differently. That people would look at his book collection and see that this was a man of culture, an erudite man. And that's really what drove him, it was building this identity for the world.
BERKES: In a 2005 interview from prison, Gilkey told Bartlett what it was like to first hold a newly acquired rare book. It's a very noisy recording, so listen carefully.
Mr. KEN GILKEY: It's been like a bottle of wine, I kind of smell the newness of the books and I just feel the crispness of it, make sure there's nothing wrong with it. I open it up very gently, �cause I'm thinking like, maybe 30 years later this book could be worth something. I don't want to make any mistakes -preserve the book.
.TEXT: BERKES: Preserve the book, that's what antiquarian booksellers also want. But Gilkey made that tough for some by using bad checks and stolen credit card numbers to steal their books - about $200,000 worth in three years. He focused first on his home territory, in the area around San Francisco Bay, and he was unstoppable until he met his obsessive match.
Ms. BARTLETT: So when people steal from anyone in the trade, Ken Sanders feels an almost personal attack. He's as determined to catch book thieves as Gilkey was in stealing the books.
BERKES: Sanders once chased a thief out of his own store, smashing the window of the getaway car and getting bloodied in the process.
As Gilkey's thefts grew, Sanders became security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association and began chasing down theft reports across the country.
Mr. SANDERS: And I became convinced early on of two things: It was the same man or group, because the MOs were just too similar. The second epiphany was these are iconic, valuable books that everybody knows, and they're very distinctive. But I could never find any trace in the marketplace of them resurfacing or being sold. He's a collector. He's a collector that's gone to the dark side.
BERKES: Bartlett chronicles the cross-country chase as Sanders tracks, identifies and exposes Gilkey. She probes Gilkey's past for clues to a life steeped in books and crime, and she documents crime beyond books. But when it comes to books...
Ms. BARTLETT: He has absolutely no remorse for his crimes. He told me the details of how he went about it, which I describe in the book, but he feels that it was his right to take them.
BERKES: This is how Gilkey justified the thefts in that 2005 prison phone interview. Remember to listen carefully.
Mr. GILKEY: I mean, it's not like 100 percent I'm wrong. I'd say it's more like 60 percent I'm wrong and 40 percent I'm right. Sure, that's their business, book dealers, but, I mean, they should make it more accessible to people that like books. I mean, that's the kind of warped thinking I had. How am I supposed to build my collection unless I'm like this multimillionaire?
BERKES: This sense of entitlement angers Ken Sanders, who suggests Gilkey isn't really obsessed with books and certainly isn't anything like him.
Mr. SANDERS: John Charles Gilkey is nothing but a thief. He's a dirty little book thief, and there's nothing romantic about it. There's nothing noble about him. He might have a passion for books, but his passion is for thievery. As far as I'm concerned, he's the man who loved to steal books too much.
BERKES: Those books include rare first editions of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Kay Thompson's "Eloise in Paris" and Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," and Sanders believes Gilkey is still at it.
Mr. SANDERS: A poor woman bookseller in Canada lost a $500 book to a man, a John Charles Gilkey, who bounced the check he wrote her for it. I can't escape him.
BERKES: Even though Sanders is retired from the post of book detective for the Antiquarian Book Dealers. John Gilkey declined to speak with us for this story, but did give permission to use excerpts of his interviews with Allison Bartlett, who says Gilkey certainly enjoys being the subject of a book. She doesn't know whether he has his own copy of "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" or how he might have obtained one. Howard Berkes, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The usual end-of-year obits tend to focus on the passing of famous actors, politicians, inventors - notables, we call them. Well, today, in the final part of our Obituaries series, we mark the passing of someone who was an anchor of his community - notable for so many reasons, but not famous.
Ernie Manuelito died this year at the age of 57, after almost 40 years behind a microphone. When Ernie spoke in English or in Navajo, his voice carried across the Red Rock Desert and into the ears of the Navajo nation.
Mr. PAUL JONES (News Director, KTNN Radio): Ernie's voice was very familiar, just like the voice of Walter Cronkite. He was the first voice that came on the air when the radio station started here in Window Rock.
Mr. ERNIE MANUELITO (Broadcast Journalist): Good evening. I'm Ernie Manuelito with KTNN radio station, and one of the...
Mr. JONES: And he stayed on here with us until he left us. My name is Paul Jones, and I am the news director here at KTNN radio station. When he first came, he was a disc jockey. He got promoted here and there in different areas.
Ms. ELLIE WILLIAMS: The weather, to the news, to hosting the oldies shows and sports.
Mr. JONES: I understand he worked in the sales department, too, for a while. So he was a jack of all trades.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Singer: (Singing) The voice of the Navajo nation, KTNN.
Ms. WILLIAMS: Radio is very important. It's everyday life of what's going on throughout the Navajo reservation, a remote area. My name is Ellie Williams. If you're herding sheep out there, they'll have their portable radio, or they're in their vehicle listening to the ball game.
These are all like, old - these are old - here we go. Let's go in and listen to them, and you'll know who Ernie Manuelito is.
Mr. MANUELITO: Troy Aikman (Navajo spoken).
Ms. WILLIAMS: Ernie and I sat down together and talked about football because people on the reservation, a majority of them have never been to an NFL game, so we have to be very descriptive. OK, how do we explain a touchdown?
Mr. MANUELITO: (Navajo spoken) This time, it's going to be goodbye, touchdown, Dallas Cowboys.
Ms. WILLIAMS: (Navajo spoken), you know, is touchdown. (Navajo spoken) is the pigskin. (Navajo spoken), getting the pigskin ready so that the - because it's so cold. It's almost like storytelling.
Mr. MANUELITO: (Navajo spoken)
Ms. WILLIAMS: (Navajo spoken) says that he ran across like a fast rabbit.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. MANUELITO: Dallas Cowboys (Navajo spoken).
(Soundbite of song, "Why Don't You Love Me")
Mr. JONES: I used to call him Early Bird Ernie. I always used to promote his show, every Friday, to tune into Early Bird Ernie. He's going to be playing your oldies, and a lot of people listening in.
(Soundbite of song, "Why Don't You Love Me")
Mr. HANK WILLIAMS (Musician): (Singing) Why don't you love me like you used to do?
Ms. WILLIAMS: It's five o'clock. (Navajo spoken). Five o'clock, KTNN. And then Ernie would be on the radio.
Mr. RAY SOSI(ph): You would think that people would still be asleep; nope, they're up, listening to Ernie.
Mr. JONES: The old country music stars, like Porter Wagoner or Dolly Parton, when they were young. And yeah, there was Conway Twitty.
Mr. SOSI: Country and a little bit on the wild side, back when we were young, when our hearts were young. That's how he put it. My name is Ray Sosi. How would I put it? Protege of Ernie Manuelito, out here on the reservation. Radio was more or less like a mental television. They compare it with the movie stars. Your voice, you're almost worshipped.
Mr. HARRISON DEHAYA(ph): I heard Ernie on the radio, and I always thought, what kind of a person is he? How does he look like? Is he big? He sounds big. He sounds like heavyset guy. He sounds tall.
Mr. JONES: We are at the KTNN radio station programming department. This is our engineering office, and that's where - we call it Ernie's office, or we call it Ernie's dungeon. And inside, you will see his desk where he left it, how he left it.
Mr. DEHAYA: It's just another vacant office to me. But some people like - with - that are deep into native tradition, they get scared of things like that. They think something spooky is in there.
Mr. SOSI: One thing that I know is he's still around. And every now and then, I get a chance to sit in his chair, just to be near him.
Mr. MANUELITO: (Navajo spoken)
Mr. SOSI: I have an understanding of how far our signal goes. It's actually endless. You know how you throw a rock into a pond? Well, our voice travels in radio waves, and that radio waves spreads out so that signal, the voices that he sent, is still out there travelling outward from the earth.
Mr. MANUELITO: Good night from Window Rock cinema, right here in Window Rock, Arizona. That's going to do it for the forum tonight.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: Ernie Manuelito died of a respiratory ailment on April 10th, 2009. Posey Gruener produced our tribute. Thanks to Paul Jones, Ellie Williams, Ray Sosi, Harrison Dehaya and Ann Manuelito for sharing their memories.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: This is NPR.
MICHELE NORRIS, host
Republicans are hoping to make gains in this year's midterm elections, and they're looking for new voices to carry their message to voters. One of their top prospects is California Assemblymember Van Tran. He's been recruited by the party to run for Congress in a Southern California district with the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans in the nation.
As part of our series on the next generation of GOP leaders, NPR's Ina Jaffe reports.
INA JAFFE: In a nondescript hotel in a town known for its auto malls, 40 supporters of congressional candidate Van Tran gathered recently for a buffet supper and speech from the candidate. He began with this realization.
Assemblyman VAN TRAN (Republican, California): I am standing between you and the roast beef.
(Soundbite of laughter)
JAFFE: So, demonstrating his instinct for survival, he spoke for less than 20 minutes, but the relative brevity took some effort.
Assemblyman TRAN: And, I mean, I can talk until tomorrow - which I'm not going to do, obviously - about my legislative track record or my...
JAFFE: He is especially proud of his bill to widen a local freeway.
Assemblyman TRAN: So whenever you drive on the 55 freeway and you get onto the carpool lane, please remember my name.
JAFFE: Van Tran's name is easily remembered in Orange County's Vietnamese community. He's represented it for nearly six years in the state legislature. Before that, he was a member of a local city council. And Tran's personal story is very much like his constituents. His family left Vietnam on an American military transport plane a week before the fall of Saigon. He was 10 years old.
Assemblyman TRAN: It was a trip that defined, of course, my life. But you've left a lot of memories back in the old country, and still you remember the legacy of the war, and you live through it, through your parents and through your elders, as well.
JAFFE: And that experience, says Tran, has given him a unique perspective that's guided his political life.
Assemblyman TRAN: It goes back to the virtues that make this country great. Whether we've been here for generations or we've just been here yesterday, it's all about freedom. It's all about opportunity. It's all about hard work and fairness and the generosity of the American people, as well.
JAFFE: Tran describes himself as a conservative on social issues, as well as fiscal ones. But Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who's in charge of recruiting candidates for the National Republican Congressional Committee, says he was looking for more than a conservative ideologue.
Representative KEVIN MCCARTHY (Republican, California): I'm looking for fresh faces, people who understand their district, listen to their district, could actually solve problems.
JAFFE: And Van Tran, says McCarthy, is all of those things.
Rep. MCCARTHY: And when you look at this district and the makeup of it, he's the - one of the first names that come to mind.
JAFFE: Tran has a rival for the GOP nomination. Quang Pham, however, is not as well funded and lacks the official backing of the party. So, presuming Tran wins the primary, he'll then be taking on Democrat and seven-term incumbent Loretta Sanchez.
Representative LORETTA SANCHEZ (Democrat, California): Mr. Speaker, I write today in support of House Resolution 334, which I...
JAFFE: Sanchez has paid considerable attention to the concerns of her Vietnamese constituents and serves as the co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Vietnam.
Rep. SANCHEZ: This resolution calls for the release of 118 Vietnamese citizens who have been arrested, detained or harassed for signing the Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy in Vietnam.
JAFFE: The demographics in the 47th Congressional District favor Sanchez. There are nearly three times more Latinos registered to vote than there are Vietnamese, and Democrats have a 13-point registration advantage. The executive director of the Orange County Democratic Party, Melahat Rafiei, says the Republicans have made a mistake in targeting Loretta Sanchez.
Ms. MELAHAT RAFIEI (Executive Director, Orange County Democratic Party): It's a very bad idea to make the assumption that, you know, that Vietnamese voters are going to vote for someone just because they have a Vietnamese name or they're Vietnamese. And voters in this district know that Congresswoman Sanchez has been there for them as a representative. And, you know, if this was another district where the representative was out of touch with the community, I could understand the Republican strategy. But they've kind of picked the wrong person to fight.
JAFFE: Still, Van Tran believes he can unseat Sanchez next November, despite the challenges. As evidence that nothing is impossible, he points to a Democrat. Look at Barack Obama, he says. Who would have thought he'd be president today?
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Step by step, workers in the White House budget office are getting more fit. For the last three months, budget office employees have been counting their steps in an effort to encourage more physical activity.
As NPR's Scott Horsley reports it's a small but telling example of how the Obama administration relies on intensive data gathering to help shape behavior.
SCOTT HORSLEY: The White House Office of Management and Budget launched its pedometer challenge back in October, on the first day of the new fiscal year. Budget Director, Peter Orszag, explained the idea in a jaunty homemade video.
(Soundbite of video)
Mr. PETER ORSZAG (Director, White House Office of Management and Budget): The basic idea is that we all wear these pedometers and they measure daily activities. When you measure something and have a competition surrounding it, it creates a strong incentive to do more of it.
HORSLEY: Evidence shows pedometers are one of the most cost-effective ways to increase physical activity. Orszag said at the time and in true OMB fashion, we like to walk down the path cleared by the best data. The pedometer challenge is typical of Orszag, a number-crunching marathoner whom Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel described as making nerdy sexy.
But he's not the only one in the administration turned on by this kind of data-driven exercise. Whether it's health care, education or even the war in Afghanistan, the president and his team are big believers in the power of information. President Obama told the American Medical Association last summer part of what ails the country's health care system is a lack of data.
President BARACK OBAMA: We're not doing a very good job harnessing our collective knowledge and experience on behalf of better medicine. Less than one percent of our health care spending goes to examining what treatments are most effective, less than one percent.
HORSLEY: The administration is trying to change that, setting aside more than a billion dollars to compare different medical treatments in hopes of learning more about which ones work best. School districts have also been told to gather better data if they want to qualify for billions in federal education grants.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says tracking students' performance by classroom will provide important clues about which teachers are getting through.
Secretary ARNE DUNCAN (Department of Education): There are teachers every single year, where the average child in their class is gaining two years of growth for a year's instruction. And nobody can tell you who those teachers are. Shouldn't we be learning from them? On the flip side of it, if you have teachers or schools where students are falling further and further behind each year, I think we need to know that as well.
HORSLEY: The nonprofit Education Trust, which also relies on data to improve school performance, applauds the administration for trying to identify the best teachers. The trust's vice president, Amy Wilkins, cautions gathering the information is only the first step.
Ms. AMY WILKINS (Vice President, The Education Trust): We can have reams and reams and reams of data, but unless we have the courage to say to some teachers who are not as strong that you need to get help and you need to improve your practice or you need to get out of the classroom. If we don't have the courage to act on what the data says to us, then the data doesn't do us much good.
HORSLEY: Wilkins says that's true of lots of issues, where good data can point you down a path but can't do the walking for you. Mr. Obama seemed to minimize that challenge when he spoke to the American Medical Association, suggesting if doctors are simply given enough data, they'll automatically do the right thing.
Pres. OBAMA: See, I have the assumption that if you have good information about what makes your patients well, that's what you're going to do.
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. OBAMA: I have confidence in that.
HORSLEY: But sometimes, good information is not enough. Health care expert Gail Wilensky points to the recent uproar over a recommendation that women get fewer mammograms even though the data behind that recommendation is solid.
Ms. GAIL WILENSKY (Senior Fellow, Project HOPE): I'm a little distressed at the response of the public and the media to the guidelines. But it's a reminder of how careful we'll have to be.
HORSLEY: Wilensky, who's with the health education foundation Project HOPE, says policymakers may have to nudge people to actually follow where the data lead, not by outlawing less-effective medical procedures, but with gentle rewards and penalties.
Ms. WILENSKY: I'm at the school of don't-say-no. Make it expensive.
HORSLEY: Even the Budget Office hasn't relied on measurement alone to get people walking more in the pedometer challenge. Small prizes are awarded to those who walk the most and those who show the biggest improvement. So far, the average participant is walking almost 20 percent more than when the contest began. Since October, OMB workers have logged over 100 million steps and counting.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
Few ideas are less popular in a recession than increasing taxes. So, how do states, counties and municipalities that are struggling financially raise money without raising taxes? For many, the answer is simple, just don't call them taxes, call them fees. Those are special taxes that don't hit the general public.
NPR's Greg Allen reports on how state and local governments are raising revenue in an anti-tax climate.
GREG ALLEN: Nearly every state in the country struggled to close budget deficits in 2009, and for many the struggle is not yet over. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that 36 states already have budget deficits for the fiscal year that began in September. Gaps are only expected to grow as the new year gets underway.
There have been lots of cuts, and more are coming. Governors and legislatures have laid off and furloughed state employees, tapped rainy-day funds, cut spending on education and health care. And they have also raised revenue - what most people call taxes.
Few states have struggled more with the budget gap than New York. There, the legislature's solution was to raise a panoply of fees. Fees for bottle deposits, tax preparers, nuclear plants, horse racing. If there was a fee, they raised it. If there wasn't one, they created it.
Mr. DAN SHARP (Owner, Honeoye Lake Bait and Tackle Shop, New York): The only thing that they can't get by and say it's a fee or surcharge, rather than a tax, they're going to do it.
ALLEN: Dan Sharp owns Honeoye Lake Bait and Tackle Shop in upstate New York. The state also raised the cost of hunting and fishing licenses. Sharp says that move, combined with the poor economy, is hurting his business at a time when he should be busy, ice-fishing season.
Mr. SHARP: There's a few guys out on the lake. It just started here about a week or so ago, and - but not the crowds like you'd expect to see.
ALLEN: At least seven other states have also raised hunting and fishing fees. While politicians have generally tried to avoid using the T word, there are some taxes that have proved hard to resist. Many cities and states are raising taxes on hotel rooms and rental cars. The reason is obvious, they are taxes paid by out-of-towners, not hard working home folks, in other words local voters.
Craig Banikowski of the National Business Travel Association calls it taxation without representation. And he says that over the past year, cities and states across the country have been raising rental car and room taxes like never before.
Mr. CRAIG BANIKOWSKI (President and CEO, National Business Travel Association): September 1st, Indianapolis added additional hotel taxes. Boston on October 1st increased its hotel occupancy tax by two percentage points, Hawaii, Nevada. San Francisco just added a $3 fee on room rates of $200 or more in a special area close to Moscone Convention Center.
ALLEN: While raising taxes on constituents is always dicey, the sorry state of their budgets has forced a few states to do so. In Arizona, New Jersey, New York and Colorado, legislatures have suspended some property tax exemptions.
In Colorado, shutting down exemptions for senior citizens is saving the state $100 million annually. Mark Lowderman is a tax assessor in El Paso County. He says he's already heard from 30 or 40 seniors and they all share a common sentiment.
Mr. MARK LOWDERMAN (Tax Assessor, El Paso County): The general feel is that they think they're trying to balance their budget on the backs of the seniors.
ALLEN: Lowderman expects the outcry to grow once the property tax bills go out in the next few weeks. If there is such a thing as a popular tax, it would be on alcohol and tobacco, the so-called sin taxes. More than a dozen states raised taxes on alcohol, and 15 states raised tobacco taxes over the past year.
Danny McGoldrick with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says some states have raised their cigarette tax by a dollar a pack. Even so, he says, there's room for more.
Mr. DANNY MCGOLDRICK (Vice President of Research, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids): They go from a low of seven cents a pack in South Carolina to a high of over $3. So there's a lot of room for tobacco tax increases across the country, and we're hoping that's what's going to happen in the coming year.
ALLEN: State and local governments have been inventive - some might even say devious - in finding ways to increase revenue. One idea that's catching on across the country is automatic surveillance cameras to monitor red lights and speed zones. Typically, they're installed and maintained by private companies bringing cities a new revenue stream while improving public safety.
The state of Georgia has another new idea, a super speeder law that requires motorists caught doing 85 to pay a special $200 state fine on top of the local penalty. It's expected to raise $23 million in the coming year. And if it's successful, look for it to be coming soon to a state near you.
Greg Allen, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
After months of focus groups and story board revisions, even a name change, the Walt Disney Company finally introduced audiences to its first black heroine with "The Princess and the Frog."
The story centers around Tiana, a young woman in New Orleans who dreams of opening her own restaurant and fulfilling the dream of her late father.
(Soundbite of movie "The Princess and the Frog")
(Soundbite of song "Almost There")
Ms. ANIKA NONI ROSE (Actor): (As Tiana) (Singing) I know exactly where I'm going, and getting closer, closer, every day. And I'm almost there, I'm almost there, people down here think I'm crazy, but I don't care. Trials and tribulations, have had my share, there ain't nothing gonna stop me now �cause I'm almost there.
NORRIS: Tiana is a very entrepreneurial princess. But even with the introduction of Disney's first African-American princess, there are some who question how far Disney has really progressed when it comes to the way it treats the subject of race on the big screen. With us now is Scott Foundas, he's a film editor and critic for L.A. Weekly, and he joins us from Tampa. Thanks so much for being with us.
Mr. SCOTT FOUNDAS (Film Editor and Critic, L.A. Weekly): My pleasure.
NORRIS: Now, this film was a big moment for a lot of people who grew up on Disney and felt that they didn't see themselves in that long pantheon of Disney princesses, but sounds like you weren't exactly cheering this production. The headline in your piece in The Village Voice was "Disney's Princess and the Frog Can't Escape the Ghetto." What are you unhappy about?
Mr. FOUNDAS: Well, it seemed puzzling to me that after all of this pressure over many years from various groups for Disney to create an African-American princess that when they finally got around to doing it that they decided to put her in Jim Crow era Louisiana, hardly, let's say, a shining moment in the history of African-Americans in the U.S. in terms of their standing in society. So that's sort of a trouble spot to begin with.
But certainly from the time that it was announced in 2006 up until the release, there has been a lot of back-and-forth between Disney and various special interest groups who have really been very attentive watchdogs on the production. And as you mentioned at the start, demanded all kinds of changes to the title of the film, to the profession of the main character, to the main character's name.
And yet, somehow seem to miss the bigger issue of where this film is taking place, how it's distorting history in a sort of very overt way. And I find that surprising not just on Disney's end but on the end of all of these people who did seem to have such a vested interest in making sure that this thing turned out the way they wanted it to.
NORRIS: The anticipation for this film was so great in part because there seemed to be a sense that Disney had a whole lot to make up for. What is Disney's record when it comes to race?
Mr. FOUNDAS: Definitely problematic. Disney, going back to the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons from the �20s and �30s had references to Al Jolson in blackface, Mickey and at times Pluto imitating Al Jolson, then you move into �40s and you have the feature films "Dumbo" and "Song of the South," both of which are famous or infamous for including any number of somewhat risible African-American caricatures in "Dumbo" in the form of a gaggle of crows who speak in a kind of exaggerated southern black dialect.
(Soundbite of movie, "Dumbo")
Crow #1: Well, looky here, looky here.
Crow #2: My, my. Why, this is most irregular.
Crow #3: Well, I just can't believe my eyes.
Crow #1: They ain't dead, is they?
Crow #4: No. Dead people don't snore, or do they?
NORRIS: These are crows talking to each other onscreen. There was much made of this. NAACP filed a complaint. Many people lodged their complaints specifically and directly to Disney. Was Disney just a product of its times there, is it fair to reach back and criticize them for something like that?
Mr. FOUNDAS: I think that you can say to an extent it was a product of the time. I mean, we're still more than two decades away from the Civil Rights Act at this point. But I don't think that that gives Disney a free pass either. The other problem is that this is not exactly a syndrome that seems to go away over the years. I mean Disney has been criticized for these same issues in films made well after 1964, including "Aladdin" with its depiction of the Middle East.
(Soundbite of movie, "Aladdin")
(Soundbite of song, "Arabian Nights")
Mr. SCOTT WEINGER (Actor): (As Aladdin) (Singing) I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home.
Mr. FOUNDAS: So, this kind of accusations has sort of been in ether. And in certain cases, Disney has actually tried to make a kind of reparation by re-editing the films in question like lyrics about the Middle East being a place where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. That was deleted from the home video edition of the film.
NORRIS: Now, I was going to ask you how Disney has dealt not with the specific examples where they actually went in and changed the films digitally but overall how they dealt with these complaints?
Mr. FOUNDAS: Well, I think one of the way that they dealt with it is sort of by case by case trying to do something as an amends. In the case of "Princess and the Frog," they're giving us their first African-American princess. In the case of "Aladdin," they were giving us the first Arabian princess. In the case of "Pocahontas," they were giving us the first Native American princess. In "Mulan," we had the Chinese princess.
So, they've sort of been making the rounds, you could say. And it's clearly an awareness, I think, on the corporate side about the fact that consumers of Disney products are not exclusively Caucasian audience and it took them a little while to get to that.
NORRIS: As we talk about "The Princess and the Frog," is it possible that we are debating issues that just don't carry the same weight with the target audience for this film?
Mr. FOUNDAS: Well, I think that that's true to a certain extent. I mean I think a lot of people can go see this film and they'll probably enjoy it and their kids will enjoy it and they won't really think twice about it. But I think that, you know, it's the role of criticism to talk about how films function in a broader cultural context. So, you know, I may have my own objections about the movie, the music, the acting these kind of criteria. But what we're talking about here is something that goes beyond, I think, the artistic merits of the film.
And, you know, people who want to say, oh it's only a movie, that's really ignoring the impact that films have on the broader culture, whether it's Clark Gable showing up without an undershirt in "It Happened One Night" and suddenly the garment industry is in panic because sales of undershirts are plummeting or "Top Gun" comes out and suddenly the Navy sees the biggest uptick in new recruits since World War II. These kind of things happen and certainly children watching Disney animated films learn something from them about these characters, and how these characters function in society and what they are entitled to, what they're not, and that makes an impression on an impressionable mind.
NORRIS: Scott Foundas, thanks so much.
Mr. FOUNDAS: My pleasure.
NORRIS: Scott Foundas is a film editor and a critic for L.A. Weekly.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
The 2008 presidential campaign was supposed to herald a new era for women in politics. Sarah Palin shot from Alaskan obscurity to the number two spot on the Republican ticket, and she was a big hit at the GOP convention.
(Soundbite of archival footage)
Governor SARAH PALIN (Republican, Alaska; Vice-Presidential Candidate): I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: Republicans thought they had a star, and they did until she stumbled badly in a series of high-profile interviews. After that, her star began to fade among some voters.
On the other side, Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination early on, a sure-fire bet to make history as the first woman to head a presidential ticket until a candidate from the south side of Chicago edged her out with his own historic campaign. Despite the close loss, Clinton was optimistic about the future in her concession speech.
(Soundbite of archival footage)
Senator HILLARY CLINTON (Democrat, New York; Presidential Candidate): And although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: But more than a year later, political watchers in both parties have concluded that the proverbial ceiling, even with all those cracks, is still pretty hard to break through.
Anne Kornblut spent months chasing Clinton and Palin across the country during their campaigns. She writes about the experience in a new book called "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win."
I asked Kornblut whether John McCain and the Republican Party had considered how the press and the public would react to a female candidate.
Ms. ANNE KORNBLUT (Author, "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win): It's worth noting that all of the people who made the decision to put Sarah Palin on the ticket were, of course, men. You had a male campaign manager, a series of very senior men on the McCain campaign and the candidate himself.
I think they failed to take into account that some of the personal criticism that women have faced at much lower levels, you know, running for mayor, for governor, for senator, might actually occur if they put a woman on the ticket, and I think they failed to appreciate the level of excitement that they thought would only be used for the good for them on the ticket, but also can be used for the negative. That certainly was the case in Sarah Palin's case.
NORRIS: You know, I had the experience of actually having my head almost bitten off when I asked about the juggling of family responsibilities while also traveling on a campaign bus by one of the McCain aides, and I know several reporters also had similar experiences. They seemed not to take that into account early on.
Ms. KORNBLUT: They were very unprepared for those kinds of questions, questions that would be unique to women. And, in fact, some of this was true for both the Clinton and the Palin campaigns. They both struggled with questions that are unique to women, that are to do with gender.
In Clinton's case, they were very different questions. It was what kind of woman are you? Are you feminine enough? But in Sarah Palin's case, the question of can you be a mother and an office holder? What kind of impact will having a small child and several small children with you be? - was one that they weren't prepared to answer. And they fell back on "that's not a fair question," when, in fact, women who run for office all over the country know that's something they're going to face. Any woman is going to have to be able to answer these questions, even if they don't like them.
NORRIS: I want to turn to Hillary Clinton, where her campaign seemed to make an assumption from the outset that Clinton would appeal to women of all ages, of all stripes, of all backgrounds. That turned out to be a major miscalculation. Why?
Ms. KORNBLUT: It sure did. And in hindsight, it's easy to forget that Hillary Clinton lost women in Iowa and lost big. She actually came in third after John Edwards. And among young women, women under about the age of 30, she was in the teens in terms of her support.
But even among older women, the Clinton campaign spent so much time focusing on proving her toughness, talking about the war, talking about national security because, of course, that had been a traditional weakness for women, something they felt they had to overcome, that they began to lose support among women who were not sure what kind of woman she was, wasn't sure - weren't sure she was in touch with her feminine side. And she lost some very prominent women early on, in 2007, of course the most important of which, arguably, was Oprah.
Once the campaign evolved, she did begin to pick up steam among women, and by the end of it, especially older women were the core of her support. But early on, that was not necessarily the case.
NORRIS: Why was Hillary Clinton so uncomfortable with emphasizing her gender? Even up to the end, she was removing gender-specific references from her now-famous concession speech. And even that line where she noted the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, that was something that was offered to her by a man. That wasn't a line that she came up with on her own.
Ms. KORNBLUT: That's right. Her speechwriter, Jim Kennedy, inserted that line as he was working on the draft, and it became the most memorable line of the speech.
The story of that concession speech is actually fascinating. She had struggled throughout the campaign with this idea of whether she should give a gender speech. Long before Barack Obama gave his heralded speech on race, her campaign had thought about it. Should they talk about it? Should they go to Wellesley? Should they go to Seneca Falls? Should they remind the nation of what it would mean to elect a woman president?
Ultimately, they decided not to. They were concerned about turning off male voters. They were worried about emphasizing her gender. She said over and over in the campaign: I'm not running because I'm a woman. And her aides often said that was just part of her nature. That was part of who she was.
And growing up in the time she did, in a time when women in law firms in prominent positions were told not to put pictures of their children in their office because their colleagues might think they were too focused on their families. This had been ingrained in her, that you had to prove your toughness as a woman. You had to overcompensate and talk about the substance of your work.
NORRIS: In the end, do you come to the conclusion that a woman candidate for higher office does have a harder row to hoe, that there still are many, many obstacles?
Ms. KORNBLUT: Oh, absolutely. It's hard for anyone to run for office, right? But for women, no one seems to have entirely cracked the code of how to present herself as a woman, what kind of woman she'll be who will both be taken seriously as an office holder but also accessible as a person.
In Hillary Clinton's case, she learned towards the end of the campaign to keep that balance. But from everyone I've spoken to, it seems that whoever's going to win someday, whatever woman is going to run for president and win, will be the kind of woman who's learned to walk that balance, to be tough but not too tough, to be a woman but not so much of a woman that she's diminished her credentials as a lawmaker.
NORRIS: Anne, before I let you go, I just want to ask you about this wonderful anecdote that you have at the end of the book, where you ask Rahm Emanuel, who is now the chief of staff at the White House, what it will take for a woman to run and win.
And when you're talking to him, he's fiddling with his BlackBerry. He's having a hard time answering what seems to be a pretty simple question that you put to him. Tell us about that scene, and help us understand what it says about the core question that you pose in your book.
Ms. KORNBLUT: Well, I'd gone to the White House to interview Rahm Emanuel, mostly about Nancy Pelosi, who I had also interviewed for the book. But I asked him, because he used to be the chief recruiter for the Democrats in the House, of candidates. So I thought he might know some hidden secret out there.
I said, you know, what's it going to take? How soon do you think it will be before a woman wins? And he was, frankly, stumped. And it took him a few minutes, and he didn't have an answer. And finally he said, well, you know, if we could elect Barack Obama, it shouldn't be that hard to find a woman and elect her.
But he didn't have a list of names. And as I went around the country asking other people the same question, very few people have a list of names. And so while there's a few names here and there, I would not at all be surprised if Janet Napolitano someday runs or Claire McCaskill; in Florida, Alex Sink, who's running for governor, might run someday. But really, it's only about a half-dozen names that people were able to furnish of women who might run.
So when it comes to the practical question of who will it be and when will that happen, I think it might actually be farther away than people think.
NORRIS: Anne Kornblut, thank you so much for talking to us.
Ms. KORNBLUT: Thank you so much for having me.
NORRIS: That's Anne Kornblut. Her book is called "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win."
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris. And we begin this hour with a look at politics and promises - specifically, presidential promises. Almost one year ago, President Barack Obama entered office with a vow to shake up business as usual in Washington and an ambitious agenda: passing a health care overhaul, fixing an ailing economy, improving America's image overseas and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
President BARACK OBAMA: Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious, and they are many. They will not make - be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.
(Soundbite of cheering)
NORRIS: That was President Obama on Inauguration Day. Historically, presidents have a day of pomp and celebration, and then they have to get down to the business of trying to keep all those promises they made in their campaigns. But Mr. Obama still has many promises to keep. He also has many miles to go before he sleeps. It's still early in his term.
But we're going to spend some time measuring his progress with our regular political commentators, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution, and David Brooks of the New York Times. Happy New Year to both of you.
Mr. DAVID BROOKS (New York Times): Happy New Year.
Mr. E.J. DIONNE (Washington Post, Brookings Institution): Happy New Year. Happy new decade.
NORRIS: Well, you know, as we begin this conversation, I want to look back at the previous decade and the close of the decade, and I'm wondering if President Obama entered the presidency with particularly steep challenges, since he talked so much about hope and change in his campaign.
E.J., does he enter this presidency with heightened expectations about his ability to meet all those promises?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, I think he entered the presidency with many people thinking he had miraculous powers, and that's very hard for anybody to live up to. He's somebody who was elected, just as you say, on these soaring promises of change and hope, but it was combined with a pragmatic style and a cool demeanor. And that will always make him, I think, someone very difficult for people to get a handle on. But I think once people got over the fact that no, he doesn't have miraculous powers, I think he has governed very much as he said he would in the campaign - this pledge to make change, but to use fairly traditional means if that was the way to get it.
So he may have a little less - sort of get a few less points than he did before on inspiration, but I think he is, broadly, who he promised to be.
NORRIS: Traditional means - but he came to Washington talking about really shaking up the system, and I want to actually tick through a few specific areas and talk about the promises he made and his progress in trying to actually meet those goals. David, because national security dominates the headlines right now, let's begin there. Some of the president's goals were fairly specific: ending the involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are a bit more opaque: making America safer in the face of terrorism. What will it take for him to credibly claim that he's made progress on both fronts?
Mr. BROOKS: Well, I think he's basically continued the Bush policies, closed Guantanamo - or at least promised to, not actually closed it, and will move some of the people to a prison, maybe, in Illinois. But it's basically continuity on the national security front, kept the Department of Homeland Security on Afghanistan, basically taking the strategy that was left to him by the Bush administration and now expanded it in Iraq, basically taking the SOFA, the agreement we had - that the Bush administration had to wrap down that war, accelerated it. So it's an evolutionary change, but I wouldn't say it's a dramatic change on national security.
NORRIS: E.J., on Guantanamo, specifically, does he change the timeline or shift the goal there? Because he's obviously not going to meet that one-year deadline.
Mr. DIONNE: They are saying that they won't shift the goal, and I think they are too locked in. Guantanamo has sort of come to stand for all of the changes he would make in the Bush security policies, where he would respect civil liberties more, where he would make us look better in the eyes in the world. But, clearly, his timeline is going to slip on that.
NORRIS: OK. As we tick through another promise, improving America's reputation overseas and its relationship with both allies and adversaries, what will it take for him to make the case that America has a new and perhaps more effective relationship with countries like Iran or Pakistan - in the news today, again, because of the suicide bombing at a volleyball game there?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, in Iran, I think Iran has made it very difficult on itself. I mean, he's going to have to shift his policy. He's gotten tougher and tougher in speaking about human rights and speaking in support of the opposition movement there. In Pakistan, there has been some progress where the Pakistanis really have become more aggressive against sort of Taliban-like, al-Qaida-like elements there. But that has always been the place that was going to be the biggest challenge of his presidency, and I think it still is.
NORRIS: And he can, you think at this point, make the claim that he's changed the temperature there?
Mr. DIONNE: Go ahead, David.
Mr. BROOKS: Well, he tried something. They said we'll be open to Iran. We're going to try to talk to them. A lot of them - a lot of the people within the administration knew that would fail, anyway. But they thought, OK, we'll give this gesture. After it fails, we'll have stronger position from which to try to impose sanctions. And that's essentially where we are. The policy's essentially failed. They knew it would fail. Now they're going to try impose sanctions. And to me, it's the crucial issue, because the day Neda was shot was the day that regime lost its legitimacy. And they're in a race between getting nuclear weapons and going through total collapse. And handling those two processes is going to be the most explosive relationship I think they face.
NORRIS: Now, we can't talk about presidential promises without talking about the health care overhaul. You both have been fairly optimistic that the president is going to meet his goal there. He might not do it in the timeline he - that he specifically laid out, but you think he's going to get there. Are you both still confident about this?
Mr. DIONNE: Yes.
Mr. BROOKS: Yes.
Mr. DIONNE: I think there's no doubt there's going to be a health care bill. And it's going to largely look like what he promised in the campaign. He's got two problems. One is he promised he wouldn't tax insurance benefits. He attacked McCain on that. He's going to end up taxing insurance benefits. The other, he said no mandate. He attacked Hillary Clinton on that. He's got some explaining to do. But broadly, this is going to be a big thing to celebrate.
NORRIS: Now, on the issue that actually helped propel him past John McCain in the campaign, the economy, he pledged to fix the economy and to take on all those titans on Wall Street. There are signs of recovery in the economy, but do voters feel like the president has actually made good on those promises? David?
Mr. BROOKS: Well, they don't give much credit for it, but he does deserve credit for this. I think the tail end of the Bush administration and the Obama administration really took us out of what was a complete freefall and got us to some sad equilibrium. And they deserve credit for that. The stimulus could have been designed better. But it did some good.
Mr. DIONNE: You know, and I agree with David on that. I do think he has developed a reputation - and his team has - of being too close to Wall Street. People are still very upset that all this money went into the banks. There seems to be no change in the behavior on the part of the titans of finance. And I think you're going to see a little bit more of a populist Obama, even though that's not always a natural fit for him, in the coming year. Because not only his base, but also a lot middle-income people say, wait a minute. Something is unfair out there. And I think he's going to start speaking to that unfairness.
NORRIS: We only have a few seconds, but is there an issue or a goal that maybe falls in the not-done-yet category or the been-there-haven't-finished-with-it-yet category that perhaps we should just call out before we say goodbye?
Mr. DIONNE: Education reform, I think, is going to be a huge issue in this year and in the coming years.
Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, I agree. Race to the Top is the single most successful program he's done. It's changing education reform in state after state.
NORRIS: But we don't hear so much about it.
Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. It's the - Rahm Emanuel calls it the invisible revolution, but it's really having bigger effects than almost anything else he's done, save health care.
NORRIS: Thanks to both of you, and Happy New Year.
Mr. BROOKS: Same to you.
Mr. DIONNE: Happy New Year.
NORRIS: Here's to a bountiful 2010.
That's E.J. Dionne with the Washington Post and David Brooks with the New York Times.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
What would New Year's Day be without predictions about the year to come? Well, commentator Andrei Codrescu offers this prediction: Things will go wrong.
ANDREI CODRESCU: There is talk now of a digital dark ages, brought about by either info-hating nomads or some accident. We are as vulnerable now as Europeans were in the 12th century. The Internet is one big place, just like the leftovers of the Roman Empire, ripe and ready for a gang of neo-barbarians. The difference is that it took the medieval dark ages years before they got started, while it might take but a few seconds to get us to the digital ones. It would take but a few keystrokes to start up the nuclear winter, the illiterate millennia or the digital dark ages.
The fact that they haven't yet occurred is one more proof that our angels are on the job. In Europe, back in the 1200s, they were sleeping. Now and then, the thought of how fragile we are hits me - not like an idea, but as a feeling. Tiny human being drives into big tree, or big wind sweeps up your house or river sucks you under. Or wireless quits.
All this happens all the time, but you don't notice it until it happens to 4,000 people at once, or a million or several million. And the more interconnected we become, the more likely it is that what happens to one can instantly happen to many. It amazes me that anything I see is around long enough for me to believe that it's actually there.
Many things are not, of course, still around after I've seen them, and I don't miss the ones that vanish before I had a chance to see and miss them. But enough of them are there long enough so I can call them real. I'm afraid to sleep for fear they'll vanish, so I watch and wonder. I know it's not firewalls that keep us safe. It's got to be angels.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: Andrei Codrescu edits Exquisite Corpse. That's a literary journal online at corpse.org.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
Raw food and molecular gastronomy, low carb diets and celebrity chefs - just a few of the food fads that were on the menu over the last decade. But come on, what did we really eat in the past 10 years - not just read about but actually put on our plates and into our stomachs?
For real answers about America's real dietary trends, we turn to Harry Balzer. He's vice president with the NPD Group, that's a consumer marketing research firm, and he specializes in studying what Americans eat and that's why we're talking to him. Welcome to the program and Happy New Year.
Dr. HARRY BALZER (Vice President, The NPD Group): Well, Happy New Year to you too, Michele.
NORRIS: So was there one specific thing that defined the American diet over the last decade?
Dr. BALZER: Well, if there is one that defines this decade it would have to be yogurt.
NORRIS: Yogurt?
Dr. BALZER: Yogurt would be the category or the food that has increased in our dietary habits more than any other food during the past 10 years.
NORRIS: Color me surprised.
Dr. BALZER: And it probably, if you think about your own behavior, I'll bet you start your day off a lot with yogurt or have it during lunchtime, or maybe have it as a dessert or a side dish or as a snack, more than you did probably 10 years ago.
NORRIS: That's true.
Dr. BALZER: It's one of those things that kind of sneaks up on you, but yet I think defines what Americans are really looking for from its food supply.
NORRIS: Well, now, is it because yogurt is something that's healthy or because it's convenient or because it now comes in all kinds of forms?
Dr. BALZER: Yes.
NORRIS: It's not just in tubs. It's in tubes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: It's frozen. It's...
Dr. BALZER: Say yes to all of those. It's very convenient. It's very individualized. You don't get a bunch of yogurt like you get a pizza pie and celebrate with everybody else. This is just for you. It's your own flavor. It has a health halo certainly surrounding it. It really does define what I think America wants from its food supply.
NORRIS: So beyond yogurt, what other shifts have we seen? Are there foods that have surged and others that have disappeared or all but faded away from the menu?
Dr. BALZER: Well, the item that has faded away - and I won't say it's disappeared, it's just not as popular - would be toast. But on the flip side of that, we've been eating more breakfast sandwiches, particularly in our car. A matter of fact, that would probably be one of the other trends that have gone on in this country is the use of drive-thru to feed ourselves more and more.
NORRIS: In the morning?
Dr. BALZER: Well, throughout the day, be honest with you. At lunchtime and the pickup and bringing home from restaurants, that's been a moving trend throughout this decade. Although, the one trend that I would say is another one that defined the decade, that was unlike the previous five decades going back to World War II, was the stopping of us using restaurants more.
We went for nearly five decades of every decade we could count that Americans would buy more meals at a restaurant at the end of the decade than at the beginning of the decade. But this will be the first decade in my lifetime where this has not occurred.
NORRIS: We have been talking about food but what about beverages? Was there a drink of the decade?
Dr. BALZER: Oh, the drink of the decade, without a question, and probably follows - identifies what America is or was, is bottled water.
NORRIS: I thought you were going to say coffee.
Dr. BALZER: It's a funny thing. The peak year for coffee consumption in this country was 1946. It's really not been increasing since 1946. It's been declining, if anything. But what has happened is we've shifted where we get that coffee. The first shift was getting more of it away from home and less likely to have it in home. No, no, actually the very first shift was not to end up having coffee at lunch or dinner. There was a time during the '50s and '60s where this country ended its meals with coffee. It's today you just have it at breakfast time.
NORRIS: So, you say though, that the actual beverage of the decade was bottled water. Take me back to the beginning of this decade, the year 2000.
Dr. BALZER: And again, this is probably something that's been going on for more than that - than just this decade, but it is by far the fastest growing beverage. And it was a category that also kind of surprised us. It's certainly not new. We know water. You walk away saying the only advantage it must have had was it was convenient. It was convenient to have a beverage always near you that didn't require any other special handling. It didn't have to be hot. It didn't have to be ice cold. It just had to be a liquid.
As the decade would progress, we'd find that people found ways of flavoring this thing, making it healthier, adding things to it. So that it really became kind of like what carbonated beverages were to begin with, and that's really the beverage it replaced.
NORRIS: Mr. Balzer, it's New Year's Day, so this is a good opportunity for us to look ahead and perhaps look into your crystal ball and talk a little bit about the trends of the future. What's the next decade hold?
Dr. BALZER: Well, the next decade is much more - it's going to be very difficult to predict. But I will tell you if we talk 10 years from now, we will talk about those things that made our lives easier. That's going to be the driving force 'cause that is the long-term trend in eating is - who's going to find the new way of preparing the meal for us? Who's going to find the easier way to deliver the food to us? Who's going to find the easier way to clean up the food for us?
What won't change is what we eat. I will tell you the number one food that we will eat in the year 2020 will be a ham sandwich. And I know that because I've been doing this for 30 years and I was hard pressed in 1980 to be asked what we'll be eating in 1990. When I discovered that the ham sandwich was the number one thing we ate in 1980, and I made a prediction that we'd be eating it in 1990. And guess what we ate in 1990 - a ham sandwich. What do you think it was in 2000 - a ham sandwich. 2010? A ham sandwich.
So do I have to go out on a limb to tell you that the number one food we'll be eating in this country in the year 2020 will be a ham sandwich? What I don't know is what will be the bread. There will be something new about the ingredients or the condiments that go on this. But when I ask you, what did you have? You'll say, oh, I had a ham sandwich.
NORRIS: Harry Balzer, it's been pleasure to talk to you. I think there's a ham sandwich in my future, so I'm going to let you go. Harry Balzer is the vice president with the consumer marketing research firm the NPD Group. Thanks so much for talking to us and Happy New Year.
Dr. BALZER: Happy New Year to you, too.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
The decade that just ended marked a big change in moviemaking. Films didn't just get big. They got digital big.
(Soundbite of movie)
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) Damn them!
(Soundbite of crashing)
(Soundbite of screaming)
NORRIS: Transformers, pirates, wizards, vampires, whole other worlds. Hollywood's gotten to the point where if a director can dream it, it can be brought to digital life on the screen.
But our critic Bob Mondello says he has a problem. Movie technology has gotten so sophisticated over the last decade that he says it's now tough for a critic to tell where an actor's performance stops and the work of hundreds of artists and digital technicians actually begins. And Bob joins me now to try to help us figure out what to do about that problem. Welcome to the studio, Bob.
BOB MONDELLO: Hi. It's good to be here.
NORRIS: Now, I know the movie "Avatar" is what got you thinking about all this. They've been talking about their motion-capture technology and how that's let them blend the actors with that technology. People were very excited about this movie, but you're saying this is a bad thing?
MONDELLO: No, no, no, no. It's wonderful for the audience. It's tough for a critic. I'm sitting there, and I'm trying to decide who's doing what. At Oscar time particularly, I'm going to have to say okay, well, that was a great performance.
Now, if I'm looking at somebody like, let's say, Meryl Streep...
NORRIS: In "Julie & Julia."
MONDELLO: ...in "Julie & Julia," I can judge whether that performance is a good performance. If I'm looking at a digital character who is 10 feet tall, has a wasp waist of maybe 15 inches and has a big, blue tail, I have a little more trouble judging whether the performer is acting well. And...
NORRIS: Now, for people who haven't seen the movie "Avatar," they don't necessarily know that you're talking about Zoe Saldana, the...
MONDELLO: Right, who is fantastic, I think, but I'm not absolutely certain that she is what's fantastic about the performance.
NORRIS: So when she - we're talking about Zoe Saldana when she's - when you see her on screen, and there are things that she does that are really quite subtle and almost endearing, sometimes almost a little bit scary, but you're wondering: Is that really her, or is that some digital technician?
MONDELLO: Right. I can actually tell you when I started having this problem, starting in 2002 when Gollum appeared in "Lord of the Rings." I couldn't tell anymore. Gollum was a character who's kind of this little ogre, and he is partly an actor who was acting with the motion-capture stuff and partly digital creation, but he's clearly not human.
(Soundbite of movie, "The Lord of the Rings")
Mr. ANDY SERKIS (Actor): (As Gollum) Must have the Precious. They stole it from us, sneaky little hobbitses.
MONDELLO: Now, in order to create him, director Peter Jackson took computer-generated images, CGI, and attached it to this motion capture of Andy Serkis. But what you end up with is this character who can't exist in real life. I mean, he's too gnarled and too small. It was one of those worrisome things. I think we really dodged a bullet that he didn't get nominated for an Oscar because if he had been, we'd have been trying to figure out back then who did what, which is kind of the problem.
NORRIS: Who'd get the statue?
(Soundbite of laughter)
MONDELLO: Exactly.
NORRIS: Now, this isn't something that's new, at least between the two of us. We have talked about this. I remember last year, we talked about "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Let's just listen for a minute before we actually talk about that film and the character Benjamin Button in that film.
(Soundbite of movie, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button")
Mr. BRAD PITT (Actor): (As Benjamin Button) I don't think I have worms. This is just how I am.
NORRIS: That was Brad Pitt, in case you didn't recognize that voice.
MONDELLO: Brad Pitt as a very little boy, which is weird because he's aging backwards there. So when he was a small child, he had a very old face. And in order to create that, they took another person's body and they superimposed Brad Pitt's features on this other person so that you're dealing with two sets of body English, kind of, and two sets of features, and it's all blended digitally. And that was a case, I mean, Brad Pitt was nominated for an Oscar. And...
NORRIS: Deservingly so, in your estimation?
MONDELLO: Well, I think it was a terrific performance, based mostly on the other scenes, where I could see Brad Pitt all the time and I was sure that he was doing it. So that was another one where I was - you know, this is a tricky problem, and it's a problem that we didn't have in the old days.
If you think just about makeup - take Margaret Hamilton in "The Wizard of Oz." She's got this enormous nose with a big wart on it. She is green. So it's not the color of the skin or the difference in the appearance that's getting me. It is the fact that I'm not sure I can see the performer.
NORRIS: Are they trying extra hard to make sure that you do see the performer? And I'm thinking specifically of "Benjamin Button," where they did try to make sure that - you know, Brad Pitt has very particular features, and there are certain expressions that you see in several of his films. And they made sure that you could see that in the character, even when he was a younger version of an older man. They made sure that when you saw that person, you could see Brad Pitt's unique features. Are they doing that with someone like you in mind?
(Soundbite of laughter)
MONDELLO: I don't know. I doubt that they have me in mind under any circumstances, but I think in "Avatar," they have gone way out of their way to do that. I mean, the characters really do look like the actors when you see them as Na'vi, because, you know, they're blue and they're 10 feet tall, but their faces are elongated. And something really interesting happens to the face.
And this is - here's my problem.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MONDELLO: I've got lots of problems with this, but here's the real one. In "Avatar," they've been very canny about this. They have made the faces elongated and beautiful. The figures are elongated and beautiful, and the eyes are enormous.
Do you remember Keane drawings, those - K-E-A-N-E? They had children with enormous...
NORRIS: With very big eyes.
MONDELLO: ...huge eyes. And you looked at them, and you thought they look so sad. And psychiatrists looked at that and said, well, the reason you're feeling like that is because they've infantilized the characters. They've made them look like babies, in a way, and that our reaction is to want to protect them.
Well, I think that's what they've done to the Na'vi. By making their eyes so big, they've made us want to protect them. Now, would I feel the same for Meryl Streep as Julia Child? She can't open her eyes as big as that.
NORRIS: So she can't amplify her emotions with some sort of digital technology. She's got to work with what God gave her.
MONDELLO: That's right.
NORRIS: Or maybe a makeup artist.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MONDELLO: And I think - you know, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. It's really wonderful that they can manipulate things like this, but it's tricky. And on some level, when I'm trying to pull the thing apart and say oh, well, that was wonderful, I'm not sure who I'm complimenting.
NORRIS: So this is a Bob Mondello bugaboo, or is this something that many movie critics talk about and wrestle with?
MONDELLO: Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think what's kind of interesting about it is that it's infecting so many different kinds of movies these days. If you look at, well, take "Happy Feet," a picture that is a big, animated cartoon about penguins, right? And they use Savion Glover's movements. They motion-captured him and translated that into penguins.
Well, having done that, you've got a penguin who's dancing like Savion Glover. They are moving the penguin closer to reality, in a way, at the same time that you're moving reality closer to animation by doing all of this. And where we are now is kind of right in the middle of that, and it's a brave new world, a brave new form, a brave new something. But I think it's a fascinating moment to be looking at film.
NORRIS: Always good to talk to you, Bob.
MONDELLO: And to you.
NORRIS: That's our film critic, Bob Mondello.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Montana is in line to become the third state to allow physicians to assist some people who wish to end their lives. The Montana Supreme Court ruled yesterday. It said there is nothing in state law to prevent doctors from prescribing lethal drugs to mentally competent, terminally ill patients.
NPR's Alix Spiegel reports.
ALIX SPIEGEL: Bob Baxter was in his 60s when the cancer came, lymphocytic leukemia. He had been a Marine, a truck driver, an outdoorsman, fiercely independent. But after almost a decade of fighting cancer, Baxter was unable to sit up or get out of bed without assistance. And so he approached his doctors. Baxter wanted a prescription that might end his pain by ending his life.
But Kathryn Tucker, the lawyer who argued Baxter's case, says that his doctors, though sympathetic, were hesitant to assist.
Ms. KATHRYN TUCKER (Director of Legal Affairs, Compassion & Choices): There had been a general understanding in the physician community in Montana that providing a patient like Bob Baxter with medication that the patient could ingest to bring about a peaceful death, that that could run afoul of Montana law, specifically the Montana homicide law.
SPIEGEL: So Baxter and his doctors sued, sued the state of Montana claiming that under Montana's constitution, Baxter had a right to die as part of his right to privacy and dignity. The lower court agreed. So the state of Montana appealed. And yesterday, Montana's Supreme Court issued its ruling about whether doctors in Montana can assist in death.
Ms. TUCKER: What the court said yesterday is that, yes, that that is something that a physician can do in Montana for a patient like Bob Baxter.
SPIEGEL: But yesterday's ruling wasn't a complete victory for Tucker's side. The Supreme Court declined to engage the broader constitutional privacy question and instead pointed to a Montana statute which allows terminally ill patients the right to refuse life-preserving medicines like ventilators, which is at least relatively good news for opponents of so-called assisted suicide.
The state attorney general's office was not available for comment. But Jeff Laszloffy, president of the Montana Family Foundation says he sees the ruling as a cup half full.
Mr. JEFF LASZLOFFY (President, Montana Family Foundation): What we were worried about was that the Supreme Court was going to uphold the lower court decision and say physician-assisted suicide is constitutional. And that would have been much more difficult to challenge. We would have to ramp up a constitutional amendment effort. Now all we have to do is go back into a legislature that for the most part is friendly to our side of the issue and just get them to put language in the Montana code that outlaws physician-assisted suicide. It's much easier to do.
SPIEGEL: But Kathryn Tucker argues that the ruling is still significant both for Montanans and nationally.
Ms. TUCKER: I think it's reflecting the growing trend among Americans generally to have this choice available.
SPIEGEL: As for Baxter, his legal case actually outlived him. Baxter died without assistance in December of 2008.
Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
(Soundbite of music)
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
Some encouraging news out of Iraq today - at least from a U.S. military perspective - for the month of December 2009, there were zero American combat death, a first since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Our Baghdad bureau chief, Quil Lawrence, joins us now to talk about this. And, Quil, we should point out that there were still over 200 Iraqi casualties among civilians and security forces, but zero U.S. combat death in December. Is that just good fortune or the result of a very real drawdown in U.S. forces?
QUIL LAWRENCE: Well, it's partly the drawdown. We've seen since June 30th when the Americans left the cities, there are just far fewer of them around, there are far fewer to target. They're going on less combat missions. And the insurgency here is much less active. We're having much lower number of attacks per day.
The attacks we have seen are against Iraqi government buildings, and those have been catastrophic. But in terms of American interaction, it's a much quieter war.
NORRIS: Let me ask you about the drawdown. The U.S. is scheduled to drawdown to less than half of its current forces of about 50,000 troops by August of 2010. Is that still on track or has the delay in the Iraqi elections changed the schedule?
LAWRENCE: That's a question we've been asking. General Ray Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces here in Iraq, spoke to reporters today and he had been saying that there would be an assessment, maybe 60 or 90 days after the election, to decide at what pace they would be drawing down troops. Well that - with this delay now, puts us into May.
Also speaking with him today was CENTCOM commander David Petraeus and he actually announced that there would be a speeding up of the troop withdrawal, specifically in Anbar province, which has been in the news recently. There was a double bombing there on Wednesday, which nearly killed the governor of the province. And it's sending a pretty clear message here that I think both Iraqis and American military are hearing that the U.S. is gaining momentum on this drawdown and the conditions on the ground really might not stop that.
NORRIS: Quil, before I let you go, speaking of sending a message, there are some news from Washington last night that are sure to have repercussions there in Iraq. The five Blackwater security guards accused of killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians back in 2007. All charges against them were dismissed. How is that news being received there in Baghdad?
LAWRENCE: Well, it's just trickling out. When the news was announced in Washington, it was about midnight New Year's Eve here in Baghdad. We were able to speak to some of the family members of those civilians who were simply stuck in traffic that day back in September of 2007 when the Blackwater guards open fire.
One father of a victim said that he hopes somehow the Iraqi government would still be able to bring these Americans to justice here. And the government of Baghdad has expressed an interest in that. Another relative actually broke down in tears on the phone with us, and he just said there was no justice and Iraqi lives just don't mean anything to the U.S.
Ray Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces here, spoke about that today.
General RAY ODIERNO (Commanding General, Multi-National Force, Iraq): I worry about it because, clearly, there were innocent people killed during this attack. It's heart-wrenching. We all know it was not U.S. soldiers, sailors and the Marines who did this. It was a private security company. What I worry about is will there be backlashes against private security companies that continue to operate here.
LAWRENCE: In fact, we've already seen that backlash as the Iraqis take over security here in Baghdad. Back in October, there were four of these private contractors who actually work for the U.S. Embassy who had a disagreement with some Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint and they were beaten, some of them within inches of their lives, before they were eventually turned over to the U.S.
NORRIS: We've been speaking to NPR's Baghdad bureau chief Quil Lawrence. Quil, thank you very much.
LAWRENCE: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. No, this isn't the "Tale of Two Cities," it's the tale of one state.
In 2009, Illinois beamed with pride at Barack Obama's inauguration; then in the same month, that pride turned to embarrassment when the state's governor, Rod Blagojevich, was impeached and removed from office.
NPR's David Schaper takes a look back at the year of Blagojevich in Illinois.
DAVID SCHAPER: If it was a Dickensian year in Illinois, then most of the state's residents probably agree that when it comes to their former governor, Rod Blagojevich, 2009 was probably not the age of wisdom and certainly was the age of foolishness.
(Soundbite of television program "Late Show with David Letterman")
Mr. DAVID LETTERMAN: Why exactly are you here? Honest to God, what...?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ROD BLAGOJEVICH: Well, you know, I've been wanting to be on your show in the worst way for the longest time.
Mr. LETTERMAN: Well, you're on in the worst way, believe me.
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH: I sure am...
SCHAPER: David Letterman summed up what many in Illinois and the rest of the country were likely thinking, as Rod Blagojevich hit the talk-show circuit just a month after being arrested on corruption charges.
Blagojevich is accused of trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder and engaging in what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called pay-to-play politics on steroids. Yet, this is what Blagojevich said of himself when asked on the "Today Show" his first thoughts when he was arrested.
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH: I had a whole bunch of thoughts, of course, my children and my wife, and then I thought about Mandela, Dr. King, Gandhi and tried to put some perspective in all of this.
SCHAPER: Not only did he compare himself to some of the great leaders of the world but to movie heroes, including Jimmy Stewart's character in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Blagojevich and his hair became punchlines on late night TV, "Saturday Night Live," and of course at Chicago's own Second City.
(Soundbite of rock opera, "Rod Blagojevich Superstar")
Second City Cast Members: (Singing) Rod Blagojevich superstar, are you as nuts as we think you are? A day of reckoning you will need...
SCHAPER: The Second City staged an entire rock opera based on Blagojevich and sold out virtually every performance.
Mr. ANDY SHAW (Executive Director, The Better Government Association): Illinois became a national laughingstock, an embarrassment.
SCHAPER: Andy Shaw is a longtime Chicago TV political reporter who now heads up the corruption-fighting nonprofit The Better Government Association.
Mr. SHAW: And Blagojevich fanned the flames with his cross-country circus act, going from one talk show to another and letting them muss with his hair.
SCHAPER: But Blagojevich didn't stop.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH: Hi, this is Rod Blagojevich. I'm filling in for Don Wade and Roma.
SCHAPER: Last spring, Blagojevich sat in for the morning hosts on Chicago talk radio station WLS, where he now has a Sunday afternoon show of his own. He later asked a federal judge to allow him to travel to Costa Rica to appear on a reality TV show. Many Illinoisans had other ideas.
Unidentified Woman: He should be lost on the "Lost" show, and then just lose him.
SCHAPER: The judge wouldn't allow it, so his wife Patty appeared on the reality show. Blagojevich wrote a book called "The Governor," and he hit the talk-show circuit again. He did other appearances, including one where he impersonated Elvis, and we're not done with him yet.
In 2010, he's scheduled to appear on Donald Trump's reality show, "The Celebrity Apprentice," and then, of course, there's his corruption trial set to begin in June.
Mr. SHAW: Well, this will be the biggest political circus we've ever seen in Chicago...
SCHAPER: Again, Andy Shaw.
Mr. SHAW: ...because he's a showman. And he's the sort that will gab on the way into trial and the way out of trial and provide a running commentary.
SCHAPER: Shaw says if there's any good to come from the Blagojevich scandal, it's that the state of Illinois now has, for the first time, limits on campaign contributions, a stronger Freedom of Information Act and other political reforms.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: Up next, the state of the glass ceiling after Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the race of 2008. Author Anne Kornblut, that's when we continue with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
I opened a CD that arrived at our office a couple of weeks ago, and when I put it on to listen I didn't recognize this song at all. See if you can get it.
(Soundbite of song, "True Colors")
Ms. CAROLINE HERRING (Singer): (Singing) You with the sad eyes, don't be discouraged. Oh, I realize it's hard to take courage...
KELLY: So, I didn't realize this was a big hit from my high school days - until I heard the refrain.
(Soundbite of song, "True Colors")
Ms. HERRING: (Singing) But I see your true colors shining through. I see your true colors and that's why I love you. So don't be afraid to let them show your true colors, are beautiful like a rainbow.
KELLY: That, of course, is Cyndi Lauper's classic '80s hit, "True Colors," but this time it's rendered anew by a singer from Mississippi named Caroline Herring. She spends about half her new CD taking ownership of familiar tunes like that. The other half she's filled with songs she's written herself - some personal, some gothic tales of the modern South.
Caroline Herring's new album is called "Golden Apples of the Sun," and she joins me now to talk about it from the studios of Georgia Public Broadcasting.
Thanks so much for coming in.
Ms. HERRING: Oh, it's my pleasure.
KELLY: Well, let me start with that song, "True Colors," because when we listen to it here we realized we had never really heard the words before. And was it the same for you? Had you really listened to the words before you sat down in that recording session?
Ms. HERRING: No. Not really. I mean, I suppose I had about 400 times, you know, listening to it on the radio but never in that way.
KELLY: Tell us a bit about how you arrived at this version.
Ms. HERRING: Well, I know it might seem a bit arrogant to take on songs like that and change the melodies. It was a fun, creative process for me. And I thought now I could never sing it like Cyndi Lauper did. I'm a folk singer. I don't have that range. I don't have that style. I think Cyndi Lauper's amazing and a real American original.
And so, I thought she wouldn't mind. In fact, I thought she'd like it if I changed things around. So, that's the direction that I took it and took other covers that I put on that record.
KELLY: Well, let me take you back to your roots a little bit. I learned that you sang in your church choir in Mississippi growing up.
Ms. HERRING: Yeah.
KELLY: And you grew up steeped in southern literature. I'm told your mother was a librarian and she used to prod you to read some of the southern writers she loved. Who's your favorite?
Ms. HERRING: Right now, I'm enamored of Eudora Welty because of her wonderfully funny stories. But I'm beginning to see just under the surface of all of that she tackles huge issues and issues I'm very familiar with; from being a woman in Mississippi or growing up in Mississippi to certainly issues of race and class.
And I had begun work on an album about Eudora Welty, short stories and photographs. I am still steeped in the South. I'm here in Atlanta, this bold new Southern city, and it's a great part of me, all the horrors and all the beauty and all of the great art that's been produced here.
KELLY: Caroline Herring, I want to ask about another song on this CD, inspired by art of a very different kind. And that is the work of a Mississippi artist named Walter Anderson.
(Soundbite of song, "Tales of the Islander")
Ms. HERRING: (Singing) We found a paradise and its own garden gate. Adam in a hat on a rowboat, phosphorescence in the wake. The squall has passed, and we're tied to the decay, but one day may the hurricanes come and carry us away. Carry us away...
KELLY: This song is called "Tales of the Islander."
Ms. HERRING: That's right. Walter Anderson was a Mississippi Gulf Coast artist and I grew up knowing about Walter Anderson and obtained my first Walter Anderson piece of art at age 16. So, I've always loved him and all Mississippians do. He worked in his family's pottery business by day and painted at night.
But when Walter Anderson died, his wife went into the cottage that he had always kept to himself, and in there she found thousands of pieces of artwork as well as murals on the four walls of the cottage representing sunrise, day, sunset and night. They were his cottage murals. And I based my song "Tales of the Islander" on those four walls.
KELLY: And the family had never known about them before.
Ms. HERRING: That's correct. Nobody had seen them until after he died.
KELLY: And we should note there's a bit of a sad coda to Walter Anderson's story. I know much of his work was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Ms. HERRING: That's true. A lot of it was but a lot remains and there's plenty to be seen.
(Soundbite of song, "Tales of the Islander")
Ms. HERRING: (Singing) Give me a sunset of lilac, gold and green gray skies. I'll give you spirals and zigzag lines. It's a magic hour of a halcyon day. And all of mankind stands there, barely awake.
KELLY: Well, the new record is beautiful but we would also be remiss if we let you go without at least asking you to sing live for us, and I know you brought your guitar. We wondered if you would sing for us a song from the new CD called "Abuelita" about your grandmother. Tell us about her.
Ms. HERRING: My grandmother Eleanor grew up in Texas and in Costa Rica, and she spoke fluent Spanish, of course. And after college, she decided she wanted to go to med school, and she was accepted to Tulane University, which was a big deal for anybody. But in the late '20s that was certainly a big deal for a woman, and she ended up doing some residency work in Mississippi, where she met my grandfather.
Unfortunately, for different reasons, my grandmother never did become a doctor, and they found him a job in Mississippi where they both lived out the rest of their lives and raised five girls. And my mom actually didn't even know that my grandmother spoke Spanish until long after my grandmother had died.
KELLY: Wow. She never spoke it at home at all.
Ms. HERRING: Never spoke it at home. And so I explored all of that in this song.
KELLY: All right. Well, we'd love to hear it. Let me let you get your guitar ready.
Ms. HERRING: Okay.
(Soundbite of guitar)
Ms. HERRING: Okay. This is "Abuelita."
(Soundbite of song, "Abuelita")
Ms. HERRING: (Singing) I should have known why I loved, driving through the cactus fields or wearing white leather gloves. Admiring the virgin, as she stands upon the moon. Waltzing behind a second line or harmonizing the gospel tunes. Abuelita underneath the trees of Costa Rica and her dark shored seas. They won't tell me about you, they don't want me to see. Abuelita, you're just like me.
KELLY: That's the song "Abuelita" from Caroline Herring's new album, "Golden Apples of the Sun." It's just beautiful.
Caroline Herring, thank you.
Ms. HERRING: Thank you so much.
KELLY: Looking for more music by Caroline Herring? Head to our Web site, npr.org/music. And while you're there, you can also sign up to get NPR's Song of the Day newsletter.
(Soundbite of song, "The Dozens")
Ms. HERRING: (Singing) I had a few more questions, I never knew to ask. You were feeling downhearted, the last time we parted. With a shuck of the white hair, life has changed a lot, you know. And I'm kind of scared of that, it bottoms out in seconds flat.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
The novelist Tracy Chevalier has made a career of bringing history to life. She's written books set in medieval France, in 18th century London and in 17th century Holland, specifically in the home of painter Johannes Vermeer.
That book tells the story of a Dutch teenager who became a maid in the Vermeer household � and the subject, as Chevalier imagines it, of one of his most famous works, "Girl with a Pearl Earring."
Well, Tracy Chevalier is back with a new historical novel. It's called "Remarkable Creatures." And at its center is a pioneering 19th century fossil hunter named Mary Anning. Chevalier encountered Mary Anning's story one day while visiting a small dinosaur museum in England.
Ms. TRACY CHEVALIER (Author, "Remarkable Creatures"): I had never heard of her. And I learned from the display that she was a working class girl who had lived in Lyme Regis, which is on the south coast of England, and had been fossil hunting with her father. And one day she and her brother discovered a huge specimen of what turned out to be an ichthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile about 200 million years old, had no idea what it was � thought it was a crocodile � and went on to discover another ancient marine reptile called a plesiosaur.
And she was really quite an amazing woman because she was completely self-taught, never had any formal education, was very poor, found these things for a living. And maybe most importantly to me as a novelist, she was struck by lightning as a baby and she survived it and lived to tell the tale.
And I loved that. When I found this out, I thought I have got to write a novel and I've got to start it off with a lightning strike.
KELLY: And you open the book with the line: Lightning has struck me all my life - just once it was real. I wonder if you would read a bit of that passage for us.
Ms. CHEVALIER: Sure.
(Reading) The lightning killed the woman holding me and two girls standing next to her, but I survived. They say I was a quiet, sickly child before the storm, but after it I grew up lively and alert. I cannot say if they're right, but the memory of that lightning still runs through me like a shiver. It marks powerful moments of my life: seeing the first crocodile skull Joe found, and finding its body myself; discovering other monsters on the beach; meeting Colonel Birch. Other times, I'll feel the lightning strike and wonder why it's come. Sometimes I don't understand, but accept what the lightning tells me, for the lightning is me. It entered me when I was a baby and never left.
I feel an echo of the lightning each time I find a fossil, a little jolt that says, yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach. That is why I am a hunter: to feel that bolt of lightning, and that difference, every day.
KELLY: So, that's the first chapter of your book, the way you open it. And, again, this is real person, Mary Anning, who really did survive a lightning bolt. And to be clear, this is a book set in the very first part of the 19th century, the early 1800s.
Ms. CHEVALIER: Yes.
KELLY: This is from, you know, a couple of generations before Darwin was writing "Origin of Species." And what she was finding, you know, the scientists were still really trying to understand the very concept of what a fossil was.
Ms. CHEVALIER: That's right. It was prime Jane Austen territory, if you like. It was early 19th century. Most people believed that the world was 6,000 years old and had been created by God in six days and set to run, and was exactly, if you looked around, it was exactly as God had made it. They took the Bible as literal history.
And they're - scientists were very slowly starting to question that. And when Mary discovered this specimen of an animal that clearly didn't exist now � first they called it a crocodile, but they really quickly realized it couldn't be because it has this huge bulbous eye like a doughnut, and it has paddles rather than claws and legs � and they quickly figured out it was an animal that was extinct. And that was like setting off a little bomb in this cozy idea that the world was 6,000 years old, because suddenly people realized, actually the world isn't just as God had made it.
There are animals that have died out, that have gone extinct, and that was a very new concept.
KELLY: So, Mary Anning, as she hunts for fossils on the beach, you write about how she would look at these things and she felt a sense of wonder and of awe at what she was seeing, but she didn't really understand it. The other narrator for your book, and the other central character, is a woman named Elizabeth Philpot, and she did understand it a bit more. Tell us about her.
Ms. CHEVALIER: Well, Elizabeth was like a little gift to me as a novelist. When I started researching about Mary's life, I kept hearing about this woman named Elizabeth Philpot who became a very good friend of Mary's. And they used to go out fossil hunting on the beach every day.
And Elizabeth was 20 years older than Mary, a middle-class woman who had moved with two sisters down to Lyme Regis from London in 1805. And they never married, and they became quite interested in fossils. But I thought Elizabeth was perfect because when I was looking into Mary's life, I thought it's going to be very difficult to tell this story only from Mary's point of view. Because her point of view is necessarily limited because her experience is limited. She hardly ever left Lyme Regis, and she never had any formal education.
And so, I needed a voice. I needed somebody who could in a way be the reader standing, watching the person who's the genius at work and commenting and thinking about them. So, it's a book that becomes about - more about their developing relationship. It's about fossils but it's also about friendship. And in a way, this book tries to answer that question, what do women do who don't find the Mr. Darcy of the Jane Austen novels? What do they do when they don't get married? What is there for them in this society that expects them to marry?
KELLY: Mary Anning not someone that most people will have heard of today, certainly not for reading your novel. She did leave one legacy, though, that lasts and that's something that may be familiar to children, a saying that you discovered, we think was based on her.
Ms. CHEVALIER: There is a tongue twister: she sells seashells by the seashore. And I think that was created in 1908, supposedly as a tribute to Mary Anning, who sold mostly fossils, but she did indeed sell seashells by the seashore. And the funny thing was (unintelligible)...
KELLY: And you still can't say it three times fast.
Ms. CHEVALIER: Yeah. I was originally going to name the book "She Sells Seashells," and then I thought there's no way I'm going to do that because I'm going to have to say it so many times and I'll never be able to do it.
KELLY: Do you feel any pressure from having had such a huge success with "Girl with a Pearl Earring" relatively early in your career, knowing that you're going to have a really big audience no matter what you write, a lot of people will read it?
Ms. CHEVALIER: I'll tell you, what I feel pressure most is getting things right. Most people aren't going to read a biography of Mary Anning or read scientific books about her. They're going to read this novel and they're going to think that's exactly how it happened. I had that feeling after I wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring." People took it as if that was what really happened with Vermeer the painter, and that's how the painting came about, when actually I made most of it up.
And I had no idea that the book was going to have the success it did. And so, afterwards, it was a real shock. And ever since then, as I write books about things that really happened, I have to be very careful. So, I definitely feel the pressure of being in a way like Mary Anning's representative, and I need to get it right as best I can.
KELLY: Tracy Chevalier, speaking to us about her latest novel, "Remarkable Creatures." Thank you so much.
Ms. CHEVALIER: Thank you very much.
KELLY: You can read an excerpt from the book about the discovery that launched Mary Anning's career as a fossil hunter at our Web site, NPR.org.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz is away. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
Today, President Obama came right out and said what many people have suspected - there's a direct link between al-Qaida and the man who tried to bomb that Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day.
President BARACK OBAMA: It appears that he joined an affiliate of al-Qaida, and that this group - al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula - trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.
KELLY: Nowhere is the story of that attack being tracked more closely than the place we're about to take you. It's in McLean, Virginia, and it's called the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center.
We are now on the floor of the operations center, up on a big, stainless steel balcony looking out - it's about a 40-foot ceiling in here, and we're looking down on, let's see, maybe a couple of dozen analysts. They've each got three or four computer screens up, monitoring big screens on the wall. And this is 24/7, looks like this.
Mr. MICHAEL LEITER (Director, National Counterterrorism Center): This is 24/7. We have secure video teleconferences at 1 a.m. every night where people sit down - what do you see? What have you seen over the past eight hours? And this never stops.
That's Michael Leiter. He's the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, which puts him right in the middle of the controversy about how a Nigerian man was able to walk onto a U.S.-bound plane with a bomb sewn under his clothing.
Teams from NCTC are briefing the president twice a day on that incident. About 600 people work there. They all have top secret security clearance. Our visit to the NCTC came right before the attack, a relatively calm day, so I didn't get to ask about it. But I did get to ask Michael Leiter about how he approaches his job and how he ended up in the counterterrorism world. Turns out, after college, he joined the Navy and flew EA-6B Prowler jets over Bosnia and Iraq.
You flew for a few years and then in '97 started at Harvard Law School.
Mr. LEITER: I did.
KELLY: And then you went on a clerked for Justice Breyer...
Mr. LEITER: I did.
KELLY: ...at the Supreme Court.
Mr. LEITER: I was there on 9/11, actually.
KELLY: Oh, really? At the court itself?
Mr. LEITER: At the court. Interesting experience of the justice was actually in India, but we were in chambers and we watched it on TV. And next time I looked outside, there were hundreds of people streaming down East Capitol Street, running from the Capitol. And then the Supreme Court police were running through with their shotguns saying, everyone, run, run. And our entire chambers ended up in my basement apartment on Capitol Hill, huddling there for the day as the reports continued to stream in.
KELLY: I mean, for many of us, that was the first real experience of terrorism touching our lives in a concrete way. Was it for you?
Mr. LEITER: I think it was. Even in my Navy time, I never focused on terrorism. I obviously lived in and around New York during the first bombing of the World Trade Center. I remember going to my senior prom in the World Trade Center. I actually was sworn into the Navy in the World Trade Center. So I hadn't given a lot of thought before 9/11, although, obviously, pieces of it. And then when it occurred, it hit very close to home for me.
KELLY: Now, Mike Leiter's job is trying to protect the U.S. from another 9/11. The room where we sat down to talk is where President Obama visited soon after he assumed office to see for himself how the effort is going.
Mr. LEITER: President Obama sat roughly right where you are.
KELLY: Just to describe the conference room a little bit, we're at a table with, what, maybe 15 chairs or so around it, screens that can come up so you can see people who are sitting all over the country and around the world if you need to. And in a way, this is kind of a metaphor for what you all are doing here. It's getting the 16 U.S. spy agencies and a bunch of others to talk to each other, share what they know.
Mr. LEITER: That's exactly right. I think before 9/11, one of the very fair criticisms of the U.S. government was there was a whole lot of information out there, but people weren't communicating with one another. Our job is to make sure we know where that information is and the people who need to have it to act on it, see it as soon as possible.
KELLY: Of course, in the days since I talked with Leiter, this very issue has become intensely controversial. We now know U.S. spy agencies had intelligence that might have prevented the attempted Christmas Day bombing, intelligence that was not put together, not shared with the right people.
Here's how an editorial in today's New York Times put it, quote: "Either the National Counterterrorism Center didn't get all of the information it was supposed to get - or it utterly failed to do its job," end quote.
When we spoke to him, Leiter insisted that a lot of progress has been made, that the U.S. is safer than in the days before 9/11. He says it's about vigilance, day by day, hour by hour.
Mr. LEITER: I usually get here around 6:45. I start my day taking the same brief that the president takes - the president's daily brief, and we walk through that with a special focus on counterterrorism. I then spend that next hour or so looking at any terrorist event or any movement of terrorist operatives or any intelligence we have from anywhere in the world walking through that in some detail with my staff. And then it's a series of many, many meetings.
KELLY: And that's a typical day. If something big is happening, if there's a big arrest, or if there's a, you know, a bomb goes off somewhere in the Middle East, does your whole schedule get turned upside down?
Mr. LEITER: I just take my little schedule card and I rip it up...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. LEITER: ...and it ends up being a different set of meetings that any of us have planned for. And certainly, over the past four months, with some of the arrests that we've seen within the United States, we've had a lot of those days where you just rip up your card and start again.
KELLY: You mentioned homegrown cases...
Mr. LEITER: Yes.
KELLY: ...and how we seem to see an uptick in recent months. How come?
Mr. LEITER: Well, first, I would say this isn't entirely unpredicted. I think for many years, we've looked at the ways in which al-Qaida and associated movements have started to shape their message to appeal more to Western audiences - using slicker graphics, using English, using other Western European languages.
And we've obviously seen this trend in the United Kingdom, to some extent in Germany, Spain, other places. We have never looked at the American population as being immune to that. We just saw them, and I think still appropriately so, as being more resistant to it. So it first is not a surprise, I would say. And second, it still is not that widespread. The question is, is it becoming more widespread? And I think it's still probably a little too early to say.
KELLY: How worried should we be about what we seem to see this trend of Americans becoming radicalized here? Americans, U.S. residents - I mean, you can pick through the cases just in these past few months that have come to public attention of Najibullah Zazi, David Headley, five Americans detained in Pakistan. Is this something you think we're going to see more of?
Mr. LEITER: I think it's always difficult for someone in my position to answer whether or not the public should be worried. I think the public should undoubtedly be aware, and the public and state and local governments and the federal government have to do things to try to minimize the likelihood of this occurring.
I don't actually want people running around all day being worried that their neighbor or their friend is a radical terrorist because the likelihood of that is still incredibly small.
KELLY: Should we take some heart in the fact that a lot of these people coming to light don't actually seem to be that competent, that far along in what they were trying to execute?
Mr. LEITER: I think we have been lucky so far that the people who've been radicalizing the United States are not necessarily the best and the brightest. But I don't think we can take much comfort in that. First of all, you often don't have to be a genius to perpetrate some really horrific acts of violence. You have to have access to certain tools and you can do it. You don't need a Ph.D. to hurt a lot of people.
Second, over time, we see in all terrorist groups and in all situations of radicalization, people getting better. They learn from the mistakes of others. And slowly but surely, those capabilities will improve, and it will be harder and harder for us to detect some of them.
KELLY: So again, I sat down with Michael Leiter before the attempted bombing on Northwest Airlines flight 253. But I did ask about another recent episode, the shooting rampage in November at Fort Hood.
When something like that happens, I mean, and the job that you have, do you just feel it in your gut? I mean, is it hard not to take something like that personally when it - when something like that happens?
Mr. LEITER: I think it's impossible not to. And in both the successes and those cases that we don't stop, we've got to look internally and say, what could we have done differently to improve our chances of stopping this? We're not going to stop every attack. Americans have to very much understand that it is impossible to stop every terrorist event. But we have to do our best, and we have to adjust based on, again, how the enemy changes their tactics.
KELLY: What keeps you awake at night? What is it that worries you most? Because this seems like it would be a very worrying job.
Mr. LEITER: There are really two things: the most sophisticated threat we face still comes from core al-Qaida in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. There's no doubt in my mind - and I think with the arrest of Najibullah Zazi in September of this year, after he went to New York from Denver, I think that is the sort of thing that is very difficult to detect and makes me nervous every day and every night have we found that individual here in the United States.
The second thing that absolutely also keeps me up at night, which is different and probably not as sophisticated, but it's the homegrown threat, and it is so very, very difficult in an open democracy where there is relatively easy access to a lot of tools that can be used for both good purposes and for terrorism. It is very, very difficult to find an individual who, for a variety of reasons, suddenly believes that he is a warrior in the name of al-Qaida.
KELLY: Mr. Leiter, thank you.
Mr. LEITER: It's my pleasure. Thanks very much.
KELLY: Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He can add another item to the list of things keeping him awake at night: the apparent determination of al-Qaida branches in places like Yemen to strike directly at the U.S. mainland.
Leiter has not spoken publicly since the attempted bombing on Christmas Day. He's given his first statement to NPR. Here it is. Quote: "The failed attempt to destroy Northwest flight 253 is the starkest of reminders of the insidious terrorist threats we face. While this attempt ended in failure, we know with absolute certainty that al-Qaida and those who support its ideology continue to refine their methods to test our defenses and pursue an attack on the homeland."
Mike Leiter continues: Our most sacred responsibility is to be focused on our mission: detecting and preventing terrorist attacks from happening on our soil and against U.S. interests. The American people expect and deserve nothing less.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
President Obama has made some major changes in the past year to this country's Afghanistan strategy, promising to triple the number of troops there and to focus on counterinsurgency techniques.
But when it comes to global AIDS policy, the president has pretty much stuck to the blueprint laid out by the Bush administration. And for some people dedicated to fighting AIDS, that's a concern.
NPR's Brenda Wilson reports.
BRENDA WILSON: Nearly $14 billion were spent on the global AIDS epidemic in 2009 with the U.S. contributing about half of that money. That's far more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent a decade ago. It means that millions of people in developing countries now get anti-AIDS drugs.
But that's made U.S. Global AIDS Ambassador Eric Goosby's job harder.
Ambassador ERIC GOOSBY (U.S. Global AIDS): We are constantly increasing the number of individuals that are alive and continuing to use services. And it is a growing crescendo kind of economic burden that the United States and the countries are learning how to accommodate.
WILSON: That strategy may have worked well getting millions of people into treatment, Goosby says. But it's neither efficient nor sustainable to continue to deal with AIDS as if it is an emergency.
Amb. GOOSBY: One that is completely dependent on offshore resources and not embedded in the public system of the country runs the risk of being ephemeral and dependent on how steady and reliable those resources remain.
WILSON: And the recent global recession has threatened both the steadiness and reliability of that kind of funding. Instead of relying on one program, such as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR, Goosby says the U.S. has a new five-year strategy that would help low and middle income countries build their own health care systems that incorporate international health programs.
Amb. GOOSBY: Taking the PEPFAR, the TB, the malaria, the vaccine, the maternal to child health, family planning, reproductive health, platforms, pull them together to actually really create a central package of primary care services.
WILSON: Talk like this worries AIDS advocates who see the administration broadening the global health agenda without putting much more money in. As it now stands, only half of the people who need drugs are getting them.
Christine Lubinski of the Infectious Diseases Society of America thinks the president chose the right person for the job but put him in an impossible position.
Ms. CHRISTINE LUBINSKI (Vice President for Global Health, Infectious Diseases Society of America): I happen to feel they made a very good choice. A man who's been an amazing advocate and provider of HIV treatment, and now may be faced with telling all of these countries they need to do more with less. At the same time, you know, tens of thousands of very sick people are knocking on the door asking for treatment.
WILSON: That's where we are now more than 25 years into the epidemic with no end in sight. In 2031, the epidemic will be 50.
Robert Hecht, a development expert with AIDS 2031, recently did some projections on how to spend AIDS money to get the best results.
Mr. ROBERT HECHT (Development Expert, AIDS 2031): Smart prevention today, like male circumcision or preventing the transmission from infected mothers to their babies, reaching discriminated, stigmatized groups like men having sex with men, or injecting drug users in certain countries, if the money is concentrated in those kinds of areas, we can both slow down the number of new infections and can lower the costs of treatment in the future.
WILSON: In fact, targeting prevention is a key part of the administration's global AIDS strategy, one that it says developing countries will need to buy into if they ever want to get the epidemic and its cost under control.
Brenda Wilson, NPR News.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
When it opens on Monday, the Burj Dubai, that's Arabic for Dubai Tower, will officially become the tallest building in the world. It's been described as an architectural icon, also as a monumental folly, and an impossibly lanky beanstalk skyscraper.
For that last description, we're indebted to Christopher Hawthorne, who writes about architecture for the Los Angeles Times.
And, Christopher Hawthorne, tell us how tall is the Burj Dubai.
Mr. CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE (Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times): Well, the official number, believe it or not, is still a secret. Best we can tell, it's about 2,600 feet, which is just about half a mile tall. It's about 1,000 feet taller than the CN Tower in Toronto. It just almost looks endless when you stand at the base and look up at it.
KELLY: You are an architecture critic, tell me, does this building work? Aside from its incredible height, does it work aesthetically?
Mr. HAWTHORNE: You know, typically, the buildings that are trying to set the mark for tallest structure in the world are not particularly notable for their architecture. This building actually, I think, is rather elegant. It is very massive at the base and then it gets more slender as it goes up. And so, the impression that it gives when you're standing some distance away is that it's remarkably slender and almost delicate, which is surprising, given that it's about a half mile tall.
KELLY: Well, let me inject two words into this conversation: Dubai world. I mean, we know the economy is in deep trouble, it's billions of dollars in debt, and yet they are debuting this very glamorous tower. How should we square that?
Mr. HAWTHORNE: Well, the timing of the debut is pretty awkward to say the least. The fact that it's opening in the midst of all these concerns in Dubai about the collapse of the real estate market and, really, the fate of the entire economy makes it a pretty complex architectural symbol as these things go.
There already have been lots of comparisons, given it's location to the Tower of Babel, lots of descriptions of it as a kind of folly, as you suggested, and a kind of monument to megalomania and to hubris to overconfidence, all of those things. And for me, one of the most striking things about it is that, as far as we can tell, it opens and will probably be mostly empty.
KELLY: So they built it and the challenge now will be to fill it.
Mr. HAWTHORNE: The challenge will be to fill it. And it's likely to be, I would guess, several years before they even come close to doing so.
KELLY: I assume that across the board, building in Dubai must have screeched to a halt this past year. Is that right?
Mr. HAWTHORNE: It really did. And when I was there, what was really striking was visually it looked, at least to judge from all of the construction cranes that were dotting the skyline, it looked like a place that was still expanding. But then as you stopped to listen, you notice that there was almost no sound coming from those cranes. They were all stopped and all silent.
KELLY: All silent.
Mr. HAWTHORNE: And so it really did come to a screeching halt. And it was remarkable, even when I was there in the spring, how dramatic the collapse was even at that point. And then, of course, toward the end of the year, we all became familiar with Dubai World and its troubles.
KELLY: Well, and I gather there's something of a history to this, countries racing to build incredibly tall buildings and then having huge epic financial troubles. I guess one example you could point to would be the Empire State Building. And then we saw, of course, the Wall Street crash.
Mr. HAWTHORNE: Right. The race to build the tallest building in the world was always complicated symbolically. The effort always has to do more with symbolism, more with making a kind of mark and making a splash than really filling some kind of market need in whatever city or country you're talking about.
And that's been true back to the days when the United States was producing the tallest buildings in the world. But it also raises a question of the degree to which architectural ambition has migrated out of the United States, out of cities like New York and to places in Asia and in the Middle East.
KELLY: Americans aren't trying to build the biggest buildings anymore.
Mr. HAWTHORNE: We're not even coming close. We don't have that kind of ambition. One could say maybe it's not significant to us in the same way. Particularly, we've seen China really trying to make a mark with really ambitious avant-garde architecture, like the buildings they've produced in 2008 to mark the summer Olympics.
And that sort of ambition has left the United States and gone elsewhere. But part of what makes that ambition possible, I think it has to be said, is the kind of government, like the one in Dubai, like the one in China, where these kinds of projects can be done essentially by Fiat. There's not the kind of environmental review, there aren't the kind of obstacles that there are to building in American cities.
KELLY: Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. He's been telling us about the Burj Dubai, which will officially become the tallest building in the world when it opens on Monday.
Christopher Hawthorne, thanks for taking the time.
Mr. HAWTHORNE: Thanks very much.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
Political intrigue in Afghanistan today, the parliament rejected more than two-thirds of President Hamid Karzai's cabinet nominees. Only seven of his choices were approved. Among them, the current interior, defense and finance ministers, all of whom are supported by Afghanistan's international partners, especially the United States.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has been tracking developments in Kabul.
And, Soraya, welcome to the show.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Hi. How are you, Mary Louise?
KELLY: Hi. We're great here. Thank you. So tell us what exactly happened there today.
NELSON: Well, you have to picture the slowest vote counting process in history at least that I've experienced. I mean, all day long, you had members of parliament filling out pieces of paper, sending them forward and then they were all counted by hand, basically. So this process took all day long. And at the end of it, 17 out of 24 nominees that President Hamid Karzai had put forward were rejected. I mean, this was such a resounding blow for him. And among the people who were rejected were the sole female nominee for the Women's Affairs Ministry, as well as Ismail Khan, who is a former warlord and currently heads the power and water ministry.
KELLY: And was this unexpected? I mean, what were the lawmaker's objections to the picks that President Karzai had settled on?
NELSON: Well, certainly, I think this reflects a lot upon the relationship between President Karzai and parliament, which has been very difficult and has gotten worse as time has gone on. I mean, the people in parliament feel that Mr. Karzai plays too much to warlords, that he plays too much to the ethnic factor, in other words, to his ethnic Pashtun factor. And also, they felt that there was a reflection of bribery and corruption here in the nominees.
What was interesting, though, is that most of the ministers that were approved, in fact, were people that the West supported, including the defense minister and interior minister.
KELLY: And how big a setback will this be for President Karzai?
NELSON: Well, certainly, politically, this is embarrassing for him. But I think there's a - in the bigger picture, this is also very bad for Afghanistan because this is certainly a year where there has to be significant progress in getting the government connected to the people and providing services and making sure that there's local governance - 80 percent of the people live in rural areas and they really need - have no sense of their government. And having this delay go on is going to make it difficult to do any of the things that are needed to bring people back into a hopeful situation and to get them to be connected to their government.
KELLY: And does he have to start from scratch now, Soraya, put together another slate of names? I mean, how long might this delay go on?
NELSON: This - there is no indication yet as to when he's going to bring forth new nominees or when the parliament might actually vote on it. They were supposed to go into winter recess, so that could delay things even further. And certainly, this schism, this separation that exists between the two sides here - President Karzai's government, as well as the parliament - I mean, this is going to require some repair because it's unlikely that other candidates will get quickly approved.
KELLY: And meanwhile, I understand that they have now set a date for parliamentary elections.
NELSON: Yes. The Independent Election Commission came out today and said May 22 is the date that is constitutionally mandated to hold these parliamentary elections. They've also asked for $50 million from the Western community to be able to hold these elections. They do have some leftover money from the last election - about 70 million, but they need extra, so they're going to be asking. But this is really seen as an opening salvo. I mean, it's not - the debate is not over here because the West really does not want elections held, given the security situation, given the vast amount of fraud that existed last time. But at this stage, the election has been announced for May 22.
KELLY: I presume if last year's presidential elections are any indication, they're going to have a lot of work cut out for them to make these go smoothly.
NELSON: Absolutely.
KELLY: NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Kabul.
Thanks, Soraya.
NELSON: You're welcome.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. The way America teaches its teachers is under fire. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been leading the charge with a series of speeches calling for education schools to reinvent themselves.
Secretary ARNE DUNCAN (Department of Education): The programs are heavy on educational theory and too light on developing core area knowledge and clinical training under the supervision of master teachers.
KELLY: Duncan says it's crucial to change now, as schools prepare to replace a wave of retiring baby boomer teachers.
NPR's Larry Abramson reports on one university trying to rebuild its teacher training program by taking a page from doctors.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Deborah Ball says most professions are clearly defined. We know, she says, what a lawyer or a doctor has to be able to do, same for a plumber or a hairdresser.
Ms. DEBORAH BALL (Dean, School of Education, University of Michigan): We expect people to be reliably able to carry out that work. And we don't seem to have that same level of either expectation or requirement around teaching.
ABRAMSON: As dean of the education school at the University of Michigan, Ball is trying to change that. She and her faculty have taken apart their training program and then reassembled it, trying to figure out what skills teachers really need. The Teacher Education Initiative, as their overhaul is known, will cut the number of classes students must take, and it will turn time in the classroom into an experience that is tightly focused on problem solving.
Ms. BALL: Imagine the difference between learning about child development, which is unquestionably helpful, and learning how to have a sensible interaction with a child, which permits you to know exactly what's going wrong right now with that child's reading, or why is this error occurring over and over again in math. That's actually being able to do something with that knowledge.
ABRAMSON: Stress what teachers have to do, not simply what they have to know.
Professor Robert Bain says when the effort is finished, the education program will no longer be a series of courses students have to take.
Professor ROBERT BAIN: But rather a program that's building on these experiences, much again like most professional schools, like a good med school or a law school.
ABRAMSON: So the university has picked up an idea from medical school: rounds.
Mr. STEVE HUDOCK (Teacher, North Middle School): Is it possible for the readings to be about the same length?
Unidentified Woman #1: Yeah.
Unidentified Woman #2: Sure.
ABRAMSON: You can see the idea in action at North Middle School in Belleville, Michigan. Teacher Steve Hudock is talking to four University of Michigan student teachers before seventh and eighth graders arrive for a class on comparative religion.
(Soundbite of people talking)
ABRAMSON: This is one of several schools these budding teachers will visit as they learn to analyze various teaching problems in different settings. Here, it's how to deal with students in small groups. Professor Bob Bain says before class, he demonstrated how the teachers in training might approach this challenge.
Prof. BAIN: What their job is, is to practice the experience with - of actual students, but then also looking to see how Mr. Hudock, a skilled teacher, does exactly the same sorts of things. Then on Thursday, they'll debrief.
Ms. STEPHANIE SMITH(ph) (Student Teacher): I see a connection between Buddhism and Shintoism. What connection do we see here?
ABRAMSON: Teacher-in-training, Stephanie Smith, is leading a group of six students trying to understand the relationship of Shintoism to Buddhism in Japan.
Ms. KATIE WESTIN(ph) (Student Teacher): That's great, Markie(ph). So...
ABRAMSON: Student teacher, Katie Westin, says that when she compares notes with teaching students in other programs, she notices a big difference.
Ms. WESTIN: We take on more of an interactive role, I think, than some of the other programs do because we actually lead lessons, and we get to work with the students in group activities like the one we're doing today.
ABRAMSON: Once the class is over, the group sits down with Hudock and talks in a focused way: What worked? What didn't? Steve Hudock says this is a lot different than the student teaching experience he had 15 years ago.
Mr. HUDOCK: I set up my own experiences, contacted teachers, sat and observed on the sideline. I didn't really get to interact with students.
ABRAMSON: There's a good reason the folks at the University of Michigan are making these changes: Their very reason for being has been called into question. Some studies have shown that teachers who get on-the-job training do about as well as those who went to teachers' colleges. Dean Deborah Ball says training programs need to show they can do a better job of equipping the huge number of teachers needed in the coming years.
Ms. BALL: What we need to be more responsible about is not just the recruitment problem, which I think is important, but the training problem, what we equip people with before they do it.
ABRAMSON: The medical rounds model is a popular one among education reformers, but it is clearly a lot of work. And it requires plenty of coordination to move students in and out of different schools. It may be difficult to scale this model up to train the quarter-million new teachers who graduate every year.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
As soon as films learned how to speak, they just had to sing. From the very first talkie in 1927, all the way through the 1970s, the musical lit up the silver screen.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Woman: Goodbye.
(Soundbite of film, "Meet Me in St. Louis")
Ms. JUDY GARLAND (Actor): (As Esther Smith) (Singing) Meet me in St. Louis, Louis.
(Soundbite of film, "Singin' in the Rain")
Mr. GENE KELLY (Actor): (As Don Lockwood) (Singing) I'm singing in the rain.
(Soundbite of documentary, "That's Entertainment")
Unidentified People: (Singing) That's Entertainment.
(Soundbite of film, "Mary Poppins")
Ms. JULIE ANDREWS (Actor): (As Mary Poppins) (Singing) Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down...
KELLY: Such great stuff. But in the '80s and '90s, the film musical basically disappeared. That all changed this past decade. Think "Hairspray," "Chicago," "Mama Mia," "Dreamgirls," also "Sweeney Todd," "Phantom of the Opera" and, fittingly, one of the last movie releases of the decade was a musical, "Nine."
Our film critic Bob Mondello joins us once again to take a look back at the decade gone by.
Hello, Bob.
BOB MONDELLO: It is good to be here.
KELLY: All right. So before we get to these past 10 years, tell us, why was there such a drop-off? Why just a handful of movie musicals in the '80s and '90s?
MONDELLO: Well, because the ones at the very beginning of the '80s were terrible, which helps a little bit.
KELLY: Get off to a bad start, yeah.
MONDELLO: My theory is, if you think about it, in 1980, '81, this other thing happened. We started watching music in a different form, music videos on TV.
KELLY: MTV.
MONDELLO: Exactly. And so, I think that because we had this other way to look at it, it wasn't necessary to have the whole long thing with stories.
KELLY: But what happened - because you're saying these type of musicals made a big comeback in the last 10 years. Well, we still have music videos out there today.
MONDELLO: Right. But there was something that happened in Hollywood, which was that they made this little musical called "Moulin Rouge," and it made lots of money. That was in 2001. And it was a story set in 1899 with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. And Ewan McGregor was writing a musical, and as you will hear - I'm about to play a clip - he was not entirely in period.
(Soundbite of film, "Moulin Rouge")
Mr. EWAN McGREGOR (Actor): (As Christian) (Singing) All you need is love.
Ms. NICOLE KIDMAN (Actor): (As Satine) A girl has got to eat.
Mr. McGREGOR: (As Christian) (Singing) All you need is love.
Ms. KIDMAN: (As Satine) She'll end up on the street.
Mr. McGREGOR: (As Christian) (Singing) All you need is love.
Ms. KIDMAN: (As Satine) (Singing) Love is just a game.
Mr. McGREGOR: (As Christian) (Singing) I was made for loving you, baby. You were made for loving me.
MONDELLO: Isn't that nice? I mean, it was really kind of fun what they were doing with it. They used a whole bunch of other songs, big hit songs, and turned it into a lovely collection of music videos, in a sense, and it was big and splashy and gorgeous, and the audience bought it.
KELLY: Gorgeous to watch. And that kind of opened the floodgates, or we could put it apr�s Moulin Rouge le deluge.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MONDELLO: Yes. And a lot of those pictures - the ones you mentioned at the very beginning - went over the $100 million mark. And that's really what's different about this decade. These pictures are gross enormous amounts.
KELLY: Huge box office hits.
MONDELLO: Right. And especially "Mama Mia!"
KELLY: The ABBA musical...
MONDELLO: That's right.
KELLY: ...that's been a huge hit onstage.
MONDELLO: Which grossed more than $600 million.
(Soundbite of film, "Mama Mia!")
Ms. MERYL STREEP (Actor): (As Donna Sheridan) (Singing) Whoa-oh-oh. Mamma mia. Here I go again, my, my, how can I resist 'ya?
MONDELLO: Man, I wish I could have resisted that one. That drove me crazy. That was that big a hit, because it's by no means one of the great musicals to come along. But it is - I mean, it was very popular, and audiences all over the world loved ABBA and therefore loved that show.
KELLY: And a few of this genre, of the film musical genre, have been actually good movies. You could name "Chicago," for example, which actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture a few years back.
MONDELLO: That's right, in 2002, and it was the first one to win in that category since "Oliver!" had in 1968. So we'd had a long dry spell about all of that.
(Soundbite of film, "Chicago")
Ms. CATHERINE ZETA-JONES (Actor): (As Velma Kelly) (Singing) Hold on, hon, we're gonna bunny hug. I bought some aspirin down at United Drug in case you shake apart and want a brand new start to do that jazz.
KELLY: Why do you think these film musicals are making a revival?
MONDELLO: Well, the theory usually put forward about why musicals stopped being popular was that audiences just felt uncomfortable with the fact of people bursting into song all the time. And I was thinking about it, and I think in around 2001, 2002, people started walking around on the subway, at least here, singing.
KELLY: IPods.
MONDELLO: It's iPods. And I suddenly realized, oh, how weird. And I think it is that we got used to the idea that we have a soundtrack in our heads as we're walking around, and so it didn't seem so strange for characters to have that.
(Soundbite of film, "Once")
Mr. GLEN HANSARD (Actor): (As Guy) (Singing) I don't know you, but I want you.
MONDELLO: There was one musical that actually took that idea and sort of ran with it. It was about a couple of musicians in Ireland, and they decided that they were going to try to put together a song. And one of them recorded the music onto a tape.
KELLY: I'm remembering this.
MONDELLO: You remember this?
KELLY: This is - "Once" it was called.
MONDELLO: That's right.
KELLY: Right.
MONDELLO: And he gave the tape to his girlfriend. And she put on headphones, and she's coming up with the lyrics. And so, she's walking down the street, wearing the headphones, listening to the music, and she's singing.
(Soundbite of film, "Once")
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. HANSARD and Ms. MARKETA IRGLOVA: (Singing) Take this sinking boat and point it home. We've still got time. Raise your hopeful...
MONDELLO: So it makes perfectly good sense, even if you're a stickler for realism, that they would be singing like that.
KELLY: This is obviously easier done with a film that's about music, a little bit harder if you're doing about a movie about - or musical about Wall Street or something.
MONDELLO: Yes, that's true. Let's hope they don't come up with a musical about Wall Street.
KELLY: Gordon Gekko sings and dances. Well, last question for you, Bob. Is this a trend we're going to see continue?
MONDELLO: Oh, yeah. Actually, this coming summer, they're remaking "Footloose."
KELLY: Oh, dear.
MONDELLO: "Hairspray 2" is coming along. Emma Thompson, I read, was working on a new script for "My Fair Lady," and they're talking about Keira Knightley as Eliza. So we're going to see a bunch of stuff. And actually, there's a whole bunch of others that are in theory coming along like "Carousel" and "Aida" and "The Color Purple" and "Wicked" and "Sunset Boulevard." It's going to be another musical decade.
KELLY: Movie critic Bob Mondello, who's been reviewing the decade in film for us these past few weeks. It has been a lot of fun. I know Guy has had a lot of fun, and I am so lucky to be able to sit in for the grand finale.
Bob, thank you.
MONDELLO: It's always a pleasure.
KELLY: And we'd like to hear from you. What was your favorite movie musical from the past 10 years? Join the conversation at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
We're going to check in now on a case we first started reporting on over a year ago, the disappearance of more than two dozen young Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis area.
As it turns out, the young men were recruited to join the ranks of a Somali Islamic militia called al-Shabab. Al-Shabab is fighting the transitional government in Somalia right now. It's on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, and it's thought to have links to al-Qaida.
In response, the FBI launched what has become the biggest domestic terrorism investigation in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks.
NPR's counterterrorism correspondent, Dina Temple-Raston, is here to talk about it.
Hi, Dina.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Hi there.
KELLY: So, Dina, remind us how this case actually started.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, essentially, it all started back in 2007, when there were some young men in the Somali community in Minneapolis who were getting together to talk about politics and the recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
And that invasion whipped up a lot of nationalist feelings in the Somali community in Minneapolis. And allegedly that fall, there was a meeting in a local mosque in which some of the young men in the community called someone in Somalia, and essentially, they offered up their services to this group al-Shabab, which at the time was fighting Ethiopian troops.
Apparently, this al-Shabab guy on the phone in Somalia said, we need you guys here, and these guys started to think about how they could make that happen.
KELLY: Okay. And so, that would be when these young Somali-Americans here in the U.S. started to disappear.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes, a short time after that. But the case really didn't get the FBI's attention until about a year later. In October of 2008, there was a suicide bombing against a U.N. compound in Puntland, which is a region in northeastern Somalia, and there was a DNA test done on the bomber. And it turned out that it was a young Minneapolis Somali-American named Shirwa Ahmed. And that's when the case went from local law enforcement to the FBI. And the FBI was worried that it had a jihadi pipeline on its hands, essentially like an underground railroad of sorts that recruits people for jihad.
KELLY: So, how was the recruitment effort organized? How did they actually persuade these young men to go over?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, what they've uncovered is there was some sort of intricate and kind of informal network of people in the Somali community here in the U.S. And apparently, they not only encouraged the young Somalis to travel to Somalia and fight, but they actually helped them pay for it, and they arranged for people to take them to the airport and to meet them in Somalia and to help them get into al-Shabab camps there.
And, you know, this is 20 kids, which is a lot of kids to go and funnel towards Somalia. And the concern that the FBI has is that the situation will morph into one in which the kids come back and decide to launch some sort of terrorist attack here.
Now, the FBI hasn't uncovered anything like that, but of course, that's what worries them.
KELLY: And we're talking about more than 20 young men involved. That adds up to a very big case for the FBI.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Yeah, that's 20 young men who just went to Somalia, which is a remarkable number for a terrorism case in this country. And there's been sort of a drip, drip effect in terms of arrests. I mean, so far, 14 people have been charged with material support to a terrorist organization, essentially helping these 20 kids get to Somalia.
There are four people in custody in the U.S., and there is someone in custody in the Netherlands, and the FBI is working on his extradition. And I expect he'll be here in this country pretty soon this year.
KELLY: And the latest charges that the FBI filed were just in November. Are they anywhere near to actually wrapping up this case?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, there are lots more arrests expected in 2010.
KELLY: Oh, okay.
TEMPLE-RASTON: We haven't seen them arrest any sort of mastermind. So it's unclear whether there is one person who's principally behind it. And I think also the other thing we're going to see, according to sources I've talked to, is that the investigation is really going to expand.
Sources tell NPR that there are five other cities in the U.S. that are experiencing these same problems. San Diego is one of them; Boston is another; and Columbus, Ohio, is another. And there have been grand juries that have convened in some of these cities.
And so, I think we're not only going to see arrests in Minneapolis, but we're going to see some indictments pop up in these other cities as well as the year goes on.
KELLY: That's NPR's Dina Temple-Raston.
Thanks very much.
TEMPLE-RASTON: You're welcome.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
In the next part of the show, we're going to get elemental. We'll talk water in a few minutes with an author who argues that water could replace oil as the resource that defines power in the world.
First, though, to the power of dirt. Ownership of land is a political flashpoint in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales was just reelected. Morales is giving land to the nation's poor, indigenous majority. And that includes state land, unused land, and land taken from private individuals. Those private interests call this a populist land grab.
Reporter Annie Murphy has the story.
ANNIE MURPHY: Think back to when you played in the dirt as a kid. You've got decaying leaves, rocks, worms and that smell, damp and rich. On a larger scale, dirt becomes even more powerful: land, where we build our homes and where we grow food, not to mention the emotional connections we have with the places where we live.
But in Bolivia, many indigenous people don't own land. Until a few decades ago, they were forced to work as sharecroppers or even slaves on other people's farms, and this is particularly true in tropical Santa Cruz state.
Ignacia Patude(ph) is a Chiquitano Indian who spent most of her life as a slave. Now, she lives in an indigenous reservation. Her grandson cuts grass with a machete as she speaks.
Ms. IGNACIA PATUDE: (Through translator) In the past, we had an owner who called us his servants. He sent us about, gave us orders, told us what we were going to do. Our lives were the rubber harvest and field work.
MURPHY: But that's been changing. Indigenous farmer Evo Morales came into office in 2005. And his administration gave Iganacia Patude's community a land title.
(Soundbite of cheering)
President EVO MORALES (Bolivia): (Foreign language spoken)
MURPHY: President Morales believes most indigenous Bolivians are poor because they don't have land. For the past few years, he's carried out what he calls an agrarian revolution, a series of reforms to make land ownership possible for more people.
After his reelection a few weeks ago, Morales' government started to carve up some of the biggest estates in the country. The government says these properties are illegally held.
Miguel Urioste is the director of the NGO Fundacion TIERRA. He works on land issues. Urioste says that Bolivia's problems with land ownership began during the Spanish conquest, nearly 500 years ago, and only got worse during the dictatorship of the 1970s.
Mr. MIGUEL URIOSTE (Director, Fundacion TIERRA): During this period, the government distributed at least 12 million hectares of land to people they don't even pay a penny. It was free. It was a political favor. The majority of the owners of land in Santa Cruz, they don't have legal documents to certify their property. In an indigenous country like Bolivia, the big paradox is that the big landholders are not indigenous.
MURPHY: This is the issue Morales aims to solve. The big property owners are furious about his reforms.
Mariano Aguilera belongs to an old, landowning family and is president of the country's largest sugar cane refinery. The Aguileras control tens of thousands of acres of rich farmland.
Mr. MARIANO AGUILERA: (Through translator) This land belonged to my great-grandparents. Then my grandparents inherited it, then my father and his family and now us. What we do here is about hard work. It's not about politics or a free ride. People who come here to work, serve and make progress, there's no issue, but not the people who come here to take our land, to take advantage of what we've made.
MURPHY: And, says Aguilera, families like his are prepared to go out fighting.
Mr. AGUILERA: (Through translator) No one is going to just stand by while someone takes away their inheritance and a lifetime of work, that's for sure. And if we have to take up arms, whatever is necessary, we're going to do it because we are not willing to lose.
MURPHY: But as Fundacion TIERRA's Miguel Urioste points out, for most Bolivians, these reforms are long overdue and the opportunity of a lifetime.
Mr. URIOSTE: Having land in Bolivia gives you a lot of power. And especially now, when there is an environmental crisis, energy crisis, that means that the land all over the world is increasing their price and their value.
MURPHY: In Bolivia, land that went for $200 a hectare a few years ago now sells for $2,000. That would have been a small fortune for anyone here in the settlement of Pueblos Unidos. Before Morales came into office, this community of about 200 families spent years roaming the countryside, looking for land to farm. In 2007, the government gave them 16,000 hectares; some of it appropriated from a large estate.
Sixteen-year-old Abram Stejas(ph) has been with the community since he was 10. Back when his parents worked as sugarcane harvesters, they couldn't earn enough money to buy land. Today, Abram is at the family plot, burning brush and plowing.
Mr. ABRAM STEJAS: (Through translator) The worst moment was when we were marching, looking for land, when there was nowhere to go, no shade, nothing to eat. There was nobody to help us, nothing. It took a lot to get this land.
I think I'll still be here working. That's what I fought for, for this land and to be here working the land.
MURPHY: Abram finishes his work and leads the horse back home. The sun is setting, and kids are playing in the river. Women pump water from a well to wash dishes by candlelight. And then, one by one, the candles are snuffed out.
It's just a dot in the Amazon Basin. But for the people who live here, owning this piece of land means everything: the shadows of the mango trees, the stars, and the smell of freshly plowed dirt.
This is Annie Murphy for NPR News.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Now, we'll turn from the drama of water to drama in the snow. It started on New Year's Eve at England's highest altitude pub, the Tan Hill Inn in West Yorkshire. A group of friends got together for a New Year's party, and then a snowstorm hit. So while most of us have put the champagne and hangovers behind us, resolutions already broken, for these guys, the party didn't end until today.
On the line with me now is one of the survivors of this episode, Chris Birchall.
Welcome.
Mr. CHRIS BIRCHALL: Hello.
KELLY: Hello. So let me start with the beer. You just spent three days stuck in a pub with 30 of your closest friends.
Mr. BIRCHALL: That's right, yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
KELLY: How many pints would you estimate were consumed?
Mr. BIRCHALL: Well, when we went in, they had four different specialty beers on. We finished three of them. So each of those will have been probably 48 pints. So we've had a lot.
KELLY: I'm glad that you're upright still to tell us this story, then. We read in the Guardian newspaper, where we spotted this story, that the one you were down to was Black Sheep's Riggwelter. Is that as atrocious as it sounds?
Mr. BIRCHALL: It's not too bad. It's very, very strong, lots of alcohol. So we left it until last because we didn't know what the effects would be.
KELLY: And you are all alumni of the same school. Is that how you know each other?
Mr. BIRCHALL: Yes. We've all been to Leeds University and been in the cross-country club. So we're all runners.
KELLY: The cross country club runners. Okay.
Mr. BIRCHALL: Yeah.
Kelly: As opposed to cross country skiing, which might have actually been useful. So what was the plan supposed to be for you all?
Mr. BIRCHALL: Well, we often get together at New Year and go to different pubs in the country. This one in particular, they specialize in New Year's parties. They have a barn. They were going to put on a barn dance and a...
KELLY: A barn dance.
Mr. BIRCHALL: Just kind of like a big barn with a DJ, but it didn't happen in the end.
KELLY: The snow rolled in, and you ended up all staying in the inn. This is the highest pub in England.
Mr. BIRCHALL: Yeah.
KELLY: How far away are you from the nearest city?
Mr. BIRCHALL: It's six miles from the nearest village. A hundred years ago, there were still a lot of mines out there, and it was set up as a cottage for mine owners. But that's long since closed, and there's only the one building that remains, and that's the pub.
But it's quite unique. It's known for its bizarre customer service. You go up there and get shouted at and insulted and things like that.
KELLY: This is a selling point for the Tan Hill Inn.
Mr. BIRCHALL: People go up there just to see what it's like. We had a great time. And the staff were very friendly, but it is unique. Yeah.
KELLY: How did you pass the time, three days?
Mr. BIRCHALL: Well, every day we got up and just started thinking about how we were going to get out. In the afternoon, we all just tried various ways of getting out, generally just failed. Late afternoon, when it got dark, sat down, ate some food and started on the beer again.
KELLY: How much snow did you all actually have?
Mr. BIRCHALL: Probably only a foot of snow. I mean, the main problem is that in England, we're just not, we're not used to snow. Nobody knows how to drive on snow.
KELLY: How did you all finally dig out? That was this morning.
Mr. BIRCHALL: Well, last night, a couple of people contacted the BBC, and we were on the radio last night, BBC radio. When we got up this morning, before 9 a.m., we just - there's a couple of people who were outside and saw all these vehicles coming over the horizon, a variety of plows and snow blowers, and then we just set off in a convoy, making sure everyone got (unintelligible) to the hills and then all got together in the nearest village, shook hands and went our separate ways.
KELLY: You didn't all head to a pub afterward?
Mr. BIRCHALL: No. No, no.
KELLY: That's Chris Birchall, telling us about being stranded over the long New Year's weekend at England's highest pub. Thanks so much for talking to us.
Mr. BIRCHALL: Thanks.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Now, the musical revolution has reached way beyond Broadway and the big screen, all the way to the ears of 4-year-olds. For that, we can thank Dan Zanes. He's a shaggy, folky superstar for the preschool set known for his kid-friendly collaborations with big name guests from Sheryl Crow to Philip Glass to the Blind Boys of Alabama. And Dan Zanes' latest obsession, as Jeff Lunden reports, is show tunes.
JEFF LUNDEN: It all started with a call from Paul McCartney's publishing company, which has music by many Broadway composers in its catalog.
Mr. DAN ZANES (Musician): Did we want to make a family CD of Broadway music? And I couldn't hear it in my head.
(Soundbite of song, "76 Trombones")
Unidentified Man #1 (Singer): (Singing) Seventy-six trombones led the big parade with 110 cornets close at hand.
Mr. ZANES: But my manager kept saying, you know, just keep thinking, keep thinking. Be open-minded. And you know, I was thinking, oh, it's just going to be weird folk music in the end. And everybody said, no, that's fine. That's what we want. You just do your thing.
(Soundbite of song, "76 Trombones")
Unidentified Man #2 (Singer): (Singing) Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun, 110 cornets right behind.
LUNDEN: And Zanes, who plays guitar, banjo, mandolin and harmonica, has done just that. His new CD, "76 Trombones," features 17 show tunes, all done in Zanes' trademark style.
Mr. ZANES: You know, I like the raggedy sound. I really do. I feel like that's our specialty. I wanted to really try and make Broadway music for the new economy, where it just sounds like it's a little group of people who might not be all that familiar with what Broadway is, but the spirit is high, the musicianship is high, but it's not about perfection. It's all about enthusiasm.
(Soundbite of song, "Hello Dolly")
Mr. ZANES AND Ms. CAROL CHANNING: (Singing) I stuff his shoes with extra socks. Run seven blocks in nothing flat. Yeah, I can do that. I can do that.
LUNDEN: Zanes says this album is inspired less by big showbiz than by little showbiz.
Mr. ZANES: It's the shows that kids put on in the living room after dinner. It's the shows that people put on in high schools and junior highs. And it's community theater. It's all the shows, large and small, that go on. It's such a huge part of life here in America, for everybody that's here regardless of where you're from, what's your background. Putting on a show is - it seems to be such an essential part of the human experience.
(Soundbite of song, "Hello Dolly")
Mr. ZANES: (Singing) Together at last, together forever. We're tying knots they never can sever. I don't need sunshine now to turn my skies to blue. I don't need anything but you.
LUNDEN: But Dan Zanes has invited some guest artists from big showbiz to perform on the album.
Mr. ZANES: I don't know much about Broadway, but I do know enough to know Carol Channing and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Matthew Broderick. And so the idea of working with those people is instantly exciting and appealing.
Ms. CAROL CHANNING (Singer): (Singing) Hello, Harry. Well, hello, Louie. It's so nice to be back home where I belong...
Mr. ZANES: Carol Channing to me just embodies the spirit of showbiz. And "Hello Dolly," we flipped the lyrics around a little bit so that it was almost a way of celebrating her, as well as the song itself.
(Soundbite of song, "Hello Dolly")
Ms. CHANNING: (Singing) I feel the room swaying for the band playing one of our old favorite songs from way back when. So here's my hat, fellas, I'm staying where I'm at, fellas. Dolly will never go away again.
LUNDEN: Another song from "Hello Dolly" got the Dan Zanes treatment with some help from Matthew Broderick.
(Soundbite of song, "Before the parade Passes By")
Mr. MATTHEW BRODERICK (Singer): (Singing) Look at that crowd up ahead. Listen and hear that grass harmony growing.
LUNDEN: Broderick says when a song is sung in the musical, it has a completely different context.
Mr. BRODERICK: It's about life passing you by, and you've got to jump in, which doesn't resonate to a 4-year-old. So we played it more as just watching a parade. You know, parades are fun to watch. And maybe 20 years later, a kid who listened to it will say, hey, wait a minute. I think that was about middle age or something.
(Soundbite of song, "Before the parade Passes By")
Mr. BRODERICK: (Singing) Sparklers light the sky. I'm gonna raise the roof. I'm gonna carry on. Give me an old trombone, an old baton before the parade passes by.
LUNDEN: Another song with a completely changed context comes from "La Cage Aux Folles," where it was sung by a proud drag queen.
Mr. ZANES: They go crazy for Jerry Herman songs. And the one that particularly kills me on this record is "I Am What I Am." For me, it just felt like the perfect campfire song, and that's how we tried to record it as if the group was really sitting around a campfire late at night.
(Soundbite of song, "I Am What I Am")
Mr. ZANES: (Singing) I am what I am. I am my own special creation. So come take a look. Give me the hook or the ovation. It's my world. I want to have a little pride. In my world, it's not a place I have to hide in. Life's not worth a damn 'til you can say hey, world I am what I am.
I always hope with everything we do that people hear these, and they want to go make their own music, that it inspires people to go and do the same, that somehow this music is suddenly within arm's reach.
LUNDEN: Dan Zanes says he's enjoyed recording this album of Broadway songs so much, he and his group are going to put together a live stage show with tap dancing and break dancing to showcase them.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
KELLY: That's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz will be back next weekend. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Have a great week.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz is away. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
The U.S. and British embassies in Yemen are locked tight today. President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, says that's because of intelligence that al-Qaida was plotting an attack.
Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (Deputy National Security Adviser): And we're not going to take any chances with the lives of our diplomats and others who are at that embassy. So we made a decision overnight. I spoke with Ambassador Seche, our ambassador in Sana'a, to make sure that we're doing everything possible to protect our diplomats there.
KELLY: And that's White House counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, speaking earlier today on Fox News.
Joining us now is the man who had that job during the Clinton administration and the early George W. Bush years, Richard Clarke.
Good to have you on the show.
Mr. RICHARD CLARKE (Former White House Aide): Good to be with you.
KELLY: What do you make of the decision to close the embassy today in Sana'a?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, it sounds like a major event, but in actual fact, we close embassies because of terrorism threats with some frequency. We've done it throughout Africa, throughout the Middle East. When we receive a credible threat against the embassy, we close it down until we can improve security and until we can close out the threat.
KELLY: And in this case, this embassy has been attacked more than once in the past, as recently as last year.
Mr. CLARKE: There was a very major attack against this embassy last year that was only stopped by the second barrier of defenses. And we know there are 100, perhaps 200 al-Qaida people operating inside the country, and they have promised revenge for the U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaida in Yemen that occurred in the middle of December.
KELLY: This weekend, President Obama came out and made a direct link between this branch of al-Qaida based in Yemen and the attempted bombing on Christmas of a U.S. passenger jet. That's the first time - if I'm not mistaken, the first time that an al-Qaida branch, a franchise of the core group, has attempted to attack the U.S. directly since 9/11.
Mr. CLARKE: I think that's right. There have been several attempts at aviation attacks, but they've all been drawn back to what's called al-Qaida Central, the people in Pakistan on the Afghan border. There have been attempts by Afghan affiliates to do attacks elsewhere, notably the Bali bombing, attacks in Morocco and elsewhere. But to attack the United States directly, this may be the first time we've seen somebody other than al-Qaida Central trying it.
KELLY: You mentioned, of course, this was an aviation attack. Why is al-Qaida so focused on continuing to attack airplanes?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, it's not just al-Qaida. If you look at the history over the last 30 years or more of terrorism attacks, very, very often, it's against international aviation. And the reason the terrorists focus on aviation is, primarily, the publicity it gets. It gets a lot more attention around the world than if the attack were on a police station or a school.
The terrorists also know that aviation is key to international economics. And so, it hurts business. And it inconveniences hundreds of thousands of people because every time they try something, there are new security measures put into effect that disrupt travel.
KELLY: Is it an indication of progress in counterterrorism efforts that as devastating as it would have been had this bomb on Christmas Day gone off, you're talking one plane, as opposed to on 9/11, when al-Qaida seemed to have much greater, wider ambitions, multiple planes, attacks coming from multiple cities coordinated simultaneously.
Mr. CLARKE: Well, there have been three attempts by al-Qaida, including 9/11, to do multiple airplane attacks simultaneously. And when this one happened, the Department of Homeland Security stepped up. Janet Napolitano talked about this as being the system worked.
It did work after the attack. They immediately started searching aircraft that were in the air. And they kept other aircraft on the ground because they expected multiple attacks.
KELLY: What's your take, Richard Clarke, on why U.S. spy agencies missed this, were not able to prevent it? Why, as the president has put it, there was a systemic failure to prevent this attack?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, no matter how good your software is, at the end of the day, there are humans in the loop. And it appears that there have been, in this case, a few mistakes by humans.
There was a mistake by CIA in sitting on this information for too long a time, not sharing it, as it's supposed to do right away, with the National Counterterrorism Center.
There were also mistakes apparently at the State Department, where information was received about this bomber and his father's allegations. And yet, that information was not immediately acted on.
KELLY: There's, of course, ongoing reviews being led by John Brennan at the White House to try to fix some of these gaps. What is your sense of what's likely to come out of all this? What more will change since the U.S. intelligence organizations have just been through a major overhaul these recent years?
Mr. CLARKE: And I don't think we need another major overhaul. I think what we do need is to, you know, reinvigorate everyone involved. Because there hasn't been a major attack in so long, a lot of people become complacent. They don't realize that their boring drudgery of intelligence analysis that they have to do every day is extremely important, and lives depend on it. So there is just infusing people with a new enthusiasm for their work.
KELLY: Could that be the silver lining of this episode, that at the end of the day, no one did die, the plane was not destroyed and perhaps it serves as a wake-up call to allow people to fix things, get it right the next time?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, Obama has good luck, and his luck has held in this case, and because there was not a fatality, and yet we're able to see the mistakes in the system. There's an opportunity here for the Obama administration to make some real improvements and have the congressional and perhaps even the public support that they need.
If the Obama administration had called for full-body scans six months ago, there would have been a widespread outrage against it. Now, I think it'll happen.
KELLY: Richard Clarke, you were the chief counterterrorism adviser both before and after 9/11 at the White House. When something like this happens, do you still feel any sort of personal responsibility, any sense of how the system could've been, should've been tweaked to help prevent these types of things from happening?
Mr. CLARKE: Well, I think it's very hard for anyone who's held these jobs not to feel, when something like this happens, that they would like to be there and like to be helping out. But this is an administration in its first year in office, and it's responding in a way that, frankly, other administrations during their first year would not have been able to do.
KELLY: Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism adviser to Presidents Bush and Clinton, thanks very much.
Mr. CLARKE: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
I'm Melissa Block.
And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: And we begin with a story of medical technology. Pain associated with burn injuries is considered some of the most severe and challenging to treat, and hundreds of soldiers are returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with extensive burns. An Army hospital in Texas is experimenting with a virtual reality program to help alleviate some of that pain. The program, known as SnowWorld, was developed by researchers at the University of Washington.
Patricia Murphy of member station KUOW reports.
PATRICIA MURPHY: About a year ago, Sergeant Oscar Liberetto was with his unit in Iraq when an IED detonated near the Humvee he was riding in. The 23-year-old suffered severe burns on his left arm and hand. He was the only survivor from his group of five.
Sergeant OSCAR LIBERETTO (U.S. Army): It was really painful. Sometimes I didn't think that I was going to make it, but I don't know.
MURPHY: Liberetto is one of a dozen military burn patients being treated at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, who participated in the study using SnowWorld. It works, essentially, through distraction. By wearing high-tech goggles with a wide field of vision, SnowWorld helps patients block the unpleasant view of their wounds, their charred skin, allowing them to navigate an icy canyon instead.
(Soundbite of animals squawking)
MURPHY: Push a button, and throw a snowball at a giant penguin. Pelt a mammoth, and it will trumpet angrily.
(Soundbite of mammoth trumpeting)
MURPHY: All to the soothing sounds of Paul Simon.
(Soundbite of song, "Call Me Al")
Mr. PAUL SIMON (Singer, Songwriter): (Singing) A man walks down the street, he says, why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle now?
MURPHY: I know. Paul Simon? Turns out, he's a friend of one of the developers. Sergeant Liberetto says SnowWorld made a big difference for him.
Sgt. LIBERETTO: I think the environment makes you feel like you're at peace.
MURPHY: University of Washington researcher Hunter Hoffman says his work with combat burns, that tend to cover up to 80 percent of the body, has been promising.
Mr. HUNTER HOFFMAN (Cognitive Psychologist, Memory Expert): What was very encouraging is the ones who needed it the most were the ones who benefited the most. So the patients that were in the most pain are the ones that showed the most pain reduction from SnowWorld.
MURPHY: In a handful of civilian hospitals where this technology is already in use, it's a virtual reality helmet that the patient wears to experience the snowy distraction. But combat burn victims are often too injured to wear the helmet. Hoffman's team redesigned the VR unit as a pair of goggles and a joystick. Dr. Christopher Maani is the chief of anesthesia at Brooke Army Medical Center. He says the treatment has reduced stress for nurses, as their patients are more comfortable. And then there's the appreciation from soldiers' family members, who see a big difference in the emotional well-being of their loved ones.
Dr. CHRISTOPHER MAANI (Chief Of Anesthesia, Brooke Army Medical Center): You know, you can be stopped in the hallways, and a hug is a very simple thing, but it means so much. Those are the true rewards. It really is making a difference, and it really is helping our patients and their families.
MURPHY: The Army is also researching the use of virtual reality for treatment of PTSD.
For NPR News, I'm Patricia Murphy in Seattle.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
China's most famous film director, Zhang Yimou, is well-known internationally in the art-house world. His fame spread even wider when he orchestrated the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics. Now, he's taking on Hollywood in the Chinese market. He has remade and transformed a Coen brothers movie.
NPR's Louisa Lim spoke with him in Shanghai.
(Soundbite of movie, "Blood Simple")
LOUISA LIM: "Blood Simple" by the Coen brothers was a nerve-jangling noir thriller set in a Texas bar. The story revolves around the chaos that ensues when a good-for-nothing bar owner hires a detective to kill his wife and her lover.
(Soundbite of movie, "Blood Simple")
Mr. M. EMMET WALSH (Actor): (As Loren Visser) You want me to kill them?
Mr. DAN HEDAYA (Actor): (As Julian Marty) I'll give you $10,000.
(Soundbite of movie, "A Simple Noodle Story")
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2 (Actor): (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
LIM: I've got a big job for you, killing the two of them, and I'll give you 10 strings of coins. That's Zhang Yimou's version, named "A Simple Noodle Story."
The storyline remains similar. Some shots are identical. But Zhang's moved the action to a remote noodle shop in ancient China, a decision he admits taken for the sake of ease.
Mr. ZHANG YIMOU (Director, "A Simple Noodle Story"): (Through translator) It's more convenient setting it in ancient China. The level of freedom is greater. It's not that easy to shoot contemporary material. Lots of things are forbidden.
(Soundbite of movie, "A Simple Noodle Story")
LIM: A bigger change still is Zhang's decision to make the film as a slapstick comedy with song and dance numbers revolving around noodle-making. Some of China's top comedians star. One is a nervous girly guy; another is a goofy character with buck teeth who falls down almost every time he appears.
It's a far cry from Zhang's early trailblazing films, seen as allegories against China's communist bureaucracy. Zhang is unapologetic.
Mr. ZHANG: (Through translator) It's very absurd, very exaggerated. It's because I shot such serious films before, I wanted to experiment with a different style. In fact, there were commercial factors. We wanted to make a New Year's film.
(Soundbite of movie)
Unidentified Woman (Actor): (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
LIM: Commercial factors were behind his decision to incorporate elements of Chinese folk culture. This is an example of errenzhuan, a form of comic dialogue from northeastern China. Zhang says the rise of the mainland market is making Chinese directors change their focus. Ten years ago, his films relied on the international market. Critics sneered that his main audience were international film festival judges.
Now, however, Zhang says a Chinese film can make at home 10 times what it makes overseas. He argues that by being commercial, he's doing battle with Hollywood for the soul of Chinese cinema.
Mr. ZHANG: (Through translator) Young people are the key. If they lose interest in domestic movies, we'll be in big trouble. Then China's film market will be occupied by foreigners. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea are examples of this. The mainland is our last battleground. So in this case, it's not shameful to shoot commercial or funny movies.
(Soundbite of music)
LIM: This is Zhang's first return to film after staging the Olympic opening ceremony, the most viewed television event ever, according to one study. He subsequently directed the closing ceremony and the military parade marking China's 60th anniversary.
These gigantic spectacles earned Zhang accolades, but also raised doubts overseas about whether he'd become the artist in residence to China's authoritarian government.
His status has changed at home, too, according to Yang Junlei, associate professor at Fudan University.
Professor YANG JUNLEI (Fudan University): (Through translator) Before the Olympics, Zhang was a trailblazer for an elite minority of culture lovers. But afterwards, because of the success of the opening ceremony, he's become a national cultural hero who is widely approved of by the Chinese people.
(Soundbite of music)
LIM: Despite his state-sponsored assignments, Zhang denies losing his independence. He argues that censorship limits all Chinese directors equally, and he denies being burdened by the expectations of his new status.
Mr. ZHANG: (Through translator) I can't think about the pressure. If you thought about it, you wouldn't able to do anything. You have to have your feet on the ground.
(Soundbite of movie, "A Simple Noodle Story")
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
LIM: In its first four days, "A Simple Noodle Story" took almost $15 million at the box office. Despite its commercial success, it's been panned. Half those answering one online survey thought it was terrible or worse than expected.
But the director professes not to care. He's already moved on to his next project, a love story set in the Cultural Revolution. For the film after that, his producer says he's talking to Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks for a role set in the Japanese occupation of China.
Eyes ever on the market, Zhang Yimou appears to be setting his sights on not just saving Chinese cinema, but also conquering Hollywood.
Louisa Lim, NPR News, Shanghai.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
A new federal rule has angered fishermen in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. The rule, which took effect today, is a ban on fishing for red snapper. That's one of the most popular saltwater fish. Federal agencies and environmental groups say that in the South Atlantic, the red snapper is in trouble. And along with the ban, officials propose temporarily closing a huge area to virtually all fishing.
NPR's Greg Allen has the story.
GREG ALLEN: To people who don't fish or live in the Southeast, it might seem like a lot of fuss over one species. But in fishing communities like St. Augustine, Florida, the red snapper is more than just a fish. It's the reason thousands of anglers come here each year to fish on their own or to go out with charter boat captains like Robert Johnson.
Captain ROBERT JOHNSON: In all honesty, I can tell you that snapper fishing is better today than it was 10 years ago.
ALLEN: Robert Johnson has fished for red snapper here, off the eastern coast of Florida, for nearly 30 years. When his charter business slows down, he also fishes for them commercially. He just returned from a day trip where he and his mate used hook and line to catch nearly 100 red snapper, now packed on ice. Johnson reaches into a cooler and pulls one out.
Capt. JOHNSON: He's probably 24, 25 inches, about six, seven pounds. That's about an average size snapper. We do catch 20 and 30-pound fish, though.
ALLEN: That's a key point. Red snapper can live to 50 years old and grow to 20 pounds or more. Fish that old and big are very rare, though, a clear indication, scientists say, of how much they've been overfished. Today, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates the population of red snapper off the Atlantic Coast is just three percent of what it was 60 years ago. Because of that, the service has put in place a six-month interim ban on fishing for red snapper with an option to extend it further.
Regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service in the Southeast is Roy Crabtree. He says the science leaves little doubt the population of red snapper in the South Atlantic has been severely depleted.
Dr. ROY CRABTREE (Regional Administrator, National Marine Fisheries Service): I think the only real debate is the extent of the overfishing. But I don't believe there is a whole lot of scientific debate about whether the stock is undergoing overfishing or overfished.
ALLEN: Robert Johnson and others in the recreational fishing industry question the methodology used to estimate the red snapper population. Their doubts are supported by the National Research Council, which has called into question the government's process for estimating catches and fish populations. Johnson believes that while red snapper have been overfished, limits on catches have done a lot in recent years to help rebuild the species.
Capt. JOHNSON: They still keep claiming we're fishing at eight times the sustainable rate, and I just don't see that being true. If that was the case, then we would see the stock in our catch per unit effort, the amount of fish we're catching per trip would fall. It would not be consistently the same over the last 10 years and it definitely wouldn't be getting better.
ALLEN: For Robert Johnson, there's a lot at stake. He says at least 60 percent of his customers come out to fish for red snapper or other bottom species like grouper, also now off-limits. And even more alarming than the red snapper ban is another proposal now being considered. It would close some 10,000 square miles of the Atlantic, from North Carolina to Florida, to virtually all fishing. Johnson says that will likely put him and the two dozen other charter captains here in St. Augustine out of business and take a toll on the restaurants, hotels and others in town who benefit from the influx of anglers.
Holly Binns with the Pew Environment Group's campaign to end overfishing in the Southeast says people who want to fish will still have other options.
Ms. HOLLY BINNS (Pew Environment Group): I think it's important to keep in mind that 80 percent of what recreational fishermen caught in the waters off the coast of these four states last year will still be open for fishing.
ALLEN: Binns concedes, however, that communities in areas like St. Augustine that depend on red snapper will be the hardest hit. That's something Dave Workman already knows.
Mr. DAVE WORKMAN (Owner, Strike Zone): I can get sentimental real quick about this. My father started taking me fishing at six years old. It was a big deal. I mean, it's a legacy. And they're talking about completely shutting down fishing completely.
ALLEN: Workman owns the Strike Zone, a fishing outfitter in Jacksonville that carries everything from reels and tackle to kayaks. He says customers have already stopped buying fishing tackle, and he expects business to get much worse once the red snapper ban goes into effect. Like others in the industry, Workman thinks the government has greatly underestimated the ban's economic impact.
Mr. WORKMAN: The total amount is - it'd be $3 million for the state of Florida. And they said 10 percent of that will be the tackle retailers. That's $300,000. Between my two stores, it'll cost more than that in the yearly sales.
ALLEN: A group called the Recreational Fishing Alliance has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the red snapper ban from taking effect on January 4th as planned. Federal regulators may decide whether to approve the larger area ban when it meets in March. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group in Congress from coastal districts is working on a bill that would require federal regulators to consider the impact on local economies before ordering fishery closings in the future.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Two researchers have confirmed something skiers and snowboarders have long suspected: Resorts sometimes boost their snowfall measurements to attract more customers. The researchers found that ski areas report more snowfall on the weekends.
And as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, if you look at government weather data, there is no such weekend effect.
JEFF BRADY: The researchers are both from Dartmouth College and big fans of the snow. One is economics professor Jon Zinman.
Professor JON ZINMAN (Economics, Dartmouth College): We certainly had some experiences being drawn out to the slopes to play hooky on days with advertisements of lots of nice, fresh powder, and then got into the slopes and been a bit flummoxed that the reports didn't live up to their billing.
BRADY: Zinman says they gathered snowfall data from ski-area Web sites, and then compared it with government weather data. The results were a bit fishy.
Prof. ZINMAN: Twenty-three percent more snow reported on weekends, on average, across all resorts.
BRADY: And the exaggerations were even higher at resorts with more to gain, such as those within a day's drive to a major population center.
(Soundbite of moving vehicle)
BRADY: Just about an hour from downtown Denver, at a ski area in the foothills of the Rockies, Robin Freidburg(ph) finds the research conclusions very amusing.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRADY: That surprise you at all?
Ms. ROBIN FREIDBURG: No.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRADY: Nearby, Vicki Bienham(ph) is finishing up a day of skiing.
Ms. VICKI BIENHAM: They want you to come up here. They want you to go ski. Yeah, it doesn't surprise to me.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRADY: The researchers don't single out specific resorts in their reports, choosing instead to make only broad statements about the industry as a whole. Michael Berry is president of the National Ski Areas Association. He didn't even try to make up a good excuse for the report's findings.
Mr. MICHAEL BERRY (President, National Ski Areas Association): I mean, we really are an industry filled with optimists. I mean, if you're a cynic, you go to law school. If you're an optimist, you end up running a ski area. We're a weather-dependent industry, and the weather gives and the weather takes.
BRADY: And sometimes, the weather needs a little help to boost business. Anyhow, Berry says it's a stretch to call snow measuring at most resorts scientific. It's typically a worker up on the mountain checking a measuring stick once a day. Berry says snow reports are becoming less important in the age of Facebook and Twitter. Today, he says, a lot of skiers are getting information from their friends who live near resorts. So he has this advice for his industry colleagues.
Mr. BERRY: If you try and create a reality that you perceive to be the truth, it better be consistent with the reality on the ground, because the consumer will remind you of that instantly if that's not the case.
BRADY: Back at Dartmouth, Jon Zinman saw evidence of this in his research. During the study period, an iPhone application was released that allows skiers and snowboarders to report conditions themselves.
Prof. ZINMAN: Once that came online, exaggeration by resorts fell very sharply, and fell all the more sharply at resorts that have good iPhone reception.
BRADY: The developer of the skireport.com application says it has proven very popular. In the past year, there have been more than 40,000 postings on ski conditions around the country.
Jeff Brady, NPR News, Denver.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michel Norris.
Politicians in Washington may disagree about a lot in the health care overhaul, but pretty much everyone agrees that costs have to come down. One way to achieve that is to give doctors incentives to cut costs. The bills in the House and the Senate include pilot projects to do just that. One proposal is for physicians to form what are called Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs.
Sarah Varney from member station KQED checked out an ACO that has been trying to lower costs for years. It's a clinic in San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles.
SARAH VARNEY: If you're having a hard time imagining what an Accountable Care Organization is, it's a bit like a building contractor. Let's say his name is Bob. Bob gets together with some other contractors � plumbers, electricians, roofers � and they agree to repair your house for a set amount of money.
(Soundbite of song, �Can We Fix It�)
Unidentified Man: (Singing) Can we fix it? Bob the Builder. Yes we can.
VARNEY: If you've had a home repair that went sideways, this whole approach to managing health care may not inspire a lot of confidence. But there's good evidence to suggest that physicians who have a financial stake in your medical costs are more efficient and more effective.
Dr. ALEXANDER TERRAZAS (Member, ACO, San Bernardino County; Member, Redlands Family Practice): Have a seat here.
Unidentified Woman: Thanks.
Dr. TERRAZAS: How are you feeling?
Unidentified Woman: Well, my eye starts, you know, still hurts.
VARNEY: Dr. Alexander Terrazas is a reluctant poster child for Accountable Care Organizations. When I first called to request a visit to his small family practice in Redlands, he told me flatly, this is not a silver bullet. And yet his three-doctor clinic, which sits in a strip mall between a pet grooming shop and a fabric store, has achieved cost savings and quality scores usually only seen at much larger, elite health care systems.
Dr. TERRAZAS: This was a psychological transition for the physicians, but it also was a transition for the patient.
VARNEY: Dr. Terrazas and his colleagues began their experiment in 1984. That's when a San Bernardino health plan proposed paying them a fixed monthly fee per patient. Today, Medicare pays about $11,000 a year to private insurers and Redlands gets the vast majority of that amount. The clinic has to stretch the so-called global payment to cover all of the patients' visits, any specialist referrals, lab tests, even surgeries and hospital stays. If there's a surplus left over, the partners divvy it up. If they're over budget, they take a hit.
Dr. TERRAZAS: The main transition was to what extent can I coordinate and treat the medical problems the patient has and at what levels do I really need assistance?
VARNEY: Today, about half of Dr. Terrazas' patients are covered under global payments. Dr. Terrazas says he's managed to make it work by reassuring his patients that their doctors aren't shortchanging them on quality to make a bonus.
Dr. TERRAZAS: We had to get the patients comfortable that they were going to receive whatever care they needed. If they needed orthopedic surgery, we were going to get you to the orthopedist.
VARNEY: In fact, the doctors at Redlands decided there were some patients they wanted to see much more often. Those with multiple chronic illnesses come in almost monthly, even when they're doing well. Hospitals also had to get on board. The clinic offered the local hospital financial incentives for getting patients out quickly and safely and avoiding unnecessary and costly readmissions.
Executive Director Sandee Derryberry says the clinic focuses almost obsessively on helping patients make a smooth transition out of the hospital.
Ms. SANDEE DERRYBERRY (Executive Director, Redlands Family Practice): We, I think, all quickly realized that we needed to know where the patient was in all of the processes, if they'd gone to the hospital, what were the next steps? What specialists were seeing them? What were they going to need when they arrived home?
VARNEY: The Redlands clinic closely monitors its performance. At monthly meetings, physicians compare the medical services they've charged and the number of specialist referrals, ER visits and preventive screenings.
Ms. DERRYBERRY: You want the doctors to see how they're comparing against their peers, because a lot of times that encourages a discussion of, well, you know, I keep having this problem with patient X.
VARNEY: For all these efforts, Redlands Family Practice spends 15 percent less than the regional average. The clinic has faced tough times. Derryberry says one month, five patients went into the hospital for costly open heart surgery. But those are balanced out by relatively quiet periods and the clinic's aggressive management of chronically ill patients.
Despite the clinic's lower costs, private insurers continue to raise premiums, and Dr. Terrazas says that threatens to unravel the tacit agreement he and his colleagues have made with their patients.
Dr. TERRAZAS: The people coming into the office say, hey, they just raised my premium 10, 12 percent. I want to make sure I'm getting something for this. I want this stuff. I want this stuff. That's on our fiscal responsibility.
VARNEY: Congress is not prescribing all physicians accept global payments. In fact, the Accountable Care Organization program included in the health care bills is quite flexible and promotes a pretty simple idea. If all the doctors who take care of you, your primary care physician, any specialist and your hospital work together and their financial fates were somehow connected almost like business partners, you'd get better care and it wouldn't cost as much. These affiliated provider groups could earn bonuses if they met or exceeded certain quality and cost targets for their Medicare patients.
Dr. Elliot Fisher is a leading health policy researcher at Dartmouth who has closely studied the ACO concept. He says greater savings will come if the model spreads.
Dr. ELLIOT FISHER (Health Policy Researcher, Dartmouth College): One question is, will all payers � Medicaid, Medicare and the private payers � adopt the same reimbursement model and the same aligned incentives?
VARNEY: Although there's been no political opposition to ACOs and the American Medical Association supports the approach, Dr. Terrazas is skeptical the accountable care model will catch on.
Dr. TERRAZAS: Every time I've gone out in the community and tried to sell it, develop it, everybody seems to be so hesitant. As soon as we stop talking, it's, oh, this won't work for me.
VARNEY: Physicians tell him they don't have the time or management expertise to negotiate contracts with other physicians and hospitals. And Dr. Terrazas says, when you cut costs by reducing hospital readmissions, duplicate lab tests or unnecessary specialist referrals, someone somewhere loses out.
Randy Brown, director of health policy research for Mathematica, a nonpartisan research firm, shares that criticism. Brown says the U.S. health care system is littered with pilot projects and research studies that map out how to reduce medical spending, but implementing them requires tough political and business decisions.
Mr. RANDY BROWN (Director of Health Policy Research, Mathematica): If you're going to cut costs, the spending pie has to shrink. And that means somebody is going to make a lot less money. And there's no discussion about who that's going to be. Who's going to take that hit? It's very much a Kumbaya thing.
VARNEY: Brown says while some celebrated health care systems and physicians like Dr. Terrazas have made those tough choices, it's unlikely large numbers of providers will do so. Congressional leaders and health system reformers, though, are optimistic there are enough incentives in the bills for physicians to at least give it a try, though, perhaps less enthusiastically than Bob the Builder.
(Soundbite of song, �Can We Fix It?�)
Unidentified Man: (Singing) Can we fix it? Bob the Builder. Yes we can.
VARNEY: For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
As we just heard, some theaters are trying to coax people back into the seats with the offer of luxury.
NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates visited a new theater that's charging a high ticket price and offering perks to match it.
Unidentified Man #1: We have "2012," "The Blind Side," "Invictus."
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES: It's about 10:30 a.m. on a weekday in Pasadena, just north of Los Angeles, and I'm stopping to buy a couple of tickets to "Invictus," the new movie starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon.
Unidentified Man #1: For tomorrow and Friday it will be $29 a ticket.
BATES: Excuse me?
Unidentified Man #1: Friday through Sunday is $29. Monday through Thursday is $22.
BATES: Yup, you heard correctly, $29 for a matinee. At the Gold Class Cinemas, my $29 entitles me to a movie in my choice of 40 reserved seats.
Mr. MARK MULCAHY (Vice President of Marketing, Gold Class Cinemas): This is the size auditorium that a normal theater chain would probably put 150 seats, but we only put 40.
BATES: Marketing VP Mark Mulcahy gives me a tour of one of the screening rooms.
Mr. MULCAHY: You can see even if Shaquille O'Neal was sitting in front of you, it wouldn't be a problem because there is no bad seat in the house here.
BATES: Which helps when you're stretched out in one of their microsuede recliners.
(Soundbite of announcement)
Unidentified Man #2: Welcome to Gold Class Cinemas. And now, our feature presentation.
BATES: They'll even bring a pillow and blanket if you want.
Mr. MULCAHY: What our customers often say is they say it's like flying first class.
BATES: And then there's the food. $29 doesn't pay for your food, but it does allow you the privilege of having food and cocktails served to you while watching the film.
Unidentified Woman: I'll be right back with your drinks. And just so you know, there's a server call button right here. So if you need anything, just press that, and I'll be right over.
BATES: The seasonal menus include everything from fried calamari with lemon and ginger to hand-pulled pizzas cooked fresh to order.
Los Angeles theaters have been trending toward luxury for almost a decade now. The Arclight in Hollywood and The Landmark theater in West L.A. claim a phenomenal picture, comfortable seats and excellent sound quality, plus $14 to $19 tickets. But Gold Class Cinema has upped the ante.
Despite that extra $10, some consumers, like Martha Wall, who came to see "The Blind Side," are sold.
Ms. MARTHA WALL: We loved it. This is the only way to go to the movies. We just - wow.
BATES: Her friend Cheryl DiSpaltro admits this will be an occasional indulgence.
Ms. CHERYL DISPALTRO: For once in a while, for a special treat. I'm bringing my husband for our anniversary.
BATES: But is business like this enough to keep Gold Class afloat?
Mr. KEVIN GOETZ (President, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, OTX): The question is, what amenities mean something?
BATES: Kevin Goetz is president of the Worldwide Motion Picture Group at the research firm OTX. In a 2009 OTX survey, Goetz says dinner and a movie under one roof was high on the list of customer wants. Other stuff, not so much.
Mr. GOETZ: Things like alcohol at movies score very low. Valet parking was also low. Even reserved seating was not terribly high.
BATES: Bad news for Gold Class, since the bar is where they expect to make their money.
Mr. GOETZ: With up to only 40 seats, with, I think, something like six screens or whatever they have, is that enough - is that sustainable?
BATES: Good question. These deluxe movie houses have been introduced by Village Roadshow, an Australian entertainment conglomerate. In addition to Pasadena, Gold Class has opened three other theater complexes around the U.S.
According to Goetz, none of their American theaters are as successful as their Australian counterparts. But it's early yet. And if the economy stabilizes, they may do better. Given the past year's economic turmoil, Mark Mulcahy says battered consumers were hungry for a little escapism.
Mr. MULCAHY: This is a great night out. And you may not be going to the Bahamas this year, but this is something you can afford, okay? Everybody can afford this.
BATES: To be successful, what Gold Class needs is enough everybodies who can and will part with that kind of money on a regular basis.
Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
For the first time in months, the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt is open. Busloads of people have been crossing in and out of Gaza and trucks of medical aid are heading into Gaza. The Egyptian border is the only border Gaza shares with a country other than Israel. And Israel has kept a tight blockade on Gaza ever since Hamas took control there more than two years ago.
NPR's Peter Kenyon traveled to the border today.
PETER KENYON: Egypt's border policy with Gaza is a source of deep frustration and anger in the Arab world, where Egypt is seen by many as not doing enough to help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Egypt maintains that it has treaty obligations to live up to, as well as protecting the integrity of its borders.
But for Gaza residents, such as 79-year-old Youssef Mohammed, the border policy is punishment by their Arab neighbor to the south. He came to Egypt to visit his children and had to wait five months until he could finally get back home to Gaza City today. Sitting in the front row of an idling Egyptian bus, he said there's no reason Egypt couldn't make this a routine crossing.
Mr. YOUSSEF MOHAMMED: (Through translator) They should just open the border. It's choking us. Look, we're married to Egyptians and Egyptians are married to Gazans. They should open it.
KENYON: Egyptian police thoroughly checked every passenger's documents, and one elderly woman is hustled off the bus, gesturing and complaining to no avail. She stands outside the tall black iron gates of the border, arguing with a guard who wants to see a travel document she doesn't have while the bus she was just ejected from goes through into the no man's land dividing Egypt from Gaza.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
KENYON: You're Egyptian, asked the guard?
Yes, says 64-year-old Zeinab Attiya, who got up at 3:00 this morning to travel from Helwan, south of Cairo, to the border.
Ms. ZEINAB ATTIYA: (Foreign language spoken)
KENYON: My three children and 11 grandchildren live over there in Gaza, she adds, and I haven't seen them in seven years.
These are the stories that so often go unheard amid the debate over the continuing though sporadic Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli military strikes, and concern about Hamas' efforts to re-arm via smuggling tunnels beneath the ground here.
Palestinian and Egyptian families joined by intermarriage remain divided; parents don't see their children grow up and may never know their grandchildren. And the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of Rafah, sundered by walls, military patrols and Israeli drones, is on one side brutally impoverished, and on the other plagued by a rising criminal class that has grown out of the booming smuggling operations here.
When help does arrive for Gaza, it often takes the form of well-meaning international activists who bring in truckloads of aid, which is rarely followed by any sustained effort to lift the blockade.
The leaders of the Viva Palestina convoy completed their journey from Britain to the Gaza border today after a number of setbacks, chiefly Egypt's refusal to permit the trucks to travel overland across the Sinai Peninsula. The group's most well-known member, the outspoken Scottish member of the British Parliament, George Galloway, was diplomatic upon his arrival here, thanking Egypt for eventually permitting more than 200 truckloads of aid into Gaza.
Galloway was also realistic enough to point out that the attention generated by this type of humanitarian activism is only really useful if it generates pressure on political leaders to spend more time and effort solving the underlying problem.
Mr. GEORGE GALLOWAY (Member of Parliament, Great Britain): But these convoys, whilst important for a whole number of reasons, are not a substitute for lifting the siege on Gaza. No amount of convoys can be more than a drop in the ocean of troubles, which the people of Gaza are suffering.
KENYON: But with no apparent progress toward a permanent lifting of the siege of Gaza, Palestinians say they're afraid the best they can hope for is more brief border openings from Egypt; not a sigh of relief but the hiss of a safety valve.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, near the Egyptian-Gaza border.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
We hear it all the time: Good teachers make a difference. But how do you train teachers to be good? Leaders at teacher education programs still aren't sure. So the state of Louisiana has decided to figure it out.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the effort is attracting national attention and causing some local discomfort.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Statistician George Noell wanted to do something no one had ever done before. He wanted to compare the success rates of teachers from different training programs in his home state of Louisiana. He didn't want to rely on the old measures of success, like whether principals were happy with their teachers. He wanted an objective measure of gains by students taught by, say, me.
Dr. GEORGE NOELL (Professor of Psychology, Louisiana State University; Statistician): In essence, who taught Larry math? Then we look at, for the youngsters that Larry taught, how did they score on the state's achievement tests at the end of the spring the year before Larry worked with them and then that following spring?
ABRAMSON: Good test scores should show that my teacher training program was doing something right. Bad scores would indicate my program didn't do a good job.
Noell says there are so many variables in education, he wasn't sure he'd see any meaningful differences between programs.
Dr. NOELL: Right off the bat, we saw in just a small sample within a few districts - geographically close together districts - between two institutions that prepared a lot of their mathematics teachers, some what looked like pretty notable differences between the performance of the graduates from the two institutions.
ABRAMSON: In fact, grads from some state schools were getting classroom results that rivaled those of experienced teachers - pretty surprising when you think about it. The results were supposed to help training programs do a better job. But when the news came out, schools were ranked like baseball teams. And that led to some headlines that were a little embarrassing to Gerald Carlson, dean of the education school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Dr. GERALD CARLSON (Dean of Education, University of Louisiana, Lafayette): I think it said UL-Lafayette College of Education, you know, last in the state.
ABRAMSON: Carlson says that wasn't quite right. But one program at the university did do poorly in English language arts. So the university has changed the curriculum to boost the English skills of graduates. And, Carlson says, he's trying to make the program more selective.
Dr. CARLSON: We've tightened the backdoor. We're screening them more carefully. We're looking at their ACT scores. And so, now we're going to make them go back and remediate if they don't have the background that we feel is necessary.
ABRAMSON: That's good, right? School gets info from study, changes program, improves teacher performance. Trouble is, the study didn't exactly tell schools what they need to do to improve. And that leaves many people down here in the dark about what they should do.
Ms. NANCY ROBERTS (CEO, Louisiana Resource Center for Educators): I'm Nancy Roberts. And I'm the executive director of the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators.
ABRAMSON: Nancy Roberts founded the resource center over a decade ago to address a big problem in the state: Thousands of teachers were working without proper training. She put together a lending library in this open, light-filled warehouse in Baton Rouge, full of books that teachers can check out, even skeletons and models of the human body. The place feels warm and inviting.
Ms. ROBERTS: I really always wanted to have a nice place for teachers to go to train instead of putting them in a back room someplace.
ABRAMSON: But Roberts learned that some of her graduates aren't doing as well as she had hoped. Their students scored lower on the Louisiana study. Roberts felt bad about that and said she'd like to give her graduates some additional support. But she can't.
Ms. ROBERTS: We know who we trained, but we don't know who's in the study. It's not enough to help us pinpoint where we need to improve.
ABRAMSON: The study only told schools how their graduates did in general. It didn't say which graduates fell short. Some educators say the study falls short on other levels. It judges teachers strictly on the basis of annual test, the same ones used to judge student performance under No Child Left Behind.
Jim Meza, dean of the School of Education at the University of New Orleans, says that means it ignores the one thing that really stymies new teachers: classroom management.
Dr. JAMES MEZA (Dean, College of Education, University of New Orleans): That typically becomes the number one need of new teachers. This data currently doesn't tell us that at all. You also need some level of observation to complement academic growth.
ABRAMSON: Teacher effectiveness is a hot issue nationwide, but it is white hot here in New Orleans, where loads of newcomers have arrived to help rebuild the education system here. The impact of those new teachers is the focus of tomorrow's story.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Ireland, a new law came into effect on January 1st targeting blasphemy. The law imposes a penalty of as much as $35,000 for speaking badly of anything held sacred by any religion.
The law has been greeted with bemusement and challenged by atheist groups, as NPR's Rob Gifford explains.
ROB GIFFORD: In the Irish Constitution, written in 1937, is a line saying that blasphemy is an offense punishable by law. The law that punished it was the 1961 Defamation Act. But now, that act is being repealed, so the Irish government says it had to put a new law in place to uphold the constitution.
The new statute has had people of all beliefs and none scratching their heads.
Michael Nugent is head of a group called Atheist Ireland.
Mr. MICHAEL NUGENT (Chairman, Atheist Ireland): We believe that that law is both silly and dangerous. That it's silly because it's essentially a medieval religious law, and it's dangerous because it incentivizes religious outrage.
GIFFORD: So in order to test the law, Nugent has published on the group's Web site a series of 25, what he calls, blasphemous quotes, and he's challenged the Irish government to prosecute him. The quotations include the words of Jesus, Muhammad and Pope Benedict, as well as writers such as Mark Twain and Salman Rushdie, and films such as "Monty Python's Life of Brian." Nugent says the law is simply too ambiguous.
Mr. NUGENT: It defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion. It doesn't define what a religion is, thereby causing outrage, which again isn't defined among a substantial number of adherents of that religion. And again, what's a substantial number?
If it's an actual number, it discriminates against small religions; if it's a percentage of adherents, it discriminates against large religions.
GIFFORD: So, says Nugent, the law is almost impossible to enforce. Amazingly, everyone seems to agree, even committed Catholics, of whom there are still many in Ireland.
Professor WILLIAM REVILLE (Biochemistry, University College Cork): Atheism in Ireland would be a very minority preoccupation.
GIFFORD: William Reville is an academic at University College Cork, who's campaigned for the continued influence of the church in Irish society. Even he, though, says he can't see why the law has been brought in.
Prof. REVILLE: I have no interest in it, really. After all, Jesus Christ was convicted of blasphemy and he was crucified on the charge of blasphemy, so it doesn't have the happiest history in the tradition of Catholicism.
GIFFORD: Reville says the Catholic hierarchy has not pushed for the law at all, and indeed, no senior churchmen have come out in recent days to defend it. Some observers have suggested the move is simply to bring the old law up to date with the increasingly multicultural, multifaith nature of Irish society.
Others, such as David Quinn, a former editor of The Irish Catholic newspaper, have their own theories.
Mr. DAVID QUINN (Journalist; Former Editor, The Irish Catholic): My own personal theory is that it actually had to do with the Danish cartoon controversy of about four years ago. That there was a fear that we might get a Danish cartoon-style controversy in Ireland, that some newspaper might publish something that Muslims found highly offensive, and it might have repercussions for Irish trade in the Muslim world.
GIFFORD: There's been no sign so far that the Irish government is going to prosecute the group Atheist Ireland or, indeed, anyone else. So many people say the best step forward is to hold a referendum about deleting the clause from the 1937 Constitution, and then there would be no need for a law to uphold it.
Rob Gifford, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block. The U.S. embassy in Yemen has been closed for two days now. And as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today, it will stay closed as the Obama administration assesses threats from the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen. Clinton said instability in Yemen is a threat to security everywhere, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Secretary of State Clinton says the embassy was closed to the public yesterday and today for good reason.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): That is in response to ongoing threats by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, so-called AQAP, that have been ongoing. They certainly predate this holiday season, and they are aimed at American interests in Yemen.
KELEMEN: The embassy has been the target of terrorist attacks before, as recently as 2008. Clinton said officials review the security there constantly.
Sec. CLINTON: And we'll make a decision on reopening the embassy when the security conditions permit.
KELEMEN: She was speaking today alongside the prime minister of Qatar, another country on the Arabian Peninsula which is worried about the situation in Yemen. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani raised concerns not only about the terrorist threats in Yemen but also about civil strife.
Prime Minister SHEIKH HAMAD BIN JASIM AL-THANI (Qatar): This is the fifth or the sixth war in Yemen and for that reason, we know that this problem have to be solved through dialogue, and dialogue which can give the lead for the state of Yemen because we support the unity of Yemen.
KELEMEN: U.S. General David Petraeus visited Yemen over the weekend, and announced that the U.S. will more than double its counterterrorism aid to the country. Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, says the U.S. shouldn't just train troops, though.
Ms. BARBARA BODINE (Former U.S. Ambassador, Yemen): It's not nearly as sexy to train a bureaucrat as it is to train a soldier. It doesn't look nearly as good on film. But if you're really talking about the ability of a state to survive, you really need a strong governmental structure.
KELEMEN: Speaking by cell phone today, Bodine said the U.S. and its partners need to find a way to make sure Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries, doesn't go from fragile state to failed state.
Ms. BODINE: If you just want to do it from a dollars-and-cents point of view, it's a whole lot more cost-effective to invest in state capacity building and human capacity building than to wait for Yemen to become a failed state - and then have to go back and try to help rebuild it. And we certainly don't want it to fail.
KELEMEN: Britain plans to hold an international conference on Yemen later this month, and Secretary Clinton says she'll be consulting her counterparts before then to come up with new strategies to stabilize the country.
Sec. CLINTON: We see global implications from the war in Yemen, and the ongoing efforts by al-Qaida in Yemen, to use it as a base for terrorist attacks far beyond the region.
KELEMEN: Secretary Clinton is also gearing up for a White House meeting tomorrow on how a Nigerian man who allegedly got training and explosives in Yemen managed to board flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit last month. The man had a valid U.S. visa, though his father had warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that he had been radicalized. Clinton said the State Department sent the information through the proper channels, but she conceded today that those procedures might need an upgrade.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
In response to that failed airliner attack, the Obama administration has announced that it's stepping up airport screening measures. The new policy allows for more random searches on U.S.-bound international flights. It also mandates pat-downs and the physical inspection of carry-on luggage for all citizens of, or anyone flying through or from, nations with significant terrorist activity. That includes Nigeria, Cuba, Iraq, Pakistan and others -14 countries in all.
Before the attempted bombing over Detroit, the Government Accountability Office put U.S. aviation security to the test last fall. It looked for risk across the country's commercial airports, and it found plenty of flaws. It also concluded that the Transportation Security Administration had, in the words of the GAO, no unifying national strategy. Stephen M. Lord wrote that report. He is director of homeland security and justice issues at the GAO. He says individual passenger screening is only one part of the process.
Mr. STEPHEN M. LORD (Director, Homeland Security and Justice Issue, GAO): You have to also focus on airport perimeter and access, which we did in our report. We found that - the first big issue we identified is, we thought TSA could do a better job of assessing the vulnerabilities at each of the individual airports through undertaking a formal assessment, known as a vulnerability assessment. This is not to say they have not done anything to assess the gaps and potential vulnerabilities. But we thought it should be more rigorous, should be more documented, and conducted in conjunction with the FBI - so basically, formalize an existing process.
NORRIS: When you talk about vulnerabilities, we most often think of that scene at the airport where you have to take off your shoes and pull out your laptop, but it sounds like you're talking about something larger, or something beyond the actual terminal. You're talking about the entire airport.
Mr. LORD: Yeah, this is the entire airport and with a focus on a perimeter security and the workers who work within the airport - that's an important part of the aviation security picture. The events of last week have focused largely on airport screening, you know, passenger screening - that's a very important part of it, too. There are several related components when you discuss aviation security. So you need to discuss the full set of programs.
NORRIS: What is the largest threat to the TSA?
Mr. LORD: Well, in the aviation security realm, TSA conducts what they call civil aviation, a threat assessment annually, and it persistently identifies the threat of hijackings and IED devices on aircraft as the principle threat. And this is public information.
NORRIS: In the wake of the attempted bombing on Christmas night, there has been much attention paid to these whole-body imagers, which might have caught the concealed bomb elements on the suspect. Did your report look specifically at the effectiveness and the feasibility of those devices?
Mr. LORD: We had access to some at a classified testing result, so I'm not at liberty, obviously, today to discuss them. But our point was, more generally, before you deploy any new technology, we think it's very important that you carefully test it in an operational environment to see how it works. The airways have been filled with stories within the last week about the promise of this new technology. And I think it's important to be a little more circumspect and objective and, you know, focus on the testing results. Some people have heralded this is the next best thing or the silver bullet, yet it's only a technology. It's used in conjunction when - human operators and other screening procedures, so it does have some limitations. I think that's really important to understand.
NORRIS: The new procedures that were announced today - the pat-downs, the physical inspection of carry-on luggage - does that follow your recommendation?
Mr. LORD: Yeah. Because when you look at aviation security, you have to focus on three critical components - not only the technology, the screening policies and procedures, and the people who administer the system, the screeners. So even though most of the press has been focused on the technology issues in the last week, you have to look more holistically, at these other procedures as well.
NORRIS: Based on your knowledge of the various options that individual airports have when deciding how to set up the screening process at an individual airport, is there a technology that is not used as widely as it should be used right now?
Mr. LORD: As you know, the whole-body imaging technology has engendered a whole series of questions about whether it's possible to protect privacy while using this technology, I think that's a decision that's still being looked at, obviously. And as I often add, it's just not a trade -ff between security and privacy. There's a third dimension: It's commerce. You have to look at the throughput for these machines and not�
NORRIS: The throughput - what do you mean?
Mr. LORD: Yeah. The - how many people you can process through this technology in an hour. I'm not sure the American public, over the long term, would be willing to put up with any technology they thought imposed a burden on, you know - inordinate burden on their traveling.
NORRIS: Mr. Lord, thank you very much for coming in to talk to us.
Mr. LORD: Hey, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
NORRIS: Stephen Lord is the director of homeland security and justice issues at the GAO.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Moving on now, to a big moment in the world of smart phones: The Google phone is coming, as we mentioned in All Tech Considered a couple of weeks ago. That phone, called the Nexus One, is the buzz in advance of the tech industry's biggest extravaganza, the Consumer Electronics Show. It is this week in - where else? Las Vegas.
And NPR's Laura Sydell has managed to get a hold of one of the Google phones. Laura, tell us about it. What do you think?
LAURA SYDELL: Well, I have to say, I really like it, Melissa. It has a nice weight. The screen is about the same size as an iPhone screen. It has a wonderful camera. I actually have to tell you that I did a side-by-side comparison of a photo on the iPhone and a photo on the Google phone. Google phone was better, has flash. The screen moves really quickly. I actually found just navigating through it, the user interface was very fast. It also has longer battery life. The iPhone that I was using had about eight hours if you were lucky, and it would run out on you.
This really lasted, and that means a lot. The other thing is, it appears you're going to be able to choose a carrier. So, you could choose either T-Mobile or AT&T. But you'll have to pay for the phone separately, which means it might be expensive.
BLOCK: Yeah, and when we say expensive, we're talking maybe $500 if you were to buy it without a phone package.
SYDELL: That is correct. So it could be as much as $500 to actually just buy this phone - which is something Google wanted to do because Google wants to make it possible for people to buy a device without having to sign up with a carrier. Google clearly is trying to start a trend that would separate devices from carriers. For example, people are upset that you have to sign up with AT&T to get an iPhone. Well, what if in the future you could get an iPhone and then choose your carrier? I think Google would like to push us in that direction, and that's one of the reasons they're doing this at all.
BLOCK: And Google here directly taking on Apple. What is the timing of the release of the Nexus One, Laura?
SYDELL: Well, I think what Google's doing is they're trying to eclipse the Consumer Electronics Show, which starts on Thursday. So, they have a press conference scheduled tomorrow in Mountain View, which is where everybody believes they're going to announce this phone. So, it's a way to say, hey, pay attention to us instead of getting lost in the big floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which starts on Thursday.
BLOCK: And what about that show? What's supposed to be big there this year?
SYDELL: Well, you know, you'll see some 3D TV, mobile TV, Internet-connected TV, lots of eBooks. That's something you're going to see a lot of this year. We've already got the Barnes and Noble Nook. We've got the Kindle. We're going to see more. But there's a good chance that by the end of the month, those eBooks are going to get eclipsed by Apple. You may have heard rumors about something called an iSlate�
BLOCK: Hmm.
SYDELL: �which is a tablet computer that everybody is expecting Apple to announce by the end of January. And this is essentially - a tablet computer is something where you have a screen and you use a sort of, you know, touch-point pen. And you can navigate around, and it will have 3D images. And everybody's talking about this new iSlate as the second coming. But it would allow you to read things on it. It would allow you to watch movies on it, all kinds of things. And it could eclipse many of those eBooks that we're about to see at CES.
BLOCK: Everything's eclipsing everything else, very quickly.
SYDELL: Everybody wants to somehow say, hey, my gadget's just the best. And clearly, Google and Apple are the two companies that are putting brackets around this show, Google first by making this announcement on their phone and then Apple, at the end of the month, by bringing out their tablet computer, which is supposed to be called the iSlate. That's the rumor.
BLOCK: NPR's Laura Sydell, thanks so much.
SYDELL: You're welcome.
BLOCK: And as always, you can check out the All Tech Considered blog up there now. You can find out how NPR Facebook and Twitter fans summarized 2009. We asked you to give us one word to describe last year. We got a variety of answers, of course, but a popular word was: ugh. See if your word for 2009 made the list at npr.org/alltech.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Time now for your letters. And we begin with a correction. Last Friday, we discussed the dismissal of manslaughter charges against five Blackwater security guards. You may have heard us say the guards had been acquitted. In fact, as several of you pointed out, the guards had yet to be tried. A federal judge dismissed the charges, citing missteps by the prosecution.
BLOCK: A few of you wrote after hearing our story about compression in recorded music and what it takes to squeeze thousands of songs onto your iPod. Our co-host, Robert Siegel, talked to Andrew Oxenham of the University of Minnesota. He studies how the ear interacts with the brain. And Robert asked him where he stands on the debate over whether compression in MP3s reduces the quality of the listening experience.
Dr. ANDREW OXENHAM (Associate Professor, Psychology Department, University of Minnesota): There are really different levels of MP3 coding. You can go from much less data, which people can hear the difference, to higher levels of coding, which take up more space on your MP3 player, but sound better and are basically indistinguishable from the CD. And I would argue that under proper listening conditions, if it's really indistinguishable from the CD, as far as your ear is concerned, then you really haven't lost anything perceptually.
NORRIS: Well, Aaron Andrew Hunt(ph) of Charleston, Illinois, disagrees. He writes: That may be true for people who do not listen very well, but anyone with a keen ear can tell the difference no matter how high the encoding bit rate. He continues: When data is lost, the reproduction of the sound will not be the same. This is especially true for noisy sounds, like percussion instruments, which usually sound extremely unnatural when compressed by the MP3 algorithm.
BLOCK: Finally, Robert Siegel's interviews last week about warranties prompted a number of you to write. Robert spoke with a behavioral economist, who suggested that purchasing a warranty is essentially just buying piece of mind. He also spoke with the chairman of a company that sells warranties on behalf of retailers such as Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart.
NORRIS: Well, Amy Masick(ph) of Yorktown, Virginia, thinks we missed a pertinent question. She writes: Why should we need them at all, especially on items considered durable goods, a term which has now become an oxymoron due to pervasive shoddy workmanship? It is disgusting that the purchase of a $1,000 washer should immediately be followed by the question: And would you like to buy an extended warranty for this machine?
BLOCK: Meanwhile, Andrew Williams(ph) of Chicago was disappointed we didn't speak with customers. He writes: I'm in the middle of a three-month long battle to get Target to honor the three-year extended warranty I purchased on an MP3 player, and I'm continually ignored by the service line.
NORRIS: Well, want to get our attention? Go to npr.org and click on contact us at the bottom of the page. We read some of your letters on air several days a week.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
We begin this hour with some controversial questions about what to do with terrorism suspects. First, those held at Guantanamo. About 200 detainees remained imprisoned there and about half of them are from Yemen.
NORRIS: What to do with the men from Yemen has always been a central problem as the Obama administration tries to close the prison. Now it's even more complicated by revelations that the man who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas trained with al-Qaida in Yemen.
NPR's Ari Shapiro reports.
ARI SHAPIRO: Yemen has always played a disproportionately large role in the global jihadist movement. Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and he has studied the Guantanamo population in depth.
Mr. BENJAMIN WITTES (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Of the original nearly 800 people who went to Guantanamo, more than one in eight was from Yemen, which is, you know, astonishing when you think about how small the country is.
SHAPIRO: And the U.S. has been slower to release Yemenis than detainees from any other country, says Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He works with lawyers who represent Yemenis.
Mr. SHAYANA KADIDAL (Center for Constitutional Rights): Saudi Arabia had a little over 130 detainees at Guantanamo over the years, about 120 of those have been returned. Whereas Yemen had, I think, a little over 100 and there are still about 90 Yemenis left.
SHAPIRO: There are 91 Yemenis left, to be exact. The Bush administration gave 14 Guantanamo detainees back to the Yemeni government; the Obama administration: seven. So, why have the Yemenis been the last to go? Juan Zarate, who was a counterterrorism advisor to President Bush, explains.
Mr. JUAN ZARATE (Counterterrorism Adviser to President George W. Bush): Part of the calculus in terms of returning detainees to their home governments is the ability of the home government to actually deal with those individuals to either secure them, to rehabilitate them or to reintegrate them into their society. I think over the past few years there's been greater confidence in the Saudi government's ability to do precisely that.
SHAPIRO: The U.S. does not consider the Yemeni government totally reliable. Some Yemenis who've been released have reportedly returned to al-Qaida. Yesterday President Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told CNN the administration will continue to transfer Yemenis in a way that does not put Americans at risk.
Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (Counterterrorism Adviser to President Barack Obama): We made a decision that we would send back six because we were very pleased the way the Yemeni government handled the one individual we sent back about eight weeks ago. And so we're making sure that the situation on the ground is taken into account, that we continue to work with the Yemeni government and we do this in a very commonsense fashion because we want to make sure that we are able to close Guantanamo.
SHAPIRO: And there's no way to close Guantanamo without addressing the Yemeni problem. The administration is asking how much of a threat each individual detainee poses. President Obama set a high bar last year in a speech at the National Archives.
President BARACK OBAMA: I'm not going to release individuals who endanger the American people.
Mr. WITTES: Politicians say those sorts of things, but it's actually nonsense.
SHAPIRO: Benjamin Wittes.
Mr. WITTES: Because you're dealing with a population about which you have imperfect information. You don't really know who's going to go back to the fight and who's not. So when you release somebody, you assume some risk.
SHAPIRO: And that risk involves a political calculation. According to Juan Zarate, the calculation changed when a man who trained with al-Qaida in Yemen tried to blow up an airplane Christmas Day.
Mr. ZARATE: This case highlights politically and publicly the fact that you've got a direct threat to the homeland coming out of the adaptations of al-Qaida in Yemen. And to send known al-Qaida operatives back to Yemen at this time, I think, is politically untenable.
SHAPIRO: Shayana Kadidal, whose group represents Yemenis at Guantanamo, fears Zarate may be right.
Mr. KADIDAL: Obviously the timing on this couldn't have been worse, but the people who are being sent home now are people who have been cleared by this exhaustive review by the Interagency Task Force. So, they have a much more cautious process that's been undertaken now and if people get cleared by that process, they ought to be sent home.
SHAPIRO: Conservatives in Congress are urging President Obama not to release any more Guantanamo detainees to the Yemeni government. Another option is indefinite detention in the U.S. without trial, but that angers liberals in Congress, which helps explain why President Obama will not meet his original deadline to close Guantanamo later this month.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The man who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas is at the center of another debate. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is being held in federal prison in Michigan and is due to appear in court on Friday. The Obama administration has decided to pursue the case in federal criminal court, not through a military commission, and that decision has both supporters and detractors. We're going to hear now from both sides on that question.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
David Laufman is a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who prosecuted several terrorism cases there. He also worked in the Justice Department helping to coordinate the department's response after 9/11. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID LAUFMAN (Former Assistant U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of Virginia): Thank you.
BLOCK: And we're also joined by David Rivkin, co-chair of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He worked in the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush focusing on legal policy and intelligence oversight. Welcome to you.
Mr. DAVID RIVKIN (Co-Chair, Center for Law and Counterterrorism, Foundation for Defense of Democracies): Good to be with you.
BLOCK: And David Laufman, let's start with you first. You prosecuted terrorism cases yourself, as I mentioned, and you say federal criminal court is the proper venue for this case. Why is that?
Mr. LAUFMAN: Well, prosecution of this individual in a criminal justice system is consistent with a vast bulk of experience of how individuals accused of committing terrorism offences has been handled, going back far beyond the Obama administration into the first George Bush administration and before that. It is by far the norm for the government to proceed by way of criminal prosecution rather than in the more recent military commission system.
BLOCK: So you say president is that that would be how this is handled.
Mr. LAUFMAN: Correct.
BLOCK: David Rivkin, you disagree. You say that Abdulmutallab should have been charged as an enemy combatant, should've been pursued through military courts.
Mr. RIVKIN: Right, not because of lack of precedent. My colleague is absolutely right. That's the way things have been done most of the time. But let's consider several factors. First of all, this is a poster child for a military commission. This is an individual who immediately upon being detained indicated he was a member of al-Qaida. This is an individual who possesses, if at all, valuable operation intelligence - not strategic intelligence. He's not Osama bin Laden.
His intelligence is of vanishing value, it's essential to interrogate him immediately, interrogate him properly. He was never subjected to gruesome(ph) interrogation. He was never held on any black site. If that is not the right person for military commission, which combines the benefits of being able to obtain (unintelligible) intelligence quickly before he gets (unintelligible) up, then I don't know who is.
BLOCK: I want to hear from both of you on one other argument that's raised -and that's this, that when terrorism cases are channeled through the federal criminal system, it can foster cooperation around the world with foreign intelligence, foreign law enforcement. Is that, do you think, plausible or relevant? David Rivkin, you first.
Mr. RIVKIN: Well, actually, there is some truth, unfortunately, to this argument because much of the rest of world certainly (unintelligible) allies are not serious about all things military. Military commissions and the whole military justice system has gotten a very bad rap. But there's also one other point - the symbolic benefits, democracy - words in a democracy matter. How you portray a given offense matters a great deal to your citizens, to the community at large. This is not just an act of terrorism. I've been living with terrorism for decades, unfortunately. This is an act of war. It is a different animal.
So, on one the hand we have a commander-in-chief who tells us we're at war, but every time, here's somebody who carries out an act of war against the United States, we treat as an act of terrorism. This is more than an act of terrorism.
BLOCK: David Laufman, what do you make of that point? That this, according to David Rivkin, was an act of war, should be treated as such in the courts?
Mr. LAUFMAN: I don't debate the point that there may be parallel jurisdiction appropriate to try him in the military commission system. My point is simply is that the American criminal justice system has worked very effectively to deal with precisely these kinds of offenses. The Richard Reid case, which arose, I believe around Christmas of 2001, when we were at the highest level of crisis management in the post 9/11 moment, is precisely on all fours with his case. He was tried criminally. There was no great hue and cry. Richard Reid was successfully prosecuted. He got a life sentence. This guy, if he's convicted, is going to get a very, very heavy sentence.
BLOCK: We're talking about Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber.
Mr. LAUFMAN: Correct.
BLOCK: Richard Reid pleaded guilty in federal court and, as you say, serving a life sentence at Supermax in Colorado. David Rivkin, why shouldn't that be the closest parallel to what we're talking about here? It was also an attempted attack on an airliner.
Mr. RIVKIN: Well, first of all, at the time Mr. Reid was apprehended, the military commission system was not stood up. Second of all, I frankly find the whole argument puzzling - the argument by reference to tradition. Tradition is a good thing, but following tradition blindly - let's stipulate, even if Mr. Reid was apprehended at the time military commission was stood up and the Bush administration did it, it's not bipartisan(ph). It was a mistake. Okay? Just because you made one mistake does not mean you have to keep repeating that mistake. New president comes in, tremendous more authority. He says, and I take him at face value, but military commissions are important. Well, give them some exercise.
BLOCK: David Laufman, what do you think?
Mr. LAUFMAN: It's not a choice of more process, less security. We've had eight years to get the commission system right, and we still haven't gotten it right. I don't think the commission system should be a Petri dish now for bringing terrorism cases into a system that is not able to adjudicate them effectively.
BLOCK: Thanks very much to both of you for coming in.
Mr. LAUFMAN: Thank you.
Mr. RIVKIN: Thank you.
BLOCK: David Laufman is the former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. And David Rivkin is with the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Both have worked in the Justice Department.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
That state dinner at the White House continues to make news for the wrong reasons. It turns out that Tareq and Michaele Salahi were not the only people to crash the dinner. The Secret Service has confirmed that another uninvited guest got into the White House, as NPR's Don Gonyea reports.
DON GONYEA: There was already a criminal investigation underway involving the Salahi's very unwelcome and very much photographed visit to the White House. But today, the Secret Service says the investigation into the slip-up has revealed that another person made it to the state dinner without an invite. The individual's identity has not been released, but in a statement, the Secret Service says it appears that the subject traveled from a local hotel where the official Indian delegation was staying. There was a security sweep there with the entire delegation handled by the State Department, then that delegation and the uninvited guest boarded a bus that took them all to the White House.
The Secret Service says there's nothing to indicate that this individual had contact with the president or first lady. So far there are no pictures. It is also not clear at this point if the person had any direct connection to the official delegation from India. The Secret Service says it will have no further comment because of the ongoing criminal investigation since the state dinner security procedures for all White House events have been enhanced.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
With one Herculean toss, a college basketball player has earned a place in the YouTube hall of fame. It happened yesterday when things were looking downright desperate for the University of Florida men's basketball team. Playing at North Carolina State, the Gators were down by one with less than three seconds to go.
They could only stand by and watch as a Wolfpack player was on the free throw line with a chance to put the game away. He missed the second shot. Then Florida forward Chandler Parsons got the rebound on that last free throw. And with so little time and almost the entire court to travel, he really had only one very, very, very long shot.
Unidentified Man #1: Parsons, a long three-point shot. It's good.
Unidentified Man #2: It's good.
Unidentified Man #1: It's good.
Unidentified Man #2: It's good. Chandler Parsons has won the game.
Unidentified Man #1: Unbelievable.
Unidentified Man #2: Oh, man. Sixty-two to 61, Chandler Parsons shoots in a 65-foot three to win the game. How, my - I don't believe what I've just seen.
NORRIS: The Florida announcers might not have believed and the headlines today were quick to call it a miracle shot. But just how miraculous was it? Well, for an answer, we turn to John Gasaway. He's a writer for basketballprospectus.com, and he joins us from member station WFYI in Indianapolis. Welcome to the program.
Mr. JOHN GASAWAY (Writer, BasketballProspectus.com): Thank you for having me.
NORRIS: A lot of happy people in that clip.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GASAWAY: Just listening to that gets me excited all over again. That was a great call of a great play.
NORRIS: Yeah. If you haven't seen it on YouTube, it is an amazing bit of basketball play there. But in your most recent post for Basketball Prospectus, you jokingly - we think - say that Parsons, who's a reserve forward, has made a strong case for the National Player of the Year. Are you serious about that?
Mr. GASAWAY: He's the most exciting thing I've seen in calendar 2010, I'll put it that way.
NORRIS: I'm going to ask you about the shot in just a minute, but first, the player. Tell me a little bit more about Chandler Parsons.
Mr. GASAWAY: This is the best thing he's done in his career. He's a fine player, all kidding aside. But he's a role player for Florida. He's not the star player for the Gators. And Florida looks to be a team that will be right on the edge, as far as getting into the NCAA Tournament this year. So one point I made in my post today was that this shot actually could turn out to be a very important shot for their season, in addition to being great TV. That was an important game for them to win and they have Parsons solely to thank for that.
NORRIS: Did the coach know that he had this particular talent, that he could make a shot at 65 feet or however wide it was?
Mr. GASAWAY: I think Florida coach Billy Donovan's exact quote, and if you can call a Twitter post a quote was, "That's not the way I drew it up, but I'll take it."
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: How often do we see this kind of shot?
Mr. GASAWAY: You know, it did happen in an NCAA Tournament game last March. A Missouri player by the name of Marcus Denmon did the same thing from almost the exact same spot on the floor with a key difference: It was to close out the first half, not the whole game and it didn't turn out to make the difference between winning and losing.
When shots like this are made from this distance, they get on the highlight reel. You see them. They're very rare. And then one that singlehandedly spells the difference between victory and defeat is rarer still. So we're right to make a big deal out of this. It's pretty special.
NORRIS: But you said it matters for the team, that this could make a difference in terms of tournament play. How will this change the fortunes for that young man?
Mr. GASAWAY: Well, he'll be on YouTube forever. He will be attached to this feat forever. We're now talking about him on NPR. You know, I don't want to write the subsequent book on his playing career, but this is certainly the biggest splash he's made so far. It's a pretty big deal.
NORRIS: Well, John Gasaway, thanks so much for talking to us. All the best to you.
Mr. GASAWAY: Thank you very much for having me.
NORRIS: John Gasaway is a writer for basketballprospectus.com.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
The Internal Revenue Service is taking aim at the tax preparation industry. Many Americans use tax preparers to do their returns, but there are no federal standards or competency tests. The IRS says that has to change. It announced rules today, and NPR's Wendy Kaufman joins us to talk about them. And, Wendy, there a lot of different kinds of tax preparers. Who exactly is it that the IRS is targeting here with these rules?
WENDY KAUFMAN: Well, Melissa, you know, the tax preparation industry is huge and it's growing. And it turns out that about 60 percent of us use paid preparers, and in many cases, those preparers aren't regulated at all. So you've got everything from tax lawyers and CPAs to the guy who hangs out a shingle in March and disappears a few weeks later. The IRS wants to crack down on the shoddy operators or those who are simply incompetent.
BLOCK: And crack down how exactly?
KAUFMAN: Well, here are what some of the new rules are going to look like. Tax preparers are going to have to register with the federal government and get an ID number. In general, everyone except lawyers and CPAs will have to pass competency tests, and they're going to have to take continuing education courses. And they're going to have to comply with ethics rules that currently don't apply to them.
BLOCK: And how many tax preparers is this likely to affect, do you think?
KAUFMAN: The IRS says about a million preparers will be covered. And the government's hope here is that the new rules will help ensure the integrity of the tax system, consumers will be more likely to get accurate, honest advice, the government will hopefully collect what it calls the appropriate amount of tax. By the way, the government isn't saying if it expects more tax revenue or less tax revenue, but the appropriate amount.
I should say here, Melissa, that these rules are a huge change for the federal government, which has never attempted to adopt regulations, anything like this in the past. So it's a huge step on the part of the IRS.
BLOCK: Yeah. And when would these new rules go into effect?
KAUFMAN: Well, the rules will not go into effect for the coming tax season. They're going to be taking some time to be implemented. But the IRS is stepping up its oversight of the industry. And in some cases, this can be actually going undercover to check out some of these guys.
By the way, Consumers Union sees these rules as a big first step in getting rid of bad actors. H&R Block, the largest tax preparation company in the country, said it too viewed the rules as a positive step. So we're coming a long way, it looks like, at least from the IRS' perspective.
BLOCK: Undercover tax work. I like that. Wendy, if the new rules, as you say, are not going to be in effect for the coming tax season, what does the IRS say that taxpayers should be on the lookout for in the meantime as they get their taxes done?
KAUFMAN: Well, it raised a couple of potential big red flags that consumers should take note of. One would be any tax preparation company that says to you in advance they're going to get you a big, giant refund. And the other big red flag they mentioned was that you should avoid any tax preparer whose fee is based on a percentage of any tax refund that you're entitled to.
BLOCK: Okay, Wendy, thanks so much.
KAUFMAN: You're welcome, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Wendy Kaufman.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Hollywood movie executives were just getting used to the new reality that fewer people are going out to the movies. Instead, Americans are buying movies on DVD, lots of them. U.S. box offices have not outsold movies on DVD since 2002.
BLOCK: Well, at least one new study shows 2009 movie ticket sales in the U.S. have increased a whopping 10 percent over 2008. At the same time, DVD movie sales plunged 13 percent.
To help us understand why and why it matters, we're joined by Sarah McBride of the Wall Street Journal.
Ms. McBride, did DVD have a bad year or did the movie theaters just have a very good year?
Ms. SARAH MCBRIDE (Reporter, Wall Street Journal): You know, a bit of both. Because of the economy, more consumers are looking for a cheap night out, and for many people, that's going to the movies. The box office has been helped enormously by the record number of movies that are coming out in 3D, and theaters charge a premium, anywhere from $3 to $5 for that. At the same time, people are getting a bit more penny-pinching when it comes to buying DVDs.
BLOCK: Is it that overall moviegoing is up or are we seeing something akin to the "Titanic" effect where people are seeing the same film over and over and over and over again?
Ms. MCBRIDE: For some of these 3D movies in particular, people are seeing the same movies over and over. And the studios are focusing more on big box office hits that they think will be successful and draw huge crowds. That's coming at the expense of kind of mid-tier movies that are cheaper to produce, but they, the studios know, won't draw as many people to the theaters.
BLOCK: What beyond the 3D movies, what have the big studios or the movie theaters been doing to try to coax people back into those theaters?
Ms. MCBRIDE: There have been a huge number of sequels this year. And theaters are trying to make the experience more pleasant. One of the big trends in moviegoing right now is those luxury theaters where, for example, you can have drinks at your seat, sometimes a meal, you can reserve your seat. So there's a big effort coming from the theaters and the studios.
BLOCK: Are we just talking about DVD movie sales? I'm wondering if movie sales have fallen because people are buying other kinds of DVDs: HBO series or network series or other kinds of things.
Ms. MCBRIDE: Actually, things like TV series and sports are doing very well. The bigger problem is with the movies, where people are less inclined to buy the movie and more inclined to rent it.
BLOCK: Sarah McBride, we've seen this script before, with the transition from VHS to DVD. Is the DVD decline the beginning of the end for the DVD until studios transition to the next technology, whether it's streaming or some sort of on-demand system?
Ms. MCBRIDE: What the studios would like to see happen is people moving from DVD to Blu-ray and then eventually to paid digital downloads. They'd like those things to happen faster, and they're doing everything they can to encourage consumers to move to those new media. But for consumers, that involves doing things like buying a Blu-ray player or perhaps getting one of those Internet-enabled TVs. And that's a big outlay of cash, and people just aren't doing it.
BLOCK: Sarah McBride, thank you very much.
Ms. MCBRIDE: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah McBride.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
New information is surfacing on the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA officers last week in Afghanistan.
Several news organizations are reporting that the bomber was a Jordanian intelligence asset and a double agent of al-Qaida. His handler, a Jordanian intelligence officer, was also killed in the attack.
The bomber struck a base used by the CIA in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. The attack dealt the single most deadly blow to the intelligence agency since the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983.
New York Times reporter Richard Oppel Jr. is following the story from Islamabad, Pakistan.
And Richard, what more are you hearing about the identity of the suicide bomber?
Mr. RICHARD OPPEL JR. (Reporter, The New York Times): Well, he was someone who had been arrested in Jordan and then recruited to work for Jordanian intelligence and then brought to the frontier region to pursue top al-Qaida targets. And he was viewed as very valuable, and as someone who was a credible asset. And our understanding, from our source, is that's why he was allowed onto the base without being more thoroughly searched.
BLOCK: This is quite different, Richard, from the initial reports about this attack, which were that somebody posing as an Afghan national army officer had somehow infiltrated the base. This is a very different story now.
Mr. OPPEL JR.: Yes, what we've been told is that the initial information about someone being brought on - brought into the base as a - as an Afghan national army officer is not correct.
BLOCK: What was the role of this - now, what turns out to be Jordanian double agent, what was his role supposed to be working with U.S. and Jordanian intelligence in Afghanistan?
Mr. OPPEL JR.: Well, as it's been described to us, he was someone who was seen as someone who could penetrate and infiltrate al-Qaida at high levels and provide intelligence, very hard to get intelligence on operatives at the highest levels of the terror organization.
BLOCK: And as we mentioned, one of those killed was apparently the Jordanian intelligence officer who was his handler, who had apparently brought him to the base, to the Americans.
Mr. OPPEL JR.: That's correct. And the handler was someone of high status in Jordan. The king of Jordan and his family turned out to meet his casket when he was flown back, and to attend his funeral as well.
BLOCK: Richard, how do you think this suicide bombing, and this new knowledge about the identity of the suicide bomber as a Jordanian and a Jordanian intelligence asset, how will that affect U.S. cooperation with the Jordanian intelligence services?
Mr. OPPEL JR.: Well, certainly, it's embarrassing for the Jordanians, but it also may not play that well with people in Jordan. But the Jordanians and the American intelligence services have had a close relationship for a long time.
BLOCK: And describe just a bit, if you would, the role that this forward operating base where the attack took place, the role that that plays in operations right now in Afghanistan.
Mr. OPPEL JR.: Well, it's a very sensitive base because it's where a lot of intelligence is gathered on the Taliban networks in the frontier along the border. And a lot of that intelligence is fed into the targeting of suspected militants by CIA drones. So it's a place that has a very big role in the, you know, the CIA drone campaign that has been ongoing for some time.
BLOCK: OK, Richard, thank you very much.
Mr. OPPEL JR.: Well, thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's New York Times reporter Richard Oppel Jr., speaking to us from Islamabad about the news today that the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA officers last week in Afghanistan was, in fact, a Jordanian intelligence asset and a double agent of al-Qaida.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
The new German film "The White Ribbon" is a dark meditation on physical and psychological violence and repression set at the turn of the last century. Some critics are calling it a subtle exploration of the origins of Nazism. Despite that painful undercurrent, "The White Ribbon" has been well-received in Germany.
BLOCK: It's also done well elsewhere. At this year's Cannes Film Festival, it won the top prize, the Palme d'Or. It's also generating a lot of Oscar buzz as a contender in the foreign language category. "The White Ribbon" opens in American theaters over the coming weeks.
From Berlin, NPR's Eric Westervelt tells us more about the movie.
ERIC WESTERVELT: "The White Ribbon," or "Das Weisse Band," centers on the fictional village of Eichwald in Northern Germany on the eve of the First World War. The small, strict Protestant community is soon paralyzed by a series of mysterious and vicious acts. Children are found bound and beaten, a farm building burns in the night. The village's lone doctor is thrown from his horse and injured by a wire stretched across the road.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified Woman #1: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Woman #2: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: The narrator, a schoolteacher, suspects a group of the village's children and questions them.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified Man #1: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Director Michael Haneke refuses to turn his camera on the culprit or culprits in the baffling acts of violence. As he did in his last film, "Cache," Haneke presents an engrossing whodunit that is left unresolved.
At a screening in Berlin, Haneke pointed out that the narrator may be unreliable.
Mr. MICHAEL HANEKE (Director, "The White Ribbon"): (Through translator) The film opens with the narrator's words: I'm not sure whether what I am about to tell you is faithful to the truth. Much of it I've forgotten and much of it relies on hearsay. So the narrator questions the very authenticity of what we are about to see from the very beginning.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified Man #2: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: "The White Ribbon" is different from most every historical drama that film critic Andreas Kilb has seen. The movie has none of the elaborate costumes, carriages, panoramic vistas or other eye candy of typical Hollywood or British period pieces. It's just a stark rural setting displayed in crisp and haunting black and white, a dusty family picture book come to life.
Mr. ANDREAS KILB (Film Critic): I had the instinctive notion that that's what it may have looked like in its strangeness. It bears very much a resemblance to what our family albums and our grandfathers' and grandmothers' and great grandmothers' tales sounded and looked like.
WESTERVELT: We see the children hovering inquisitively near almost every crime scene. Yet, if they are the perpetrators, the responsibility may lie elsewhere. The violence in the film is physical, psychological and sexual, and plays out in unison with themes of authority, discipline, order and control.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified People: (Singing in foreign language)
WESTERVELT: Director Haneke shows us the underlying brutality of the tools used to raise the children: from beatings to the white ribbons the village pastor ties to his sons and daughters to remind them of their sins and to try to teach them to strive for purity.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified People: (Singing in foreign language)
Unidentified Man #3: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Woman #3: (As character) (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Please forgive me, father, sir, please forgive me, the daughter says. But Andreas Kilb, with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says the children become the secret rulers of this tightly wound village.
Mr. KILB: They are the coming generation. They are the one that own the future. So, of course, what is perpetrated in this film is done by children. But the responsibles for the deeds are, of course, the adults. Maybe this is a very biblical notion: the sins of the fathers surface in their children. But it lies underneath the movement of the story in this film.
WESTERVELT: The meditation on Protestant repression, discipline, cruelty and guilt has led some in the German film press to speculate that "The White Ribbon" is, in fact, an exploration of the origins of the Nazi era. The children forced to wear the white ribbons of purity by the pastor are of the generation that grow up to wear the red and black swastika armbands.
Mr. BURGHART KLAUSSNER (Actor): This historical film, of course, gives you material to think about where we come from and what our fathers and grandfathers may have had in mind.
WESTERVELT: Actor Burghart Klaussner, known internationally for his roles in the films "The Reader" and "Goodbye Lenin," plays the village pastor. Klaussner believes the film addresses universal themes: the pedagogy of terror and authoritarianism. But he says the work is certainly grounded in Germany's history.
Mr. KLAUSSNER: It is not especially a film about the roots of the Nazi period, but a film about maybe the roots of the 20th century violence in the whole. I mean, the children shown in this film were our fathers and grandfathers. So, of course, we make up our minds, well, how does it come that those children 20 years, 30 years later would torture other people and would bring violence over nearly the whole world?
WESTERVELT: In fact, the film was released in Germany with the subtitle "A German Children's Story," something director Michael Haneke says will not appear abroad.
Mr. HANEKE: (Through translator) Perhaps that is the irony. I decided that people in Germany should understand the film as a film about Germany, but I do not want this to be the case abroad. Elsewhere, it should be understood beyond its German framework.
WESTERVELT: But in tackling such a loaded issue in Germany - how ordinary people can embrace brutality, if in fact that's what Haneke is doing - it may be hard for foreign audiences to look beyond the film's German context.
By the end of "The White Ribbon," you're almost relieved when World War I breaks out, as perhaps it offers a chance for the villagers to be punished or redeemed through violence.
So, is the film about the social origins of National Socialism? Who really is the perpetrator of the movie's brutal acts? Haneke's response may be as perplexing as his unresolved ending.
Mr. HANEKE: (Through translator) It is not my job to interpret my films. My wish is to take my audience seriously and to give them the opportunity to make up their own minds.
WESTERVELT: His job, Haneke says, is merely to ask questions.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Berlin.
BLOCK: At our Web site, you can watch clips from "The White Ribbon" and read NPR's review of the film. You can also find reviews of other films that are in theaters now. Those are at npr.org.
(Soundbite of movie, "The White Ribbon")
Unidentified People: (Singing in foreign language)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Mexico's brutal drug war, the city of Juarez has seen horrific levels of violence. In 2009, it racked up the highest number of murders in its history. Last year, close to 2,600 people in Juarez were killed in drug-related crimes. The city lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
NPR's Jason Beaubien traveled there and sent this story.
(Soundbite of sirens)
JASON BEAUBIEN: Juarez is a city torn apart by more than just murder. It's a city adrift, a city struggling unsuccessfully to find hope, a city flooded with heavily armed security forces, but where most people say they don't feel secure. The wave of killings that's grown steadily over the last two years has spawned a secondary crime wave of kidnapping and extortion. And the violence has left the city in a state of shock.
In downtown Juarez, Diana Martinez just placed a small black cross with the name of her brother on it on a banner to the thousands of people killed since 2007.
Ms. DIANA MARTINEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: I think we are now living in a state of paranoia, Martinez says, all of the inhabitants of Ciudad Juarez, even the children. It's something that's completely upturned our lives. I don't feel secure in the streets or even in my house.
Her brother, Rafael, who sold used cars, was gunned down in May in what Diana thinks was a robbery.
Ms. MARTINEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: He was a very young man, 24 years old, she says. He leaves behind a family and three kids. It's a tragedy just like the thousands and thousands of tragedies that are repeating here every day in Juarez.
In 2009, officials promised things would get better in Juarez. 2008 has been a terrible year in the border city as two of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels fought for control of smuggling routes into El Paso, Texas. Early last year, the Mexican military took over the Juarez police department. President Felipe Calderon sent in thousands of federal police and soldiers to regain control of the city, but the violence has only gotten worse.
More than 2,600 people were killed in Juarez in 2009, making it the murder capital of the hemisphere and giving it a homicide rate more than 17 times greater than that of Los Angeles.
Mr. NELSON ARMENTA: The last two years have been just unbelievable, how the level of violence, you know, we are living each day. I mean, the level of violence is just incredible.
BEAUBIEN: Nelson Armenta runs a small seafood restaurant in downtown Juarez. After he was held up twice in one month, he hired a security guard to twirl a baton out front.
Mr. ARMENTA: These young guys, you know, almost 17 years old, you know, carrying guns. That got us worried. That's why we got the security guard.
BEAUBIEN: Mexican soldiers with automatic weapons also patrol in front of his restaurant. Truckloads of federal police with machine guns mounted on their pickups roll through the streets, but the violence hasn't just continued, it's been increasing.
Every day, he reads in the paper about businesses getting shot up or burned down for not paying for so-called protection.
Mr. ARMENTA: And we just realized that, you know, we cannot be afraid of that. I mean, it's not about religion, but it's about faith. It's about, if this happens, well, at least we can do is just move on.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Juarez is a city of dreams. To Americans, it may look like the ugly, dusty, beat-up stepsister of El Paso. But to poor Mexicans, it's a land of promise. For decades, people have flocked to the low-paying but plentiful jobs in the city's maquiladoras. They must first apply for mandatory criminal background checks. And each day, a long line extends outside the state attorney general's office as jobseekers wait for their paperwork. Other enterprising souls are hawking burritos, tacos and cold drinks to the people stranded in line. But at the same time that the city's murder rate has skyrocketed, so has unemployment.
Jorge Pedroza, the executive director of the local maquiladoras association, says the global economic downturn hit the Juarez factories incredibly hard.
Mr. JORGE PEDROZA (Executive Director, Asociacion de Maquiladoras): Since 2008 to 2009, we lost around 125,000 jobs.
BEAUBIEN: This in a city of just 1.5 million people, and it represents almost a 50 percent drop in jobs at the city's main source of legal employment.
Tighter border controls and the bad publicity from the drug war have also slashed tourism. The U.S. military has ordered its personnel not to enter Juarez without special permission. Despite this, a U.S. airman was gunned down along with five other people in a Juarez strip club in November.
The city is trying to confront the situation. The mayor has reconstituted and doubled the size of the local police force. He's opened subsidized day care centers for the children of factory workers.
But Clara Rojas, who teaches political rhetoric at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, predicts it will take decades for the city to recover. She traces the roots of the current violence to the hundreds of murders of women in the 1990s that are still unsolved.
Professor CLARA ROJAS (Political Rhetoric, Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez): It's impunity, of course. What else?
BEAUBIEN: She says that that impunity sent a signal to the drug cartels and other thugs that Juarez is, in her words, fertile ground for criminal activity.
Prof. ROJAS: There is no way you can change anything if everybody thinks the city is a trash can for whatever they want to do.
BEAUBIEN: Rojas says Juarez has much more than a drug-related problem. She says the current violence stems from deep social fissures. And until those are fixed, she predicts the killings will continue.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Now to the story of a popular educator from California who was brutally murdered in Mexico. Last week, 33-year-old Bobby Salcedo was visiting relatives in Durango, Mexico. He was abducted by a gang of armed men, and he was killed. Now, the FBI is likely to join the investigation.
As NPR's Carrie Kahn reports, Salcedo's death has devastated his hometown of El Monte, just outside Los Angeles.
CARRIE KAHN: El Monte is a working-class, largely immigrant community, and Bobby Salcedo was one of its role models. He was a product of the town's public schools who later came back to teach. He became an assistant principal and eventually was elected to the school board.
El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero says Salcedo gave everything to his town.
Mayor ANDRE QUINTERO (El Monte, California): There was nothing selfish about this young man. And he was just a bright, shining star for our community, and it's just a tragic loss.
KAHN: Salcedo is believed to be the first elected U.S. official caught up in the violence of Mexico's ongoing drug war. Last week, Salcedo was vacationing in Durango, Mexico, with his wife in her hometown, Gomez Palacio. They were out with friends at a local bar when gunmen burst in and kidnapped Salcedo and five other men. The next day, all were found dead, their bodies dumped alongside a canal. Mexican authorities say it looks like the work of a drug gang. Salcedo's family says Bobby was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His brother, Juan, says Bobby has been traveling to Gomez Palacio for years without problems.
Mr. JUAN SALCEDO: He did a lot of fundraisers for that city - I mean, as ironic as it is - fundraising for orphanages, fire department, an ambulance for that city.
KAHN: Salcedo and his wife, Betzy, were married there just a year and a half ago. Speaking in Spanish, she said she's devastated by the loss of her husband. Bobby's sister, Griselda, translated.
Ms. BETZY SALCEDO: (Foreign language spoken)
Ms. GRISELDA SALCEDO JEFFERSON: I would like people to remember him as a great educator. Education was, he believed, the solution to our problems.
KAHN: The women said Salcedo's main goal in life was to inspire young people and help them get into college. He appeared to achieve that goal, according to the thousands of people who filled El Monte's high school football field last night to remember Salcedo.
(Soundbite of a marching band)
KAHN: The school marching band played their fight song as speaker after speaker told stories of Salcedo's incredible drive and commitment to the youth of El Monte.
Students like Crystal Delgado wrote remembrances on dozens of poster boards hanging from the football field fence.
Ms. CRYSTAL DELGADO: He wasn't just a teacher, he was a friend. He was always there for us. And especially when I needed help, like on my college apps, he was there helping me. He was someone great who I'm always going to remember.
KAHN: Delgado was in Mexico when she heard about Salcedo's murder. She says she's much more cautious in Mexico now than ever before.
Jose Barrajas, who was also at the rally, says he no longer travels home to Mexico.
Mr. JOSE BARRAJAS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: He says Mexico isn't like it used to be. You don't know who is good, or who is bad.
Salcedo's relatives say they have no confidence that Mexican officials will find Bobby's killers. They urged everyone at the rally to call their congressmen and put pressure on Mexico so that their loss, and that of El Monte's, won't be in vain.
Carrie Kahn, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
When Republicans go looking for leaders, Texas has long been one of their first stops. The Lone Star state has served as an incubator for the GOP. One of the newest stars there is just finishing his first year as speaker of the Texas House.
NPR's Wade Goodwyn has his story in our series On the Next Generation of Republican Leaders.
WADE GOODWYN: Republicans in Texas hold every statewide office and have for years. But when Joe Straus was born, the Texas GOP could practically caucus in a phone booth. His mother, Joci, was in that phone booth from the very beginning.
Speaker JOE STRAUS (Texas House of Representatives): I came from a pioneer Republican family. My mother, in the '60s, when I was a very young child, she was the organizer of the Nixon Girls in San Antonio.
GOODWYN: Joe Straus was raised on Republican politics. Growing the party was a part of growing up. He played golf and rode. His family owned and raced prized thoroughbreds. After Vanderbilt, he went to Washington to work for Vice President George Bush in 1982. In his 40s, Straus turned to a career he'd been groomed for for much of his life. In a special election in 2005, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives from San Antonio. Although Republicans controlled the Texas House, Senate and governor's mansion, there were deep divisions inside the party, especially in the House.
Speaker STRAUS: We became a little arrogant and a small minority in our party went on a bit of a purge, where they were looking for Republicans that didn't fit their mold. And I very strongly disagree with that approach.
GOODWYN: While some of this had to do with ideology, conservatives purging moderate Republicans, most of it had to do with raw power. Tom Craddick, the speaker of the Texas House during the last decade, had a reputation of ruling with an iron hand. So, Straus took his impeccable Republican bona fides and joined forces with the Republican opposition group called the Gang of 11.
It was a bare-knuckle political fight, but with the help of the minority Democrats, the renegade Republicans pulled off a palace coup. Tom Craddick was voted out and to nearly everyone's complete surprise, Joe Straus was elected speaker in January of last year.
Mr. PAUL BURKA (Senior Executive Editor, Texas Monthly): It was stunning when they picked Straus because he'd only been there barely two terms.
GOODWYN: Paul Burka is the senior executive editor at Texas Monthly magazine.
Mr. BURKA: He's very smart. He's very public spirited. I think that Straus is somebody who listens. He doesn't come with his own agendas, which is very refreshing for a speaker.
GOODWYN: If the previous speaker fashioned a reputation for putting the Republican Party's political interests before other considerations, Straus struck more of a balance. He let legislation bubble up from members. He included Democrats in negotiations. He played the politician, not the autocrat.
Speaker STRAUS: I haven't been up here in a while.
GOODWYN: Straus stands on the dais of one of the most beautiful public spaces in the country, the Texas House of Representatives. He says the proudest moment of his young political career came at the end of his first session as speaker.
Speaker STRAUS: I remember I was looking out at this scene. It was about 4 o'clock in the morning in May toward the end of the session. We took a final vote on our House budget and it passed a 150 to zero, 76 Republicans and 74 Democrats all voted yes to the budget.
GOODWYN: It was a singular achievement, as improbable as the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. all voting unanimously on the next budget bill. But the next session will not be so easy. Texas is looking at a $10 billion shortfall. And once again, the Legislature must redistrict the state's congressional seats. If Joe Straus can hurdle these fences, more of his mettle will be revealed. Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka.
Mr. BURKA: I think he can go wherever he wants to go because of his family connections and the fact that he gets along with Democrats and Republicans. Another thing is that he's from San Antonio, which is the action city, politically. That's where you have the mixture of Anglos and Hispanics that have learned to work together and share common ground, which is really the future of the state.
GOODWYN: Joe Straus is a Republican more in the mold of the first President George Bush than the second. Whether he can appeal and lead a Texas GOP that has been pushed further to the right by the Tea Parties remains to be seen.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Finally this hour, we're going to hear about a singer who goes by the name Somi. She's been compared to famous jazz vocalists such as Cassandra Wilson and Sarah Vaughan. Somi's latest album is broader than just jazz. Critic Derek Rath has this review.
(Soundbite of music)
DEREK RATH: The great thing about coffee � or, in my case, a nice cup of tea � is the first sip, and just for a moment, the accompanying sense of well-being. It's a snugness, a familiarity imparted by ingredients from places of which you likely have no knowledge. And so it is with the new CD from the artist called Somi.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SOMI (Singer): (Singing) I'm headed home. My heart and heading home. The wind seems strong.
RATH: It's an apt metaphor, because although she has lived most of her life in Illinois and New York, Somi spent her early childhood with her Ugandan and Rwandan parents in Africa. It is this merger of cultures and experience that shapes her awareness and gives a distinct flavor to her music.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SOMI: (Singing) Ain't it (unintelligible) from home can relieve the pain?
RATH: Somi's style may well span territory mapped out by Sade, Sarah Vaughan and even perhaps Steely Dan, but there's much more to it than that. For one thing, Somi sings not only in English but three African languages. And there is, at the core of her music, a top-notch African rhythm section.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SOMI: (Singing foreign language).
RATH: In "Enganjyani," which according to Somi means the memory of whispered prayer and being haunted by a past lover, she is also joined by the legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. Most telling, though, these prodigious musical chops are employed in the service of some savvy songwriting.
(Soundbite of song, "Enganjyani")
RATH: Her lyrics are intimate and personal, turning on the everyday tribulations of life, things we can all relate to.
(Soundbite of song, "Wallflower Blues")
Ms. SOMI: (Singing) They say that silence is golden, but she knows it can be blue. (Unintelligible) and there's just no getting through to you.
RATH: This seeming vulnerability is her strength, and her singing exudes both with confidence. This is life closely observed, and the delight is in the details. And she's not afraid to drop the music out to practically nothing to focus on them.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SOMI: (Singing) We argued yesterday, and my morning sun seems low. Clouds of violins...
RATH: With this CD, Somi unites the familiar with the exotic and reveals the universalities that can be found in individual experience.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. SOMI: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
RATH: These intimate ruminations need no larger-than-life sonic padding. They are a potent brew from the first sip to the last drop.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: The album from Somi is called "If the Rains Come First." Our reviewer is Derek Rath.
(Soundbite of music)
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
It's common for teachers to work in classrooms not far from where they went to school themselves. One study found that more than half of all New York City teachers were working just 15 miles from where they grew up. Educators in New Orleans are trying a different model. The city lost so many teachers after Hurricane Katrina that it's now hiring teachers from all over the country.
NPR's Larry Abramson has this story on reaction to the new arrivals.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Welcome to New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy. The campus is a sea of trailers, which is not unusual in New Orleans, particularly here in New Orleans East, which was devastated by Katrina. The kids come from all over the city, the teachers from even further afield.
Ms. KAYCEE ECKHARDT: I actually spent four years in Japan.
ABRAMSON: Kaycee Eckhardt followed an unusually long path to New Orleans. But other teachers from this and a neighboring campus hail from Chicago, or Memphis or Maine. And it's not just charter schools. You meet teachers from all over the country in traditional schools here, too. The one thing they all have in common, says Eckhardt, is that they are on a mission.
Ms. ECKHARDT: I think that people that join Teachnola and Teach for America really want to enact change in New Orleans or in the school system that is very, very broken in America.
ABRAMSON: And principal Ben Marcovitz says that same drive has led to a teacher roundup from all over the country.
Mr. BEN MARCOVITZ: People who are fairly ambitious, fairly energetic, that's who we hire, period. And I think, you know, a hefty portion of those end up being connected with Teach for America.
ABRAMSON: Teach for America has nearly 500 people in the Greater New Orleans area, making it one of the program's biggest markets. Other national programs, such as The New Teacher Project, have also found New Orleans to be a great magnet for reformers who want to jump into education with both feet. That has turned New Orleans into something unusual, according to Sarah Usdin, a local activist and head of New Schools for New Orleans.
Ms. SARAH USDIN (Head, New Schools for New Orleans): There's a real market here for teachers. Teachers can shop around in what kind of schools they want to teach in. And school leaders are being highly selective about the type of teachers they want to build their teams with.
ABRAMSON: As we heard yesterday, Louisiana is conducting a groundbreaking study of teacher effectiveness. It turns out teachers who came through Teach for America and other non-profits did very well in that study. TFA New Orleans chief Kira Orange Jones.
Ms. KIRA ORANGE JONES (Chief, Teach For America, New Orleans): Their performance was statistically significant when compared with other certified, new and veteran teachers in their building.
ABRAMSON: That's a wonky way of saying TFA-ers(ph) outperformed other teachers who had a couple of years of experience under their belts. But those results have raised concerns among local educators.
Dr. ANDRE PERRY (Assistant Dean, Higher Education, University of New Orleans): TFA, Teach for America, has descended upon New Orleans, with hundreds of teachers coming from high-profile schools throughout the country.
ABRAMSON: Andre Perr, of the University of New Orleans, leads a group that helps run six charter schools in the city. He's concerned that teachers from TFA and other programs may not stick around as long as homegrown teachers. Regardless of the test scores, he says, that hurts kids.
Dr. PERRY: Because also, what is needed in teaching is some longevity in the profession.
ABRAMSON: In fact, the same effectiveness study showed that TFA-ers are much less likely to stay around than other teachers. Few lasted more than three years. Andre Perry doesn't question the commitment of the new arrivals, but he says consistency is important.
Dr. PERRY: And it's not romantic to say that people want to develop and grow in the areas that they lived in or grew up in. To lose that local flavor, it hurts the profession of teaching in terms of its local value.
ABRAMSON: Sara Usdin, of New Schools for New Orleans, says retention is important, but not as important as student performance.
Ms. USDIN: The thing that's most important is student learning, whether a teacher was prepared and stays for 20 years - if a teacher is prepared and stays for 20 years and doesn't get student results, that's a travesty.
ABRAMSON: The experience of New Orleans over the long term could answer an important question: Should teacher training programs be more selective? Should low-performing urban districts cast their nets nationwide to find the most dedicated teachers? Or should they focus on better training of teachers who are already in place?
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now we're going to hear from air travelers, especially people arriving in the U.S. from abroad, about the security measures they're experiencing. In a moment, to the airports in Detroit and Los Angeles. But first, NPR's Robert Smith has the scene today from New York's Kennedy International Airport.
ROBERT SMITH: The flight from Dubai to JFK took 14 hours. So, you can understand that the passengers getting out of terminal four did not look their best. And to make matters worse, the women didn't even have the option of cosmetic enhancement.
Ms. SARAH LINDENBERG(ph): They actually took my makeup. It's powder, Bare Minerals makeup.
SMITH: Sarah Lindenberg says it came as a complete surprise as she was boarding the plane in Dubai. The security agents told her that along with liquids and gels, powder isn't allowed.
Ms. LINDENBERG: I have taken my makeup all over the world, and they haven't taken it from me - except they took it this time. So...
SMITH: Welcome to the new rules of travel. Except the problem is, no one knows quite what the rules are anymore. Women coming from Johannesburg, South Africa, got to keep their makeup. But during a stopover in Dakar, Senegal, they had to remove the luggage from the overhead compartment and keep it on their laps for rechecking.
Vikas Rafi(ph), a frequent flier from India, says his flight from Mumbai was exactly the same as usual, until he hit customs. Suddenly, everyone was getting the third degree.
Mr. VIKAS RAFI: I mean, they used to always ask you once and, you know. But now, they are asking everybody. What you do? How long were you gone? How long are you going to be here now?
SMITH: If the goal is to keep people on their toes, then it's working. In fact, the head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, even said last week that the new measures are designed to be unpredictable. But some aren't so surprising. People aboard Emirates Flight 203 from Dubai say they were patted down at the departure gate. Sarah Lindenberg was taken behind a curtain and told to take off all her extra clothing.
Ms. LINDENBERG: So basically, you're standing there in your jeans and T-shirt. And they pat you down. And, I mean, it's full-service pat-down.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LINDENBERG: If you know what I mean.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: Let's just say if there had been any explosive underwear, they might have�
Ms. LINDENBERG: Yes, they would have found it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LINDENBERG: Or if they're had been in my bra, it would have been found.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: And just in case something got through, the flight went into a sort of lockdown an hour before landing in New York. No getting out of the seat, nothing allowed on the lap.
Ms. LINDENBERG: I was irritated because I didn't want to them to take my blanket and headphones.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LINDENBERG: But I was just like, what I'm going to do for the next hour? But no, I mean, it wasn't that bad.
SMITH: After all, it could have been worse. The passengers getting off the El Al flight from Tel Aviv laughed when I asked about extra security. Israeli flights have been on this kind of alert for decades.
Still, Jeffrey Thomas(ph), an American student, was surprised when he was taken aside by Israeli security and grilled about the hardback book he was carrying.
Mr. JEFFREY THOMAS: They asked me, where did you get this book? Did someone give it to you? Who gave it to you? What's his name? They really wanted to know the origin of that book, and they inspected the book pretty closely.
SMITH: Can a requirement for only paperback books in airports be far behind?
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
INA JAFFE: I'm Ina Jaffe in Los Angeles. At L.A. International Airport, it seems no one travels light when coming from overseas. Catherine Ansari(ph) was typical of the crowd outside of the international terminal as she wrangled a cart stacked high with luggage while keeping track of three little girls. Her United Airlines flight had just arrived from London. She said the security was double what it usually is.
Ms. CATHERINE ANSARI: Well, they had the initial security coming out of the London airport, and then once you got towards the gate, they had another security session there that - they patted you down.
JAFFE: Even her daughters, ages 1 through 6, were frisked.
Ms. ANSARI: But I explained to them, so they were OK with it.
JAFFE: What did you tell them?
Ms. ANSARI: That they need to do that for our security. That once, you know, we are flying in a - you know, on an airplane, and that we want to make sure that we are safe and secure, and that we make it home safely. So, they understood.
JAFFE: It wasn't just that Catherine Ansari didn't mind the added scrutiny; she welcomed it.
Ms. ANSARI: Because you know that at least they're trying to make it as safe as possible.
JAFFE: Nearly all of the passengers we spoke with, who arrived from Europe, South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, reported being patted down and having their hand-luggage searched - every piece.
Ms. RESHA PATEL(ph): They've gotten a lot like, tougher, you know.
JAFFE: That's Resha Patel, who is 12 years old. Along with her father and brothers, she just arrived from India by way of Dubai on Emirates Airlines. In Dubai, she says, she was taken into a private room and frisked by a female security officer. She is not quite sure how she feels about that.
Ms. PATEL: It was like, weird because they didn't do that before. But they didn't like, thoroughly check. All she did was like, patted down my jacket because it's big.
JAFFE: Los Angeles Airport Police think it would be safer if everyone were subjected to a virtual frisk. Their union is urging the federal government to require a full-body scan for all passengers. L.A. is one of 19 U.S. airports that has the controversial scanning machines, but they are only used for secondary screening. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today announced other new security measures being put in place at L.A. airports. Those include a new, automated baggage-handling system that will track each piece by bar code, screen for explosives, and reduce the opportunities for tampering.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
JENNIFER GUERRA: I'm Jennifer Guerra at Detroit Metro Airport where a botched bombing attack caught the world's attention last month. Since then, passengers like Anthony Salem(ph), flying to the U.S. from overseas, say they definitely noticed an uptick in security.
Mr. ANTHONY SALEM: I thought it was really strict, especially in Paris.
GUERRA: The 17-year-old flew from Barcelona to Paris to Detroit with his family. He says they were searched three times before they could board the plane to the U.S.
Mr. SALEM: They went in all of our bags - and all the little, tiny pieces of our bags, and then they did us - you know, the body search. It made me feel comfortable because they were really searching the stuff. But in another sense, it also made me feel like a little bit intruded, just slightly.
GUERRA: Salem admits he was pretty annoyed when a security official rifled through his carry-on backpack and made him toss out some body lotion he had in there. Hand-checked carry-on luggage is just one of several security upgrades airports have implemented since a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit Metro Airport. Britney Solenburger(ph) flew from Amsterdam to Detroit yesterday. She says not only was her carry-on bag checked by hand, so was she. And that was a first.
Ms. BRITNEY SOLENBURGER: Kind of like you see on TV: Spread your legs, put your arms out, and they give you a pat-down, up and down. They pat your butt, everything. So yeah, I would say they cover all corners - and curves, for that matter.
GUERRA: What do you think about having this kind of security?
Ms. SOLENBURGER: Honestly, even though it's a hassle, I would rather be safe than sorry.
GUERRA: Another passenger, Stephanos Garacousen(ph), makes the trip regularly from Amsterdam to Detroit for school. He says while he wasn't bothered by the extra pat-downs and carry-on checks, he doesn't necessarily feel safer because of them.
Mr. STEPHANOS GARACOUSEN: Not really, because that guy who made that�
Unidentified Man: Bomb. Dynamite.
Mr. GARACOUSEN: �bomb he had this - that stuff in his underwear. This time, you can do the same.
GUERRA: And while Garacousen and a couple of his classmates laugh at the thought of getting their underwear checked, that possibility isn't too far away. Like LAX, Detroit Metro also has a full-body scanner. And a Dutch official just announced that beginning in three weeks, the Amsterdam Airport will use such scanners for people traveling to the U.S.
For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Guerra.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Yesterday, Dubai celebrated the opening of the world's tallest skyscraper -2,717 feet - more than half a mile high. But Dubai's glory is North Dakota's downfall. The KVLY television tower has for years held the title of the world's tallest structure, 2063 feet, rising out of the plains of Eastern North Dakota. Doug Jenson is chief engineer of the NBC affiliate that operates the tower. He joins us from Fargo. Mr. Jenson, your bragging rights took a little bit of a hit, I guess.
Mr. DOUG JENSON (Chief Engineer, NBC): Yeah. They did actually for the second time. There was a tower in Poland that, for a time, was taller than it back in the - I believe, it was like the late '80s, early '90s until it came down.
BLOCK: Was it a big deal, do you know, at the time when it was put up?
Mr. JENSON: Well, I believe so. I actually grew up in the area around here and I was probably seven or eight at the time and I remember it. It was heavily promoted. In fact, the call letters of the station at the time was KTHI, or K Tower Hi is what it was short for. They had a lady who was known as Katy Hi(ph)�
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. JENSON: �and was a personality at the time and a lot of things along that line for many years.
BLOCK: Mr. Jenson, you're in charge of maintenance for the tower, I guess, right?
Mr. JENSON: Yes.
BLOCK: How do you get up?
Mr. JENSON: There's a small two-man service elevator that will take you up to the base of the antenna, so it's about 1,950 ft or so.
BLOCK: And how long does that ride take?
Mr. JENSON: It takes about 20 minutes to get from the bottom to the top of the tower.
BLOCK: No kidding. And how far can you see once you're up there?
Mr. JENSON: I'd say you can see 20 miles pretty easily. And the only difference between that and flying in a plane is, is you see this tower going down below you connecting to the ground and it's a little unnerving at first.
BLOCK: You know, I would think that this would be kind of a source of pride for you there to have that�
Mr. JENSON: Yeah.
BLOCK: �even if now you're just second tallest, but still it's a really big tower.
Mr. JENSON: Yeah. It's for the people that work especially with the tower and those of us in the technical side, it's always been sort of a source of pride that here in little North Dakota, we have something that is somewhat unique.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Jenson, thanks for talking to us about it.
Mr. JENSON: Nice talking to you, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's Doug Jenson, chief engineer for KVLY-TV in Fargo, North Dakota, whose tower is no longer the world's tallest structure, but it's still pretty darn tall.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's time now for your letters, and one correction. Yesterday, we talked to Stephen Lord of the Government Accountability Office. He wrote a recent report on the state of U.S. airport security. Some of you may have heard us mention the Transportation Safety Administration, or TSA. Well, we should have said Transportation Security Administration.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Many of you perked up when you heard our story about a chain of luxury movie theaters. They offer lots of perks, including plush recliners, and on-call food and alcohol service. Of course, those perks come with a hefty price tag, as much as $29 per ticket. Some of our listeners, including Elizabeth Templeton(ph) of Brookfield, Vermont, wished movie theaters provided a different set of amenities. She writes: What I'd really pay more for is a movie theater without talkers, cell phone users, seat kickers, and the people who see nothing wrong with talking back to the movie characters. Audience behavior keeps me out of movies more than the price does.
NORRIS: And Gregory Westwater(ph) of Gladbrook, Iowa, sent us this note: What really grabbed my attention was the remark by the theater representative that you may not be able to go to the Bahamas this year, but everybody can afford this. No, not everybody can afford $29 theater tickets. In the past year, I've heard several stories on how to save money during the recession: only fly for one vacation instead of two, or cut back to basic cable. Guess what? There's a huge portion of our society that has never flown anywhere for a vacation and don't subscribe to any cable service at all. To some of us, these suggestions, and now the idea of $29 movie tickets as a bargain, sound like modern-day equivalents of let them eat cake.
BLOCK: And finally, an update on a story we aired last week. Kurt Haskell was a passenger on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, the same flight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is charged with trying to destroy with explosives hidden in his underwear. We talked to Mr. Haskell about what he said he saw before the flight left Amsterdam: the Nigerian in the company of an older man. That man, according to Kurt Haskell, was trying to convince the ticket agent that Abdulmutallab did not need a passport to board the flight.
NORRIS: Well, Dutch authorities announced recently that Abdulmutallab did, in fact, have a passport, and now the Dutch Public Prosecutor's Office says that after viewing more than 200 hours of airport surveillance footage, it believes Abdulmutallab acted alone in Amsterdam.
So we checked back in with the passenger Kurt Haskell for his response. He admits that, as with any eyewitness account, there is a possibility he was mistaken. But he says he stands by what he saw, and what he told us, until he is able to see the surveillance footage that proves him wrong.
BLOCK: We appreciate your letters. Please keep them coming. You can write to us by going to npr.org, and clicking on contact us.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris. Some of the guiltiest pleasures on television can be found on HGTV and the Food Network.
(Soundbite of television show "Down Home with the Neelys")
Ms. GINA NEELY: So now, macaroni and cheese with a smoky bacon and potato chips.
(Soundbite of television show)
Unidentified Woman #1: It's not all about what you have. It's about what you do with what you have. And in this room, 50 bucks and a little bit of paint changed everything.
NORRIS: But several million people in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey are going without these guilty pleasures - or for some, tutorials; or for some, even obsessions. It all started last Friday. It's because of a fee dispute. On one side, there's Scripps, which owns the channels; on the other, Cablevision, the cable provider.
Andrew Wallenstein covers TV for the Hollywood Reporter, and he is a sometime commentator for us, and he joins us now to talk about this.
Mr. Wallenstein, why can't these particular cable subscribers get their HGTV and their Food Network? What's at the heart of this dispute?
Mr. ANDREW WALLENSTEIN (Hollywood Reporter): Well, at the heart of this dispute is a little bit of industry arcana known as retransmission consent. And at the risk of oversimplifying it, basically, broadcast companies are guaranteed some form of compensation from cable operators for the rights to these broadcast signals. Now typically, what's happened is, that kind of compensation has come in all sorts of creative workarounds that didn't involve paying cold, hard cash. That was then, this is now. Broadcast companies want - no, actually, they need cold, hard cash.
NORRIS: And in this case, it sounds like HGTV and the Food Network is trying to call their bluff.
Mr. WALLENSTEIN: Yes. I mean, in this particular case, you know, Cablevision doesn't want to pay what Scripps is asking for, for these cable networks. And I think the reason we're seeing that is Cablevision is anticipating having to pay some much greater fees for some of the broadcast networks, and this has to do with an even larger fight that just got resolved between Time Warner Cable, a different cable operator, and News Corp., where basically, News Corp. is going to start getting a lot of money from Time Warner Cable as a result of this similar dispute.
NORRIS: Now, the viewers can't watch the networks that they might want to see, but I wonder if all the other networks are carefully watching this power-play, to see how it plays out.
Mr. WALLENSTEIN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, make no mistake. This isn't just about greed. This cuts to the heart of some pretty fundamental issues - not just for the TV industry but the media business at large. I think whether you're in broadcast TV, whether you're online, a lot of moguls are deciding they can't live on advertising alone. And these retransmission consent fees are essentially, a new revenue stream that could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
NORRIS: Now, I'm wondering if this whole fight runs the risk of alienating customers and perhaps encouraging them to move to other platforms, like Web TV or your satellite.
Mr. WALLENSTEIN: Absolutely. I mean, think of this standoff between broadcast and cable as a duel, where instead of pointing the guns at each other, they're pointing them at their own heads. Basically, broadcasters are pulling signals, even though they know it's going to impact what they get from advertisers. And cable operators - well, Time Warner got so involved in this at such an intense level that they put a video on YouTube showing people how to get these kinds of programs through Web TV instead of their own business, cable. So it's getting pretty intense.
NORRIS: How does HGTV and the Food Network explain this blackout to their customers?
Mr. WALLENSTEIN: It's a PR war that plays out on a number of fronts. You'll see newspaper ads, where they're basically trying to call the other side the enemy. You'll see it on Twitter. You'll see it on YouTube. There is no expense that isn't put out there in terms of making the other side look like the enemy.
NORRIS: Andrew Wallenstein, thanks so much for talking to us.
Mr. WALLENSTEIN: Terrific.
NORRIS: Andrew Wallenstein covers TV for the Hollywood Reporter.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
I'm Melissa Block.
And we begin this hour with the latest on the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA officers last week in Afghanistan. A Jordanian spy was also killed in the attack. As we've been reporting, it now appears the bomber was an al-Qaida member who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence to spy on al-Qaida. He then lured his CIA and Jordanian handlers into a trap.
With us now to sort out some of the threads of this story is NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. And Mary Louise, what have you been able to find out about this suicide bomber?
MARY LOUISE KELLY: Well, it appears that what we have here is a triple agent. This was a young Jordanian doctor, originally known in al-Qaida circles as a recruiter, someone who posted regularly to the jihadi chat rooms and Web forums. Because of all that activity, the Jordanians arrested him a couple of years ago. And while they had him, they tried to flip him - get him to spy for Jordon and for Western intelligence agencies. It had seemed to be working. They sent him to Afghanistan, where he apparently provided a lot of valuable information.
However, we, of course know that as of last week, certainly, he was working for al-Qaida. What we don't know is: Did he ever really work for the U.S. or for Jordon? Was he always secretly working for al-Qaida? One former CIA official who I spoke to said it is incredibly difficult to run a triple agent. One lesson of this is that the fact that al-Qaida apparently managed to do it, speaks to how resourceful they still are after all these years.
BLOCK: And one big question still, Mary Louise, is how he got onto the base without, apparently, being searched, so he could carry out this attack.
KELLY: Yeah. This is something that has stunned a lot of intelligence veterans. And what they will tell you is that when you work with these types, you have to assume that you may be working with a double or, in this case, a triple agent. Because of that, one of the key rules of spy trade craft, I'm told, is you would never let someone like this onto your operating base because if you do, they know what it looks like, they know what security looks like, they know what you look like. So, it's obviously a very risky thing to do. One U.S. intelligence official I spoke to said, look, we realize that there's huge risk here, but, you know, these are unsavory individuals and we have to work with them. A saint is not going to get us the intelligence we need.
BLOCK: Yeah. One thing - to work with an unsavory individual, as you say, another thing to let them onto your forward operating base, in this case, a key base in Afghanistan.
KELLY: Right. And clearly there are details that we still don't know yet. One explanation that was provided to me is maybe they were trying to build up trust, develop a respectful relationship. It may also be - I've had several sources tell me - that perhaps another security check was coming. The bomber was apparently outside a fitness room. He was not yet in the meeting room when he detonated. And apparently, perhaps another pat-down was coming and he had to detonate early.
BLOCK: Mary Louise, another question that's emerged about whether procedures were followed and that's, why were so many CIA operatives in the same place at the same time, including, I believe, a station chief, right?
KELLY: Apparently, what I'm told is that the bait that this bomber provided was that he had information on Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's number two. That would've been some tantalizing bait. And apparently a lot of officials wanted to gather to hear it. I'm told that the fact that they were all there speaks to how hard U.S., by agencies, are trying to still go after these top al-Qaida officials, they're taking more risk to try to do it.
BLOCK: Now, you mentioned the suicide bomber's Internet postings, jihadi chat rooms that he was involved in, must've raised suspicions now among his handlers?
KELLY: Apparently not. That's one thing that does not seem to have roused suspicions because that would've been part of his cover. If he was arrested because of intelligence activity online, if you're Jordanian intelligence trying to flip him, the last thing you would want him to do in terms of his credibility would be to stop those postings. One key thing here, I think, Melissa, is that it will raise for CIA people all sorts of questions about all the other sources they're trying to run.
Obviously you're always questioning that, you're always wondering whose side somebody's on in this murky world, but I think a lot of attention will have to focus now on trying to make sure the CIA is not being penetrated.
BLOCK: NPR's Mary Louise Kelly who covers intelligence for us. Mary Louise, thanks very much.
KELLY: You're welcome.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The deadly suicide bombing at the U.S. base in Afghanistan highlights a challenge for spy agencies. The CIA relies on human intelligence, credible information from people who understand the culture, the warlords and the insurgents. Yet, if an individual's close enough to enemy targets to provide useful information, how can they really be trusted?
Michael Scheuer ran the CIA's effort before 9/11 to target Osama bin Laden. He has since left the CIA and has written extensively about intelligence gathering, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
Mr. MICHAEL SCHEUER (Former CIA Analyst): Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
NORRIS: Now, one former CIA officer has been quoted as saying that in the Cold War the biggest worry was that a Russian double agent might feed you false information. But these days, if you have a double agent, he might detonate in your face. Does this call into question the whole intelligence strategy in Afghanistan?
Mr. SCHEUER: No, I don't think it does. But he's right. It's a double-edge threat now. It used to be just feeding bad information, but now this man may well have fed us bad information for a year and then killed our officers to boot. So, it's a very serious, very deadly business. I think Americans tend to forget what we're trying to do out there is to get people to commit treason against their country, their organization, or in this man's mind, probably against his faith.
NORRIS: And that requires recruiting people, individual one-on-one recruitment. And to the extent that you can answer this question, how do you recruit informants that can provide credible human intelligence? And how do you know when you've turned them?
Mr. SCHEUER: It's a very human process. So much depends on, of course, identifying someone who has access to the information you need, finding a way to meet him and then trying to build rapport with him over time - finding what would entice him to work with you. Is it money? Is it a liking for America? Is it a dislike for the person you want to collect against?
NORRIS: How does the role of fundamentalist religion complicate things in a place like Afghanistan? Does it make it harder to use cash, for instance?
Mr. SCHEUER: Yeah, it makes it very difficult. In the Cold War, the people who wanted to work for us worked for us because they admired our society and found their society repulsive. They found out the Soviet Union was, at the end of the day, just a gangster organization. Unfortunately, in the Islamist military organizations, their leaders are actually on the battlefield. There are people who have given up livelihood such as a surgeon in terms of Zawahiri, a very prominent family in Egypt, the son of a multibillionaire in Osama bin Laden. So, what happens is the person you're talking to is very attractive by his own system and not very attracted by yours.
NORRIS: And I want to ask you, also, how you know if you've actually turned someone. If you believe that you could actually trust them, if there is actually such a thing as trust when you're talking about espionage.
Mr. SCHEUER: Ma'am, I don't think you ever trust anybody 100 percent, but when you recruit someone in our organization, he takes a polygraph test, you check the information he gives you regarding biographical details. You create tests for him to do to see if he'll do what you tell him to do. And, of course, over time you take the information he gives you and try to corroborate it with information from other sources.
NORRIS: What are the particular challenges in trying to gather human intelligence in a place like Afghanistan?
Mr. SCHEUER: Primarily the problem is that we are viewed as foreign, infidel occupiers by all Afghans. And at the end of the day they want us out more than anything else. And we - you know, the president - neither president of the recent presidents have told the American people the truth about that. The Taliban would not be effective if the local people weren't supporting it. They increasingly see us as the successors to the Soviet Union, as occupiers of Afghanistan. So it makes human collection very, very difficult and increasingly dangerous.
NORRIS: I understand that you know many of the people that were killed in the bombing in Afghanistan.
Mr. SCHEUER: Yes.
NORRIS: To the extent that you can actually talk about this, what, beyond just the loss of human life, what does this mean for the CIA? What was lost in terms of the expertise in the brain trust?
Mr. SCHEUER: Well, several of the people were among the top, I would say at least the top five experts on al-Qaida in the United States, people with anywhere from 10 to 15 to more years of expertise in trying to find a way to destroy al-Qaida. When you lose that type of expertise, it's very hard to replace it, impossible to replace it in the near term.
BLOCK: Mr. Scheuer, thank you very much.
Mr. SCHEUER: You're welcome, ma'am.
BLOCK: Michael Scheuer ran the CIA's effort before 9/11 to target Osama Bin Laden. He has since left the CIA and has written extensively about intelligence gathering.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
A founder of modern feminism has died. Mary Daly was a radical theologian. She died on Sunday at the age of 81.
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Ten years ago, in the twilight of her life, Mary Daly described herself this way.
Ms. MARY DALY (Theologian): I am a radical lesbian feminist and it scares them.
HAGERTY: Them is the Catholic Church, Boston College, where she taught for three decades, and what Daly regarded as a male dominated society. But for many women, such as Sister Joan Chittister, a prominent nun, Daly was an icon.
Sister JOAN CHITTISTER (Nun): She shocked us into seeing old things in a new way. She made us understand that we were blind to have our world.
HAGERTY: The female half. She says Daly shook up Catholic theology, asserting that the Trinity, for example, was derived from triple goddesses in ancient culture. Daly also condemned male dominance in church, business, government and society. Here she is on KDVS Radio in 2006.
Ms. DALY: Almost everything has been stolen from us by the patriarchy. Our creativity has been stolen, our creative energies, our religion. I want it back.
HAGERTY: Daly defied expectations from the start. Born in Schenectady, New York of working-class Catholic parents she earned three PhDs before joining Boston College's theology department in the mid 1960s. Her first book called "The Church and the Second Sex" got her fired in 1969 until the then all-male student body protested and demanded the school hire her back.
Nevertheless, Daly avoided speaking to men and generally refused to attend department meetings. And after the college went co-ed, she almost always refused to let men into her classes. This decision ran her afoul of school policy in federal law. And in 1999, a male student sued the school. Daly said the student had not taken the prerequisite course. But she told NPR she found men disruptive.
Ms. DALY: I saw women that were repressed. When they're in classes with young men, they shut up all the time. They're laughed at if they have unusual ideas. They have to be sexy, then they can't really think.
HAGERTY: Lawrence Cunningham, who teaches at Notre Dame, believes Daly went too far. And in the end will be only a footnote in Catholic theological history. But he says she was a huge voice in one of the most influential movements of the 20th century.
Professor LAWRENCE CUNNINGHAM (Theologian, University of Notre Dame): You could kind of describe her as the gold standard for absolute feminism. I mean, everybody, at least in Christian circles or feminist circles would kind of measure their feminism against the standard that Mary Daly set.
HAGERTY: And Cunningham says the female students he teaches today are the prime beneficiaries of Daly's radical life.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
We can now sum up one of the worst years ever in auto sales. Numbers are out today for December, and they show sales ended on a generally positive note. At Ford, sales rose more than 30 percent from December. A year ago, sales at Toyota were up almost 23 percent. But General Motors and Chrysler still face big challenges.
Frank Langfitt covers the auto industry for NPR, and he's here with us in the studio. Frank, what do today's numbers tell us about the state of the overall car business?
FRANK LANGFITT: Well, Michele, what we're seeing is more stability in the industry. You know, sales are slowly rebounding from these historic lows. Last year were among the worst sales in more than a quarter century. Of course, some companies now are doing better than others. In Detroit, really, Ford has been the stand out. The company didn't take a government bailout, didn't go bankrupt like GM and Chrysler and has been gaining share of the market, kind of on the strength of some quality, you know, products like the sedan - the Fusion is doing pretty well. So, a lot of analysts see Ford kind of turning the chaos of last year into a bit of an opportunity.
NORRIS: Now, you mention GM and Chrysler, two companies that did take the government buyout. How were their sales in December?
LANGFITT: Both were down. GM was down about six percent, Chrysler down four percent. And, you know, for GM it was a really turbulent year. I mean, not only did the company go bankrupt, but took about $50 billion in taxpayer money. Two CEOs were fired in just eight months.
But there are some promising products on the way for the company. Next week, at the auto show in Detroit, where I'm going to be headed, GM is going to push the Chevy Cruze. It's a small car, going to compete with the Honda Civic and the Toyota Corolla and could get in the neighborhood of about 40 miles to the gallon. GM has to do well with this car. And finally, towards the end of this year, GM is going to roll out its long-awaited electric car, the Volt.
NORRIS: Now, before the recession the auto show was a big, flashy affair, not so flashy this year.
LANGFITT: You're right. Traditionally, this is like the prom in Detroit, huge social event. This year, it's going to be much more sober. I'll be there for the press preview on Monday, but they've cut that back to just a day-and-a-half. The GM exhibit is going to be a lot smaller. You're not going to see Hummers or Saturns, Pontiacs or Saabs and that's because the company's selling or shutting down those divisions.
NORRIS: Frank, I want to ask you about Chrysler. A couple of years ago, the company brought in a herd of steers to promote the new Dodge Ram truck, big doings there. Any steers this year?
LANGFITT: None at all. In fact, they're not going to be doing hardly anything. Chrysler has almost no new product coming out right now. And so, not only are you not going to see any steers, there's not even going to be a press conference. And that's pretty amazing in one of the industry's really key events of the year. Chrysler's now waiting on new small cars, based on technology from Fiat, the Italian carmaker. Chrysler says it's going to start building the Fiat 500, which has been a hit in Europe at the end of this year.
NORRIS: Thank you, Frank.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Michele.
NORRIS: That was NPR's Frank Langfitt.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
President Obama said today that to defeat al-Qaida, the U.S. will have to evolve and adapt.
President BARACK OBAMA: As these violent extremists pursue new havens, we intend to target al-Qaida wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary as we are doing currently with the government in Yemen.
Barbara Bodine was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001. During her posting, the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists at a Yemeni port; 17 sailors were killed.
Ambassador Bodine joins us to talk about Yemen's role in counterterrorism then and now. Ambassador Bodine, welcome to the program.
Ambassador BARBARA BODINE (Former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen): Thank you very much.
BLOCK: And take us back, please, to the time right after the Cole bombing in 2000. How cooperative were Yemeni authorities?
Amb. BODINE: Yemen saw the attack on the Cole as an attack on Yemen, as well as an attack on us. And their first response was to pledge full cooperation in a joint investigation.
Now, it, I think as we all know, did not run quite as smoothly as everyone would have hoped. But some of that was a problem of communication and a problem of vastly different capabilities. We came in with a 21st century investigative capability, and we were working in a country that was too poor to have fingerprint powder. Sometimes there will be the political will, but there's not always the capacity.
BLOCK: And at the same time, later, Yemen refused to extradite Cole suspects to the United States. In 2006, there was a notorious prison break of convicted al-Qaida terrorists, including a key player in the Cole bombing. And they were assumed to have had help in their escape from the inside. Both of those seem to point in a very different direction.
Amb. BODINE: It's a very complex situation. Now, on the extradition issue, the Yemeni constitution expressly forbids the extradition of a Yemeni citizen any place. The prison break was quite spectacular. I remember...
BLOCK: In the worst way.
Amb. BODINE: In the worst way of spectacular. But we also do have to understand the context within which they are working. When it has come to going after the bad guys, I think Yemen has stepped up to the plate.
BLOCK: We hear Yemen described as the poorest Arab country. It's also, of course, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden. How much support do you think there is among Yemeni people for al-Qaida?
Amb. BODINE: There is perhaps a broad support for a worldview of an Arab world without a large Western presence. But I think we have to be very careful to make a distinction between kind of a broad philosophic support and support for the tactics that al-Qaida uses. And there is very little support for the tactics.
BLOCK: Ambassador Bodine, help us understand the sort of balancing act that the Yemeni government has to engage in here; on the one hand, cooperating with the U.S. in strikes on terrorists; at the same time trying to maintain the support of tribal leaders and other figures who might be either sympathetic to al-Qaida, or at the very least, resistant to U.S. involvement in their country.
Amb. BODINE: There is a fine line between providing full support to the government efforts and taking it on ourselves. And to the extent that it looks as if we are either doing this directly or that the government is doing it - to use the basic term - as a puppet of ours, we are actually going to be delegitimizing that government rather than supporting it.
And one difference between Yemen and the others who it generally gets lumped in with: Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, this is a sovereign state and it is a legitimate government. How this is done is pretty much up to us. We can either support, or we can actually make the situation worse.
BLOCK: We've been talking with Barbara Bodine, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen. She's now diplomat-in-residence at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Ambassador Bodine, thanks very much.
Amb. BODINE: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The bodies of the seven CIA officers killed in Afghanistan arrived yesterday at Dover Air Force Base. Several of the dead have been named in media reports, but the CIA itself has not released any information. It's citing the sensitivity of the mission and ongoing operations.
The CIA commemorates its dead at a memorial wall at the agency's headquarters in Virginia. Carved into the wall are 90 stars, each representing a life lost in the line of duty. And under the stars is "The Book of Honor," which lists some but not all of the names of the fallen. "The Book of Honor" and the unnamed operatives in it are the subject of a book by the author, Ted Gup. Earlier, I asked Ted Gup about the history of the memorial.
Professor TED GUP (Journalism, Emerson College; Author, "The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA"): It really came into being about 1974, which if you'll remember, was a time when the agency came under pretty severe attack because of nefarious activities which were revealed by congressional hearings. The agency was licking its wounds and losing pride and suffering in recruitment. And I think to some degree, it was an effort to restore a sense of faith and purpose and self-esteem. It was certainly also intended to recognize the ultimate sacrifices of those that died in the line of duty.
NORRIS: In the course of working on this book, and we should say that you actually wrote this book 10 years ago, what did you learn about the way the agency handles deaths?
Prof. GUP: The agency attempts to handle deaths with a great deal of compassion, but that compassion is always balanced against the need for security. It's a very complicated matter, as you can well imagine. There's a certain inherent contradiction in the notion of a memorial wall to remember the deeds of heroism of those whose names you don't know and whose deeds you don't know, which is not to challenge the legitimacy of the memorial - it's quite moving.
The issue is, how do you remember someone and preserve the sources and methods, which potentially could be compromised by the release of the names? Sources and methods refers to how the agency gathers its intelligence. The manner in which it gets that information and the people from whom it gathers that information, both of which are spoken of as the crown jewels of the agency and are jealously guarded.
NORRIS: I'm curious to know, Mr. Gup, what you heard from the families that you've interviewed for the book. What was it like for them to have to maintain a certain level of secrecy about the deaths of their loved ones?
Prof. GUP: Well, you can imagine if you've lost a loved one that that grief is exponentially compounded by the fact that you can tell no one the circumstances of the death or what it was that the person died for. If you ever say anything about your loved one, you must stick to the cover story, which is to say, you must tell a lie.
Historically, some very interesting things have happened in this regard. There was a gentleman who was the liaison between the agency and the grieving families named Ben DeFelice, a wonderful human being whose heart really went out to the grieving families. He would draft the letter of condolence, take it to the director, who would sign it - the head of the agency - and then deliver it to the widow or widower. And that person would then read the letter. And when they were finished reading the letter, Ben DeFelice would then request -indeed, insist - that the letter be returned to his hands.
They were not allowed to keep it because it was evidence of the CIA connection. And that letter was then placed in the casualty's personnel file. The same treatment was given to many of the medals that were awarded because the agency wanted no evidence linking them to the staff.
NORRIS: Now, there are 90 stars on the memorial wall, and presumably, seven now will be added for those killed in Afghanistan last week. When do you think the names of those killed might be added to that book?
Prof. GUP: You know, that's a very good question and it's pure speculation on my part. The world has changed because of Facebook and the Internet. It's much harder to keep a secret. My guess is that there's going to be a lot of pressure on the agency to come forward with these names, much faster than they have historically.
NORRIS: Ted Gup, it's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you very much for your time.
Prof. GUP: Thank you.
NORRIS: Ted Gup is the author of "The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA." He teaches journalism at Emerson College in Boston.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
President Obama has been meeting with intelligence and security advisors this afternoon in the White House situation room. They've been reviewing the attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day and they're looking to establish new safety protocols for planes flying to the U.S. from abroad. The president is expected to make a statement shortly.
NPR White House correspondent Don Gonyea joins us now.
Don, the president has said intelligence agencies had bits and pieces of information that should have kept the suspected bomber off that plane. What is the sense at the White House about what exactly went wrong?
DON GONYEA: They're still trying to figure out. But here is what they talk about. They use the image of different silos of information. One represents the CIA, one represents the FBI, one represents Homeland Security, or other branches of the intelligence services. Information goes up each silo to the top but it's not shared well across from one silo to the next. And they have to figure out how to do it.
And one of the very difficult things here is these are the exact same kinds of questions that were being asked after 9/11. So, the question that is being discussed at this White House meeting today is, why? Why haven't we fixed the things that were supposed to have been fixed back then? The other thing the president, we can to expect to hear from him today, in terms of what he will say, is gathering intelligence is hard. It's hard work. It's difficult coming up with timely information that is actionable. It's one thing not to have complete information but it's another thing to have information that isn't shared. And that's what they really need (unintelligible).
NORRIS: Now President Obama talks often about accountability and Mr. Obama has promised to support intelligence agencies but he has also said that he plans to hold them accountable. Does that mean that someone in this case might get fired?
GONYEA: Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked that today and he dodged the question. Yeah, the president has talked about both systemic failures here and human failures that they know took place. That's how the guy got on the plane on Christmas Day in Amsterdam. There has been a lot of talk about how to address these systemic issues, but so far no talk about whether any humans will be held accountable and perhaps lose their job.
But so far, the Homeland Security director, the president's counterterrorism advisor, the director of national intelligence that's the position that was created to have someone be able to connect the dots - that term you hear. All of those people, a confidence has been expressed. But we are going to have to see on that.
NORRIS: Don, in addition to reviewing intelligence the administration is beefing up airport security, new measures announced this week, especially as it relates to security abroad. Tell us what's happening and what else we might be seeing.
GONYEA: Well, some of the things we are not seeing and that's part of it. Some of it is being kept secret and it's not being detailed. But we do know that people with passports or merely traveling through 14 countries are now subject to automatic extra screening before they board a flight. We are not sure how enforcement on that is going but it includes Nigeria, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya so that has been put in place.
There is also a sense that existing rules need to be enforced better. Somebody buys a one-way ticket, somebody who pays cash for their ticket, those things that are supposed to be the flags, those things that have gotten people on no-fly lists and watch lists, those sorts of things have to be better coordinated and really enforced.
NORRIS: Before I let you go, what does all this mean for the president's agenda? He was expected to start the year focusing on domestic matters, jobs, finishing up health care.
GONYEA: Well, the White House says this is not a distraction for starters. And that national security is obviously the president's most important job. They also say that he has been working on specifically the situation in Yemen since well before Christmas Day. So, it's not like it's something that's brand new on his plate. That said, they did want to start focusing more on domestic issues. He will still be doing that. Health care obviously needs to be finished up. And the first thing that Robert Gibbs said at his press conference today was the president will be going to Lorain, Ohio, to talk about jobs on January 22nd, so�
NORRIS: Thank you, Don.
GONYEA: Thank you.
NORRIS: That's NPR White House correspondent, Don Gonyea.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The troubled U.S. Olympic Committee has picked a new CEO. Multiple sources tell NPR that the committee has reached into its past and selected Scott Blackmun. He was chief counsel and acting CEO 10 years ago. A formal announcement is scheduled for tomorrow.
As NPR's Howard Berkes tells us, Blackmun's return is getting positive responses.
HOWARD BERKES: It seems more coronation than appointment, not because Scott Blackmun inherited the job, but because praise for his return to the U.S. Olympic helm is so enthusiastic.
Mr. DOUG LOGAN (CEO, USA Track and Field): He will bring a measure of stability that this organization has not had, certainly, in the last year and maybe going back even further than that.
BERKES: That's Doug Logan, who runs USA Track and Field. And he's referring to a decade of management turmoil at the U.S. Olympic Committee, with nine different CEOs, including Blackmun temporarily in 2001. Go back far enough and it's 13 chiefs in 14 years. The turmoil is blamed in part for Chicago's failure to win the bidding for the 2016 Olympics.
Mr. LOGAN: The state of the USOC was chaotic, and Scott is a very, very able executive. He's got years of experience in sports and in entertainment. He is a very able and skilled administrator. He's got a longtime reputation for being a conciliator.
BERKES: Which is a skill the U.S. Olympic Committee needs, because some of the turmoil stemmed from battles among sports federations competing for influence and money.
The USOC governs Olympic sports in the United States and doles out a good share of their funding. It also needs good relationships with international sports federations and the International Olympic Committee if the United States has any hope of ever hosting another Olympics.
Willie Banks was a triple jumper in the Olympics and represents former and current athletes.
Mr. WILLIE BANKS (Former Olympic Athlete): The problem that we've faced for a long time is the fact that we continually have changeover in our leadership and that is very disconcerting to our international friends. So, if they're seeing that we're going with someone who's tried and tested that they know, it's a little bit easier to deal with them.
BERKES: Blackmun helped shepherd the U.S. Olympic Committee through the 1998 bribery scandal involving Salt Lake City's Olympic bid. The scandal focused mostly on the International Olympic Committee, but the USOC also came under scrutiny for influence peddling involving its own employees.
Blackmun left the USOC in 2001 when he was passed over for the permanent CEO job. And what followed was a series of failed CEOs. Most had perfect corporate pedigrees, but little Olympic experience.
Lisa Delpy Neirotti is an Olympic scholar at George Washington University.
Professor LISA DELPY NEIROTTI (Olympic Scholar, The George Washington University): Scott does bring the corporate knowledge of how to run a business. So you get both: the understanding of what the USOC's role is, as well as how to run it efficiently and effectively.
BERKES: This should comfort corporate sponsors who watched in dismay as the USOC's missteps seemed to tarnish the American Olympic brand. In one notable flub, the group announced a U.S. Olympic TV network, even after the International Olympic Committee warned against it, fearing conflicts with exclusive rights holder NBC.
Scott Blackmun has a task as daunting as the competition facing athletes, whose own abilities to succeed may depend on his success.
Howard Berkes, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
President Obama said today the U.S. government has to do a better job of detecting and disrupting terrorist plots, and must act with utmost urgency. He spoke after meeting with intelligence and security advisers in the White House Situation Room. They reviewed the case of the young Nigerian man who was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day, carrying potentially deadly explosives. The president says it's his job to find out how that happened, and to prevent it from happening in the future.
NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley joins us now. And Scott, the president says intelligence agencies had bits and pieces of information - red flags, he called them - that should have kept the suspected bomber off this airplane. What went wrong?
SCOTT HORSLEY: That's right, Melissa. We've been learning more about those bits and pieces. The government knew, for example, that the Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists. The government knew that Yemeni forces were plotting an attack in the U.S. and that they were working with a Nigerian. The bottom line, Mr. Obama said, is the government had the information it needed to disrupt this plot, but didn't connect the dots.
President BARACK OBAMA: This was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there, agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it, and our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together.
BLOCK: So the president there, talking about shortcomings. Is the conclusion that anyone will be fired for what happened here?
HORSLEY: The White House dodged that question today. What Mr. Obama has said is that he wants to both support intelligence agencies and also hold them accountable. He has ordered the agency heads to recommend fixes for these shortcomings right away, this week, and to put those fixes into place. He says the U.S. has to do better because American lives are on the line.
BLOCK: And these fixes - part of that is beefing up airport security. Some of that is supposed to be happening already. What are you hearing about how that's working?
HORSLEY: Well, just yesterday, the TSA ordered additional screening for anyone traveling to the U.S. who is either carrying a passport from, or passing through, any one of 14 countries, including Yemen, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, others. The idea is that those passengers should get extra scrutiny, maybe pat-downs, maybe a hand search of their luggage - in some cases, full-body scans.
Enforcement, so far, appears to be uneven. But Homeland Security officials are on the road this week. They've gone to other countries to explain these rules to foreign airport officials. Now, some folks say this is a particularly blunt instrument and will wind up causing a lot of inconvenience for people that the U.S. really doesn't have anything to fear from.
BLOCK: Scott, Republicans - some Republicans have been using this incident to once more call on the administration not to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The president responded to that today as well.
HORSLEY: He did. President Obama is standing by his pledge to close Guantanamo. The administration has argued for a long time that the prison camp in Cuba has served as an effective recruiting tool for al-Qaida and for others. The administration did, however, say today that it will not be sending any Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, for the time being.
Now, a lot of the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo are from Yemen. But the situation on the ground, in that poor country on the Arabian Peninsula, is just seen as too unstable. Not only did Yemeni extremists supply the explosives used in the bungled Christmas Day plot, but Yemen's had other security problems. Of course, we know that those forced the U.S. embassy in Yemen to close for two days earlier this week. So for now, at least, the White House is saying Yemen will not be a relocation site for prisoners from Guantanamo.
BLOCK: It's interesting, though, Scott, because in his remarks today, the president also mentioned forging new partnerships to deny al-Qaida sanctuary, specifically in conjunction, he said, with the government in Yemen.
HORSLEY: That's right. And the U.S. has been working with the Yemeni government to deal with extremist threats there, trying to keep its hand a little bit in the background for fear of just aggravating the violence in that country.
BLOCK: OK. NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Scott, thanks very much.
HORSLEY: It's my pleasure.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Springdale, Arkansas calls itself the chicken capital of the world. Tyson's Chicken is by far the town's biggest employer. Springdale also has another distinction: about 1 in 10 residents moved to the town from a string of tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: the Marshall Islands.
NORRIS: That distinction gives Springdale a particular stake in the health care overhaul and how the House and the Senate merge their bills. The House bill would give Marshall Islanders in Springdale health insurance coverage.
Reporter Jenny Gold visited Springdale and brings us this story.
JENNY GOLD: Marshall Islands Consul General Carmen Chong Gum says people come to Springdale because there are jobs at the poultry plants, good schools and because they have family here.
Ms. CARMEN CHONG GUM (Consul General, Marshall Islands): We're able to travel this way, which is a passport, and we can also live, go back to our country whenever we want to. So, with that privilege, you know, why not?
GOLD: Right after World War II, the U.S. used the Marshall Islands as a nuclear test site. The country has been independent since the 1980s, but the U.S. still maintains a military presence there. And in exchange, the Marshallese are allowed to come live in the U.S. if they want to. Now, somewhere around 6,000 of them live in Springdale. And just as they do at home, the Marshallese often live in big, extended families. The women still wear long, flowery muumuus, but now over jeans and flip-flops, a perfect blend of their current and former environments. Carmen Chong Gum says her countrymen tend to be warm, generous people, quick with a smile, a little bit shy and very religious.
(Soundbite of music)
GOLD: There are about 20 Marshallese churches in Springdale - King's Chapel is one. It's in the office space off a fast food-lined highway that runs the middle of town. On a Wednesday night, about 50 people gathered for a prayer service.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified People: (Singing) (unintelligible)
GOLD: Forty-year-old Waston Attari sits in the front row pouring over a Bible. He moved here to seek a better life for his family. But sometimes, he says, the American dream feels more like a myth.
Mr. WASTON ATTARI: I've seen some people struggle with their day-to-day, you know, the lifestyles. And so, you know, people live paycheck to paychecks trying to take care of their family, trying to put food on their tables.
GOLD: For Attari, the biggest challenge has been getting health care. He's self-employed, helping other Marshallese do their taxes among other things. But he can't afford private health insurance. And the Marshallese don't qualify for Medicaid. Attari suffers from diabetes. He's been able to get free insulin from a local clinic, but it's not enough.
Mr. ATTARI: I cannot do any physical exams and go to see a doctor because I don't have the money to pay for the bills.
GOLD: What will you do if you get really sick?
Mr. ATTARI: I don't know. I don't know what I can do. Just keep praying.
GOLD: Some Marshall Islanders could get health insurance through the poultry plants. At Tyson's, a family plan costs about $120 a month. But they earn just over minimum wage and few of them can afford that premium.
County health worker Sandy Hainline Williams says many elderly parents, nieces, nephews and cousins in the Marshallese household wouldn't be covered under such a family health insurance plan anyway.
Ms. SANDY HAINLINE WILLIAMS (County Health Worker): It just makes me so sad to see them and know that they need to go see a doctor. I can't find a doctor for them. No one will see them. And St. Francis House is absolutely full.
This is our newly remodeled dental clinic. We've got nine operatories...
GOLD: The St. Francis House is a community health clinic that offers health and dental care on a sliding scale. Executive Director Kathy Grisham says St. Francis House sees about 1,000 Marshallese patients a year - more than any other health care provider in the region. Right now, the clinic is doing a lot of that care for free.
But a provision in the health care overhaul bill, recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, could bring relief. It would give Medicaid eligibility to the Marshallese, as well as migrants from Palau and Micronesia who are in a similar situation.
Kathy Grisham is all for the bill passing.
Ms. KATHY GRISHAM (Executive Director, St. Francis House): It would be an excellent thing. I'm not holding my breath, but I do hope health reform will bring that to us.
GOLD: But Mark Krikorian says Medicaid access isn't the solution. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that wants to reduce immigration. He supports the Medicaid provision in the overhaul bill, too, because, he says, right now the burden is falling unfairly to emergency rooms and federally funded clinics like the St. Francis House.
Mr. MARK KRIKORIAN (Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies): The bigger issue is should we be letting in people with little education from underdeveloped countries into a modern post-industrial welfare state, because there's no way to avoid the costs. We're not going to let people die on the steps of the emergency room.
GOLD: Consul General Carmen Chong Gum in Springdale says the Marshallese are contributing to the economy by working and paying taxes. She says they should have the same access to government programs as everyone else.
Ms. GUM: It's like going to a party and you're bringing your potluck, you're bringing a dish of rice or fried chicken and fried fish. And you bring the food to the party and you're just sitting there not eating anything.
GOLD: The provision that could help them is just a tiny insert in the 2,000-page House health bill. There's still a long way to go before it could become law.
For NPR News, I'm Jenny Gold.
NORRIS: And that story was produced by Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
For more than a decade, scientists have been trying to understand why certain communities report having so many kids with autism. They've looked at air pollution, contaminants in drinking water and pesticide exposure without much success. Now, a team of scientists in California has found a different explanation.
NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.
JON HAMILTON: The team looked at 10 California communities with autism rates at least 70 percent higher than those in surrounding areas.
Irva Hertz-Picciotto of the University of California, Davis, says they didn't find any local environmental problems. But she says they did identify two major risk factors. One was having a certain type of parent.
Dr. IRVA HERTZ-PICCIOTTO (Department of Public Health Sciences, University of California, Davis): These would be parents with higher levels of education, more likely to be white and more likely to be older, within the framework of people who can reproduce.
HAMILTON: Hertz-Picciotto says parents' age and race had a relatively small effect, but the effect of education was huge. In most areas, a child whose parents completed college was four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child whose parents did not finish high school.
Dr. HERTZ-PICCIOTTO: It doesn't necessarily mean that higher education causes autism, but that it gets you the diagnosis more frequently.
HAMILTON: Hertz-Picciotto says that's partly because educated parents are more likely to request services for children with autism.
Dr. HERTZ-PICCIOTTO: It may also have to do with people with more education are just better able to navigate a very complicated and possibly arcane health system.
HAMILTON: But she says parents weren't the only factor affecting diagnosis rates.
Dr. HERTZ-PICCIOTTO: A couple of the clusters were found actually fairly close to a treatment center in California.
HAMILTON: She says parents near state-run treatment centers are probably more aware of autism and autism services.
So you might wonder if the clusters reflect over-diagnosis. Hertz-Picciotto says no, the rates were still lower than those found in communities studied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which means lots of children are probably slipping through the cracks. Hertz-Picciotto says her study found that children of Hispanic parents, for example, were less likely than other children to receive an autism diagnosis.
Dr. HERTZ-PICCIOTTO: It's entirely possible that families are hesitant to go to a state-funded agency if they have a member of the family who might be undocumented, for instance.
HAMILTON: The study has implications for apparent autism clusters in other parts of the U.S.
Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University, says that when researchers encounter a cluster, the first thing they should ask is whether it can be explained by demographic factors.
Dr. STEVEN NOVELLA (Neurologist, Yale University): Only once you rule all those things out, you say, okay, is there any environmental, biological cause? Are we looking at a genetic cluster or an environmental trigger cluster?
HAMILTON: Demographics might have explained an apparent cluster from the 1990s in Brick Township, New Jersey. Many parents in this predominantly white, middle-class community were convinced their kids were being harmed by something in the water. But a federal investigation found no problem.
Novella says that hasn't stopped people from trying to link other autism clusters to local chemicals or pollution.
Dr. NOVELLA: There are proponents of the environmental paradigm of autism who have, I think, jumped the gun on preliminary data and say, aha, see, this is evidence of an environmental trigger, when really that data does not exist.
HAMILTON: Novella says if something in the environment does trigger autism, it's probably something found everywhere, not just in some communities. The new study appears in the journal Autism Research.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Today, we mark the passing of a man who's credited with solving a linguistic problem: What do you call a bunch of blogs? His name is Brad Graham.
Commentator Jeff Jarvis is a blogger and author of the book "What Would Google Do?"
Mr. JEFF JARVIS (Author, "What Would Google Do?"): Most bloggers I know don't much like the word blog, and they have even less affection for blogosphere. Blech.
Wikipedia says credit or blame for coining blogosphere goes to Brad Graham, a theater publicist and blogger in St. Louis who died this week at the age of 41. Look him up on Google and you'll see - blogosphere is his legacy. But thank goodness Graham was joking when he first said it - at the very birth of the form - in September 1999. He, too, didn't much like the word blog. Oy, that name, he exclaimed on his site, Bradlands.
And so, he worried about where this would lead us: perhaps to jokes about falling off a blog, or worse, blogorreah. Goodbye, cyberspace, Graham wrote. Hello blogiverse? Blogosphere? Blogmos? Well, blogosphere stuck.
But Wikipedia informs us that credit for blogosphere is also claimed by William Quick, a conservative blogger and novelist whose site does indeed proclaim: Yes, I'm the guy who named the blogosphere.
I remember well the day, January 1, 2002, when Bill, our cyber-Adam in the digital Garden of Eden, named this beast. He reasoned that the root logos follows the Greek for the principle governing the cosmos. Graham had been joking, Quick wasn't. Though he did concede in an email to me that alcohol may have played a role in his inspiration.
But in the Internet age, ideas and words leave their creators and spread - and mutate - like fruit flies. On the Urban Dictionary, I counted more than 300 words built on the root blog: blogalicious, blogamy, blogasm, blogviate, blogophile and blogophobia.
The same dictionary, by the way, defines blogosphere as, quote, "a word created with the sole purpose to be the worst sounding thing ever, second only to the originating term blog."
But then again, a friend theorizes that having cute, approachable names is what made blogs- and Google, Twitter and Yahoo - successful. It humanized cold technology.
And now, I must confess my own sins. Back in the dawn of blogging - I started in September 2001 - a fellow blogospherian, Tony Pierce, turned his online diary into a book. I made the mistake of suggesting it should be called a blook. I'm sorry, okay? I'm very sorry. Please don't include that in my obit. Don't etch blook on my tombstone. I'm also accused of creating Googlejuice, but I swear that's not my fault, and I'm searching Google right now for someone else to blame.
To settle their dispute, Bill Quick and Brad Graham held a cordial discussion in blog comments in 2002. Quick conceded provenance of blogosphere to Graham, but Graham gave Quick credit for popularizing it. Besides, Graham said he preferred blogmos anyway.
Graham also said he'd rather be remembered for another neologism: pentropy, defined as the contraction of the universe that causes ballpoints to disappear from your desk. Pentropy: It's all yours, sir.
NORRIS: Jeff Jarvis directs the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He blogs at buzzmachine.com. He was remembering Brad Graham who died this week.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Violence may be down in Iraq, but life is still dangerous for Iraqis, especially those who have worked with U.S. forces or with American media and humanitarian organizations. In 2008, thousands of them began applying for visas to the U.S. under a special State Department program. But that was before the economic meltdown. Now, some of the applicants are having second thoughts, as Quil Lawrence reports from Baghdad.
QUIL LAWRENCE: On any given morning, a long line of Iraqi families forms outside the U.S. base in the center of Baghdad where visa interviews are conducted.
(Soundbite of metal gate)
LAWRENCE: At the end waits a chain-linked gate guarded by private security contractors, followed by rigorous body searches and various metal-detecting machines. Then finally interviews, cross-referenced with letters of recommendation and more interviews on subsequent visits.
Most Iraqis consider the ordeal worth the prize, a visa to the United States. About 17,000 Iraqis won visas in 2009. But lately, there are some doubts, fed by a small but surprising number of Iraqis returning from the States. Abu Haidar(ph) worked as a driver for NPR in Baghdad for several years. His trip to America was a shock.
Mr. ABU HAIDAR (Driver): (Through translator) When I arrived in America, there was no work, especially for someone without a degree and with no English. Such people can't make it in America.
LAWRENCE: Abu Haidar may be a worst-case example. The visa program settled him in Houston, Texas, and everything went wrong from the start. Food, lodging and transportation were too expensive, and his salary as a cleaner at a hotel was too low. And Abu Haidar had arrived in the U.S. with some pretty harsh stereotypes about some of the people living there.
Mr. HAIDAR: (Through translator) There are Mexicans living there. So I felt scared to go out. I worry about my son and daughter. My son almost went crazy � he's used to coming home at midnight, but there, he had to be in by 8, just like a prison.
LAWRENCE: Somehow, the unknown dangers in America scared Abu Haidar more than the car bombs still exploding back in Iraq. Besides the racial stereotypes, Abu Haidar's son also protested that sweeping floors was a shameful job for a 47-year-old man. After just two months, Abu Haidar called it quits.
Mr. HAIDAR: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: I'm not going to tell anyone else what to do, says Abu Haidar, but for himself, he is happy to be back in Iraq. Stories like this have set off an earnest debate among the visa candidates. The International Organization for Migration, IOM, has put out a small guidebook for Iraqis outlining the challenges. Sami al-Hilali recently got the call that he had been awarded a visa, and he turned it down.
Mr. SAMI AL-HILALI: I want go to America because my daughter and my son could study English. But IOM, they all give me book. It's tough.
LAWRENCE: Hilali says he has worked hard all his life and dreamed of opening a restaurant in America. But he is not sure that he and his wife are ready to start from scratch during the American economic crisis. He worries about the cost of health care for him and his wife.
Mr. AL-HILALI: America is better, but different economy. There is crisis economy in America.
LAWRENCE: Hilali knows the dangers of staying in Iraq intimately. He lost a leg during the Iran-Iraq war and worked through most of the sectarian violence. He thinks all of the time about what might happen to his family if he were killed by a bomb. But that reminds him that here in Iraq he has got the support of friends, family and tribal relations - something America can't offer. It might be a great opportunity, says Hilali, for a younger family.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LAWRENCE: Husam(ph) and Yasmin(ph), not their real names, are just such a family. Their eight-month-old boy keeps grabbing the microphone. The entire family has just had a final interview before they head off to a new life in North Carolina.
Mr. HUSAM: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: Of course, life in America is going to be better, says Husam. He adds that he doesn't think Iraq will be stable for another decade. Looking at their daughters, five and six years old, Yasmin says it's worth whatever hardships they might face.
Ms. YASMIN: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: Things will be difficult at the beginning, but we have to endure it for the sake of our children, Yasmin says. She adds, I'll go to America with my eyes closed, but gradually my eyes will open and I'll learn how to live there.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Baghdad.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Imagine living in a country so desperately poor, so stricken by famine that you were reduced to eating a thin porridge of powdered pine bark extended with sawdust, a country so repressive that it dictates the length of hair on a man's head, a country so cut off from the outside world that the sight of an American-made nail clipper is a thing of total wonder.
This is North Korea, the country described in the accounts of North Koreans who defected to the South and told their stories to Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick. Her new book based on their stories is titled "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea."
And Barbara Demick, welcome to the program.
Ms. BARBARA DEMICK: (Author, "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea"): Thank you.
BLOCK: You open your book by describing a nighttime satellite image of this area, a country of 23 million people, North Korea, completely black.
Ms. DEMICK: Yes. This is a very famous photograph of Northeast Asia. And what it shows is the bright lights of South Korea, increasingly China, Japan, and in the middle of this is a black hole, which is North Korea, because North Korea has very little electricity, and at night, it's almost completely dark. And I opened with this image because I thought it conveyed a lot of our thinking about North Korea, a black hole, a place that we know very little about.
BLOCK: And what we do know of it is of a country that has gone through, as I said, extreme deprivation. Describe, if you could, just the level of desperation at the height of the famine in the 1990s, after the death of Kim Il Sung.
Ms. DEMICK: The desperation was to a point where people were eating weeds, grass, bark. There was really nothing to eat. And the thing that's really different about North Korea than other places where there's acute poverty and starvation is, you know, often that's in the countryside. But this was a relatively developed country through the 1980s, and the people in my book lived in a city, you know, a concrete jungle. So in a way, it's almost a post-apocalyptic scenario, what happened to them.
BLOCK: And you describe in these cities cartloads of corpses being wheeled away from the street, from train stations. You mention a frog population that was entirely wiped out from overhunting, even though people would have never eaten frogs before.
Ms. DEMICK: Yeah. Frog is not part of the North Korean or South Korean diet. And, you know, they found the frogs, they found the grasshoppers, the pigeons, the rats, the dogs, you know, people's pets, you know, everything. Everything was eaten.
BLOCK: You tell the story of modern North Korea through the accounts of some remarkable characters whom you met, defectors to the South. And I want to talk to you about two of them, a young couple, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, who are from the northern city of Chongjin. And I'm tempted to call them young lovers except that really grossly overstates the extent of their relationship, as Mi-ran described it to you.
Ms. DEMICK: Well, they were - yes, it was a very chaste relationship. They didn't hold hands for three years. It took them another six years before they kissed, and I think that was a peck on the cheek. And in some ways, their love story tells the story of what North Korea was like for young people.
The young woman, Mi-ran, came from a very poor family, a low class background. In North Korea, everybody is graded and stratified for their class background. And she and her boyfriend, Jun-sang, who came from a better family, were really unable to be a proper couple. And they had very little privacy because this is a repressive regime. You can't expect privacy. And they dated for many years, taking advantage of the dark. And they used to go out at night, after everybody else had gone to bed, walking in the dark. And that was the nature of their relationship for many years.
North Korea is prudish. Mi-ran has, you know, told me that when she left North Korea, she was 26 years old, and she didn't know where babies came from. She really didn't have a clue. You know, this was a certain age of innocence.
BLOCK: Now, the young man, Jun-sang, because he is of a higher class and has some privilege, goes away to school in Pyongyang, and they're communicating by letter. And it feels like you're going back in time a couple of hundred years. I mean, it would be maybe up to a month before they might hear from each other because that's how the mail service worked.
Ms. DEMICK: That's right. It was a very Victorian romance, except in the Victorian days you had paper. The way she described it to me, it was an ordeal even to get paper. She would try to find a few sheets of paper, and it was always made of corn husks or some very poor material. And then, the letters were taken by train to Pyongyang, but the train system was broken down, and often the letters were lost. People believed that the conductors were so cold on the trains that they would take the letters and burn them to keep warm.
BLOCK: The young woman, Mi-ran, is the first to defect to South Korea with some of her family, and it's so touching in the book because she realizes she cannot tell Jun-sang that she's going. She just leaves, and he has no idea where she's gone.
Ms. DEMICK: Yeah. She decides very suddenly that she wants to leave North Korea, but she can't tell him. But she doesn't realize that he also wants to defect, and he hasn't dared to tell her. So their lack of communication is what ultimately breaks them up.
BLOCK: He, though, does later do the same thing. And you describe the turning point for Jun-sang. He's at a train station, it's 1998, and there are a lot of homeless children on the platform. And he sees and hears a little boy, clearly starving, singing a song to get money for food.
Ms. DEMICK: Yes. The song is called "Nothing to Envy," and this is the song that I used for the title of the book. This is a favorite song of North Korean children, and if I could sing better, I would sing it for you, but basically what it says is, you know, (foreign language spoken). Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world. Our house is within the embrace of the Workers' Party. We are all brothers and sisters. Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid. Our father is here. We have nothing to envy.
This is the favorite song of young children, and this is what they believe. They have nothing to envy in the world. They live in the best country. And Jun-sang has this moment of, I guess his epiphany, when he sees this starving child singing it, and he realizes, you know, what a lie this is.
But, you know, I didn't want to paint North Korea as just a living hell. Almost all the people I've talked to had moments when they were happy. You know, for one, they had this core belief. It may have been a big lie, but they believed it. They believed in their country. They believed in themselves. And there's an underlying sadness for them at what was lost, even if they know it was a lie.
BLOCK: How shattering was it to them when they realized - when they came to the realization of that lie, though?
Ms. DEMICK: Devastating. Devastating. I mean, to imagine that everything you've ever been taught was untrue - it's shattering. There are quite a few North Korean defectors who've done, you know, poorly after they've defected. There have been suicides. They find it difficult to, you know, recreate that meaning in their lives.
BLOCK: Barbara Demick, thanks very much.
Ms. DEMICK: Okay. Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: Barbara Demick's book is called "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea." And you can read an excerpt at npr.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Many of the millions of Americans who take antidepressants struggle with debilitating depression, but many of them are not severely depressed. It turns out that few studies have looked directly at the effects of antidepressants on people with those milder symptoms.
NPR's Alix Spiegel reports on new research that does just that.
ALIX SPIEGEL: Since Prozac was introduced to the American public in 1987, there's been a huge amount of research on antidepressants. Small armies of patients have offered themselves up for testing and gone through a complex screening process.
Robert DeRubeis is a psychological researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. And he says when part of that process is a standardized test, which measures your level of depression:
Dr. ROBERT DERUBEIS (Psychological Researcher, University of Pennsylvania): The interviewer asks a series of questions and the patient responds to those questions. And on each of those items, the interviewer assigns a rating of zero, if it's not present, up to the maximum number four.
SPIEGEL: Now, any score over 19 indicates severe depression, and DeRubeis says that in most cases, antidepressant studies won't accept you unless you're actually higher than 20.
Dr. DERUBEIS: It's just been the practice of pharmaceutical trials that studies of antidepressant medications include patients with severe or very severe depression.
SPIEGEL: This week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, DeRubeis publishes a study which looks not at the very severely depressed but at people with mild and moderate depression.
Gregory Simon is a mental health researcher at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, who says this issue is important because many patients treated with antidepressants fall into exactly that category.
Dr. GREGORY SIMON (Psychiatrist, Group Health Research Institute): My best guess would be that about half the people treated by doctors out in the community would probably fall into that severe or very severe range, and about half of them would fall into the moderate or possibly even mild range.
SPIEGEL: In fact, a recent survey showed that almost 70 percent of depressed patients on medication had moderate to mild symptoms. So why only study those with very serious problems?
People who are mildly ill often recover without medication if they get some attention, even a placebo. And so, testing a drug in that group will make it look like the drug is not as effective.
Professor Brett Deacon of the University of Wyoming is a psychologist who does research on depression treatments.
Dr. BRETT DEACON (Psychologist, University of Wyoming): Because drug companies fund the vast majority of clinical trials, and obviously drug companies are interested in having their clinical trials show the efficacy of their antidepressant medications, and they're more likely to have that favorable outcome if they can recruit very severely depressed patients.
SPIEGEL: But it's not just about drug companies getting striking results so that they can get a drug approved by the FDA. Gregory Simon says it's also about doing right by the patients involved in research.
Dr. SIMON: Ethically, there's some obligation to say how can we do this research the most efficiently so that we don't enroll a lot more people than we need to in a study where they're randomly assigned to get a placebo?
SPIEGEL: So what did the JAMA study conclude? DeRubeis compared people who took real pills to people who got placebo pills. And he says that it appears that antidepressants do genuinely improve mood in severe cases. But DeRubeis says people with mild depression didn't really do so well.
Dr. DERUBEIS: The difference of the benefit of the medication over placebo was rather small, nearly zero.
SPIEGEL: But Dr. Philip Wang, deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says consumers with mild symptoms shouldn't necessarily be scared off of drugs by these results.
Dr. PHILIP WANG (Deputy Director, National Institute of Mental Health): They don't not work for everyone, and they don't work for everyone. I think buried within the group are people who do respond if they have mild or moderate depression.
SPIEGEL: And so, Dr. Wang says clinicians just need to closely monitor patients who don't seem to respond to medication and give them an alternative treatment if necessary.
Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
As we've just heard, after serving in Congress for nearly 30 years, first in the House of Representatives and then as a three-term senator, Byron Dorgan has announced his retirement. And Senator Dorgan joins us now from his office to talk about his decision. Welcome to the program, Senator.
Senator BYRON DORGAN (Democrat, North Dakota): Thank you.
NORRIS: A lot of your fellow Democrats were shocked at your decision, even your constituents back in North Dakota. How long have you been mulling this over, or did you have some sort of epiphany over the winter break?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Sen. DORGAN: I didn't have an epiphany. It's been a long wrestling match with me in trying to determine to what I wanted do, but, you know, the fact is I've served in public office for 40 years which is a long, long time. I served ten years in elective office in the state capital and then 30 years here in the United States Congress, 12 in the House and 18 in the Senate. So, the question for me was if I run this year for reelection I think I would have won. But that means if starting now the next seven years would be in the United State Senate.
And then it just seemed to me like that's just too much of a commitment beyond the 30 years I've already served in the Congress. And I mean, there are other things I want to do in life so I made a decision that I was not going to seek reelection.
NORRIS: Now you say that if you ran again you think you would win, but polls show that the governor of North Dakota, Governor John Hoeven is very popular in the state. Recent polls show that if you were to face him in a one-on-one election that it would be very close, in fact that he might beat you. Did that influence the decision?
Sen. DORGAN: No, I don't believe he would have won. There are polls on both sides of this. But the fact is that he is not a candidate at this point - was not a candidate and there was no determination that he would be. He had not made any decision. But that wasn't a part of my calculation. I think North Dakotans understand the benefits and the value of seniority and experience here in the Congress. Had I run for reelection, I'm fairly confident the North Dakota people would have given me the opportunity to continue to serve.
But, you know, I think there is a time to make other decisions and I think sometimes it's very difficult. Someone once described the Congress as like the Hotel California, you know, you can only check in, you can't check out. It is very hard to get here. But it's also very hard to leave. And yet I think in many ways I'd rather, as someone once said, have people wonder why I left so soon rather than stayed so long.
NORRIS: In your statement today you lament the loss of bipartisanship. And before we go on I just want you take a moment to listen to something that you told NPR right before the holiday break.
Sen. DORGAN: You know, I've served here a long time. I've never seen things quite as convoluted and difficult, and, you know, it is - it's a circumstance where the agenda and the year, this was kind of a lost year in many ways.
NORRIS: Senator, what am I hearing there in your voice?
Sen. DORGAN: It sounds like I was looking for words�
NORRIS: You sound very frustrated.
Sen. DORGAN: Well, this has been a long and difficult year and there is no question that things need to be better, more bipartisanship, less rancor. They just need to be better. But again, that is not the basis for my decision. I'm an eternal optimist about this country. We've been through tough times and good times. And this has been a particularly difficult period with a very deep recession, the deepest since the Great Depression. And I mean, we're going to come out of this. I'm very optimistic. But this decision for me was just about do I wish to commit another seven years beyond the 30 years I've served in the Congress.
NORRIS: You know, sometimes when you make a difficult decision you're able to, in the exhale, able to see things more clearly. Is there a candid assessment that you would be willing to share of where the breakdown happens in the Senate? I mean so many people are so frustrated at the logjam that seems to be consistent in both the Senate and the House. Where's the breakdown? Why is so little getting done?
Sen. DORGAN: I'm going to serve this entire year in the Senate so I'm not going to name names, but let me say to you that I still have hope that we'll be able to find ways to come together and fix things together here in the Senate, because I do think most look at the Senate and say, you know, what it's not working the way it should work or it used to work. But, you know, the remedy for that, I think, lies within each of us and I would hope very much that all of us would reach across the partisan aisles and decide that there are things we can work together on.
NORRIS: Thank you very much for taking time to talk to us today.
Sen. DORGAN: Thanks a lot.
NORRIS: All the best to you. That was Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Consumer Electronics Show is the convention where technology companies show off their shiny new toys. It starts tomorrow in Las Vegas. Some of the shiniest toys are going to be 3-D television sets. NPR's Laura Sydell is in Las Vegas to cover the show with her 3-D glasses.
At the ready, Laura, I imagine a lot of this show will be devoted to these fancy new TV sets.
LAURA SYDELL: They will. And I have had a chance to look at some of them, and the 3-D itself is kind of extraordinary. It feels like you're being surrounded in a room by a bunch of fictional characters. It has this kind of amazing feel. But sets themselves don't look terribly different. The thing that's different, of course, is that you mostly have to wear those funny glasses in order to see 3-D because the way the whole thing works is that one eye sees something slightly different from the other and the glasses bring it together. And you get the illusion of being in a three-dimensional world.
There is possibly one set that will come out made by 3M where you don't have to have the glasses. The problem with that one is that it actually means you have to sit in a certain position in order to see it.
BLOCK: And if somebody were to invest in 3-D TV how much would it cost them?
SYDELL: You know, initially, it could set them back as much as $2,000 for a television, for I guess a larger 42-inch screen. Part of the question here is with regard to the cost is that people just bought HDTVs. So, one wonders if people really want to go out and buy another television set after you've just been told you needed to buy an HDTV. But that's the initial cost. And probably the people who would be likely to buy it are the kind of people who are going to be first adopters, you know, they want to be the first on their block to have one.
BLOCK: You would also want to be sure if you were going to make that investment that there would be something you'd want to watch. What about content in 3-D?
SYDELL: Well, content is coming. I think that a lot of the networks were pretty excited about the success of "Avatar," the 3-D movie that came out and now I guess it's been about a billion at the box office. So, ESPN, starting in June, will broadcast the World Cup in 3-D. Also another venture was just announced that included Sony and IMAX and Discovery and they say they are going to launch and entire channel dedicated to 3-D. But that won't come out until sometime in 2011. So, that's down the line. Right now, all you're really going to be able to watch is ESPN.
BLOCK: Laura, you and I talked a couple of days ago about the buzz over tablet computers said to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show. What else are you hearing about?
SYDELL: Well, the other thing that I've seen and it's the big buzz here is mobile TV. So, you could get TV on your cell phone. So, last time I saw a Samsung phone, it had a little antenna, and you could watch the local news, you could get network television on it. And this is something was - that was made possible when everybody transferred over to digital television.
And then there's also kind of some fun things like a drone. You will be able to buy yourself your own drone. People keep talking about military drones and this one you can control it with your iPhone.
BLOCK: I am so far behind the curve.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: Laura, thanks very much.
SYDELL: You're welcome.
BLOCK: It's NPR's Laura Sydell, surrounded by the preparations for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It opens tomorrow.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The only officially recognized survivor of both atomic bomb blasts in Japan died on Monday in Nagasaki. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was 93 years old and died of stomach cancer. Yamaguchi was a ship designer on a business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped. He was badly burned but got on a train home to be with his family in Nagasaki. Three days later, the second bomb was dropped there. Writer Charles Pellegrino interviewed Mr. Yamaguchi and other survivors for his upcoming book "The Last Train from Hiroshima."
And, Mr. Pellegrino, I wonder if you could read from your book the description of what happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He was just two miles away.
Mr. CHARLES PELLEGRINO (Author, "The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back"): Right.
The ground roared and quivered, snapped and leaped, tossing Yamaguchi out of the ditch nearly a meter into the air. As he fell, the fireball imploded overhead and began to rise at stupendous speed, creating a vacuum that for a second or two threatened to draw the engineer upward from the face of the Earth. But instead, it merely levitated him for what seemed an impossibly long time on a cushion of air and rushing dust before finally dropping him face first into one of the muddy furrows from which it had drawn him. He felt like a leaf on the wind.
BLOCK: Tsutomu Yamaguchi had horrible burns. He was in severe pain, but he hears, by your account, that a train was leaving for Nagasaki. To get to that train, though, he had to cross over a river without a bridge. What did he do?
Mr. PELLEGRINO: He actually crossed over on bodies. At one point, actually using basically a floating pile, almost like a rafter, iceberg of bloated bodies the next day and paddled across on those.
BLOCK: He does find his family in Nagasaki, his wife and his young son. And you describe him going back to work at Mitsubishi. He's still covered in bandages, still badly wounded, and he tries to warn the workers there about how to protect themselves: if another bomb were to come, to duck behind any desk or chair for cover. And they scoff at him.
Mr. PELLEGRINO: Yes. His boss was actually telling him, what he was saying about the entire city of Hiroshima disappearing, that this was almost treasonous talk. He said, do the math. You've been injured in your head. No bomb can do this sort of thing. And then right on the heels of this, there was the flash outside the window, and everyone immediately obeyed the previous instructions he had given and ducked down.
That section of the Mitsubishi office was actually located in what became known as a shock cocoon. Behind the office was a steel-reinforced stairwell that diverged the blast wave almost the way the prow of a ship would throw water to either side, and almost the entire building disappeared around them. More than 300 people died in adjoining offices. And Mr. Yamaguchi and the 30 men who were in that one office with him behind the stairwell, they were basically all that was left of the building.
BLOCK: You write that Mr. Yamaguchi felt that he had been given, through the course of these two tragedies, a second life and that he had to choose how to lead it. What was his choice?
Mr. PELLEGRINO: Right. For a period of time, for months, he was very depressed, very angry, even wanting revenge. And he felt where another colleague of his, Dr. Akizuki(ph), stayed angry for a very long time and referred to these concentric circles of death. Mr. Yamaguchi had another type of viral idea that he could empower children, he could empower anyone to just go out with something, with what in America we call the pay-it-forward principle. And he felt that somewhere, somehow, this would reach into some place, maybe change the life of some child who might otherwise grow up to do something evil and ultimately had a small chance of even preventing perhaps another Hiroshima or another Nagasaki in the future.
BLOCK: Did Tsutomu Yamaguchi explicitly become an activist on nuclear nonproliferation?
Mr. PELLEGRINO: Yes. He hoped that eventually there would be a time when nuclear weapons would simply not exist anywhere in the world. That would be a good thing to hope for. I don't think many people can disagree with it. It's just how do you get there? That's what we have to work at and think about.
BLOCK: Charles Pellegrino, thank you very much.
Mr. PELLEGRINO: You're welcome.
BLOCK: Charles Pellegrino, his forthcoming book is titled "The Last Train from Hiroshima." He was remembering Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who died on Monday in Nagasaki. He was 93.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
We begin this hour with two stories about how intelligence is gathered. First, the case of the seven Americans killed last week in Afghanistan. They were working for the CIA on a counterterrorism mission. The attack on them seems to have been the result of a counterintelligence failure. The suicide bomber had worked as an informant for the Jordanian intelligence agency, but he was, in fact, a double agent, loyal to al-Qaida or another terrorist network.
NPR's Tom Gjelten reports now on the challenges of counterintelligence.
TOM GJELTEN: Counterintelligence is a specialty. It's not just spying on your enemy. It's getting information about your enemy's efforts to spy on you. The intelligence mission of tracking down terrorists, obviously, depends on having good informants, agents who can tell you what al-Qaida is up to. The counterintelligence task is to make sure your informants aren't secretly working for your enemy. Michael Hurley, a former CIA officer, who pursued al-Qaida in Afghanistan, describes how it should work.
Mr. MICHAEL HURLEY (Former CIA Officer): They will say, I went to this district or province in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and they will say, I saw this terrorist there. This is someone you should be interested in. Well, the first question to ask is, were they really there? Were they standing outside the house that they say they saw this person in? Does any of that make sense, is it logical?
GJELTEN: There are dozens of questions to be answered before an informant can really be trusted. Is he really who he says he is? Is the information he offers verifiable? It's detailed painstaking work and because it's defensive rather than offensive, the rewards may not be so great. Burton Gerber is a 40-year CIA veteran, and the co-editor of a new book on rediscovering counterintelligence.
Mr. BURTON GERBER (CIA Veteran; Co-Editor, "Vaults, Mirrors, and Masks: Rediscovering U.S. Counterintelligence"): It's not sexy. And the people who are really good at it are usually people who come in and say, hey boss, you may want to look at this again. And how many of us like our subordinates to say, hey boss, you may be, you know, jumping off the cliff when you don't want to?
GJELTEN: Good counterintelligence does not take you closer to your target. It stops him from getting closer to you. But with Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri still on the loose more than eight years after 9/11, intelligence agencies are under greater than ever pressure to find them.
Mr. GERBER: People want to produce, and cutting corners is a way to do it. And the more pressure there is in terms of, you know, bring me the head of Osama bin Laden, it is that people begin doing things fast instead of well.
GJELTEN: Intelligence officials say the suicide bomber who attacked the CIA base in Afghanistan had offered information on the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri. He'd been working for the Jordanian intelligence service, whose agents reportedly vouched for his reliability. But one of the cardinal rules of counterintelligence work is to remember that the other side is always going to be going after your agents. In the words of one former intelligence official, you never own them, you only rent them. Again, Burton Gerber.
Mr. GERBER: You are still conscious of the fact that something could've happened to that source since the last time you saw him or her. And therefore, every source needs to be revalidated with every meeting.
GJELTEN: All these are classic counterintelligence challenges, but in the counterterrorism context, the stakes can be even higher. Michael Hurley points out that during the Cold War, the enemy spies just wanted to learn about us.
Mr. HURLEY: It was to get information and learn about, you know, our capabilities, what we were doing against them and so on. Where, in this case, it's often just to get people with very bad and lethal intent in close to our personnel so that they can kill them.
GJELTEN: That was clearly the case with last week's suicide bomber. Presumably, he could've taken advantage of his access to his U.S. and Jordanian handlers to find out more about U.S. counterterrorism operations. Instead, he just blew them up as soon as he had the opportunity.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now we turn to the other big terrorism case in the news, this one much closer to home: the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253. In the forensic analysis of what went wrong in the lead up to that potential attack, the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center will certainly be placed under close review. The center was created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to serve as a clearing house for information for more than 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and departments. And it was designed to help prevent the kind of disaster that nearly occurred on Christmas Day. The center has a daunting task. It's supposed to process between 10,000 and 12,000 pieces of information every single day.
To find out more about how the NCTC works, we're joined now by Rick Nelson. He was a supervisor at the NCTC when it was first created. He's now the director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome to the program, Mr. Nelson.
Mr. RICK NELSON (Director, Homeland Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies): Thank you very much.
NORRIS: So, the agency is essentially an aggregator that sifts through a lot of information. How do you find these red flags when the information comes in from all of these various databases? At some point, does technology stop and do human analysts actually have to step in and do this work?
Mr. NELSON: Well, it's a combination of the two, but mostly relies on the judgment of the individual analysts that are there. The analysts who are skilled in research techniques and analytic techniques are subject matter experts. And based on their instincts and based on what they're seeing and what they're reading, they're the ones who would go ahead and begin additional analysis and beginning connecting the dots based on trends they may be seeing with the information.
NORRIS: So, given that both State and the CIA were aware of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, help us understand, what should've happened with the intelligence that they actually had at NCTC?
Mr. NELSON: Well, what I - on the State Department piece - and I think that's a great point - is I would've liked to have seen a system where when the derogatory information was put into this tied database, which is held at NCTC, that it triggered State Department to note - annotate his visa so that he could go under some additional scrutiny or further scrutiny before he was allowed, actually, to get on that airplane.
But with NCTC and the information that they have out there, again, what they're going to do is when they get a trigger, they're going to try to link that with other pieces of information they have out there and put together a profile. But at the end of the day, they're not the ones that can take action with that information. They are certainly just the aggregators of it.
NORRIS: Should the NCTC have known that Abdulmutallab had an active visa to enter the U.S.?
Mr. NELSON: That system - those two systems should've been talking. The NCTC should've been aware of the fact that he had an active visa. I'd like to look at it from the other perspective, though, is what should've happened is when the father came into the embassy and said, I was concerned about my son. That information should've triggered the visa system to flag it prior to allowing him to get on an airplane.
NORRIS: So, when you talk about agencies talking to each other, how would they have known? What should have happened?
Mr. NELSON: Well, there should've been - there should be a free flow of information. Some of this information should happen automatically and it doesn't and that's...
NORRIS: You mean, update across systems in all agencies.
Mr. NELSON: Absolutely, that's correct. Some of it is still done manually. There are still a lot of work to be done in the U.S. government to get these databases to talk between the databases. And that's something that we need to fix. Certainly you want to have human - a role in this - human intervention and the amalgamation of information and a decision-making process. But some of this, for example, if a derogatory piece of information is put on an individual, where we had specifically - had his name, that should've been matched against a visa database and that should've been noted.
NORRIS: Yes or no question before we move on. I'm thinking about that picture that was released in the White House yesterday. The president's at this great big table, all kinds of people are sitting - seated around that table. Is that part of the problem, a lot of people in that room, perhaps too many parts in the security machinery?
Mr. NELSON: Well, you know, you can say that. Yeah, yes or no question. I think we do have too many people trying to do the same job. And we need to put - at least give someone some authority over it to take care of it.
NORRIS: Rick Nelson, thank you very much.
Mr. NELSON: Thank you.
NORRIS: Rick Nelson is a former supervisor at the National Counterterrorism Center. He is also a former Navy commander. And he now is the director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Take a look at a weather map of the U.S. right now and there are a lot of frigid blues and purples in places you don't often see them. It is unusually cold in the Southeast. Farmers are trying to protect their fruit and vegetable crops. And homeless shelters are seeing more people, as NPR's Kathy Lohr reports.
KATHY LOHR: As the temperature dipped into the teens, volunteers in Atlanta searched the streets for homeless people and tried to convince them to come inside for the night.
Mr. CARL HARTRAMPF (Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless): Hello, anybody home?
LOHR: Under an interstate overpass near downtown, a man is bundled up in a plaid blanket. From underneath his cover, he refuses help.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: We've got some extra coats here for you if you want some.
Unidentified Man: No.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: And we'll be happy to bring you in, too. We've got a ride back to shelter.
Unidentified Man: No.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: Okay. It's going to get cold tonight.
LOHR: Carl Hartrampf is with the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, which operates the largest shelter in the Southeast.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: People that out here like this tonight, it's so cold, and they refuse to come in, there's something, either depression or maybe even addiction or mental illness that's preventing them. And that's why it's so important to do this outreach, really, all year and try to get people in some proper facility.
LOHR: About 500 men regularly stay at the shelter, but on nights like this, Hartrampf says, they'll see twice that many. In a nearby parking lot, dozens of homeless wait in line for a hot meal. And they rush over as Hartrampf and another task force member hand out coats from the back of a pickup truck. A man who calls himself Roots Daniel(ph) stops by.
Where are you going to stay tonight?
Mr. ROOTS DANIEL: I stay outside. I sleep outside.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: But it's so cold, don't you want to come in?
Mr. DANIEL: No, we stay in tents and stuff.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: You think that's going to be enough?
Mr. DANIEL: It's been enough so far. Thank the almighty.
Mr. HARTRAMPF: If it's not, y'all come down to Peachtree and Pine, okay?
Mr. DANIEL: Yeah, I know.
LOHR: On this bone-chilling night, only one woman we meet, huddled in a doorway, is willing to come inside. Shelters in churches across the Southeast have opened up overflow rooms. When it's below freezing, they say they won't turn anyone away. More than a dozen water mains have ruptured in the Atlanta area this week, a combination of the lingering cold and old pipes. In Southeast Alabama, two old boilers stopped working at the Bullock Correctional Facility, leaving some 1,300 inmates without heat or hot water. Brian Corbett with the Alabama Department of Corrections says one boiler is working now, the other is being replaced.
Mr. BRIAN CORBETT (Alabama Department of Corrections): We've moved approximately 650 inmates to other facilities. And we've bought in temporary heating. You know, unfortunately, these don't break in the summer, they break in the winter when they're most needed, but we are working to make sure that we have adequate heat and that the repairs are made.
LOHR: The extended cold snap also brought scattered damage to Florida's citrus crop, a $9 billion industry. Governor Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency and relaxed restrictions on commercial vehicles to allow farmers to get their crops to processing plants quicker. Andrew Meadows is a spokesman for Florida Citrus Mutual, which represents 8,000 growers. He says temperatures fell below 28 degrees in several spots.
Mr. ANDREW MEADOWS (Spokesman, Florida Citrus Mutual): It looks like we have some isolated pockets of damage, maybe some frozen fruits, some twig and leaf damage. But overall we came through pretty well. It certainly was not a catastrophic event.
LOHR: But Meadows says growers remain on alert, as forecasters are calling for below freezing temperatures again this weekend.
Mr. MEADOWS: So it's really going to be an anxious week for us and our growers, not a whole lot of sleep going on, I can assure you that.
LOHR: Another wave of Arctic air heads south tomorrow and it's expected to dump rain, sleet and snow from South Carolina all the way to Louisiana.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Atlanta.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
This election year has just begun and already the political world is abuzz. Just yesterday, news broke that three leading Democrats will be retiring: veteran Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, along with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. Yet Republicans have just as many open seats to defend at this point.
Joining us to talk about the 2010 political landscape is NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, let's start with the news. The in-party always loses seats in off-year elections like this one. Do yesterday's Senate retirements make the outlook for Democrats a bit more challenging?
MARA LIASSON: Doesn't make it more challenging, it just reveals how dire it already was. I think that Byron Dorgan in North Dakota was facing a very tough, if not, impossible race against the sitting governor, John Hoeven, if he had decided to run, and he is expected to run. Polls there show that he was running very far ahead of Dorgan. In Connecticut, where Chris Dodd decided he wasn't going to stand for election, that retirement, actually, is a relief to Democrats. He already was a goner, a dead man walking.
And at least at the White House they feel strongly that they have a good candidate in the State Attorney General Blumenthal who could win there. And even in Colorado where Governor Bill Ritter announced he wouldn't run, there are potentially some good Democratic candidates, maybe Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, maybe even Ken Salazar, the interior secretary. It's not clear who's going to run there. So the situation was already pretty difficult for Democrats. I don't think what happened yesterday changes it that much.
NORRIS: And Colorado was one of those purple states that...
LIASSON: Right.
NORRIS: ...really could tilt either way. What's the overall outlook for the Senate?
LIASSON: Well, the overall outlook is that I think there's no one who would say the Democrats will have 60 votes after 2010. I think that will be a distant memory. I think that North Dakota is almost an automatic pick up for the Republicans. Most handicappers think the Democrats could lose anywhere from two to seven seats, although, change of control in the Senate is probably unlikely at this moment. It's not impossible. Wave elections have a very particular dynamic of their own. The last one we had in 1994 developed pretty late and that caught the Democrats off guard.
NORRIS: Let's talk about the House. How are things looking now?
LIASSON: Well, the big question remains: How many total retirements will there be? This is the month where we're going to see a rush to the exits if there's going to be one. People have had a chance to go home, talk to their families, talk to their pollsters, kind of figure out what they wanted to do. The filing deadline in many of these states is months away, but most people want to give their party a heads up, so they can recruit another candidate.
Right now, retirements in the House have slightly more Republicans retiring than Democrats. But don't let that fool you because Democrats are the ones who are bracing themselves for big losses. The only question is how big. Forty-one would be a switch in control, that would be a tidal wave. Anything over 25 losses I think would seriously change the dynamic of the House, make it much more difficult to pass legislation. You know, anything under that, under 20 probably would be manageable by the Democrats.
NORRIS: The Obama administration has a lot riding on this, in one word, healthcare. And beyond that there are many other issues in climate change and the banking bill and other things. How is the Obama administration calibrating their legislative strategy to account for all this - and does he have coattails?
LIASSON: Well, whether he has coattails is a really big question. He certainly didn't in those off-year gubernatorial elections. He's going to try to rejuvenate his coattails and rejuvenate that network of ardent supporters of his who've gotten a little disenchanted with him. But the legislative strategy is fewer tough votes for Democrats. Don't make them walk the plank so many times. They also - the White House also is going to try to send a very important message to the voters they want to get back - what they call the expansion voters: the Obama voters, African-Americans, young voters, Latino voters, new voters.
I think you're going to see the White House talk a lot about transparency, also about earmarks, about Wall Street. For independent voters who care a lot about the deficit, you're going to see the president lay out a plan to reduce the deficit. He's going to talk more about earmarks, also. I think in general you're going to hear a more populist message trying to remind those voters about the kind of change that they voted for.
NORRIS: Is the Republican Party, overall, in position to take advantage of these developments, these retirements or the president's lagging popularity?
LIASSON: Well, they certainly think they are. They're quite thrilled with each one of these democratic retirements. And I think in a lot of places they are. I mean, their voters are more enthusiastic. We see that in poll after poll. Republican voters show more intensity. That's a key factor in turn out - in a low turnout mid-term election.
NORRIS: Seems to be, though, some disarray within the party (unintelligible).
LIASSON: Well, certainly a lot of turmoil. I don't know about disarray, but a lot of turmoil. In Florida just recently, the Tea Party activist base, which is a very energized group of conservatives, got their first scalp. They got rid of the state Republican chair, handpicked by Charlie Crist, who's the moderate Republican, who's really struggling there in a primary against Marco Rubio who is the choice of the tea party activists. So, that - we - it still remains to be seen whether the Tea Party movement will energize the party or push it too far to the right, we don't know yet.
NORRIS: Thank you so much, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
NORRIS: That's NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Today, a federal grand jury in Michigan indicted a Nigerian man on charges he tried to destroy a Northwest Airlines' plane on Christmas Day. NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr says the bomber's method is yet another example of an ominous trend.
DANIEL SCHORR: Like Richard Reid before him � the one with the explosive in his sneakers � Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is alive today only because he failed in his mission, which was bringing down an airliner with an explosive concealed in his underclothing. In recent years, the suicide bomber has emerged as the greatest menace to the lives of innocents, a menace more deadly because it's difficult to design a strategy to deal with someone ready, maybe even eager, to face death by his own hand.
Manifestly, martyrdom has become the weapon of choice of the militant bent on jihad. Suicide as a weapon has a long history. There were the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. In 1983, there were truck-bomb attacks on both the American embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Two hundred forty two Americans died in the Marine compound, along with the driver of the truck. In the year 2000, as the U.S. destroyer Cole was refueling in the Yemini harbor of Aden, a small boat laden with explosives approached it and blew a huge hole in the side of the warship, killing 17 sailors and the two suicide bombers.
Truck bombs in a government building in Chechnya, Russia, in 2002, in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2003, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2008, the London subway and a bus in 2005, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and a nightclub in Tel Aviv in 2001. And then the most spectacular suicide venture of all, 9/11, the assault with hijacked airliners against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
And now Humam al-Balawi, the Jordanian physician so trusted that he was admitted to a CIA camp without screening, and who then detonated the explosive on his body, killing seven intelligence officers and a Jordanian agent. The late prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, once told me that of all the threats the international community faced from its foes, the suicide assailant was the one for which no defense had been devised. He who is willing to give his life in the name of a cause wields a powerful weapon.
This is Daniel Schorr.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
When Congress returns to Washington, it will face 1,279 pages of unfinished business. That's the House bill designed to reshape the financial system. The bill would create a big new regulator: the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But from the moment that regulator was proposed, banks, phone companies, lawyers and car salesmen, among others, have been working tirelessly to exempt themselves.
David Kestenbaum and Chana Joffe-Walt of NPR's Planet Money explain.
CHANA JOFFE-WALT: There's a joke floating around the financial world that a lot of banking lobbyists got toasters for Christmas this year.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: Not because they didn't make a lot of money; because they're tired of hearing Elizabeth Warren make the toaster argument. Elizabeth Warren heads a panel on the financial crisis put together by Congress. And her toaster argument for why we need a Consumer Financial Protection Agency goes like this.
Dr. ELIZABETH WARREN (Chair, Congressional Oversight Panel): You can't buy a toaster in America that has a one in five chance of exploding. But you can buy a mortgage that has a one in five chance of exploding, and they don't even have to tell you about it.
JOFFE-WALT: We have agencies that protect people from bad toys, milk, but there's no single agency that would stop banks and auto lenders and credit card companies, everyone, from selling you the financial equivalent of an exploding toaster.
KESTENBAUM: And so, back in June, the Obama administration proposed a new government regulator. This would be an agency that would regulate any and all financial products and services. The administration used the words broad jurisdiction a lot.
JOFFE-WALT: Broad jurisdiction, two words that freaked a lot of people out in the financial world. Troops mobilized. Fine, they said, regulate, but not me. First, there were the small banks.
Sal Marranca is president of a 108-year-old one in western New York, and he and lots of lobbyists shared their feelings.
Mr. SALVATORE MARRANCA (CEO, Cattaraugus County Bank): I'm against a new government, all-potent, all-powerful, all-start-from-scratch, build a new building, staff it with 10,000 people, make them judge, jury and executioner for something I'm already being regulated on.
JOFFE-WALT: Marranca says small banks already have so many regulators that when the regulators come to do inspections, there aren't enough rooms to put them in.
KESTENBAUM: So Marranca and people like him got some lawmakers to agree, and here in the House bill, the Miller-Moore amendment. It basically says small banks do not need to be examined by the new Consumer Protection Agency, but they would have to follow any new rules.
JOFFE-WALT: Sal Marranca is happy. The financial crisis, he says, not his fault. He says, you know whose fault it was?
Mr. MARRANCA: Fifty thousand mortgage brokers out there that were giving people adjustable mortgages that tripled in six weeks, or whatever the heck happened to those.
KESTENBAUM: Chana, I can see in the bill here, those mortgage brokers weren't so excited about new regulation either. Yes, here at page 770 - exclusion for real estate licensees.
JOFFE-WALT: It's a partial exclusion. It goes like this: If brokers are central to working out a mortgage with you, they're covered. But if they just talk to you about the house and the interest rate, help you out, they're exempt.
KESTENBAUM: The Chamber of Commerce wanted an exemption, too, for businesses. Some stores have their own credit cards or layaway plans.
JOFFE-WALT: And the Chamber of Commerce put out this ad saying small businesses are already suffering.
(Soundbite of TV advertisement)
Unidentified Woman: Now, Washington wants to make it worse with the CFPA, a massive new federal agency that will create more layers of regulation and bureaucracy.
KESTENBAUM: Yeah, Chana, page 760: exclusion for merchants, retailers and sellers of non-financial services.
JOFFE-WALT: Yes, that comes right before the exemption for insurance companies, accountants, tax preparers, modular home retailers, and attorneys and car dealers.
KESTENBAUM: Yeah, some people are really upset about that one. Car dealers, a lot of times, set you up with a loan.
JOFFE-WALT: But the dealers argue: We're not the ones making the loan; we just sell cars.
KESTENBAUM: Consumer groups say, wait, car dealers are the ones who help you choose a loan.
JOFFE-WALT: So, depending on how you see this, we've got a bunch of special interests sneaking exemptions into the bill.
KESTENBAUM: Or you can see them as knowledgeable advocates improving the bill.
JOFFE-WALT: Whatever bill we end up with will be at least 1,000 pages long.
KESTENBAUM: And sometimes it's not until after the next financial crisis that someone goes back and says, see here, page 458 - that was the problem.
I'm David Kestenbaum.
JOFFE-WALT: And I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The housing sector can tell us a lot about the health of the economy, but it's been sending off a lot of mixed signals. Some analysts think the worst is over, that housing hit bottom last spring and is now on the mend. Others are convinced that housing is the economy's Achilles' heel.
Joining us to help sort out where the housing market is headed is economist Karl Case of Wellesley College, one of the creators of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.
Professor Case, welcome to the program.
Professor KARL CASE (Economics, Wellesley College): Happy to be here.
BLOCK: And one new number that we're seeing is this: For pending home sales, they had been climbing throughout 2009. But then in November, that number - the number of homes placed under contract - took a big tumble, the first drop in nearly a year. And it was a whole lot steeper than was expected. What does that tell us?
Prof. CASE: Well, it's hard to say it. A lot of these numbers have a plus and a minus in them, and pending home sales did, it dropped in November. But it's up 16 percent over a year ago. And there's a number of statistics that are good, a number that are bad and a lot that are confusing.
BLOCK: When you look at these confusing numbers, what do you conclude? Can you conclude anything?
Prof. CASE: Well, I believe we've actually hit a bottom, and I'm not saying this with much conviction. I think that the positives in the marketplace now, the statistics that show an increase in sales, a response to the government programs, there are buyers, I think that outweighs, in my mind to some extent, these big negatives. But you can't say anything with certainty these days.
If, by the way, if house prices fall another 15 percent, it really would imply that we're likely to have a double dip in the economy. Because if prices fall, then the mortgages that we wrote in 2008 and 2009, the mortgage lending that took place is going to be bad. People are going to be underwater on those mortgages and that's another shot to the system that we don't need.
BLOCK: Another wave of foreclosures.
Prof. CASE: Another wave of foreclosures could be coming if that's - if prices fall.
BLOCK: There has been, Professor Case, an $8,000 incentive for first-time homebuyers, a tax credit that was supposed to run out in November, but it's been extended to April of 2010. What happens when that expires?
Prof. CASE: Well, all the momentum that you see in the data are caused by not only just the $8,000 credit, but by the fact that interest rates are being kept low by the Feds, and they're buying up mortgage bank securities, which is preventing the mortgage rate specifically from going up. If the Fed withdraws that, it's going to slow things down, but we don't know how much.
BLOCK: You mentioned that you think that we've hit bottom in the housing market, but unemployment is still climbing, and I would think that would give you some pause.
Prof. CASE: It gives me great pause. I mean, if people don't have jobs, they can't make their payments and that continues to feed the foreclosure chain. Fifteen million people are unemployed and the duration of unemployment is longer than it's been. That's a big negative. It's a big headwind that this tailwind from the government has to overcome.
BLOCK: What other numbers are you going to be looking at in the months to come, Professor Case, that will, you think, maybe answer some of these questions about where the housing market is headed?
Prof. CASE: Well, the two that I think are the most important are the existing home sales numbers that come out every month and the number of starts. If that starts to pick up, then there's more optimism in the land. And, of course, prices - the last Tuesday in every month, the Case-Shiller prices come out. And I think right now they're tending to show a mixed picture.
They've been up over the last three, or four or five months. But the number which came out last month, which was for October, was pretty shaky. It was not down, but it wasn't up. And so, all these numbers have something to offer. And in digesting them, it's just the hardest moment in recent history, as far as I'm concerned.
BLOCK: Professor Case, thanks very much for talking with us.
Prof. CASE: A pleasure.
BLOCK: That's Professor Karl Case, who teaches economics at Wellesley College. He's also one of the creators of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Today, for the first time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency tested the national emergency alert system. The test took place in Alaska. It made use of a code that, in a real emergency, would allow the president to address the entire nation.
Annie Feidt of the Alaska Public Radio Network tells us how the test went.
ANNIE FEIDT: For more than two weeks, Alaskans tuning in to radio and TV have heard this message...
(Soundbite of broadcast)
Unidentified Man #1: Stop and chill. It's just a drill. On January 6th at approximately 10 a.m., Alaska will participate in the first ever test of the EAN system that can alert the entire nation in the event of an emergency.
FEIDT: Emergencies are something of a specialty for Alaska, there are just so many of them to deal with.
Mr. JEREMY ZIDEK (Alaska Department of Homeland Security): We have volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, severe weather.
FEIDT: That's Jeremy Zidek with the Alaska Department of Homeland Security. He says all those potential disasters made Alaska the perfect place to test the national alert system.
Mr. ZIDEK: We've got a pretty well-oiled machine, and I think that's why the federal government chose Alaska as a test bed for this national test of the emergency alert system.
FEIDT: In the event of a real national emergency, the White House would activate an address from the president to be sent out across the country. It was just after 10 a.m. today when the test appeared on radio stations and television screens in Alaska.
(Soundbite of broadcast)
Unidentified Man #2: Test, test, test. This is a test of the emergency alert system. The message you are hearing is part of a live code test of national emergency alert system capabilities limited to the state of Alaska only.
FEIDT: Zidek says, for the most part, the test went well, although a few stations didn't receive the message.
Mr. ZIDEK: There were some minor problems with, you know, different stations throughout Alaska, but they were a very small percentage. And most of the stations rebroadcast the message loud and clear.
FEIDT: The state's Department of Homeland Security is hoping more feedback on the test comes in from Alaska residents in the days ahead.
For NPR News, I'm Annie Feidt in Anchorage.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
2010 just got tougher for Democrats now that two Democratic Senators have announced retirements. Today, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut announced he's leaving after nearly 30 years in his seat. That's after a similar announcement last night from Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. In a few minutes we'll talk with Senator Dorgan about his decision.
First NPR's David Welna explains that those two departures could jeopardize the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority.
DAVID WELNA: It was only five months ago that Christopher Dodd summoned reporters to his Connecticut home to say he was being treated for prostate cancer and seeking a sixth term in the Senate.
Senator CHRISTOPHER DODD (Democrat, Connecticut): I'm running the reelection.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Sen. DODD: Now I'll be a little leaner and a little meaner, but I'm running.
WELNA: Today, Dodd faced reporters again outside his front door. On this Feast of the Epiphany, he said he had had the insight that this country is still a work in progress.
Sen. DODD: And that is how I came to the conclusion that in the long sweep of American history there are moments for each elected public official to step aside and let someone else step up. This is my moment to step aside.
WELNA: Dodd insisted no single reason prompted him to step aside. But he did site his factors: the deaths of both a sister and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy last summer, his struggle with cancer and realizing that he's in what he called the toughest political shape of my career.
Sen. DODD: I'm very aware of my present political standing here at home in Connecticut. But it is equally clear that any certain prediction about an election victory or defeat nearly a year from now would be absurd.
WELNA: University of Connecticut political scientist Howard Reiter says Dodd hurt his re-election prospects with a series of bad political moves: from relocating his family to Iowa two years ago for a long shot run for president, to inserting language in a financial bailout bill that shielded bonuses for executives at insurance giant AIG. Reiter said Dodd's biggest mistake was failing for months to deliver promised documents on two home mortgages he'd taken out with Countrywide Financial, bolstering the perception that Dodd got a sweetheart deal from the lender.
Mr. HOWARD REITER (Political scientist, University of Connecticut): Instead of responding right away and clearing the issue, he basically stonewalled for months and months. And this was a kind of a tone deafness that we just simply aren't used to seeing in Dodd. He's a very cagey and skillful politician and for him to have missed the boat on that issue, it was very surprising.
WELNA: Dodd's father who also was a U.S. senator lost his Senate seat three years after being censured by the Senate for financial improprieties. Dodd appears determined to leave office on a high note by pushing through a financial regulatory makeover as chairman of the banking committee.
Sen. DODD: My service isn't over. I still have one year left on my contract with the people of Connecticut.
WELNA: At the White House, spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed confident Dodd could still deliver on a financial regulatory overhaul.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (Press Secretary): Knowing Senator Dodd and the passionate advocate that he is, I think he will continue to work hard and want to get this done by the end of the year, as the president does, too.
WELNA: Meanwhile, the fight continues for what's now an open Senate seat in Connecticut. Former Republican Congressman Rob Simmons and wrestling entrepreneur Lynda McMahon are battling for the GOP nomination. And today the state's popular Democratic attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, announced he too will seek Dodd's seat. In North Dakota, it's less clear who will run for the seat Democrat Byron Dorgan is vacating. The state's popular GOP governor, John Hoeven, is one strong possibility. University of North Dakota political scientist Mark Jendrysik says Democrats face stiff odds for retaining the seat.
Mr. MARK JENDRYSIK (Political scientist, University of North Dakota): They have a thin bench but, you know, they just don't have anybody coming up behind who they can immediately slot in. They don't have anybody holding statewide elected office. They just don't have someone who's an obvious candidate.
WELNA: Which is why Dorgan's retirement is even more likely than Dodd's to dent the Democrats' 60-seat majority.
David Welna, NPR News, The Capitol.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The NBA has suspended the Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas indefinitely. NBA Commissioner David Stern made that decision public today. Arenas was involved in a conflict with a teammate, and he brought guns into the team locker room.
NPR's Tom Goldman has the latest.
TOM GOLDMAN: The indefinite suspension without pay stems from an incident in late December. Gilbert Arenas, the Wizards' leading scorer of the season, displayed several unloaded guns in the team locker room at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. Sources say he laid out the firearms for a teammate, Javaris Crittenton, to chose from in order to settle a dispute from a card game a few days earlier. In a statement this week, Arenas said he took out the unloaded guns, quote, "in a misguided effort to play a joke on a teammate," end quote. It's not a joke to the NBA, however.
In 2005, the league and its players union agreed to toughen up firearms rules, so players could be disciplined if they brought guns to an arena or practice facility. In a statement today suspending Arenas, NBA Commissioner David Stern seemed to send a message not only about guns, but Arenas' apparent cavalier attitude about the incident. Arenas publicly has joked about the matter. This week, a photo with teammates showed Arenas pointing his index fingers at them as if there were guns.
Said Stern, although it's clear the actions of Mr. Arenas will ultimately results in the substantial suspension and perhaps worse, his ongoing conduct has led me to conclude that he is not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game.
The suspension is immediate. Still pending are a full NBA investigation and a criminal probe by law enforcement officials. In a statement, Arenas said he transported the handguns from his home in Virginia to the Verizon Center, mistakenly believing recent changes in D.C. gun laws allowed a person to store unloaded guns in the district. Arenas, indeed, was mistaken. The current law says no one is allowed to bring a hand gun into D.C. unless they're a D.C. resident. And no hand guns are allowed in D.C. workplaces.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Deborah Amos begins her report in Syria.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAIN)
DEBORAH AMOS: This winter rain barely settles on the hard, cracked farmland in northern Syria. There was a time when these fields were green, but the summer droughts have taken a toll. Driving further east is the Badia, a vast rangeland, where thousands of people tend herds of sheep.
(SOUNDBITE OF VILLAGE)
AMOS: Addami is a traditional village. The houses are white domes of baked clay. This summer, Addami was completely abandoned during the driest months. There was no water and too much sand.
NOFA HAMID: (Foreign language spoken)
AMOS: Sand got in your kitchen?
HAMID: (Foreign language spoken)
AMOS: Yeah, it was crazy. The sand was everywhere this summer, she says.
HAMID: (Foreign language spoken)
AMOS: Life has never been easy here. But Ismar Mohammed, a 43-year-old shepherd, who's wrapped in a black, wool robe against the cold, says he was wealthy by local standards. He owns the largest herd. He had to drive his flock more than 150 miles for water. With no luck and no grass, he had to buy feed for his sheep.
ISMAR MOHAMMED: (Through translator) Two-hundred seventy-five heads.
AMOS: And did you have to sell some to feed them?
MOHAMMED: (Through translator) No question. I had to do this, otherwise they would die. And, also, I need to feed my kids. Before the drought, I'm talking about - I used to have 400 heads.
AMOS: So, at one moment you were actually doing well at this business?
MOHAMMED: (Through translator) No question. We were doing fine, just except for this drought has affected us very badly.
(SOUNDBITE OF VILLAGE)
AMOS: In Syria, more than a 160 villages are abandoned now. According to a United Nations report, 800,000 people have lost their livelihoods. Hundreds of thousands of them walked off once fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tents near the big cities looking for any kind of work.
NABIL SUKKAR: Until now, it's an emergency. Until now, it's an emergency. If we have two more years of drought, I'm sure, then we can say we do have a crisis.
AMOS: Syrian economist Nabil Sukkar, formerly with the World Bank, now heads a private consulting firm for development and investment. He has been researching the emergency, including its economic and social costs.
SUKKAR: I've gone out and I saw some people in the tents. I told them, where you are coming from? How do you manage? They said, we find short-term work, but this is not sustainable.
AMOS: The mass migration to the cities has created a new community of displaced people across Syria and Iraq.
HUSSEIN AMERY: So, yes, water scarcity is forcing people off the land. And therefore, these refugees are very much water refugees or water - they are products of water scarcity of the region.
AMOS: That's Hussein Amery, an expert on Middle East water management and the policy failures that have made the emergency worse. On a visit to the region, this professor at the Colorado School of Mines, says the water crisis has been building for years.
AMERY: The water refugees are a product of climate change, mismanaged water resources. It's a product of population explosion. It's a lot of things. It's a perfect storm of sorts that is wreaking havoc in the rural farming sector in Syria and Iraq.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
AMOS: The Syrian city of Palmyra, due east to the capital, is a tourist destination. The Roman ruins are a draw for these Japanese visitors and one livelihood for the locals.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
AMOS: But, Palmyra, hit hard by the drought, is also a headquarters for the government response. Emergency measures include food aid for families, low-cost loans for farmers. At the office for development, Mohsan Nahas says Palmyra is experimenting with new water-saving techniques.
MOHSAN NAHAS: (Through translator) Yes, yes. I have talked about the oasis we've been setting up here. That's being done with drip irrigation, only drip irrigation.
AMOS: Nahas shuttles through a slideshow to explain what he's up against - a dust storm so large, it could be seen from space on Google. Conditions on the ground were intolerable.
NAHAS: You see the sand?
AMOS: It's a ball of sand that's coming towards the tents.
NAHAS: (Through translator) Yes, it is coming to their houses, it's coming to the tents. It's even melting and mixing with the food that's affecting their eyes. You see this kid? He can't see because of the sand.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE)
AMOS: And with the widespread drought, a food crisis is looming. For the first time, Syria had to import wheat. Economist Nabil Sukkar says things won't get better unless the country changes a history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques.
SUKKAR: Unfortunately, we have not introduced modern technology, and so we are dependent on rainfall, period.
AMOS: But rainfall, or lack of it, is not the only culprit, he says. Syria and Iraq blame Turkey's huge network of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates river for reducing water supplies by 50 percent. Turkey is the site of the headwaters of the rivers that that Syria and Iraq depend on. An informal agreement determines the flow downstream.
SUKKAR: When we had bad relationships with Turkey, they reduced the flow of water, despite the agreement. And now, thank god, we have excellent relations with Turkey, and hopefully, we will not see any cutoff of water.
AMOS: Turkey says there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their share. Hussein Amery says the Turks are partly right.
AMERY: The issue is water, but it actually goes far beyond water.
AMOS: Amery says the key to head off a water crisis is more efficient management of a scarce resource. But he adds politics, not climate, is the problem.
AMERY: That a lot of Arabs believe that Turkey is trying to assert itself as a regional superpower and water is being used as a tool to advance that interest.
AMOS: Deborah Amos, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Well, in her book, Diana Wells writes about a hundred trees, arranged in alphabetical order from acacia to willow and more, and she joins me now. Diana, why did you decide to write this book?
DIANA WELLS: Well, because I am a lover of trees. They're so much a part of our lives, both in ways we know and ways we don't know. I challenge almost anyone listening to be further than two feet away from something that came from a tree, whether it be a cup of coffee or a Kleenex or your rubber tires on your automobile. They are very much bound in our life. And these days, of course, we know that they're essential to our planet.
NORRIS: Of all the trees that you wrote about and researched, which one still lives on in your imagination?
WELLS: The Stewartia is a tree which I'm very fond of because it's in my garden, and it's an absolutely lovely little tree. It comes from Japan, and it has lovely white flowers in the summer, when not much else is blooming, and it has a flaky bark.
NORRIS: Is this the tree that you looked out on when you were writing this book?
WELLS: Yes, you've got it just right. It is exactly the tree I looked out on. The willow is a tree - weeping willow - I like because of its name. Its botanical name is Salix babylonica, which means it's a willow Salix from Babylon. In fact, it's not from Babylon at all. It's from China. But it was called that from a mistranslation of the Bible, when the Jews were exiled to Babylon and they wept when they remembered Zion and they hanged their harps on the willows, which were supposed then to have stayed pendent every since.
NORRIS: The willow also has some interesting lore attached to it. You note that in China, willow trees were planted outside the women's part of the house. Why?
WELLS: Oh, I don't know why. They were supposed to be female trees, and it was always compared with dancing girls. Of course, the most famous willow is the willow passion tree, which is a legend about two lovers who run away and they die and then they become two birds, which fly above the weeping willow tree.
NORRIS: Each of these entries is filled with all kinds of fun facts as well. We learn that willow wood was used in England to make bats that were especially springy for playing cricket, or that charcoal from willow wood is supposed to make the best gunpowder. Who knew?
WELLS: But then somewhere along the line, we got the grenade, which was from the fruit grenata, and that of course, as we know, is a weapon. It always seems to me a little ironic that the life-giving tree should also be a weapon of destruction.
NORRIS: Can I ask you about breadfruit? Because this is - it includes a story that many of us have learned about and read about, and who can resist a good story about Captain Bligh?
WELLS: Then, actually, eventually, they did have another cargo of breadfruit that went to St. Vincent, but the slaves in the end didn't eat it.
NORRIS: I have to ask you about the Japanese cedar, in part because it looks like such a beautiful tree but also because you introduce the reader to a ritual there that I was not familiar with, the tradition of forest bathing.
WELLS: And apparently, a businessman in Japan still do it. I actually do do it quite a bit. Quite often, we'll walk in the woods and just let the trees - you know, I feel as if I'm part of the forest. And it's very, very soothing. It's beautiful.
NORRIS: What do you want people to do with this book? How do you want people to use it in their lives?
WELLS: Well, I think it would be nice if they got to know the trees around them. And if it inspires them to do that, I think that it would help us if we were more familiar with the trees because in the past people were very familiar with trees. Nowadays, you can get somebody living on a street named after a tree and they've never really seen the tree. It's just a street name. And I think if we did that, it would cement the bond, which has got a little loose, between us, and it would help all of us.
NORRIS: Diana Wells, thank you very much.
WELLS: Thank you very much.
NORRIS: Diana Wells is the author of "Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History."
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
T: NPR's Christopher Joyce explains.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: Margaret Palmer is a biologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who studied what happens in a valley fill.
NORRIS: You expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites.
JOYCE: Writing in the journal Science, Palmer and 11 other scientists reviewed research on the biological effects of mountaintop mining. They say those chemicals stick around.
NORRIS: Even after a site has been reclaimed and attempts have been made to re-vegetate it, the streams that remain below that that weren't filled have high levels of all sorts of nasty things.
JOYCE: So, they say mountaintop mining should be stopped. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has been holding up almost 80 permits for new mines to give them extra environmental scrutiny. And at a Senate hearing last year, EPA water expert John Randy Pomponio said the agency doesn't really know how bad the stream damage is.
NORRIS: These little streams are like capillaries in your blood system. They are what travel through the landscape and capture the pollutants, clean those pollutants, and we frankly don't know where the tipping point is in losing one stream, five streams, 18 streams in a particular watershed.
JOYCE: While the EPA reviews the science, the mining industry in West Virginia is growing unhappy with the go-slow approach. Randy Huffman is secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection.
NORRIS: They just shut everything down, basically, and it kind of turned industry on its head.
JOYCE: Huffman says new requests for mining permits in West Virginia are getting closer inspection from his department and some should go ahead while regulators are looking for solutions. As for the pollutants the scientists listed, he says they've created a worst-case scenario.
NORRIS: If you wanted to look at 30 years of coal mining in Appalachia and pick out the worst of everything that's ever happened and put it on two pages, you can do that and it looks like that's what's been done.
JOYCE: Environmental and citizens groups in Appalachia have been suing for years to stop mountaintop mining with mixed success. But Huffman says even if mountaintop mining were outlawed, that wouldn't keep other sources of mine waste out of valleys.
NORRIS: We have valley fills associated with every type of mining, including underground mining.
JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Debbie Elliott has their story.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRIVING)
DEBBIE ELLIOTT: Congressman John Tanner's family has farmed in Union City since before the Civil War. We're driving down a winding country lane in this small West Tennessee town, not far from the Kentucky State line. It's called Walker Tanner Road.
JOHN TANNER: That's my grandfather.
ELLIOTT: We drive by the stable of Tennessee walking horses, between fields where the soybeans and corn have been harvested and stop at a barn flanked by dog pens.
(SOUNDBITE OF BARKING DOGS)
TANNER: This is where we keep the quail.
ELLIOTT: It's called a fly pen.
TANNER: Can you hear them?
(SOUNDBITE OF QUAIL)
ELLIOTT: The quail stay in the barn until it's time for the hunt. Then, they're loaded into crates and taken to a wooded field nearby.
TANNER: Then you open the thing and they fly out all over the place. And then you put the dogs down and the dogs go and find them and point them and you shoot them.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ELLIOTT: Sitting by the fireplace in Quail Haven, his family's rustic wood- paneled hunting lodge, Tanner acknowledges the South is a tough place for incumbent Democrats now - even those of the Blue Dog breed.
TANNER: We're too liberal in our home areas and too conservative in Washington. I mean, we get it on both sides, and which means I think we're doing something right.
ELLIOTT: Tanner is retiring after 22 years in the seat once held by Davy Crockett. He would've faced his toughest challenge in years, but was still favored to win reelection. Tanner says he wants to spend more time with his grandchildren, but also sounds frustrated with the climate in Congress.
TANNER: Out of office, I may actually be able to do more than I actually can trying to pass a bill that - in this mud fight between Democrats and Republicans, that is unrelenting and, in my view, very destructive.
ELLIOTT: The latest blow in that mud fight came just before Christmas, when freshman Blue Dog Parker Griffith of Alabama defected to the GOP.
PARKER GRIFFITH: Our nation is at a crossroads, and I can no longer align myself with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy and drives us further and further into debt.
ELLIOTT: One of the GOP's best opportunities is in middle Tennessee, where veteran Democrat Bart Gordon is retiring after 26 years. He's a Blue Dog known to buck the party, but recently fell in line on health care and climate change legislation. Like John Tanner, Gordon says he's leaving for personal reasons - not to avoid a serious election challenge.
BART GORDON: There are 15 counties in this district, and I've never lost any one of them. This is a more difficult environment, but, you know, winning and losing didn't play a role in this decision.
ELLIOTT: Unidentified Woman: All right, y'all quickly get your breakfast.
ELLIOTT: At a Murfreesboro Chamber of Commerce meeting this week, handyman Brian Hughlett said he's disappointed by the Democratic agenda and Gordon's recent positions.
BRIAN HUGHLETT: Yeah, this last year I really think some mistakes have been made, and I'm not real happy with the way things are going. And with him retiring, maybe we can get someone, you know, maybe a little more middle of road in there.
ELLIOTT: Others suggested Blue Dogs could be an endangered species around here. Martin Porter owns a golf shop in Murfreesboro.
MARTIN PORTER: You know, the words conservative Democrat in this area might be an oxymoron, I guess.
ELLIOTT: Given voter sentiment, Vanderbilt University political scientist Bruce Oppenheimer says this election could further polarize Congress.
BRUCE OPPENHEIMER: In an earlier generation, we saw the gradual disappearance of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. And now we're seeing, increasingly, the disappearance of more moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats.
ELLIOTT: That's something that troubles Tennessee Democrat John Tanner. He blames the divide on the partisan way congressional districts are drawn. By his estimate, only about 88 of the 435 seats in the House are competitive. The rest, he says, are gerrymandered to be determined by party loyalists, making it hard to govern.
TANNER: In a society like ours, the middle has to hold for there to be compromise to work out the problems facing us not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.
ELLIOTT: Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Unidentified Woman: Ladies, you have to know (unintelligible).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NORRIS: Johnson was married to publishing titan John Johnson. They were both from Alabama. She was also the secretary-treasurer of the publishing company. And like Eunice Johnson, Andre Leon Talley is a giant of the fashion world. He's the editor-at-large for Vogue magazine, and he joins us now to talk about the legacy of Eunice Johnson. Welcome to the program.
ANDRE LEON TALLEY: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: At a time when black women had little access to the fashion world, in many places they couldn't even use the dressing rooms at department stores, Eunice Johnson brought the fashion world directly to them, right there in their communities. What were those Fashion Fair events like, especially in the early days?
LEON TALLEY: Mrs. Johnson was hands-on everything. I worked with her. I remember traveling with her to Paris, to Florence, to Milan, selecting the designs that she would showcase in the Fashion Fair.
NORRIS: Now, I understand in the early days, some of the designers did not want to sell their wares to her.
LEON TALLEY: That is true, but then, you know, increasingly, as people became more aware, particularly in the '60s, of the importance of the show, she had so much clout due to the passion of her vision, it just became a phenomenon that people had to embrace.
NORRIS: Mr. Talley, I have to ask you about Eunice Johnson's Fashion Fair line of cosmetics. There was a time when no matter where you were, if you went to a department store, there would always be a little bit of buzz at a certain space at the cosmetic counter where people, you know, always seemed to be a throng of people around that sort of pink Fashion Fair counter. What did that mean for women who lived in communities where it was hard for them to find makeup that matched their skin color?
LEON TALLEY: Well, it just meant that this was a lady who was thinking about their needs. It was Mrs. Johnson smart enough to take color and translate it to the needs of women of many hues. So when she did those coppery hues or those patinated bronzes or those bright, bright colors that once were very much part of the world of fashion, when Yves Saint Laurent was making a lipstick that was so cyclamen, fuchsia, pink-hot, bright, fuchsia, orange-red that everyone clamored for it. Mrs. Johnson translated that for the black woman.
NORRIS: Andre, do you have one last memory you'd like to leave us with?
LEON TALLEY: Yes, I'd like to leave you with the memory that Mrs. Johnson was an extraordinary, loving lady. The world of style not only was about the proper or the most extraordinary dress from Paris or jacket or sequined evening gown, she also was one of the first African-American women to have her own Picasso in her living room in Chicago. Mrs. Johnson wasn't above, you know, having a Picasso in her living room, but going straight into her kitchen, which was obviously state-of-the-art, and making a wonderful pound cake.
NORRIS: Andre Leon Talley, thank you so much for talking to us. What a pleasure.
LEON TALLEY: Thank you.
NORRIS: Andre Leon Talley is an editor-at-large for Vogue magazine. He was sharing with us his memories of Eunice Johnson, the founder of the Ebony Fashion Fair and the secretary-treasurer of the Johnson Publishing Company.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
As for the non-experts, NPR's John Ydstie has tips on how to understand the unemployment report beyond the headline numbers.
JOHN YDSTIE: Let's start by talking about the number of jobs gained or lost in the economy. The most recent employment report showed payrolls at U.S. businesses declining by just 11,000 jobs in November of last year. But Tom Nardone of the BLS says that doesn't mean just 11,000 people lost their jobs. Every month, he says, there's a huge churn of job losses and gains in the economy.
TOM NARDONE: You have millions of people who will lose or leave their jobs and millions of people who will gain jobs. And what gets reported as that headline number is just the net change of that.
YDSTIE: In fact, during the depth of the recession last January, when the employment report showed 741,000 jobs being lost, far more people than that were being hired.
NARDONE: In January, the worst month in terms of job loss, you had approximately 4.3 million hires that were going on in the economy.
YDSTIE: The unemployment rate - 10 percent in the most recent report - is also a less- than-definitive number. Different groups experience it differently. Blacks and Latinos have higher unemployment rates than whites. Teens have higher rates than older workers. And education makes a big difference, says Nardone.
NARDONE: For someone who has less than a high school diploma, their unemployment rate in November was 15 percent.
YDSTIE: By comparison, workers with a four-year college degree had an unemployment rate just under five percent. The headline unemployment rate also doesn't capture everyone who's lost a job, including people like Leslie Leigh Jividen of Akron, Ohio.
LESLIE LEIGH JIVIDEN: In my case, my layoff came in right after Christmas on December 29th.
YDSTIE: That was a year ago in 2008. Jividen, who had been employed by a lighting firm doing customer service and sales support, immediately began looking for another job.
LEIGH JIVIDEN: I'd never not worked. So, you know, my first instinct was, oh, I got to get something else. And then when I started looking, there just wasn't a lot out there.
YDSTIE: John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
The heightened security measures announced this week called for pat-down searches, luggage swabs and stepped-up screening for international fliers entering the U.S. from or through 14 countries, but there are questions about just how much the U.S. can do to enforce those requirements overseas. For more on this, we're joined by Rick Nelson. He's a former supervisor at the National Counterterrorism Center. He's now the director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome back.
RICK NELSON: Hi. Thank you very much.
NORRIS: Does the U.S. have the power to endorse this mandate overseas?
NELSON: Well, not necessarily. Ultimately the security is going to be conducted by the host country, by our partners over there. They are the ones who would actually be conducting the inspections. We have officials over there, they will work with those countries to ensure the standards are met. And the airlines themselves, who are very obviously very concerned about security, officials from those airlines will work with other countries and those security systems too, to ensure the security is where it needs to be.
NORRIS: And what if these procedures are not met? What does the U.S. do then? What can the U.S. do then?
NELSON: Well, what can do, ultimately, we can refuse to accept passengers or flights from these countries. That's ultimately what we can do.
NORRIS: You know, when the new standards were released this week, a number of foreign officials said that they were unhappy about this. A number of countries are chafing about these new rules. Is that itself a signal that there might be tepid acceptance of these new regulations?
NELSON: We can again go back to the Richard Reid example. He was a British citizen. And in his case he would not be subjected to these additional searches. So, certainly, again, anything that we're going to do to prevent these attacks as necessary, we have to be careful again to understand that this is not a long term solution.
NORRIS: Even if the countries overseas follow all of these measures, is it enough? Are these effective screening protocols?
NELSON: Well, the pat-downs are somewhat effective. They're really not. Obviously a much more effective screening measures are these backscatter X-rays or these millimeter X-rays are much better at doing what - or finding things that shouldn't be on individuals. I mean, it's that kind of technology that we're really going to have to pursue. And if you go back to the 9/11 Commission Report, it's that kind of screening that the report was asking for us to have and that we still don't have eight years later.
NORRIS: I'm thinking about the pat-down screening. I mean, would that have detected the explosives that Abdulmutallab tried to sneak onto the - or actually did sneak onto the airplane in his underwear?
NELSON: Well, again it's hard - that's hard to prove whether it would or wouldn't have. I would say that, you know, probably it's unlikely it would have especially if it was done, you know, in a foreign country. I think obviously we would have very good chance of detecting that explosive material had he actually gone through a backscatter X-ray.
NORRIS: To some degree, we're talking about protocols and technology...
NELSON: Hmm.
NORRIS: ...but we're also taking about individual employees who carry out these screenings in airports overseas. How can the U.S. ensure that they are properly trained to do this kind of work, and act accordingly if they actually spot trouble?
NELSON: Well, absolutely. I mean, that's a - that's a good question. And it's something that we work very, very closely with these governments. And it's one of the reasons why we have Homeland Security officials overseas, but what becomes a very difficult challenge when you have to put officials throughout all the countries to ensure the security in the airlines. And it's very difficult on some of these larger airports to ensure that the standards are met. It's very difficult in our own country to ensure that the standards are being met, let alone somebody else's country.
NORRIS: Do we have a big enough presence in these airports overseas, the U.S. government?
NELSON: Well, you know, it depends on how you want to look at that. Again, some of our presence over there is limited. We do not want this to come across as well as that the U.S. is, you know, necessarily running the security standards of another country. We want the country to be a productive partner in our security. And we ultimately want these security checks to be done by the host nation partners. We just have to ensure that there (unintelligible) that they are properly trained. And I know that from what I understand, DHS is taking steps to ensure that training is enhanced.
NORRIS: Rick Nelson, thank you very much for being with us again.
NELSON: Thank you.
NORRIS: Rick Nelson is a former supervisor at the National Counterterrorism Center. He is also a former Navy commander and he now is the director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
USAID: defense, diplomacy and development. And today, she swore in a man who will be in charge of that last D: the new administrator of USAID, the Agency for International Development, which handles foreign aid. His name is Rajiv Shah. He is young, 36-years-old, the son of Indian immigrants. He has only recently come to government work. He is a medical doctor by training, worked on agricultural development with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And now, he is heading an agency that's been terribly neglected and depleted in recent years. Rajiv Shah joins us to talk about his new assignment. Welcome to the program.
RAJIV SHAH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: And what do you see the intersection being between development aid to foreign countries and national security here at home?
SHAH: Well, I think it's important to recognize we do development for two reasons. We both do it because it's the right thing to do. When we are able to help everyone on this planet or as many people as we can live up to their God- given potential, that's an extension of American values and that helps improve our world. And it's important for us to do. But we also do it because it's in our self interest, that it is important to our national security and a vital aspect of our foreign policy.
BLOCK: I can imagine though that there would be lots of times when those three pillars of national security, the 3-Ds - defense, diplomacy and development - might be in opposition to each other, not necessarily working in tandem, that a defense goal might be in direct contrast to what you might want to do for development in a country.
SHAH: Well, actually our development aspect of foreign policy is about creating the very conditions, the stable societies, economic growth opportunities, ensuring that women and girls have access to health and education and the ability to lead productive lives. Those are the types of conditions that should allow us to not need more foreign assistance, and hopefully not need military intervention.
BLOCK: But let's think of an example. For instance, in Afghanistan: I mean, you and Secretary Clinton have both talked about integrating development with defense and diplomatic efforts in the field. But, if you're an Afghan farmer and you're interested in learning how to grow a new crop, turning away from opium poppies, but if you also know that USAID is working in conjunction with U.S. military, isn't that a conflict? Isn't there a tension there?
SHAH: I think the opposite is the case, you know. That's a great example, because there are some parts of Afghanistan where there are many Afghani farmers trying to do exactly what you describe and move away from opium to other forms of high value production. And USAID is working together with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other civilian assistance agencies on the ground to make sure that we can create effective trade and market opportunities for those farmers. And it's in fact the security provided by our defense pillar and it's the security provided by the Afghan government themselves that allows for that development effort to be effective and successful.
BLOCK: You don't think that it might also dissuade some farmers from cooperating if they were afraid of being seen as working in tandem with U.S. military?
SHAH: Well - and that's why there is something else the secretary has highlighted that becomes very important. And that is doing our work in deep partnership with the people we serve and their country government, their country leadership. No country has ever developed itself and no community has developed itself from the outside. Those are decisions that have to be made locally and pursued locally. And then we can work in partnership with those local leaders and local efforts to help them be more successful.
BLOCK: When you think about the countries that become the focus of our development aid, I wonder how you try to sort through places that might be politically important, strategically important to the United States and focus on those, but at the same time, not neglecting countries that really may have no geopolitical importance to the United States, but are in dire need of help?
SHAH: And we are pursuing that effort in places where it's most appropriate and where we can be most effective at reducing the numbers of the hungry and the malnourished at large scale. These are all parts of a very broad and important USAID mission of activities. And so, we're excited to be executing all of these things. And really do believe that the core theme of results and accountability and doing this work in deep partnership applies as much to those efforts as it does to the way we might work in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen.
BLOCK: I've been wondering about your role coming from your work with the Gates Foundation, where I'm assuming you had a fair amount of nimbleness. If you came up with an idea on Tuesday, maybe by the next week, you could have that sort of up and running, I'm guessing. I'm not sure it would work that way in a big government bureaucracy that you're coming into and I wonder if you think there might be a bit of a cultural shock for you here.
SHAH: Well, I have had a few months now of getting to know and meet some of the great leaders here at USAID. They bring a lot of talent and a lot of capacity to solve problems. We are also going to do things a little bit differently: bring in outside expertise and become more of a coordinating platform so that we can work with private sector innovators, like the Gates Foundation, or work with other foreign entities that are involved in development and bring their ideas in house and partner better and coordinate better with them, all for the purpose of delivering better results for the people we serve. So, that people standing in line for immunizations in a health clinic outside of a city in Mali can actually get immunizations for their kids. Or, so that women farmers trying to make - grow enough food for their family and their community can do that in places like Kenya or Senegal or Rwanda.
BLOCK: What do you think your training as a doctor brings to your new role as head of AID?
SHAH: That's a great question. I haven't practiced medicine a lot very recently. But, you know, you go into medicine because you want to serve individuals. And I went into medicine because there is something deeply gratifying about being able to help a patient who is in a situation where they really are needing that technical help and doing that in a way that demonstrates compassion and that is respectful to patients. You know, in the same way, I think that the ability to be at an agency that's fundamentally about improving the human condition for hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world, and an agency that has a history of having saved millions of lives so that - you know, those are millions of families where mothers don't have to bury children. And that's deeply, deeply meaningful. And so this is just a great opportunity. I'm very excited and I'm very honored to be able to be here.
BLOCK: Rajiv Shah is the new administrator for USAID, the agency for international development. Dr. Shah, thanks for talking with us.
SHAH: Thank you, Melissa.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
In Washington, few things are more familiar than Congress creating a commission. Blue-ribbon panels follow virtually every major misstep. We're going to spend time now looking at the special commission assigned with the task of trying to determine the cause of the catastrophic financial crisis.
NORRIS: Welcome to both of you.
BILL THOMAS: It's good to be here with you.
PHIL ANGELIDES: Thank you. Nice to be here.
NORRIS: Now, gentlemen, you said your job is to shed light and not heat on the Wall Street scandal. I thought it was an interesting statement because there are a lot of people who feel like a little bit of heat is exactly what's needed when dealing with the bankers who helped bring down the economy.
ANGELIDES: So we will be asking very tough, hard questions on behalf of the American people. But at the end of the day, the mission of our commission is to try to get to the truth, what really happened here, so that hopefully we do not soon repeat the mistakes that led to this cataclysm. So, yes, anger. And we hope to ask questions on behalf of the American people to get to answers that will satisfy some of that anger.
NORRIS: Mr. Thomas, Mr. Angelides noted that the sun is still shining in many places on Wall Street. Are you going to be just looking back at what caused the financial crisis? Or are you going to also be looking at the behavior of the people who run these big Wall Street houses today, the bonuses, the decisions that they're making right now?
THOMAS: Michele, I especially liked your introduction about commissions. I was in Congress for 28 years and saw a lot of commissions come and go. Most of the commissions that weren't successful tended to be creatures created by Congress as a substitute for the policymakers making policy. This commission is going to look a lot more like, for example, the 9/11 Commission, which was charged with trying to find out what happened. So the answer to that or any other question you might ask as to what we're going to do is going to be driven by how we get the facts, to what extent are people forthcoming. We do have the power of the subpoena. We can refer to the Department of Justice. That's not a threat. That's just an understanding on the part of Congress that some people may not be as willing as others to provide us with the questions that we've asked.
NORRIS: Your first hearings will be held next week. Who do you plan to call to testify at these hearings?
ANGELIDES: Well, we are holding two days of hearings. The first four witnesses will be the heads of the four big surviving investment banks: JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America. We will then be hearing from people about the impacts of the crisis on ordinary Americans. Day two will be given over to federal, state and local officials who are attorney generals and local prosecutors, telling us about what their investigations have revealed about the financial crisis.
NORRIS: At the end of 2010, you are going to have to produce a document that will include all of your findings. We're talking about financial instruments that were so complex that the people who ran these credit default swaps couldn't even explain them in English themselves. So how at the end are you going to be able to produce a report that the average person will be able to read and understand? And again, I'm thinking about the 9/11 Report, which read almost like a novel in the telling of what happened and what they discovered. Mr. Thomas?
THOMAS: You know, it's been said that pride goeth before a fall but so does arrogance and avarice. The regulators were supposed to be regulating. There were institutions that did have the power to examine and have the competency to examine, and they were a little bit lax. So our job doesn't have to be a technical graduate course in advanced economics. But you can in a relatively simple way explain arrogance, avarice, failure to follow through on your job and the consequences of that.
NORRIS: How effective can this commission be, since Congress is already at work on a number of financial reforms that actually might be complete before your work is finished at the end of 2010? Does this mean by default that the commission's work will become more anthropological than actionable?
ANGELIDES: Well, let me say, to start with, this national debate about how we reform our financial system is just beginning, not ending. And let me just say this - and this is not to minimize legislation - but even if Congress were to act in the next couple of months - and who knows when they will - on financial reform legislation, if they create a new agency or new powers, let's be clear: We had regulatory authorities. We had agencies with lots of authority. What matters is how are the laws implemented? How do regulators pursue their job? How do people act in the marketplace?
THOMAS: I hate to sound like a broken record, but having been in Congress for 28 years, if you think between now and this December, Congress is going to pass several different pieces of legislation, given the comprehensive nature of the financial crisis, through committees that have narrow jurisdiction, it's just not going to happen.
NORRIS: Should the people who run the large investment houses, the rating agencies, even people who worked and presently work in the SEC or worked in the SEC under the previous administration, should they be afraid of what you're doing?
ANGELIDES: My view is that there's a need for accountability and responsibility, and I think it serves everyone's purpose to get the facts and the truth on the table so that this country can move on. And you know, there may be some people who are going to be afraid, but no one should be afraid of the truth, even though I'm sure there are a lot of people who would just assume that we didn't exist for the next year.
NORRIS: Mr. Thomas, Mr. Angelides, thank you very much for your time.
ANGELIDES: Thank you.
NORRIS: That was Democrat Phil Angelides and Republican Bill Thomas, chair and co-chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The commission's hearings will begin next week.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
More than 75 years ago, Wall Street titans came to Washington to answer for their actions, too.
BLOCK: 1929, the financial house of cards collapses, and the overinflated stock market plunges into a Great Depression. A financial panic grips the world.
BLOCK: After the Crash of 1929, a Senate commission began investigating Wall Street. That probe was led by a tenacious counsel named Ferdinand Pecora. We asked scholar Michael Perino, who is writing a biography about Pecora, to tell us about the man.
MICHAEL PERINO: He was an Italian immigrant, quit school at an early age because his father was injured in an industrial accident. He eventually becomes a lawyer. He is for many years an assistant district attorney in New York and at the time was in private practice when he got this call out of the blue to serve as counsel.
BLOCK: In 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent, and the stock market was 90 percent off its crazy high. It was the perfect time to tap into the outrage of America. And that's exactly what Pecora did. He turned the proceedings into riveting political theater and shed light on the shady banking practices of the day.
PERINO: Really, the genius to his success, I think, was his ability to take complex corporate transactions, which people had enormous trouble understanding, and turning them into simple morality plays.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Explaining complex corporate transactions is also a challenge for the commission that begins work next week. Michael Perino's forthcoming biography about Ferdinand Pecora is titled "The Hellhound of Wall Street."
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed tighter standards for smog. As NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, this is the latest example of the Obama administration redoing a controversial environmental policy from the Bush administration.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN: EPA administrator Lisa Jackson says the science makes it clear: Lower levels of smog have serious impacts on health and the environment.
LISA JACKSON: All of us have been outside on a hot, summer day and have that wheezy feeling. But for many Americans, especially children and older Americans and those who have lung problems, smog can be deadly. It can mean more hospital and health care visits.
SHOGREN: Jackson is proposing stricter limits than those set by the Bush administration in 2008. Under the Bush standards, about half of the counties in the country have unhealthy air. Jackson's proposal would add several hundred more to the list of smoggy counties. She based her decision on the advice of an EPA scientific advisory panel whose recommendations had been rejected by the Bush administration. Air pollution expert Rogene Henderson from Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute headed that panel.
ROGENE HENDERSON: This is a win for science. It says: Let's look at the facts. And I'm most pleased.
SHOGREN: But business groups complain that the new standards would cost them tens of billions of dollars. That's because states would have to find ways to clean up, like shifting drivers to public transportation or requiring more pollution control equipment.
BRYAN BRENDLE: Power plants and factories would definitely have to install new, more expensive controls, and this would raise energy costs.
SHOGREN: Bryan Brendle directs energy policy for the National Association of Manufacturers.
BRENDLE: This is very bad timing to be adding new controls and regulations on industry as we attempt to recover from the steepest economic downturn since the 1930s.
SHOGREN: Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
President Obama says the U.S. must do a better job at keeping dangerous people off airplanes. The president spoke this afternoon as the administration was releasing a preliminary report. It outlines intelligence failures that allowed the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airline's jet. Mr. Obama took responsibility for the failure to prevent the attack.
BARACK OBAMA: Ultimately, the buck stops with me. As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.
NORRIS: First, here's NPR's White House Correspondent Don Gonyea with us here in the studio. Don, tell us what the president had to say about what went wrong.
DON GONYEA: The second part of it, he said, that failure to analyze and that failure to connect the dots should have, would have led them to Abdulmutallab, and that this person planned some sort of an attack. Finally, he said, all of this resulted in him not being put on a specific no-fly list that would have kept him off that Amsterdam-to-Detroit plane on Christmas Day.
NORRIS: So, what specific fixes is the president planning to put in place?
GONYEA: The analytical process has to be strengthened so that the intel they do receive can be sifted and sorted in far more meaningful ways. And that no-fly list has to be more effective. Now, he also said, again, there is no silver bullet to protecting, you know, the thousands of flights that come in and out around the country and into the country, but he said we can spend more money, we will on investment into explosive detection devices that would have caught the kind of thing that this would-be bomber had.
NORRIS: President Obama also spoke about taking personal responsibility for what went wrong. What exactly does that mean and will he hold others responsible? Is anyone likely to be disciplined?
GONYEA: But in this particular case, he said, quote, "I'm less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning what happened and preventing these mistakes." This one, ultimately, he said, was more of a systemic thing than it was any one person. But look for him to be watching individuals in the future.
NORRIS: Don Gonyea, thanks so much.
GONYEA: Pleasure.
NORRIS: That's NPR's White House correspondent Don Gonyea.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And now we're joined by the National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. Mr. McDonough, welcome to the program.
DENIS MCDONOUGH: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: And when we talk about an expansion of the terrorism watch and no-fly list, how much of an expansion are we talking about? What new criteria are you going to use?
MCDONOUGH: But the bottom line, I think, Melissa, is this - we had this information because we have very effective intelligence collection capacity, very experienced and talented intelligence professionals. What we have to do is just get that final five yards. And I think we've seen that happen before throughout the course of this year and, frankly, since 2001. And we're going to see an awful lot of more of it because of these reforms.
BLOCK: The president said that this was not a failure to share information, that the information was out there and one of the notes says that people who needed this information were not prevented from accessing it. It seems to me that depends on what you mean by share. If sharing information means dumping it into a database - or does it mean something more active than that?
MCDONOUGH: What we want to do is make sure that they have the targets, that they're informed by developments on the ground so that they can take all that information and direct against the kind of new threats like this one we saw on Christmas Day.
BLOCK: Now, we heard this, of course, after 9/11 too, that the databases weren't talking to each other. Are you saying that now, you know, eight plus years after 9/11, that's still the case?
MCDONOUGH: So, it's not a failure to share so much as it is to make sure that this vast amount of data that's pouring in every day is available, is consumable, is directed against the most pressing threats. And that's the issue that the president pointed out today. We saw an increased activity in Yemen. We have to make sure that when we see that kind of activity, we see a threat stream, we follow that thing, that threat stream until we knock it down.
BLOCK: And when it comes to analyzing those vast streams or universes of data that are coming in, would it be fair to say that there are not enough specialists at the National Counterterrorism Center to do that? Do you have enough, say, Middle East specialists, Arabic speakers, Urdu speakers, Pashto speakers?
MCDONOUGH: You know, we do. At the National Counterterrorism Center, at the Central Intelligence Agency, within all of the other intelligence agencies in the government, all 16 of them, we have a great depth of talent. We have a great depth of experience. What we want to make sure that we are doing is giving them up-to-date guidance, up-to-date rules and protocols informed by this threat, which is changing, which is adapting. We want to be as adaptable and as nimble, as the president said this afternoon, as these extremists and our enemies are trying to be.
BLOCK: I want to run by you a critique from Thomas Kean, who was one of the chairs of the 9/11 Commission. He calls this most recent intelligence failure an eerie echo of the failures that led to 9/11, and he says fundamental flaws that he saw then persists. Among them, he mentions turf battles among intelligence agencies. How big of a problem do you think that is?
MCDONOUGH: So, the fact is, this isn't a question of turf battles. This is not a question of not sharing. What it is is an example where we had bits and pieces available to the analysts, bits and pieces available to different agencies, where when you pull them all together, they paint a picture that should have set off alarms and, frankly, we'll make sure that when that happens in the future, it does set off alarms.
BLOCK: That report said the majority of employees at the DNI, including senior officials, were unable to articulate a clear understanding of their mission, roles and responsibilities. That sounds like a pretty damning assessment of the office in charge of all intelligence.
MCDONOUGH: And frankly, we saw that again on Tuesday, when the president sat down, heard an update on the investigation, in this case, from the FBI director. But he didn't just sit with the FBI director, but rather, with all of the relevant agency heads, so they could find out what are the tactics that al-Qaida is employing today? What does that tell me about the kind of threats that we have to be worried about tomorrow? And where should I be directing the kind of resources that the American people are investing in this fight - where should I be directing those resources to? That's exactly the kind of sharing, collaboration, cooperation that we believe is going to continue to be successful as it already has been for so long.
BLOCK: And briefly, Mr. McDonough, before we end, do you think we have fallen victim to complacency here? Is that one lesson learned?
MCDONOUGH: No, I don't think so. In fact, if you take a look at what happened on that flight, I think that you saw passengers who reacted with an amazing...
BLOCK: I don't mean passengers, I mean on the governmental level.
MCDONOUGH: Well, and I think the challenge here is what I wanted to get to, Melissa, is that we want to make sure that the government is as agile and as capable as those passengers were that day. We want to make sure that we see the threats when they develop and we stay on top of them as we address them.
BLOCK: Denis McDonough is the chief of staff of the National Security Council. Mr. McDonough, thanks very much.
MCDONOUGH: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
In this election year, this week will be remembered as the time some big-time Democrats bowed out. The most prominent, Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota - both decided not to run for reelection, and they're not alone. In the House, a number of Democrats are retiring, and we'll hear about two of them in a few minutes.
BLOCK: NPR's Jeff Brady has our story.
JEFF BRADY: In making his announcement, Governor Ritter offered a classic explanation: He wants to spend more time with his family.
BILL RITTER: I would say it this way: I haven't found the proper balance where my family is concerned. I've not made them the priority that they should be.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAFFIC)
BRADY: Out on the snowy streets of Denver, voters were surprised and not everyone was buying it.
RICHARD MOREAU: It came kind of as a shock, 'cause I don't know if he's being forced out or not, you know?
ED RABY: I had no idea it was coming. Learned yesterday morning, completely surprised.
BRADY: Governor Ritter says he was not forced out. He says he made the decision over Christmas break and that personal matters were at the top of his mind. But speaking at the state capitol right after the governor's announcement, the head of the Republican Party in Colorado, Dick Wadhams, was not so sure.
DICK WADHAMS: The political calculation he had to make with low poll numbers and a very bad national and political environment for Democrats, I think played an even larger role in his decision, in my opinion.
BRADY: Democrats won, not only because they appealed to the third of voters who don't belong to either party. And now, Colorado pollster Floyd Ciruli says they're starting to swing back toward the GOP. At the same time, Ciruli says Republicans are uniting around an issue they all can agree on - the economy.
FLOYD CIRULI: They tend to get divided on social issues, but the fiscal issues are a little safer for them. And they're very united at the moment. And Democrats, quite frankly, are now a bit divided and dispirited.
BRADY: Jeff Brady, NPR News, Denver.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Michigan Public Radio's Rick Pluta has the story.
RICK PLUTA: Granholm says that was a big mistake as Michigan tries to double the number of college graduates living here and create a highly educated workforce that will attract employers.
JENNIFER GRANHOLM: I think it's really, really important for us to provide access to higher education as we try to double the number of our college graduates. So I think the Michigan Promise is one important aspect of that.
PLUTA: Granholm says the Promise was also critical to the success of local Promise Zones. The state allowed 10 high-poverty communities to take a portion of local property taxes to help pay even more of a student's tuition.
GRANHOLM: The foundation of those Promise zones were Promise scholarships, and so the challenge is if we don't have a Promise scholarship, those Promise zones become much more challenging for those local communities to send their kids to school.
PLUTA: She says the Promise zones encouraged at-risk teens to finish high school. Other states that have turned to publicly funded scholarships are also running into budget woes. Vincent Badolato is a higher education expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures. He says while states want to make higher education more affordable, it's easier to cut spending on colleges than nearly anywhere else in a state's budget. He says many states are shifting the burden to schools and demanding better results if they want taxpayers' money.
VINCENT BADOLATO: I think it's starting to have states think about - and more seriously think about performance funding, providing a certain amount of money for institutions if they meet certain benchmarks for (unintelligible) students.
PLUTA: Michigan State University junior Brett Tesla(ph) says the Promise scholarship helped him and a lot of other students focus on trying to graduate in four years. Tesla is one of 96,000 students who lost the Michigan Promise scholarship this year. He says he'll take out another loan because he doesn't have time to take on a second job, and his parents can't help with any more tuition costs.
BRETT TESLA: I think I should be all right, but I don't know. It just seems like kind of a lose-lose situation.
PLUTA: For NPR News, I'm Rick Pluta in Lansing, Michigan.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
President Obama has announced details from the White House review of what went wrong in the lead-up to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airplane. Mr. Obama said intelligence agencies will reshape how they prioritize terrorist threats.
P: We must follow the leads that we get. And we must pursue them until plots are disrupted. And that means assigning clear lines of responsibility.
BLOCK: The president said a failure to connect the dots meant the Nigerian bombing suspect was not on the no-fly list, though he should've been. He said that list will be expanded and that there will be still more screening at airports. We'll have more on the president's remarks elsewhere in the program, but we're going to begin this hour by hearing about the impact of new security rules in foreign airports.
NORRIS: Iraq and Nigeria. And from Italy, which is a key transit point for travelers headed to the U.S. First, to Nigeria.
(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPORT TERMINAL)
OFEIBEA QUIST: This is Ofeibea Quist-Arcton and I've come to Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Nigeria's capital Abuja to see whether these new tighter security and screening measures, A, have come into operation and B, what Nigerians traveling to the U.S. and other places think about the enhanced security. Right ahead of me is Departure C, and I'm just going to talk to the passengers to see what they think about the tighter new securities. Sir, your name please-
NORRIS: My name is Basi Ban. I leave in Columbus, Ohio, but I'm visiting Nigeria. I think sometimes you need to take a balance between security and freedom. And it seems that this point in time security kind of trumps out freedom and it's kind of inconvenient but it's warranted. I hope the American government tries to find a balance without making every Nigerian seem responsible for what that little guy did.
NORRIS: My name is Nella Amdem Ela and I'm a legal practitioner. I think it's very offensive. As a matter of fact, I'm embarrassed for America to isolate Nigeria for a singular offense when what they should be doing is to place the blame where it ought to be, because if the father of a child tells that there was need to report the unusual behavior of his son and obviously there was a lapse somewhere.
QUIST: So, what's your message to President Obama-
NORRIS: Actually he was number one on my list. I mean I used to be his fan but I'm beginning to question who he is really and what he stands for. I'm beginning to question it because he should have thought better and asked more questions. And place the blame where it ought to be. And find out where the loopholes were. (Unintelligible) can treat Nigeria as he wishes with his left hand- I'm embarrassed for him.
QUIST: So, will you traveling to the U.S. in the future ma'am.
NORRIS: I couldn't be bothered to go there because I won't be insulted, certainly not.
QUIST: Thank you. And that's the view from Nigeria. For NPR News, this is Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reporting from Abuja International Airport.
(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPORT TERMINAL)
SYLVIA POGGIOLI: This is Sylvia Poggioli in Rome, where Fiumicino Airport is one of Europe's key hubs to the United States. But at this security checkpoint there are few visible signs of stepped-up screening as passengers walk through metal detectors. Susanah Coppola(ph) is one traveler not in favor of body scanners.
NORRIS: (Foreign language spoken)
POGGIOLI: I don't think we need to go so far to examine passengers, she says. We're bombarded with scare stories, she adds, that's what makes us scared of flying. Another traveler Giuseppe Mancini(ph) has fewer qualms.
NORRIS: (Foreign language spoken)
POGGIOLI: It's better to have security he says. Privacy can take second place but these Americans he adds are always asking an awful lot from us. Within two or three months, Rome, Milan and Venice airports will be equipped with full- body scanners for people traveling to the U.S., Britain and Israel, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni announced today.
NORRIS: (Through Translator) Security comes first for everything else for those who fly. And body scanners will be installed in compliance with health and privacy requirements.
POGGIOLI: Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
QUIL LAWRENCE: I'm Quil Lawrence in Baghdad. This isn't the sound of Baghdad International Airport. In fact this isn't even the parking lot outside Baghdad International Airport. It's the parking lot about a quarter of a mile away where most people traveling to the United States or anywhere outside Iraq have to get out of their cars, unload their bags, and get into an airport approved shuttle bus. Baghdad Airport might be the most elaborately secured commercial airport in the world, not least because it's surrounded by one of the biggest U.S. military bases in Iraq. As such, there really isn't much to do to increase security here. Every single person that makes it even to the airport lounge has been ID'd, metal detected, physically searched and had their set out in the road to be sniffed by a German shepherd.
NORRIS: (Foreign language Spoken)
LAWRENCE: Ali Abu Taher is on the way to Amsterdam with his son. He says it doesn't bother him to spend extra time getting to the airport. The road out to the airport used to be one of the most dangerous in Iraq. It's now considered relatively safe. And once inside, the extra measures can provide a rare sense of, well, security. Khadim Rahim(ph) works here loading suitcases.
NORRIS: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Baghdad.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Joining me now is NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Tom, what have you learned tonight about how Secretary Gates' tenure will continue?
TOM BOWMAN: Well, a Pentagon source tells me that Gates told his staff several weeks ago that he would be staying on at least until January 2011. And he said he told the president just prior to the staff meeting that he would be staying on.
BLOCK: And did he give reasons for wanting to stay on in this role?
BOWMAN: And the other thing he's talked about a lot with his staff is he wants to make sure that the returning soldiers and Marines and other service members from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated well, that they have the right medical care if they need it, especially those, of course, who are wounded.
BLOCK: How would you describe the relationships between Secretary Gates and President Obama?
BOWMAN: Gates, of course, is a Republican, served under George W. Bush, was very close to George H.W. Bush, was CIA director, of course. And this really affirmed up a relationship with this new Democratic president. And, of course, the other thing was the war in Afghanistan, it was Gates who was key in making sure that General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander there, got enough troops that he needed in Afghanistan. And Gates really brokered that 30,000 troop figure that they eventually decided on.
BLOCK: And given that escalation of troops into Afghanistan, what does having Secretary Gates stay on as head of the Pentagon mean for the ongoing U.S. effort there? What are his goals?
BOWMAN: So, Gates is on board with their strategy for the war in Afghanistan, making the people of Afghanistan, as a counterinsurgency, making sure that they are secure, that they are the prize here - making sure that they are safe and secure. So you would look to see him supporting General McChrystal, I think, in the coming year at least. And then making sure that, you know, eventually troops can start pulling out. And, also, he's keen on making sure that the Afghanistan forces are trained well enough so they can start taking over the security job from the United States forces. And that would, of course, allow more U.S. troops to come out.
BLOCK: That's NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman with the news tonight that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will stay on at the Pentagon for at least another year. Tom, thanks very much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Melissa.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
But his obstacles go far beyond sport, as NPR's Mike Pesca tells us.
MIKE PESCA: Seun Adebiyi was 6 years old when he left Nigeria and arrived in Alabama. It was the only place his mother, a math professor, could get a job. She was the kind of woman for whom the challenge of being a single mom in a new country wasn't enough. She founded a nonprofit to educate schoolchildren. To fund her teaching, she and Seun picked crops, but that was a lesson as well.
BLOCK: My mother has a Ph.D. She went to Oxford on full scholarship, and here she is working in the Alabama sun, picking crops because she has a dream.
PESCA: Seun wound up majoring in math and the classics as an undergrad, and then enrolled in Yale Law School. By the time graduation came around, he knew he could rededicate himself to his Olympic dream. He figured the Winter Games might be his ticket, but which sport? He and his friends began watching some YouTube videos.
BLOCK: And we decided cross-country skiing was way too hard. We decided I'd probably kill myself in downhill skiing. I've never shot a gun. Biathlon was out.
PESCA: Hockey, no. Luge, suicide.
BLOCK: And then we found skeleton. And everyone was like, what's this?
PESCA: Skeleton became Seun's new passion. He took a job with Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City, home to one of the country's two tracks dedicated to this headfirst, sliding sport that reaches 80 miles an hour. Seun began training five hours a day. It was daunting but doable until...
BLOCK: Until life comes and knocks along, and you just take another route.
PESCA: Seun is standing in the kitchen of an apartment on Manhattan's East Side. The location is significant because it's two blocks from Sloan-Kettering Memorial, a hospital known for its cancer care.
BLOCK: Right now, I've got two teaspoons of posaconazole. I've got some lansoprazole. I've got...
PESCA: He got in touch with Katharina Harf, the executive vice president of the bone marrow donor center DKMS.
BLOCK: You know, the first time I met him, I just, I just was like, oh my God, we have to work with this guy, and he's just so incredibly inspiring.
PESCA: So with DKMS's help, he flew with his mom to Nigeria, where they established the country's first bone marrow registry. This Sunday, he's sponsoring a bone marrow drive at New York City's Yale Club. And he still trains, even through chemotherapy.
BLOCK: When I was staying in the hospital for seven weeks, I would do lunges in the hallway and push my IV tube beside me, and the nurses would line up behind me and start doing lunges.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: So I had this little parade going on.
PESCA: He says living with cancer is like living a highly concentrated, extremely potent version of life.
BLOCK: I feel very free. At the same time, I know that in a couple of weeks, I'm going to have - I'm going to lose a lot of freedom. I'm going to lose all control over my schedule. I'm going to lose control over what I eat, who I see. I'm going to lose my bone marrow, and then I'm going to literally be reborn.
PESCA: Soon, this super-achieving young man will rely on his doctor's skill, his body's resilience - and just plain luck. He refers to this as the risky time. And then, he says, the dream begins anew. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
You're listening to NPR.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Eleanor Beardsley has this story from Paris.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: The proposed law covers every kind of insult, including repeated rude remarks about a partner's appearance, false allegations of infidelity, and threats of physical violence. Some media reports have made light of the legislation, joking that screaming at your wife could now make you a felon in France. But parliamentarian Martine Billard, who helped draft the bill, says psychological abuse is a serious matter.
NORRIS: (Through translator) There are situations where the man constantly degrades the woman with his remarks and destroys her, little by little. And this is often done in front of the children.
BEARDSLEY: Billard rejects critics' charges that under the new law, couples could be hauled in for having an argument. She says it must be proven that the abuse is repeated, and done with the intention of destroying the victim's human dignity. France already has a law against psychological harassment in the workplace. This one simply puts the home front on an equal par, says Billard. A woman dies every two days at the hands of her husband or partner in France. The French government recently declared ending violence against women a national cause. Several chilling television spots warn viewers about domestic violence while giving a new telephone hotline to report it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV COMMERCIAL)
U: (Foreign language spoken)
BEARDSLEY: One ad shows viewers how kids learn violence from their parents. Two young children are playing dress-up and having tea. The viewer sees only their legs under the table, wearing grown-up shoes. When the tiny wife mistakenly spills some tea in front of her tiny husband, an adult scenario unfolds.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV COMMERCIAL)
(SOUNDBITE OF SLAPPING)
BEARDSLEY: French Prime Minister Francois Fillon recently unveiled a panoply of new measures to fight conjugal violence.
P: (Foreign language spoken)
BEARDSLEY: And this new law will allow us to react to insidious situations where the violence leaves the victims destroyed psychologically but with no physical trace, said Fillon.
U: (Foreign language spoken)
BEARDSLEY: It's late afternoon at a women's shelter in northeast Paris. A handful of mothers and young children hang out in a small living room. The shelter provides a temporary escape and counseling for women abused by their partners.
U: (Foreign language spoken)
BEARDSLEY: But shelter director Viviane Monnier says she fears the new law, because it also applies to men, will end up being used in a perverse manner.
NORRIS: (Through translator) While men inflict physical violence, many people say women engage in psychological violence. We foresee a dangerous situation where this law will lead to charges against the victims by the perpetrators, who will claim they are the victims of verbal abuse.
BEARDSLEY: For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Democrats aren't the only ones dealing with dissent in the ranks. Republicans are also facing unrest. The latest shake-up came this week in Florida. The state party chairman was forced to resign by Republican dissidents. The chairman is a man closely linked to Florida's moderate governor, Charlie Crist, as NPR's Greg Allen reports.
GREG ALLEN: Former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio was already campaigning for the Senate nomination when Crist decided he wanted the job. Palm Beach County GOP Chair Sid Dinerstein says, for many in the party, Greer's move crossed the line.
NORRIS: When Greer tried to literally muscle Rubio out of the race, the party said no more, and that led to a revolution.
ALLEN: Through the fall, the attacks against Greer built and this week, he said he was stepping down. In a conference call with reporters, Greer said his critics have just two goals.
NORRIS: And the first one is, remove me as chairman, and if that doesn't work, burn the house down and try and destroy the Republican Party.
ALLEN: Much of the unrest here comes from conservatives, many of them Rubio supporters. But Bill Bunting, a former county chair and Greer critic from Pasco County, north of Tampa, says the insurrection is less about ideology than party politics. County committeemen felt they were being ignored.
NORRIS: These are the people that organize the bases in their counties: do the mailings, stuff the envelopes, call the precinct people, the phone banks, open up more offices at election time. And what you were doing is, you were taking away their right.
ALLEN: A return to stability in party leadership will help Crist by putting a nagging problem behind him. But Palm Beach County GOP Chair Sid Dinerstein says he believes Crist's problems are much bigger than who's running the state party.
NORRIS: Charlie has refused to debate Marco Rubio and yet, the national issues are at the top of everybody's agenda. We need these people in the same room, talking to the voters of this state about health care and cap-and-trade and amnesty and all the issues.
ALLEN: Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Today, NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Turkey, where the country's control over water has brought privileges and distrust.
(SOUNDBITE OF FISHING BOAT)
DEBORAH AMOS: I'm on a small fishing boat on the waters of the Bosporus. It's one of the busiest shipping lanes for oil transport in the world. More than a dozen tankers are on the horizon, but none of this oil comes from Turkey. The resource that counts here is water. Turkey is one of the only countries in the region to have enough water for its population.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE SHUTTING DOWN)
HUSSEIN AMERY: The Arabs, the Iraqis and the Syrians feel very much that Turkey is asserting itself as a regional hydrological superpower.
AMOS: That's Hussein Amery, a water specialist at the Colorado School of Mines. Turkey is a water superpower, he says, because the headwaters of the great rivers - the Tigris and the Euphrates - are in the Turkish mountains. Over the years, the Turks have built dozens of dams limiting the flow to the Arab world downstream. The severe drought in Syria and Iraq, says Amery, has fuelled resentment against the Turks.
AMERY: Something like 160 villages in Syria between 2007 and 2008 were totally depopulated. I know, also, there are scores and scores of villages that have been depopulated in Iraq as well. Crops were not growing, cattle were dying and their source of livelihood just sort of ceased to be.
AMOS: In Turkey, Gun Kut, a water expert, expresses an often-heard criticism in response to Arab complaints.
GUN KUT: Quit wasting the water and there will be enough for everybody.
AMOS: Kut says outdated farming techniques and even worse water management wastes a dwindling resource.
KUT: Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF PRAYER)
AMOS: At the inauguration, more than a decade ago, then-President Suleyman Demirel said neither Syria nor Iraq could lay claim to Turkey's water, any more than Turkey could claim Arab oil. While Turkey's position has softened since then, former diplomat Faruk Logoglu says that statement has caused tension for years.
FARUK LOGOGLU: Turkey, in my judgment, properly claims that these waters originate in Turkey and that we have the first say.
KUT: They have oil. We don't have oil. They have the capital, they should invest.
AMOS: Invest in water efficiency, says Gun Kut. More important, sign on to a regional management of the Euphrates and the Tigris as if the borders didn't exist. Turkey has renewed this proposal at a time when relations with its Arab neighbors are improving. At the same time, this drought threatens the stability of Iraq and Syria, says Josh Landis, an American academic who writes an influential blog on Syria.
JOSH LANDIS: How a little country like Syria, which is badly run economically, is coming out of a socialist past, is trying to liberalize - is going to be able to provide water to all of its people is a mystery.
AMOS: There was a time that the Ottoman Empire controlled the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AMOS: These days, hawkers sell wooden flutes outside the palaces, which are now museums as well as a monument to the 800-year empire. Turkey's aggressive outreach to the Arab Middle East is sometimes called neo-Ottomanism. The new approach includes binding neighbors together through commercial ties, gas and oil pipelines and a shared electric grid. And finally, it seems, after years of tension, there are signs of agreement on regional water, says Hussein Amery.
AMERY: I would tell the Syrians, Turks and Iraqis to get together, cooperate in managing the Tigris and Euphrates as one ecosystem that it is. It requires a new way of thinking about farming and irrigation.
AMOS: Deborah Amos, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Joe Palca reports now on a physicist who found some.
JOE PALCA: This is a story about matter and the beautiful properties it can display. But to understand what kind of properties and what sort of beauty, you have to dig deep. So, let's get started. The stuff the world is made of comes in a variety of phases. There's the gas phase, the liquid phase, the solid phase, and each of these phases has different characteristics.
ALAN TENNANT: Liquid flows. Solids are stuck there.
PALCA: That's Alan Tennant. He's a condensed matter physicist at the Helmholtz Center Berlin in Germany. Condensed matter physicists are concerned with transitions.
TENNANT: When you change from liquid to gas, you get a transition.
PALCA: Transitions are interesting because matter takes on some unusual properties as it makes transitions. To get a transition from ice to liquid water, you add heat. But Tennant isn't working something as everyday as the phase transitions of water. He's interested in the exotic transitions of the element cobalt, and that requires exotic tools.
TENNANT: Instead of using heat, we use high magnetic fields in very low temperatures.
PALCA: Really, really low temperatures, like close to absolute zero, as low as you can go. This is where quantum physics kicks in. In the quantum world, it's all about how single atoms of matter behave. And in the quantum world, the states of matter are not at all like the ones we know, and their transitions aren't either.
TENNANT: At the exact point where you change from one state to another, that's where you get the really important stuff.
PALCA: Some transitions are complicated and messy, but not the ones Tennant finds in his cold cobalt.
TENNANT: The quantum aspect of the system provides a kind of simplification, a kind of extra layer of order in the system that you wouldn't expect.
PALCA: In fact, the order Tennant and his colleagues found has a kind of beautiful, complicated symmetry.
ROBERT KONIK: They found this E8 symmetry.
PALCA: That's Robert Konik, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Now, here's where the story gets kind of tricky. Explaining transitions in quantum states of matter is easy compared to trying to explain E8 symmetry, but it's part of where the beauty lies, so let's try.
PALCA: E8 is one of a group of symmetries known as Lie symmetries, first studied by a 19th-century Norwegian mathematician named Lie. Konik took a crack at explaining them.
KONIK: If you had a ball, something that was perfectly spherical, the ball can be rotated about any of its axes, and the ball looks the same.
PALCA: So Lie symmetries are things that stay symmetrical when you rotate them, like spheres.
KONIK: That would be the very simplest, you know, it's more sort of generalized notions of rotations. For example, you can go to - think about symmetries involving rotations in higher dimensional spaces.
PALCA: I think I'd rather not just now. But the point here, as Alan Tennant says, is that in this weird quantum world, under certain precise conditions, a new kind of order emerges that was previously unknown.
TENNANT: When I started out, I really expected that quantum systems would be somehow more complicated and, you know, somehow more confusing than the everyday world that we're familiar with, but every system basically that we've looked at has turned out to be elegant. It's turned out to be truly beautiful.
PALCA: Joe Palca, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson has this story about criticism of the president from the left.
MARA LIASSON: Adam Green is one of many ardent Obama supporters who've had their enthusiasm challenged this year. Green runs something called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which among other things runs a Web site called YesWeStillCan.org.
NORRIS: Many people went to the polls in 2008 and worked very hard for President Obama in 2008, with the expectation that they were supporting change we can believe in, and somebody who would really fight special interests on behalf of the little guy. And there's been a great sense of disappointment among some of President Obama's strongest supporters.
LIASSON: And if that doesn't change, Green says...
NORRIS: It's looking like a lot of Democrats won't show up in 2010.
LIASSON: Adam Green's issue is health care, the public option in particular, which he feels the president bargained away without much of a struggle. And Green has some high-profile company. There was this unprecedented attack from a former chairman of the president's own party. Howard Dean blasted the legislation the president is supporting as the basis for a final bill.
NORRIS: I'd kill the bill all entirely and have the House start reconciliation, which is what they should've done in the first place.
LIASSON: Steve Rosenthal is the former political director of the AFL-CIO.
NORRIS: I do believe that if the Senate doesn't vote on the Employee Free Choice Act, that it's very possible that a number of unions, the unions that are most active politically, would be missing in action in key Senate states, in key Senate races across the country in 2010.
LIASSON: Why all this frustration from inside the president's own ranks? Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner of New York has a theory.
NORRIS: Despite the fact that the president waged an aspirational and fairly ideological campaign, he's turned out to be a fairly transactional president, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. You have to make deals to get legislation passed. But the problem is that many people in Congress don't know what he believes about some of the big issues that we're considering.
LIASSON: And that's ironic, says Weiner, because President Obama has made more progress toward the Democrats' cherished goal of universal health coverage than any other Democratic president.
NORRIS: Look, health care should be an unvarnished win for Democrats. Unfortunately, a lot of the folks who are the animated base for President Obama and a lot of other Democrats are disappointed. Now, maybe it's because their expectations are too high. But it could also be that the president hasn't shown them the type of fight that they would like to see.
LIASSON: White House aides believe a lot of the liberal angst about health care will go away once the president actually signs a bill. And to the extent the Democrats have a problem motivating their core voters, they've got time to fix it, says White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer.
NORRIS: We're not overly concerned about these things, first and foremost, because there isn't an election tomorrow, not an election the next day. We have a long time to deal with this.
LIASSON: There will be a sharper focus on the economy and jobs, of course, but also new initiatives on transparency in government, getting rid of earmarks, tackling the deficit. And there's something else the president needs to do to get his base enthused again, says John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
NORRIS: I do think they want to see the passionate Obama; the guy who they saw and rallied to in the context of the campaign, not just somebody with a pencil behind his ear trying to sketch out a path forward. And they want to see that fight back, but I suspect that they will be able see that.
LIASSON: Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Michigan Radio's Sarah Cwiek has the story.
SARAH CWIEK: Just hours before bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was scheduled to make his first appearance in a Detroit federal court, a group of local imams gathered to denounce those who practice terrorism in the name of Islam. Joining them was Hebba Aref, who was returning to Detroit on Northwest Flight 253 when Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to set off an explosive device on the plane. Aref says as a Muslim, she doesn't understand Islamic extremists.
NORRIS: I don't know how they can twist such a wonderful and peaceful religion, turn and do what they do.
CWIEK: Egerton Abulu is the secretary of the Nigerian Foundation of Michigan. He says religious extremism is anathema to Nigerian society.
NORRIS: What that guy did was just an isolated case, very isolated. Why he did it, we don't know. But it's isolated. It is not our nature.
CWIEK: The all-African market on Detroit's west side is a small store selling West African food staples along with a selection of CDs and DVDs. On a recent evening, Ameeka Sarnati and Ezenua Uwazrike sat behind the counter, watching a Nigerian TV show on a laptop computer. Uwazrike is a teenager who goes by the initials E.Z. He was born and raised in the U.S., but says his Nigerian family was horrified when they found out the alleged terrorist was a fellow countryman.
NORRIS: They was all in shock. Like, we was all together on Christmas. And that, like, everybody just sat down in the living room, was watching the news, because nobody would expect a Nigerian person to do that.
CWIEK: Ameeka Sarnati grew up in Nigeria and says he has no sympathy for Abdulmutallab. Sarnati calls him a young man of privilege, and says he's ruining his country's name.
NORRIS: He was in a better position as a young, you know, African man, you know, to help out his community. You know, use all that efforts and, you know, passion that he had for extremism, he could've channeled into other, better things.
CWIEK: For NPR News, I'm Sarah Cwiek in Ann Arbor.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Well, that's where our next guest comes in handy. Chef Philippe Parola is working with the state to help people figure out how to cook the carp. And he joins us from Baton Rouge. Chef Parola, what does carp taste like? How would you describe it?
PHILIPPE PAROLA: Well, number one, carp is kind of misleading on that name because the carp that we know in Louisiana, the common carp, they are bottom feeder, and they taste good, but not as good as the silver carp, which we tried to rename it as a silver fin.
BLOCK: The silver fin, yeah.
PAROLA: Absolutely. The meat texture of it is it's a cross between scallops and crab meat. That's how good it is.
BLOCK: Now, the bones, though, I think are a problem. These are big fish with lots of bones. What do you about that?
PAROLA: But it - absolutely, it's a lot of bones. And the first thing first is about bleeding the fish. That fish has to be bled. It helps to get the meat really white. And secondly, on the bone, I found that if you steam the fish, you can remove the bones very easily. And then you take the end product of the steamed meat and do all kind of different things such as fish cake, and fish spread, and soups and so on. I mean, you know, we're known in Louisiana for good cooking, and a gumbo pot, you know, you can put literally almost anything there and it will taste good.
BLOCK: And these are big fish. So you're getting a big fillet out of this fish, I would guess.
PAROLA: Well, actually, believe it or not, this is one of the very few fish, the bigger it gets, the better it is, because the bones are bigger, you can remove them, but the fish quality of it stays the same.
BLOCK: I understand that you have had carp land in your boat. Is that right? They jump out of the water and you've had them land right in there?
PAROLA: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, actually, all this started last August. I was doing a little work with Jeff Corwin from the Animal Planet, and he had a, you know, cooking show on the Food Network called "Extreme Cuisine," and he asked me to get an exotic fish out of Louisiana. So we went and got an alligator gar. And while I was riding a boat to catch an alligator gar, literally 40 minutes from New Orleans, these two giant carp just jumped in my boat and landed on my feet. Then I took this fish back to the restaurant, try them out.
BLOCK: So you're on this campaign. This is your mission, how to turn this nuisance fish into a delicacy.
PAROLA: Yeah, absolutely. It is an invasive species, but it's domestic now. We have it.
BLOCK: And if I were to come to you today, Chef Parola, come into your kitchen and say, okay, convince me about this carp, this silver fin, make me something amazing, what would you cook for me? What would you serve?
PAROLA: All right, well, I will tell you what: How long will it take to fry a fish nugget - three minutes?
NORRIS: I guess.
PAROLA: That's how long it will take to convince you. As soon as you're going to break that piece of fried fish, just fry it, that's it. And don't have to make a fancy sauce or anything else, it's that good. You don't have to cover it up with anything. You'll break it up, you'll taste it and just, wow.
BLOCK: Chef Parola, thanks for talking with us.
PAROLA: No problem, thank you and bon appetit.
BLOCK: Chef Philippe Parola, he's helping Louisiana create a demand to eat the invasive Asian carp, otherwise known as the silver fin.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Michele Kelemen has the latest.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Secretary Clinton says, for the Obama administration, 2010 is a year of renewed commitment and increased effort to re-launch talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
HILLARY CLINTON: There is a hunger for a resolution of this matter, a two-state solution that would rebuke the terrorists and the naysayers, that would give the Palestinians a legitimate state for their own aspirations and would give the Israelis the security they deserve to have.
KELEMEN: At the State Department today, Jordan's Foreign Minister, Nasser Judeh, said from the Arab world's perspective, there have to be clear deadlines and benchmarks if this peace process is to actually yield results.
NASSER JUDEH: Some deadlines have to be put on the table. And these deadlines help to serve the parties rather than present obstacles in the path towards peace. They help the parties put things in the right timeframe and the right perspective. We've said it in the past: We've had too much process and not enough peace. What we don't need in the region right now is another open-ended process that leaves issues unresolved and that leave loose ends without being tied.
KELEMEN: Jordan's foreign minister warned that Jerusalem could be a dangerous flashpoint. Secretary Clinton agreed, but made clear, as she stood next to her Jordanian counterpart today, that she'd like to see Israelis and Palestinians start their negotiations on the issue of borders.
CLINTON: Resolving borders resolves settlements. Resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements. So I think we need to lift our sights. And instead of being - looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest. You know, where are we headed together?
KELEMEN: She said the Obama administration wants to meet the Palestinian goal of having a viable state based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war with agreed land swaps and meet the Israeli goal of security within its boundaries. Clinton says there is a sense of urgency to all of this, which she heard in both her meetings with Arab officials today, including from Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit.
AHMED ALI ABOUL GHEIT: We are coming to try to regenerate enough energy and to create enough momentum for a peace effort. And it is crucial that we would win, and we would succeed, and we would bring the process on a proper basis.
KELEMEN: Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Tough news today for the millions of people struggling to find work. The latest jobs numbers are worst than expected. In December, the economy shed another 85,000 jobs. President Obama called that a matter of concern to every American.
P: The jobs numbers that were released by the Labor Department this morning are a reminder that the road to recovery is never straight.
NORRIS: NPR's Frank Langfitt explains what the numbers tell us about where we are on that road to recovery.
FRANK LANGFITT: The U.S. economy has been out of recession for months, but you wouldn't know it from today's jobs report. Instead of showing progress, the labor market sagged again as firms ranging from construction to retail laid off tens of thousands in December. Heidi Shierholz works for the Economic Policy Institute, a labor think tank in Washington. She says today's report shows any jobs recovery will take time.
BLOCK: It's going to be a long haul. We're not only not adding jobs, we're still losing jobs at a steady pace right now.
LANGFITT: The government says the economy began growing again in the summer and early fall, but most employers are still reluctant to hire. Mark Vitner is managing director at Wells Fargo. He says companies were uncertain about the strength of consumer demand, and they don't know how major legislation, such as health-care reform, will affect their bottom line.
BLOCK: A lot of this is - saying, how am I going to commit to hiring workers when I don't know how much it's going to cost me to employ them? And if they don't know what it's going to cost to hire a worker, they're not likely to move forward that decision until they feel a lot more certain about economic environment.
BLOCK: What is true is, we're all disappointed. I'm sure the American people are disappointed.
LANGFITT: That's Christina Romer. She's the White House's chief economist, and she was reacting to today's labor report. Romer says recoveries can be slow and halting. For instance, the government's revised figures for November show the economy actually grew by 4,000 jobs that month. But 4,000 jobs is too small to have much of an impact in a labor market that employs more than 138 million people.
BLOCK: This is how real recoveries happen. They come in fits and starts and now, it looks like November was a start and December was a little bit of a fit.
LANGFITT: Romer noted a bright spot in today's report. Temporary hiring grew in December. That's the fourth month in a row, and it's important.
BLOCK: As companies start to ramp up and hire again, many of them usually turn to temporary labor first to get, you know, someone in the door quickly and get the work done.
LANGFITT: Joney Roogie(ph) works for Adecco, the temporary services giant.
BLOCK: We're seeing increase in some of our manufacturing customers. The demand for products is increasing, and they're starting to add people back even in, you know, the warehouses and production facilities. So that's a very good sign.
LANGFITT: But those new jobs for temp workers last month were offset by continued layoffs in the construction business. Karl Case is an economics professor at Wellesley College. He says the glut of foreclosures has reduced demand for workers to build new homes.
P: They're not building anything. People say, why should I buy a new house if I can get an old house that's deeply discounted to get it sold?
LANGFITT: Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
So, more jobs lost in December. Also this week, some key Democratic senators said they'll leave their jobs; they've decided not to run again. And of course, the review of intelligence failures leading up to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner - all this gives us a lot to talk about with E. J. Dionne and David Brooks, our regular Friday political commentators. Welcome back to you both.
BLOCK: Great to be with you.
BLOCK: Thank you.
BLOCK: And let's start with the attempted terrorist attack and the president's remarks yesterday on what that intelligence review revealed. David Brooks, there had been calls for the president to fire someone in the intelligence community. That didn't happen. Should it have, do you think?
BLOCK: No, it shouldn't have. There are a lot of post-op geniuses in the world. But, you know, war is a catalog of errors. If you're going to have a resilient country in the face of war, you've going to have to have loyalty up and down. And I thought the president showed some loyalty. You're not going to have to scapegoat people up and down. Earlier in the week, the president was a little blaming people below him, but by the end of the week he said, the buck stops here. He hung together as a cohesive team. And I think that's going to stand the country well in the long term. We need a cohesive team at the top where people know that occasionally they're going to be mistakes, but they're not going get shoved out to sea.
BLOCK: E.J., my ear was caught by one reform that the president talked about yesterday. He mentioned assigning specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high-priority threats so these leads are pursued and acted upon aggressively. You would think that that would already be done, and that was surprising for me. What did you see here that was surprising in his remarks?
BLOCK: Well, in fact, I think that on the firing issue, the very problem we have here is that we have created a system that is so complicated that you wouldn't know whom he should fire if you wanted him to fire somebody. And I, too, was surprised by that recommendation, that hadn't been taken up before. But I really think, when you look at what happened since the Christmas incident, I think 50 percent of it was substantive - what can we learn from this, and how can we make messages pass through the government more quickly so people can act on them? Well, 50 percent of it was about messaging, that the president really, really, really wanted to show that he was on top of this. A lot of these meetings, the pictures were as important as what was said. And I think that - I agree with David: The buck stops with him was the most important thing. There was a period when he was veering toward looking like he was blaming everybody else. I think that was the most important moment of the last two weeks.
BLOCK: Well, speaking of messaging, since you mentioned that, let's listen to something else that President Obama said toward the end of his remarks, after his comment that "the buck stops with me." Let's listen.
P: We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far- reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.
BLOCK: Now E.J., the president has, in the past, taken heat from Republicans, including Dick Cheney, who claim that the president does not, in fact, consider this a war. This seems to be a direct response to those broadsides. Language is important.
BLOCK: Well, in fact, if you go back through his record, he has said over and over again, since the campaign, that we are at war with terrorism. What the administration has not wanted to use is sort of phrase like global war on terror, and to say that should govern every decision we make on foreign policy. There, there is a difference with the Republicans. But the Republicans are trying to take that difference and say that somehow, the president doesn't think this fight with the terrorists is a war. It's just wrong. And I guess he's going to have to say it over and over again until people believe him.
BLOCK: And David Brooks, do you see partisanship on this question dying down or heating up still?
BLOCK: Oh, dying down.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: No, we never have bipartisanship. No, it's going to the stay the same. I thought Dick Cheney was wrong. The idea that this act was semi-possible because of some policy change at the top - that's absurd. It wasn't because of that. Nonetheless, if Barack Obama says we're at war, maybe we should try the perpetrators of these acts as if they were warriors and not put them in civilian court, as the Detroit bomber and as KSM is being put in the civilian court.
BLOCK: Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
BLOCK: Khalid Sheik Mohammed. And I think that - so there's a little contradiction there, which I think he's going to have to eventually resolve.
BLOCK: Let's turn to the news this week that two longtime Democratic senators, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, have decided, as we said, not to run again. Looking ahead, E.J., to this November's elections, how bad a portent do you think this is? Will there be more of a Democratic exodus? And are we looking at huge Democratic losses?
BLOCK: Well, you know, when all of Washington is going one way, you want to bet on the other side. And, you know, if you heard the talk this week, it's as if the Democrats are going the way of the Whigs or the Federalists.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And that's just wrong. I mean, of course, they've got troubles. So we just had - heard the unemployment report. The Democrats in the House are defending Republican seats that they've won in the last two elections, so some of those are going to be very difficult. But just look at what happened with the dropouts: Byron Dorgan dropping out helps the Republicans in North Dakota; that probably becomes a Republican seat. But Chris Dodd dropping out in Connecticut probably helps the Democrats. He had become very unpopular. Dick Blumenthal, the state attorney general who's going to run for the seat, is very popular. There are, in the Senate, seven vulnerable Democratic seats, about four to six vulnerable Republican seats. Yes, Republicans could win a lot of seats, but it also could be more complicated. Last point is, I think the big difference between this year and 1994 is that Democrats this time are worried and ready. I was talking to a Democratic pollster who was speaking in 1994 June to a group of Democratic governors. He said, look to your right and look to your left. A lot of the people you see won't be in this room next year. They didn't believe him. This time they believe him, and that puts the Democrats in a better position.
BLOCK: David Brooks, what do you think?
BLOCK: So, there's a whole series of rightward shift in the public, recoiling against what they see as the centralization of power in Washington. That does not mean Republicans are going to take over. The Republican Party is still in terrible shape. Nonetheless, there is a recoil against what's happening here. And I think the Republicans will pick up 25, 30 seats in the House. But you've got - let's think, there's at least a 10 or 15 percent chance of a real landslide.
BLOCK: That's where we'll have to leave it this week. Thanks to you both.
BLOCK: Thank you.
BLOCK: Thank you.
BLOCK: David Brooks of the New York Times, and E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
In Los Angeles, there is a new development in the Michael Jackson case. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors may be gearing up to charge the late pop star's physician with involuntary manslaughter. Dr. Conrad Murray was with Jackson last June when the pop star died suddenly. And the doctor has been under investigation ever since, as NPR's Carrie Kahn now reports.
U: All right, we're on our way there.
CARRIE KAHN: It all started with that 911 call from Jackson's rented mansion in Bel Air.
U: Did anybody see him?
U: Yes. We have a personal doctor here with him, sir.
U: Oh, yeah. The doctor is there?
U: Yes. But he is not responding to anything, to no, no - he is not responding to CPR or anything, sir.
U: Oh, OK.
KAHN: Dr. Murray performed CPR on Jackson until paramedics arrived, but it was too late. Murray later admitted to police that he had injected the pop star with a powerful anesthetic called propofol hours before Jackson died. But turning that action into a murder charge would have been nearly impossible for prosecutors to prove, says Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson.
P: The bar for a murder conviction would be very, very high. They would have to show that he intentionally killed Michael Jackson, or that he took an extreme risk that he knew about. This charge doesn't make them prove that. Here, they only have to show that he should have known about the risks, that he acted with gross negligence.
KAHN: Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, says it won't be any easier getting an involuntary manslaughter conviction. She says the case is extremely complicated since Jackson had been using propofol before his death, along with other drugs prescribed by several other doctors. A lawyer for Murray says the doctor has not been called before a grand jury. Murray has long said he has done nothing wrong, even declaring his innocence on a videotape statement.
D: I have done all I could do. I told the truth, and I have faith the truth will prevail.
KAHN: Carrie Kahn, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Psychological abuse is often called the wound no one can see. Because of that, it tends to get less attention than physical abuse. We called on psychologist Steven Stosny, who has written several books on the subject, to help us understand what exactly is psychological abuse.
D: You have to distinguish between abusive acts and an abusive relationship. Psychological abusive behavior is just hurting the feelings of someone, trying to make them feel inferior; they are not as good as you. And that can happen in any relationship. You're upset, you say the wrong thing, you call a name, you're insulting or demeaning. But then you apologize for it and you reconnect. An abusive relationship is where you do those behaviors systematically to control or dominate another person, to get them to submit to what you want. And you don't apologize. You feel self-righteous. You made me do it or you had it coming, or if you were a better person, I wouldn't have to do that.
NORRIS: How prevalent is that in relationships?
D: Well, psychological abuse is very prevalent. It's probably - about one in four relationships go through some period where they will have psychological abuse.
NORRIS: One in four?
D: Yes. It's a precursor to violence; about 40 percent of them will become domestic violence. But psychologically speaking, it actually does more damage than physical abuse. The only time that's not true is if the physical abuse does some kind of crippling or maiming or disfigurement. Otherwise, psychological abuse is more - has more psychological effects. You feel worse about yourself for longer.
NORRIS: What kind of toll does it take over time, then?
D: It impairs your ability to sustain interest, trust, compassion and love. In another words, you can't love without hurt. We are actually programmed to believe what people we love say and how they treat us, to be about us. I call it the mirror of love. The only way you know how lovable you are, and how valuable your love is to other people, is by interacting with people you love. So if somebody hits you, it's a little bit easier to see that that person has a problem, at least an impulse-control problem. But when they're demeaning you or making you feel inferior, you're actually psychologically programmed to believe that's your problem.
NORRIS: Are there triggers?
D: Yes. There is an interesting gender distinction of whether a man is abusive or a woman is abusive. If a woman is abusive, she will usually hit the male vulnerabilities of dread of failure as a provider, protector, lover or parent. So she will say, you know, I could have married somebody who made more money than you. I had better sex with my last boyfriend. You're a terrible parent, and I don't feel secure with you. When a man is abusive, he tends to hit fear vulnerabilities. He'll make her afraid that he is going to hurt her, or he'll trigger her fear of isolation that nobody will love you, nobody will care about you; and her fear of deprivation: She can't have a nest, she can't buy anything for the house, she can't buy anything for herself.
NORRIS: If someone is listening to this and they recognize what you are describing in their own household, what should they do?
D: It's really hard to stop on your own once it becomes habituated behavior. So, they are going to need help to do it. If it's not too entrenched, ordinary marriage counseling can help. If it becomes habituated, though, they need something more heroic. Like, we do three-day boot camps where it's eight hours a day for three, sometimes four days. It needs something that drastic to break through the habits. Once you're in the habit of hurting someone you love, it's very hard to stop the habit.
NORRIS: Mr. Stosny, thank you very much for talking to us.
D: Thank you.
NORRIS: Steven Stosny is an expert on psychological abuse. He is also the author of the book, "Love Without Hurt."
U: So, Stefan, Alabama beat Texas in last night's championship game at the Rose Bowl. But you're still not convinced they should be proclaimed the champion.
STEFAN FATSIS: Look, it was a terrific event: a hundred thousand people in the Rose Bowl, great excitement. But I'm guessing I was not alone in that I kept thinking during the game about the other team that had already finished with a perfect 14 and 0 record: Boise State. And I know this is a dead argument now, but it will not leave my brain and it is becoming a bigger and bigger distraction every year. College football needs a modern, reasonable, equitable playoff system, and not a postseason controlled by a minority of elite athletic institutions the way we have now. I am done until next year. Let's move on.
: Well, glad you got that off your chest.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: Well, the National Football League, of course, does have a playoff system. And conveniently the playoffs start this weekend: two games tomorrow, two on Sunday.
FATSIS: Yup, the New York Jets in Cincinnati and Philadelphia at Dallas tomorrow, Baltimore at New England, Green Bay at Arizona on Sunday. Kind of amazingly, three of the four games are actually rematches from last weekend. Hard to glean too much from those games. Some of those teams didn't play their best players. My only wish for this weekend: heavy snow in Cincinnati or New England. A good snow game is great in the NFL.
: Oh, Vikings. Sorry, Stefan.
FATSIS: Not playing.
: I know but I still have to get my shout-out in, nonetheless.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: Well, off the field, the Supreme Court next week will hear arguments in a case that could have an important business ramification for the NFL and for other sports leagues. Tell us about that, please.
FATSIS: Well, it's called American Needle versus the NFL. The case is narrowly about marketing and merchandising. American Needle is an apparel company. It was shut out of the NFL in 2000 when the league awarded a contract to Reebok. The company argued that the NFL is a collection of 32 competing interests - the teams - and that it violated anti-trust laws by signing a deal with one company. But the reason for what has been intense interest in this case is the fear that the NFL could win a much broader anti-trust exemption that it could then apply to other aspects of its business.
: Other aspects? What you talking about?
FATSIS: Well, concessions, stadium parking, the kinds of things that could increase cost to fans, anti-trust protections on matters like franchise relocation. But the biggest fear is from players' unions. They say that a ruling in the NFL's favor could give the league and other leagues the unchecked ability to control salaries, and restrict free agency, and cripple union leverage in the event of a labor dispute. The likelihood, I think, is that the court will rule that leagues like the NFL can act as a single entity in some areas, like licensing, and as groups of competitive teams in other areas, like player acquisition. But no one is taking any chances here. There've been a lot of briefs filed on both sides.
: Finally, Mr. Fatsis, you've got an article on The New Republic's Web site today about the arrival here in Washington of a man who was coach during your short time as an NFL kicker with the Denver Broncos. We're talking about Mike Shanahan.
FATSIS: Yeah, and this is a big deal in the NFL. He's a pedigreed coach, two-time Super Bowl winner. He's coming to one of the elite franchises in the league - at least in terms of revenue, if not victories, in the last decade. And there's a terrific dynamic that's going to be at play. You've got a very strong owner, Dan Snyder, who's earned a reputation as sort of brash and over- involved in the operations of the team. You've got Mike Shanahan, a very type A, controlling figure, known as a real control freak in the NFL. Whether they will clash over the next few years or whether they will find a way to carve out room for both of their egos to restore the Redskins - what people in Washington sort of insanely believe is their birthright - to be one of the best teams in the NFL, we will see.
: It sounds like the action off the field could be as interesting as the action on the field.
FATSIS: You know, it often is in the NFL, particularly here in the nation's capital. This is a place where Richard Nixon used to call George Allen, the coach of the Redskins, to offer advice and check in from week to week.
: Have a good weekend, Stefan.
FATSIS: You, too, Michele.
: That's Stefan Fatsis. He's the author of "A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL."
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADVERTISEMENT)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
U: Buy any new Hyundai, and if in the next year you lose your income, we'll let you return it.
: The program was called Hyundai Assurance. At the time, I spoke with John Krafcik about the program. He's president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America.
BLOCK: So if you quit your job, we don't cover you for that one, but you know, if you're laid off, if your job causes you to relocate to another country, we cover that as well.
: Well, that was a year ago, and we thought we'd check in with John Krafcik again to see how many takers Hyundai had. Welcome back to the program.
BLOCK: Oh, Michele, thanks, it's great to be back.
: So in 2009, how many cars returned under that Hyundai Assurance program?
BLOCK: You may be surprised to hear that it was less than 100 customers.
: Put that in context for us. Fewer than 100 people returned their cars. How many cars did you sell?
BLOCK: Last year, we sold 435,064. So the fact that only a hundred consumers had to take us up on the offer, we thought was actually pretty good news.
: How many people did you think would return their vehicle?
BLOCK: Frankly, it was quite a bit lower than what we had expected, Michele. And of course, in a way, this is - and we treat it almost like a kind of insurance, a kind of social insurance, so we had to make some, you know, financial set-aside for it. And in the end, it ended up being substantially below what our expectations were, thank goodness.
: How much did the program cost Hyundai?
BLOCK: We're not sharing the specific costs of the program, but the good news is we have decided to continue to offer the program through 2010.
: Did you attribute the strong year you had this year - you had a pretty good year, particularly in comparison to the other automakers. Do you think that that was in part because of this Hyundai Assurance program?
BLOCK: It used to be all about, oh, they make a pretty good, inexpensive car. And now, I think we've been able to add some texture. This was something we were doing on our own. You know, it was classic free enterprise working in an innovative way to build a great story and build demand for the brand, and we think it worked.
: Do you think it worked in part because of the safety net, or was there some other - almost a kind of advertising psychology going on, that you were acknowledging something that people felt, essentially saying, we feel your pain? With the new ads that you have out now, you're saying, by now we hope we'd be further down the road to recovery, and we're not out of the woods yet. Is that the kind of thing that people were responding to as much as the offer to take the car back?
BLOCK: Exactly. Our program was designed to tackle that root cause of economic insecurity, and the way we said it, this very empathic voice - I don't know if you know this, but we used Jeff Bridges in our commercials, and we think Jeff just did such a fantastic job in getting that empathetic tonality that Americans really seemed to respond to.
: Remind us: Whose idea was this?
BLOCK: And Joel took those insights from that focus group and then in a discussion with Mike Buckingham, the head of our Hyundai Motor Finance Captive Group, he mentioned this program. And within 37 days, we had the commercials put together, the program approved, and we were on the air on January 2nd.
: John Krafcik, thanks so much.
BLOCK: Thanks, Michele.
: John Krafcik is president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
The TV industry is abuzz over what NBC will decide to do with Jay Leno. He's been surfing the bottom of his prime-time slot five nights a week. The talk is that NBC might move Leno back to late night, where he was once a ratings king. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, that would be a major programming shake-up.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Last night, Jay Leno got some good jokes out of the rumors.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM "THE JAY LENO SHOW")
BLOCK: It's Katie Couric's birthday today, and you know, she left NBC for another network. I've got to give her a call, see how that's working out. Yeah, yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLAIR: So here's the deal: Nobody but NBC executives really knows for sure where Jay Leno will end up, and it's possible they don't even know yet. But NBC did come out with a statement yesterday saying that the new Jay Leno show, in their words, presented some issues for our affiliates, affiliates like WEEK in Peoria, Illinois, where Mark DeSantis is the general manager.
BLOCK: The promise of - from NBC was that we were going to have something that was unique and different five nights a week.
BLAIR: It hasn't really worked out that way. Low ratings for Leno means fewer people are hanging around to watch the local news on WEEK.
BLOCK: And most affiliates would confirm this. The lead-in for our late news has diminished, and the Conan show, the new "Tonight Show," has not done well, especially - or at least in Peoria. And it has affected our morning news as well because people getting up - you know, if they've gone to bed and they're watching Letterman, they get up and they turn on my competition.
BLAIR: So now what? There are lots of questions. If NBC does move Jay Leno back to the 11:35 p.m. time slot, what happens to Conan O'Brien or Jimmy Fallon, who comes on after him? But an even bigger question is:
BLOCK: What will NBC do with five hours at 10 p.m.?
BLAIR: Eric Deggans is TV critic for the St. Petersburg Times.
BLOCK: The rumors are that they've ordered something like 18 different pilots for dramas to get a sense of what they can put in that time slot. But the time frame we're hearing is that the Leno change could happen in March, after the Winter Olympics.
BLAIR: Deggans says there's no way NBC can be ready with five new dramas by March. Another possibility is moving older hits like "Law Order" back to Leno's slot, and fill in with reality shows early in the evening. Eric Deggans says they might have had a success last year with a new police drama called "Southland."
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM "SOUTHLAND")
BLOCK: (As Officer John Cooper) The victim can be the suspect; the suspect can be the victim.
BLOCK: It had high production values. It had good acting in it. It had edgy subject matter.
BLAIR: But then NBC yanked it from the schedule. General manager Mark DeSantis says NBC had no room for "Southland" because Jay Leno was taking up all the real estate. "Southland" went to cable network TNT. Eric Deggans:
BLOCK: It was a curious move at the time, and I wonder if they wouldn't want to take that back now, given what they have to do with Leno.
BLAIR: NBC network executives will have lots to talk about at their affiliates meeting in a couple of weeks. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Quinn Klinefelter of member station WDET was in the courtroom for the arraignment. And Quinn, what can you tell us about the demeanor of Abdulmutallab in court today?
QUINN KLINEFELTER: And the entire situation was one where there was a lot of angst and a very short time to actually have it be shown, as the actual hearing itself was probably three minutes, if that.
BLOCK: And I gather he did not plead not guilty himself, his lawyer entered the plea for him. Is that right?
KLINEFELTER: True. He stood mute, as they would say under a Michigan law, which at times can be taken as almost a type of silent protest against the charges, although there was no mention of that whatsoever in the courtroom. His defense attorney actually entered the plea of not guilty. There were several Nigerian attorneys in the courtroom as well, but they did not do anything on his behalf and said that they were there only observing on behalf of his family.
BLOCK: And the next step? He's been arraigned now, what happens next?
KLINEFELTER: Well, it remains unclear. There will be another hearing set. But many legal experts don't think he'll ever make it there. They believe that the evidence is so overwhelming that he may have to try to take some type of a plea agreement, although there would be nothing mentioned about that at this point in time. One of the defenses that many people brought up is that he could use what's known as a diminished capacity defense, meaning that he, in fact, had been brainwashed and that would somehow mitigate the incident that he had been a part of. However, legal experts say that even if that was the defense, they believe that it may not be sufficient.
BLOCK: Okay. Quinn, thank you very much.
KLINEFELTER: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's Quinn Klinefelter of member station WDET, talking about today's arraignment of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in federal court.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Andrea Seabrook explains.
ANDREA SEABROOK: The 9/11 Commission was lauded for its deep, bipartisan look at what went wrong before the September 11th attacks. One of its most urgent recommendations was for Congress to reorganize its oversight of intelligence and security agencies. Today, six years after the commission's report, Congress has mostly ignored that recommendation. And 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey says the Christmas Day bombing attempt should jostle the Congress wake.
BLOCK: I'm, in a weird way, sort of glad we had this moment one more time to examine this issue because in 2004, when we made our recommendations, Congress very quickly, with an overwhelming affirmative vote, reformed the executive branch. And I don't think they mustered 15 votes to reform itself.
SEABROOK: Kerrey is a former senator and is now the president of the New School. He says the 9/11 Commission recommendations were very specific. I read several of them out loud to Kerry.
SEABROOK: The TSA and the Congress must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers.
BLOCK: We didn't do it.
SEABROOK: Number 38: We should minimize as much as possible the disruption of national security policymaking during the change of administrations by accelerating the process for national security appointments.
BLOCK: We didn't do it.
SEABROOK: The effects today are obvious - explosives undetected, no chief of the Transportation Security Administration because of a political fight in the Senate, and an oversight process in the Congress that rivals a Department of Motor Vehicles in complexity. Lee Hamilton was the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission.
BLOCK: With regard to Homeland Security, the oversight is not centralized, as we recommended. But the jurisdiction is split among dozens, really, of committees and subcommittees.
SEABROOK: Hamilton is a former congressman who now heads the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank. He says in 2008 alone, officials from the Department of Homeland Security attended more than 370 congressional hearings. They gave more than 5,000 briefings to members of Congress.
BLOCK: That really is an absurdity. When you have that many people involved in the oversight process in the Congress, it greatly dilutes it. Nobody has the clout or the strength to push through improvements. It's just too diffuse and too decentralized.
SEABROOK: There was one big change following the recommendations. When Democrats took control of the Congress in 2006 and Nancy Pelosi became House speaker, she set up a brand-new committee, called the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. She put New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt in charge of it.
T: overseeing an agency, and funding it. The 9/11 Commission specifically recommended this, says Holt, to give Congress more control over the somewhat autonomous intelligence agencies.
SEABROOK: They felt they would give the committee enough clout that the intelligence heads couldn't, well, blow them off.
SEABROOK: Holt says in the three years the new panel has operated, it's improved oversight of domestic surveillance, covert operations and other areas. So it has worked - partly, he says.
SEABROOK: The oversight is stronger. Sure, there was occasional oversight before, but not as strong as it is now. Now, is it good enough? Of course not. Obviously, things aren't working right or we wouldn't have had the Christmas bombing that only the diligence and bravery of people on board the plane stopped.
SEABROOK: No comparable oversight mechanism has been established in the Senate. Now, there are those who argued against implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Heather Wilson, a former Republican congresswoman from New Mexico, has focused on national security for much of her career.
BLOCK: The idea that centralizing oversight improves oversight, I think, is not necessarily true.
SEABROOK: But Wilson does think there's a problem with oversight whenever you have an executive branch and legislative branch controlled by the same party. She saw that in the Bush years, she says, and she's seeing it now.
BLOCK: Can you imagine what these hearings coming up in January would be like if this was a Republican president, and the secretary of Homeland Security had said the system worked? I mean, this would be a firestorm on Capitol Hill. And it is so much more muted.
SEABROOK: So, while lawmakers prepare for hearings next week, Wilson and others hope they can set aside politics as much as possible, and figure out how to correct the systems that failed on Christmas Day. Meanwhile, the 9/11 commissioners say Congress should be delving into its own mistakes, too - though Commissioner Bob Kerrey doesn't have much hope for that.
BLOCK: Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, the Capitol.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Now, some of your letters. The first comes from Kevin Monroe(ph) of Cincinnati, Ohio. He complains about what he calls the persistent use of a particular phrase in coverage of the attempted bombing of an airplane on Christmas. The phrase is failure to connect the dots, which President Obama has employed recently.
BLOCK: Connecting the dots is typically used when referring to solving a difficult problem or puzzle using cryptic clues. The current situation, in which a terrorist was virtually handed to authorities on a silver platter, hardly qualifies for connecting the dots. Mr. Monroe concludes: Perhaps you should begin using the phrase failure to connect to the behemoth, freaking obvious dots, to better characterize the situation.
: Sounds like Jonathan Knowles(ph) of Lake Worth, Florida, is on the math beat for us. He heard our conversation about the formerly tallest structure in the world; that's the TV tower for KBLY in North Dakota. It lost the title this week to a new skyscraper in Dubai.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Knowles got wonky, as he put it. He says: The gentleman being interviewed stated that one could probably see for 20 miles from the top of the tower. In fact, as the tower is 2,063 feet high, the visible horizon would be about 55.6 miles away. The formula for distance to horizon, Mr. Knowles tells us, is D equals the square root of 1.5 times height.
: Got that?
BLOCK: You knew that, right, Michele?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: I don't know if I knew it. Maybe you did, Melissa.
BLOCK: Nuh-uh.
: Well, of course, you know, who knows how far you could see on a cloudy day?
BLOCK: That's true.
: Moving on, a music-minded listener caught something in our interview with a politician that didn't sound quite right. We spoke with Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan about his plans to retire. Christopher Sagan(ph) of Richland, Washington, sent us this.
BLOCK: Senator Dorgan referenced that the Senate - actually, he said Congress - was like the Hotel California. You can check in, but you can't check out. And Mr. Sagan says sorry, Senator, that is the Roach Motel.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMMERCIAL)
U: Black Flag Roach Motel. Roaches check in, but they don't check out.
: Yes, the Roach Motel is a product that captures creepy crawlies. Mr. Sagan then continues...
BLOCK: The irony of the comparison of the Senate and the Roach Motel was not lost on me, but at the Hotel California, it's: You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
: Let us know if one of these nights, we've given you a peaceful, easy feeling - or if we failed to take it to the limit. Come to npr.org, and click on Contact Us.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT")
THE EAGLES: (Singing) Take it to the limit, take it to the limit, take it to the limit...
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's David Schaper laws out the legal side of the story.
DAVID SCHAPER: Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox says that harm now almost here in the form of Asian carp.
MIKE COX: They devour plankton, algae and other material on such a large volume that they have the potential of destroying every Great Lakes fishery, whether it's Lake Michigan, Superior, Erie, Ontario or Huron.
SCHAPER: Cox and others worry that if the Asian carp get through those locks, they will crowd out native species of fish in the Great Lakes, causing an ecological and economic disaster.
COX: Fishing and tourism is a $7 billion industry along the eight lakes - excuse me, the eight states and the two provinces that make up the Great Lakes. And clearly, hundreds of thousands of Michigan jobs are dependent upon fishing and tourism and all that's related to the fact that we are the Great Lakes state.
SCHAPER: But if the Chicago locks are closed, there are many people who make their living here on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, whose livelihoods could be affected. I'm standing on the Mary C. It's a tow boat pushing barges up the canal toward Chicago. Bill Russell is with the company that owns the Mary C, Illinois Marine Towing.
BILL RUSSELL: 16.9 million tons of cargo moves up and down this waterway system into Chicago.
SCHAPER: That cargo is moving 24 hours a day all year round, even on these bitterly cold and blustery days. Russell points to the hulking industries lining the canals that are fed by the barges.
RUSSELL: We're right at the edge of the Citgo Petroleum refinery, one of the users of the waterway. They bring a lot of things in and out of here by barge that they can't move by pipeline. We have salt piles here along the facilities that supply salt to all the cities around Chicago, as well as the city itself. All that salt comes up the river by barge.
SCHAPER: Road salt, petrochemicals, coal, steel, sand, grains and more all move through the Chicago locks. Shipping those materials over land would add more than a million trucks and tens of thousands of rail cars, increasing pollution and congestion. And closing the locks would cost hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, including the 125 at Russell's company.
RUSSELL: Without this river system being open and without the locks, our company would cease to exist because we wouldn't have anything to move if these barges couldn't travel in and out of Chicago.
SCHAPER: David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Now, a moment to remember Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden. She was known to family and friends as Jean, and better known to most of us as the mother of Vice President Joe Biden. Mrs. Biden passed away today. She was 92. In 2008, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Joe Biden told stories about his mother as she smiled from the audience.
V: As a child I stuttered, and she lovingly would look at me and tell me, Joey, it's because you're so bright, you can't get the thoughts out quickly enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
V: When I was not as well dressed as the other kids, she'd look at me and say, Joey, oh, you're so handsome, honey, you're so handsome.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: In a statement today, Vice President Biden said this of his mother: Her strength, which was immeasurable, will live on in all of us.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, another museum here in Washington is celebrating an experience of a different kind - the Elvis experience.
(Soundbite of song, "Hound Dog")
Mr. ELVIS PRESLEY (Singer): (Singing) You ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time...
RAZ: Yesterday would've been the king's 75th birthday. And to celebrate, we walked down to the National Portrait Gallery, which just unveiled an exhibit of fine art called "One Life: Echoes of Elvis."
Mr. WARREN PERRY (Exhibit Curator, "One Life: Echoes of Elvis"): If you look around the room, I think you'll see a lot of images by some really great artists of the 20th century. We have Howard Finster represented here, Robert Arneson, William Eggleston, and the most prolific painter of royalty and reigning heads of state of all time, Ralph Wolfe Cowan is also represented in this gallery.
RAZ: Let's look at that portrait by Ralph Wolfe Cowan. And this is the only portrait that Elvis ever sat for.
Mr. PERRY: It's fantastic. First of all, that's a Graceland that you'll never see. The ground in front of the portrait is almost desolate-looking. It looks like Tara after the invasion of Georgia. It's very dramatic. And Ralph uses these bold colors. You see that steel blue in the sky and then you see the sunset. And then you see that red shirt that Elvis is wearing. And Elvis just pops almost out of that shirt. It's a very stunning good-looking Elvis that Ralph features in this image.
RAZ: Oftentimes, when - I think when people hear the term Elvis and art, they think of Elvis as sort of the tacky art. But I mean, here we're surrounded by some of these great iconic American artists. I want to ask you about the Howard Finster pieces. What was he doing in this piece here? What was he trying to portray?
Mr. PERRY: It's an interesting image of Elvis with the wings of an angel coming off of him. But it's not the adult Elvis, it's not the young Elvis, it's the very, very young Elvis - it's the baby Elvis in a set of overalls and a large hat. And Finster, I think, is trying to insinuate Elvis in this pantheon of very, very blessed men. Finster saw Elvis as something of an emissary of God, as a messenger, if you will.
RAZ: I mean, you look around this room and it's so clear in almost every single one of this pieces it's almost as if Elvis is divine or as in this sculpture here, this bust, as Julius Caesar.
Mr. PERRY: There are a lot of pieces that place Elvis out of the earthly orbit in this room, and certainly, the artisan piece of Elvis as Caesar is one of them. It's very much larger than Elvis, larger than life. You've got the guitar crest emblazoned across the armor in the front. And then you've got - if you look closely - titles of Elvis's songs stamped into the pedestal.
RAZ: Now, I'm looking at this bust in Elvis as Julius Caesar. We know that Julius Caesar was one of the great Roman emperors - not necessarily the greatest, but certainly the best known, the one that people remember when they think of the Roman emperors. You could probably say the same thing about Elvis. I mean, he wasn't necessarily the greatest performer or artist in American history but the best known. I mean, he was the king.
Mr. PERRY: I think time will certainly tell if he's the greatest with respect to numbers, but I wouldn't want to pick a fight with an Elvis fan about it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: What do you think it was about him? I mean, was it his appearance? Was it his music? Was it his charisma? Or is it something that just isn't possible to know?
Mr. PERRY: Elvis had that something, that undefinable something. You got to admit, the guy was a great-looking guy. The fact that he could sing as well as he did certainly enhances all of this, as well as he was fun. You don't hear a lot of mean stuff about Elvis. You hear stories of practical jokes and you see him teasing the audiences in his shows and you see him having a good time.
There's also this: when it came time for Elvis to go into the Army, like so many other Americans, he went into the Army. And that brought him into the mainstream. But prior to that, he we liked because he was a rebel. He - really, he set the pattern for the rock and roll generation in many ways.
(Soundbite of song, "Rip It Up")
Mr. PRESLEY: (Singing) Well, it's Saturday night and I just got paid...
RAZ: Warren Perry is the curator of the "Echoes of Elvis" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery here in Washington, D.C. The exhibit continues through August. And you can see portraits of Elvis and listen to some of his greatest hits at our Web site, that's NPR.org.
(Soundbite of song, "Rip It Up")
Mr. PRESLEY: (Singing) I'm gonna rip it up, and ball tonight. Well, I got me a date and I won't be late. I picked her up in my '88.' Shag on down by the social hall when the joint starts jumping I'll have a ball.
RAZ: And that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Have a great night.
GUY RAZ, host:
There's a job that pays in the low six figures. There is no dress code, no cubicle, no office politics. And it's a job that, even in a recession, is pretty secure. Now, the customers can be a bit of a handful, but it's nothing a few treats and a long walk can't satisfy.
Reporter Josie Holtzman got an inside look at a business that's bucking the recession - or at least walking it off.
JOSIE HOLTZMAN: It's 10 o'clock in the morning in downtown New York, and Casey Butcher is ready for work. But he's forgotten his paper.
Mr. CASEY BUTCHER (Dog Walker): Shoot. You don't have the paper, do you?
HOLTZMAN: A lot of New Yorkers start the day with the morning paper. But for Casey, the newspaper serves a different purpose.
Mr. BUTCHER: Mochi, the Moch-meister(ph).
HOLTZMAN: Maybe not for him, but for his first client of the day.
(Soundbite of a dog barking)
HOLTZMAN: Mochi, a French bulldog puppy. See, Casey works for a company called Club Pet NYC. He's in the dog-walking business, and Mochi is about to take care of his own business.
Mr. BUTCHER: A lot of dog walkers invest in the blue poop bags. I prefer using an amNewYork when I can. I'm a little aware of my carbon footprint. I can go through like, 20 bags a day.
HOLTZMAN: It's not the most glamorous way to start a day, but even in this economy, poop pays. How much it pays? Well, that can be a little controversial.
An article in the 2004 New York Daily News asked, people how much do you make? A dog walker named Sammy Swale reported about $50,000, which prompted some pretty dismayed online responses such as, I went to grad school for five years for a Ph.D., and I still make less than the dog walker? Then someone else wrote in: The dog walker's lying; we make much more than that. Casey agrees.
Mr. BUTCHER: My friend got me this job. He's making right - just about six figures. Somewhere like, between $90,000 and $100,000. And that's with the company taking half. So just the work he does walking dogs generates, you know, a little under $200,000 a year.
HOLTZMAN: But not just anyone is cut out for this line of work. Walkers say it's a lot harder than it looks. First, there's the physical toll. Sherman Ewing, the guy who started Club Pet NYC, said his foot grew a size and a half in his first year of walking dogs. He walked about 10 miles a day. There are also the logistics, like the keys to 200 apartments.
Mr. ERIC HAHN (Dog Walker): I can tell if any are missing, just from the sheer weight of it.
HOLTZMAN: That's Eric Hahn, who has worked for Sherman for the past seven years. He considers himself somewhat of an expert walker. But even so, walking five dogs at a combined weight of 350 pounds, that can get a little bit tricky.
Mr. HAHN: There is a method. Everybody kind of sees you with a bunch of dogs and they think it's just random. But whoever is full and has not been emptied yet is on the outside. It's a matter of rotation. I need to keep track of who's empty and who's full because when a dog is about to go and you go into a lobby...
HOLTZMAN: Well, you can imagine what happens next. But what makes dog walking truly challenging is you have to be good with dogs and with people.
Mr. HAHN: I have people where their kids call me Uncle Eric. I've had dinner with my clients. Really, you know, it's not like I'm the help, necessarily, you know? It's more of extended member of the family.
HOLTZMAN: The people at Club Pet won't call dog walking recession-proof, but it certainly will never require a government bailout or a stimulus package because unlike the banking industry, dog walkers can always count on a high rate of deposit.
For NPR News, this is Josie Holtzman.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, once Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan announced their retirements this week, many pundits were quick to declare the Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate majority doomed.
(Soundbite of Fox News' "Hannity")
Mr. SEAN HANNITY (Host, ): ...2010 prominent Democrats all around the country are running scared.
Unidentified Man #1: Keeping those 60 in November is going to be very tough.
Unidentified Woman: This really could endanger Democrats already endangered 60 vote majority.
Unidentified Man #2: Look, Democrats are not going to have 60 votes next year.
RAZ: New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez is the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I spoke with him yesterday and asked whether it's realistic to think the Democrats could actually hold on to 60 seats.
Senator ROBERT MENENDEZ (Democrat, New Jersey; Chairman, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee): Midterm elections of the president's party, historically, is a challenge. But we believe that with an excellent group of incumbents who are up for reelection with six Republican retirements creating open seats, I think that we will be in a good position come November.
RAZ: But it sounds like you're setting your party up for lower expectations. I mean, saying things like midterms are traditionally a weak spot for the party in power.
Sen. MENENDEZ: Well, that's just a historical truth.
RAZ: So it's a...
Sen. MENENDEZ: Having said that, we're still seeking to defy that history and be as strong as possible this November.
RAZ: I mean, obviously, you're hoping to gain seats. But more importantly, I suspect you're hoping not to lose any seats. And there are some vulnerable places for the Democrats, there's just several vulnerable places, including Nevada, the home state of the majority leader Harry Reid. Surely, it would be embarrassing to Democrats if you lost that race.
Sen. MENENDEZ: Well, Harry Reid is going to win his reelection. He has built himself a very strong record, and that record is going to carry him through in this year's election.
RAZ: Let me ask you about some of the states where you think Democrats could actually pick seats up. Which states are you primarily focused on?
Sen. MENENDEZ: Well, in the six open seats, there's five very competitive races. We're certainly focused in Missouri. Robin Carnahan, the secretary of State, already a very popular statewide figure; Roy Blunt has a pretty tough history to carry into Missouri, having been a person who carried out President Bush's and Tom DeLay's work in the House of Representatives.
I look at Ohio and I see Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher doing great efforts on jobs. And then compared to Rob Portman, Bush's trade ambassador and OMB director. And then I look at New Hampshire and Paul Hodes versus the candidates running on the Republican side.
And the other thing to note in all of these states, Republicans are having one bloody process in their primaries. And so, not only are they spending a lot of money, but even their, quote, unquote, "preferred candidate" is constantly being pushed by the right. They're moving outside of the center, which is where one would want to be when it comes to the general election.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. I mean, I understand that part of your job is to remain optimistic, of course, as the head of the Senatorial Campaign Committee, but you heard the clips we played earlier. Do you think that it's a media creation that the Democrats are concerned about losing seats in the Senate, or do you think that there's some basis in reality to that?
Sen. MENENDEZ: Well, I think certainly the two retirements is a bit of an overstatement in terms of the dire nature of the clips you played when Republicans have six incumbents that have announced their retirements. I mean, they have to run the entire table. They have to win each and every one of those seats just to stay even in their present minority status. So I'm not quite sure how the stories play the way they do.
RAZ: In your role running this committee to elect Democrats to the Senate, what race is keeping you up at night?
Sen. MENENDEZ: You know, I'm like a mother hen: every race keeps me up.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: That's New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. He heads up the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Senator Menendez, thank you so much.
Sen. MENENDEZ: Thank you.
We asked Menendez's counterpart, Texas Senator John Cronyn, the head of the Republican Senatorial Committee, to talk about his party's prospects in 2010. He was unavailable, so we called Ed Goeas, one of the best known Republican strategists in the country to give us a sense of how the party expects to do this fall.
Ed Goeas, welcome to the program.
Mr. ED GOEAS (Republican Pollster; President/CEO, The Tarrance Group): Oh, thank you, Guy. Glad to be here.
RAZ: You just heard Senator Menendez acknowledging the obvious, that the party in power almost always takes a hit...
Mr. GOEAS: Right.
RAZ: ...in the midterm elections. But there has been so much ink spilled over these Democratic retirements, we've almost forgotten that there are more longtime incumbent Republican senators not running for reelection.
Mr. GOEAS: You know, I'm working in several of those races that he mentioned. Particularly, the Ohio race, we're running ahead. In New Hampshire, we have a good solid lead ahead. I heard a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the senator when he was talking about the various races.
The numbers are not good for the Democrats. We did a survey with actually Democrat pollster, Celinda Lake, the battleground poll right before they broke for Christmas. And at that point, we were finding Republican intensity 13 points higher than the intensity of Democratic voters. The independent voters actually more intense. Quite frankly, in the off non-presidential year election, it's more the angry independents that vote.
RAZ: Ed Goeas, let me ask you about a point Senator Menendez raised, which is the internal challenge within the Republican Party from the right. And we see it most acutely in Florida, where Governor Charlie Crist could lose the Republican nomination for the Senate seat to a far more conservative candidate, Marco Rubio. Democrats are arguing if that happens they'll be well-placed to win that seat because Rubio is too conservative for Florida. Isn't this a problem for Republicans?
Mr. GOEAS: No, not at all. In fact, that is probably the only race you could point to where there's a major competition between what is being portrayed as a more conservative candidate versus a moderate candidate. I think portraying him as just a conservative candidate is really selling him short. He is one of the younger, more aggressive conservatives, yes. But he also has a great deal of experience in the state legislature down in Florida, and is really touching a lot of positive notes.
RAZ: The Democrats now have 58 seats in the Senate, plus two members, independent members who caucus with them. Which seats will the Republicans be focusing on closely?
Mr. GOEAS: Well, I think in Connecticut, it's still a little bit hard to tell with Dodd out. That was obviously the most vulnerable seat. I think if you look at North Dakota, with Dorgan out, that is almost a probably win for Republicans at this point; Colorado, looking very good with Republicans, both with the Democratic governor not running for reelection and the appointed senator in the state there. Harry Reid, out in Nevada, he is not able to be Nevada's senator over the last couple of years. He's now the Democratic leader. So there's just a handful right there.
RAZ: That's Ed Goeas. He's the president of The Tarrance Group. It's a Republican research and strategy firm.
Ed Goeas, thank you so much.
Mr. GOEAS: Thank you, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
And the big story this week: A failure to connect the dots.
President BARACK OBAMA: The U.S. government had the information, scattered throughout the system, to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack.
Representative PETER KING (Republican, New York): This was more than a stumble. This was really a glaring error.
Pres. OBAMA: I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately, the buck stops with me.
RAZ: That was President Obama and Republican Congressman Peter King on the intelligence lapses that almost led to disaster on Christmas Day. It's one of the stories our news analyst, "The Atlantic's" James Fallows, has been following this week.
Jim, I haven't spoken to you since 2009. So Happy New Year.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, "The Atlantic Monthly"): Happy New Year to you, Guy. Welcome back.
RAZ: A dramatic public admission by the president this week. He is responsible, he said, for the gaps that allowed a known radical to board that flight to the U.S.
Mr. FALLOWS: I'm sure there are many aspects to this case we're going to be studying for a long time, and in the etiology of the actual problem itself and the responses of the Obama administration versus the way the Bush administration responded, when the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, had his aborted airline attempt in late 2001.
So far, we can see that President Obama has been quicker to take personal responsibility himself and to issue a report. But in a way, that's understandable, in that the Bush administration was still, you know, recovering from the shock from 9/11.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FALLOWS: What I think is really interesting about these intelligence failures of the past week: the would-be Nigerian bomber, I think, illustrates or helps us see the combination of incompetence and brilliance with which al-Qaida has carried out some of its plots over the last eight years. Incompetence in the sense that we have another sort of unfortunate figure who couldn't quite carry off the same kind of bomb that was tried eight years ago, but brilliance in the sense of the response that it evokes from the whole U.S. system.
It was because of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, that tens of millions of people have been taking off their shoes ever since and no liquids on airplanes...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FALLOWS: ...and who knows what kind of change in air travel we're going to have now. And that is something to take seriously of just how a small number of people had these enormous ripple effect changes.
RAZ: Jim, as we heard earlier in the program, a tough outlook for Democrats possibly going into the midterm elections in the fall - nothing new. But what will it mean for President Obama's ambitious agenda if he loses that filibuster-proof majority he now has?
Mr. FALLOWS: Certainly, it seems probable now that the Democrats won't have 60 seats in the Senate. And after these midterm elections, they probably will still have majority in both Houses. For the Democrats to lose their current majority in the House, they'd have to have losses on the scale of Bill Clinton in the 1994 elections. And people don't think that's likely.
But I suspect what might happen, if the Democrats retain a majority in both Houses but don't have the 60 seats super majority, you might see a resurrection of the whole sort of anti-filibuster argument, which you've heard over the last month or two of saying, is it really fair to have this kind of super majority, anti-Democratic provision in the Senate? That is something that each new Congress can change for itself by majority votes, so we might conceivably see a discussion (unintelligible) raised again.
RAZ: Hmm. Jim, I'm going to embarrass you here because you're such a modest guy. But I think everyone ought to read your cover story in The Atlantic this month because unlike so many stories we've heard about America's so-called decline, you actually think we're in pretty good shape.
Mr. FALLOWS: I guess my first reply should be to say, aw, shocks. Well, thanks. I do hope people can read the story, which is online at The Atlantic site. I spent a lot of time on it interviewing people when I came back from China. And I tried to do something that I think is not that normal in our political discourse to make both a pretty positive and a somewhat negative argument.
The pretty positive one is about the basic resiliency and fitness to prevail of the U.S. in modern, economic and cultural, and other kinds of competition, precisely because this is a place where people still want to come and lots of our businesses and institutions are self-renewing. The negative part involves the one part of our life, which is not so self-renewing, which is our governing structure.
So I mean this to be an encouraging and cautionary tale, and hope that the net is to give people some sense of where we can focus our efforts going forward.
RAZ: Finally, Jim, before we let you go, I understand reading your blog this week that you are one of the few lucky people to have gotten your hands on the Google smartphone - the Nexus One. What do you think about it?
Mr. FALLOWS: It is a lot of fun. And I'm sure that all kinds of people will debate its impact on the industry, in having this model where you can buy a phone without having to buy wireless service.
What I love so far is voice search. I can speak in a query to a Google-type search - in fact, a Google search, it's a Google phone - and it comes back with the actual real answers. That, to me, is something like the Holy Grail.
RAZ: That's The Atlantic's James Fallows. He's with us most Saturdays here on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Jim, thanks. And talk to you next week.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: And, Jim, one more thing.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes?
RAZ: I hope you'll keep that Google phone tucked away while you're driving.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLOWS: It's a deal.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, you can't use a Google phone to drive a car, at least yet, but technology has arrived for things like wireless Internet in cars and iPhone apps that could control features on your dashboard. Those were unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
Joel Johnson is there. He's an editor with Gizmodo.com.
And, Joel, what are the trends you're seeing there in terms of, you know, in-car technology?
Mr. JOEL JOHNSON (Editor, Gizmodo.com): The big trend this year is car manufacturers starting to give up trying to build their own gadgets to put in cars and trying to figure out how to let you use your smartphone in your car and wire it all up into the existing system.
Ford, for instance, announced some upgrades with a system they called SYNC.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. JOHNSON: And, for example, one of the things they were showing was an Android phone that runs the Pandora streaming service...
RAZ: Pandora, we should point out, is a music service.
Mr. JOHNSON: Yeah, exactly, a music streaming service; something that people normally would - originally listened to on their Web browser and then eventually on their phone. And now, you can plug it into the car itself. And instead of having to look down and use the phone to control things, you can just push a button on the steering wheel and it'll talk back to the phone and allow everything to go through.
So they're starting to realize that people want some of these services in their car. But, you know, if you only buy a car every five years, that computer is going to be pretty old. But you buy a new cell phone every year or two, so they're trying to figure out how to keep those all together.
RAZ: Right. And you talked about this Ford system, the SYNC. Ford, this American car company, has actually produced the gold standard for like what an in-car technology should be, right?
Mr. JOHNSON: Yeah, it's pretty impressive, I have to say. I've been looking at this story quite a bit over the last month or so, and I talked to car companies from all over the world. And I think Ford has the best system out there right now. They're a couple generations ahead of probably where everybody else is at.
RAZ: Hmm. Now, you mentioned Pandora. This, you know, music streaming service that I use on my iPhone. You need an Internet connection to use it. Does this mean that they're making wireless Internet in cars that's going to be available any time soon?
Mr. JOHNSON: So there's been a kind of trend over the last couple of years to try to get Internet in cars.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. JOHNSON: And what Ford has done - and not to just get back to Ford - but again, they're the ones kind of doing this right. They're going to allow you to just plug in a 3G USB stick right into the car and then use your existing cellular Internet in the car.
RAZ: Like big Wi-Fi hubs.
Mr. JOHNSON: Yeah, exactly.
RAZ: Drive in Wi-Fi hubs.
I want to move on to another pretty cool thing that I read about: Applications that they're designing for iPhones and for Blackberries that could control things inside of your car, right? I mean, tell us about what's out there.
Mr. JOHNSON: It's going to be a long time before applications can actually control things that matter in the car, that are going to be safety-related issues.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. JOHNSON: You're not going to tune your car. You're not going to be able to input a lot of information into your car for a long time.
But what is opening up a lot more is allowing your car's sensors and the information that it's gathering to talk back to the iPhone. What's going to happen - it's happening in phones, it's happening in almost all of our technology. All of the things our gadgets and our technology can sense are starting to talk to each other. And we're trying to figure out how to use all that data to learn new things.
So the idea of being able to open up your car door locks with your iPhone, like, yeah, you know, that might happen at some point when they can really get the security tightened. But I think a lot of the more interesting stuff is about what happens when your car can talk back to your phone and then on through to the Internet, and what happens when cars become parts of the whole network together, not just individual islands.
RAZ: That's Joel Johnson. He's an editor for Gizmodo and he's at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Joel, thanks very much for joining us.
Mr. JOHNSON: It's a pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
And as Joel mentioned, cars of the future will probably become networked: Fords talking to Hyundai, Chevys to Toyotas. It's actually a pretty radical concept considering how the one-time Big Three carmakers here in the U.S. - GM, Ford and Chrysler - were doing everything but cooperating.
All that changed in the fall of 2008, when the heads of the Detroit Three and the chief of the workers' union, UAW, all went to Capitol Hill, cap in hand asking for help from Congress. Now, eventually, the government did bail out GM and Chrysler - companies that were close to collapse.
Journalist Paul Ingrassia covered the rise and fall of the auto industry, and he tells a story in his new book. It's called "Crash Course." And he says back in its heyday, American cars and the men who made them were national icons.
Mr. PAUL INGRASSIA (Author, "Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster"): It's really hard to believe today. I mean, when Henry Ford bought out the Model T in 1908, there were far more orders than Ford could fill for the car. It was like people lining up for iPhones today.
In 1955, General Motors became the first corporation on the planet to earn more than a billion dollars in a single year. And the Big Three car companies, which today don't even have half of the U.S. car market, back then had 95 percent of the car market. So their power over the American psyche in films and in music and in movies and all that, as well as in economic clout, was incredible.
RAZ: And GM, I mean, at a certain time, and not in the distant past, was one of the biggest companies in the world - at one time the biggest company in the world.
Mr. INGRASSIA: Oh, absolutely. You know, when I was transferred to Detroit by the Wall Street Journal in 1985, GM topped the Fortune 500 list. It was easily the largest company in the country and in the world. And it's been a steady decline and sad decline since then.
RAZ: You write that the seeds of collapse are there already in the 1970s, particularly when GM agrees to a demand by the union, by the United Auto Workers, to allow union employees to retire after 30 years with full pension. Why did GM agree to do that?
Mr. INGRASSIA: Don't forget, at that time, Guy, the U.S. auto industry was characterized by a corporate oligopoly and a union monopoly. So the whole ethos of the system, be on the labor or management side, is that we can pass the cost on to consumers and they don't really have a choice because everybody's got to have a car in America if they want to get around.
RAZ: I mean, it meant that you could join a company like GM or Ford or Chrysler at the age of 18 and retire at 48 with a full pension.
Mr. INGRASSIA: Yes. Although I might add that in 1970, there was originally -the 30 and out retirement plan did require a minimum age of 58. It was only three years later that they did away with the minimum age requirement. So, you're exactly right. You could retire at 48, and then if you lived until age 78 or 79, you could actually collect full pension and benefits for a longer period of time than you worked.
RAZ: Now, you can't understand the decline of the auto industry without understanding the relationship between these companies and the unions. Describe why the relationship was so contentious right up until last year when the unions essentially came to Congress with the automakers asking for a bailout?
Mr. INGRASSIA: You know, it really goes back to the union's organizing effort against the car companies to gain recognition in the 1930s, which was marked by violent struggles and violent resistance. So, this whole ethos of we have to struggle, you know, we have to get more, this whole idea of, you know, we don't really have a stake in the company's prosperity because their prosperity is assured by their oligopoly.
The old 1960s Cold War term Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, is actually what happened in Detroit.
RAZ: In 1984, GM and the UAW agreed to create something called the jobs bank. Describe what that was for us, sir.
Mr. INGRASSIA: Sure. The jobs bank originally was intended to be limited in scope. And it basically said, if we put in new plant technology in a factory and workers are displaced for a year or so, we will pay those workers 95 percent of their full salary to give them a chance to adjust.
Within a few years, by 1990, GM just, you know, let the fences wide open and said, for whatever reason, if a worker is laid off in a factory, that worker will get 95 percent of their wages indefinitely.
RAZ: To the point where you write in 2007 GM was paying something like $800 million a year to pay workers who weren't actually working. I mean, some of them were playing cards.
Mr. INGRASSIA: Well, exactly. You know, playing cards or going to Disney World or whatever. I mean, they didn't have to show up in sort of a detention hall, if you will, every day but there was a lot of abuse of the system, let's put it that way.
RAZ: One of the former heads of the UAW, Leonard Woodcock, is quoted in your book shortly after he stepped down. And he said this in the 1970s. He said, our members have the best contract that people with their skills and education could ever hope to get, but we've convinced them that with every new contract they're entitled to more. How much responsibility, in your view, does the UAW have in the decline of the American auto industry?
Mr. INGRASSIA: Well, I think it has a lot of responsibility, although I hasten to add, Guy, I would put the major responsibility on management. Management agreed to all this stuff. And in fact, in some cases, such as the jobs bank, they even proposed it, you know, amazingly enough.
But it even goes deeper than that. The cultural divide between the union and the management was actively encouraged by a lot of ways that workers were treated by managers. You know, I remember once in 1987, General Motors asked me to visit a few factories to see how this new age of labor management cooperation was working. And I went to an engine factory and I got the dog and pony show for several hours and it looked quite good.
And before I took the flight back to Detroit, I said, gee, I have to go to the men's room before heading to the airport. And they directed me to the men's room, but there was not one, but there were two men's rooms, an hourly men's restroom and a salaried men's room, right next to each other.
RAZ: Two separate restrooms?
Mr. INGRASSIA: Segregated restrooms like there was in the Old South but not by race but by rank. It was amazing.
RAZ: Now, Paul Ingrassia, how much responsibility does Congress have for the decline of the U.S. auto industry?
Mr. INGRASSIA: Look, there's a lot of culprits here. But in the 1970s, Congress passed the Corporate Average Fuel Economy laws in which they mandated fuel economy requirements. And they really forced Detroit to build unprofitable cars to meet these fuel economy requirements. The much saner approach would have been to raise gasoline taxes. I mean, that's why they have fuel-efficient cars in Europe because gas is $8 a gallon.
If we would have started raising gasoline taxes step by step 30 years ago and boosted gasoline prices and at the same time cut income taxes so you're taxing consumption, not production, you would've had a much more rational automotive transportation system and encouraged the consumption of small cars, not big SUVs.
RAZ: Do you believe that the U.S. auto industry will ever be as powerful as it once was?
Mr. INGRASSIA: Well, no. I don't think so. First of all, the economy is much more diversified. You're never going to have a big three anymore. You're going to have a medium six companies. And half of the medium six will be foreign companies doing business here but they'll all have between, let's say, eight and 20 percent of the market share.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if the U.S. auto industry is not as dominant as it once was, because we have new industries - high-tech industries, Silicon Valley - that we didn't have. But I do think it's important that we keep a manufacturing footprint in this country.
And the fact that the Japanese and Korean and German car companies are successful and financially profitable building cars here indicates that with proper management, we can do it.
RAZ: Paul Ingrassia covered Detroit for the Wall Street Journal. His new book is called "Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster."
Paul Ingrassia, thank you so much.
Mr. INGRASSIA: Thank you, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of song, "Gumby")
Unidentified Woman: (Singing) Gumby. He was once...
RAZ: Claymation pioneer, Art Clokey, the creator of "Gumby" and "Davey and Goliath," died yesterday at his home in California. Our producer Petra Mayer has this appreciation.
PETRA MAYER: Everybody knows "Gumby." Even if you didn't grow up watching his adventures on TV, that wedge-shaped green head is a cultural icon.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Gumby")
Unidentified Man (Actor): (as Gumby) Oh, boy.
MAYER: In the early 1950s, Art Clokey was teaching school by day and studying film at night. For one project, he set up a fantastic landscape of colored clay on a ping pong table in his stepdad's garage. In over 4,000 carefully posed shots, he made the balls, rods and squiggles of clay dance to some crazy jazz beats.
(Soundbite of music)
MAYER: Clokey called his film "Gumbasia," a sort of mash-up of Disney's "Fantasia" and the gooey mud called gumbo that his stepdad recalled playing with as a child. But why use clay rather than real actors? In a 2002 interview, Clokey said it was just cheaper.
Mr. ART CLOKEY (Animator): It was more economical and easier to do this study film without using people.
MAYER: Necessity was the mother of an invention that ended up changing Clokey's life. He showed "Gumbasia" to Sam Engel, a film producer at Columbia. Engel loved it. He told Clokey:
Mr. CLOKEY: That's the most exciting film I've ever seen in my life. He said, can you make little figures out of that clay? And I want to improve the quality of television for children - he had young children. He said, I'll finance a pilot film if you'll make some children's films with it using clay animation.
MAYER: And so "Gumby" and his orange pal, Pokey, began to take shape. Clokey's wife Ruth suggested a sort of gingerbread man shape. His favorite color was green, so Gumby was green. And that distinctive wedge-shaped head was inspired by Clokey's father, who sported a similar hairdo in an old photo.
(Soundbite of music)
MAYER: "Gumby" began airing as part of "The Howdy Doody Show," and in 1956 he struck out on his own. He stayed in production throughout the 1960s alongside other Clokey shows like the Christian-themed "Davey and Goliath."
(Soundbite of TV show, "Davey and Goliath")
Unidentified Man (Actor): (as Goliath) Davey...
MAYER: By the early '80s though, "Gumby's" popularity had begun to fade a little. Until...
(Soundbite of TV show, "Saturday Night Live")
Unidentified Man: How are you, Gum?
Mr. EDDIE MURPHY (Comedian): (as Gumby) Not Gum, Gumby. I'm Gumby, damn it.
MAYER: Eddie Murphy's cranky cigar-chomping version of Gumby for "Saturday Night Live" sparked a new surge of interest in the little green guy, eventually leading to a revival of the television series, a movie and scores of new bendy toys. Clokey didn't mind Murphy's mockery. He told a newspaper in 2002 that Gumby can laugh at himself.
(Soundbite of music)
MAYER: Art Clokey died Friday at his home in California. He was 88 years old.
Petra Mayer, NPR News.
(Soundbite of song)
Unidentified Group: (Singing) 'Cause he's Gumby, Gumby, Gumby, the magical clay boy.
GUY RAZ, host:
There's a new museum going up here in Washington but right now its walls are just virtual. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture is open but on the Web. The physical building won't be done for at least five years. So in the meantime, the founding director, Lonnie Bunch, is scouring the country from antique shows to shops to basements and he's looking for artifacts that tell the story of black America.
And while he's getting things organized, Lonnie Bunch has agreed to come on this program from time to time to talk about how things are coming together.
Welcome.
Mr. LONNIE BUNCH (Founding Director, Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture): Thank you.
RAZ: Tell me about the process of opening a museum of this scale. How do you go about building a museum?
Mr. BUNCH: It is clearly something not for the faint of heart. You'd start like you'd start almost of writing a writing project. What are the stories you really think you have to tell? What do you want to do that differentiates that museum from any other museum of its type in the country and in the world? And then, how do you really think about what a national museum should do?
RAZ: What about the actual physical artifacts? I mean, there are so many museums of American history all across the country, and presumably many of these museums have artifacts that would be of interest to your museum. I mean, artifacts that are important to African-American history.
Mr. BUNCH: Well, if you said to me what is the thing that worried me most going into this job - wasn't raising money, wasn't building the building, it was building the collections. I knew that there were some things. But even if I went through the entire Smithsonian, it would only give me 20 percent of what I needed.
And as I looked around the country, while there were places that had materials and objects we could use, that to be able to tell a comprehensive story, a lot of that wasn't there. One of the things we did was we created a program called Saving Our African-American Treasures. And really, the goal was to help preserve things.
So, we put together a plan. We brought in conservators and preservation experts from the Smithsonian and the local communities, and we said, listen, we're coming to your town. So, we want to do like an antique road show.
RAZ: What are some of the things that you found?
Mr. BUNCH: I'll tell you, in Chicago, what we did - what we found was a woman came in and said, you know, I got a Pullman porter's hat. Most Pullman porter hats are blue or gray. She had one that was a white leather hat, which meant that it was really used by the sort of leader of the Pullman porters whenever they were doing something like servicing presidents or big vice presidents.
RAZ: Oh, wow.
Mr. BUNCH: So it was a really rare thing. And I had only seen it in photographs. So to have it brought right in front of you, I immediately said, what are you going to do with that? And she said, I think this ought to go to the Smithsonian. And I said, I couldn't agree with you more.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: Lonnie Bunch, tell us a little bit about what we could expect to see in the museum.
Mr. BUNCH: Well, one of the things that's important to me is to craft a museum that on the one hand is a place that helps you remember the African-American experience, remember the names you think you know - the Martin Luther Kings, the Sojourner Truths - but to really understand those stories that you don't know. To really understand what it was like to be an enslaved woman or to really understand what it meant for a family to leave Mississippi to the Southside of Chicago in 1917.
So, one of the things that you will see is an amazing artifact. It's - I like to call it a Jim Crow railroad car. And it looks like a old standard 1940s railroad car, until you walk in. And the first half of the car was for white passengers. Beautiful seats, amazing bathrooms for 1940; and then you walk towards the back and there was a little swinging door that said colored. And when you walked through that door, the back part was much smaller and just had benches.
And what I realized is, helping people, especially younger people, understand what segregation means. This would be a wonderful way to do it - to have people be able to walk through that car and just understand something as simple as getting from one part of the South to another, you had to sit in this kind of Jim Crow railroad car. So, those are the kind of things that we want people to see.
RAZ: But half of the funding for the museum is coming from the federal government but you've got to raise the other half. That's a lot of money. There have been some African-American history museums that have had trouble keeping their doors open. How confident are you that you can do this?
Mr. BUNCH: I've been struck by the number of average people who want to give to this museum. And the best way to sum that up is: I was in Austin, Texas. I went to get my shoes shined and it was an old black man. He's shining my shoes. He looks up and he says, you're that Washington, you know, museum guy on TV. And I said, yes. He doesn't say a word. So he finishes shining my shoes, I reach in my pocket, I give him $6, and he says keep the money for the museum.
Now, I got to be honest. I said, come on. You know, in my mind, I'm thinking: This is a shoeshine guy. He needs this money. So I push it back to him. He says to me, keep this money because if you do this museum right, my grandchildren will finally understand what I did to life and what life did to me.
RAZ: Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. It's set to open in 2015.
Lonnie Bunch, thank you so much for coming in.
Mr. BUNCH: My great pleasure. Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Midterm elections are almost always good news for the party in opposition. And while there are some 10 months to go before a third of the seats in the Senate and the entire House are up for grabs, Republicans are already anticipating big celebrations for the night of November 2, 2010.
Two Senate announcements this week added to that optimism. North Dakota's Byron Dorgan and Connecticut's Christopher Dodd announced they wouldn't seek reelection.
Senator CHRISTOPHER DODD (Democrat, Connecticut; Chairman, Senate Banking Committee): After 35 years of representing the people of Connecticut in the United States Congress, I will not be a candidate for reelection.
Senator BYRON DORGAN (Democrat, North Dakota): I mean, there are other things I want to do in life so I made a decision that I was not going to seek reelection.
RAZ: We begin the hour with a look at how these retirements may or may not affect both policy and power on Capitol Hill. Chris Dodd's retirement could have a pretty big impact on the prospects for reform of this country's financial system. He's the head of the Senate Banking Committee and he's been trying to rewrite the rules that govern Wall Street - a bill that's expected to be taken up within the next two months by the full Senate.
And for that story, we turn to NPR's Audie Cornish on Capitol Hill.
And, Audie, Senator Dodd has been the Democrats' sort of point person in the Senate on reforming the financial system. What kind of impact does his announcement have on reform?
AUDIE CORNISH: Well, the one thing people can agree is that it essentially in a way ensures that it will happen. Chris Dodd came out and said that he is not going to seek reelection. And one of the things he sort of hinted at is about his legacy. And you can't underestimate how meaningful that is for senators.
After 30-something years, they want to walk away from this place with their name on something and having had made a difference. And with this piece of legislation, Dodd could change the way the financial industry works for an entire generation.
RAZ: I mean, you talk about legacy and Chris Dodd, of course, has kind of been known as the banker's man in the Senate. I mean, some of his biggest campaign contributors have been big banks. So when you say legacy, is there a sense that Chris Dodd may want to leave the Senate without having had that reputation?
CORNISH: Well, first of all, in fairness, Connecticut is a state that has an industry that is heavy with hedge fund managers and insurance companies and financial industry firms. So that's sort of a given. But what happened with Chris Dodd in his own state, he was perceived as too cozy with the industry. What he's tried to do over the last year is punch back with backing credit card legislation and executive pay legislation.
RAZ: Right.
CORNISH: And he's tried to bring back that sort of populist feel or sort of be the super populist.
RAZ: Yeah. The fact that he's announced that he's not running for reelection, does it kind of unleash him in a sense? I mean, could he push for more aggressive reform?
CORNISH: Well, certainly, if you are a consumer advocate, that's what you're thinking right now and that's what you're hoping for right now. But the fact is it's still been a brutal year for legislation in the Senate and it's so partisan. And any one senator can kind of put the kibosh on things. So he is working in a bipartisan way. And he broke up his committee into little bipartisan groups and everyone's working on a bid. And really, this is the opposite of what we saw, say, with health care reform.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. And so, this probably won't be as contentious.
CORNISH: It's interesting. When you talk to senators, say, on the Banking Committee, they say, you know, this is not as emotional for us as health care reform. This is really just about the nuts and bolts of making the economy work for Wall Street and work for Main Street, all that sort of language. But it has been so partisan this year that don't expect to see anything go through smoothly.
I mean, one central part of the legislation is the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. This idea of a standalone agency that keeps watch over subprime mortgages and credit cards and overdraft protection. It's hugely contentious.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
CORNISH: The industry hates it. Republicans don't want it. And it is a central part of the bill.
RAZ: That's NPR's Audie Cornish on Capitol Hill.
Audie, thanks so much.
CORNISH: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of archival footage)
Mr. WALTER CRONKITE: Good evening. President Nixon reportedly will announce his resignation tonight.
RAZ: For decades, Walter Cronkite was the standard for broadcast journalism. And as they wrote their stories, young reporters would often ask themselves: What would Walter think?
Well, today, it's not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters. More often, it's a fear that their stories might get picked apart by Jon Stewart.
(Soundbite of television show, "The Daily Show")
Mr. JON STEWART (Host, "The Daily Show"): After Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, attempted to blow up an airliner in 2001, President Bush did not publicly respond for six days and stayed on his vacation. I say this as a means of providing just a slight bit of context to some of the criticism our current president has faced concerning a similar, or some would say, exact same, kind of attack.
Mr. SEAN HANNITY (Host, "Hannity"): For more than three days after the incident, President Obama remained silent.
Unidentified Man: The president waits 72 hours before we hear from him?
RAZ: That's a clip from "The Daily Show" this past week. In a recent article in Newsweek, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams wrote that Jon Stewart is the guy he thinks of when his team considers which stories to air on its nightly newscasts. He asks: Will it pass the Jon Stewart test?
And Brian Williams joins me from the NBC studios in New York.
Hello.
Mr. BRIAN WILLIAMS (Host, "NBC Nightly News"): I should quickly add: We have another set of standards we put our stories through, but Jon's always in the back of my mind. Thanks for having me.
RAZ: I mean, you write, in this essay in Newsweek, you write: On occasion, when we're been on the cusp of doing something completely inane, I will gently suggest to my colleagues that we simply courier the tape over to Jon Stewart's office to spare "The Daily Show" interns the time and trouble of logging our broadcast that night. How often do you do that?
Mr. WILLIAMS: Oh, I think I do it mentally quite a bit. When words are about to pass through your lips that you can envision making a damn fine clip on "The Daily Show" that night, try another chain of words. Try another way of putting it.
And none of this is to give a show on Comedy Central any more weight as a journalistic check and balance. But you know what? It's not a bad thing, because a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious. They hold people to account for errors and sloppiness.
It's usually delivered with a smile, sometimes not. When and where it gets interesting is when a guy like Jim Cramer came on and really bore the sole brunt of the housing collapse and other ills. That particular night, the parlance in journalism for what happened there is a takedown.
(Soundbite of television show, "The Daily Show")
Mr. STEWART: I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a (BEEP) game.
Mr. JIM CRAMER: Jon, don't you want guys like me, who have been in it, to show the shenanigans? What else can I do? I mean, last night's show...
Mr. STEWART: No, no, no, no, no. I want desperately for that, but I feel like that's not what we're getting. What we're getting is, listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was.
Mr. WILLIAMS: And I think in the days, weeks and months that followed, Cramer was given a little more slack, and Jon was called out for a kind of an attack interview where the odds were stacked against Jim Cramer. But on a night-to-night basis, what Jon does is hold our feet to the fire, we in the news media. It's healthy and helps us that he's out there.
RAZ: Do you think that general reporting has improved because of Jon Stewart's scrutiny?
Mr. WILLIAMS: That's a great question. I think people are more wary. But the fact that "The Daily Show" has no shortage of raw materials with which to put together a broadcast every night shows that there's no shortage of errors and people falling short in their jobs.
RAZ: Brian Williams, as you know, many Americans do not trust, do not like people like you and me. They have a low opinion of journalism in general. Do you think that "The Daily Show" sort of feeds into that negative impression at all?
Mr. WILLIAMS: I guess they do. There's a populism about them, which is kind of clever and crafty and perverse when you think about it, and I would obviously defend their right. I think it's fantastic. I've over and over called it the missing branch of government.
RAZ: I mean, are you ever jealous? Like, do you ever sort of wish you could do some of those things?
Mr. WILLIAMS: Well, I get to get my ya-yas out when I get invited on shows like, you know, Leno and Letterman and, you know, (unintelligible).
RAZ: And ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Mr. WILLIAMS: Absolutely. And I've got to add WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME because they have been nice enough to grill me on stage a few times.
RAZ: Brian Williams, I'm not sure if you know this, but it's actually Jon Stewart's 11th anniversary with the show on Monday. Is there anything you want to say to him on this special occasion?
Mr. WILLIAMS: I looked it up. There's a Hallmark site on the Web, and the appropriate gift for 11 years is a knife. So I'll bring it over to him. I'll present it to him by hand.
No, we are off-camera acquaintances, and when I go on there, I love seeing the posts on the Web: Do you think they were fighting? Williams seems to hate Stewart. And it's always fun to watch the after-action reports, as our friends in the Pentagon call them.
He's a great guy. I hope he keeps doing what he's doing because he has had an effect. And anyone out there that keeps us all on the straight and narrow and policed up I think is doing a good job.
RAZ: That's Brian Williams. He's the managing editor and anchor of the "NBC Nightly News." He joined me from NBC Studios in New York.
Brian Williams, thank you so much.
Mr. WILLIAMS: Thanks for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
Every year, the editors of Oxford American magazine search the South for music, old or new, blues, jazz, classical, psychedelic, pop, anything that grabs their attention.
(Soundbite of song, "Color Him Father")
Ms. LINDA MARTELL (Singer): (Singing) There's a man in my house he's so big and strong. He goes to work each day, and he stays all day long. Comes home each night, looking tired and beat.
RAZ: This song is called "Color Him Father" by Linda Martell. It's one of the tracks off the latest Oxford American compilation CD of Southern masters. And joining me to talk about it, from KUAR in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the editor of the magazine, Marc Smirnoff.
Welcome to the show.
Mr. MARC SMIRNOFF (Editor, Oxford American): Thank you.
RAZ: Tell us about this song we're hearing.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: It's from a 1970 album by Linda Martell called "Color Her Country.
(Soundbite of song, "Color Him Father")
Ms. MARTELL: (Singing) I think I'll color him father. I think I'll color him low. I'm gonna color him father. I think I'll color him low.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: And I think it's a lost masterpiece. Linda Martell is an African-American who recorded a few soul 45s before being signed up, for some reason, I don't know, to make this country album. And it is a revelation, I think. I'm astonished and disappointed that it's not better known in the country field. This track in particular is flawless.
RAZ: Marc Smirnoff, let's move on to a newer recording. This is from 2008, and it's called "Guess You Wouldn't Know Nothin' About That" by Wiley and the Checkmates.
(Soundbite of song, "Guess You Wouldn't Know Nothin' About That")
WILEY AND THE CHECKMATES (Music Group): (Singing) Seems like your plans have been headed south. You left a bad taste in my mouth. You've got no business spreading my business around to all them harlots you've got in town. Baby, ooh baby, baby, oh, baby. Guess you wouldn't know nothing about that.
RAZ: Now, this man, Herbert Wiley, is from Oxford, Mississippi, and you actually know him. What's surprising to me is that he is completely unknown outside of Oxford, Mississippi.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Yes. I hope that's starting to change. He is a phenomenon. If you ever have the opportunity to see him live, he will be somebody you never forget. He comes out in sequined suits and is a showman for whom those suits are almost an understatement. But I did know him before I knew that he was a musician. He used to be a shoe repair man. He had a really tiny store right off the Oxford square. We all just knew him as Mr. Wiley, the shoe repair man.
RAZ: And that was what everyone just thought he was.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Yeah. We had no idea that in the 1960s, he had been a soul singer for a band that I think never recorded, that he hung it up for literally 30 plus years. I still have to pinch myself that mild-mannered Mr. Wiley is also the superhero of Wiley and the Checkmates.
RAZ: Absolutely amazing story. I want to turn a corner here, actually a pretty extreme corner, to the 1960s and psychedelic pop. And this is a girl band that you put on here from the '60s called The Feminine Complex from Nashville. I want to hear that song.
(Soundbite of music)
THE FEMININE COMPLEX (Music Group): (Singing) (Unintelligible).
RAZ: And I want to qualify something. They are actually described as a girl band. I mean, they were literally girls, five girls, out of a Nashville high school. Tell me about them.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: That's right. Yeah. They made one record, and unfortunately, none of the girls played on the album except for the singer, Mindy Dalton(ph), whose husky voice we just heard. Man, she just shivers my timbers every time I hear her.
RAZ: Unbelievable.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Yeah. She wrote all the songs, and she sang on the record. But they used country music studio musicians for the recording, as was the practice those days. That's what they did with The Monkees and et cetera.
But it's another one of those cases where you just kind of don't understand why they never made it big. I mean, you listen to that song, there's no reason why it shouldn't have been playing the AM radio of the day.
RAZ: Now, Marc Smirnoff, this year, the magazine has done something a bit different. Normally, you release one CD of Southern masters. This year, you've added a second one with music from just one state, and that state is Arkansas. And I guess - I guess the goal is to do that with a new state each year, but I wanted to ask: Why start with Arkansas?
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Well, it's our home state for one.
RAZ: And I should mention you were based in Oxford, Mississippi at one point. You are now based in Arkansas.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: That's right. The second thing is I realized that I kind of enjoyed the challenge of finding out more about this state. You know, there were some big-name musicians who we knew going into this, people like Johnny Cash and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Al Greene all came from Arkansas.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: But we were very interested to find out whether the artists below those big names were as great as we thought they might be.
RAZ: What did you find that most surprised you when you were sort of trolling through, you know, the bowels of record stores in Arkansas and labels?
Mr. SMIRNOFF: You know, I suspected that the state would be rich in rockabilly and blues music. But what I did not expect was that there would be such a deep jazz scene. For example, Little Rock, Arkansas, has produced free jazz masters like Pharaoh Sanders and Walter Norris and Oliver Lake and on and on.
(Soundbite of song, "Gano")
RAZ: And we're listening to a song by the Oliver Lake Organ Trio. The song is called "Gano" from 2008. Tell me about Oliver Lake.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: He's actually from Mariana, Arkansas. And I think he cut his first record in 1971, and he's been prolific. He's got a very endurable reputation in jazz circles. You don't necessarily associate Arkansas with adventurous jazz playing, but quite frankly, we all should.
RAZ: You wrote about someone you describe as Arkansas' Buddy Holly. His name is Larry Donn, and this is him singing in 1963. It's - the song is called "I'll Never Forget You."
(Soundbite of song, "I'll Never Forget You")
Mr. LARRY DONN (Singer): (Singing) If I should see you, say on tomorrow, please don't be angry if I don't say hello. But I still love you, I belong to another. I've begged and I've pleaded, but still she won't let me go.
RAZ: Now, Marc Smirnoff, you wrote in those liner notes, and I'm paraphrasing, that if the Elvis lost tapes were ever discovered, this should be on it. How was it that he was just passed by for all these years?
Mr. SMIRNOFF: What you're saying was almost the exact reaction that I had when I heard this song. It was, like, so clearly a hit. And then I heard a few other Larry Donn songs, and they were also great. And even though, as you say, he is unknown in the USA - and, I must confess, in his home state of Arkansas - he can go to England where they love old rockabilly and Germany and Holland and elsewhere overseas and just pack them in.
So, what I concluded from that is that there's nothing wrong with Larry Donn, that when we enjoy his music, we're probably having a sane reaction. It's just that for whatever reason, you know, apparently in America, you have to have a certain kind of support system in place or just be lucky to be well-known, that it's not always whether you are talented or not.
RAZ: And he's still alive and still living in Arkansas.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Agnos(ph), Arkansas. That's right.
RAZ: And before we let you go, I want to ask you about one final piece of music on the Arkansas CD. It's by William Grant Still, and it's called "Suite for Violin and Piano, Third Movement."
(Soundbite of song, "Suite for Violin and Piano, Third Movement")
RAZ: You know, I heard this and instantly thought George Gershwin. And I must confess, I had not heard of William Grant Still.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Well, you know, he's considered to be the first major African-American classical composer. And he died in 1973. I think he was born in the late 1890s. He was born in Woodville, Mississippi. But at the age of three, he and his mother moved to Little Rock.
He has so many firsts. Like, he was the first black man to conduct an American symphony. He's the first black man to have an opera presented in New York City. He really is an American treasure.
RAZ: We hear about the great American composers of the 20th century. We hear about Copeland and Gershwin.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: And then there's this guy in Little Rock named William Grant Still who should be considered for that list, as well.
RAZ: Why wasn't he put on that list? Why?
Mr. SMIRNOFF: You know, I couldn't say for sure. I know that the first opera that he did called "Troubled Island," was panned by the press. People just didn't - this was like in 1949, maybe - and people just did not know how to respond to an opera by a black man: i.e., you know, it sort of assaulted their preconceptions.
But if you listen to him, you just enjoy him. There's no more to it than that.
(Soundbite of song, "Suite for Violin and Piano, Third Movement")
RAZ: That's the music of William Grant Still. Marc Smirnoff is the editor of the Oxford American magazine. The 11th annual music issue is on the newsstands now.
Marc, thanks for joining us.
Mr. SMIRNOFF: Thank you for your questions, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: And you can hear full versions of some of the songs picked by the Oxford American plus a track we haven't played by a band called the True Gospel Wymics. That's all on our Web site, npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
If you look up in the sky on most nights, even in a big city with lots of light, one of the few stars you can see with your eyes is Epsilon Aurigae. It's big and very bright, except once every 27 years or so, when it dims dramatically and for more than a year.
Epsilon Aurigae is actually two stars spinning around each other, and the latest eclipse began last summer. Now, astronomers have been puzzling over these drawn-out eclipses for centuries. But this time around, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, they might have solved the mystery.
And Don Hoard from the California Institute of Technology has been researching the phenomenon.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. DON HOARD (Research Scientist, California Institute of Technology): Thank you.
RAZ: Before we get to the mystery, because we want to keep our listeners in suspense, tell me about this star. If I wanted to find it, where would I look?
Mr. HOARD: Well, if you were here in Washington, if you were to go out tonight at about 10 o'clock and look almost straight up, a little bit to the north of the exact straight up position above your head, that's where it would be. It's near a very bright star called Capella.
RAZ: So according to your new research, what causes the eclipse?
Mr. HOARD: So about two eclipses ago - so in the mid-1950s, early 1960s - the idea was developed that there's probably a disc formed of gas and dust that surrounds one of the stars. And the reason the eclipse lasts so long is because this disc is passing in front of the other star - the brighter star in the system - and it just takes a long time for it to go past.
And around the time of the last eclipse, 27 years ago, two competing theories were proposed, and both of them involve the eclipsed star, the one that we mainly see the light from, being a very large star. And the main difference in the two competing models was the nature of the primary star.
It was proposed to be either what's called a supergiant star, which is a sort of normal type of star, but it has a mass about 20 times the mass of our sun and will probably end its life as a supernova.
And the other theory is that the eclipsed star, this big bright one, was essentially a dying star...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HOARD: ...something with much lower mass, about two times the mass of our sun, and a star that's on its way out the door.
RAZ: Like a flickering light bulb.
Mr. HOARD: It's - yeah, it's not going to last much longer.
RAZ: So now, based on this new information you have from the Spitzer Space Telescope, what did you determine?
Mr. HOARD: Initially, I and my collaborators, I think, all went into this sort of thinking that the massive star model was probably the right one because it's sort of the least unusual model.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HOARD: So we initially tried reproducing the data that we were seeing using a model where the eclipsed star is very massive. And we kept running into problems. The model kept having to get more and more complicated. And so, we kind of, you know, stopped doing that and looked at the competing theory. And when we start from there, all of a sudden, everything just falls into place.
And so, what we've really done here is just really strongly tipped the scales in favor of one of these two competing models. And this tells us a lot about sort of the big picture of Epsilon Aurigae.
RAZ: That's Don Hoard. He's a research scientist at Caltech. And he led a study investigating the mystery of why the star, Epsilon Aurigae, is eclipsed for so long.
Don Hoard, thanks so much for coming in.
Mr. HOARD: Thank you.
TRAVIS LARCHUK: I do.
GUY RAZ, host:
Travis Larchuk, one of our producers here on the program, you have the answer.
LARCHUK: Yes. And I think that this could be one of the biggest innovations in sports technology of the decade, by which I mean from 2001 to 2010.
RAZ: You mean from 2000 to 2009.
LARCHUK: No, the real decade.
RAZ: Okay. So describe this for people who did not see the Liberty Bowl.
LARCHUK: Right. So every football game begins with a coin toss, and whichever team wins it gets to decide who kicks off first. But watching the coin toss is boring.
Mr. DAN LaRUE (Inventor): We're seeing six little people, very far away, doing something in the center of the field, and we can hear the ref talking about it, but we cannot see it.
LARCHUK: All right, so that's Dan LaRue. He's an inventor, and he saw this problem, and he came up with a solution.
RAZ: A solution.
LARCHUK: Yeah. So, have you ever played the Nintendo Wii, you swing a plastic controller around and you're pretending to play tennis on TV.
RAZ: No.
LARCHUK: But you know about it.
RAZ: Yeah.
LARCHUK: So it works kind of like that, except you take the technology that makes the Wii controller work and you put it into the referees coin.
Mr. LaRUE: When the ref tosses the coin, there is data coming from that coin to a computer. The computer calculates the height and the spin rate of the coin and projects that on the display using computer graphics.
RAZ: Okay. I'm not sure I got all that.
LARCHUK: Well, I'll demonstrate. Let me empty out my change purse.
RAZ: You carry a change purse?
LARCHUK: Don't judge me, Guy. You see this quarter that I'm holding up right now?
RAZ: Yup.
LARCHUK: All right. Now, say we're on the field at the Liberty Bowl and I'm the ref. Now, as I move this quarter around, there's a 3D virtual coin up there on the JumboTron that's moving in the exact same way that my coin is.
RAZ: So as your coin is spinning through the air, I can watch a computer version in real time flipping on the JumboTron.
LARCHUK: Exactly. And you can even see which side the coin lands on before the ref does.
RAZ: This is ridiculous. Why would anybody ever invent this?
LARCHUK: Well, it's the age-old story, Guy. If you can get everyone in the stadium's eyes glued up there on the JumboTron during the coin toss, you could put an ad up there and make some money.
RAZ: Of course. That's one of our producers, Travis Larchuk. Travis, thanks.
LARCHUK: No problem, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Over the past few weeks, we've heard a lot about Yemen, the country where a young Nigerian man studied before the attempted Christmas Day attack on a U.S.-bound jetliner. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab spent time in Yemen studying Arabic.
Five years earlier, Sandy Choi also went to language school there. She's now a photographer and a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine. The magazine's Web site is showcasing her photos of daily life in Yemen. You can see some of those photos at our Web site as well.
These are pictures of a Yemen we haven't seen much of since the attempted attack. And Sandy Choi joins me now in the studio.
Welcome to the program.
Ms. SANDY CHOI (Photographer, Foreign Policy Magazine): Thanks for having me, Guy.
RAZ: So you were a graduate student...
Ms. CHOI: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...when you traveled to the capital city...
Ms. CHOI: Yes.
RAZ: ...Sana'a. Do you recognize the Yemen that's been portrayed in the media?
Ms. CHOI: No, to be perfectly honest. It was really a shock to me. I mean, it was a little shocking just to see Yemen all over the news in the first place. But it would be like seeing the neighborhood you grew up in on the news and described as a dot on a map and a terrorist haven with sort of no regard to it actually being a living, breathing place.
RAZ: Now, you took some incredible photographs of this beautiful...
Ms. CHOI: Thank you.
RAZ: ...beautiful city - the old city of Sana'a. And this is, of course, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Ms. CHOI: Yes.
RAZ: There are four in Yemen.
Ms. CHOI: What we're looking at right now is the old city. And in fact, it's...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Ms. CHOI: ...the view from the roof of the house I lived in.
RAZ: This was your view...
Ms. CHOI: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...looking out at these sort of gingerbread...
Ms. CHOI: Yeah.
RAZ: How would you describe this architecture?
Ms. CHOI: That's exactly what it looks like. It's kind of like a life-size gingerbread house, if you can imagine.
RAZ: Gingerbread city.
Ms. CHOI: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the house that I lived in was one of those buildings, sort of the...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Ms. CHOI: ...four or five stories tall, dirt brick with white trim around the windows. And at night, it's really kind of magical to see the stained glass windows lit up and the white trim illuminated. It's very special.
RAZ: You also traveled in parts of the country, and there's a beautiful photograph of the city of Shibam.
Ms. CHOI: Shibam, yeah.
RAZ: Shibam. And if you were to drive past this photo, you would just think that this was modern apartment buildings, these sort of cheap-looking tenements. They're actually 16th century skyscrapers.
Ms. CHOI: Yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. CHOI: Very often, they'll refer to it as the Manhattan of the desert.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Ms. CHOI: And it really is sort of what it looks like from a distance as you're driving by. They're just these tall, smooth skyscraper-like buildings. But when you get closer to them, you can actually get a good look at what the construction looks like. And it really is just - it's mud and clay and straw and very basic materials.
RAZ: And people live in them.
Ms. CHOI: Absolutely.
RAZ: I mean, they are still living, breathing...
Ms. CHOI: Absolutely.
RAZ: ...houses.
Ms. CHOI: When you enter into Shibam, actually, you realize very quickly that you've just stumbled into someone's town. You know, there are schools. There are shops. There are people coming and going from home. It's very much just a town or city.
RAZ: I'm clicking through these photographs of Sana'a...
Ms. CHOI: Yes.
RAZ: ...and there's a picture of three old men...
Ms. CHOI: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...just sort of chatting in the town square.
Ms. CHOI: Yeah. Yeah.
RAZ: That was a kind of a daily ritual for you.
Ms. CHOI: It absolutely was, and that's actually one of my favorite pictures. And I remember, I just - I loved these three old men. They were obviously very close friends and had known each other for a long time. And when I would come through that particular square, there was a juice shop and a little restaurant and a tea shop, and you would just see people coming through, maybe on their way to the market or on their way to work and stopping to chat with one another, and they were sort of a fixture in the neighborhood.
RAZ: Do you plan to go back anytime soon?
Ms. CHOI: I would absolutely love to go back. I actually had spent some more time after this in other parts of the Middle East and spent a year and a half living in Cairo.
I'd very much like to go back to Yemen and just see what's happening in my neighborhood, if the people I remember are still there and what sorts of things have changed. But it's someplace I do hope to get back to.
RAZ: That's Sandy Choi. She's a photographer and a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine. You can see a selection of her photos from Yemen at our Web site. That's npr.org.
Sandy Choi, thanks so much.
Ms. CHOI: Thanks, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
Here's a story about just how hard it can be to find people, let alone count them. It begins with a vacant lot in Los Angeles County. No one's paid the property taxes on it since at least 1980. And the owner?
Ms. DONNA DOSS (Assistant Treasurer and Tax Collector, Los Angeles County): D. Smith. That's all I can tell you. It belongs to a D. Smith.
RAZ: That's Donna Doss. She's in charge of property tax collections for L.A. County. Her office recently sent out more than 1,100 certified letters to D. Smiths all over L.A. County, which caused all kinds of confusion.
Mr. DWAYNE SMITH(ph): My name is Dwayne Smith. I'm a security officer.
Ms. DANA SMITH(ph): My name is Dana Smith. I'm an accountant.
Ms. DOLORES SMITH(ph): My name is Dolores Smith. I'm a foster parent. And I do not own that piece of property in Los Angeles.
Mr. DOUG SMITH (Database Editor, Los Angeles Times): I opened it, and my first reaction was that it was a bill for $33,000.
RAZ: That's Doug Smith, a database editor for the Los Angeles Times. He also got the letter three times. So he used his computer analysis skills to help us track down his brethren. And it turns out many D. Smiths share something important in common: that split-second fear they experience when confronted with a bill for $33,000.
Ms. SMITH: And I said, oh, no, what are they doing?
RAZ: That was Dolores Smith's reaction when she opened the letter. Now, in fairness, the law requires county officials to make a good faith effort to find the owners of vacant properties before those lots are sold at auction.
Tax collector Donna Doss suspects the real D. Smith has probably died. So we wondered whether the mass mailing yielded any clues.
Ms. DOSS: No, other than if you find D. Smith, let us know.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GUY RAZ, host:
From eclipsing stars now to a computer program that could make sportswriters disappear. It's the product of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, and it's called StatsMonkey. What it does is take the statistics from a baseball game and produce a computer-generated news story about that game.
Dr. KRISTIAN HAMMOND (Co-Director, Intelligent Information Laboratory, Northwestern University): University Park: An outstanding effort by Willie Argo carried the Illini to an 11-5 victory over the Nittany Lions on Saturday at Medlar Field. Argo blasted two home runs...
RAZ: That's Kris Hammond. He is co-director of the lab at Northwestern, and he's reading a story generated by the StatsMonkey program.
And I have to say, Kris Hammond, that sounds pretty close to what you might read in the local paper.
Dr. HAMMOND: It's - I mean, that's what it's aimed at being.
RAZ: So how does it work? How does the program work?
Dr. HAMMOND: Well, it starts with the numbers. And, in fact, in general, what we do is we go from numbers to story. So it looks at the box scores, it looks at the play-by-play information. And then it uses that to figure out what we call the angle. That is, what kind of game was this? Was it a back and forth? Was it a pitcher's duel? And then from that, it actually generates the language.
RAZ: What if something sort of a bit unusual happens, you know, say, a pitcher throws a no-hitter or, you know, a bat slips out of a hitter's hands and injures a fan? Can the program actually handle those scenarios?
Dr. HAMMOND: Yes and no. For a no-hitter, absolutely. For a bat slipping, no because that's not going to be reflected in the numbers.
RAZ: Why - I mean, you work at Northwestern, at the journalism school at Northwestern. Why would a journalism school sort of be interested in creating a computer program that could eventually make what you do and the people you train irrelevant?
Dr. HAMMOND: That's a good question.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. HAMMOND: It doesn't make anybody irrelevant. We're really aiming this at a genuinely local audience. That is, we're trying to write the stories that no one else is writing.
We could literally write a game story for every single Little League game that's played in this country. And that means every kid, every dad, every family, every grandma, would see the story of what their kid is doing.
RAZ: At some point, you're going to lose control over that technology. And so, I'm wondering if you don't see it as a technology that will replace human beings as journalists?
Dr. HAMMOND: Yes, someday, we'll build something that can do absolutely everything a journalist can do, given that they - you know, the facts are in front of them. But that's our goal. Our goal is to genuinely model human thought, intelligence, reasoning, but always looking to the long tale, looking to the places that are underrepresented, underreported, and trying to fill that niche.
RAZ: What about sportswriters? Have any of them contacted you and said, you know, cease and...
Dr. HAMMOND: Oh, absolutely.
RAZ: They have?
Dr. HAMMOND: Not cease and desist.
RAZ: Oh.
Dr. HAMMOND: We actually had a writer who did a side-by-side of his story and our story. And he really said - he said, I hope you guys don't try to replace me because I like going to games, and it would make me sad if that was no longer part of my job. And honest to God, we have no interest in doing that.
RAZ: So no chance of, you know, I'll be replaced by a computer anytime soon?
Dr. HAMMOND: In a couple weeks.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. HAMMOND: No. Not anytime soon.
RAZ: Kris Hammond is co-director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University. He joined us from member station WBEZ in Chicago.
Kris Hammond, thanks so much.
Dr. HAMMOND: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, Kevin Blackistone, first it was the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco twittering from the locker room. Now, it's a computer writing sports stories. Is there anything left for you to do?
Mr. KEVIN BLACKISTONE (Columnist, AOL Fanhouse): There better be. And I went to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and if they continue with this program, they've gotten their last alumni check from me.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: That is Kevin Blackistone. He is a sports columnist for AOL and ESPN commentator. And Kevin, the NFL playoffs kicked off this weekend with a pretty dramatic start.
(Soundbite of football game)
Unidentified Man#1: And there it is, rookie coach, rookie quarterback come on the road to win, and the Jets will advance to the playoffs.
Unidentified Man#2: The Dallas Cowboys, for the first time in 13 years, win a post-season game.
RAZ: Both the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets look pretty impressive.
Mr. BLACKISTONE: I wasn't surprised by the Dallas Cowboys, but I was surprised by the New York Jets. Here is a team coached by a rookie coach in Rex Ryan who just a few weeks ago, after a loss, pronounced his team out of the playoffs. He didn't know how the NFL works. And then they got into the playoffs, and he immediately announced that they were the team to beat for the Super Bowl.
A great win for them. Mark Sanchez, the rookie quarterback - one of the few rookie quarterbacks to actually win in the playoffs - just a year ago at USC was criticized by his coach at the time, Pete Carroll, for leaving to go to the NFL. Pete Carroll said he wasn't ready. Well, guess who's laughing now?
RAZ: Is this a kid that we should be looking out for for the next few years?
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Oh, there's no question. I mean, Mark Sanchez has star power written all over him. He's going to get better in this league. Sanchez has got charisma. He's mobile. He's smart. He's got a Latino background, which is very nice in the NFL, and going to be a great role model, I think, for kids from Hispanic backgrounds.
RAZ: Now, you mentioned Sanchez' coach, Pete Carroll, at USC. It turns out that he may be jumping to pro football, to the Seattle Seahawks. Why would a guy who has such a sweet deal in L.A., you know, the big school, the big money, big talent, move back to the pros when he had trouble there as a coach in the '90s?
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Pete Carroll may be just ahead of the posse. The NCAA, for a number of years now, has been USC football programs for rules violations, particularly those going around the recruiting and retainment of Reggie Bush. Pete Carroll had a rocky year, to say the least. In his tenure there this year, he's said to be in disagreement about how the program is going with the athletic director, Mike Garrett. And an opportunity came his way, and it sounds like he's going to take the money and run.
RAZ: Kevin, finally to a story that's really gripped NBA fans here in Washington, D.C. and really across the country, the Gilbert Arenas story. He's accused of bringing guns into the locker room at the Verizon Center. He's been suspended indefinitely. What does it say about his future in basketball?
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Well, I think his future as a Washington Wizard in particular is over. And now, he's actually facing a criminal investigation, which, who knows, could lead to jail time down the road. So this is a - this is really a horrible situation that Gilbert Arenas, a guy that everybody really has enjoyed throughout most of his career, has gotten himself into. And it's something that the team and the league absolutely cannot tolerate.
RAZ: That's Kevin Blackistone. He's a columnist for AOL Fanhouse. He's a commentator on ESPN's "Around the Horn" and all-around weekend sports guy for us here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Kevin, thanks.
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Thank you.
RAZ: And one more thing before you go.
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Yeah.
RAZ: Did you watch the Liberty Bowl about a week ago?
Mr. BLACKISTONE: I saw so many bowl games, I'm not even sure.
RAZ: Well, did you see that computerized coin toss at the beginning?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BLACKISTONE: Oh, I did see that.
RAZ: So do you know what was up with that, Kevin?
Mr. BLACKISTONE: I sure don't.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
This week, the U.S. Census Bureau launches a nationwide ad campaign ahead of this year's count. As the Constitution mandates, everyone - felons, migrant workers, newborns, the homeless - every single person within the borders of the country is counted every 10 years. It's the largest nonmilitary operation mounted by the U.S. government. And so, how do you start counting 300 million people?
Dr. ROBERT GROVES (Director, U.S. Census Bureau): Believe it or not, we measure Alaska first.
RAZ: That's Robert Groves. He's the director of the U.S. Census.
Dr. GROVES: We need to get up there before the spring thaw begins. But the vast majority of folks in America will get a mailed questionnaire in mid-March.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Dr. GROVES: And we ask them to fill it out and mail it back by April 1.
RAZ: And if you do that, it will save the Census Bureau billions of dollars. Now, we're going to hear more from Robert Groves in a few minutes. But first this hour, we begin with a look at the stakes for getting the count right.
We took a walk through a neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., that illustrates some of the challenges Census workers will face.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Woman: Thank you.
RAZ: We ran into Merritt Drucker(ph) passing out flyers about the Census in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood here in Washington on a freezing cold morning. This is the heart of the city's Central American population. Many folks here are undocumented; most from places like El Salvador and Guatemala.
Now, Drucker is part of an army of volunteers and workers who'll try and convince every person in the city to fill out the Census form this year. And why such a push? I met Maurice Henderson at a restaurant in the neighborhood to find out.
Mr. MAURICE HENDERSON: Thirty-five hundred dollars per person is what this basically equaled out to. So for every single head that we count, we're talking about a little over $3,500.
RAZ: There's a lot of money at stake.
Mr. HENDERSON: There's a lot of money at stake.
RAZ: Henderson works for the mayor's office, and he's in charge of outreach for the Census here in the district of Columbia. And as he explains, the higher the count, the higher the federal funds. And each year, $400 billion are divvied up by Congress and sent to the states. It's money that's distributed based on Census data.
Now, it turns out Washington, D.C., is one of the hardest places in America to get an accurate count.
Mr. HENDERSON: We have, of the Census tracks that the Census Bureau follows, 55 percent of ours are what they deem hard to count.
RAZ: So more than half of the population of this city is considered, based on the statistics, difficult to reach.
Mr. HENDERSON: Yes.
RAZ: Why such a high number?
Mr. HENDERSON: Well, when you're looking at it statistically, you've got 12 percent of our population is foreign-born. 15 percent speak a language other than English in the household. You've got a high number of renters, so a very transient population.
RAZ: In every census, there are people who are missed. And D.C. actually went to court a few years back to challenge the official numbers from the 2000 count. And as a result, the city managed to add 30,000 people to its population.
And that's why guys like Juan Carlos Ruiz are so important to Maurice Henderson. Ruiz is also at the restaurant where I meet Henderson. He's originally from Peru and now a community organizer here in the neighborhood. Everyone knows him. But still many people, he says, are suspicious about handing over information to the government. So here's the pitch Ruiz makes.
Mr. JUAN CARLOS RUIZ: Look, this is going to benefit your children this way, this way, this way. This is going to benefit the church this way. This is going to be your schools. This is going to be your health care. So you've got to be very clear in saying this is what is going to happen if you do this.
RAZ: The problem is that plenty of people are here without legal papers. Multiple families sometimes share two or three-bedroom apartments. It's a violation of the city's code, so they're scared to fill out the Census forms because they worry that that information will be used to evict them or maybe even deport them, which it won't because the Census Bureau, by law, has to keep that data private.
But then, for some others here, well, take Publio Fernandez(ph). He is one of a dozen men standing along a wall outside 7-Eleven. Fernandez doesn't think the mayor is doing enough for his community. So he's not convinced that filling out the form will matter all that much.
Mr. PUBLIO FERNANDEZ: I don't pay too much attention because, right now, what the mayor is doing - the mayor is not doing too much for the city anyway.
RAZ: Do you think you'll fill out your Census form or maybe not?
Mr. FERNANDEZ: Maybe yes. Maybe yes.
RAZ: Do you think it's important to fill out, you know, all that information?
Mr. FERNANDEZ: It might help. It might not. I'm not too positive about it, no.
RAZ: Fernandez and the others hang around outside, in plain view. So easy to see, but so hard to count, which is why Juan Carlos Ruiz shakes his head in frustration.
Mr. RUIZ: Do you see the trust issue there?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. RUIZ: The trust issue is huge.
RAZ: You have your work cut out for you.
Mr. RUIZ: We have. We have. It's not going to be easy.
RAZ: And that's just in Washington, D.C. But what about on a national level? How can the Census be sure its count is accurate? Here is the U.S. Census director Robert Groves.
Dr. GROVES: All of the efforts of the 2010 census design are focused on attempting to improve the quality of the counting across all groups with special consideration of groups that tended to be undercounted or groups that tended to be over-counted. We have both kinds of groups in the country.
Our advertising is focused disproportionately on those groups that tended to have low return rates in 2000. All of our efforts in terms of outreach and data collection efforts will be focused on reducing that differential undercount.
RAZ: Now, according to D.C. Count(ph), a group here in Washington, D.C., 18 to 39-year-old African-American males nationwide are traditionally the hardest group to count. Why do you think that is?
Dr. GROVES: Well, I think when you look at what the influences on difficulty to count are, they actually go across demographic groups. And so, the group you mention is a group where their attachment to individual households is sometimes tenuous. They may live with a girlfriend for a few days of the week and with their family another day, with a roommate another day. And so, when the simple questionnaire is asked who lives in this household, it becomes a little ambiguous.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Dr. GROVES: That attribute is actually shared by kids who are one to 9 years old to kids who live in families with divorced parents and may have a shared custody situation. We tend to miss them, too.
RAZ: Or count them twice?
Dr. GROVES: We tend to miss them...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Dr. GROVES: ...as it turns out. And you could imagine them being counted twice as well. So we have trouble in households that are non-traditional in some sense.
RAZ: And foreclosures as well may be an issue this year.
Dr. GROVES: Foreclosures are a big issue. The problem with foreclosures is two-fold. One, we're going to spend more money on this census because of foreclosures. So we will mail out questionnaires to those addresses. They won't come back because no one lives at those addresses. And then in May, we will go out and knock on those doors. And we're going to knock several times to make sure that it is, indeed, vacant.
So the first impact of foreclosures is we're going to spend money on those vacant units. That's bad enough. But what I'm more concerned about is that - is where the people who used to live in those units now live. We want those new arrivals to those housing units to be counted there.
This is a big message we're trying to get out effectively because the surveys that we're doing prior to the census have told us that there's a bit of a stigma attached to having gone through this tragedy. And the family of the household that has been joined by these folks are a little reluctant to say they're living here as opposed to just visiting. But since they don't have any other household, that's our only way to get them counted. We want them counted at their new, temporary quarters.
RAZ: Robert Groves, what do you anticipate will be the biggest change? And what do you think the impact of that will be?
Dr. GROVES: Well, this is pure personal speculation, but we're all going to be surprised at the geographical dispersion of new immigrant groups. You know, I think a major finding out of the census 2000 was the growth of the Hispanic population.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Dr. GROVES: I think a sub-story out of 2010 will be that the new immigrant groups are everywhere. It's not just a coastal phenomenon where they immigrate to the East Coast and the West Coast. They're in small towns in every state of the union. There are little clusters of groups, often sponsored by a church to help an initial family from an immigrant group, and it begins to act as a magnet for others. And that's an interesting story. It's almost the renewal of the American story writ large.
RAZ: That's Robert Groves. He is the director of the U.S. Census Bureau. The forms should start arriving to your home in mid-March.
Dr. Groves, thanks so much.
Dr. GROVES: Thank you very much.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, a book that one celebrated writer considers his guilty or not-so-guilty pleasure. Charles Bock is a novelist. Critics swooned last year over his book "Beautiful Children." And for us, Bock swoons over something less literary for our series My Guilty Pleasure.
Mr. CHARLES BOCK (Author, "Beautiful Children"): I feel no guilt whatsoever about my love for "Motley Crue: The Dirt � Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band." I say this while admitting that Motley Crue's music was its own cliche � a form of lowest-common-denominator hair metal that dominated the rock world during that regrettable time known as the '80s.
The Crue's album titles include such demure offerings as "Shout at the Devil," "Theatre of Pain" and "Doctor Feelgood."
But band quality has no correlation with a quality reading experience. I say to you "The Dirt" is the singularly greatest sex, drugs, rock reading experience of our age. It's one of the all-time great rock bios. Not one sentence in its 448 pages is about Motley's music, which is even more impressive and appropriate.
Chapters are narrated by the band's members: Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars. We start with them as delicate unknowns, torching cockroaches with hairspray in their rat hole pad off Sunset Boulevard.
So what if young Nikki knew so little about music that he showed up at practice thinking the six-string he just stole was a bass? So what if front man Vince Neil regularly could not remember lyrics during concerts? With their black leather, apocalyptic makeup and penchant for setting themselves aflame onstage, Motley Crue was a blunt reaction to the peppish, skinny tie new wave music in vogue at the time. Moreover, the band's ravenous appetite was indicative of the gluttony that epitomized the '80s.
Ghostwriter Neil Strauss deserves combat pay for getting Motley's inner circle to reconstruct this glorious, ridiculous time, from L.A.'s club and flier scene to the newly minted power broker that was MTV, all the barroom fights and upside down drum solos, the strippers and rehab stints and marriages gone wrong.
There's Vince Neil's drunk driving accident that killed a friend from another band. The poetry Tommy Lee writes to Pamela Anderson from jail months after their infamous sex tape. The time Nikki Sixx was declared dead from a heroin overdose, then woke up, left the hospital and changed his answering machine to say: Hey, it's Nikki. I'm not here because I'm dead.
Supposedly, a movie of "The Dirt" in development, it can't possibly be any good. This is too sprawling, too wild, an experience that's better off read and left to the mind's interpretation. So go get "The Dirt." Not a guilty pleasure, just a rocking good read.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: Charles Bock is the author of the novel "Beautiful Children." His pick for our series My Guilty Pleasure is "Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band." And you can read recommendations and reviews of all sorts of books at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In the days before President Obama's inauguration, there was renewed hope of bipartisanship in Washington. But today, Congress is as partisan as ever. That's according to a new study from Congressional Quarterly.
Here's NPR's Andrea Seabrook.
ANDREA SEABROOK: Nasty and brutish, that's how political expert Norm Ornstein describes this past year in politics. And he says it took only days for the dream of bipartisanship to be revealed as pure fantasy.
Mr. NORMAN ORNSTEIN (Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute): You have a president who wins in a landslide. He enters office on January 20 with a 70 percent approval rating. We have an economy teetering at the edge of the abyss, and he comes up with a major initiative to deal with it. Three weeks into his presidency, not a single Republican in the House votes for the bill.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; Speaker of the House): On this vote, the yays are 244, the nays are 188. The bill is passed without objection and most...
SEABROOK: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling the vote on the economic stimulus package. The partisan divide continued through 2009. The budget, environment legislation, health care - according to figures from Congressional Quarterly, the House took partisan votes more than half the time, and the Senate, close to a whopping three-quarters of the time - a record. And both parties were extremely successful at keeping their members in line. It's a striking turn from what the majority of Americans seemed to want in the fall of 2008.
Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has some ideas why.
Mr. ORNSTEIN: If a member of one party collaborates with a member of the other, then you might be reducing in some ways the wedge issues that will give you a chance to gain seats, so you may be jeopardizing something larger.
SEABROOK: In other words, Ornstein says, today, politicians are constantly campaigning. Unlike much of the 20th century when Democrats were perceived as a sort of permanent majority, now the control of the House and Senate seems always up for grabs. So the parties work hard to emphasize their differences. Another factor, says Ornstein, is the increasingly conservative Republican Party. There's little room for ideological conversation in the GOP. Moderates these days tend to be Democrats. And perhaps, most important to this era of striking political division is the rise of partisan media. Ornstein says the left and the right each have their own spin doctors on the air and on the net, 24-7. So the two parties can't even agree to a set of facts underlying any particular policy debate.
Mr. ORNSTEIN: Put all of that together and you've got a kind of witch's brew that drives our parties apart and enhances partisanship and ideological division.
SEABROOK: Now, put the question to members of Congress and you get two distinct perspectives on the problem.
Representative DAVID DREIER (Republican, California): I've been here for three decades.
SEABROOK: David Dreier is a top House Republican.
Rep. DREIER: In this Congress, I will tell you, we've been completely shut out.
SEABROOK: In 2009, Republicans had little chance to offer their own alternatives to Democrats' legislation. In the House, the majority tightly controlled debate. In the Senate, Democrats held together and blocked filibusters. Dreier says if Democrats wanted bipartisanship, they could broaden their agenda and allow more participation from Republicans. Then again, you can look at this from a different angle.
Representative STENY HOYER (Democratic, Maryland; House Democratic Majority Leader): The Republicans have, in effect, chosen not to participate...
SEABROOK: House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer.
Rep. HOYER: ...for, in my opinion, political objectives rather than policy objectives, because they believe if we fail, they will succeed.
SEABROOK: Republicans made the political calculation that they couldn't win back the majority by voting with the Democrats, Hoyer says. So most of them voted no on everything they could in the House. In the Senate, they used every parliamentary trick in the book to slow down or halt debate.
So with this being among the most partisan Congresses in history, perhaps it's no surprise that the Republicans blame the Democrats and the Democrats blame the Republicans. Who you choose to blame probably depends on who you voted for. But if we can stand back and assess the most basic of facts for a moment, most people agree that there is little political incentive right now for the parties to work together on anything.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
(Soundbite of song, "Cousins")
BLOCK: This is a song called "Cousins" off the new album from the band Vampire Weekend.
(Soundbite of song, "Cousins")
VAMPIRE WEEKEND (Band): (Singing) You found a sweater on the ocean floor. They're gonna find it if you didn't close the door. You and this model sit outside the side. And in a house on a street they wouldn't park on the night.
BLOCK: Vampire Weekend had a meteoric rise to fame two years ago with its first album. Our reviewer Will Hermes has been anticipating the second album, along with a lot of critics and fans.
(Soundbite of song, "Cousins")
WILL HERMES: Vampire Weekend's popularity synched up with a bunch of trends: rock bands influenced by world music, rock bands that dress like preppies and pop culture phenomena connected in some way to vampires.
They suffered some backlash in the wake of their instant popularity, but that struck me as sour grapes. These guys deserved their popularity. Their fusions were smart and self-aware, and they wrote great songs. For their latest, they just wrote some more.
(Soundbite of song, "Horchata")
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: (Singing) In December drinking horchata. I'd look psychotic in a balaclava. Winter's cold is too much to handle. Pincher crabs that pinch at your sandals.
HERMES: I was encouraged Vampire Weekend didn't mess with their style too much. They're still blending catchy Caucasian pop rock with Bollywood disco or African chimurenga like a Banana Republic mix tape. And on occasion, they still sound like Graceland-era Paul Simon, which as far as I'm concerned is a perfectly excellent thing to sound like on occasion.
But they've also added some cool electronic colors to the mix, like this song where they use the familiar voice processing software AutoTune in an unfamiliar way: with chamber music accompaniment.
(Soundbite of song, "California English")
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: (Singing) Sweet carob rice cake she don't care how the sweets taste. Fake Philly cheese steak but she use real toothpaste. 'Cause if that Tom's don't work, if it just makes you worse, would you lose all of your faith in the good earth? And if it's all a curse and we're just getting worse, baby, please don't lose your faith in the good earth.
HERMES: Singer Ezra Koenig likes wordplay and brand name details, and he portrays American upper crusters like an indie rock F. Scott Fitzgerald: There's the guy dreaming up plans for his girlfriend's trust fund and another who gets stoned and falls into bed with a friend who happens to be the son of a diplomat.
(Soundbite of song, "Diplomat's son")
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: (Singing) He was a diplomat's son. It was '81. He was a diplomat's son. It was '81.
HERMES: Sometimes, there's a blankness to the voices in Vampire Weekend songs that's more Bret Easton Ellis than F. Scott Fitzgerald. But "Contra" does broaden the band's emotional scope. Besides ennui and bafflement, there's palpable heartbreak too. The sounds are generally so happy, though, most people won't notice the lyrical bummers. It seems like useful music for this new decade. It's not ignoring the bad stuff; it just wants to dance while it figures things out.
(Soundbite of song, "White Sky")
BLOCK: Our reviewer is Will Hermes. The new album from Vampire Weekend is called "Contra." And you can listen to the entire album at nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of song, "White Sky")
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: (Singing) The nation business, a modern piece of glasswork down on the corner that you walk each day in passing. The elderly salesclerk won't eye us with suspicion. The whole immoral corporation's giving its permission.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR New, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Egypt is constructing a new underground steel barrier at its border with the Gaza Strip. Violent protests erupted over the barrier last week. It's aimed at blocking hundreds of smuggling tunnels that snake under the border. Smuggling has boomed since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. And Israel and the U.S. have pressured Egypt to stop weapons from flowing to Hamas.
NPR's Peter Kenyon just returned from the border area. He found fear among Gazans about the new barrier and anger from Egyptians over the new criminal class the tunnels have spawned.
PETER KENYON: I'm standing on a rooftop less than 100 yards from the crossing with Gaza. On one side, Egyptian children are playing in their yards and on the other side, scores of white tents, which are covering entrances to smuggling tunnels. On the Egyptian side of the border, large cranes are at work building Egypt's latest defense against these tunnels. The residents of Rafah here have been warned, even intimated by the police not to speak to foreigners, but we did manage to talk to a few.
MOHAMMED: (Through translator) They're destroying the Palestinians. This way they will die very slowly.
KENYON: Thirty-year-old Mohammed, wearing dark glasses and a red nylon jacket is completely used to the brazen openness of the large-scale smuggling operations going on just across the border, which is the first thing that leaps out at first-time visitors to the rooftop. Another young man hands my translator a cell phone and points across the border to the sea of white tents. A man is holding a phone to his ear and waving at us. Suddenly, my translator is having a conversation with a Palestinian smuggler, who gives his name as Abu Khaled and confirms that he's standing in front of a tunnel.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
Mr. ABU KHALED: (Foreign language spoken)
KENYON: We're going to have a humanitarian crisis over here if they build that wall, says Abu Khaled. He says our only outlet is the tunnels, and if the border crossing is closed and the tunnels are closed, too, people will eat each other. It will be an absolute disaster.
(Soundbite of vehicles)
KENYON: As recently as just a few years ago, it would've been safe to assume that Abu Khaled was probably working for either Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement or for the Islamist Hamas because there were far fewer tunnels then and all were controlled by the Palestinian factions.
But since Hamas drove Fatah from Gaza, the tunnel business has been thrown wide open, with an estimated 400 dug to date. The tunnels are important because of the strict blockade imposed by Israel, which controls all of Gaza's other borders. On the Egyptian side of Rafah, smuggling is a booming business that has brought cars, motorcycles, fancy new homes and a wealthy and well-armed criminal class that residents say is beyond the reach of the police and is tearing apart the traditional tribal way of life in northern and central Sinai.
(Soundbite of city)
KENYON: Some 25 miles south of the border, the port city of El-Arish no longer bears much resemblance to the sleepy seaside resort it was in the 1980s, when Egyptians would flock here for vacations. These days, the city is in the grips of what residents call an unprecedented crime wave. You don't see women on the streets after 9 p.m., taxi drivers won't turn off the main roads, residents carry guns as protection against armed robbers. When Arish resident Abdel Karim Shorbagi was gunned down on January 3rd, the city erupted in protest.
When security officials delayed handing over Shorbagi's body, a mob stormed the hospital and took it to a funeral attended by an estimated 10,000 people. It was an unusual display of popular fury that crossed tribal and clan lines, and Arish's main square seethed well into the night.
(Soundbite of shouting)
KENYON: Thousands of people alternated between yelling and throwing rocks at security men and running away in panic, causing periodic stampedes. Most shops were locked and shuttered, and left-wing activists staged a sit-in protest demanding immediate action against what residents called the complete failure of the police to halt the growing lawlessness in North Sinai.
Mustafa Singer, an Arish native who reports for the independent Al-Shorouk newspaper, has spent years piecing together the story of how this quiet port city was transformed into a nearly lawless outpost. He says it all comes back to the tunnels, as well as the above-ground smuggling farther west that goes on between Egypt and Israeli criminal gangs. Locals call them the nouveau riche � criminals without ties to the local tribal power structure, who have better and more powerful weapons than the police. Singer says Arishis want the current security leaders sacked.
Mr. MUSTAFA SINGER (Reporter, Al-Shorouk): (Through translator) After they failed to arrest even one person after more than 2,000 cases of motorcycle theft, that's besides the murders and the armed robberies on commercial entities, so it's a complete security failure.
KENYON: Singer's scenario was corroborated by several Arish residents, who all chose not to speak on the record for fear of being targeted by the criminals. According to this scenario, certain Bedouin families from the small villages around Arish have made large fortunes as the smuggling escalated. Along the way, security officials have insinuated themselves into the process, and not just by taking bribes to permit the tunnels to operate. Among other things, Singer says, they mediate family and business disputes between smugglers � for a fee.
The unintended consequence the government didn't see coming, he adds, was that this well-armed criminal class wouldn't stop with smuggling, but would turn on non-Bedouin tribes like the people of Arish, stealing and killing seemingly at will, with no fear of the law.
(Soundbite of traffic)
Mr. SINGER: (Through translator) The leaders of the security forces are corrupt. They are very involved in the smuggling business, so they cannot arrest them, they are partners in crime. Citizens have now been carrying weapons to protect themselves in the absence of any protection from the state and there's a new culture of violence.
KENYON: Egyptian security officials, refusing to give their names for fear of retribution by their superiors, denied systematic corruption or routine protection of known criminals. But they acknowledged that maintaining law and order in the border region is extremely difficult.
The Egyptian barrier on the Gaza border will take months to complete. Egypt has not described it precisely, but analysts say it may turn out to be a network of defenses both below and aboveground, including walls, fences, motion detectors and other measures.
But already Hamas leaders are warning what could happen if Egypt does seal Gaza in. In Gaza City, Mayor Issa al-Nashar said the Strip would explode into violence, and he suggested that Egypt would not be spared.
Mayor Issa al-Nashar (Gaza City): (Through translator) Certainly the more the pressure increases, the closer we get to the explosion. Our main enemy is the Zionist enemy, but all those who contribute to besiege us are standing with the enemy. Therefore, the explosion of the Palestinian people may be in any direction.
(Soundbite of city)
KENYON: On the Egyptian side of the border, the smugglers are nervous about the barrier and seem to be accelerating their efforts while it remains incomplete. But the residents of North Sinai wonder when, if ever, a sense of law and order will be restored to their towns.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News.
SIEGEL: And Ahmed Abu Hamda contributed reporting for that story from Gaza.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Does this movie sound appealing to you? The main character spends most of his time either skulking on a sidewalk smoking cigarettes, or questioning the meanings of words. Well, the judges at this year's Cannes International Film Festival thought it was pretty appealing. They gave the movie their Jury Prize. It's from Romania, and it's called "Police, Adjective." It opens this month in some American theaters.
Howie Movshovitz of Colorado Public Radio asked the director what it's all about.
HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ: A young detective struggles with whether or not to arrest three students who've been smoking hashish. He believes their lives will be ruined for a minor crime. The title of the movie is written "Police, Adjective," and director Corneliu Porumboiu says the film's a discourse on language and the detective's search for the meaning of such words as conscience, moral and law.
Mr. CORNELIU PORUMBOIU (Director, "Police Adjective"): The movie is built around this concept, and at the end, I arrive to the meanings of the words: what is conscience? Because police have to enforce and to respect the law, which is my words and when I start to think this movie, I had the impression that all the time we speak one with each other, but at the end, each one of us has his own representation.
MOVSHOVITZ: The representation or meaning of each of those words can be determined by whoever speaks them, or they can be taken literally. In a crucial sequence, the young detective's commander, in a soft, patronizing voice, forces him to read dictionary definitions of the words he uses to justify leaving the students alone.
(Soundbite of movie, "Police, Adjective")
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
MOVSHOVITZ: Look up conscience, the police chief says and fixes a cold stare while the young detective reads like a child in front of the school principal.
(Soundbite of movie, "Police, Adjective")
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
MOVSHOVITZ: It's a grim, humiliating scene, and the weight of the commander's oppressive logic squashes the young cop's spirit. The joyless feeling is matched by the film's images of the small city of Vaslui, where it takes place and where director Corneliu Porumboiu grew up. He says "Police, Adjective" was filmed on gray November days using long takes with a stationary camera. There's no music.
But Porumboiu rejects the idea that his film is a metaphor for the dull lingering chill of the former authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. He says that it's just about a cop searching for meaning.
Mr. PORUMBOIU: In a way I'm afraid of metaphor or to generalizate, you know? It's this character, and he's in a transition period. He doesn't have values. He hasn't - doesn't have something to grab, you know?
MOVSHOVITZ: As the commander takes away his words, the young cop looks like he's grabbing for a lifeline, drowning in his own silence. His sense of ethics goes unexpressed.
That silence may not be a metaphor, but it does in a way represent the plight of people struggling to escape the legacy of tyranny, says Corina Suteu. She's director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, a government agency that promotes her country's culture in the United States. She recently organized a festival of new Romanian films.
Ms. CORINA SUTEU (Director, Romanian Cultural Institute): The question that this film asks is how much has Romania today - how much do we really get out of long-term legacies of totalitarian thought, of authoritarian way of thinking, of ideologies? How free are we really to get out of it and make also our individual choices inside a society?
And for me this is the film that really points this very, very strongly and also in a very simple, completely non-sophisticated way. Maybe this is why Corneliu hates to speak about it as a metaphor because he's just very - he wants to keep it simple.
MOVSHOVITZ: That style also characterized Corneliu Porumboiu's critically acclaimed first feature "12:08 East of Bucharest."
Corina Suteu says that Porumboiu's unadorned films reveal perplexing and difficult problems: both the commander and the detective want to do their jobs well, but they're trapped by the history of their country.
Ms. SUTEU: A mind that is captive cannot get rid of this captivity. You become, finally, the main guard of this captivity. You become the captive and the one who is the guard to the prison. And this is maybe the most dangerous and awful legacy of totalitarian regimes because you're afraid to get out of this captivity.
MOVSHOVITZ: Suteu says that having to live with dual realities is what the great Romanian Dada artists Tristan Tzara and Eugene Ionesco called absurdity, and that Corneliu Porumboiu has entered this absurdist tradition with his observation that words have become meaningless.
Mr. PORUMBOIU: I think now we are living in a world which we are making the laws. But in the same time, I think that it's more and more difficult to understand each other.
MOVSHOVITZ: His characters don't seem to think we can. Director Corneliu Porumboiu is a little more optimistic.
For NPR News, I'm Howie Movshovitz.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The Detroit Auto Show opens this week. Today, reporters got a preview of what's coming to showrooms later this year. So did a group of congressional leaders. They are there in Detroit to see how General Motors and Chrysler are spending all that taxpayer money they've received.
NPR's Frank Langfitt is on the floor at the Auto Show. And Frank, what can you see from where you are now?
(Soundbite of crowd)
FRANK LANGFITT: Well, I'm right now, I'm at the Ford exhibit and I would say so far, this has been Ford's show, at least of the Detroit Three. They won the North American Car of the Year and the Truck of the Year this morning. As you remember, they didn't take that bailout money and they've kind of enjoyed a bit of a halo effect with customers because of that. So, they've been kind of doing better. And they just launched the Ford Focus, which I'm looking at right now. It's a compact - pretty sleek looking car for a compact. And they're going to put it up against the Honda Civic and the Toyota Corolla later this year.
SIEGEL: No halo effect over at General Motors, I guess. GM went through bankruptcy. It also had two CEOs who were forced out in just eight months. How does GM look at the Auto Show? What do they have on display there?
LANGFITT: Well, they are looking better. They've got some nice things coming from Buick. They're also going to be launching the Cruze, it's a Chevy. And they say it's going to get up to 40 miles to the gallon. It's also a compact and again, is going to go up against the Focus. But the design, when people look at it, analysts, other people who focus on those things, they don't think the design is all that strong. And there is a sense that GM is doing better, but still trying to find its way. And it has been, as you said Robert, a really turbulent year.
(Soundbite of train)
SIEGEL: What was that noise, Frank? Sounded like car.
LANGFITT: Well, that's a train that goes over the Civic Center. Every now and then, you hear it running nearby.
SIEGEL: That's mass transit at work is what you're hearing.
LANGFITT: Indeed.
SIEGEL: Now, Chrysler is obviously the weakest of the U.S. automakers. In years past they've had some really elaborate and expensive displays. Now they are owned by Fiat. Is there a different feel from Chrysler this year at the Auto Show?
LANGFITT: A totally different feel. And if you'll wait with me for a moment, Robert, I'm going to walk over to Chrysler and describe what it looks like now.
ROBERTS: Okay, you walk across the floor and we'll hear what it looks like this year at Chrysler. This moment requires a bit of suspension of disbelief.
LANGFITT: Well, Robert, I'm over at Chrysler now and you wouldn't really recognize it from last year. There are - is no press conference. There isn't much at all in the way of new product. And there is kind of a schizophrenic feel. I mean, you see they brought in a lot of the Italian cars that Fiat makes, including, they have over here a convertible Maserati with a very long leggy model in it. And next to it is the Dodge Grand Caravan. So, a lot of people in Detroit are looking at Chrysler and trying to figure out where this company is going. They are not showing us new product and people are a little worried because Chrysler, of course, has had the worst sales at the Detroit Three. And people are questioning whether they can really make it.
SIEGEL: Now, the delegation at the Auto Show from Washington includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also Hilda Solis, the secretary of Labor. Have you run into them and can you get a sense of what they're interested in at the Auto Show?
LANGFITT: Well, Nancy Pelosi has been walking around. I actually also ran into Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. He was looking at a lot of the electric vehicles and he was looking at the Nissan LEAF, which they say, they are going to launch it pretty soon, I guess later this year. They say it'll get up to -will be able to drive for a hundred miles on a single charge. But Secretary LaHood also asked about infrastructure, you know, people, if they live in apartments, will they be able to charge these cars? So, he was also raising some of the basic infrastructure questions surrounding electric vehicles.
SIEGEL: One coincidental bit of news: It turns out last year, the market for autos, for new cars in China actually became larger than the U.S. market for cars. So, I wonder, is the North American International Auto Show as the Detroit show is called, is it suddenly the second most important auto show in the world, next to one that they have over there?
LANGFITT: Well, that's a great question and China is on everybody's minds here. Certainly BYD, it's an electric carmaker out of China, they are having a press conference tomorrow that I think most people will go to. And when people talk about the global market, Ford, when they were launching the Focus just earlier this morning, they are all talking about the importance of China and the importance of continued growth there. So, I think as people build cars here in Detroit, they are really looking across the Pacific to the consumers there.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Frank.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Frank Langfitt at the Annual Auto Show in Detroit.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
It was almost a year ago that President Obama signed the economic stimulus plan into law. The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was supposed to jumpstart the economy through tax cuts and job creation. Here is the president at the bill signing ceremony last February in Denver.
(Soundbite of applause)
President BARACK OBAMA: Because of this investment, nearly 400,000 men and women will go to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing our faulty dams and levees.
BLOCK: But according to an analysis conducted by the Associated Press, those new jobs have not affected local unemployment. AP reporter Matt Apuzzo conducted the analysis and he joins me here in the studio. And Matt, your findings show those jobs not as promised.
Mr. MATT APUZZO (Reporter, Associated Press): What we found was, there is no real correlation between the amount of money you spend on transportation and whether unemployment goes down, or even whether unemployment goes down in the construction industry. And that was what was most surprising because you would expect if you spent a lot of money to rebuild our nation's crumbling roads and bridges that construction workers would benefit. But what we found is that the construction industry is such a small subset of the overall economy, and the transportation construction industry is such a small niche within that subset, that you can pour all of this money in and it does put people to work. It does hire people, but not enough to make any sort of move on the needle, one way or the other, as far as overall unemployment goes.
And that's significant because the president has actually singled out construction money as a real big part of the second stimulus, the one that the House has passed and the Senate is considering.
BLOCK: So, if I understand this right the Recovery Act, the stimulus plan, is creating jobs, people are building roads and bridges, but those are offset by other job losses, so the net effect is negligible.
Mr. APUZZO: Well, it's not just that it's offset. It's that, you know, people are working, and there's a difference between employing people and creating new jobs. And what we found is that the stimulus is employing a lot of people, but it's not making any sort of dent in the unemployment rate or even in construction employment. Part of that is just because, you know, things like residential construction and commercial construction, those are the big chunks of the construction industry. The solution of putting money into roads and bridges is very politically popular in both parties, frankly. And it's easy to do and the Department of Transportation is really good at getting the money out the door. But it's not necessarily the best way to get bang for your buck in terms of moving the needle on unemployment.
BLOCK: The argument is, though, that building infrastructure also has a ripple effect, it create other jobs down through the economy.
Mr. APUZZO: Absolutely. And - I mean, that is a fantastic public policy argument. It's not necessarily the best stimulus argument. I mean, if the idea is we need a second stimulus to help improve unemployment in the short term, you know, roads and bridges might not be the best way to do that. But there's absolutely a great public policy argument that we need roads and bridges and if the government is going to be in the business of making sure we have good ones that we need to spend more money on them.
BLOCK: What has the White House said about your findings as you conducted this analysis of transportation jobs?
Mr. APUZZO: Well, in advance of this story, we did speak with the White House and the White House economists who pretty much said, people are working, people have jobs and it's good policy to put people to work repairing the roads. After the story moved, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made the argument that it has really helped a very small sector of workers in the transportation construction industry. And that that's where we should be measuring our effect, not in the overall unemployment.
BLOCK: And what do you think of that argument?
Mr. APUZZO: I mean, it's not really what we tested. What we tested was the question of has the stimulus helped unemployment generally, because I think that's the way it was pitched when it was passed. You know, if they want to argue that it has helped unemployment in a very small sector, I think the data backs that up. I think the data does show that if you spend a lot of money on transportation, you will improve the situation for a small niche of construction workers who focus on transportation.
BLOCK: Matt Apuzzo is investigative reporter with the Associated Press. Matt, thanks a lot.
Mr. APUZZO: Thank you for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
A survey about jobs was released earlier this month. It rated the best and the worst among 200 jobs.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The survey was conducted by the job search company, CareerCast. It looked at five factors: stress, work environment, physical demands, income and hiring outlook.
SIEGEL: The results: actuaries were at the top. At the bottom, roustabouts, the people with the dirtiest jobs in the oil business, operating and cleaning oil rigs.
BLOCK: Well, that's what the numbers showed. But then there is subjective experience. Karen DeToro is a consulting actuary in Chicago. She advises life insurance companies about risk. Adam Henry is a roustabout in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana. And we got these two strangers to talk to each other.
Ms. KAREN DETORO (Consulting Actuary, Chicago): So, Adam, when did you first decide that this was what you wanted to pursue?
Mr. ADAM HENRY (Roustabout, Gulf of Mexico): Well, it's been something I've - even in grade school I did book reports and such on.
Ms. DETORO: Wow, that's great.
Mr. HENRY: Yeah. How did you end up in your present occupation, Karen?
Ms. DETORO: Well, when I was in college, I actually just decided to major in math, didn't necessarily have a plan for what I was going to do with it. And frankly, I had some student loans I needed to pay back and I needed to get a job, found out about this career, applied for and got a job. And I thought it would be a short term thing until I could get those loans paid off. But it turned out to be something I really enjoyed. I've worked at a few different employers in the field and so I've gotten to see some different aspects of it. I love what I do for a living. And so, it was very gratifying to see that this survey reflected a lot of the same positives that I see in my job.
Mr. HENRY: In my situation, you want to escape, you know, if you're a roustabout in a drill camp or on a drill ship you're in an area where you're in seclusion. To me, that's an exciting adventure.
Ms. DETORO: Right, and that's very different.
Mr. HENRY: And it's dirty work, you know. You wear coveralls, all kinds of safety equipment.
Ms. DETORO: There are certainly some things about my job that people wouldn't find appealing. You know, we do a lot of work with numbers. Certainly that's not something that everyone is interested in.
Mr. HENRY: I'm always thinking in my own mind that it's work always indoors and I've never been very good at that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DETORO: Well, I will tell you I get to travel a lot for my job. And so, when I get to where I'm going, I'm going into a client's office and working indoors again. But I like the days where I'm running to the airport or I'm driving from my office to a client in the middle of the day. I do like having that opportunity to get out of the office during the day. But I would say, I don't think I would take it to the extreme that you do. I don't think it's something that I would be capable of doing. So, I'm happy that there are guys like you who do do it.
Mr. HENRY: Yeah. Two nights ago, we had dolphins all around the ship. It was a nice quiet night. The water was like glass. And the dolphins were just swimming around, feeding in the lights around the ship.
Ms. DETORO: Well, Adam, it was a pleasure talking with you. Best of luck.
Mr. HENRY: Thank you, Karen.
Ms. DETORO: Okay, thank you very much.
Mr. HENRY: All right.
Ms. DETORO: Bye.
Mr. HENRY: Bye.
SIEGEL: That was roustabout Adam Henry taking with actuary Karen DeToro about their personal experiences with what one survey found to be the best job and the worst job.
(Soundbite of song, "Roustabout")
Mr. ELVIS PRESLEY (Singer): (Singing) I'm just a roustabout shiftin' from town to town. No job can hold me down, I'm just a knock-around guy. There's a lot of space beneath that sky till I find my place there's no doubt, I'll be a roving roustabout. Call me the carefree kind�
BLOCK: The King on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And now, a tribute to a technology that is not new. It's old enough to become the butt of movie jokes - from the likes of "Austin Powers," spoofing James Bond movies. It's the laser.
(Soundbite of movie, "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery")
Mr. MIKE MYERS (as Dr. Evil): Are those sharks with laser beams attached to their heads?
(Soundbite of laser)
BLOCK: Musician and writer David Was went in search of some tech geeks who might be celebrating a big birthday for the laser.
Mr. DAVID WAS (Musician; Writer): Having just returned from the digital bacchanal known as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was surprised how few of the participants knew that the once mighty laser turns 50 this year.
(Soundbite of laser)
Mr. WAS: Forgotten amid the din of tiny gadgets that go beep in the night, the laser beam can rightly lay claim to being the Rodney Dangerfield of high tech.
Mr. RODNEY DANGERFIELD (Comedian; Actor): I tell yeah, I don't get no respect. No respect at all.
Mr. WAS: But even if the laser's golden anniversary was being denied the respect it deserved, it wasn't hard to find lasers slaving away on the convention center floor.
(Soundbite of convention center floor)
Mr. WAS: Most moderns are aware that it takes a laser beam to read a bar code, that CDs and DVDs are worthless silver Frisbees without lasers to decode the embedded bits and bytes. The laser also plays a role in delivering crisp images from small video display devices, like the many palm-sized projectors that debuted at CES this year.
Mr. BEN AVERCH (Global Product Manager, Microvision): I love lasers personally.
Mr. WAS: Ben Averch, the global product manager from Microvision, was unstinting in his affection for the beam and its role in his product, the show WX laser pico-projector.
Mr. AVERCH: Due to the quality of the laser light, we get about 240 percent of the available colors that you can see as opposed to an LED-based system.
Mr. WAS: Even the Swiss Army Knife, which has had a corner on analog multitasking for over a century, now has a weapon more suited to the board room than the wilderness. It has a 16 gigabyte USB flash drive that won't do you any good when a mountain lion attacks, but the red laser pointer might be used in a pinch to distract the critter, a parlor trick well known to cat fanciers everywhere. Swiss Army Knife's Dan Carpenter was properly laser-reverent.
Mr. DAN CARPENTER (Swiss Army Knife): We're thrilled to have it as a part of our product and we hope for many more years of the lovely laser to come.
Mr. WAS: Finally, I sought out one of the little-guy firms, toiling in the shadows of the 10,000 square foot corporate behemoths. The Tokyo based Ariel 3D display project is responsible for those hovering logos you might see dangling in midair at a trade show like CES. I asked the company's rather earnest spokesman how many lasers it would take to project a digital effigy of a troubled female pop star.
Mr. TONY MERCEDEZ (Spokesman, Microvision): Britney Spears. Well, if you have enough laser machines and then enough all scanners, then we can create.
Mr. WAS: Tony Mercedez's literal answer to a facetious query was well worth the price of admission. At 50 years old, the humble laser is alive and kicking, removing tattoos, shooting down missiles, or projecting blimp sized Britneys into the stratosphere. Happy golden anniversary.
BLOCK: That's writer and musician David Was for our weekly segment, All Tech Considered. This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Connecticut, Democrats expressed sadness last week when Senator Christopher Dodd announced that he would not seek reelection. That was the personal reaction. But politically, there was a sense of relief. Dodd is Connecticut's longest-serving senator ever. But for nearly a year, he has had horrible polling numbers.
From our member station WNPR, Diane Orson reports on Connecticut's new and fluid political landscape.
DIANE ORSON: Standing with friends and family in front of his home near the Connecticut River, it was a somber Senator Chris Dodd who last week announced he would not seek a sixth term in the Senate.
Senator CHRISTOPHER DODD (Democrat, Connecticut): I have been a Connecticut senator for 30 years. I'm very proud of the job I've done and the results delivered. But none of us is irreplaceable. None of us are indispensible. And those who think otherwise are dangerous.
ORSON: Democrats had been pessimistic about Dodd's chances of winning reelection. Polls showed him in big trouble against either Republican opponent. But within hours after his announcement, their gloom turned to joy as Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced he would throw his hat into the ring.
Mr. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (Attorney General, Connecticut): Today is really Chris Dodd's day. I'm also here to say that I intend to be a candidate for the United States Senate.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
ORSON: Blumenthal has been a state attorney general since 1990 and is arguably Connecticut's most popular elected official. An activist for consumer protection, he's led major lawsuits, including a fight against the tobacco industry that resulted in a multibillion-dollar settlement.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL: What's really very compatible is the roles that I see for attorney general, which is a very activist, aggressive fighter for the people, and the role that I see for United States senator, which is a very activist, aggressive fighter for the people of Connecticut.
ORSON: Howard Reiter is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Connecticut. He says Democrats no longer face the difficult prospect of trying to save an endangered incumbent.
Professor HOWARD REITER (Political Science, University of Connecticut): Well, it certainly removes an albatross from the Democrats. It gives the Democrats a much stronger chance of holding on to that seat.
ORSON: Early polls show Blumenthal with a commanding lead over anyone the Republicans put up. But Reiter says the GOP is seeing a lot of national momentum, even in Connecticut.
Prof. REITER: He will certainly benefit from his longstanding popularity with the voters. I mean, some of that will carry over. But the national context is not as favorable to Democrats this year as it was in 2008 or 2006. So, you know, there's a question mark there.
ORSON: The frontrunner for the Republican nomination is thought to be former Congressman Rob Simmons. Only days ago, Simmons was confident he could defeat both his primary opponent, former World Wrestling executive Linda McMahon and Dodd. Now, he has the specter of Blumenthal as his opponent in November. But Simmons insists things are not that different.
Mr. ROB SIMMONS (Former Republican Congressman, Connecticut): The way I look at it is there is going to be a change in the face, but not necessarily a change in the race. The issues that we've been interested in - deficit spending, the increased debt, the failure of the stimulus package, unemployment - are still there.
ORSON: Although the GOP has been relishing the thought of running against Dodd, some in the party like former state senator, James Fleming, say they're sorry to see him go.
Mr. JAMES FLEMING (Former Republican State Senator, Connecticut): I think it's a loss to the state. He's a senior senator, carries a lot of weight down there. I think for him and his family right now, we should say thank you.
ORSON: For the longest time, Connecticut Democrats had been grumbling about the state's other senator, the Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman. Many couldn't wait for 2012 when Lieberman's term was up and they could try to unseat him. But for now, they're thrilled that a Senate race that once looked gone has somehow become far more promising.
For NPR News, I'm Diane Orson in New Haven.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Northern Ireland, a sex scandal linked to possible financial impropriety is threatening to scuttle the power-sharing peace agreement there. The scandal involves the wife of Northern Ireland's Protestant leader Peter Robinson. He's the head of the Democratic Unionist Party. His 60-year-old wife, Iris, admitted to an affair with a 19-year-old. She also admitted helping him raise tens of thousands of dollars to open a cafe.
Iris Robinson is herself a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and the British Parliament. She says she'll resign those posts. And according to her husband, Peter Robinson, Iris attempted suicide.
Well, today, Peter Robinson announced that he is temporarily stepping aside as Northern Ireland's first minister.
Mr. PETER ROBINSON (First Minister, Northern Ireland): Iris is receiving acute psychiatric treatment through the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust. As a father and a husband, I need to devote time to deal with family matters.
BLOCK: The BBC's Mark Devenport joins us from Belfast to sort through what's going on. And, Mark, explain first how this sex scandal with this financial component to it was first revealed.
Mr. MARK DEVENPORT (Political Editor, BBC Northern Ireland): Well, it was revealed by a BBC documentary investigation. A whistleblower who had been on the staff of Iris Robinson, who is not only the wife of the first minister but is a member of the Westminster Parliament and of the Northern Ireland Assembly in her own right, revealed all about the affair, the suicide attempt, and more importantly from, I think, the documentary team's point of view, these questionable financial dealings.
BLOCK: And the accusation is not just that she helped raise the money but that she and potentially her husband helped to conceal those funds?
Mr. DEVENPORT: Certainly, there was a sin of commission by Iris Robinson. She was also a member of the local council which controlled the lease to the property in which her young lover was setting up a cafe. And effectively she sat in on the decision which approved that, without declaring any kind of interest, which would be against all our local government guidelines.
It was also against the government guidelines that she didn't declare a financial interest in the loans that she got from the property developers on behalf of her lover.
So far, as her husband was concerned, the documentary investigation alleged that he had also breached the rules by not reporting this activity to the relevant authorities when he discovered it. But he contends that he had done nothing wrong, that he had no duty to immediately report this and that actually he had instructed his wife to get the money paid back from whence it came.
BLOCK: Now, one added dimension here, I gather, is that the Robinson's party, the Democratic Unionists, are seen as socially conservative. I've seen the word puritan used. I think she herself has, in the past, made statements that have been very critical, calling homosexuality shamefully wicked and vile.
Mr. DEVENPORT: Yes. I mean, Iris Robinson, of all the politicians in Northern Ireland, has been one who has, in the last few months, been living in a glass house, sort of waiting for people to throw stones at her. She made that statement on a radio program, that homosexuality was an abomination. She was also, in one interview, critical of Hillary Clinton for sticking with her husband in the course of all the problems that the Clintons had with their marriage. So she hasn't been slow about condemning others.
BLOCK: Now, how does all of this threaten the power-sharing agreement between the Unionists and Sinn Fein, the nationalists, who want to break with Britain?
Mr. DEVENPORT: We have sort of separate difficulties, which were nothing to do with these scandals, over whether local politicians here should be responsible for the police and the courts. So any kind of instability at the top seem to make it less likely that they could sort this out, and that political row has been sort of coming to a head just as these scandals broke.
BLOCK: Mark Devenport, thank you very much.
Mr. DEVENPORT: Thank you.
BLOCK: Mark Devenport is BBC Northern Ireland's political editor. He spoke with us from Belfast.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
A central figure in the French New Wave has died. The film director and critic Eric Rohmer died in Paris today. Some of his best known films are "My Night at Maud's" and "Claire's Knee." As our critic Bob Mondello explains, Rohmer was an odd fit for the New Wave.
BOB MONDELLO: Most films offer audiences an escape from reality. Eric Rohmer's films urged audiences to plunge right in. His pictures are filled with the everyday: characters who have long, searching conversations, and in whose lives nothing much appears to be happening.
He made his name with a series of films grouped together as "Six Moral Tales," all of which dealt with a similar theme: A young man about to commit to one woman meets another who makes him reconsider, as Jean-Louis Trintignant did in "My Night at Maud's."
(Soundbite of movie, "My Night at Maud's")
Mr. JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT (Actor): (As Jean-Louis) (French spoken).
Ms. MARIE-CHRISTINE BARRAULT (Actor): (As Francoise) (French spoken).
MONDELLO: The brief dalliance in these movies never quite takes the man will return to the woman he'd initially settled on, but it's that moment of indecision that captivated Rohmer. It gives the character pause. And in that pause, as his whole life seems to be coming apart, he takes stock.
Rohmer once described his "Moral Tales" as stories which deal less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it. My work, he said, is closer to the novel than to other forms of entertainment, like the theater.
Eric Rohmer was born Jean-Marie Scherer and didn't adopt the name under which he made his films until he was in his late 20s, teaching literature and reporting for a Paris newspaper. His professional moniker was a combination of two that he liked: The first name of actor-director Erich von Stroheim and the last name of novelist Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu Manchu stories. As you'll gather from that, Eric Rohmer devoured all sorts of storytelling, spending a lot of time at the Cinematheque Francaise, watching movies and developing new film theories with such future new wavers as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
The three of them went on to work for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema, hoping to popularize their new wave's low budget, realistic, director-driven films. Rohmer, though, was a decade older than most of the young Turks he was associating with, and his films seemed to be influenced by French filmmakers who had preceded even him.
Plot was never at the heart of any of his films, talk was: witty, highbrow chatter from characters who are sophisticated, articulate and often determinedly trivial, which of course, earned him his share of detractors. Gene Hackman had a line in an American action picture in which he snorted that he'd once watched a Rohmer film, and it was kind of like watching paint dry. Rohmer said he understood that and claimed to be surprised when his films became modest box office hits, as they almost always did.
Besides the "Six Moral Tales" he made early on, he made several other film cycles: "Comedies and Proverbs," which explored notions of deception; "Tales of the Four Seasons," which looked at loners; and his most recent film, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," which he completed just three years ago when he was 86.
Eric Rohmer, who began his career championing a revolt against the orthodoxies of his time, ended up dedicating his life behind the camera to making movies more like literature, and that was revolutionary in its own way.
I'm Bob Mondello.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In San Francisco today, the issue of same sex marriage began a journey that is likely to end at the Supreme Court. For the first time a federal court is examining whether states have the right to ban same sex marriage. The trial looks at Proposition 8, California's voter-approved ban on gay marriage.
NPR's Richard Gonzales has been covering today's events. He joins us now. And, first, Richard, there were some pretrial drama today. We've been reporting that the Supreme Court stopped an effort to put the proceedings on YouTube. Tell us about that.
RICHARD GONZALES: Well, we start with Judge Vaughn Walker. He's a libertarian leaning judge who was appointed by the first President Bush. He wanted to be the first to experiment with televising federal trial. The people who brought this case, the opponents of Prop 8, said fine, no problem. But supporters of Prop 8 challenged that decision. And Judge Walker came up what he thought was a compromise. He said he would record the trial and then broadcast it on a delayed basis via YouTube.
The Prop 8 side said that a televised trial would lead to witness intimidation. And they took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a temporary stay this morning. And the justices want more time to consider the matter and their stay is in effect until Wednesday afternoon Eastern Time.
BLOCK: Well, set the scene for us at the court house there in San Francisco. What's it been like?
GONZALES: Well, there was a small demonstration of people favoring gay marriage in front of the court house, but it was far smaller and more restrained than in past court hearings. And, today, inside the court room, opening arguments by the lawyers against Prop 8, basically the message they delivered was that Prop 8 does harm to gays and lesbians by denying them the right to marry, which they called a basic civil right.
And then on the opposing side, the lawyer for Prop 8, Charles Cooper, argued that since ancient times the fundamental purpose of a marriage is the protection of children created by man and woman who join together to procreate.
Now, I want to play for you just a couple of comments from an Oakland couple, Ellen LaPointe and Kleigh Hathaway. And they've been together for 17 years and they talked about the roller coaster effect of this debate in which the legality of their marriage is in and out of the courts and subject to the will of the voters. First, Ellen LaPointe.
Ms. ELLEN LAPOINTE: You know, what might look a little different in terms of which court we're in this time and different plaintiffs and the like, it's still the basic, you know, fundamental issue, which is why can't we marry? I'm hopeful, but I am much more cynical, you know. I hope it works out, and I'm going to live my life.
GONZALES: And I think you can hear a sense of weariness and apprehension there.
BLOCK: Now, this case, Richard, has brought together two heavyweights in the legal world. They've been on opposite sides in at least one key case in the past. And now they're working together on behalf of same-sex couples.
GONZALES: That's right. The challenge to Prop 8 is brought by Ted Olson and David Boies, a legal odd couple, if you will. Olson is a prominent conservative litigator who argued successfully for George W. Bush before the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. David Boies was on the opposite side in that case. He argued unsuccessfully for Al Gore. And now the two have joined forces to oppose Prop 8.
And when you bring that kind of court room muscle, it tends to raise expectations. And being inside the court room today, you could feel as if it were an important historical and legal moment.
BLOCK: A moment not just there in California, but apparently it could also have huge national implications.
GONZALES: That's right. Regardless of how this trial turns out, the verdict will be appealed and this is only the first step on a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court. And up until now, gay marriage has been handled only in state courts or during elections. So what both sides want is a federal ruling, most likely from the Supreme Court and that will establish a national standard for whether same-sex couples can marry.
BLOCK: Okay. Richard, thanks a lot.
GONZALES: My pleasure.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Richard Gonzales joining us from San Francisco, where the federal trial started today on California's gay marriage ban.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
There is big news today out of Major League Baseball. Big, but not especially surprising news. Mark McGwire admitted that he used steroids. The former single-season homerun champion made that disclosure in a statement to the Associated Press. McGwire is preparing to return to baseball as a hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals.
NPR's Tom Goldman joins us now. Hi, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN: Hi, Robert.
SIEGEL: McGwire's statement came in response, not so much to appeal to us as say it ain't so, Mark, as to say it so already. What did he say?
GOLDMAN: Yeah. Here's some of what he said. He said: I used steroids during my playing career and I apologize. I remember trying steroids very briefly in the 1989-1990 offseason and then after I was injured in 1993, I used steroids again. I used them on occasion throughout the '90s, including during the 1998 season. That, Robert, as you remember, was the year of McGwire's thrilling season-long homerun duel with Sammy Sosa.
And then he continues: I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era - kind of an interesting statement there. He also said he used human growth hormone, which is banned in baseball. McGwire hit 583 career homeruns, tied for eight on the all-time list with Alex Rodriguez, who also admitted steroid use within the last year.
And McGwire finally said: I'm sure people will wonder if I could've hit all those homeruns had I never taken steroids. Now, Robert, people will wonder. I think a lot of baseball writers have decided, no, which is why they'll never vote for him or any other guys from the so-called steroid era for induction into the Hall Of Fame.
SIEGEL: Responses from Major League Baseball, from others to his statement today?
GOLDMAN: Yeah, they're pouring in. Major League Baseball Bud - Commissioner Bud Selig who reveled in that 1998 homerun duel between McGwire and Sosa because it basically saved baseball. Selig released a statement today saying he's pleased McGwire confronted his use of banned drugs, that he used the opportunity - Selig used the opportunity to talk about how baseball has toughened up its drug testing program, calling it the toughest, most effective in pro sports. He said the steroid era clearly is a thing of the past and McGwire's admission is another step in the right direction.
And then McGwire's former manager, Tony LaRussa, who managed McGwire in Oakland and then St. Louis, who was around Mark McGwire as much as anyone in baseball, he said today on ESPN that he ran a legit program in both places and that he didn't know anything about Mark McGwire's drug use until Mark McGwire told him this morning.
SIEGEL: LaRussa, which should be noted, I believe, went to law school if I'm not mistaken, saying that even after 2005, he didn't suspect that McGwire was using banned drugs when everybody else in the country did.
GOLDMAN: Yeah, that would've isolated him. Certainly everyone did because of that now infamous Congressional hearing on steroids when Mark McGwire said repeatedly, I'm not here to talk about the past. It was embarrassing, it was damming. He fell out of the public eye then, only to reemerge now.
SIEGEL: What do you make of the statement by McGwire that baseball's drug problems are in the past. You think that's true?
GOLDMAN: Well, what Selig says, that there are now fewer positive tests for steroids and that baseball has a tougher drug testing program. That is true. Tougher program, I might add, because baseball was strong-armed into doing it by Congress. Selig also talks about the tiny percentage of minor leaguers testing positive. All I know, Robert, is that I get regular releases from Major League Baseball showing a steady stream of suspensions for powerful steroids, big clusters of suspensions in Latin American Minor Leagues, in particular. It maybe better, but steroids in baseball, hardly a thing of the past.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Tom.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
It is bonus season on Wall Street, and Washington is poised for outrage. White House economic adviser Christina Romer said yesterday that big bonuses at banks that took federal aid are ridiculous. And today, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said this.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (White House Spokesman): There are folks that just continue not to get it.
SIEGEL: Well, joining us from New York is Steven Hall, who runs an executive compensation consulting firm. And, Steven Hall, we talked with you around this time last year when financial firms were being asked by the government to cap their compensation. How have you been?
Mr. STEVEN HALL (Managing Director, Steven Hall and Partners): I've been good. It's good to be back with you again.
SIEGEL: Well, it's reported that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have combined, that is, have set aside $47 billion for bonuses. They know how unpopular these bonuses are with the public. Why so much pay in bonuses?
Mr. HALL: Well, first of all, I guess I have difficulty understanding a number like $47 billion. All of those zeros get me a little cock-eyed in terms of thinking about it. The way in which that total number is derived, though, is based on a sharing of the profits that the employees generate for shareholders.
SIEGEL: And, indeed, it's been a good year on Wall Street.
Mr. HALL: It's been a good year on Wall Street. And, you know, the reasons are one that I think we all have to sit back and think about, you know, how much is based on real smart thinking on the part of these executives and how much is based on the times and based on interest rates and other things like that.
SIEGEL: Well, the banks, evidently, will pay more of the bonuses in stock -that's obliging some pressure from the government. How much of a difference should it make if somebody who's getting a million or two in a bonus this month gets it in the form of stock as opposed to cash?
Mr. HALL: Well, I think for some people - were they to get a bonus and if they were expecting the cash in order to be able to live on it, pay schooling for children, pay for that second home, pay other expenses that they have - finding that you're not going to get the cash could be a little bit of a surprise. But I think Wall Street firms have been telegraphing this to their employees for a while: expect a lot more. And in some cases, expect all of it in the form of stock that you won't be able to get for three to five years.
SIEGEL: Steven Hall, can you hear the sound of blood boiling right now, as you say, for people who might not be able to make ends meet with school and the second home at a million or two a year?
Mr. HALL: I certainly can. And I'm not sure whether it matters if you were to cut Wall Street compensation in half or cut it to 25 percent if the numbers still wouldn't have people boiling. You know, you throw out a number of 47 billion when we started this discussion, if you cut it to 12 billion, wouldn't people still be boiling? You know, the letters that I get from people after doing an interview like this, you know, make it very, very clear that people are hurting and they're upset.
SIEGEL: The greatest anger at bank bonuses that we hear always in Washington and elsewhere in the country for that matter, is those banks got money from the TARP, from the Troubled Assets Program from the Treasury. But beyond that, all of the banks are benefitting right now from very low interest policies at the Federal Reserve, so much so that they're getting almost free money as it is. And that's some of the money that's being paid out in bonuses.
Mr. HALL: It's not that it's necessarily being paid out in bonuses. Remember, they didn't borrow money and then pay that out. But what's happened is the performance that they're being judged on has been based on - they borrowed money from the government for nothing and then even if they put into T-bills or something like that, got some form of an interest rate. That didn't take a very smart individual to create that kind of money or that kind of profit for the banks.
SIEGEL: Not innovation in the financial sector.
Mr. HALL: Not innovation. Not, you know, smart thinking. Not smart analysis or anything else. It was just a very simple arbitrage to be doing.
SIEGEL: Has it been your sense that all of the complaints about big bonuses has actually had some effect on the thinking of Wall Street banks about how much people should be compensated this year? Or is it just the sort of annoyance people there feel you have to put up with from Washington?
Mr. HALL: Yeah, it has. It has everybody thinking: What's the right thing for our public image? What's the right thing for our employees? I think there was a quote today from Mr. Blankfein that, you know, no matter what we do, employees are going to be unhappy and the public is going to be unhappy.
SIEGEL: That's Lloyd Blankfein, the number one man at Goldman Sachs.
Mr. HALL: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of interesting to think about. And, again, I feel for the problems that are going on here. But if it's decided not to pay a banker as much money, how does that help someone on Main Street?
SIEGEL: Well, Steven Hall, thanks for talking with us. Sorry about the email that you're going to be getting.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HALL: I wish people would understand that it is a very difficult world that we're all going through right now, and I don't make the rules. But I do try and report honestly on what I see going on out there.
SIEGEL: Okay, thanks a lot. Steven Hall, who is an executive compensation consultant in New York talking with us about Wall Street bonuses.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Well, for those of us on Main Street, our love affair with credit card seems to be fading. Cards are harder to come by and credit limits are going down. But as NPR's Martin Kaste reports, some people are turning to alternative forms of credit that may actually cost them more.
MARTIN KASTE: You may have noticed the logo on some Web sites. Instead of paying with a credit card, you're invited to click on Bill Me Later, that's actually the name of a payment company Bill Me Later. It's used by sites ranging from AirTran to Zappos.
Brea Todish(ph) discovered it a while ago.
Ms. BREA TODISH: Primarily I've used it for clothing items and for books.
KASTE: Bill Me Later takes your name and part of your Social Security number and then, depending on a credit check, it lends you the money for a single purchase.
Todish says when she was shopping online for new clothes for job interviews, the Bill Me Later option clinched the deal.
Ms. TODISH: I was sort of looking at, you know, a couple of different sites for options. And in the end, I ultimately chose the site that had Bill Me Later, because at the time, I was pretty short on other funds.
KASTE: As some people become more reluctant to use credit cards, online merchants are especially worried about losing sales.
Marty Keane, VP of e-commerce at a retailer called Bluefly, says Bill Me Later is a must.
Mr. MARTY KEANE (Senior Vice President of E-Commerce, Bluefly, Inc.): It is the one thing that we can offer that says, okay, well, if you don't have a credit card at all, here's an opportunity to still make a purchase.
KASTE: Bill Me Later charges no interest for the first few weeks or even the first couple of months, depending on the deal offered by the merchant. So it's essentially a free loan if you pay it back on time.
Mr. STEVE BERMAN (Attorney): If you pay exactly on time.
KASTE: Steve Berman is a lawyer in Seattle.
Mr. BERMAN: But if you don't, you get surprised by the interest payment and the penalties, and that's where people start complaining.
KASTE: Berman's law firm has been online collecting those complaints for a lawsuit against Bill Me Later. He says as soon as customers are out of the repayment grace period, they face an interest rate of 20 percent plus late fees. Berman says one of his clients missed a payment on a $20 purchase and found himself owing 40.
Mr. BERMAN: A loan shark would be happy to get 100 percent of the purchase price.
KASTE: Berman contends that these fees violate the usury laws of California, the home state of Bill Me Later's parent company, eBay. And he says the company is trying to get around the state rules by using an out-of-state bank, CIT, as a front. He says Bill Me Later's business may be capitalizing on customers who are already in financial trouble.
Mr. BERMAN: Now, I wonder if the people who are pushing the buttons Bill Me Later are going to be - have a more propensity of not to pay on time. Because why would you do this? If you've got a credit card, just slap it down.
KASTE: Bill Me Later told NPR that it would not comment on Berman's lawsuit and it didn't accept an invitation to talk more generally about its product. EBay and CIT did take questions but did not respond to them.
Customer Brea Todish says she's satisfied with Bill Me Later. She says she hardly blinks at the company's interest rate.
Ms. TODISH: A couple of years ago, 20 percent, which is usually what it is, would have seemed very high to me. But now I have credit cards that want to charge me, you know, 24, 25, even up to 28 percent.
KASTE: Still, there are other costs to customers like Todish - borrowing money from Bill Me Later may hurt her credit rating - the effect of multiple credit checks for individual purchases. And she doesn't have the benefit of the consumer protection laws that cover credit card purchases. But those are costs that she says she's willing to pay if it lets her rely a little less on the plastic.
Martin Kaste, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Jimi Hendrix only released four official studio albums in his lifetime. A lot has come out since, and soon there will be more. Today, Sony Music and the Hendrix estate announced plans to release a new album. It's called "Valleys of Neptune."
Marcie Sillman of member station KUOW tells us about it.
MARCIE SILLMAN: Most of the songs on the new album were recorded in London in a series of sessions in 1969. Eddie Kramer was there.
Mr. EDDIE KRAMER: This was the year that Jimi was trying everything to find the right direction.
SILLMAN: The longtime Hendrix engineer says the guitarist was experimenting after the release of his album "Electric Ladyland." He came to Olympic Studios to try out some new material.
Mr. KRAMER: Jimi was jamming with different musicians. And I think he had the concept of an album that would follow on from "Electric Ladyland."
Mr. JIMI HENDRIX (Musician): (Unintelligible) I think I'll start up (unintelligible).
(Soundbite of music)
SILLMAN: The tapes have languished in a London vault for the past 40 years. Kramer says he knew they were there and went to look for them with Janie Hendrix, Jimi's half-sister and the head of the Seattle-based company that controls the musician's estate.
(Soundbite of song, "Bleeding Heart")
Mr. HENDRIX: (Singing) People hear me, people hear me. Do you know what it means to be left alone?
SILLMAN: The new album, to be released by Sony Legacy Recordings, is the first of a series of Hendrix music and DVD documentaries the company plans to put out.
Eddie Kramer says he spent a year remastering the old analog tapes, using state-of-the-art digital technology to clean up the sound, but not too clean. He says he was trying to bring out the essence of Jimi Hendrix.
Mr. KRAMER: When he plays the guitar and it jumps out of the track, the hair on the back of my neck just stands up. It's just so raw and in your face.
(Soundbite of song, "Bleeding Heart")
SILLMAN: Hearing the tapes again, Kramer says, was a bittersweet experience. He says Hendrix was not only a client, he was a friend.
Mr. KRAMER: He was the greatest guitar player I ever had the privilege of working with.
(Soundbite of song, "Bleeding Heart")
SILLMAN: "Valleys of Neptune" will be released on March 9th.
For NPR News, I'm Marcie Sillman in Seattle.
BLOCK: And since we have to wait until March to hear that new album, in the meantime, we leave you with some classic Jimi Hendrix.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
I'm Robert Siegel.
And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: If you visit the new tallest building in the world in Dubai, you can experience something that sounds like an amusement park ride. On the elevators at the Burj Khalifa, you can zoom up to an observation deck 124 floors high in less than a minute. That breaks records for elevator speed.
As NPR's Heather Murphy reports, these are unusually high tech elevators.
HEATHER MURPHY: What does it feel like to travel more than 30 feet a second?
Mr. KEVIN SCOTT (Reporter, Gulf News): You know, it's just like when you're taking off in a plane. My ears were constantly popping so you're having to, you know, yawn or take deep breaths. But apart from that, I think you are aware that it is going fast, but it's very smooth.
MURPHY: That's Kevin Scott, a reporter for the Gulf News. He says the Otis-designed elevators stole the show.
Mr. SCOTT: And it has, you know, built-in light and entertainment features, including LCD displays that play some quite dramatic music, which kind of reaches a crescendo just as the doors are opening at the top.
(Soundbite of music)
MURPHY: The most impressive aspect of the 57 elevators, however, relates to something no ones saw or heard: their brain.
Dr. LEE GRAY (Professor, University of North Carolina): It's the smartest brain now that we're using to control elevator traffic.
MURPHY: Dr. Lee Gray is a professor at the University of North Carolina who has been studying elevators for 20 years. He says the fundamental technology hasn't changed much since the '60s. Instead, engineers have been refining an algorithm used to control the flow of people through a building.
Dr. GRAY: You have to predict human behavior. In many instances, hundreds, or depending on the size of the building, maybe a thousand people, within a 15 to 20 minute time period enters the building and goes up to work.
MURPHY: People hate to wait, to such a degree that a lag of 30 seconds can hurt a business. So, the elevator's computerized brain has to figure out the optimal way to get everyone where they need to go.
Dr. GRAY: So, the math to sort out the traffic control and how quickly the elevators move and stop has become quite extraordinary.
MURPHY: This math is the cerebral cortex of the most advanced elevator systems. And it's working at its finest in a system called Destination Dispatch, which will be used in the busiest parts of Dubai's Burj Khalifa. Engineers say this is the future. But because Dubai is a bit far, I visited the new headquarters of Legg Mason in Baltimore, which has a similar system.
(Soundbite of scanning beep)
(Soundbite of footsteps)
MURPHY: In the lobby, you scan your employee badge, an LCD screen flashes which elevator to take.
Unidentified Female: Going Up.
MURPHY: It already knows where you're going, and the lift will only stop at your floor, often there aren't any buttons to push.
Unidentified Female: Twenty fourth floor.
MURPHY: And Schindler, another elevator company, says they're working on a cell phone app that will schedule a lift even before you've arrived in the building. Gone will be wait times, but also gone will be chance encounters with people from other floors.
Dr. GRAY: Many people in corporate settings use elevator rides for the so-called elevator pitch, or elevator talk, to pitch an idea, to talk to a colleague. Destination Dispatch could separate people who in the past might travel together.
Mr. KEITH MARSHALL (Elevator Operator): Eighth floor.
Mr. MARSHALL: Ocho. Okay, let's go to ocho floor, okay.
MURPHY: Social interaction is currently a key part of the elevator experience at the Hotel Lombardy in Washington, D.C.
Mr. MARSHALL: Oh, I see the - this is 8th floor, actually that - I just bring her off the floor.
MURPHY: Keith Marshall is one of the last truly manual elevator operators in the world. He's been driving the elevator for the past 30 years. In a few weeks, however, his job will become extinct as the lift becomes automatic.
Mr. MARSHALL: So, this is going to be gone. This is going to be all computerized.
(Soundbite of elevator door opening)
MURPHY: A buzzer rings, he pushes the letter, opens the gate.
Mr. MARSHALL: Hey, here you go.
MURPHY: But the woman has left and taken the stairs. She couldn't wait. Perhaps, she is accustomed to a more efficient, computerized elevator brain.
Heather Murphy, NPR News.
(Soundbite of "Hacia del Aire")
SIEGEL: High tech doesn't always mean good tech. We learned over the weekend that 14 passengers got stuck in one of Burj Khalifa's elevators. To find out more, you can check out our All Tech blog at npr.org/alltech.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now to an issue that the Supreme Court is revisiting. Today, the court heard arguments in a case it had appeared to resolve less than seven months ago. The question relates to crime lab analysts and when they're required to testify in court. Today the court flirted with undermining or even reversing its ruling from June, as NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Until June, the vast majority of state and local prosecutors routinely submitted notarized reports from crime lab analysts for evidence at trial. The burden was on the defense to subpoena the state's forensic analysts if it wanted to cross examine them. But less than seven months ago, the Supreme Court, by a narrow five to four vote, said that procedure is unconstitutional and that the burden is on the prosecution to produce its witnesses to testify live unless the defense agrees to something less.
The court's decision was written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia over the strong dissent of four justices. Since then, only one thing has changed: One member of the five-justice majority � David Souter � has retired, replaced by Sonia Sotomayor, who served for years as a prosecutor in Manhattan. So, all eyes were on Sotomayor today as the court considered two drug convictions based on affidavits from crime lab analysts as to what the substance was that was found on or near the defendants.
Sotomayor did not disappoint, asking lots of questions, but at the end of the day, she was noncommittal. The two cases under the microscope came from Virginia, which ironically, changed its law in August to comply with the Supreme Court's June decision. The convictions at issue, however, were under the state's old law, which allowed for affidavit testimony without the consent of the defense. On the steps of the Supreme Court today, both sides saw the issue in dire terms.
The state's solicitor general, Steve McCullough, said that since enactment of the new law four and a half months ago, demands for live testimony have increased tenfold and so has defense lawyer gamesmanship.
Mr. STEVE MCCULLOUGH (Solicitor General, Virginia): And what we've seen again and again is the analyst shows up and defense says, oh, I'm ready to stipulate now.
TOTENBERG: Meaning that the defense agrees to admit the forensic report without live testimony. Countering that was defense lawyer Richard Friedman, who contended that if Virginia's old statute is upheld, it would mean that any witness could avoid live testimony. He pointed to child abuse cases, for instance, where the prosecution has taken a written or videotaped statement from a child and introduces it, knowing that if the defense calls the child for cross examination, it will likely cost the defense dearly.
Justice Ginsburg confronted Friedman with the expense question raised by many states. Would it be all right, she asked, if in order to save money, crime lab analysts testified via video conference from the lab? Friedman noted that some states are experimenting with that, but he contended that, in fact, dire predictions of high costs are exaggerated. Justice Alito: How can you say that when we have a brief from 26 states and the District of Columbia saying exactly the opposite?
Virginia Solicitor General Steve McCullough told the justices that the confrontation clause of the Constitution stems from the Colonists' fear of anonymous accusers and no-show witnesses, and that the old Virginia law doesn't permit either. But Justice Scalia wasn't buying that argument, noting that under the old Virginia law, once a lab report is introduced into evidence, it may stay in evidence even if the lab analyst is a no-show later for cross examination.
Supporting Virginia today, the federal government's lawyer, Leondra Kruger, said that as long as the analyst is available, the prosecution has satisfied its burden at trial. Justice Scalia: Would this apply to other witnesses as well? Answer: Yes. Justice Stevens: Supposing you have an eyewitness, can the prosecution follow the same procedure? Answer: Yes, as long as the defense has the opportunity to cross examine if it wants to. Justice Sotomayor: Are you saying that a trial by affidavit is okay under the Constitution? Essentially, yes, was the answer and it didn't seem to sit very well.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
What will future generations learn about us from our art? Well, philosopher and commentator Alain de Botton says that they certainly will not learn about our work.
Mr. ALAIN DE BOTTON (Author, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"): If a Martian came to Earth and tried to understand what human beings do just from reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that we basically spend our time falling in love, squabbling with our families and occasionally murdering one another.
But, of course, what we really do is go to work. And yet this work is unseen. It's literally invisible. And it's so in part because it's rarely represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers. It does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than a broader human phenomenon.
Two centuries ago, our forbearers would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would've been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid.
The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the production and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
How ignorant most of us are surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasps. We who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who think, even now, that it's only about money, who've avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable.
At a time when recession is reminding us how badly we need work, it should be artists who teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. One can hope for a day when photographs of electricity conductors might hang over dining tables and when someone might write a libretto for an opera set in the sales office of a packaging firm.
We need art that could function for our times, a little like those 18th century cityscapes, which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace, inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each one of us within the human hive.
We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, along with love, despite the current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life's meaning.
SIEGEL: Philosopher Alain de Botton. He's the author of "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work."
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
TUnE-yArDs is the name of a one-woman band that relies on found sounds, field recordings, ukulele and unusual percussion. That strange combination came together in an album that's made its way onto many critics' best lists for 2009.
And one of our critics, Robert Christgau, weighs in now with this review.
ROBERT CHRISTGAU: Merrill Garbus is a ukulele-playing Smith College graduate with a long musical history in folk style projects. TUnE-yArDs reflects her study abroad in Kenya, her work in puppet theater and her experience as a nanny on Martha's Vineyard. Here's the nursery rhyme chorus of "Lions."
(Soundbite of song, "Lions")
Ms. MERRILL GARBUS (Musician): (Singing) When you tell the lions that you love them, you love them, you love them. When you tell the lions that you love them, oh, you love them, oh.
CHRISTGAU: Although tUnE-yArDs' album, called "BiRd-BrAiNs," was created the postmodern way - with a laptop and a digital voice recorder - Garbus is a staunch bohemian who's big on slowing life down. She says the hard-to-type spelling of her band, which alternates lowercase and uppercase letters, was, and I quote, "intended to annoy people" and figures the digital distortion of her rather large voice will do the same. But she loves that vocal sound. And considering the idealized beauty large-voiced folkies generally cultivate, I say you go, woman.
This record has zero pretensions to grandeur. The electronic equipment takes Garbus' vocal equipment down a notch, paradoxically humanizing it. Most low-fi muffles musical content ordinary listeners want to hear. In tUnE-yArDs' low-fi, muffled textures are the musical content. Hear how her voice is subsumed in the din toward the end of a song called "Sunlight."
(Soundbite of song, "Sunlight")
Ms. GARBUS: (Singing) (Unintelligible)
CHRISTGAU: The tUnE-yArDs track that first caught my ear was "Hatari," which begins with Garbus' solo version of the hocketing vocal technique of Congo's Mbuti pygmies. Most Western admirers of Mbuti music try to pretty up its tapping, wavering and gurgling sounds. Like me, Garbus clearly feels they're beautiful as is.
(Soundbite of song, "Hatari")
Ms. GARBUS: (Singing in foreign language)
CHRISTGAU: Merrill Garbus says she tries to maintain a balance between the original idea of recording as documentation and the current pop practice of using it to conceal faults in the original.
But as I listened through the music to lyrics that at first seemed garbled, I noticed something else - that time-honored pop trope, the contradictions of human relationships. My favorite tUnE-yArDs song is a painful one called "Fiya." It's about being alone, about your own skin making your skin crawl. It ends: I am not beautiful. I am not beautiful. I am in bloom as the world goes underground. I am not beautiful, and I am not magic yet, but I am in bloom at the end of the world.
(Soundbite of song, "Fiya")
BLOCK: The album from tUnE-yArDs is called "BiRd-BrAiN." Our reviewer is Robert Christgau.
(Soundbite of song, "Fiya")
Ms. GARBUS: (Singing) I am not beautiful.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Northern Afghanistan, the province of Balkh is often cited as an example of what's going right in the country. Business is booming. Farmers have stopped growing opium poppies and there is no sign of the Taliban. But the province also highlights what could go wrong as the U.S. plans to place more money and power in the hands of local governors.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has this story about the war lord nicknamed the teacher, who is running things in Balkh.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Dozens of tribal elders, businessmen and officials pack the spacious governor's office here in Balkh. The governor, with thinning black hair and gray-flecked stubble, beckons them to approach one by one. He extends a hand, which many visitors kiss.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Governor Atta Mohammad Noor listens to their requests while signing stacks of documents. A lawyer tells the governor he's prepared to take on the property case of a woman the governor knows.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Help her out and don't charge her too much, Atta warns the lawyer, and dismisses him with a wave. The lawyer, nor anyone else, dares challenge the Ostad, as Governor Atta is widely known. He acquired the nickname that means teacher from the days when he was a mujahedeen commander fighting the Russians.
He no longer looks like a warlord, having exchanged his Afghan tunics for expensive designer suits and ties. But there is no doubt this man, who uses full-rank general as his title on his business card, is firmly in charge here. No meaningful business in the province is transacted without his approval. Major real estate in the provincial capital of Mazar-e-Sharif is in the hands of companies Atta owns or controls. He's a key player in the transport industry in Afghanistan's north, where a crucial new NATO supply line is located.
Nader Nadery is with the country's Independent Human Rights Commission based in Kabul. He says the West has helped strengthen Atta by providing him millions of dollars for projects and sending ambassadors and other high-ranking officials to meet with him.
Mr. NADER NADERY (Independent Human Rights Commission, Kabul): While he's changed to some extent, but he still remained head of a fiefdom, a powerful figure in terms of this ability to arm thousands of people as he claims, and also challenging the government.
NELSON: Nadery says the Western rush to bypass the central government and increase the authority of provincial officials without first establishing a system of accountability could lead to more corruption and strife.
Mr. NADERY: People do not see it as a good sign to go directly and empower those figures.
NELSON: Atta's power was on display last summer when he openly supported incumbent Hamid Karzai's main rival in the presidential elections here. Billboards featuring the two are still visible around Mazar city. Atta says he has no regret over that alliance.
Governor ATTA MOHAMMAD NOOR (Balkh Province, Afghanistan): (Through translator) I am not against Karzai personally, but we were unhappy with the situation and had views on the changes to policies and actions which are needed in Afghanistan.
Professor NASIM BAHMAN (Maulana University, Mazar; TV Journalist): (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Nasim Bahman, a TV journalist and university professor in Balkh province, says Atta backed presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah because the governor was seeking more concessions from the central government. Whether or not Karzai will fire Atta for that betrayal remains to be seen. He appoints the country's 34 governors, but many here believe Karzai is too weak to remove Atta. That includes Atta, who dismisses any concern he might be forced to step aside.
Gov. NOOR: (Through translator) As I've said, lots of offers have been made for me to stay, and I will decide whether to stay or not based on what the people say.
NELSON: There's little doubt Atta enjoys a lot of popular support.
(Soundbite of city)
NELSON: Like many here, Mohammad Asef, a carpet vendor in Mazar, says that people would rebel against any effort to replace the governor. He says Atta has brought peace and stability to the province, where there are few police checkpoints and people feel safe walking around at night.
Mr. MOHAMMAD ASEF: Yeah, Mr. Atta is good man. This is good working. A lot of people are like it. People are happy.
NELSON: Back in Kabul, Atta's opponents argue such loyalty is motivated more by fear than adoration. Like Ramazan Bashardost, an Afghan lawmaker and third-highest vote getter in last year's presidential election.
Mr. RAMAZAN BASHARDOST (Lawmaker): We have a very bad experience since 30 years because we have war since 30 years. So, if there's a lot of political problem, economical problem, corruption, the people said we accept because there is not war every day.
NELSON: He and others say they worry there will be many more Attas if the West continues pushing for local governance without first establishing checks and balances.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Kabul.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
NBC executives are not having an easy time since their decision to move Jay Leno back to late night. Today, "The Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien released a statement saying that he did not want to move his show back after midnight to make room for Leno. He wrote this about "The Tonight Show": I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. O'Brien did not say that he was quitting the show or the network.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
NBC has not one programming problem, but many: How to rearrange its late night and how to fill five empty hours of primetime. Commentator Andrew Wallenstein says there's one show that's going to benefit from the whole mess. You can watch it tonight, just not on NBC.
ANDREW WALLENSTEIN: Try as NBC might to restore order to its schedule, there's damage that can't be undone: "Southland."
(Soundbite of TV show, "Southland")
Unidentified Man #1: Put your hands on the car, palms down.
WALLENSTEIN: It's a gritty show that followed the LAPD on the mean streets of Los Angeles.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Southland")
Unidentified Man #1: Get out of the car.
Unidentified Man #2: Why do I have to get out of the car?
Unidentified Man #1: Get out of the car now, (BEEP).
Unidentified Man #2: Do you know who my father is?
Unidentified Man #1: Why? Your mother didn't tell you?
WALLENSTEIN: When it started last April, "Southland" seemed as if it was going to follow in the tradition of great NBC cop dramas like "Dragnet" and "Hill Street Blues."
(Soundbite of TV program, "Southland")
Unidentified Man #2: I'm being punked, right?
Unidentified Man #1: Search the car.
Unidentified Man #2: Hey, you're making a big mistake. You can't search my car without just cause.
Unidentified Man #1: You've been watching way too much TV, dude.
WALLENSTEIN: But in October, NBC shocked the TV world by canceling it just two weeks before its second season was to begin. "Southland" was created by one of TV's top producers, John Wells, who seemed to be bringing NBC the kind of praise he had delivered before with "ER" and "The West Wing." But to understand the show's ouster, one must blame Leno.
Shifting Leno to 10 p.m. five nights a week meant shows like "Southland" were pushed to 9 p.m., which isn't traditionally the place broadcast schedules its edgiest fare. Thank heavens for cable network TNT, which snapped up rights to the show, they are replaying its first season beginning tonight. In March, the never-seen second season will unspool.
Now, basic cable may seem like a demotion, but networks like TNT have an increasingly strong track record nurturing hit dramas like "The Closer" and "Saving Grace." Plus, cable affords shows the creative license they need to be as gritty as they want. So, listen for a few less bleeps on "Southland" this time around.
So don't go feeling sorry for "Southland." If you want to send condolences to the casualties of NBC's implosion, try its local affiliates or maybe even Conan O'Brien, but "Southland" is just where it should be.
BLOCK: That commentary from Andrew Wallenstein of the Hollywood Reporter.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
First this hour: politics and Wall Street. The Obama administration is considering a new tax on large banks. It could reduce the deficit and repay taxpayers for as much as $120 billion spent to bail out the banks. The tax would also allow the president to identify with a wave of populist anger at Wall Street, as NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson reports.
MARA LIASSON: The White House has yet to decide how the tax would be levied: on assets, profits or the riskiness of a bank's loans. But it certainly is timely, coming just as the administration is under increasing fire for being too cozy with Wall Street. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the president is intent on making taxpayers whole.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (White House Press Secretary): That's been the president's position. I think that's the least the taxpayers are owed.
LIASSON: Meanwhile, the FDIC is considering another proposal to make those U.S. banks, whose compensation plans encourage excessive risk taking, pay more for deposit insurance. The White House has also been trying, with little success, to scold big banks into scaling back their bonuses. Here's the president's top economist, Christina Romer, on CNN.
Dr. CHRISTINA ROMER (Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, White House): For heaven's sakes people, you know, it does seem really ridiculous. You would certainly think that the financial institutions that are now doing a little bit better would have some sense. And this big bonus season, of course, is going to offend the American people, it offends me.
LIASSON: The president on CBS has said it offends him, too.
President BARACK OBAMA: I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street.
Professor MICHAEL KAZIN (Historian): It struck me as something his advisers said you have to say something like this.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. KAZIN: He doesn't seem comfortable when he's speaking in cliches.
LIASSON: That historian Michael Kazin, an expert on populism in America. We're in the midst of a populist moment, says Kaizen, that's causing problems for President Obama from two different directions.
Prof. KAZIN: What's happening right now is that both left and right are opposed to what they see as the sins of people in power. The right doesn't like what they see as increasing concentrations of power in government. The left doesn't like concentrated power in Wall Street and neither group is happy with Obama's response.
LIASSON: Part of the problem is being president. If the definition of populism is railing against elites - political, cultural or economic - the president by definition is the elitest guy around. And then there is Mr. Obama's personality.
Prof. KAZIN: He's a thoughtful, intellectual figure as we know. He's somebody who is not given to demagogy, and that is one of the reasons why he got elected I think. But those same traits are probably harming him politically right now.
LIASSON: It's also not so easy to craft populist policy. First of all, there is a limit to what the president can do about big Wall Street bonuses. Indeed, the White House has ruled out legislation on executive compensation. And experts say any tax on banks, no matter how it's levied, can probably be largely avoided by the banks and their armies of smart tax lawyers. But getting more money for taxpayers is just part of the purpose of a bank tax. It's also a political message, and Michael Kazin expects the president to keep looking for ways to send it again and again.
Prof. KAZIN: A lot about presidential populism is symbolic. Everyone now is talking about these obscene bonuses that the people on Wall Street are going to be getting this year. It's one thing the people care about and are right to care about. You know, he can talk about more about the gap between the better-off Americans and everybody else. It's sort of a soft class consciousness.
LIASSON: And while he's at it, President Obama can push legislation like the bank tax that might force Republicans to either vote with him or defend those fat cats on Wall Street.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Even by the standards of undercapitalized banks with TARP funds and bankrupt auto companies and nominally independent government-sponsored mortgage entities, the relationship of AIG to the federal government is stunning. The insurance giant got a $180 billion bailout from the government. It paid out bonuses earlier this year that infuriated many. On the other hand, it's now losing senior management because of a $500,000 compensation cap. And the New York Federal Reserve has evidently told AIG not to discuss payments that were made with federal bailout funds to its own trading partners, which is generally taken to mean to Goldman Sachs.
Diane Brady, senior editor at Business Week, tells us that she is immersed in all things AIG these days. So, welcome to the program to share in your immersion with us.
Ms. DIANE BRADY (Senior Editor, Business Week): Thanks. Nice to be here.
SIEGEL: And let's start with that last controversy. What is it that some members of Congress want to know about AIG that the New York Fed has told them not to disclose?
Ms. BRADY: Well, what they want to know now is whether Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was involved in these emails to AIG that was essentially pressuring them to withhold information on payments that it made to the banks.
SIEGEL: He at that time was...
Ms. BRADY: He was the president of the New York Fed. And I think what has subsequently made the public so angry is this is a company that was on the precipice of disaster, was going to go the way of Lehman and basically these contracts, which were worth very little, the banks were getting a hundred cents on the dollar.
SIEGEL: Banks insured their investments with AIG, and AIG, even as it was bust and had only federal funds to go on, was paying off a hundred cents on the dollar.
Ms. BRADY: Yes. AIG basically was doing these credit default swaps, which is in essence a form of insurance policy on these collateralized debt obligations, which is the bundling of all these toxic mortgages. But one other thing that has made people angry - and I know Goldman Sachs has been so vilified in the past year - is Goldman Sachs, we've since discovered, created and sold these collateralized debt obligations and then it sold them short, which basically means they were pressuring the credit agencies to say they were solid bets even as the firm was betting against them. But the heart of the matter is the public money was being used to pay a hundred cents on the dollar on contracts that were in no way worth that much.
SIEGEL: Because Goldman Sachs was betting against these securities by going to AIG and insuring with them.
Ms. BRADY: Exactly.
SIEGEL: Was AIG being stood up, in fact, as a conduit of federal funds passing through it to those other banks?
Ms. BRADY: Exactly. And I think especially when you see Goldman Sachs coming out and paying what some people have deemed to be egregious bonuses, but they've had a banner year and one reason they've had a banner year is in part because they've benefited from situations like AIG where, had the company gone under, they would have had to fight for their money. Instead, they walked away with a hundred cents on the dollar of every dollar that they put in.
SIEGEL: Now AIG, like a lot of other companies that received bailout funds, has said we don't want to see caps on compensation because we'll lose talent. And, in fact, their general counsel, the head of HR as well at AIG, is leaving because she says she's not getting enough.
Ms. BRADY: I think it's a complex issue. Yes, there are caps. I think there have to be caps right now in part to assuage Washington and the public, who do not want to see both millions in payout and millions in salary. I think AIG also has the - the big issue, frankly, is that its brand is very tarnished and its future is very uncertain. And if you're, let's say, CEO material or certainly senior executive material, you would think twice about going to AIG. So they're going to have trouble. They have had trouble recruiting people, but it's especially hard to recruit people when you can't pay marketplace dollars, and frankly for a general counsel, they tend to make more than 500,000 a year.
SIEGEL: Hmm. Well, what's the future for this company? I mean, is it clear that it will actually survive for a few more years or is this the wind-down of AIG?
Ms. BRADY: I think that's a very good question and people aren't quite sure. I mean, even the stock has been very skittish. But basically they're looking to sell off a lot of assets. They're having trouble retaining their people. The brand - where possible, they've dropped the name. And I think a lot of people are very skittish about the future and at the very least they think that the government support is going to continue for quite sometime.
SIEGEL: Diane Brady, senior editor at Business Week, thanks a lot for talking with us.
Ms. BRADY: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Big city crime isn't what it used to be. In New York, Los Angeles and cities in between, murders and other violent crimes are at a 50-year low. Over the coming weeks, we'll examine some reasons why and we begin in L.A., where there's a unique partnership between police and ex-gang members.
As NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports, it's making the streets safer.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO: Back in 1990, you probably wouldn't dare to stand in this alley on 77th Street in South Central like I am right now. Down the street, there is a police station. But even so, there used to be drive-by shootings. And people around here tell me that they used to hide their children in the bathtubs at night sometimes to avoid the stray bullets hitting them.
Ms. LORNA HAWKINS: It was very scary. Bullets just fly through these houses and these windows like nothing because these people don't know how to shoot. But, you know, little coward, baby-shooter killers.
DEL BARCO: Lorna Hawkins lost two sons to gang violence in 1988 and 1992.
Ms. HAWKINS: When the sun was going down, everybody better be somewhere in the dark, hiding. That's what it was like. It was hell.
DEL BARCO: And today?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. HAWKINS: They say the streets haven't been this safe for 50 years.
DEL BARCO: For decades, safe isn't a word that would have described much of L.A. Back in the '80s, at the height of the crack epidemic, there were nearly a thousand murders a year. Last year, there were 314. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says violent crime is down by nearly 11 percent from a year ago.
Mr. ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA (Mayor, Los Angeles): I used to shine shoes on 7th and Broadway, and I can tell you, there was a time when L.A. was this safe, but that time was in the 1950s.
(Soundbite of music)
DEL BARCO: Today on 7th and Broadway, shoeshine boys are gone, replaced by sidewalk merchants like Jesus Sevala.
Mr. JESUS SEVALA: (Foreign language spoken)
DEL BARCO: Sevala says the neighborhood is safer because many of the old troublemakers are locked up. Gang violence is still a problem here. But L.A.'s new police chief, Charlie Beck, says former gang members turned interventionists are helping put a dent in crime.
Mr. CHARLIE BECK (Chief, Los Angeles Police Department): Whenever a gang shooting occurs, we notify intervention, they do a couple things. They, first of all, dispel rumors. Rumors cause the next homicide, rumors about who did what to who instigate further violence. So they calm rumors. They also create peace. They broker peace between feuding factions. They also mentor and try to remove gang members from the life of violence.
(Soundbite of laughter)
(Soundbite of child talking)
DEL BARCO: Back on 77th Street, Jutaun Butler and her cousin Shonkia Dunbar are pushing her baby goddaughter in a stroller.
Ms. JUTAUN BUTLER: It seems so calm now.
Ms. SHONKIA DUNBAR: It is.
Ms. BUTLER: You don't hear that much about shootings and stuff as much now.
DEL BARCO: They say they've noticed a difference in the gang members in their neighborhood.
Ms. BUTLER: As far as trying to walk the streets, bothering people, I don't see that anymore.
Ms. DUNBAR: I guess, I see more polices out than I see gangbangers now, patrolling. So don't nobody want to go to jail no more. Everybody tired of being in jail.
Ms. BUTLER: They're losing friends. And then some of them just grew out of it.
Ms. HAWKINS: These guys started growing up and having their own babies. You see?
DEL BARCO: Lorna Hawkins became a community activist after her first son was murdered.
Ms. HAWKINS: A lot of gang members' kids are now - they are grown, and they're losing their sons, right? Nowadays, they're in their 40s, 50s, 60s, they're like, oh, I got grandkids. I cannot let this continue. So groups are coming together. They're coming together.
DEL BARCO: Gang interventionists, community groups and L.A. police all cooperating to drive down crime. Hawkins says this is a winning combination.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
In England, for the first time since the 1600s, a major criminal trial is under way without a jury.
Reporter Vicki Barker explains why it's happening and the legal debate that it's caused.
VICKI BARKER: In courtroom 35 at London's Old Bailey today, the judge, the lawyers and the four defendants were all in their appointed places. But the wooden benches where the jurors normally sit were empty. There have been non-jury trials in Britain before, in the controversial security courts in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But this was the first time since 1641 that an English judge was hearing a serious criminal case without an English jury. A number of civil rights advocates call that a threat to legal freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta, the 13th century foundation stone of British democracy. Michael Mansfield is a prominent human rights lawyer.
Mr. MICHAEL MANSFIELD (Lawyer): I think it's really part of a long-going and historic attack on the jury system by different governments who do not like juries. They may say otherwise in public, but actually they don't like the verdicts.
BARKER: But supporters say the move was the best, indeed the only way to ensure justice is done. Here's the background to this case. In February 2004, masked gunmen broke into a busy cargo warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport. They tied up 16 employees and fired at a supervisor when he tried to escape. The gang got away with more than $3 million. Since then, more than $30 million has been spent on three successive trials. The third collapsed after what that judge called a serious attempt at jury tampering. So, Britain's highest judge invoked, for the first time, a recent law allowing trial without a jury. The law can only be applied in very specific circumstances, including where there is a real and present danger that jurors face bribery or intimidation.
The journalist and author Simon Jenkins is a self-described screaming liberal on crime and punishment. But he argues that those most inclined to defend jury trials in criminal cases are those least likely to be the victims of crime.
Mr. SIMON JENKINS (Journalist; Author): Middle-class people love going out to dinner parties and telling jury stories. This is not about civics. This is about, frankly, justice. This assumption that the jury system is like the queen mother and is beyond questioning is just absurd.
BARKER: But the juryless trial does pose some challenges. For instance, if the judge rules some evidence inadmissible, he theoretically has to forget that he ever saw it when he begins to consider his verdict. Even though English law is based on precedent, legal experts say they don't expect this case to open any floodgates. But even supporters of the non-jury trial worry that this takes the justice system of England and Wales into uncharted territory.
For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
England, along with much of mainland Europe, is shivering through a cold snap and one place that's been great news is in southeastern England, near Cambridge. The Fens, the marshy wetlands there, were frozen solid enough to allow the return of a historic speed skating race for the first time in 13 years. And skaters hope the cold will last through this weekend, so they can hold the British and Fenland Championships.
Malcolm Robinson is secretary of the Fenland Skating Center. And Mr. Robinson, first tell us about the - what appears to be the glorious and long history of speed skating on the Fens. How far back does it go?
Mr. MALCOLM ROBINSON (Secretary, Fenland Skating Center): Way back to the 1700s and even sooner. Originally, it sort of started out as a means of transport, you know, traveling across the ice when it was frozen. Then it's gradually progressed to what it is today where we actually get and race whenever possible.
BLOCK: Now, you grew up, I understand, on a farm near where you are right now. And you would remember, I guess, skating on the Fenlands as a regular, normal thing during the winter.
Mr. ROBINSON: Well, whether the memory plays tricks with you or not I'm not sure, but I always remember as a child that we seemed to skate every year, whether it be little or much, somewhere on a piece of frozen water.
BLOCK: That's the memory anyway.
Mr. ROBINSON: Yeah.
BLOCK: But not so much now.
Mr. ROBINSON: In the last 10, 15 years, it's been very few and far between. Really our glory years, as far as sort of modern times go, was in the mid '80s when we had three years back to back.
BLOCK: Well, what was the scene this past weekend when you had the preliminary races there? Who came out?
Mr. ROBINSON: Mostly they was locals, anything sort of from 40, 50 miles away. But it was amazing the turnout we had from sort of general public turning up on hockey skates, or figure skates, even old Fen skates that they'd found in the cupboard and that sort of thing.
BLOCK: Fen skates?
Mr. ROBINSON: What we call Fen runners, the wooden style ones, that sort of fit to the bottom of the boot, rather than a custom-fit boot with a blade already attached.
BLOCK: Now, who would still have skates like that, or blades like that?
Mr. ROBINSON: As I said, it used to be a real tradition for this area. So, more or less every family that was involved would have a selection of skates sort of hanging up somewhere that would be dusted off should there be the chance to use them.
BLOCK: How does the race itself work? What's the course?
Mr. ROBINSON: What we skate on is an oval track, similar to a running track, and because of a lot of the history of it, we're still on yard measurement rather than meters. So it's 440 yards we skate, which would equate to quarter miles, half miles or miles. Well, we go up to - the longest race we've got is a three-mile race.
BLOCK: Did you race yourself last weekend?
Mr. ROBINSON: I did.
BLOCK: How did you do?
Mr. ROBINSON: I came second.
BLOCK: Well, not bad.
Mr. ROBINSON: I was pleased.
BLOCK: I bet that's just a great feeling when you were able to skate on the Fens this past weekend, to think about the long history, hundreds of years of skating there and to know that you were a part of that tradition yet again.
Mr. ROBINSON: It's something that seems to be in the blood because all of us don't skate on the rinks or anything. We only skate on the Fens when it's frozen. So, to actually just get stuff off the ground this weekend was fantastic.
BLOCK: Well, everybody is looking ahead now to this coming weekend and the hope, as we said, is that you can have the championship race. When was the last time it was cold enough and you had enough ice to hold a championship?
Mr. ROBINSON: Back in 1997.
BLOCK: Well, are you and your fellow skaters kind of sending great thoughts up to the weather gods...
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: ...to try to keep that cold weather coming?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ROBINSON: We sort of go round and we listen to all the old folks and they say, well, if this is happening, that's going to be cold. And we listen to all that, rather than the weather forecasters where they say it's coming milder.
BLOCK: Now, what are the old folks telling you to look for?
Mr. ROBINSON: Berries on the hedge and what the birds are doing and that sort of thing, what the hedges, how they look, whether they're starting to bud up or whether it's still sort of shut right down.
BLOCK: And when you look at those signs, what are you seeing?
Mr. ROBINSON: It's still winter and I think we're in with a chance.
BLOCK: Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed for you.
Mr. ROBINSON: Great stuff.
BLOCK: Mr. Robinson, thanks so much.
Mr. ROBINSON: That's all right. No problem.
BLOCK: That's Malcolm Robinson, secretary of the Fenland Skating Center, speaking with us from the village of Sutton in Cambridgeshire, England.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
More details are emerging about Humam al-Balawi, the man who blew up seven intelligence agents in Afghanistan. By education and professional status, the Jordanian doctor is typical of recent suicidal attackers. The man accused of trying to blow up a plane on Christmas Day is a Nigerian graduate of the University of London. In the Fort Hood shootings, a Palestinian-American psychiatrist in the U.S. Army has been charged.
Humam al-Balawi was said to be carrying information about Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two, himself a surgeon who was born to a prominent Egyptian family.
Well, Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American writer, is the author of "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror." He joins us now from California.
And, Reza Aslan, why is the enemy, even a suicidal one, so often someone with education, economic opportunity and exposure to Western society?
Dr. REZA ASLAN (Author, "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of War on Terror"): Well, it actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. When it comes to this global jihadist movement - the movement that's so clearly represented by groups like al-Qaida - they have a far more globalized view of the world. They want to reshape the global order. And it takes a certain amount of education, a certain amount of awareness, and frankly, a certain economic status to even think of such things.
Whereas for the traditional Islamist groups, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, or the Taliban, for that matter, it is more often the poor or the dispossessed who are fighting for much more local causes.
But it's really not unusual to see these intelligent, well-adjusted, well-educated people joining this kind of global movement represented by jihadism.
SIEGEL: But these jihadists - and I could add Mohamed Atta of 9/11, who was an Egyptian urban planner who had been working in Germany - these are not the wretched of the earth. What essentially is the grievance that draws them to al-Qaida?
Dr. ASLAN: Well, jihadism is a social movement. It functions very much in the same way that other global social movements, say, for instance, the anti-globalization movement or the radical environmental movement works. It provides an alternative identity to its followers. And the followers tend to be young. They tend to be socially active. They tend to be politically conscious. They tend to be aware of such things as the grievances of the global Muslim community. And they feel as though they are put in such a position in which they have to defend their Muslim brothers and sisters from what they see as a cultural, religious, political attack by Western forces.
SIEGEL: Is there an intellectual battle going on out there? That is, are there imams with real followings among university-educated Muslims who are arguing vigorously against the jihadist position?
Dr. ASLAN: Oh, yes, indeed. In fact, in many ways, you have to understand jihadism as an anticlerical or anti-institutional movement. In fact, the jihadists define themselves in direct opposition to the traditional religious authorities: the imams of Islam. They find the traditional imams to be painfully out of touch. They believe the religious and political leaders of Islam have been adulterated or co-opted in some way. And so, they don't really try to create an intellectual argument against these religious authorities, not interested in a debate.
SIEGEL: Well, people in America and elsewhere have been talking about these things ever since 9/11. You've been part of that discussion. Has there been any effective global counteroffensive, intellectual counteroffensive, to jihadism?
Dr. ASLAN: Well, yes, there has been. There has been for quite some time. But the most interesting thing over the last few years is the counterargument is now coming from within jihadist circles itself. Part of this have to do with the fact that jihadism, particularly in '05, '06 in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, has created such destruction, has slaughtered so many Muslims -innocent Muslims, women, children - that jihadist ideologues, the sort of grandfathers of this movement, have begun to criticize the younger generation of jihadists.
So the movement itself is beginning to fracture. And you have some of the grand ideologues, the people who really gave birth to the jihadist movement itself, starting to speak out against it.
SIEGEL: Reza Aslan, thank you very much for talking with us.
Dr. ASLAN: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: Reza Aslan is the author of "How to Win a Cosmic War." He teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The recent attack on the CIA in Afghanistan revealed the depth of cooperation between the U.S. and Jordan. Jordanian intelligence put the bomber, Humam al-Balawi, in touch with the CIA in hopes he would spy on al-Qaida. Jordan was then stunned when he turned out to be a double agent.
Jordanian-American cooperation springs from pro-Western sentiment in the government. But among the Jordanian people, anti-American sentiment is widespread.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has that story, and it begins at a funeral in Jordan for a member of al-Qaida.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: One after another, men with long beards file into the reception hall and pay their respects to the dead man's father. Here in the Palestinian refugee camp in the Jordanian town of Irbid, there were no tears of sadness to mourn Mahmoud Zeidan. His father, Mahdi, says his son was a member of al-Qaida who died in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan.
Mr. MAHDI ZEIDAN: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm proud of him, he says. I'm happy he died a martyr fighting the Americans.
Mahdi Zeidan says his son left Jordan 10 years ago to further his religious studies in Pakistan. Somewhere along the way, he fell in with the Taliban and then al-Qaida. The family says he was a spiritual adviser to the group. He was 35 when he was killed.
Mr. ZEIDAN: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: My son wasn't a terrorist, he says. The U.S. are the terrorists who are bringing fear to Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mahdi's other son also fought in Afghanistan. He was captured by the Americans and sent to Guantanamo for five years. He was present at the wake but declined to speak to a member of the Western media.
Outside the hall, Mahdi's third son says he isn't sure whether or not to go and fight, too.
Mr. MUHAMMAD ZEIDAN: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But Muhammad Zeidan is critical not just of the Americans. Referring to the recent revelation that Jordan helped the CIA, he says this country is absolutely fighting on the wrong side of war.
He's not alone in that sentiment. A strong current of anti-American feeling runs through Jordan. Analyst Hassan Abu Hanieh says it's no coincidence that men like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who led al-Qaida in Iraq, the recent CIA bomber and other militants like Mahmoud Zeidan come from Jordan.
Mr. HASSAN ABU HANIEH: (Through Translator) It's close to the Palestinian issue. At least 50 percent of the country is Palestinian. They blame the U.S. for supporting Israel. And then there is Iraq, also on our border, and what happened with the war there? It gets people's emotions here very high.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States provides Jordan with $660 million in foreign assistance a year.
Mr. SULAIMAN GHNAIMAT: Training, technology, intelligence coordinate and collaboration.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sulaiman Ghnaimat is a former Jordanian general and a member of the recently disbanded parliament. He says Jordan needs the U.S.
Mr. GHNAIMAT: It is serving our country. It is serving our nation. It's serving even our neighbors. So there's many, many benefits we are getting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But it is a delicate balancing act for Jordan's government. It must cater to its ally's needs in the war against Islamic extremism while keeping its population appeased.
Since news of Jordan's involvement for the CIA was made public last week, the Jordanians have been in damage control mode.
Jordan's General Intelligence Department or GID warned members of the CIA bomber's family not to speak to the press. Several analysts were also called up and told not to make inflammatory statements. At least one local journalist working with the foreign media was hauled in for questioning.
Rohile Gharaibeh is a member of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.
Mr. ROHILE GHARAIBEH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He says the government here realizes how negatively the public views their involvement with the CIA. They see it as something strange. Gharaibeh says to express opposition to the government's decisions in Jordan, though, is difficult. Opposition members, he says, are subject to harassment.
Jordan's GID has been cited by human rights organizations for its repressive tactics. It's been accused of detaining and torturing CIA prisoners in America's much criticized rendition program. Other human rights reports say it has also carried out arbitrary arrests and abuses of Jordanian suspects.
Sulaiman Ghnaimat, who has worked in intelligence in Jordan, defends their actions, saying Jordan also faces the threat of terrorism. In 2005, militants bombed a series of hotels in Jordan, killing and injuring scores of people.
Mr. GHNAIMAT: Very, very important that they should be very, very active and very, very alert, first, inside the country, and then around the country, any step which is needed (unintelligible).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block. The company Monsanto dominates the seed business with a technology that's called Roundup Ready. Recently, the agriculture biotech company has been fending off charges that it's using the technology to kill off competitors. Monsanto counters that it's winning the market among farmers fair and square.
Frank Morris of member station KCUR in Kansas City explains.
FRANK MORRIS: Even though deep snow drifts cover his fields in Eastern Kansas, Luke Ulrich, corn and soybean farmer here, is thinking about spring. It's time to buy seed again, but hundreds of seed companies have gone under in the last two decades.
Ulrich stands in the snow, remembering the days before genetically modified seeds upended the industry.
Mr. LUKE ULRICH (Corn and Soybean Farmer): Ever since they've come out with the Roundup Ready trait and that became popular and basically took over farming, we've seen significant increases every single year.
MORRIS: Ulrich says his seed cost shot up almost 50 percent last year. Farmers face lawsuits if they try to save and plant GMO seed because they don't own the technology. While they bristle at that, they love Monsanto's Roundup Ready trait. With it, they can just douse their fields with a powerful weed killer and knock out everything they're not trying to grow.
Mr. ULRICH: There's nothing like Roundup. I mean, a monkey could farm with it, you know.
MORRIS: More than nine out of 10 soybean seeds carry the Roundup Ready trait. It's about the same for cotton and just a little lower for corn.
Mr. JIM DENVIR (Attorney, DuPont): Farmers will not buy soybeans without Roundup Ready in it, so that gives Monsanto an amazing amount of leverage.
MORRIS: Jim Denvir is a lawyer working for DuPont, which owns the competing seed company Pioneer. Pioneer licenses the Roundup Ready trait from Monsanto, as do about 150 other seed companies. Those agreements control what genetics competing companies can mix with the Roundup Ready trait. Last year, Monsanto sued to stop Pioneer from stacking Roundup Ready with another trait. Jim Denvir says Pioneer complained to the Justice Department.
Mr. DENVIR: A seed company can't stay in business without offering seeds with Roundup Ready in it. So if they want to stay in that business, essentially, they have to do what Monsanto tells them to do.
MORRIS: Monsanto's critics say it used this platform monopoly to crush many competitors. Chris Holman, a patent lawyer who teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, likens it to Microsoft and its dominant Windows operating system.
Professor CHRIS HOLMAN (Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City): Because of the structure of the industry, they are able to really drive participants in the industry into using their technology.
MORRIS: Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles says those allegations are unfair, though he concedes they're coming at the company fast and furious.
Mr. LEE QUARLES (Spokesman, Monsanto): We're actively working to address questions from regulators, both the Department of Justice as well as other state attorney generals as well as other parties in the industry, to address any questions they have about our business.
MORRIS: But Monsanto is pushing ahead. It will soon market a soybean seed combining eight separate genetically engineered traits. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Monsanto will soon market a CORN seed with eight stacked traits, not a soybean.]
Roundup Ready technology was developed at Monsanto's world headquarters in St. Louis. Vice president Jim Tobin says it sells itself.
Mr. JIM TOBIN (Vice President, Monsanto): Farmers get a chance to vote every year before they plant. And it's that vote each year that determines who has the largest market share or volume.
MORRIS: Monsanto spent huge amounts of money and took big risks to develop the Roundup Ready trait. Tobin says it's revolutionized agriculture. But now...
Mr. TOBIN: Well, we've invented something new.
MORRIS: Yup. It's called Roundup Ready 2 Yield. It uses the same gene as the original, just placed in a different spot in the genome. Monsanto claims it boosts yield.
Interesting timing: Monsanto's patent on Roundup Ready 1 expires in 2014, and with it, a revenue stream of maybe half a billion dollars a year in royalties. That's unless it can switch farmers over to Roundup Ready 2.
Mr. TOBIN: We'd like to have everyone that is in the soybean business, seed business, using the trait.
MORRIS: Monsanto's putting the new trait in all its best soybean seeds. And Paul Schickler says it's forcing its licensees to do the same. Schickler's the president of Pioneer. He charges that Monsanto is trying to make Roundup Ready 1 disappear.
Mr. PAUL SCHICKLER (President, Pioneer): That's our concern, bridging or switching from one patented product, Roundup Ready 1, to the next generation Roundup Ready 2 Yield, doesn't allow generic competition for the initial technology.
MORRIS: Unlike in many other industries, there's no clear path for a genetically modified crop to go generic. As it stands, generic providers would probably still need access to Monsanto's proprietary data to get federal approval to sell the Roundup Ready trait.
They'd also need closely held technical information to update licenses to keep the trait legal in big, important markets like China and the EU.
Meanwhile, the end of the Roundup Ready patent will likely give farmers a chance to do something they haven't done in years: Plant seed they've harvested. Luke Ulrich is ready.
Mr. ULRICH: Because I don't care how good Roundup Ready 2 is. If you tell me I can save back my own seed, I'm going to plant my own seed.
MORRIS: The problem for guys like Ulrich will be in finding seed that has just the Roundup Ready gene alone, not one stacked with other patented traits. After all, if he can't find the seed in the first place, he can't grow it.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Kansas City.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Joe Rollino was a legend in Brooklyn. He was a dockworker, a boxer and a Coney Island carnival strongman. He died yesterday at age 104.
NPR's Robert Smith has his story.
ROBERT SMITH: Joe Rollino wasn't the tallest man you've ever seen.
Mr. LOUIS SCARCELLA: He was about 5'5", I guess.
SMITH: He wasn't the biggest, either.
Mr. SCARCELLA: About 145 pounds.
SMITH: But Louis Scarcella remembers him as a miracle of nature.
Mr. SCARCELLA: He was like muscles strapped to bone. Pound for pound, I think he was the strongest man in the world.
SMITH: And we're not talking here about the young Joe Rollino. This was a man over 100 years old still bending quarters with his teeth and amazing everyone he met. Louis Scarcella is a former Brooklyn homicide detective who grew up in Coney Island. He says he heard stories about Joe all his life and got to meet him in his later days.
Mr. SCARCELLA: He had charisma, and you could feel the electricity.
SMITH: Much of what is known about Joe Rollino came from interviews later in his life and from local legend. Carnival feats of strength are not verified by any official body. An article in Ironman magazine said that he began as a traveling strongman at the age of 10. He later boxed under the name of Kid Dundee. But it was as a Coney Island attraction that he became famous. He told ESPN magazine that he could once lift 635 pounds with just a single finger.
This was the legend. The reality was that until yesterday, he was still active, walking five miles every day and taking part in the polar bear plunge, you know, where seemingly sane people swim in the freezing cold water in the middle of winter off of Coney Island. That's how Scarcella, a fellow polar bear, came to know Rollino.
Mr. SCARCELLA: I heard that he swam every day for eight years and didn't miss a day.
SMITH: Rollino was hit and killed by a minivan early yesterday morning while he was on his daily walk. The driver wasn't charged. And while Rollino's name may not have made any official record books, Scarcella says that his death is another lost connection with the golden age of Coney Island.
Mr. SCARCELLA: He was a strongman. Up until the day he died, he was a strongman, and there are not enough of them around anymore.
SMITH: Mostly what's left from the carnival era is stories, like the one about the 104-year-old strongman who could still bend a quarter with his teeth.
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The U.S. military launched more drone missile strikes today, this time inside Afghanistan. Officials say 16 insurgents were killed. The Obama administration has been increasing CIA drone attacks across the border in Pakistan.
And as NPR's Tom Bowman reports, the targets of those missiles are striking back.
(Soundbite of video)
Mr. HUMAM KHALIL ABU-MULAL AL-BALAWI: We hereby declare...
TOM BOWMAN: A video released over the past few days shows a Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan.
Mr. AL-BALAWI: All the fighters who sought refuge with Baitullah Mehsud are entrusted with the duty to revenge him in the USA and outside it.
BOWMAN: Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader who was killed by a U.S. drone strike last year. The suicide bomber was avenging him. What the bomber didn't say in that tape was he was providing the Americans with information for other drone attacks against al-Qaida. A former intelligence official tells NPR that the bomber Humam Khalil al-Balawi was, quote, "feeding us low-level operatives, and we were whacking them."
Balawi's path from informant to suicide bomber highlights a secret and growing fight. As the U.S. sends thousands more troops to Afghanistan and mounts the occasional drone missile strikes like the ones today in Afghanistan, it's stepping up drone attacks on insurgent safe havens in Pakistan.
Admiral MIKE MULLEN (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff): The policy debate that we had with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan is focused on eliminating the safe havens which are now in Pakistan. Originally they were in Afghanistan.
BOWMAN: Admiral Mike Mullen is the nation's top military officer.
Adm. MULLEN: It is very focused on those safe havens.
BOWMAN: That focus is through drone strikes, mostly by CIA aircraft flown from bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The increased number of these attacks reflect the Obama administration's twin goals: defeating al-Qaida and bringing security to Afghanistan. But Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani military, says there's growing public anger in Pakistan over the American air attacks, which are also killing civilians. Pakistan's government, Nawaz says, wants to have it both ways.
Mr. SHUJA NAWAZ (Expert on Pakistani Military): The government of Pakistan pretended that this was the U.S. doing something unilaterally, when a fair amount of evidence is now available that many of the strikes were taking place with Pakistani assistance.
BOWMAN: Assistance that includes providing the Americans with targeting information. The drone strikes, according to one estimate, have left 1,000 dead since 2006. As many as a third of the dead are civilians. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar says that's a political problem for Pakistan's government.
Mr. PAUL PILLAR (Former CIA Analyst): Casualties inflicted on innocent people make it difficult for Pakistan to defend its relationship and cooperation with the United States.
BOWMAN: Besides the civilian death toll, there's another problem. The U.S. and Pakistan differ over which Islamic fighters to target inside those safe havens. Pakistan is content to help the Americans target al-Qaida and Pakistani Taliban leaders seen as a threat to the Pakistani government. But Pakistan is less willing to help the U.S. go after Afghan Taliban fighters. Shuja Nawaz says these insurgents � the Haqqani network, for example - are seen by Pakistan in a more positive way.
Mr. NAWAZ: As a potential ally or at least not a group that would be opposed to Pakistan.
BOWMAN: But these are some of the very groups the U.S. wants to go after. Here's Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mr. RICHARD HOLBROOKE (Special Envoy, Afghanistan and Pakistan) The Haqqani group straddles the border and is responsible for some of the most serious events that take the lives and injure American and allied forces. There's no question about that.
BOWMAN: But Holbrooke wouldn't criticize Pakistan when he appeared in a recent Washington conference.
Mr. HOLBROOKE: Continued discussion of this issue in public works against the goal, which is a reduction in the risk to our American forces in Afghanistan.
BOWMAN: Translation: We'll talk about it privately with the Pakistanis.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, your letters and, first, football.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Last Friday we talked about the NFL and some of you heard us say that the Philadelphia Eagles had blown out the Dallas Cowboys the weekend before. Well, Nick Allred of Sandy Hook, Connecticut wrote that he is an Eagles fan, but he wrote this...
SIEGEL: While Philadelphia certainly will be victorious this Saturday, last Sunday's game went the other way. Grateful as I am for the error, I feel obliged to correct the record and give Dallas its due.
BLOCK: Mr. Allred was right. The Cowboys had routed the Eagles the week before and, unfortunately for our listener, the rematch didn't go much better. The Cowboys won that one too, 34 to 14. Sorry, Nick.
SIEGEL: Yesterday in our All Tech Considered segment, we heard about the latest in elevator technology.
(Soundbite of elevator)
Unidentified Woman: Going up.
(Soundbite of beep)
Unidentified Woman: 24th floor.
SIEGEL: Smart elevators with computer brains that analyze the best way to move crowds of people up and down.
BLOCK: Kenneth Liddell(ph) of Austin, Texas was reminded of a time when a different kind of brain ran the elevator. He writes: My grandmother, Betty Julia Liddell(ph), was a manual elevator operator in Chicago's Covenant Club in the 1930s for several years. She has told me many times how she started as a hat check girl for the club, eventually working her way up to elevator operator. She manually controlled the elevator, slowing its ascent or descent, so as to ease the car to be flush with the desired floor.
Although she gained skill at controlling the elevators' final position, she would warn the club's patrons: Watch your step, please. Mr. Liddell adds, she fondly remembers being offered tips by the patrons of the club after riding the elevator. When the boss or management was present, the phrase, no tipping please, tripped off her lip.
SIEGEL: Well, finally, Sarah Cho(ph) of Foster City, California was moved by our profile of Seun Adebiyi. He's hoping to be Nigeria's first winter Olympian. He's also fighting Leukemia. While training for the skeleton, the headfirst sled, he found time to establish Nigeria's first bone marrow registry.
BLOCK: Ms. Cho writes: We are all given one life and everyone, no matter who you are, faces troubles. It's amazing to hear about people who even in the midst of the most severe suffering can live life with passion, courage and optimism, still able to do good for others.
SIEGEL: We appreciate your letters, keep them coming. Write to us by going to npr.org and clicking on Contact Us.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Mexican forces today arrested one of Mexico's most wanted drug lords, Teodoro Garcia Simental, known as El Teo. He's alleged to be behind much of the drug violence in Tijuana and is known for his brutality, in particular, beheadings and dissolving victims in acid. His arrest marks the third triumph this month for Mexico's government in its war on drug cartels.
And NPR's Jason Beaubien joins us from Mexico City to tell us more about it. Jason, what is the Mexican government saying about today's arrest?
JASON BEAUBIEN: Well, Mexican officials are counting this as a major blow against the Mexican cartels. El Teo was wanted both by the Mexican and the U.S. authorities. He was a major player in the drug trade that went from Tijuana into San Diego. The head of intelligence for the Mexican federal police today said that his arrest was a result of five months of intelligence work. And this morning, when the authorities finally made their move, you had dozens of soldiers and police storming a very exclusive neighborhood in La Paz in Baja California. They even came in with helicopters. They overpowered El Teo in the very early hours of the morning around 5 a.m. local time.
BLOCK: And give us some more background about this kingpin, Teodoro Garcia Simental.
BEAUBIEN: Garcia Simental was known for being brutal. And he's viewed as one of the main forces behind this incredible rise in violence and killings that you had in Tijuana over the last couple of years. Federal officials here today accused him of being responsible for more than 300 murders, including beheadings and torture. He oversaw El Pozolero, you may have remembered this guy, he was known as the soup maker in Tijuana, and he confessed to dissolving hundreds of cartel rivals in vats of acid. El Teo used to be the top (unintelligible), basically the top hit man for the Ariano Felix brothers, which is basically the Tijuana cartel.
But then he split from them in 2008, and he's been running his own criminal organization, which prosecutors today said he's allied with both the Sinaloans(ph), one of the other big cartels, and La Familia, one of the other up and coming cartels here in Mexico.
BLOCK: And he's been listed among Mexico's 24 most wanted drug lords. Where would you say he fits in the drug cartel hierarchy?
BEAUBIEN: So, he's not one of the leaders of the top six cartels. But he is a very big name. He was well-known both in the drug world and also outside of it. And the years that he spent as a lieutenant in the Tijuana cartel, he was incredibly feared. He was probably one of the most violent or, at least, has a reputation of having been one of the most violent, most ruthless and among the most deadly criminals in a bunch of very violent criminals.
BLOCK: Now, as we mentioned, the arrest today marks the third major victory for the government of President Felipe Calderon in the last month. What do you think? Does this indicate that Mexico is finally getting some traction in the war on the drug cartels?
BEAUBIEN: Well, certainly these are big victories for President Felipe Calderon in what's been an incredibly brutal, difficult war against the drug cartels. Yet, the head of the Beltran Leyva cartel, which is one of the big cartels, Arturo Beltran Leyva, he was killed in a shootout just before Christmas. And then just after New Year's, his brother was also arrested.
So, basically, you've got the Beltran Leyva cartel in shambles at the moment. Now you've got El Teo being brought down. The problem is that you end up having - and even authorities here will say that when you get these big heads of the cartels falling, other people start fighting to gain control of those smuggling routes and often leads to more violence.
BLOCK: Jason, thank you very much.
BEAUBIEN: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Jason Beaubien in Mexico City talking about the arrest today of one of Mexico's most wanted drug lords, Teodoro Garcia Simental from Tijuana.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now we're going to hear from Tijuana about killings that have shocked people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In two separate attacks last week, four teenagers were murdered.
Amy Isackson covers the border for member station KPBS in San Diego, and she sent this story.
AMY ISACKSON: I'm standing here on a street in one of Tijuana's most exclusive neighborhoods. Many of the border cities' most prominent families live here. The homes are big. They're not mansions, but they look very comfortable. Here in the street it's difficult to feel totally at ease. On this thick, pink cement wall - it's in front of one of their homes - you can see where the bullets hit. Across the street, you can see the chalk circles on the sidewalk where the bullet casings fell. Last week, gunmen pumped 59 shots into a late-model black Audi here. The driver, his name was Josefo Labastida Fimbres, was 17.
Unidentified Man: Unfortunately, crime doesn't respect (unintelligible).
ISACKSON: We can't identify the man who's talking, for security reasons. His family has been friends with the Fimbres' through three generations.
Unidentified Man: They're a very, very big family. All of them have been very, very involved in every aspect of Tijuana history and life. Hardworking country with - economically, politically, charity-wise.
ISACKSON: He says 17-year-old Josefo had come out of his shell during the last couple of years. Josefo was going to high school in San Diego. He was a good golfer. And he had a lot of friends - more than 100 of them have left messages on a Facebook memorial. They wrote about chemistry class, a ski trip and a visit to Sea World.
Unidentified Man: But, unfortunately, he got a little sidetracked, probably by the influences from friends and probably he wasn't looking for it, but was drawn into it.
ISACKSON: Mexican law enforcement authority say Josefo's killers were tied to organized crime. In Tijuana, that means drug cartels.
(Soundbite of vehicles)
ISACKSON: Across town, two days later, it happened again. Three more teenagers were ambushed, this time outside their high school. Nineteen-year-old Orlando says he saw it all happen.
Mr. ORLANDO: We were going down the hill and there was a noise, like duh, duh, duh, duh.
ISACKSON: School had just let out. He says a small, white car drove by and gunfire burst out of it.
Mr. ORLANDO: I got sick. I got sick because I looked at - they're all shot. I got sick up the street, after that, in my house. You know, (unintelligible) not coming back.
ISACKSON: The Baja California attorney general's office says the hit men used machine guns, the kinds that drug cartels like. These four murders came during a week when more than 30 people were killed in Tijuana, three severed heads were found dumped around the city. This kind of gruesome drug cartel violence had died down for most of last year. And some were congratulating Tijuana for regaining control. That was a mistake.
Dr. DAVID SHIRK (Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center): If anything, the recent uptick in violence shows us just how little control authorities have over the rate of violence among the cartels.
ISACKSON: David Shirk is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
Dr. SHIRK: Lulls and surges really appear to have more to do with what's going on between and within the cartels than anything the federal government in Mexico has done.
ISACKSON: While no one seems to know what's going on within the cartels in Tijuana, the fear is that criminals have rewritten the rules of the drug war. Under the new rules, anyone associated with the cartel, their families and even teenagers can be targets.
For NPR News, I'm Amy Isackson in San Diego.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
At the Supreme Court today, a case about sex offenders and how long they can be kept behind bars. The justices heard arguments about whether the federal government has the power to hold them long after they have completed their prison terms.
NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Involuntary civil commitment of an individual is a matter usually dealt with by the states. But in 2006, Congress authorized indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders in federal prison after they serve out their terms. Currently, there are 84 such prisoners confined to a treatment facility at a federal prison in North Carolina.
The men range from those who've completed their terms for violent sex offenses to those convicted of possession of pornography or even some who were not in prison for any sexual offense. Five of them challenged their indefinite confinement, and a federal appeals court in Richmond struck down the federal law, ruling unanimously that the statute usurps powers reserved for the states under the Constitution.
Today in the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan defended the statute, contending that the civil commitment of dangerous, mentally ill federal prisoners protects the public. She said the law is meant as a transitional measure that allows for transfer of dangerous sexual offenders to the states, where possible. But she conceded that for the most part, the states don't want these prisoners.
Justice Antonin Scalia was her main inquisitor. What power conferred upon the federal government by the Constitution permits this, he demanded. Answer: The power to run a responsible criminal justice system.
Justice Sotomayor: Under your theory, the federal government, merely because of their time and control of the individual, has an unlimited constitutional power to then civilly commit this dangerous person.
Kagan repeatedly told the justices that the federal power of civil commitment is limited and transitional so that dangerous prisoners who've served their time do not, quote, "fall between the cracks" if the states don't take them.
Justice Scalia: I find it difficult to believe that if the Federal Bureau of Prisons wrote the governor of the state into which this person is being released and said, we think the state ought to consider commitment proceedings - I find it difficult to believe that an elected governor or an elected attorney general would ignore that letter. Treatment is expensive, replied Kagan, $65,000 per prisoner, so the states don't want them.
Justice Scalia: I must say, I'm not impressed with that argument. This is a recipe for the federal government taking over everything. The states won't do it. Therefore, the federal government steps in and does it. Replied Kagan: Suppose there was some very contagious, drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in the prison system, and the states were not able to deal with quarantining people upon their release date, and Congress gave the federal government quarantining authority, would anyone say the federal government did not have the constitutional power to affect that kind of public safety measure? The exact same thing is true here.
Justice Stevens: Isn't it true that this statute applies even if a person has not been a sexual offender in the past - if the person is in prison for bank robbery, for instance? Answer: Yes, there have been 103 people who've been certified for commitment under this law. Twenty of them have been in prison for non-sexual offenses.
Arguing the other side of the case today was public defender Alan DuBois, representing five men who completed their prison terms but remain in federal prison after being civilly committed. DuBois faced immediate questions from Justice Stevens about the tuberculosis hypothetical. The public defender's answer was that the states, not the federal government, have responsibility for the public health function. Even Justice Scalia didn't buy that argument.
Justice Breyer: Could the federal government set up mental health centers to treat people not taken care of by the states? DuBois seemed to say no, prompting Scalia to hold his head in his hands, moaning, no, no, no, no. The government can spend money any way it wants, said the frustrated Scalia. The issue is whether they can force people into those hospitals.
Lawyer DuBois soon summarized the government's position as, because it's a good idea, it must be constitutional. Justice Ginsburg: It's more than a good idea. You're talking about endangering the health and safety of people. So the government has some responsibility, doesn't it? In that case, suggested Justice Scalia, couldn't the federal government give the states the money needed to take on civil commitments? Justice Stevens: I guess we could all think of a lot of different statutes that might be enacted, but we have to decide whether this one is constitutional.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Blacks in this country are showing a sharp rise in optimism about the state of black progress. That's according to a new survey on racial attitudes from the Pew Research Center. It was conducted in association with NPR. And the survey attributes that surge in optimism among African-Americans to the election of Barack Obama as president.
Andrew Kohut joins us to talk about the findings. He's president of the Pew Research Center. Andy, welcome back.
Mr. ANDREW KOHUT (President, Pew Research Center): Happy to be here, Melissa.
BLOCK: And your findings are that, overall, 39 percent of blacks say African-Americans are better off now than they were five years ago - 39 percent. How sharp a rise is that?
Mr. KOHUT: Well, two years ago, the same question with a comparable sample, only 20 percent of African-Americans said that about the condition of blacks compared to five years ago. So there is a large increase in this assessment. It's the largest that we've seen in nearly a quarter of a century. And it's part of a broader pattern of African-Americans expressing more positive views one year after the election of Barack Obama.
Is Barack Obama's election the cause of this? Well, you can't prove it. But the changes in African-American attitudes are so widespread, so broad, the only inference that I can come to is that there's an Obama effect, and it's been a very positive effect on the views of black Americans.
BLOCK: And just to clarify, that 39 percent number does not mean that the remaining 61 percent of African-Americans think they're worse off now - in fact, far from it.
Mr. KOHUT: For the most part, many say no different. Relatively few say worse off.
BLOCK: One point you make in the survey is that the optimistic number that we've been talking about runs counter to the economic realities during this recession.
Mr. KOHUT: Absolutely. There is increased optimism in this survey at a time of the great recession. Two years ago, and only 44 percent of African-Americans said that the future for blacks are going to be better. In the current survey, it was 53 percent. We find a large percentage of African-Americans in this environment saying that the gap between black standard of living and white standard of living has narrowed.
BLOCK: Andy Kohut, you also asked questions about Barack Obama himself, including one where you asked people if they think of Obama as black or mixed race. What did you find?
Mr. KOHUT: We found a huge gap in the way blacks and whites responded to this question. Among whites, 53 percent said Obama is of mixed race. Only 24 percent said I think of him as black. Among blacks, 55 percent said he's black and only 34 percent said he's of mixed race.
BLOCK: And what does that tell you?
Mr. KOHUT: And it's a signal to what we found more broadly about Barack Obama. And that is he's not being defined by many whites in racial terms. And, yes, there's a correlation between attitudes toward Obama's performance and personal valuations of him by race. But we see many of Obama's white critics holding pretty tolerant attitudes toward race and having a more positive view of blacks.
BLOCK: Andy, when you look broadly at the findings of this recent survey, where do you see issues that point to an ongoing racial divide; in other words, that we are nowhere near a post-racial society in this country?
Mr. KOHUT: Well, certainly, attitudes of African-Americans are better. But we still see wide gaps on many questions. 34 percent of blacks say the reason why blacks aren't making more progress is racism. Only 15 percent of whites hold that view. There are differences in levels of life satisfaction between whites and blacks, and differences in levels of satisfaction with their communities and views of the police.
These are all longstanding differences in the way whites and blacks look at things. And even though there are much improved attitudes among African-Americans, there's no great sea change in the views on racial issues.
BLOCK: Andy, thanks very much.
Mr. KOHUT: You're welcome.
BLOCK: Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
We have an update now on a story that we first brought you last May, when a Guatemalan lawyer was killed. Shortly after his death, a video surfaced, and on the video, the lawyer said this.
Mr. RODRIGO ROSENBERG: (Foreign language spoken)
SIEGEL: If you are watching this video and hearing this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom. At the time, the United Nations said it would investigate that charge. It did, and today it announced this dramatic finding. It says the lawyer arranged for his own murder.
Well, back in May, we spoke with Juan Carlos Llorca then, and he joins us again now. He's Guatemala correspondent for The Associated Press. Thanks for joining us once again.
Mr. JUAN CARLOS LLORCA (Guatemala Correspondent, Associated Press): Hello. How are you?
SIEGEL: Tell us a bit about this lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg. What did he claim in that video that was released after his death?
Mr. LLORCA: He claimed that he had discovered information that linked the government to the murder of one of his clients and his daughter. And then he said that if people were watching the video, it was because the president, his wife and other officials within the government had him murdered.
SIEGEL: These were the Musa's, his clients, whom he was talking about.
Mr. LLORCA: Yes, yes. It was a textile industrialist and his daughter.
SIEGEL: Khalil Musa and Marjorie Musa. Now, Rodrigo Rosenberg, as I recall from the story, was riding his bicycle when he was shot and murdered. And the conclusion of the investigation is that he, in effect, hired the hit men to kill him.
Mr. LLORCA: Yes. It turns out that he had been riding his bicycle and had sat on the sidewalk to wait for a hit man to murder him. He had previously called them to let them know where he was going to be so they could locate him and shoot him five times.
SIEGEL: Why would he do this?
Mr. LLORCA: That is what the U.N. commission cannot fully explain. They have a hypothesis, nevertheless. They say that he was very devastated because the recent death of his mother. He had just lost custody of his children - and they had gone to Mexico - and this woman, Marjorie Musa, she had been murdered a month earlier, and he had a long-standing relationship with her. And after her murder and the murder of her father, he started digging into what had just happened, and he received lots of information, no proof, says the U.N., but lots of information pointing to the government as the culprit of this crime.
So he became convinced - he convinced himself that the government was to blame. And since he was very frustrated that he thought that he could never bring the government to justice, the U.N. thinks that he thought the only way to create a change and to bring justice and to bring the government down was to record his message and then get people to kill him.
SIEGEL: Now, since May, when this posthumous accusation against the president became public, did it have political repercussions in Guatemala? Did it cause troubles for the president to be accused of this murder?
Mr. LLORCA: Yes. During the first six weeks maybe, there were marches calling for his resignation or at least his separation from office during the time the investigation was conducted.
SIEGEL: So what happens now that there's been this finding that indeed it wasn't the president's fault, it was the victim himself who arranged his own murder?
Mr. LLORCA: Well, there's at least 11 people in jail and some of them corroborated all the information that the U.N. had already gathered. And now they go to trial and there is just two persons that are at large who are his cousins, because he actually hired a hit man through his cousins. They just didn't know that it was Rosenberg who was to be murdered.
SIEGEL: Juan Carlos Llorca, Associated Press Guatemala correspondent, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. LLORCA: Thank you for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Offers of international aid are being made tonight for Haiti. The impoverished country suffered a massive earthquake earlier today. And there are reports of widespread devastation. The magnitude 7.0 quake and its aftershocks collapsed buildings and caused a number of deaths and injuries that has yet to be counted.
The United Nations reports that the headquarters of its peacekeeping mission in Haiti has sustained serious damage. Aid is being promised by numerous humanitarian organizations. The U.S. government is pledging civilian and military disaster relief to Haiti and others affected in the Caribbean.
Earlier, I spoke with Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, about what he had heard from Haiti.
Ambassador RAYMOND ALCIDE JOSEPH (U.S. Ambassador to Haiti): I have spoken to the secretary general of the presidency, and he told me that he was driving east to the Petionville from Port-au-Prince, and buildings started to collapse on both sides of the street. So he had to park his car and walk. And he doesn't know where he was going - to go, how he would reach home, but his phrase was, this is a catastrophe of major proportion.
SIEGEL: Have you been able to get any sense of how many buildings probably came down?
Amb. JOSEPH: Well, since then, what I can tell you is that the consul general of Haiti in Florida - he's in Miami. Mr. Ralph Latortue has spoken to the first lady and he said that part of their palace have been damaged, collapsed, part of the Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Finance, destroyed. And he said, again, it is a major catastrophe.
SIEGEL: Now, we've heard (unintelligible) of a hospital collapsing. Do you know what hospital that is and where it is?
Amb. JOSEPH: Yeah. I have heard that hospitals have collapsed. But right now, we're not in any position to see exactly all the things that have happened.
SIEGEL: I assume that there are deaths and that people were crushed.
Amb. JOSEPH: Yeah, quite a few victims. You see, there are a lot of flimsy houses on the hillsides around Port-au-Prince. I'm told that some of them have collapsed like cardboards.
SIEGEL: What time of day did the earthquake strike?
Amb. JOSEPH: This hit around 4:50 this afternoon.
SIEGEL: Would children have been still in schoolrooms at that time of the day or would they have been gone?
Amb. JOSEPH: No children in schoolroom, but it happened at rush hour. So, there were many cars on the road. And some of the hills just collapsed and some of the cars.
SIEGEL: What can you tell us about the effort to get assistance to people who are in the earthquake zone?
Amb. JOSEPH: Well, I know that the United States and other countries had come to our support and our health in 2008, where four hurricanes hit Haiti in a matter of three weeks. So this time, also, I'm calling on the international community to please come to Haiti, which is facing a dire situation.
SIEGEL: The last we heard, all communications were down, all telephone lines were done to Haiti.
Amb. JOSEPH: Yes. All communications were down. It was just a miracle that I was able to get to the secretary general of the presidency on his cell phone. And he told me he was not able to reach the palace himself.
SIEGEL: Well, Ambassador Joseph, thank you very much for speaking with us today.
Amb. JOSEPH: You are welcome.
SIEGEL: That's Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the United States, talking with us about today's earthquake, estimated at a magnitude of 7.0.
Earlier this evening, President Obama released a statement. It says: My thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by this earthquake. We are closely monitoring the situation. And we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Haiti this evening, people are searching for loved ones and digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings that follow in a major earthquake today. The 7.0 magnitude quake has caused an unknown number of deaths and injuries on the impoverished island. Haiti is appealing for international aid, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier today delivered this message.
Secretary Hillary Clinton (Department of State): United States is offering our full assistance to Haiti and to others in the region. We will be providing both civilian and military disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. And our prayers are with the people who have suffered, their families and their loved ones.
SIEGEL: Private aid organizations are also mustering relief efforts. Joining us now is Rachel Wolff, who works with World Vision, that's an international relief group based in the U.S. that has about 400 employees in Haiti, and she's spoken with some of them today, people who were in Haiti's capital when the earthquake hit. Rachel Wolff, what have your relief workers been telling you today?
Ms. RACHEL WOLFF (Communications Manager for Disaster Response, World Vision): Hi, Robert. Well, I spoke with World Vision's national director there in Port-au-Prince, Frank Williams(ph). He said the staff of World Vision all felt the quake quite severely. Our agency's building itself, which is quite a sturdy building, shook for about 35 seconds, and portions of the building actually fell off. He described the scene of panic, screaming in the capital there. And even in one of the better built areas where our office is, there were - roads were already blocked, significantly blocking traffic from buildings that had fallen down.
SIEGEL: What did you hear about how people in Haiti are dealing with the aftermath of the quake?
Ms. WOLFF: Well, I can only imagine - Frank, World Vision's national director, describes screaming, some panic. This is all in the capital, of course. I would expect, you know, that this frightening scene in the capital would be magnified all around the country. At the same time, Port-au-Prince being such a densely populated city, damage there, we would expect, would be quite significant.
SIEGEL: Does Haiti and its government have the capacity to handle a disaster like this?
Ms. WOLFF: This earthquake is a magnitude where, you know, World Vision would be concerned had it hit in any developing country.
Haiti, as we know, is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. World Vision has worked there for 30 years. We remember the hurricanes that hit one after another a couple of summers ago. I was there just following that. People are still recovering from those hurricanes a year and a half ago. So I would imagine - I mean, we know that the government has requested international assistance. That will certainly speed things along. World Vision is certainly already taking donations. At this point, even though things are not confirmed, I think we have a good indication to believe that quite a bit of help will be needed and urgently.
SIEGEL: Rachel Wolff with the international aid group World Vision whose employees are in Haiti. Thank you very much for talking with us.
Ms. WOLFF: Thank you, Robert.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Mexico, a commercial featuring an American soccer star is causing offense and laughs. Landon Donovan is the all-time leading scorer for the U.S. men's soccer team. And in the ad he appears dressed as a caricature of a Mexican campesino.
NPR's Jason Beaubien reports from Mexico City.
JASON BEAUBIEN: The first thing to note about this story is that U.S. soccer star Landon Donovan is very well-known in Mexico. And many Mexicans hate him. They hate Donovan the way Boston Red Sox fans hate New York Yankees star Derek Jeter. They hate him because he scored several key goals against the Mexican national team. And then there was a time in 2004 when he urinated on the field in Guadalajara. Mexicans have never forgiven him for that, and they boo ferociously whenever he plays here.
Despite his terrible public image, Donovan has been cast in an ad campaign for a new lottery in Mexico. In a gigantic sombrero, a multicolored poncho and a huge fake mustache, Donovan is seen scooting under the border fence into Mexico. He tries to tiptoe past a dozing Mexican border guard.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken) Where is Landon Donovan?
BEAUBIEN: The premise of the ad is that Donovan is sneaking into Mexico because it's easier to win the lottery south of the border.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #3: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: The guard steals Donovan's lottery ticket and then chases him back across the desert with a billy club. The GanaGol lottery is being launched by the Mexican TV giant Televisa. Televisa's communications department didn't respond to multiple requests for an interview about the campaign.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Man #4: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: The ad has been the talk of talk radio in Mexico City with most callers tearing into Donovan as an arrogant little gringo.
Mr. SERGIO SARMIENTO (Host, Radio Red): Most people, I'd say 80 percent of the people who called were very negative about it, and they thought it was insulting.
BEAUBIEN: Sergio Sarmiento hosts a morning show on Radio Red.
Mr. SARMIENTO: People thought that he was making fun of Mexicans, that he was making fun of especially Mexican migratory workers in the U.S.
BEAUBIEN: Last year, Burger King was forced to apologize and pull a global ad campaign for its Texican Whopper after it caused an uproar in Mexico. The campaign featured a short, squat lucha libre wrestler wearing a Mexican flag as a poncho alongside a tall, thin Texas cowboy.
(Soundbite of Burger King commercial)
Unidentified Man #5: The taste of Texas with a little spicy Mexican. To understand it, you must try it.
BEAUBIEN: The campaign was supposed to show how well Texas and Mexican cuisine blend in the Texican Whopper. Mexican officials, however, demanded the ads be withdrawn.
Online, people here have been criticizing the new ad for the GanaGol lottery, asking if Donovan will next do a commercial in China in a Fu Manchu mustache or a South African spot in a loincloth.
But Luis Gomez, who teaches sociology at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, says Donovan's costume is so over-the-top that it's funny. Gomez says, in Mexico, Donovan represents the great rivalry between these two countries.
Professor LUIS GOMEZ (Sociology, Autonomous National University of Mexico): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: So when you dress him up as a Mexican, it's ridiculous, Gomez says. It's not offensive. It's ridiculous. It appears comic. Unlike Burger King, GanaGol has shown no signs that it's going to take the controversial ad off the air.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Mexico City.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The term British invasion usually refers to a time in the 1960s when a bunch of raucous and very white rock bands brought their music to these shores. The sounds coming out of Britain today are decidedly different. As Britain has evolved into a multicultural society, home to a new generation with roots in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, so too has its music scene.
One of those capturing the sound of the new Britain is composer Nitin Sawhney.
NPR's Bilal Qureshi visited Sawhney at his studio in South London, and he has this profile.
BILAL QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney is the kind of musician who can perform with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall one day and DJ a club in Singapore or Dubai the next. And although he doesn't usually sing on his records, he isn't one to mince words.
Mr. NITIN SAWHNEY (Musician): It makes me laugh when I hear people saying that music or art becomes too political because I think, well, if you got nothing to say, you don't open your mouth.
QURESHI: And on his latest album, Sawhney wanted to say something about the aftermath of the attacks on London in July of 2005.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) There's no more trains going that way. There's no more trains coming this way. You better make your way home, son. There's something going down in London.
QURESHI: He says the train and bus bombings that summer tore something in the fabric of London, giving rise to paranoia and suspicion toward the city's minority communities.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) On these streets where I played and these trains that I take, I saw fire. But now I've seen the city change in oh so many ways since the days of fire.
QURESHI: And so begins his response, a record of collaborations he's called "London Undersound."
Mr. SAWHNEY: I didn't want it to be a really negative album or anything like that. And one of the reasons why I got so many collaborators involved in the album was because I wanted to dilute some of the intensity that I felt about London.
QURESHI: So he worked with the Spanish group Ojos de Brujo, sitar player Anoushka Shankar, even Paul McCartney. Fellow Londoner and reggae singer Natty says Nitin Sawhney is the kind of guy who thinks about music first.
Mr. NATTY (Reggae Singer): But it's also all about the people who can do the right music for that situation. You get a whole load of guys who say I'm not going to have any white dudes in my band, or I'm not going to have any brothers in my band. You get silly things like that, which obviously Nitin wouldn't do because Nitin's cool as hell.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) Delayed trains, delayed trains. Didn't plan for death on the subway. So I step out the station, Brazilian name all over TV. Realization I was on the next train, could've been me.
QURESHI: Composer Nitin Sawhney was profiled for the British newspaper The Guardian by Laura Barnett.
Ms. LAURA BARNETT (Arts Editor, The Guardian): What he's trying to say is that we're all Londoners. We're all British. We're not British-Asian, we're not white, we're not black. We're just people. And by drawing all these influences together into one organic whole, which is more successful on some occasions than on others, he's creating something greater than the sum of its parts. And that's kind of who we are. We're a mongrel mix, and he celebrates that.
QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney works out of studios in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London hit by race riots in the 1980s. Outside the entrance to the Brixton tube station, groups of Bengali women in headscarves walk past Afro-Caribbean families on their way to the Sunday market.
(Soundbite of music)
QURESHI: Inside, in a large studio space, Sawhney has gathered seven musicians to rehearse for an upcoming performance.
Mr. SAWHNEY: Do you feel it's as comfortable for you to sing in D as in C?
Unidentified Woman #1: No. It's in C-sharp, that one.
QURESHI: They're seated in a long semicircle, with Sawhney at one end, flamenco guitar by his side. He has a subdued, understated presence as he guides the players: a drummer, cellist, flutist, tabla player and one of three vocalists, a young white singer named Nicki Wells.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN (Columnist, The Independent): You almost can't hear that it is a white woman singing an Indian raga. There's sort of a stripping that goes on and a melding, which is amazing.
QURESHI: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist for the British newspaper The Independent.
Ms. ALIBHAI-BROWN: He is a supreme musician. And I think he has this facility of bringing together, kind of almost stripping people of their inherited identities when they work with him.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Woman #2: (Singing in foreign language)
QURESHI: What Nitin Sawhney does is often called fusion. He prefers confusion because he says he wants to challenge what his listeners expect when they see a blonde singer take the mike or what they assume when they see an Indian composer step on stage.
Mr. SAWHNEY: And that's one of the things I like to do is de-contextualize certain traditional forms so that we hear them in a different way and we start to become more aware of the power of them because I think you can get used to hearing certain singers in one way and think, okay, well, I know what that's all about now. But as soon as you hear something else going on underneath their voices, you look at them differently. It gives you a new perspective, a new angle on hearing how their voice comes out and what they have to say.
(Soundbite of song, "Daybreak")
Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language)
QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney is a self-professed workaholic. "London Undersound" is his eighth studio album. And it adds to a critically acclaimed body of work that already includes more than 40 film soundtracks, original pieces for the National Ballet of China, even the Playstation 3.
In 2006, he composed a new score for a 1929 silent film set in India. It was projected in London's Trafalgar Square as Sawhney performed with the London Symphony Orchestra before an audience of thousands.
(Soundbite of music)
QURESHI: That music was deeply influenced by what Sawhney heard as a child at home. His parents immigrated to Britain from India in 1963, just a year before Nitin Sawhney was born. He and his brothers were the only nonwhite students at school. And throughout his life, he turned to music and a community of musicians to mitigate the racism he says he experienced.
Mr. SAWHNEY: It kind of performed a multitude of different roles in my life. I mean, in one way, it was a place of refuge. It was also a place of inspiration. It was a place of no boundaries. It was a place where I could connect with other people without having to worry about linguistic barriers.
QURESHI: But just as Nitin Sawhney's music continues to blur the outlines of what a British record can sound like, his generation is part of a broader trend that's recasting what it means to be British.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says while politicians debate the merits of multiculturalism in Parliament - whether all this mixing is good or bad - those debates overlook what's already happening on the ground.
Ms. ALIBHAI-BROWN: In terms of friendship, love, sex, there just isn't a drama here anymore about whether it should be allowed, it should be seen, it represents a threat. It just is who we are. And that says something, I think, because from that stems art, stems music, stems theater, but also stems eventually a new national identity.
QURESHI: And in breathing life into London's undersound and in bringing to stage performers from the city's newest communities, Nitin Sawhney continues to rearrange the sound of the British invasion.
Bilal Qureshi, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You can hear songs from Nitin Sawhney's "London Undersound" at nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Jan Gabriel died on January 10th at age 69. You might not know of the Chicago-area racing promoter, but you may very well know of his vocal signature. It has been copied for decades by other racing announcers across the country.
Mr. JAN GABRIEL (Racing Announcer): Sunday, Sunday, Sunday at smokin' U.S. 30 Drag Strip where the great...
SIEGEL: Jan Gabriel is credited with being the first to write radio ads featuring what would become a clich�.
Commentator Bob Cook takes a look back at the life of Mr. Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
BOB COOK: On Jan Gabriel's own Web site, it did not go without notice what day he died. His death notice was headlined: The Last Sunday. It was appropriate because Jan Gabriel promoted Sunday better than any preacher.
Jan Gabriel started as Chicago's youngest teenage DJ at record hops in the 1950s, moved into commercial work, then combined his love of show business and racing beginning in 1968, when he became the track announcer at the Santa Fe Speedway in Hinsdale, Illinois. By his telling, most track announcers sat up high in a booth and talked with little cadence. Gabriel put himself on stage in the middle of the track and went crazy.
Gabriel did a lot more than Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. With his syndicated show, "The Superchargers," he put NASCAR and the National Hot Rod Association on television when most everyone else would not.
It seemed like you heard other announcers mimic the Sunday, Sunday, Sunday shtick endlessly until suddenly you didn't hear it anymore. That's because as auto racing got bigger, the small tracks where Gabriel did his most famous work disappeared, victims of underfinanced owners, high insurance costs and real estate development. Santa Fe Speedway, where Gabriel got his start, is a housing subdivision. The U.S. 30 Drag Strip is weeds.
Still, Gabriel never gave up the ghost of promoting small-time events like they were big-time. He took one Santa Fe Speedway standby, Team Demolition Derby, and transferred it to Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois, a small track affiliated with a complex that hosts Indy car, NASCAR and NHRA events. For four Saturdays every summer, Gabriel's event filled the 10,000 seats with fans eager to see what Gabriel called roller derby on wheels.
Gabriel continued his work despite his polycystic kidney disease, which necessitated a transplant in the 1980s and his legs to be amputated below the knees in 2005. But that didn't stop him from promoting and announcing Team Demolition Derby, giving it the reflected glory of Mr. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, even if he could no longer stand in the middle of the track and go crazy.
The Gabriel family is hosting a memorial service open to the public at his home in Lombard, Illinois, where they can mingle with his family and with his favorite cars. When is that service? Why, of course, it's Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
SIEGEL: Bob Cook is a writer. He's based in Chicago. If you'd like to comment on his essay, go to npr.org.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
This past year was a grim one for the magazine industry. Advertising revenue plummeted, and major publications, including Gourmet and Modern Bride, shut down for good. Other magazines like Fortune scaled back the number of issues they put out. But even in this tough climate, new magazines are still coming out.
NPR's Jim Zarroli looks at what magazine publishers are doing to stay relevant in the digital age.
JIM ZARROLI: Many people are pessimistic about magazines these days, not Carley Roney. She co-founded a company called The Knot that publishes bridal magazines. This morning, she's brimming over with enthusiasm as she addresses her sales staff.
Ms. CARLEY RONEY (Co-Founder, Editor-In-Chief, The Knot): So we have been on an absolute roll, I think, on the editorial side. I mean, I feel like we are working like a crazy machine at this point.
ZARROLI: The Knot is part of a new generation of companies trying to take advantage of a rapidly shifting media landscape.
The University of Mississippi's Samir Husni, who writes a blog called Mr. Magazine, says people still read magazines, but advertisers are deserting them for the Internet. And the problem has gotten a lot worse since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the meltdown in the financial markets.
Dr. SAMIR HUSNI (University of Mississippi; Blogger, Mr. Magazine): They have a serious problem with the advertising because the entire business model died. I mean, the American business model died in September 2008.
ZARROLI: Big magazine companies are desperately looking for ways to survive, says consultant Martin Walker.
Mr. MARTIN WALKER (Consultant): All of the smart publishing companies not only be into the Internet and into digital magazines, but they have TV deals, book deals. They're into video. They're into television.
ZARROLI: A lot of existing magazines have tried to accommodate themselves to the digital age with Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and iPhone apps. Esquire recently had an augmented reality issue. Hold up the cover of the magazine to a Web cam, and an image of Robert Downey, Jr. pops up on your computer screen.
Mr. ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. (Actor): Oh, yeah. In your face. And bless your soul. Welcome to the augmented reality issue of Esquire magazine. My name is Robert Downey, Jr.
ZARROLI: These efforts have had mixed success. But despite the industry's troubles, a lot of publishers aren't ready to give up on magazines. Samir Husni says more than 600 new titles came out in 2009, though many were one-time-only publications.
Some of the more successful launches used brand names from television, like the Food Network magazine. Others, like The Knot, started out on the Internet. It was founded as a bridal Web site and it still makes money through Web ads and e-commerce. It sells wedding merchandise and it runs a gift registry linked to major retailers like Macy's. Carley Roney says the company has amassed a huge database of new brides and this gives the company a pipeline into what its audience is thinking.
Ms. RONEY: So we have a variety of different revenue streams so we don't have to rely on just one. And it's really proven to be successful for us because we are focused on the consumer.
ZARROLI: And in recent years the company has also put a lot of its energy into magazines. It publishes 17 regional bridal magazines and spinoffs for pregnant women and new homeowners. Roney says magazines do something for their audience that other media don't.
Ms. RONEY: Magazines provide you a sort of realm of discovery, I think, that looking on the Web, you're searching for information. You might find some, but when you're browsing through a magazine, it's just a much more, it's sort of a relaxing and just entirely different experience. And so we've always felt that particularly in the world of weddings, where brides are hungry for pictures and inspiration and ideas, there will always be bridal magazines.
ZARROLI: Still, The Knot has to cut corners in a way that its wealthier, uptown rivals never did during their heyday. It's published in a downtown Manhattan building where the heat is uneven and the wooden floors creak underfoot. The same staff members write content for both the magazines and the Web. It's a long way from "The Devil Wears Prada."
Samir Husni says the economic fundamentals of the magazine world have changed for good and too many publishers are in denial about it.
Mr. HUSNI: They still believe that it's just a cycle, that advertising will come back and things will go back to the way it used to be. I think they are in a coma. If they think that things are going to go back to the way they used to be before 2007, they are not living in this world.
ZARROLI: Those companies that are to survive, he says, will have to do what The Knot is doing - figure out how to reinvent their business model and find ways to make money off the many people who still want to read traditional magazines.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
NPR's Mike Pesca is surrounded by sports merchandise of all kinds and not just because he's one of our sports correspondents. All he needs to do is take a walk on the streets of New York.
(Soundbite of street)
MIKE PESCA: I'm standing on the corner of 47th Street and Sixth Avenue, the setting for a very famous scene from the 1976 film �Marathon Man.�
(Soundbite of movie, �Marathon Man�)
Unidentified Woman: I got champagne.
PESCA: There is no woman across the street screaming at Laurence Olivier, that's true, but the one big difference for men true today are the people, what they're wearing. If you look in the background of all the shots in the movie, the men in business suits then and now still look basically the same. It's just that today, every eighth or ninth person in casual wear is sporting something sporty.
Can I ask you what hat you're wearing?
Unidentified Man #1: A Yankee hat.
Unidentified Man #2: Bruins.
Unidentified Man #3: Manhattan.
PESCA: Can I just quickly ask you what jacket you're wearing?
Mr. PETER EISMA: New York Jets.
PESCA: Do you have a lot of Jets apparel?
Mr. EISMA: I do.
PESCA: What else do you have?
Mr. EISMA: I have a hat. I have tights. I bought my wife a new Snuggie.
PESCA: The wife of Peter Eisma there has something in common with the country at large: We're enveloped in licensed sports gear and apparel.
Mr. TERRY LEFTON (Reporter, SportsBusiness Journal): Every year I say the NFL can't possibly get bigger and more pervasive in American culture and every year it does.
PESCA: Terry Lefton has been covering sports marketing and licensing since 1990 for the SportsBusiness Journal. He reports that the NFL � just one league but the biggest � sells from $3 billion to $4 billion worth of licensed goods a year. That's twice the sale of men's raincoats and much more than all the belts made in the United States. And by the way, you can buy a team licensed raincoat, belt, teddy bear.
Mr. LEFTON: Gym shorts, hoodie, barbecue, cigar humidor, trailer hitch, flask. Those are all licensed products, incidentally, legitimate ones.
PESCA: You can't get all that stuff in Frank's Sporting Goods in the Bronx, but they do sell a lot of NFL jerseys.
Mr. RON STEIN (Frank's Sports Shop): The little bit what's up there is probably $50,000.
PESCA: How many jerseys are we talking about?
Mr. STEIN: I mean, if you have 250 jerseys, you know, 200 jerseys is $50,000. We have way more than that. That's just what's, you know, on display.
PESCA: Ron Stein is the grandson of the eponymous Frank Stein. When he started, there really wasn't much of a market for more than a shirt with an iron-on decal. Now he literally has more jerseys in stock than an NFL locker room. And he sells baseball hats from the majors, minors, Dominican and Puerto Rican leagues. But Stein does say that NFL hats aren't great sellers.
Mr. STEIN: We don't sell as many hats for the sake that it's not part of the uniform itself. So it's meaningless. That's how come we'll sell, obviously, if you look around in any sport, we'll sell what's actually worn between the lines.
PESCA: The NFL realizing this has reacted by making caps seem more authentic. Coaches wear them on the sidelines and perhaps more importantly, quarterbacks, as soon as they come out of the game, throw one on. Terry Lefton says the NFL is genius at using their hours of free advertising every Sunday.
Mr. LEFTON: Just another example of how well the NFL has leveraged their sideline exposure to amp up their apparel business.
PESCA: And every year, new marketers see new NFL licensing opportunities. Lefton confirms that, yes, condom manufacturers have approached the NFL about branding. And I'm sure some fans out there this week would like to get a hold of Green Bay Packer antacids or New England Patriot antidepressants.
Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
A bit of good news now in the war on the American waistline: Two new studies this week, both from the CDC, suggest Americans may finally be responding to warnings about obesity and the health problems it causes.
NPR's Patti Neighmond reports.
PATTI NEIGHMOND: Researchers compared yearly health statistics measuring height and weight of adults over the past 10 years. CDC epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden.
Dr. CYNTHIA OGDEN (Epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention): Overall, it appears that the rapid increases that we saw in the percent of the population that were obese in the '80s and '90s have slowed.
NEIGHMOND: With children, the results are similar. The body mass index for most kids between the ages of 2 and 19 has stabilized over the past 10 years. As for why, it's only speculation.
But Dr. Bill Dietz, who directs the CDC Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, says the changes likely began with women.
Dr. WILLIAM DIETZ (Director, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention): And that makes sense because women are the early adopters of healthy behaviors. And it also makes sense that plateau in children and adolescents follow that in women because women are the providers within families. They're the ones that generally buy the food, prepare it and serve it.
NEIGHMOND: And Dietz says schools have also made positive changes.
Dr. DIETZ: Schools are not serving as much high-fat, high-salt snack foods, sugar-sweetened beverages and other high-calorie foods.
NEIGHMOND: Over the past decade, many school districts have taken vending machines that offer unhealthy snacks out of cafeterias. More schools are offering salad bars as a lunch option. And overall, Dietz says, schools are trying to offer healthier lunches. Even though this is all good news, it's clearly not time to start rejoicing, says Dietz. The problem may not be getting worse, but it's not getting better.
Today, 17 percent of American children are considered obese. And two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese. Dietz says a recent CDC study finds the health care costs of obesity-related problems continues to climb. It now accounts for nearly 10 percent of the health care budget - $150 billion.
Dr. DIETZ: The increase in those costs is due to increased frequency of doctor visits, more expensive and probably more hospitalizations, as well as higher drug costs that are associated with obesity. Now, those costs aren't due to obesity alone. They're due to the cancer that's associated with obesity to the heart disease, the type 2 diabetes, the arthritis that's associated with obesity.
NEIGHMOND: There's no simple solution to the problems associated with extra pounds. Compare obesity, say, to another bad health habit: smoking. While it may be hard to quit, the message is simple: quit. Losing weight on the other hand has to do with a number of things.
Dr. Michael Gaziano is a cardiologist at the VA Boston and at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Dr. MICHAEL GAZIANO (Cardiologist, VA Boston, Brigham and Women's Hospital): Part of the problem is, is that we tend to learn how to eat in our 20s and 30s. Then our caloric needs change. We go from working on the loading dock to sitting behind a desk, for instance, or we go from being very active in our work life to retiring, and we don't necessarily make commensurate adjustments in our diet.
NEIGHMOND: Or in our activity. Middle-aged and older Americans tend to be more overweight than their younger counterparts. Gaziano recommends diets for his patients based on their age and activity level.
Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
We are hearing these descriptions of the disaster in Haiti after yesterday's earthquake: catastrophe, horrific, unbelievable, devastating. Estimates of the dead have ranged from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. But the numbers are impossible to confirm in the midst of chaos.
SIEGEL: In the streets, piles of rubble, buildings flattened, bodies stacked on top of each other, hospitals overwhelmed or destroyed. And people terrified to go inside any buildings as severe aftershocks continue.
BLOCK: Sonia Khush is the director of emergency response for Save The Children based in Washington, D.C. She heard this story about the quakes aftermath from a staff member on the ground in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.
Ms. SONIA KHUSH (Director, Emergency Response, Save the Children): He said the air was completely grey. It was full of dust. He could hear screaming and wailing. And then about an hour and a half later, it became dark. You know, it was nightfall and there was no electricity, so it was completely dark. And he said it was a surreal experience through the night because he could hear alternating sounds of first screaming and wailing and then occasionally he'd hear some cheering, you know, as somebody was found, for example, in the rubble and then hear screaming and wailing again.
And this went on throughout the night. And as aftershocks continued, he - they could continue to hear buildings falling. When my colleagues went out and about today, they just saw people sort of wondering the streets in shock. Nobody went back into their houses overnight because they are very afraid of aftershocks. There is so much destruction and damage. So, one of the first things we want to do is get a safe either plastic sheeting or some kind of tarp, you know, over people's heads to provide with them with a minimum amount of shelter.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Earlier, I spoke with David Wimhurst. He is the chief of public information for the UN mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH.
Mr. DAVID WIMHURST (Director, Public Information, MINUSTAH): It's a hot sunny day in Haiti. And if you look at the sky, you wouldn't think there is anything wrong. But if you look around you, you realize you're in a disaster zone. There are bodies on the road, there are destroyed buildings. There are crashed cars. I mean, and if you go out into the city, the situation just gets worse and worse. I mean, the destruction is really extremely overwhelming. And the electricity supplies are out, water is in short supply. Some of the roads have cracked up. There are smashed cars on the roads. There are boulders and rocks, fallen trees. It's a mess all over.
SIEGEL: Is there some sense of where the worst loss of life or the worst loss of property would likely be? What the center of the devastation�
Mr. WIMHURST: No, it's too early. We haven't been able to really - you know, we are still saving ourselves in a way�
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. WIMHURST: �in planning, you know, immediate steps to get in relief and search and rescue teams and start that first ball rolling.
SIEGEL: Now is there anybody around there who seems to be taking charge of the situation in the city or trying to maintain order at this moment?
Mr. WIMHURST: We are, certainly.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. WIMHURST: MINUSTAH still has 7,000 soldiers and 2,000 police in this country. And they're all actively engaged, certainly in this area, Port-au-Prince and Jacmel, which have been the worst hit. So, we are very much out there on the road, on the streets helping, maintaining law and order. And we are also actively engaged in coordinating the arrival of relief supplies and humanitarian assistance. So, we are very much engaged in trying to coordinate efforts to bring immediate relief to the Haitian people and to help out also in our own - the excavation of our own collapsed headquarters.
SIEGEL: Well, David Wimhurst, thank you very much for giving us that update.
Mr. WIMHURST: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
That's David Wimhurst, spokesman for the UN mission in Port-au-Prince. And as he mentioned the UN headquarters was severely damaged. Other relief organizations are struggling to help out in Haiti, despite damage to their offices and staff dead or missing.
President Obama called the earthquake a cruel tragedy for the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. He is promising an all out rescue effort.
For more on the U.S. relief operation, here's NPR's by Michele Kelemen.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Daylight brought images of devastation as well as the first glimmer of good news in Haiti. U.S. embassy officials found the airport in better shape than expected, so relief supplies could start to flow in. The U.S. sent a disaster assessment team from the U.S. Agency for International Development, rescue teams with specially trained dogs from Virginia and California, and President Obama called for a swift coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives in Haiti.
President BARACK OBAMA: The reports and images that we've seen of collapsed hospitals, crumbled homes, and men and women carrying their injured neighbors through the streets are truly heart-wrenching. Indeed, for a country and a people who are no strangers to hardship and suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible.
KELEMEN: He encouraged Americans to go to the White House Web site to find out how they can donate to aid groups on the ground. The State Department has a hotline for people seeking information about American citizens in Haiti. There are more than 45,000 Americans there, though only about a dozen have gone to the embassy to seek help, according to U.S. officials. While the U.S. embassy was spared, the United Nations suffered a devastating blow in yesterday's quake.
Unidentified Man: We need more people down here. We need more people down here.
KELEMEN: U.N. television showed rescuers pulling a few survivors from the collapsed U.N. headquarters at the Hotel Kristoff. By midday, many were still trapped and feared dead, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's special representative to Haiti, a Tunisian diplomat, Hedi Annabi. Peacekeepers are still doing their job though, according to Alain Le Roy, who runs the U.N. Peacekeeping Office in New York.
Mr. ALAIN LE ROY (U.N. Peacekeeping Office, New York): We have 3,000 forces already in Port-au-Prince. We have more forces, of course, in the country, but in Port-au-Prince itself, we have 3,000 forces. They are there to secure, of course, the airport, the port, the main buildings and patrolling in the cities. That is already happening.
KELEMEN: The U.S. is sending communications equipment to Haiti to help the U.N. and the Haitian government, which also saw several buildings collapse. An aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, has left Norfolk, Virginia, and is expected to arrive in the coming day with helicopters to assist in rescue and relief operations. Southern Command General Douglas Fraser says a large deck amphibious ship with about 2,000 Marines on board may also be sent to Haiti.
General DOUGLAS FRASER (Chief, Southern Command): We're leaning forward to provide as much capability as quickly as we can to respond to whatever the need is when we get there.
KELEMEN: The newly sworn in administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Rajiv Shah, has taken a lead in coordinating the U.S. response. He says he is trying to move in all sorts of assets quickly with one immediate goal: to save lives.
Dr. RAJIV SHAH (Administrator, United States Agency for International Development): We have over-flight data right now that's getting better by the moment, that's allowing us to get a sense of where the destruction is and what the priorities ought to be. And our goals will be to save as many lives as possible in the first 72 hours because that is the window in which that is a possible outcome.
KELEMEN: And he says he is already thinking about how much more aid will be needed in the weeks ahead for the impoverished nation to overcome its latest natural disaster.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Among those confirmed dead in Haiti is the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot. His body was found in the ruins of the Archbishop's offices. He was 63. Father Charles Robes is the pastor of St. Clement Church in Fort Lauderdale. He grew up in Haiti and knew Archbishop Miot. Father Robes, welcome to the program.
Father CHARLES ROBES (Pastor, St. Clement Church in Fort Lauderdale): Yes. Thank you.
BLOCK: And what can you tell us about Archbishop Miot, as a man of faith and as a man of Haiti?
Father ROBES: I know him as a priest, somebody who was very devoted, respectful, quiet but clever.
BLOCK: Can you think of a moment that you shared with Archbishop Miot that comes to mind as you think now of his death?
Father ROBES: I remember a few time that I met him at the seminary. He is not a person who'll talk too much. You cannot go by him do not admire him, because his very presence is so comforting. You don't need him to open his mouth to feel that you have his support, that you know that he loves you, that you know that he appreciate and support you.
BLOCK: His presence, his image within the Catholic community in Haiti, as the Archbishop, would've been huge, I imagine.
Father ROBES: Oh, it's a big impact right now because among the priests and the faithful, knowing that we are in the midst of a disaster, in the disaster, we lose our father in faith. It's something more. It added to what we - our loss.
BLOCK: You'll be leading a service at your church in the Haitian community there in Fort Lauderdale tonight. What will be your message in the sermon?
Father ROBES: Our message tonight is in the midst of this disaster, this message of comfort to know that we are - not only that we have the support of all the international community, but also that we are here for each other and the best way we can support each other is in prayer.
BLOCK: Father Robes, thanks very much for talking with us.
Father ROBES: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's Father Charles Robes in Fort Lauderdale talking about the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot, who died in the earthquake there.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL: We'll bring you more coverage of Haiti throughout today's program. The magnitude seven quake struck yesterday just before 5 p.m. in Haiti. At this point, details remains sketchy as to how many people are dead and how many homes and buildings have been destroyed. The U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says, Haiti is now facing a major humanitarian emergency. The U.S. has sent an aircraft carrier toward Haiti to help in relief efforts and military officials say U.S. Marines maybe sent in as well. The American Red Cross says, it has run out of supplies and other aid organizations are in dire circumstances.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The leaders of four of the nation's biggest banks appeared on Capitol Hill today. They were summoned by the blue ribbon panel charged by Congress with documenting the causes of the financial crisis. The panel's members had some tough questions for the titans of capitalism.
As NPR's John Ydstie reports, they are trying to understand Wall Street's role in creating the worst financial meltdown in more than 75 years.
JOHN YDSTIE: It was the first public testimony taken by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will spend the rest of this year delving into the financial breakdown. The commission's chairman, Phil Angelides, a former California state treasurer, began by saying the 10 members of the panel will strive for an unbiased accounting of the crisis that produced devastating economic consequences for many Americans.
Mr. PHIL ANGELIDES (Chairman, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission): We'll follow the evidence wherever it leads. We'll use our subpoena power as needed. And if we find wrongdoing, we will refer it to the proper authorities. That's what the American people want, that's what they deserve and that's what this commission is going to give them.
YDSTIE: Angelides then welcomed the heads of the four banks - Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America - to make their opening statements. The four appeared voluntarily, no subpoenas required. None provided a direct apology for his role in the crisis, but all acknowledged mistakes were made, specifically that the banks got caught up in the bubble and ignored growing signs of risk. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein compared it to ignoring the dangers of hurricanes after years of quiet weather.
Mr. LLOYD BLANKFEIN (CEO, Goldman Sachs): After 10 benign years in the context where we were, look, how would you look at the risk of a hurricane?
Mr. ANGELIDES: Mr. Blankfein, I must say this, having sat on the Board of the California Earthquake Authority, acts of God we'll exempt. These were acts of men and women.
Mr. BLANKFEIN: I'm just saying�
Mr. ANGELIDES: No.
Mr. BLANKFEIN: �that you're asking me a question�
Mr. ANGELIDES: These were controllable is my only observation.
Mr. BLANKFEIN: I agree.
YDSTIE: After taking issue with the hurricane metaphor, Angelides went on to use one of his own. He chided Blankfein for Goldman's sale of mortgage-backed securities to investors while at the same time making bets against them.
Mr. ANGELIDES: I'm just going to be blunt with you. It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty breaks and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars. It just - it doesn't seem to me that that's a practice that inspires confidence.
YDSTIE: Commissioner Keith Hennessey pressed the bankers about moral hazard, that is whether the government's rescue of some firms during the crisis gave a signal to investors that their banks would be rescued, too.
Mr. KEITH HENNESSEY (Commissioner, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission): And whether you were discussing with others, well, if things get really bad, we can always count on the government to step in.
YDSTIE: John Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley, responded this way.
Mr. JOHN MACK (Chairman, Morgan Stanley): I think after Lehman was allowed to fail, that no investor, at least in Morgan Stanley, was thinking we were too big to fail or the government would come in and help us. As a result, the stock traded at one point down to $6.71. If they had a view that that was not the case, the stock would have never gotten that low.
YDSTIE: Mack went on to say that in the current fragile economic environment, the government would probably not allow a big financial firm to fail. But he said a year or so from now that isn't likely to be true. All the executives agreed that Congress should create a resolution process to seize and wind down big firms, much as the FDIC winds down failed commercial banks. The bankers also agreed with Goldman Sachs' Blankfein that the government had to step in in the depths of the crisis.
Mr. BLANKFEIN: The fact is the world was unsafe, the government, regulators, taxpayers took extraordinary measures to reduce intolerable level of risk to a much more tolerable level of risk and that we should all be appreciative of.
YDSTIE: The commission's hearing will continue tomorrow with testimony from state and federal regulators and law enforcement officials.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Many states began the New Year with record budget problems, but few are as bad off as Illinois. It's facing a deficit estimated near $12 billion. With a primary election less than three weeks away, the state's Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, is trying to put the best possible spin on it. But it's clear there's no way to sugarcoat a problem that big.
Here's Quinn today in his State of the State address.
Governor PAT QUINN (Democrat, Illinois): It's the worst financial calamity that Illinois has ever had and we've been a state since 1818.
SIEGEL: NPR's David Schaper reports on how the calamity began.
DAVID SCHAPER: Everybody waits to get paid from time to time and a lot of us get behind in our bills every now and then. But the State of Illinois is taking that to the extreme. It is six months or more behind on paying many of its bills. And those overdue bills top $5 billion.
Ms. DIANA MARTINEZ: My name is Diana Martinez(ph). And I've been fighting addiction for the past 18 years of my life.
SCHAPER: Martinez says she is recovering from drug addiction and thriving today because of a state-funded 28-day treatment program run by LSSI - Lutheran Social Services of Illinois.
Ms. MARTINEZ: I am alive today because of that program.
SCHAPER: But LSSI isn't doing too well. Illinois is more than seven months behind in paying this and other substance abuse treatment providers to the tune of $43 million. And now, some treatment centers are cutting their staff and closing their doors.
Ms. MARTINEZ: It's scary. It's scary to hear that places like this are closing down.
SCHAPER: It's not just social service providers getting IOUs from the state, but schools, doctors, hospitals, municipalities, and vendors of all kinds. And the amounts are staggering. The state owes Chicago's public schools nearly $200 million. It owes the University of Illinois more than $400 million. Cities and towns around the state are owed half a billion dollars and the list goes on and on.
Mr. LAWRENCE MSALL (President, Civic Federation of Chicago): The State of Illinois stands on the brink of financial disaster. It's a financial disaster of its own making.
SCHAPER: Lawrence Msall is president of the Civic Federation of Chicago, a nonpartisan research group. He says Illinois' budget woes have very little to do with the recession.
Mr. MSALL: It entered the economic downturn with a history of spending more than it was taking in, in terms of available revenues, ignoring its pension obligations, borrowing or taking pension holidays, instead of fully funding its pensions.
SCHAPER: And Msall says because Illinois' politicians haven't significantly raised revenue or cut spending in years, the state is now borrowing even more to pay operating expenses. By some measures, only California is in worse fiscal shape than Illinois. Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes is the state official waiting for enough money to pay the state's bills. He's also a Democratic primary challenger to Governor Pat Quinn. Hynes charges that Quinn's budget is eerily similar to those of his reckless predecessor Rod Blagojevich.
Mr. DAN HYNES (Comptroller, State of Illinois): These are the same types of gimmicks that got us into the crisis we're in right now. And they're just being repeated.
SCHAPER: Quinn acknowledges his budget is far from perfect. But in his State of the State address this afternoon, he said he's made the tough decisions.
Governor PAT QUINN (Illinois): Now, I do believe we need more revenue. I think after cutting all the costs, after using strategic borrowing, after getting as much money as we can get from the federal government, we're still short.
SCHAPER: Quinn is calling for not only an income tax increase, but for an overhaul of Illinois' tax system. Experts say it's much more than just taxation that needs reforming in Illinois and that means paying for just about every constituency, not exactly a winning formula in an election year.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Our top story today: The search for survivors in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Port-au-Prince, the capital, was devastated yesterday by a 7.0 earthquake. It's the worst quake to hit the area in 200 years. Haiti's president and prime minister have both put the death toll in the tens of thousands, but it's far too early for any hard numbers.
In an interview with CNN, President Rene Preval tried to describe the scene.
President RENE PREVAL (Haiti): It's incredible. You have to see it to believe it. A lot of houses destroyed, hospital, schools...
BLOCK: While rescuers pulled bodies from collapsed buildings and stacked them along the rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince, aid from around the world began trickling in.
Felix Augustin, the Haitian consul general, pleaded for help.
Mr. FELIX AUGUSTIN (Consul General, Haiti): We need medical supplies. We need heavy equipment to help the people in Haiti. We need doctors, people in the medical field to go down to Haiti as soon as they can.
SIEGEL: The international aid effort that was in place before the quake suffered its own losses. The U.N. headquarters collapsed, and President Preval says the head of the U.N. mission, Hedi Annabi was killed, though the U.N. has not confirmed his death.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Haiti quake may have come as a shock to the millions of people who are now suffering through its aftermath, but it was not a complete surprise to geologists. The large quakes in Haiti are rare. The country sits in the middle of an active seismic zone.
NPR's Richard Harris has that story.
RICHARD HARRIS: If you live in California, you're used to occasional earthquakes reminding you that the big one could come at any time. The Caribbean is considerably quieter than that, but Carol Prentice at the U.S. Geological Survey says don't be fooled.
Dr. CAROL PRENTICE (Western Region Earthquake Hazards Team, U.S. Geological Survey): Well, it definitely is earthquake country. This is a plate boundary between the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate.
HARRIS: The Earth's tectonic plates are forever in motion. And in this case, the Caribbean plate is gradually moving east in relation to the North American plate. The movement may seem slow, about an inch a year, but the edges of those plates are locked together so they don't move all the time. Instead, stress builds up in fault zones and one of those runs very close to Port-au-Prince.
Dr. PRENTICE: You can see it on Google Earth. It's not that hard to see. It had a very clear signature through the landscape in the area.
HARRIS: So lots of stress, a big fault, to Prentice the implications are obvious.
Dr. PRENTICE: It's not a surprise to have a big earthquake along this fault.
HARRIS: What was a surprise, as is almost always the case with earthquakes, is the timing. Geoff Abers is at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Dr. GEOFFREY ABERS (Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University): This is a fault segment that has been really quiet for about the last 200 years. There's one earthquake in 1860s, but most of the larger known earthquakes are back in the 1700s.
HARRIS: So when the rock in the fault finally gave way and let off the strain that had been accumulating for more than a century, the resulting earthquake was very powerful. The ground shook for tens of seconds and the fault gave way over a stretch that's currently estimated around 30 to 60 miles.
Abers notes that the epicenter was not only very close to Port-au-Prince, the quake started at a fairly shallow depth, just six miles below the surface.
Dr. ABERS: By being shallow and on land, the strong shaking was, I think, fairly close to population centers here.
HARRIS: The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0. And since then, there have been more than a dozen strong aftershocks above magnitude five.
Dr. ABERS: One of the concerns right now is there's a lot of structures that are badly damaged in the main shock, and they're now being exposed to these late aftershocks, some of which are quite significant.
HARRIS: The quake toppled many buildings that were not constructed to withstand such violent shaking. That includes buildings of brick and concrete that were not adequately reinforced with steel bars. Abers says there's also a lot of construction on Port-au-Prince's steep hillsides.
Dr. ABERS: These unstable slopes tend to fail in strong shaking. And, you know, that's also where a lot of the damage could happen.
HARRIS: Early reports do suggest that buildings tumbled down slopes and that landslides contributed to the death and destruction.
For the moment, all eyes are on the human tragedy in Haiti: the deaths, injuries, trapped people and devastation in one of the poorest countries in the world. And Carol Prentice, from the U.S. Geological Survey, knows this will not be the last major quake to hit the region. She's been studying a fault that runs just to the north of Haiti and cuts through the Dominican Republic.
Dr. PRENTICE: That fault, where we studied it, has not had a big earthquake for about 800 years and it's certainly due for a large earthquake as well.
HARRIS: She says the local governments are aware of that hazard, but she doesn't know how well prepared they would be to deal with it.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As we just heard, the rise in obesity has slowed. But still, two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and the cost of treating conditions associated with all those extra pounds is soaring. We wondered what's in the pending health care legislation that deals with the obesity epidemic.
And to find out, we turn now to Jeffrey Levi. He's executive director of Trust for America's Health. That's a nonprofit group dedicated to health and disease prevention.
Mr. Levi, welcome to the program.
Dr. JEFFREY LEVI (Executive Director, Trust for America's Health): Thank you.
BLOCK: And what are the public health components in the health care bills that are specifically designed to target obesity?
Dr. LEVI: Both the House and the Senate bills offer the potential for a comprehensive approach to address obesity. Everything from counseling about obesity in the clinical setting to community prevention programs; changing norms, providing opportunities for people to be more physically active, to promote healthier nutrition so that in every community across the country we can take a targeted approach to increasing physical activity and improving nutrition and therefore change the policies, change people's attitudes and result in major change.
We've got plenty of evidence-based approaches that have been proven scientifically to achieve these behavior changes, and we just need to invest in them to help them happen.
BLOCK: You say they've been proven scientifically to actually lead to change. There is an editorial in the medical journal, published along with the studies today, that says past efforts to promote lifestyle change to encourage weight reduction have been disappointing, that maybe this doesn't work so well.
Mr. LEVI: Well, we've never really invested in the kinds of changes that are needed, and these changes don't happen overnight. Look at what happened with smoking. It was education campaigns combined with clinical interventions combined with social marketing, essentially, that changed norms in communities that resulted in this dramatic reduction that we've seen in smoking.
We can do the same for obesity by increasing physical activity and improving nutrition, but we can't do it overnight, and we can't do it without a significant investment. And we also can't do it without some policy changes. And both the House and the Senate bill, for example, mandate menu labeling in restaurants and fast food outlets, giving people the information they need to be able to embrace these norm changes so they can make the healthier decisions.
We place a lot of obstacles in people's way to make the healthy choices. Americans know what they need to do; we just need to create the environment that makes it easier for them to do it.
BLOCK: What do you think - a massive public health campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of obesity, what would that campaign look like?
Mr. LEVI: Well, I think it's less an advertising campaign, though that is part of it, but more about how we change our attitudes about walking, about being physically active, about what we eat and how we eat.
But there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, and different communities are going to have different needs. You know, one of the things that's very telling in the information that was released today is that there are tremendous disparities around obesity.
African-Americans are more likely to be obese or overweight. And when you look deeper, you will also find that obesity tends to be more associated with poverty. Well, if you live in a poor neighborhood that doesn't have a grocery store, that doesn't have access to safe streets and safe places to be physically active, it's not surprising, then, that you're going to see higher obesity and overweight rates.
BLOCK: That also, I think, ties in with the question of food production and the economics behind that. In other words, are high food prices, especially for healthier foods, making it harder for families to eat well and eat healthfully?
Mr. LEVI: Sure. And certainly in this recession, I think there's a lot of concern about how much harder it is to eat healthy.
BLOCK: Jeffrey Levi, thank you for talking with us.
Mr. LEVI: Thank you.
BLOCK: Jeffrey Levi is executive director of Trust for America's Health, where he leads the organization's advocacy efforts on behalf of a modernized public health system.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And now to former President Bill Clinton, who was named U.N. special envoy for Haiti last year. He joins us from his U.N. office in New York. President Clinton, welcome to the program.
President BILL CLINTON: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: And can you let us know any direct information that you've been getting on the fate of U.N. staff in Haiti, including U.N. peacekeepers or the chief of mission?
Pres. CLINTON: Well, we have - we know we've got at least 10 survivors of the headquarters collapse, people that were taken out alive and are now getting medical care. We know that seven of the MINUSTAH people were injured. We know there are going to be some fatalities, a considerable number. We just don't know how many yet because we haven't gone through all the rubble. But, you know, the U.N. is down there working with the $10 million in emergency relief's been set aside by the U.N. They've got 86 metric tons of food prepositioned in El Salvador to bring in.
They're working on medical facilities with the World Health Organization and working with the United States to bring in more helicopters and more supplies and C-130 transport planes. I think the United States has had a very good response of what the president said, what the secretary of State and the aid directors said and the Defense Department. We're doing everything we can.
And the world community, as always, wants to respond, and people have a very generous attitude. One of the things that I've tried to do after extensive consultation with our U.N. staff is to tell people that there will come a time when we do need - we'll need volunteers, we'll need supplies, we'll need all kinds of things. But right now we are digging through rubble. There are - last night in Port-au-Prince, the streets were littered with people who were wounded and people who had died.
So, what we need now is cash to buy water, food, shelter and first-aid supplies. And we'll need that for at least the next week over and above everything else. They are not able yet to coordinate physical supplies and redirect other bodies and everything. So, I just want to urge people to donate directly to the agencies. Or if they want me to give it to them, they can send it to clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake, or we have a mobile giving program where you can send a text message to 20222. That's 20222, and $10 will go to the relief efforts. But believe me, every $10 will count. That's a lot of first-aid supplies. That's a lot of clean water.
BLOCK: President Clinton, have you been able to talk with the Haitian President, Rene Preval, or the prime minister to get a sense of the disaster?
Pres. CLINTON: No. He called us twice. Prime Minister Bellerive called us twice yesterday. Then his coverage was interrupted. So I think we'll be able to talk to him tonight. I noticed he was able to get through to CNN and do an interview. I did not bother President Preval because the presidential palace was damaged. And once I realized that he and Ms. Preval were safe, we left them alone. But they have, as you know, injured members of parliament. We don't yet know what the final toll there is on the damage to the parliament building.
And I just want everybody to realize, though, that for the next somewhere between 72 hours and one week, we are going to be uncovering debris to get people out, whether they're alive or whether they have perished. And we're going to have a very large number of people with no place to spend the night. So, we're figuring that out, and they all need clean water and food. The water supplies have been wrecked. We've got to bring the food. And we have a drastic shortage of basic first-aid equipment. We have people who have been badly mangled in this earthquake, and people who have sustained injuries that are not life threatening, but it caused them the loss of a lot of blood. We need first-aid supplies, shelter, food and water.
And then within, I'd say, two weeks we'll be up and going again on the recovery efforts and re-implementing the plan that I went down there to implement in the first place. We're going to do this. And we're going to do it right. And we're not going to give up because of this problem. This simply reemphasizes the need to build Haiti back in a stronger, better position.
BLOCK: Well, let me ask you about that long-term plan. You told the Security Council a few months ago that you were very optimistic about the future of Haiti. You said: I'm convinced that Haiti has a remarkable opportunity to break the chains of its past. And looking at this disaster now, it just seems to deal an immeasurable blow to those hopes.
Pres. CLINTON: Well, it's a terrible economic setback, but depending on how the world responds to it and the Haitian people and the Haitian government respond to it, it might be a spiritual regeneration. I mean, this could intensify the determination of the people of Haiti to build their capital city back so that its buildings are more resistant to earthquakes, the hurricanes, and more energy efficient to put more people to work and the rebuilding of the country to find ways to avoid deforestation now and reforest the country, all of the things we're trying to do.
I believe that, look, this is a horrible tragedy. It's going to be devastating economically and most important of all, an enormous number of people have died or been seriously injured. The U.N. toll alone has been - it's been terrible. You can see here at the U.N. headquarters, a lot of people are just like me. We knew these people. They were our friends. They were our colleagues. But every tragedy in life shapes the future depending on how you respond to it. And I have been extremely impressed by what I have seen here by the Haitian delegation here with whom I work regularly. They have been in touch with the president and the government. And they want to get up on their feet. But they've got to, first of all, find the living and tend to them and care for the ones who have perished and returned to their families where possible and clean the streets and, you know, deal with this immediate emergency.
BLOCK: Mr. President, you've been going to Haiti, I've read, for 35 years now.
Pres. CLINTON: That's correct.
BLOCK: And I'm wondering, when you first heard about this magnitude 7 earthquake yesterday, just how that struck you, how it resonated with you?
Pres. CLINTON: Well, it was very tough because, first, because of the damage to the Haitian people. Secondly, when I realized that the hotel containing all of our U.N. people had totally collapsed five stories, I knew that we must've had a substantial number of fatalities. And then I saw the presidential palace that I first visited in '95. I saw the parliament building in trouble. Then the cathedral where I took Hillary first in, literally, in December of 1975, I took Hillary there to the cathedral. And we sat in the pews and looked at the beautiful church and so it's very personal to me.
But this is an important thing. People all over the world can identify with this on a purely human level and, of course, in our region, the rest of Haiti's neighbors, more than at any time in my lifetime, want to see Haiti become a full partner in the future of the region. So, I think the Caribbean nations, the Latin American nations, Canada, Mexico, they're all going to be out there pitching in.
BLOCK: President Clinton, thank you very much.
Pres. CLINTON: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's former President Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy for Haiti.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
First this hour, the disaster in Haiti. In a few minutes, we'll talk with former President Bill Clinton, who is now the U.N. special envoy to Haiti. And we'll hear firsthand accounts from Haiti.
SIEGEL: The earthquake struck late yesterday and details remain very sketchy. Here's what we know so far. The magnitude 7 quake is the worst for Haiti in 200 years. Its epicenter was just 10 miles southwest of the capital city Port-au-Prince.
BLOCK: Countless buildings have collapsed, including the presidential palace and the headquarters of the U.N. mission. Among those who remain unaccounted for is the mission's chief. Across Haiti, the death toll is unknown, but it could rise into the hundreds of thousands, and relief is just starting to arrive.
SIEGEL: Lisa Buxman is one of those trying to help. She works in Port-au-Prince as a midwife with Heartland Ministries. We reached her earlier today and asked about the situation with hospitals.
Ms. LISA BUXMAN (Midwife, Heartland Ministries): There is a hospital not far off from us. And what I was just told a few minutes ago, that there's just people lined up all over in front of it waiting for care, injured people laying on sidewalks. That seems to be the story we hear from the other hospitals, not enough medical help by any means.
SIEGEL: After a quake like this, when there are aftershocks, of course people are afraid to go inside buildings, which they fear might collapse on them. First, are there tents for people to stay under outside and what's the weather like? Is it a time when people can stay outside?
Ms. BUXMAN: It's beautiful. And I have to tell you, we're really grateful. And the odd thought is that, you know, if we're going to have an earthquake here in Haiti, this is a great time of year to do it because it is cooler in January. It's not as devastatingly heat, you know, wise as it would be in, say, summer. So, the weather is beautiful. And people are making makeshift tents and staying out of their homes.
SIEGEL: Ms. Buxman, thank you very much for talking with us.
Ms. BUXMAN: Well, thank you, sir.
SIEGEL: That's Lisa Buxman, a midwife with Heartland Ministries in Haiti.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In many Haitian communities here in the U.S., people tried frantically today to reach their relatives back in the island nation.
NPR's Robert Smith reports from one of those Haitian neighborhoods, East Flatbush, in Brooklyn, New York.
ROBERT SMITH: The Pascal(ph) Bakery on Church Street specializes in Haitian meat patties. Everyone in the store gets quiet when President Obama comes on the TV screen. They've been watching scenes of devastation in Haiti since the store opened this morning, and that someone was finally promising help.
Jean-Pierre Laguerre(ph) was working behind the counter and turned away from the speech.
JEAN-PIERRE LAGUERRE: There's always been no offer. They will help. They will do this, they will do that, but they never really - just words.
SMITH: When the president was finished, the customers went back to their cell phones.
Raymond Soli(ph) kept calling her cousins.
RAYMOND SOLI: I tried to talk to them, but I don't receive no communication. Exactly, they try very hard. The communication was in bad grade, so now it's become worse. It's a big problem.
SMITH: Word spread quickly on Church Street that the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, and Governor David Paterson were coming to the Catholic Church just down the road. People from the community filed in to hear what help would be offered.
Cheryl Hall, who runs the Caribbean Women's Health Association, was looking forward to someone finally coordinating the aid response.
CHERYL HALL (Executive Director, Caribbean Women's Health Association): Everyone knows that they want to help. We've been getting a lot of phone calls, but they don't know what to do.
SMITH: Hall wanted to send some of her doctors down to Haiti and perhaps have them take some food and clothing along.
Mayor Bloomberg had to tell the crowd that this was probably out of their hands.
Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (New York City): This is not something where you can send a can of food to help, or a bottle of water. There isn't an infrastructure, and the magnitude of the problem just dwarfs anything that any one individual or even just our city can do.
SMITH: Bloomberg encouraged people to send money. But he had to admit that even New York City rescue teams and building engineers could not go to Haiti until there was a structure in place.
Kerling Deston(ph) is still waiting to hear from most of her family back in Haiti, but she left the church feeling hopeful.
KERLING DESTON: That makes me proud to see that there's people that want to help us, you know? We're from a little, small island, but there's a lot of people who have big heart.
SMITH: And now, just like everyone else in East Flatbush, she has to wait to see what happens.
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
At the U.S. Supreme Court today, the justices turned their attention to sports, specifically to the NFL and its exclusive deal with Reebok to sell billions of dollars worth of hats, shirts and other apparel.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nine Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: It used to be that lots of different companies had NFL licenses to sell stuff with NFL team logos. But in 2001, the NFL decided to award its merchandising license for all 32 teams to just one company: Reebok. Among those frozen out was American Needle, a family-owned company that until 2001 specialized in manufacturing NFL team caps. Indeed, the caps were one-quarter of its business. The company challenged the exclusive licensing deal in court, claiming it amounted to a conspiracy among the teams to fix prices and noting that cap prices had gone way up since the deal.
But a federal appeals court ruled that the league is a single entity that operates as one business, not 32 competing businesses. And it tossed the case out of court without a trial. Anti-trust experts saw the decision as an opportunity for the NFL and other leagues to gain immunity from lawsuits over more than just merchandising agreements. They saw the ruling as a vehicle to allow sports leagues to potentially, at least, set prices for tickets, or parking at games, or fees for fantasy football, for instance.
Today, in the Supreme Court, American Needle's lawyer Glen Nager told the justices that the NFL should not be able to circumvent the nation's anti-trust laws that way. He said the NFL teams are separately owned and operated businesses and that by construing the league as a single entity, the lower court had approved a merchandising monopoly for the NFL. Several justices asked where to draw the line. After all, you need agreement on league rules and a schedule. Justice Breyer, noting that he knows baseball better than football, questioned the premise of apparel competition. You want the Red Sox to compete in selling T-shirts with the Yankees? I don't know a Red Sox fan who would take a Yankee sweatshirt if you gave it away.
Justice Stevens suggested that the real competition for apparel is between sports - football and basketball, for instance - not between teams. But the questioning got even more intense when the NFL's lawyer Gregg Levy rose to argue. He conceded that the teams used to individually license their own logos. But he maintained that the purpose of the NFL exclusive deal with Reebok was not to make money, but to promote the game of football.
Justice Scalia: They don't care whether the sale of T-shirts promotes the game. They sell it to make money. Justice Sotomayor observed that if the aim is to make money, and she said she could well see that argument, then a league agreement to fix prices would be a violation of the anti-trust laws. Sotomayor prodded further: What decision could sports teams make that would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny? Answer: The NFL clubs are not separate sources of independent power. They're a unit, a single entity.
Justice Sotomayor: So you're seeking through this ruling what you haven't gotten from Congress - an absolute bar to an anti-trust claim. Justice Breyer analogized the situation this way: A joint venture to play football is one thing, a joint NFL venture to build houses is another. Chief Justice Roberts: And the other side says selling logos is closer to selling houses than it is to playing football. So, if there's a factual dispute about whether a particular activity of the league is designed to promote the game or is designed simply to make money, then that's the sort of thing that should go to a trial.
Justice Scalia: You say that the trademarks have no value apart from the game? I guess you could say the same thing for each of the 32 franchises. They're worthless if the NFL disappears. So does that mean they can agree to fix the price at which their franchises would be sold? Lawyer Levy didn't directly answer that question, but contended that the NFL is much like a law firm that sets the prices charged by its lawyers.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Now, our top story today is the aftermath of yesterday's catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. It was the worst to hit the country in 200 years. Scores of building in the capital city Port-au-Prince have collapsed, including schools, hospitals, the presidential palace and the U.N.'s mission headquarters.
Earlier today, we talked with David Wimhurst, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission there, and he described the scene in Port-au-Prince.
Mr. DAVID WIMHURST (Spokesman, MINUSTAH): The situation just gets worse and worse. I mean, we don't yet know - we don't yet have a complete estimate of how many people have lost their homes, let alone their lives. I mean, numbers still can't be fathomed, but they're vast, and the destruction is really extremely overwhelming.
BLOCK: Thousands are assumed to have been killed in the quake. Among the dead is the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot. I spoke with Father Charles Robes, pastor of St. Clement Church in Fort Lauderdale. He grew up in Haiti, and he knew the archbishop who worked to help the poor. Robes describes Miot's death as a huge loss for Haiti.
Father CHARLES ROBES (St. Clement Church, Fort Lauderdale): It's a big impact right now, because among the priests and the faithful, knowing that we are in the middle of a disaster, in the disaster, we lose our father in faith. It's something more added to what we - to our loss.
BLOCK: The U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says Haiti is now facing a major humanitarian emergency.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The American Red Cross says it has run out of medical supplies in Haiti. A spokesman insists more will be sent, but it's not clear how soon. Meanwhile, other medical groups with people on the ground in Haiti paint a picture of unlimited need and almost no capacity to meet it.
NPR's Richard Knox reports.
RICHARD KNOX: Doctors Without Borders has a lot of people in Haiti, around 800. What it doesn't have anymore are its three hospitals that were well-known destinations for Haiti's poor. Those hospitals are now wreckage or too unstable to use.
Paul McPhun, the group's coordinator for Haiti, says some of his staff are unaccounted for, too. The remainder are overwhelmed by patients wandering the streets traumatized and desperate for care.
Mr. PAUL MCPHUN (Doctors Without Borders): The reality of what we're seeing is severe traumas: head wounds, crushed limbs, severe problems that cannot be dealt with with the level of medical care that we currently have available with no infrastructure, really, to support it.
KNOX: There's virtually no way to do surgery, for instance, so there's no way to set broken bones that have pierced the skin.
Mr. MCPHUN: The best we can offer them at the moment is first-aid care and stabilization.
KNOX: McPhun, talking from Toronto, says Doctors Without Borders staffers are besieged by people they cannot help.
Mr. MCPHUN: Everywhere we go, a massive demand from people to help them with trapped family members, with people who are suffering from major injuries. You know, you're on the streets, you're getting mobbed, particularly because we're identified with that kind of medical care.
KNOX: Dr. John Paup(ph) paints a similar picture. He's a Haitian on the faculty of the Cornell Weill Medical College in New York City who runs an HIV hospital and clinic in Port-au-Prince.
Phone lines aren't working, but Dr. Paup writes in an email that he was in a meeting with Haiti's prime minister and health minister yesterday evening when parts of a concrete ceiling started falling down. We all got out alive by chance, Paup says. He estimates that 75 percent of Port-au-Prince is rubble, including parts of his own hospital. Clearing the rubble to reach those underneath is the number one priority, he says, followed by medical supplies, water, food and, of course, shelter.
But several hours away, on Haiti's central plateau, there are well-equipped and expertly staffed hospitals that were untouched by the quake. But the power is out, says Andrew Marx of the Boston-based group Partners in Health.
Mr. ANDREW MARX (Manager of Communications, Partners in Health): The hospital in Kanse, they have two days worth of diesel to keep the generators going. The central power is out, so, you know, in two days, the lights go out.
KNOX: And the operating rooms go dark. Marx hopes the group can scrounge the diesel fuel to keep the operating rooms functioning. Meanwhile, some of the 4,000 Partners in Health medical staff have gone down to Port-au-Prince to triage the injured. Marx hopes to find a way to bring the most severely wounded up to the functioning hospitals by helicopter if he can find one. But there's not much time to organize all this, says Dr. Sten Vermund, an international health expert at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. STEN VERMUND (Director, Institute for Global Health, Vanderbilt University): Well, it's got to be today. We've got to get people in. You hear of people surviving under rubble for three, four, five days, but those are an increasing minority.
KNOX: Vermund sees this particular crisis as something different from, say, the tsunami in far-off Indonesia.
Dr. VERMUND: This is right on our doorstep. It is a stone's throw from where we are. This is a time for our government to show its leadership and do the right thing.
KNOX: What happens next, he says, will be a defining moment in the history of medical and humanitarian aid.
Richard Knox, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Google always has the attention of the tech industry, but today it really turned heads. The company announced that it might pull out of China, rather than continue to censor search results on its Chinese site. The move also comes after a series of cyber attacks from within China that targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China, the U.S. and Europe.
NPR's Laura Sydell reports.
LAURA SYDELL: In a blog on its Web site, Google said it could not pin the latest attacks on the Chinese government. But the blog's author, chief legal counsel David Drummond, says it was politically motivated.
Mr. DAVID DRUMMOND (Chief Legal Counsel, Google): It's very clear that they were after the ability to access Gmail accounts and, indeed, the ability to access accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
SYDELL: Drummond says Google's investigation has determined that some of the attacks were directed at the accounts of individual human rights activists in the form of malware.
Mr. DRUMMOND: Someone would get an email they thought they could trust. There'd be a link in it, and you'd click on an email and all of a sudden you have a software on your computer that does nefarious things like record your passwords or send information back to a hacker.
SYDELL: Drummond says there are always cyber attacks, but the size and scope of this one was exceptional. It has made company officials feel that they no longer want to comply with Chinese government requests to censor search results. Drummond says Google agreed to that four years ago because it thought its presence there might make the situation better.
Mr. DRUMMOND: But as it's turned out, things seem to be more restrictive. We see these attacks, and we just feel that we just simply can't continue to operate that way.
SYDELL: Drummond says company representatives plan to talk with the Chinese government and see if there's any way for them to stay in the country without complying with the censorship rules. But even if Google shuts down its China operations, it doesn't mean that it won't still face the threat of attacks from within China.
This is not an issue that is unique to Google in China. Back in December, Twitter servers were shut down by attackers in Iran. There's no direct link to the government, but Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard says authoritarian countries are getting more savvy about how to use the Internet for political purposes.
Professor JONATHAN ZITTRAIN (Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University): In the sense of being more careful about whom they are attacking and within a given site maybe trying to compromise a single account within it.
SYDELL: U.S. military and government officials are also reporting that they've been the target of attacks from inside China. Unfortunately, being able to prove the identity of the attackers is nearly impossible, says Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology. And that makes it harder to actually stop them.
Mr. GREGORY NOJEIM (Center for Democracy and Technology): You wouldn't want to respond to an attack thinking it came from the government of China with diplomacy directed at China, when, in fact, it came from a person who wasn't under the control of the government.
SYDELL: The U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has responded with a more general request to China. He's asked officials there to ensure a secure commercial environment for Google and other U.S. companies. Google officials say 20 other companies experienced the attacks, but only Adobe has publicly acknowledged being a target.
Google is getting praise from human rights groups for its willingness to speak out. But getting out of China isn't likely to make Google or anyone else safe from politically motivated attacks.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
NPR's Carrie Kahn is at the airport in Port-au-Prince. Carrie, you flew in with a medical team. Tell us what you've seen.
CARRIE KAHN: This medical team is coming from the University of Miami. They're trauma specialists. We flew in on a charter flight. And I can't tell you, Melissa, within 20 minutes, they were at a makeshift hospital here doing triage and getting patients back in the van that we came in, back out to the airport to head back to Miami for help. They are just amazing.
In this hospital, it's devastating to see this. You see people convulsing in pain, small children crying out begging their parents to help them. There's broken bones. Everybody has something wrapped around their head. It's a very desperate situation, but I talked to some of the people that are standing around, and they say this is the best of the best at Port-au-Prince now.
BLOCK: This is a makeshift hospital set up at the airport itself.
KAHN: Yes. Officials just did - it looks like a hanger that they store airplanes in. It's a cloth hanger and they just put cot after cot after cot, and they are trying to do the best they can with the rudimentary equipment that they have. I saw people with broken arms, that they're trying to make splints out of magazines.
BLOCK: Carrie, can you estimate how many injured people there are at that makeshift hospital there at the airport?
KAHN: Over 100. More than 100 people here. It's clear. When the plane landed, the doctors were led by President Rene Preval and his wife. And at the meeting, when the doctors just held hands with him, everybody started weeping. They were just crying. There were no words to say. And they were shaking their heads. And then the first lady began just saying, it's devastating over and over again. It's devastating. It's devastating. And then the president (unintelligible) within minutes we were here at the Argentine(ph) base, this makeshift hospital.
BLOCK: Carrie, thank you very much.
KAHN: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That NPR's Carrie Kahn speaking with us from a makeshift hospital that's been set up at the airport in Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now the story of one man who traveled to a small island in the South Pacific just to make a point about America. Mike Daisey is a solo theater performer whose work has been called electrifying and brilliant. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, his latest piece is about cargo cults.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Cargo cults in the South Pacific began after World War II. During the war, thousands of Allied forces set up military bases on remote islands. They brought with them modern amenities like radios, jeeps, refrigerators. And then they left, taking their goods with them.
(Soundbite of show, "The Last Cargo Cult")
Mr.�MIKE DAISEY (Theater Performer): And in that moment, when they were on these islands, the want of the islanders crystallized.
BLAIR: In his new show, "The Last Cargo Cult," Mike Daisey talks about how, for tribal societies, this was like magic.
(Soundbite of show, "The Last Cargo Cult")
Mr.�DAISEY: And so when they left, all over the South Pacific, independent of each other, religions sprang up that worshipped America, or more accurately worshipped the power of America, worshipped the objects of America.
BLAIR: To this day, the people of the island Tanna try to summon back the Americans and their objects in an annual celebration called John Frum Day. And last year, around the time the global markets were crashing, Mike Daisey read an article about this cargo cult and decided to go there because it seemed like a place that was beyond the reach of money.
Mr.�DAISEY: And it was at that moment that I realized that I needed to go to this island, but I had to do it because of what was happening in my culture.
BLAIR: Now as a performer, Mike Daisey is quite large, physically and emotionally. Getting to this remote little island in the South Pacific was not easy for him.
(Soundbite of show, "The Last Cargo Cult")
Mr.�DAISEY: And this plane is a joke. It looks like the punch line to a joke about planes. You look at it, and you think: Really?
BLAIR: But he got there and was able to attend the John Frum Day celebration. Daisey says thousands of people attend.
Mr.�DAISEY: It's actually very breathtaking. There's this beautiful silence, and they raise a huge American flag up a flagpole. And then they begin to tell the story of the history of America as they know it to be, woven together with their own history, in these massive dances that have hundreds hundreds of people. They put Broadway to shame.
BLAIR: Some history, social commentary, comedy and autobiography: That's what you get in a Mike Daisey monologue. Jason Zinoman, a theater critic for the New York Times, calls him a master storyteller. Zinoman says Daisey might not like this, but he sees similarities between him and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck.
Mr.�JASON ZINOMAN (Theater Critic, New York Times): And I say that with generosity because I think Glenn Beck is a great performer. One of the things that, you know, Glenn Beck does is he tells several different narratives, and then they intersect in these unusual ways. And he makes these connections between seemingly disparate things, and that's what Mike Daisey does.
(Soundbite of show, "The Last Cargo Cult")
Mr.�DAISEY: I remember the moment I realized I was poor.
BLAIR: Daisey's monologues almost always refer back to his growing up in a working-class community in far northern Maine.
(Soundbite of show, "The Last Cargo Cult")
Mr.�DAISEY: Then as my father is fond of saying: Maine is like Mexico with white people.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�DAISEY: And that's why it's called vacation land because every summer, all the landed gentry of New England flood up to Maine, and they say oh my God, it's all so quaint. And it's so cheap. And the people are so cheap and they're the same color as we are.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�DAISEY: So it isn't awkward.
BLAIR: In his current show, Mike Daisey connects what he calls Americans' worship of money to a cargo cult. As an artist, Daisey says he doesn't make a lot of money, but he does think about it every day. In his show, he says the balance in his bank account is the single most important number in his life.
Mr.�DAISEY: All money is power. All power corrupts. But we can't go through life most of us can't, I know I can't - go through life totally divorced from money. I need money. In fact, I love money. At the same time, I have to recognize that the more money I have, the more it corrupts.
BLAIR: Something Mike Daisey says the people he met on a remote island in the South Pacific are aware of, even as they like us worship what it might bring.
Over the next few months, Mike Daisey is performing "The Last Cargo Cult" at theaters in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Chicago.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
To Miami now and its Little Haiti neighborhood where people struggle through their shock and grief for a second day. And as the extent of the devastation became clear, another emotion took hold: helplessness.
Rick Stone of member station WLRN reports.
RICK STONE: A communications blackout continued and many in this community of 110,000 Haitian-Americans, immigrants and refugees remain frantic about the fate of friends and relatives. This morning, shopkeeper Francesca Jean clutched a cell phone held together with duct tape. She had pressed redial too many times.
(Soundbite of vehicle)
Ms. FRANCESCA JEAN: Since yesterday I've been trying to get in contact with Haiti, and I'm trying to call my mom and my brother to see if they're okay, but I don't have no signal or nothing.
STONE: The lack of communication with Haiti has become a tremendous logistical issue. Donations are coming in: 50,000 portable housing units from one source, generators from another, supplies of bottled water from a third. But Frantzy DeRose, director of the local Haitian-American alliance, said the need cannot accurately be measured.
Mr. FRANTZY DEROSE (Director, Haitian-American Alliance): Right now we're just trying to get together different organizations, different people that's in the community so we can get together and we could try to develop a line of communication. We want to help them, but we have no contact there.
(Soundbite of crowd)
STONE: Hundreds gathered last night for a prayer service at Notre Dame d'Haiti Catholic Church in Miami. It had been a very difficult day, and emotions restrained at the beginning of this Creole song of mourning gradually erupted. By the end of a hymn, people were wailing, some of them kneeling in tears with their hands in the air or even rolling on the floor.
Unidentified People: (Singing in foreign language)
STONE: Their pastor, Father Reginald Jean-Mary, reminded them that Haiti has historically suffered misfortune followed by worldwide apathy. But he said Haitians are the children of God as much as anyone and deserving of common fairness.
Father REGINALD JEAN-MARY (Notre Dame d'Haiti Catholic Church, Miami): And therefore we deserve (unintelligible).
STONE: Haitians have been seeking TPS, Temporary Protected Status, for years. It's an immigration status that allows people to live temporarily in the U.S. when their own countries have become unsafe because of political upheaval or natural disaster. Many thought the catastrophe in Haiti would at least make TPS more likely. But local leaders like Marleine Bastien became infuriated today when the Obama administration stopped deportations of undocumented Haitians, but made no mention of TPS.
Ms. MARLEINE BASTIEN (Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition): Temporary Protected Status is given to nationals whose country has been a victim of both natural and political disasters. Haiti has been a victim of both.
STONE: The earthquake is just the latest disaster to befall the country. In 2008, four hurricanes struck Haiti. Community activist Lucie Tondreau says Haiti recovered from the storms, but just barely.
Ms. LUCIE TONDREAU (Community Activist): And we went there on a rescue mission in the country. It was amazing to see what the strength the people were gathering together to rebuild what they have lost. And we're just wondering right now how much strength is left on the spirit of the Haitians that are in Haiti right now because it's been just too much.
STONE: Members of the Little Haiti neighborhood did get some good news today when they learned Vice President Joe Biden will visit their area on Saturday.
For NPR News, I'm Rick Stone in Miami.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: If you'd like to know how you can help with the relief effort in Haiti, we've put together a selective list of aid groups on our Web site. Just go to npr.org and click on the link in the middle of the page called How To Help.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The new book "Game Change" has gotten a lot of media attention for revelations about the 2008 presidential campaign. The book forced Senator Harry Reid to apologize for remarks about President Obama's race. And it served up detailed accounts of John Edwards' self-absorption and Sarah Palin's ignorance of foreign affairs.
But as NPR's David Folkenflik reports, the book also forces readers to decide just how much they trust the journalists who wrote it.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: "Game Change" is so juicy, I could hardly put it down. And yet, when I flipped to the part that cited the sources, I found hold on a sec here oh, that's right, I found no named sources, no footnotes, no nothing in the entire book.
Mr. JOHN HEILEMANN (Co-author, "Game Change"): From the very outset we wanted to try to write a book that was narrative driven, that was character driven in the omniscient voice and to write it in the way that we've done it in a novelistic way.
FOLKENFLIK: Longtime political journalist John Heilemann is one of the authors of "Game Change," along with Mark Halperin of Time magazine. The two men wrote that they conducted interviews with 200 people. All were done on deep background, which they say meant they could use anything they were told, but that no sources would be identified in any way. Heilemann says that promise ensured candor.
Mr. HEILEMANN: It was the decision we made at the beginning and we're perfectly comfortable with it and happy with it. And it's worked out we think it worked out very well in terms of serving the public interest and getting us what we wanted to get, which was an unvarnished at the high human drama of this campaign.
FOLKENFLIK: The book is said to be flying off the shelves. But there is that lingering question asked recently on TALK OF THE NATION by the caller Polly from Wilmington, North Carolina.
(Soundbite of radio broadcast)
POLLY (Caller): I saw you on TV describing a really personal moment where Elizabeth Edwards had a meltdown. And I just thought, exactly where were your sources for that?
FOLKENFLIK: The authors say they're honor-bound not to say. So, Polly and the rest of us can't verify how true it is.
Melinda Henneberger is a former reporter for The New York Times and Newsweek, who is now editor of politicsdaily.com. The Web site gave the book plenty of copy.
Ms. MELINDA HENNEBERGER (Editor, Politicsdaily.com): You know, we had been saying that this is the genre done for especially after all the Obama campaign books, can there be any sugar left in the gum? Is there anything that hasn't been rehashed to death? And as it turns out, there was plenty.
FOLKENFLIK: But she says she has qualms about the lack of explicit sourcing in the book.
Ms. HENNEBERGER: Because these are two journalists with a reputation for accuracy and fairness - and they are we're really being asked to trust on faith that everything in it is completely accurate without the kind of sourcing that you would have for a news story.
FOLKENFLIK: The authors say they're following a strong, nonfiction tradition. Co-author Mark Halperin.
Mr. MARK HALPERIN (Co-author, "Game Change"): We didn't invent this notion of the balance between full openness and getting information. And I think if you look at why some people are attracted to the book, it's because of the quality of the material.
FOLKENFLIK: But plenty of journalists manage to get good information about sensitive topics and yet still provide readers insight about their sources. The author Jane Mayer had hundreds of footnotes in her book "The Dark Side," about torture during the George W. Bush years.
The Towson University scholar Martha Joynt Kumar actually revealed in an academic journal the scramble by White House officials to thwart a feared terrorist plot against President Obama's inauguration. How did she get her scoop? From interviews with former President Bush's chief of staff and national security adviser.
Professor MARTHA JOYNT KUMAR (Towson University): When I do interviews I do them on the record. I have a tape recorder, I put it down, turn it on and say what the ground rules are.
FOLKENFLIK: When sources are named Kumar says...
Prof. KUMAR: He probably wouldn't get the same kind of quotes the very juicy quotes, but is that what a book is about?
FOLKENFLIK: She says too often anonymous sources settle scores rather than serve history. Heilemann and Halperin say they led them to material you haven't read anywhere else.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Chaos, a U.N. spokeswoman calls it - a logistical nightmare. Getting rescue crews and relief supplies to Haiti is a serious challenge. The airport in Port-au-Prince is badly damaged and so overloaded already that the FAA has suspended all civilian flights. The U.S. military is still flying, however. And NPR's Wade Goodwyn visited the facility that is managing that effort. It's called the 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base outside St. Louis.
(Soundbite of control center)
WADE GOODWYN: It's just another day at the office at the Airlift Control Center inside Air Mobility Command headquarters. It looks like a scene out of the movie "War Games" or NASA's Mission Control in Houston. One wall, a very large wall, is a projection screen. Part of the screen is a map of the world with little colored airplanes. At the moment, about a dozen purple planes are pointed at Haiti.
Unidentified Man: Cancel the tanker mission. So we're going to just go ahead and (unintelligible).
GOODWYN: Tech Sergeant Steve Harold and Senior Airman Daniel Dickson discuss a refueling mission. The room is filled with 100 controllers sitting in front of desks watching multiple flat screens. This Thursday they will track more than 950 military flights around the world, including a new theater of operations: The rescue of the Haitian people.
Captain JUSTIN BROCKHOFF: Air Mobility Command is responsible for worldwide airlift, air refueling and air medical evacuation. And the 618th TACC plans, tasks and executes those missions.
GOODWYN: Captain Justin Brockhoff concedes the shattered infrastructure in Haiti is a challenge to the relief mission. But he says operating in suboptimal environments is not a problem for them.
Capt. BROCKHOFF: Keep in mind, our operations aren't always in a robust infrastructure type area like an airport. We have folks on the road every day. We're landing at dirt strips in Afghanistan, dirt strips in Africa. We're taking the show on the road.
GOODWYN: Tents, medication, food and water will fly in and the badly injured will fly out with other personnel. It is an intricate ballet, a very large aircraft and hundreds of airmen and soldiers.
Colonel Brian Reno is a contingency response element director. It's his job to set up the entry point - in this case, the damaged but usable Port-au-Prince airport.
Colonel BRIAN RENO (Director, Contingency Response Element): The biggest problem initially and what we're trying to work with is reestablishing communication and reestablishing the one big airfield in Haiti, i.e., air traffic control, who's managing the parking spots, who's managing the flood of cargo that's coming in.
GOODWYN: Although the Air Force has the communication and other equipment necessary to make the entry point work, it's not like the U.S. military can just come in and take control of the airport. The colonel knows cooperation with Haitian officials is as important a job as the logistics.
Col. RENO: I just got off the phone with one of our crews that got out and there are many airplanes stacked up in holding waiting to land. And they're unloading airplanes as fast as they can. The government of Japan is sending airplanes. The government of Israel is sending airplanes. So, we've got an outpouring of support globally that's all focusing in on one relatively small airfield.
GOODWYN: Colonel Reno points out that planes waiting to land on an island can't pull over to the side of the road to wait their turn. The runway at Port-au-Prince is too small for the big C-5 transport planes. The Air Force is using C-17s and C-130s.
Air transport is, of course, fast, but it's expensive and, more importantly, inefficient. Large ships are the long-term rescue and relief solution for Haiti, but the port has been much more badly damaged than the airport. The large cranes which unload the cargo from the ship's hold have toppled into the water. It sounds like a job for the U.S. Navy.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Fairview Heights, Illinois.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
And we begin this hour with the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Haiti. It's been two days now since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook the country's capital, Port-au-Prince, to its core. The Red Cross now estimates the deaths toll at 45,000 to 50,000. For the tens of thousands of injured, many of the region's hospitals have been severely damaged and outside medical and rescue groups are still struggling to reach the hardest hit areas. Medics, search and rescue teams, and other forms of aid are arriving, but the magnitude of the disaster is overwhelming relief efforts. The White House says as many as 5,500 U.S. infantry and Marines will be in Haiti or on ships offshore by Monday.
NPR's Carrie Kahn is in Port-au-Prince and she joins us now. And Carrie, as we've said, it's been two days since the earthquake hit. How would you describe the situation in the capital, Port-au-Prince?
CARRIE KAHN: Well, I think what you've said, it hits on the mark exactly. It's just overwhelming massive destruction. Every street you go down, every neighborhood you go to, there is a pile of crumbled buildings. There are desperate people still trying to pull bodies out. There are dead bodies all over the street, ever corner that we turn. We went on a three-hour walk through the hillside of Port-au-Prince today. And every corner we turned there were more dead bodies. There was a mother with two small children on top of her. As you said, it's two full days since the earthquake hit.
SIEGEL: Have you seen any successful rescues of people from the rubble?
KAHN: I have not. I haven't seen any successful. I've seen heart-wrenching attempts by people. There is no government help and what you see are people with sledge hammers, sticks, their bare hands. What they are do is they put towels or cloths around their hands and then they put plastic bags over it and wrap tape or whatever they can so that they're not cut while they're going to the rubble themselves, putting up supports as they go. We saw several bodies being pulled out and it's just heart wrenching to hear these people crying and screaming and struggling up hillsides in dangerous conditions. They're trying to get their loved ones out.
SIEGEL: What are you seeing in the way of either Haitian Police or U.N. Forces maintaining law and order? Have you seen any lawlessness, for example?
KAHN: I have not. I've seen struggles at the gas pump. I see people are desperately trying to fill up gallon jugs. But on the contrary, what I've seen is just amazing neighbor helping neighbor, people helping as much as they can. We met this one man at a clinic today, who his whole family survived, but he came to this clinic to just hold the hands of people who have no one left. He was sitting there with an eight-year-old girl who lost her entire family. And he brought her food and he was just sitting there, trying to comfort her. We've just seen some amazing humanitarian efforts of these people that are suffering so much.
SIEGEL: Any sign of a broader distribution of food and water to people by aid agencies or authorities?
KAHN: I've seen nothing here on the hillsides of Port-au-Prince, Robert, nothing. I did see one police unit in the middle of the street just sitting there in their car, while people were all around them. And at the end, all they would do is hand a few people a very, very tiny pouch of water. People are frantic. They say this is nearly the third day that they are spending without any food, any water from the government.
SIEGEL: NPR's Carrie Kahn in Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Thank you very much, Carrie. Take care.
KAHN: You're welcome, Robert.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Pierre Brisson is a Haitian businessman. He lives in Petionville on the hilly outskirts of Port-au-Prince. We reached him earlier today through Skype. He was using a generator to power his computer and his neighbor had Internet access from a satellite connection. Brisson told us he was in his house with one of his sons when the earthquake hit. They both escaped unharmed.
Mr. PIERRE BRISSON (Businessman, Haiti): It seemed that it was for longer than the 35 seconds that apparently it lasted. And it was as if a giant had taken the house, shaking it down. We ran out of the house and a cloud seemed to rise from the ground. It looked like we were between ground and sky with that cloud overshadowing the whole area. And then people started crying and shouts all over the place. We knew that it was an earthquake, but the feeling of powerlessness is what is striking. Where I am, I can overlook and see the Hotel Montana that collapsed totally. And the shanty town around it - it's like a bomb had been dropped on that place. It is disaster.
BLOCK: Mr. Brisson, are you able to stay in your house or was it destroyed?
Mr. BRISSON: No, the house is standing. The area where I am, fortunately, only one or two houses are down, but most of them stood up. So, it looks like the hills are okay, have not been hit. As a matter of fact, something that is very striking: that people are leaving town and moving. It's like a new exodus. People are moving away from town now, moving to the hills.
BLOCK: And what's in the hills? What do they hope to find there?
Mr. BRISSON: Safe haven, because the houses are shaky downtown.
BLOCK: Are you seeing any signs of a rescue effort where you are for people who might be trapped in the rubble of these homes and buildings that have collapsed?
Mr. BRISSON: Yes, there are small pockets of what you're talking about, but it's mostly neighbors and friends trying to help and moving the walls that fell down.
BLOCK: Have you heard of anyone being pulled out alive from the wreckage?
Mr. BRISSON: Oh, yes, there are some. There are some on Delma, where I was yesterday. Delma is the main artery from Petionville to downtown. I have seen people taken alive, being pulled alive from the rubbles. But the efforts are continuing all day, all night. My sons, for example, I have barely seen them because they are trying to help.
BLOCK: Mr. Brisson, it sounds like your immediate family thankfully survived. Have you gotten news of any friends or colleagues who you know did not survive the earthquake?
Mr. BRISSON: Yes, this is the very bad news. I have a lot of friends that have been found dead under the rubbles. Some are still under the rubbles, and efforts are there trying to get them out. And, oh, I could give you names and names of people that did not make it. A friend of mine, the owner of Hotel Montana, was found dead along with the two-year-old kid.
BLOCK: Hmm.
Mr. BRISSON: Yes, there are number of people.
BLOCK: We have heard reports and seen images of people badly injured, who are just getting no medical treatment at all. Are you seeing any medical crews, any medical teams there trying to help those who have been injured?
Mr. BRISSON: Oh, yes, definitely. I have encountered a number of them. Some Haitian doctors that I know are moving from buildings to buildings trying to help. What happen is that as the people are pulled out from the rubbles, they are laid on the tarmac, on the asphalt. And whoever has some medical training is helping. You know, what has struck me also is that the dead are lined up on the streets and covered with some sheets for dignity, I guess, until some trucks can come by and pick them up to wherever, I don't know.
BLOCK: Is there anybody maintaining law and order? Do you see any organized presence of crowd control or anything like that?
Mr. BRISSON: Once in a while, I can see the police trucks and some of the U.N. troops patrolling the streets. So far, I can say that there is order. It is beginning to shamble, but this is also another striking point that people are calm. It seems that we are still stunned by what happened. I'm afraid of the reaction as time goes by, where needs will be greater and despair will set in.
BLOCK: It sounds - I was going to say, Mr. Brisson, that you sound remarkably calm given what your country has gone through.
Mr. BRISSON: I'm still under the shock.
BLOCK: Yes.
Mr. BRISSON: We are all still under shock.
BLOCK: Pierre Brisson, it's good of you to talk with us. Thanks very much and all the best to you and your family.
Mr. BRISSON: Thank you very much and please ask everyone you know to pray for us, pray for this country. We have suffered too much. Enough is enough now.
BLOCK: Pierre Brisson is a Haitian businessman. He spoke with us from his home in Petionville on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
As rescue efforts in Haiti continued throughout the day, there was at least one success story. An Estonian man was pulled from the collapsed U.N. headquarters. Still, nearly 200 U.N. workers remain unaccounted for with 36 confirmed dead. The earthquake has dealt a devastating blow to the U.N., which has been a crucial player in helping Haiti overcome its many other troubles.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says a 38-year-old bodyguard from Estonia was pulled out from more than 12 feet of rubble.
Mr. BAN KI-MOON (Secretary General, United Nation): It was a small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles.
KELEMEN: Ban has sent one of his top aides to take charge at the U.N. mission in Haiti and help oversee relief efforts.
Mr. KI-MOON: Haiti will need every ounce of help we can offer.
KELEMEN: A former U.N. advisor for Haiti, Johanna Mendelson Forman, says U.N. peacekeepers are still able to do their basic job of providing law and order, but this earthquake was a serious blow.
Ms. JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN (Former United Nations Advisor for Haiti): The ultimate goal was to have gotten out by 2011. Under the circumstances in this recent tragedy, my sense is that the U.N. will be there for a long time.
KELEMEN: Now at the Center for a Strategic and International Studies, she said the U.N. mission in Haiti had a lot of successes in recent years, not just going after gangs in Cite Soleil, but also promoting both security and development.
Ms. FORMAN: The kidnapping rates have gone down. The business community feels more stable. And that's what the tragedy of this is, is that everybody was looking at a 2010 that was going to have a much more significant investment future, a greater opportunity for jobs. And now all of that is up in doubt because of the tremendous damage the city has sustained as well as the country.
KELEMEN: This U.N. mission started in 2004 and Latin-American countries have taken the lead. When the earthquake struck, there were more than 9,000 peacekeepers and nearly 500 international civilian officials in Haiti. The Brazilian commander of MINUSTAH, as the U.N. force is known, was out of country, but came back with U.S. help, according to Cheryl Mills, who run a Haiti taskforce here at the State Department.
Ms. CHERYL MILLS (Counselor, Department of State): One of the things that are grateful for is that we have the commander from MINUSTAH back in Haiti now and is able to actually deploy his teams in a way that actually reminds the civilians that are there that we actually have the support and capacity to be able to help.
KELEMEN: Once this rescue mission turns to rebuilding one, Mills says, she hopes that the investors who had shown interest in Haiti before the earthquake will realize that their support is needed more than ever.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In Beijing, Internet users have been leaving bouquets of flowers and notes of support outside the offices of Google. This week, Google threatened to pull out of China and shut down its search engine there after it discovered what it called a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on its network. Specifically, hackers targeted the email accounts of human rights activists. Many other large companies were targeted as well. We are joined by Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, to talk about what happens next. Mr. Drummond, welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID DRUMMOND (Chief Legal Officer, Google): Well, thanks, Melissa, for having me.
BLOCK: And Google has said it would stop censoring search results in China. Have you actually lifted the filters that you've had on your search engine?
Mr. DRUMMOND: No, we haven't done that yet. What we've said is that going forward, we're going to end that practice. We have asked the government to start some discussions with us about how we can operate an unfiltered search engine in China and failing that, we will have to shut it down, but - or do something else. But as of right now, it's sort of operating as we were until we talk to the government.
BLOCK: Well, it seemed like you got rebuffed from the Chinese government today. They said foreign Internet companies have to follow the law. They didn't seem to be offering any concessions on your demands. So, how does Google respond to that?
Mr. DRUMMOND: Well, we hope that there will be some more conversations. We understand that was an initial response and, you know, at the end of the day, if it's their view that an uncensored search engine - you know, that we can't do that in China, then we will have to do something different, could be shutting the site down.
BLOCK: Just to be clear here, is Google holding the Chinese government directly responsible for the hacking, for these cyber attacks?
Mr. DRUMMOND: No. We don't have definitive evidence, one way or the other, the government was involved. We know that it was a highly sophisticated attack. It was an organized attack and it was politically motivated in the sense that there seemed to be clear targeting of human rights activists who were interested in China.
BLOCK: Let's talk about the whole censorship issue here, because when Google started up in China four years ago, you agreed to censor certain sensitive topics, such as Tiananmen Square, the massacre there, or the Dalai Lama. Looking back, would you say that Google sacrificed principles and essential values of free speech in favor of a business deal, making money in China?
Mr. DRUMMOND: No, I don't think that's accurate. You know, it's never been a big market for us, you know. Even now, it's an immaterial portion of our revenues. I think we wanted to serve the Chinese market and feel that we had a responsibility to do that and there are sort of two different moral arguments you can make, you know. One of them is to say, look, there is censorship and we're not going to have anything to do with it, which was our position for a longtime with China.
And the other one is to say, well, maybe it's better in a place like China, given its scope in the world, its impact in the world, to go there and try to be a force for opening it up and though temporarily you might have to - you might have to do something that you normally don't want to do, perhaps you could be on the side of more openness, by being there and that's the position we took.
BLOCK: But do you think that, that with those initial agreements where you would censor your search engine, did Google send a message to the Chinese government that said basically, look, stepping on free speech and Internet freedom is fine, maybe you contributed to the restrictive environment that you're talking about now?
Mr. DRUMMOND: No, I don't think that's really true. Yeah, I think we've been a bit of a thorn in the government side since we've been there. You know, we've always censored quite a bit less than any of the local competitors. We didn't locate any of our Gmail servers there, for instance. So, it would be impossible for the government to come to us and get information. We operated in a different way and we pushed back at every opportunity.
BLOCK: We were looking - we were sort of fishing around on the Google.cn site today, searching for terms, such as Tiananmen Square massacre, and stories were coming up. One site that did come up was the official site of the Dalai Lama, for example, which was surprising to me that I could have access to that.
Mr. DRUMMOND: Well, it's certainly possible. You know, the Internet is an unruly thing.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. DRUMMOND: And which is one of our points when we - whenever we talk to censors or those who have an interest in censoring content. In other words, it's a difficult thing to do really well, which is good.
BLOCK: Do you have people on Google's staff who are actively filtering information in China?
Mr. DRUMMOND: Well, we - in order to operate the site as we have, there has been, you know, variety of mechanisms to comply with the law there. So, we do have people who work on that.
BLOCK: And you're saying that even with this recent standoff with the Chinese government, everything is working exactly the same, those same people who are filtering sites before are still filtering sites now?
Mr. DRUMMOND: As I said, this is not going to be the - in other words, we will stop doing that. We're going to end the censoring very soon.
BLOCK: Very soon. Can you give some sense of the timetable for that?
Mr. DRUMMOND: Can't give you an exact timetable. But it will be - I expect that this will resolve itself relatively quickly.
BLOCK: David Drummond is the chief legal officer for Google. Mr. Drummond, thank you very much.
Mr. DRUMMOND: Thanks very much for having me, Melissa.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
There has been an outpouring of charity for the victims of Haiti's earthquake. And it's been coming from the U.S. in an unexpected way: by cell phone.
As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, this is the first time that large numbers of Americans are giving donations by text message.
LAURA SYDELL: John Dallas, a San Francisco realtor, was watching the news about the earthquake in Haiti last night with his wife.
Mr. JOHN DALLAS (Realtor): And my cell phone had a text message that said give $10 to Haiti relief, text this number. And we both kind of looked at each other, like, well that's awfully convenient.
SYDELL: So convenient that they did it right away. This is the first time that there has been massive giving via text message in the United States. mGive is the company that's been working with charitable organizations to set up this kind of giving. Tony Aiello, the CEO, says people are used to interacting with local news sites via cell phone and text message.
Mr. TONY AIELLO (CEO, mGive): Now you see a call to action that allows you to do something about the story you just saw and you're already trained to interact via text messaging. Now, that text message can just take it one step further.
SYDELL: Aiello says it's bringing in donors who might not otherwise give. But a small amount like $10 seems doable. And it's getting people who give annually to give more.
Mr. AIELLO: We're seeing that it opens up an incremental donation flow from traditional donors.
SYDELL: That's certainly true of Jennifer Roy(ph). She was nowhere near her wallet when a friend posted a number for text-giving on Facebook. It might have otherwise taken her a long time to give.
Ms. JENNIFER ROY: I think people hesitate a little bit more to, like, fill out a form, give a credit card number.
SYDELL: The program is a collaboration between the U.S. State Department, the Red Cross and the wireless phone companies. Now that people are used to giving via text message, Carrie Housman of the Red Cross says it's a game changer.
Ms. CARRIE HOUSMAN (Spokeswoman, International Red Cross): I think this is the way of the future, allowing people to help right away and to be watching the news and feel like they can be a part of helping the people that they're seeing on the news who are struggling.
SYDELL: According to the Red Cross, more than $4.7 million has come in through text-message donations to date and they're expecting that number to keep growing.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
President Obama has announced a new tax on the country's biggest banks. It's designed to recoup the cost of the financial bailout for taxpayers. The tax or fee, as the administration is calling it, could generate up to $90 billion over 10 years.
But as NPR's Mara Liasson reports, it's already generating strong opposition from Republicans and the banks.
MARA LIASSON: In blistering populist language, President Obama said although most of the $700 billion in TARP money has been repaid, that's not good enough. He said he wants to recover every single dime the American people are owed.
President BARACK OBAMA: My determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people, folks who have not been made whole and who continue to face real hardship in this recession.
We want our money back and we're going to get it.
LIASSON: The tax, or what the White House calls the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, would be a 0.15 percent levy on the liabilities of the 50 largest financial institutions - only those with assets of $50 billion or more. And banks could be taxed whether or not they accepted TARP money or repaid it. Not surprisingly, the banks hate this idea.
Scott Talbott is the senior vice president for the Financial Services Roundtable.
Mr. SCOTT TALBOTT (Senior Vice President, Financial Services Roundtable): It's not a good idea to use a tax fee to punish people. The industry is resigned or is okay with paying the loss if there is one. But one: We don't know what that loss is yet; TARP is still active. And two: Banks are repaying their money with interest.
LIASSON: The TARP law requires that the White House come up with ways to recoup any loss and that's what the president's proposal is about. But in his remarks today he kept on coming back to bonuses. When the issue of those big, post-meltdown Wall Street paychecks first surfaced last spring, the White House seemed caught off guard. But today the president was full of populist rage. If these banks are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, he said, they're surely in good enough shape to pay back every penny to taxpayers.
Pres. OBAMA: And when we see reports of firms once again engaging in risky bets to reap quick rewards, when we see a return to compensation practices that seem not to reflect what the country has been through, all that looks like business as usual to me.
LIASSON: Republicans in Congress blasted the plan as a job-killing tax that would cripple the economy. The president said that was just twisted logic from Wall Street.
Pres. OBAMA: What I'd say to these executives is this: Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I'd urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives.
LIASSON: The White House has not ruled out targeting bonuses in the future. But for the moment, the president has chosen shame rather than a law to force a change in the banks' bonus system.
Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable thinks he knows the reason.
Mr. TALBOTT: I think politics have overtaken the economics of the situation here. I mean it is an election year so sort of all things are on the table.
LIASSON: The fee may, indeed, be good politics at a time when anger at Wall Street is running high and it's expected to receive widespread support in Congress among Democrats and maybe even some Republicans who don't want to be on the wrong side of voters' fury this year.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Welcome to the program once again.
Secretary TIMOTHY GEITHNER (Department of Treasury): Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: As we've heard, the banks are saying that this is about politics, not economics, that banks who've paid back their TARP or never took any TARP money are going to be taxed along with the other banks.
What do you say to that?
Sec. GEITHNER: We're doing the - what is fair and what is just, what is economically sensible and what we have a legal obligation to do, which is to make sure that we hold the American people harmless from the cost of the financial crisis and that we collect back from the financial industry - that benefited from the financial rescue - the ultimate costs of what it took to solve this crisis. That's a sensible, fair thing to do.
SIEGEL: What do you say then to a bank which says, we never took any TARP money, so we haven't benefited from this?
Sec. GEITHNER: Well, you know, this is designed to apply to the largest financial institutions in the country that benefited most directly from the rescue. And that to us seemed the sensible way to do it. You know, we're doing it in a way that effectively puts a tax on leverage, so that it'll help disincent some of the risky practices that caused the crisis. And we've designed it carefully to reduce the risk that it has any impact on lending. And we think that's the best way to do it.
SIEGEL: There's one reading of this which is that it's an effort - this tax is an effort to blunt the impression that the administration has been too close to Wall Street, too soft on Wall Street. Is that part of what's happening?
Sec. GEITHNER: No, it's not. I mean, again, the law that was passed to authorize the financial rescue put an obligation on the president to propose a way to recoup the cost of the crisis, and that's what we're doing.
SIEGEL: Now, $90 billion, say over 10 years, is a lot of money. But this year three big banks are expected to spend almost 50 billion in bonuses. So that makes it sound perhaps like no more than a nuisance tax for these banks.
Sec. GEITHNER: No, this is a very substantial fee. But, again, the size is determined by what the conservative estimate of total losses might be. That's what decides the ultimate costs. So we're, you know, Robert, we're just trying to meet that basic obligation in a way that is fair, makes sense, is good economic policy, and is basically just.
SIEGEL: What about bonuses, though? If this fee is imposed and come next January we see bank bonuses just as big as this year, would that suggest to you that this has not done the job, or could that happen and could the fee still be working?
Sec. GEITHNER: This fee is not designed to address that problem. And, as you know, our financial system has got a lot of problems in the basic design of the rules. And we are going to have to fix that. And that's why it's so important that we pass financial reform that puts in place much stronger constraints on banks taking risks, that protects the consumers and investors from the kind of behavior that cause so much damage and, you know, reduces the risk we ever again face a crisis like this...
SIEGEL: But aren't you at all concerned about, at least the appearances of bonuses that seem to show that the banks that received help from the federal government don't get it?
Sec. GEITHNER: Look, I think what's happening on the bonus front is deeply troubling. And I think it is causing enormous damage to basic trust and confidence in the people running our financial institutions. And I think it is very important, as part of financial reform creating a more stable system, is that these institutions are forced to change those practices. And we're going to work very hard to do that.
But our basic obligations, again, is to make sure we pass strong reforms, put cops back on the street enforcing those rules so that we never again put the country in the position of facing something this damaging.
SIEGEL: You're satisfied that the bill that's moving through the Senate...
Secretary GEITHNER: I think we're actually...
SIEGEL: ...qualifies as a strong reform?
Sec. GEITHNER: I think that we - what passed, I think, is a very strong set of reforms, and I know Chairman Dodd is working very hard to build on that progress. And I think we have a very good chance at getting strong reforms in place and we're going to fight very hard to make that happen.
You know, again, this is a just war. It's a necessary war for the American people.
SIEGEL: Now, there's another matter I want to ask you about that goes back to your time as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and that's been in the news quite a bit lately. It's about AIG. AIG received a huge bailout from the Federal Reserve. Financial institutions that it owed money to were getting a hundred cents on the dollar instead of having to settle for much less than that, as if AIG were in bankruptcy.
So two questions. First: Was the Fed standing up AIG so as to spare Goldman Sachs (unintelligible) Deutsche Bank the consequences of very risky decisions they've made? And second: Did the New York Fed and did you have anything to do with telling AIG to keep details of those transactions secret?
Sec. GEITHNER: No on the first. If the government had not stepped in to act to prevent the failure of AIG, this crisis would have been much more damaging. And I believe we did it in a way that ultimately will cost the government much less money than the alternatives. And I think we made the basic test of doing it in a way that was going to provide the best basic return for the American people.
In fact, on the specific transaction the Fed was involved in, it's almost certain the Fed will actually make money in that transaction.
SIEGEL: Then why wasn't the word to AIG: Go ahead and be as public about it as you would in any other filing?
Sec. GEITHNER: No, I understand that. So in your second question, I had no involvement, because I had already been appointed or at least my appointment to this job had been announced. I had no involvement in that basic decision.
SIEGEL: You're saying you had recused yourself from dealing with AIG at that point?
Sec. GEITHNER: I was recused from dealing with AIG and had no involvement in the decision about what to disclose when. But the Fed has disclosed all the information about what counterparties get, I think appropriately. And, of course, I will work very closely with the Congress to make sure they have the information necessary, that people can look and evaluate the judgments we made, with the benefit of hindsight, but these are consequences (unintelligible).
But I think overall, it's important for people to recognize that what we did was necessary even though it was offensive. I think we did it in a way that was least cost to the taxpayer.
SIEGEL: But with the benefit of hindsight, would you look back at AIG, why not say that AIG, a huge insurance company, was as imprudent with risk as General Motors was bad at making and selling cars? So if they...
Secretary GEITHNER: More imprudent.
SIEGEL: ...owed you money - more imprudent - if they owed you money: Sorry, guys, but you'll have to settle for something less than a hundred cents on the dollar. We'll keep (unintelligible).
Sec. GEITHNER: Oh, Robert, if that had been possible, of course we'd have done that, but the basic - you know, this is the tragic failure of our system. The basic problem is for a financial institution like AIG, bankruptcy was untenable.
SIEGEL: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, thanks a lot for talking with us once again.
Sec. GEITHNER: Thank you, Robert.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
When public figures have public troubles, late-night comedians are more than happy to turn them into punch lines. Well, apparently the same rule applies when it's the comedians themselves who are embroiled in controversy. Exhibit A: The ongoing flap at NBC.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
There, executives want to move Jay Leno back into his old "Tonight Show" slot after a failed bid in primetime. But that requires bumping the actual "Tonight Show" and its host, Conan O'Brien, by half an hour. Both hosts are unhappy, and they've used their respective shows to vent, to poke fun at each other and to skewer NBC.
(Soundbite of television program, "The Jay Leno Show")
Mr.�JAY LENO (Television Host): Well, some good news from Afghanistan. Did you hear about this? Critics of the war have stopped referring to it as another Vietnam. They're not calling it that anymore. The bad news, they're now calling it another NBC.
(Soundbite of laughter)
(Soundbite of television program, "The Tonight Show")
Mr.�CONAN O'BRIEN (Television Host): Ladies and gentlemen, hello there. I'm Conan O'Brien, and I've been practicing the phrase: Who ordered the mochachino grande?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�O'BRIEN: That's my - look for me, and please tip, okay?
(Soundbite of television program, "The Jay Leno Show")
Mr.�LENO: As you know, we're not just a show anymore. We are now a collector's item.
Mr. O'BRIEN: Big local story: This weekend, no one was seriously hurt, but this is true, a 6.5 earthquake hit California. Did you know that? True story, yeah. The earthquake was so powerful it knocked Jay Leno's show from 10 o'clock to 11:35.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�LENO: NBC said they wanted drama at 10. Now they got it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
(Soundbite of television program, "The Tonight Show")
Mr.�O'BRIEN: Everybody now wants to know what my plans are. Everyone's asking me. All I can say is I plan to continue putting on a great show night after night while stealing as many office supplies as humanly possible.
BLOCK: The material here is so rich that the rest of the late-night bunch, even those not embroiled in a dispute with NBC, have not been able to resist getting in on the comedy, David Letterman on CBS for one.
(Soundbite of television program, "Late Show with David Letterman")
Mr.�DAVID LETTERMAN (Television Host): Here's my goal, my dream for American television. I just want everybody who wants a show to have a show. That's all.
Unidentified Man #1: (Unintelligible).
Mr.�LETTERMAN: Conan's going to 12:05 to do "The Tonight Show," which as somebody pointed out, really 12:05 is no longer "The Tonight Show."
Unidentified Man #1: No.
Mr.�LETTERMAN: It's tomorrow's show.
Unidentified Man #1: It's the tomorrow - yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�LETTERMAN: It's the next-day show.
SIEGEL: And finally on ABC, host Jimmy Kimmel came out with a remarkable disguise this week, a white-haired wig and a jutting prosthetic chin.
(Soundbite of television program, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!")
Mr.�JIMMY KIMMEL (Television Host): My name is Jay Leno, and let it hereby be known that I'm taking over all the shows in late night.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: The jokes will no doubt continue until NBC manages to resolve what is, for them, no laughing matter.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: This is still ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The Winter Games in Vancouver are just a few weeks away, and the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation says it's back. That's after the team fell apart in 2006, plagued by scandals and injuries. It was a far cry from its dominant performance in Salt Lake City in 2002.
While the sled team insists it has regrouped, it's still struggling with injuries and money troubles. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports.
BRIAN MANN: On a breathlessly cold morning, two American sledders in Lycra suits and crash helmets hurl their bobsled down the start track into the first ice-covered chute.
(Soundbite of bell)
MANN: But at this America's Cup race in Lake Placid, New York, one of America's strongest medal hopefuls is watching from the sidelines. In 2002, Todd Hays helped break a 40-year medal drought for the American bobsled team, capturing silver at Salt Lake City. Last month, his sled flipped on a training run, hurling him against the ice.
Mr.�TODD HAYS (Former Olympic Bobsledder): Just kind of made an overcorrection and ended up crashing out of the final turn, which obviously puts you on your head.
MANN: The CAT scan confirmed that Hays is suffering from bleeding in his brain. He's expected to recover, but he'll never sled-race again.
Mr.�HAYS: I know how easy life can go one way or another, and I could easily have just been killed on that track.
MANN: Hays' accident sent tremors through America's tight-knit sledding world because the team has been here before. Four years ago, top skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace was knocked out of competition when a sled driven by another athlete ejected from a track and shattered her leg. There was controversy when an American medal hopeful was disqualified for allegedly using a banned chemical, and then female athletes accused a senior coach of sexual harassment. The U.S. Olympic Committee stepped in, staging only the second takeover of a sports federation in its history.
Mr.�DARRIN STEELE (Chief Executive Officer, U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation): Sometimes you have to take a step back and say, you know, I think we need a new perspective.
MANN: Darrin Steele, who took over the bobsled and skeleton teams in 2006, says the training program was in disarray.
Mr.�STEELE: One of the challenges I think we had in the past was that things did change year to year, and athletes, they need a level of consistency. They need to be very clear what it means to make the teams.
MANN: Rebuilding from the letdown at the Torino games have been tough, Steele says, especially with the sour economy chasing away corporate sponsors.
Mr.�STEELE: It's been a struggle. Companies are pretty cautious. They're reluctant to sign on to longer-term contracts.
MANN: The recruiting has improved, and America's bobsled and skeleton teams are competing well on the World Cup Tour, a hopeful sign. Justin Orr from San Diego played tight end for Notre Dame in college. He's fighting to secure a place on the Olympic bobsled team, which will be locked in this weekend.
Mr.�JUSTIN ORR (Bobsledder): You've got a lot more highly competitive athletes. So the sport has changed just since I came back. Before in 2002, it didn't have anywhere near the talent that they have now.
MANN: In the last Winter Olympics, America's overall medal tally dropped by nearly a third. To win big in Vancouver, the U.S. will need some of those sledders back up on the podium. For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann in Lake Placid, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Our top story today, the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Haiti. It's been two days since a devastating earthquake hit the country's capital, Port-au-Prince. The Red Cross estimates the death toll at 45,000 to 50,000. Haiti's president, Rene Preval, said 7,000 bodies have already been buried in a mass grave. Thousands more people are injured. President Obama today pledged $100 million for immediate relief to Haiti and he said we stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south.
President BARACK OBAMA: After suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, have we somehow been forsaken? To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten.
SIEGEL: But help has only begun to work its way into the country and the window for rescuing those still trapped in the rubble is slowly closing.
BLOCK: NPR's Jason Beaubien joins us from Port-au-Prince. Jason, describe where you are right now, please, and what you're seeing.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Right now I'm outside the Villa Creole Hotel, which is in the Petionville neighborhood an elite neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. And it's really quite amazing, people have brought their injured children out front here because they know that there are medical - Western medical doctors staying inside. So, people have come here to try to get attention for - mainly for their children. There's a girl - I'm sorry. There's a girl right in front of me at the moment. She's covered in bandages. She's laying on just some what are they they're from the deck chairs that would be by the pool. She's naked except for what looks like a tablecloth on top of her. And she keeps lifting her head and her lips are shaking.
(Soundbite of crowd)
BEAUBIEN: Sorry, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's okay.
BEAUBIEN: It's heartbreaking what's happening here. And there are people just in the streets everywhere. When you drive through, there are tent cities that have been sort of set up just in little lots. People are clearly just living wherever they can.
BLOCK: Jason, the girl you just described, is she getting any medical attention there?
BEAUBIEN: She clearly has gotten some medical attention because there are fresh bandages on her. And there are other people who are getting medical attention. But the numbers are just so huge that there are people who are waiting for attention. There's clearly the expectation that there are people who are still trapped in some of these buildings.
BLOCK: Does the girl have any family there with her, do you know?
BEAUBIEN: I assume that she has family here, but it's really quite striking. She's lying out in what would just normally be the driveway and there's no one around her.
BLOCK: Jason, you came into Haiti over land by car from the Dominican Republic. Can you describe that journey, what you saw as you crossed the border and came - made your way into Haiti?
BEAUBIEN: What is really striking is the drive in just shows how distant the Dominican Republic is from Haiti. These are countries that are not incredibly linked. The border - the road going to the border is terrible. At times it turns into just a rutted dirt road. This is the main road linking Port-au-Prince to Santiago in the Dominican Republic. There is no activity really going on there at all. There's no aid trucks. You weren't seeing refugees. You weren't seeing anything, really, going on out there. There was pretty much nothing.
At the border there were some people trying to get across. There were some people that were coming across in ambulances to a hospital that is right there on the border. But it was only about 100 people, the Red Cross told me, had come over the last 24 hours, which by the scale of this is a fairly small number.
BLOCK: So, somehow they had managed to make their way all the way to the border with the Dominican Republic to get medical help.
BEAUBIEN: It's true. And to some degree that's an indication of just how desperate people are to get out of the capital, which is just in shambles, really. You start to see it about 20 miles out from the capital. You start to see a few buildings that have knocked down and it gets more and more intense the closer you get to the center of the city. It's almost as if and the epicenter was not right underneath Port-au-Prince, but that's how it feels when you drive in. You can just see it get more and more destruction, more buildings that have fallen in, more chaos the closer you get to the heart of Port-au-Prince.
BLOCK: And, Jason, what you're describing with the roads obviously poses a huge problem for getting assistance in. The port is terribly damaged and apparently is pretty much unusable. There's a bottleneck of relief coming in at the airport. And you're saying by road that's really not a viable option either.
BEAUBIEN: Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
BLOCK: Jason, what about aftershocks? Are they still - are you still experiencing aftershocks now?
BEAUBIEN: Yes. They've been continuing as recently as an hour ago and about hour and a half before that. Yeah, the aftershocks are continuing.
BLOCK: NPR's Jason Beaubien speaking with us from Port-au-Prince. Jason, thank you.
BEAUBIEN: You're welcome.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Doctors in Haiti are struggling to treat the injured. Many hospitals were destroyed in the quake and medical supplies are scarce. Dr. Cruff Renard is with the nonprofit group Partners in Health, which operates a few hospitals in Haiti. He works at the hospital in the city of Hinche - that's about 100 miles northeast of Port-au-Prince. And Dr. Renard says patients are traveling to his hospital from the capital.
Dr. CRUFF RENARD (Partners in Health): We receive all kind of injuries and most of them are fractures and most of those patients also they will need orthopedic surgery to fix the problem.
SIEGEL: Orthopedic surgery, you're saying.
Dr. RENARD: Yeah.
SIEGEL: Are you in any position to perform orthopedic surgery at the hospital now?
Dr. RENARD: The whole overwhelming case is that we receive - we are not able now to provide care for everyone, but what we are doing, we try to do a triage and stabilize most of the patients that we receive. We still have patients waiting for orthopedic surgery because we don't have a lot of supplies.
SIEGEL: Dr. Renard, what is your greatest concern right now looking ahead?
Dr. RENARD: Our greatest concern now are a lot of people from Hinche and from everywhere in the Central Plateau (unintelligible) to Port-au-Prince to look for families and bring them to Hinche. So, probably we have other problems not only for medical problems - like having food, having clean water, beds for patients, even clothes for all those people who are suffering and who will also be coming from Port-au-Prince to Hinche.
SIEGEL: So, if I understand you, even though Hinche, a good 100 miles away from Port-au-Prince, the capital, was not really damaged by the earthquake, people from Hinche are going to the capital to look for their families, to look for their relatives...
Dr. RENARD: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That is what is happening now.
SIEGEL: Dr. Renard, thank you very much for talking with us and good luck to you there.
Dr. RENARD: Thank you very much for giving us this interview.
SIEGEL: That's Dr. Cruff Renard, who is an infectious disease specialist with Partners in Health, that NGO operates several hospitals in Haiti. He's at the hospital in Hinche about 100 miles away from Port-au-Prince, but as you heard, people are being taken there for treatment of their injuries.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The outlook for the world economy this year is stronger, but still fragile. And the recovery is more sluggish in big, established economies like ours than in the newly industrialized economies of Asia. That is according to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at a news conference and in a Web cast today. Mr. Strauss-Kahn joins us. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN (Managing Director, International Monetary Fund): My pleasure.
SIEGEL: And you spoke today, also, about Haiti. You said that after the immediate emergency needs are met there, there may be need of a massive reconstruction plan for that country. What sort of thing do you have in mind?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, on one hand we need to act very rapidly in trying to provide this country with the needed resources. And so the IMF has announced that they will be able to provide $100 million very rapidly. But I do believe it's not enough. This country has been hit several times in several years by hurricanes, high-price foods and now this earthquake. And really, I believe, that the whole economy has to be rebuilt. So it's something much bigger.
SIEGEL: A project that would cost, say, in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions - what do you think?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, I can't just give a figure now. We have to go on the ground and see exactly what is needed. But a piecemeal approach now is not effective. You need to address it in a comprehensive way.
SIEGEL: Well, let's turn now to the International Monetary Fund's outlook for 2010. When you said that the outlook for the world economy is stronger but fragile, you added a warning: Don't back off economic stimulus programs too soon. What's the danger of countries backing off their economic stimulus programs?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, the problem is as growth is coming back - and that's the good news; growth is coming back faster than expected. But in many countries -but maybe Asian countries - this growth is mainly supported by a public program, the stimulus, which is fine. That's what the reason why this stimulus has been put in place. But at the same time, it means that the private demand is not still that strong.
And so if people were just fooled by the growth resuming, saying the figures are good, we are back to business as usual and we don't need to have the stimulus anymore, then it will be a mistake because we will have a risk of what some economists call a double dip, which is a new downturn in the crisis.
SIEGEL: And you think that that risk would apply to the United States, among those countries that you'd be addressing that to?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, I don't think that it will happen, providing that we go on with the programs and the stimulus which have been put in place. But if in some part of the world, people were thinking that it's time to withdraw fast, then there will be a risk of this kind of double dip.
SIEGEL: What does the IMF see as the likelihood of unemployment in the United States, say, declining below 10 percent in this year?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, that's the big problem. The fact that growth is coming back does not mean that unemployment is going to decrease rapidly. In the U.S., as in European countries, unemployment now is around 10 percent. And the peak will be reached only in a few months from now. So it means that that has to be the main concern, the highest priority for everybody - fighting against unemployment. And the crisis really will be over only when we will be back to the level of unemployment we had before the crisis.
POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION:<\em>Joseph Stiglitz is the former World Bank chief economist, not the former IMF chief economist.
SIEGEL: I want to ask you about an observation that many people have made about the IMF, including the former IMF chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate who will be on this program tomorrow, by coincidence, and that is that when the International Monetary Fund - or the U.S., for that matter - or just countries to continue to spend and stimulate their economies in the face of this crisis, they're saying the opposite of what the IMF told, say, the Asian countries when they had an economic crisis.
In those days, it was raise your interest rates, get rid of your deficits. What do you to say to people for whom the IMF remedy in the past was much more painful medicine than you're prescribing to big countries today?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Well, first you have to take into account the crisis in the past was not the same crisis that we're facing today. So, different crisis, different remedies. But let's be blunt. It's true to say that we learn from the past crisis. And we learn that we need to take into account not only the economics of the crisis, but also the political environment, the social cost, the fact that the poorest in the society are always the most vulnerable to the programs to get rid of the crisis. And so the problem is not only on the sheet of paper to find the right numbers. The problem is to be able to implement it for the benefit of the people.
SIEGEL: Am I correct in hearing a note of almost contrition in that statement that the IMF was getting it wrong in the past?
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say that. You can say that. I have no problem with that. I think that the IMF learned a lot from the Asian crisis. We did some things good and some things bad. And I think that really, the world now has a new IMF.
SIEGEL: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Mr. STRAUSS-KAHN: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Senior news analyst Daniel Schorr has been thinking about the U.S. financial crisis and the growing anger with the banks and their bonuses.
DANIEL SCHORR: It's getting to feel a little like the 1930s when President Roosevelt inveighed against the economic royalists, and congressional investigator Ferdinand Pecora slapped subpoenas on the biggest bankers of the land. As a token of humiliation, J.P. Morgan had to endure a dwarf plunked in his lap by a circus employee as he waited to testify.
Once again, as often in the past, America vents its anger against what President Obama calls the fat-cat bankers. The billions of dollars in bonuses and other compensation voted to themselves by executives of banks, some of them using government bailout money, has left Americans almost gasping in outrage. The banking industry is taking defensive action. In some cases, bonuses are being paid out in stocks. The Bank of America, which paid out billions to employees before taking over Merrill Lynch is offering to settle shareholders' claims.
But anger with the banks extends beyond compensation avarice. As Wall Street was blamed for the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing depression, so now the mortgage bubble is seen as the root of a recession that poised America and the world on an economic precipice.
We may not see the kind of wave of regulatory zeal that propelled the Roosevelt era, but President Obama finds the climate conducive to proposing a levy on big banks designed to recover up to $120 billion in bailout funds. There's also some talk of a special tax on executive bonuses. And the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation wants to punish banks for risky compensation practices.
Back in the 1930s, FDR could rally the nation to a crusade against the unscrupulous money changers. Since then, the banking industry has improved its lobbying skills and may be able to fend off an era of punitive regulation. But in the public mind, banks are linked with recession.
This is Daniel Schorr.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Massachusetts, the race to fill the Senate seat long held by Edward Kennedy is giving Democrats something they hadn't counted on: A fight.
Democrats hold a 3-to-1 registration advantage over Republicans in the state. But the GOP candidate Scott Brown has waged an energetic campaign, and he's polling well against the Democrat, Attorney General Martha Coakley. Voters head to the polls next Tuesday. And in these final days, both sides are pulling out all the stops.
From member station WBUR in Boston, Monica Brady-Myerov reports.
MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: What's at stake in the Massachusetts Senate race, from a national perspective, is the health care legislation currently before Congress. Democrat Martha Coakley's yes vote could secure its passage. A victory by State Senator Scott Brown, who opposes it, could rob the Democrats of 60 votes in the Senate. The race is crucial to the national fortunes of the two major parties.
Until two months ago, the Republican Senate candidate was a relative unknown. Jennifer Nassour, who chairs the state GOP, gives Brown a lot of credit for changing that.
Ms. JENNIFER NASSOUR (Chair, GOP, Massachusetts): When you see someone with such a great, positive attitude about what he's doing, and when people keep telling you, god, you have an uphill battle, and you walk in with a smile on your face and say: I can do this, you start to make people believe that you can do it.
BRADY-MYEROV: Brown's campaign language has the aura of a revolutionary crusade. He talks about red invading the blue state and calls his fundraisers money bombs. Coupled with his celebrity magazine good looks, he was a Cosmopolitan centerfold in 1982. Brown has become a serious contender.
Attorney General Coakley beat three Democrats in the primary. She has a strong record regulating banks, defending gay marriage and protecting children. But she's been criticized for a passionless style that suits a courtroom more than the campaign trail.
Democrats have themselves to blame for giving Republicans hope, says longtime Democratic strategist Michael Goldman.
Mr. MICHAEL GOLDMAN (Democratic Strategist): I think that it was easy to believe post the primary that the Brown campaign was never going to get the kind of traction or attention that would force her to engage.
BRADY-MYEROV: So Martha Coakley coasted, holding few campaign events and not putting on TV ads until recently. And Democrats let Brown define himself. In his first TV ad, Brown compared himself to John F. Kennedy on tax cuts. A black-and-white image of Kennedy speaking fades into one of Brown finishing Kennedy's speech.
(Soundbite of TV ad)
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: Would have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy.
State Senator SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Senatorial Candidate): Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary.
BRADY-MYEROV: Democrats say using JFK was a phony device, but people took notice, to the amazement of strategist Goldman.
Mr. GOLDMAN: Lots of people think he's a really swell fellow, you know, basically a moderate Republican, maybe even a conservative Democrat. When, in fact, this person has been and is an extremely conservative Republican, far to the right of anyone we've elected in this state.
BRADY-MYEROV: Brown favors the death penalty. He's against gay marriage. He questions whether global warming is man-made or natural. And he's been endorsed by an anti-abortion group.
Ron Kaufman, former White House political director under the first President Bush and a longtime Republican strategist, says Brown's climb in the polls should be credited to his stance on issues voters care about.
Mr. RON KAUFMAN (Former Political Director, White House): Right now, like most of America, they're upset with what's going on in this country. They're upset with health care. They're upset with spending. They're upset with huge deficits. They're upset with terrorism. And they are in sync with where Scott Brown is on these issues and where she's not.
BRADY-MYEROV: Still, in polls, voters say they see Coakley as the best candidate to handle issues such as taxes, the economy and health care. And this week her campaign struck back with this attack ad.
(Soundbite of a political ad)
Unidentified Man: Who is Scott Brown, really? A Republican in lockstep with Washington Republicans.
BRADY-MYEROV: Brown has received little overt support from the national GOP, but he's been getting funding from conservatives around the country, including Tea Party activists.
In contrast, national Democrats have been pouring in money and staffers on behalf of Coakley. In their gut and in their internal polling, Democrats find it almost impossible to believe that the seat they've held since John F. Kennedy could go to a Republican.
But just in case, they're bringing in Bill Clinton tomorrow to fire up the troops. Because for Democrats nationwide, a win in Massachusetts could secure the passage of Senator Ted Kennedy's dream of universal health care.
For NPR News, I'm Monica Brady-Myerov in Boston.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The International Olympic Committee says it is not worried about the weather at next month's Winter Games in Vancouver. Warm temperatures and rain have closed Cypress Mountain, one of the ski resorts that'll host Olympic events.
This week, Vancouver Organizing Committee Chief John Furlong found himself answering questions about whether this could turn into the Spring Olympics.
Mr. JOHN FURLONG (CEO, Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee): We had anticipated for years that we could be confronted with challenges with weather. We are where we are in the world and that's the way it is.
SIEGEL: Well, how have preparations been affected by the warm weather?
NPR's Martin Kaste drove up to British Columbia to find out.
(Soundbite of driving)
MARTIN KASTE: Well, I'm almost at Cypress Mountain, the site of snowboarding and freestyle skiing events that are in these Olympics. You can hear the rain on my windshield, the French jazz on my radio. I don't know, this does not look like a Winter Olympics venue right now. It looks really, really soggy.
Mr. TIM GAYDA (Official, Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee): It's the challenge of running an outdoor sport. It's something that we enjoy. And we're up for the challenge.
KASTE: Tim Gayda, an official with the organizing committee held court near the brown ski runs at Cypress Mountain, tried to reassure a scrum of local reporters. Yes, he said the rain had washed away about three feet of snow pack here. But he reminded everyone that they can make snow. And if that's not enough, they've also been doing what he called snow farming pushing together big stockpiles of snow on a neighboring mountain.
Mr. GAYDA: They're in the thousands of cubic meters and they're kind of piled up all over the mountain. Obviously it's a lot of work to get that snow over to Mount Black, but it's something that should the temperatures look like they're going to stay warm, which, unfortunately they're not, we would go and get it.
KASTE: Organizers are looking forward to a predicted drop in temperatures next week. And conditions are snowier at Whistler, the ski resort two hours out of Vancouver where most outdoor events are planned. Still, even at Whistler things can get mushy. The humid Pacific air that comes swirling up British Columbia's sounds and inlets can do a number on ski conditions even at 7,000 feet. And this year there's an El Nino effect in the Pacific making things worse.
The Olympic organizers have their own meteorologist, Chris Doyle, to try to predict the effects of all this.
Mr. CHRIS DOYLE (Meteorologist): We actually could see the signal - this kind of system - appearing ten days before we arrived, and that's the kind of information we're providing to the organizing committee.
KASTE: Doyle also has to keep his eye on the humidity, which can ruin ice even indoors. The ice arenas in Vancouver have been equipped with extra dehumidifiers to keep out the city's persistent damp. The fact is, British Columbia is part rain forest and there have always been questions about whether it was a good bet to plan the Winter Games in Vancouver. If you ask the organizing committee's in-house meteorologist about that, you'll find it's a question that he'd rather not answer.
Mr. DOYLE: Well, of course that wasn't my decision. I just forecast the weather.
KASTE: In Vancouver's Robson Square, the Olympic countdown clock is now past the one-month mark. And kids enjoy free skating on a rink that was reopened for the games. Linda Fox watches the fun and says even an Olympic skeptic like her is now hoping for the best.
Ms. LINDA FOX: I think all of this is really nice. And considering the last year we've had, you know, it's cheering everybody up. And everything, I think, is proud to showcase Vancouver.
KASTE: Of course, right now that showcase is pretty wet. Even as the kids circle the ice, a maintenance man gets up on a lift and pokes at the cloth awning overhead, knocking off a torrent of excess rain.
Martin Kaste, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
One of the most distinctive R&B voices of the 1970s has died. Teddy Pendergrass gained international attention as the lead singer for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. He went on to a wildly successful solo career that ended abruptly when an auto accident left him partially paralyzed.
NPR's Allison Keyes has this remembrance.
ALLISON KEYES: The first thing that struck you about Teddy Pendergrass was the voice. It was raw and gravelly, but not in a way that would hurt in a way you wanted to touch especially if you were one of the legions of screaming female fans that flocked to his shows.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. TEDDY PENDERGRASS (Musician): (Singing) (unintelligible)
(Soundbite of screaming)
KEYES: Women famously threw, well, undergarments on stage when Pendergrass sang, mesmerized by a voice that somehow seemed more manly, more virile than other soul singers like Marvin Gaye, whose vocals were more vulnerable and safer. In 1983, even comedian Eddie Murphy had to recognize the power of Pendergrass.
(Soundbite of show)
Mr. EDDIE MURPHY (Comedian): I like dudes with masculine voices, like a Teddy Pendergrass.
(Soundbite of cheering)
Mr. MURPHY: Teddy would just come out and take the lyrics and go, you got, you got, you what I need. Throw your panties on the stage.
KEYES: Pendergrass discovered early that he wanted to be a performer. Born Theodore DeReese Pendergrass in 1950, he was raised in Philadelphia. He sang in church as a child, and thought he wanted to preach. But when he was a teenager, he saw Jackie Wilson perform.
Mr. PENDERGRASS: And he just controlled the stage. His audience was in the palm of his hands.
KEYES: Pendergrass told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1998 the show changed his life, particularly the reaction of women who ran to the front when Wilson intentionally rolled off the stage.
Mr. PENDERGRASS: To see the ladies run through the guardrails and just lay on top of him and appear to make mad, passionate love to him in the middle of the floor at whatever time it was that morning, my jaws dropped. I was, like, my god.
KEYES: Pendergrass dropped out of high school, got a gig as a drummer with the Cadillacs and, in the early '70s, ended up as lead singer with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
(Soundbite of song, "If You Don't Know Me by Now")
Mr. PENDERGRASS: (Singing) All the things that we've been through, you should understand it like I understand you.
KEYES: Producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff architects of the 1970s style that became known as the sound of Philadelphia told WHYY's Fresh Air that Melvin was miffed that Pendergrass was getting all the attention.
Mr. PENDERGRASS: He used to come to me and say: Man, they think that Teddy is Harold Melvin. I said: Well, you know, don't worry about it. That was that power.
KEYES: That power led Pendergrass to a solo career.
(Soundbite of song, "Love T.K.O.")
Mr. PENDERGRASS: (Singing) Looking back over my years, I guess I've shedded some tears. I told myself time and time again, this time I'm going to win.
KEYES: His million-selling albums produced a string of hits from "Close the Door" to the smash anthem "Turn Off the Lights" to 1980s "Love T.K.O."
(Soundbite of song, "Love T.K.O.")
Mr. PENDERGRASS: (Singing) Looks like another love TKO.
KEYES: Then, in 1982, Teddy Pendergrass was partially paralyzed in an automobile accident. He continued to sing from a wheelchair, but it was 19 years before he gave another full concert. It was difficult for the singer to project his voice the way he once had. But Pendergrass said a lot more changed after the accident.
Mr. PENDERGRASS: I know I see life much different because I'm experiencing life much, much differently. But I feel good about me because I'm not going to let this keep me from being the person I know I can be.
KEYES: Teddy Pendergrass set up a foundation to help others with spinal cord injuries. He died yesterday in suburban Philadelphia eight months after surgery for colon cancer. He was 59 years old.
Allison Keyes, NPR News.
(Soundbite of song, "This Gift of Life")
Mr. PENDERGRASS: (Singing) And I want to thank you for giving me the privilege just to live.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
I'm Robert Siegel.
And we begin this hour with the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Haiti. It has been two days now since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook the country's capital, Port-au-Prince. The Red Cross now estimates the death toll at 45,000 to 50,000. And the first American death has been confirmed: a long time employee of the State Department. Fifty-seven-year-old Victoria DeLong died when her home collapsed. There are tens of thousands of people injured, many of the region's hospitals have been severely damaged, and outside medical and rescue groups are still struggling to reach the hardest hit areas. Medics, search and rescue teams, and other forms of aid are arriving, but the magnitude of the disaster is overwhelming relief efforts. The White House says as many as 5,500 U.S. infantry and Marines will be in Haiti or on ships offshore by Monday.
NPR's Greg Allen has spent the day in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince and he joins us now. And Greg, as we've said, it's been two days since the earthquake hit. What's the situation like where you've been today?
GREG ALLEN: Well, Robert, I spent much of the day driving around the city of Port-au-Prince, through the residential neighborhoods. And as you can imagine from the pictures you've seen, this devastation there is just staggering.
You drive through these narrow streets, which were narrow in the best of situations and there barely room for one car to pass with rubble piled high on each side.
Very many houses are collapsed totally. You know, mostly stone houses all totally gone now. Houses that weren't collapsed, you'll see a wall missing, a corner missing.
Needless to say, everyone's out on the street. People can't live in their houses. They're - some are living in lots where houses used to be and they're bathing their children and trying to carry on some kind of normal life. But at the same time, cross the street, you'll see piles of dead bodies. You know, wherever you go in Port-au-Prince in these residential neighborhoods, you'll see bodies by the side of the road.
SIEGEL: And we hear so much about the search for people who might be trapped under these collapsed buildings. Have you seen any signs of success in finding anybody who's under the rubble?
ALLEN: Well, I have not myself - we went to one building today at the Interior Ministry in Port-au-Prince City center, and a crew from the Dominican Republic came up. And they were a rescue crew and we stopped to ask them what they were going to do there and they told us that they believed that two men were trapped in the building, but it was too dangerous to proceed. And so they stayed there for a while and then they left.
Before they left, they said they did have a lot of success yesterday at another ministry building where they pulled a person out. And they're very about that, but today was not going to be a success for them.
SIEGEL: Have you seen efforts to distribute food or water to the Haitians?
ALLEN: I have not seen that yet. Certainly, there's a lot of aid groups coming in. The planes are arriving at the Port-au-Prince airport hourly. So I think there is some aid on the way. Coast Guard ships are here. We see, of course, the UN presence is here. But so far, there's not really been a large-scale distribution of aid begun that I can see.
SIEGEL: And Greg, now that it's nightfall, are these people who are sleeping out of doors, do they have some kind of protection from the elements?
ALLEN: Well, it's actually the, you know, the dry season here, so it should not rain, although that wasn't the case. It did rain yesterday. And it's - the weather is not bad. However, you know, the only protection people have is a tarpaulin, you know, and maybe a sheet. There's not a lot of protection here. Fortunately it's, as I say, it's, you know, it's a tropical climate, and at least for now that might be okay. But when the rainy season comes, it'll be a different story.
SIEGEL: NPR's Greg Allen outside Port-au-Prince. Greg, thanks a lot. Take care.
ALLEN: Thank you, Robert.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
For the first time in a decade, the Justice Department is moving to intervene in a harassment case involving gender stereotypes. It is a case in which a gay male high school student was beaten up for being effeminate.
As NPR's Ari Shapiro reports, gay and lesbian groups see it as a statement about the Obama administration's priorities.
ARI SHAPIRO: Jacob and his father, Robbie Sullivan, live in Upstate New York in the town of Mohawk. Jacob is 15 and gay.
Mr. ROBBIE SULLIVAN: He is one of the greatest, loving, timid kind of kid you could meet. And I love him to death and he doesn't give me a bit of problem at all.
SHAPIRO: Robbie says Jacob was always effeminate. Starting in junior high, kids threw food at him and told him to get a sex change. They smashed his iPod and his cell phone. One pulled out a knife and threatened to hang him from a flagpole.
According to court documents, a teacher said: You should hate yourself every day until you change.
One day, Jacob came home from school limping. That evening, he called his father from a party and said he had sprained his ankle at the party.
Mr.�SULLIVAN: It was a really bad sprain. They put a cast on it, gave him crutches. And shortly after that, I found out that it didn't happen at the party. It happened at the school because somebody pushed him down the stairs.
SHAPIRO: Over two years, Robbie Sullivan went to his son's school three or four times a week to talk with the principal. According to court papers, officials did nothing. The harassment got so bad that Jacob changed school districts. With the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Robbie Sullivan eventually sued.
Mr.�SULLIVAN: A parent can only do so much against an entire school. I can't go to the school and grab the students and investigate it myself. I mean, I have to rely on the school to hopefully do what they're supposed to do.
SHAPIRO: The school superintendent Joyce Caputo was at a conference today and unavailable for comment, but a few months ago, she told the local paper: Our district has not and will not knowingly tolerate discrimination or harassment of its students by anybody.
Now the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has stepped in.
Ms.�HAYLEY GORENBERG (Lambda Legal): We haven't seen this kind of involvement in quite some time. It's a long time coming, and we really need it.
SHAPIRO: Hayley Gorenberg is with Lambda Legal, a group that represents lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Ms.�GORENBERG: I take it as affirming that this Justice Department is interested in taking a stand against harassment and discrimination against students, particularly LGBT students.
SHAPIRO: People who worked in the Civil Rights Division under Republicans agree that only Democrats would make this argument. Roger Clegg served under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He says bullying is wrong, but he does not agree with the Obama administration's interpretation of the law here.
Mr.�ROGER CLEGG (General Counsel, Center for Equal Opportunity): They are making up a legal violation when there hasn't been one.
SHAPIRO: The Justice Department's argument relies on a law called Title IX, which protects students from gender discrimination. Obama administration lawyers say Title IX also covers discrimination based on gender stereotypes, that is to say boys who get beaten up for acting girly. The government has not made that argument in a decade. Roger Clegg.
Mr.�CLEGG: You know, if the Civil Rights Division and the Obama administration want to propose that Title IX be amended to include sexual orientation, that's something that they can do and that can be debated in Congress, but Congress has not passed a law that deals with discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
SHAPIRO: Some courts have ruled that Title IX covers gender expression and sexual orientation, but the law is still murky in this area, and now the Obama administration has made its position known. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. In Joseph Stiglitz's new book, "Freefall," the Nobel laureate and Columbia economics professor gives Washington bad grades on its responses to the three main economic crises we face.
Stiglitz is least scathing when it comes to the stimulus bill, which he finds an anemic and insufficient response to the recession. When it comes to the housing and financial crisis, he is less charitable. The government has rushed to save institutions it should have let sink, and it has let individuals sink instead of coming to their rescue.
Joseph Stiglitz served on and later chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. He was also chief economist at the World Bank, and he joins us from New York. Welcome to the program.
Mr.�JOSEPH STIGLITZ (Author, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy"): Nice to be here.
SIEGEL: And I'd like to begin by playing you something the treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, said on this program recently. This was his upbeat appraisal of where the economy stands.
Secretary TIMOTHY GEITHNER (Department of Treasury): The economy is growing again. The policies the president put in place are helping lay the foundation for growth and job creation, and everything we're focused on doing is to try to bring forward the time where the economy's creating jobs again, people going back to work, people can be more confident about their financial future, their financial security.
And I think Americans can be more confident of that, and if you look carefully at what you see about consumer confidence surveys, surveys of business confidence, if you see how people are behaving again now, you see confidence starting to come back.
SIEGEL: Joseph Stiglitz, do you share any of the Treasury secretary's optimism?
Mr.�STIGLITZ: Well, things are better than they were, say, a little over a year ago, but the fact is that even the growth that he's talking about is not sufficient to really create the jobs the economy needs. Unless the economy is growing between three percent and three and a half percent, it's not growing enough to create the jobs, let alone to get the unemployment rate down from the 10 percent that it is today to a more normal level.
SIEGEL: As you say, that we should look at unemployment or job creation or job losses not just in absolute terms but relative to how many jobs we would naturally add to the economy when the economy is growing.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: That's right. And normally, we would be adding, say, about 150,000 jobs per month. Right now we're losing jobs.
SIEGEL: Do we need a new economic stimulus plan? And if so, wouldn't it be a lot easier to get through the Columbia Economics Department than through the Congress at this stage?
Mr.�STIGLITZ: We do need another stimulus plan. At the very least, we need to be ready to put one into place. States and localities are really suffering. There's a shortfall in the revenues. When this current stimulus package comes to an end, those shortfalls and revenues will be even more marked.
SIEGEL: Now, I want to ask you next about the housing crisis. In "Freefall," in your book, you're very critical of the approach that the administration took to the mortgage crisis, and you describe at one point an alternative of how the government - I'm not sure if you're talking about the Treasury or the Federal Reserve in that case - might have used government funds for people to use to refinance a portion of their mortgage.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: Well, exactly. The problem is the government has been using its ability to lend to give money to the banks. If they had lent it onto households, maybe with a little charge for transaction, one or two percent, that would bring down their payments, and that would mean that the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes - and with that their life savings - all of that could have been stymied.
SIEGEL: You're saying that somebody, say, with a $300,000 mortgage at five or six percent that they're really having trouble paying now could take a chunk of it, say 100,000 of it, and what if they refinanced through the Fed at two percent? That would bring down their monthly payments. The government would be helping the borrower instead of the lender of the mortgage, and the person would be no longer underwater on the mortgage?
Mr.�STIGLITZ: Well, he'd still be underwater, but his payments would go down by - in the case that you just - the example you gave, paying six percent going down to two percent, that'll bring down his payments by two-thirds. And so that would make the house more affordable, more likely that he wouldn't have to go into foreclosure.
SIEGEL: How do you explain the fact that it seemed quite obvious to people in Washington to do something for the banks, to make money available to them at very low interest rates through the Fed, as opposed to bypassing the banks and making money available to people directly for mortgages at very, very low interest rates?
Mr.�STIGLITZ: I think you have to look at the way Washington often works. The banks are there in great presence. There are estimated five lobbyists per congressman. So it's no wonder, with that kind of clout, that the banks get more of what they want and American households get less of what they need.
SIEGEL: But you address very often in your book the questions of moral hazard, and you come down on the side that the mortgage crisis is largely about predatory lending practices. Some people would say, yes, there are predatory lending practices, but that person who would get the two percent mortgage loan, let's say, from the Fed that you're talking about, was very possibly extremely imprudent in taking out that mortgage in the first place and should've known better.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: Well, he probably was imprudent, but remember, we're talking about, in many cases, first-time homebuyers. They were dealing, on the other hand, with banks who they assumed were experts in risk management. They didn't really understand the game that the banks were playing.
SIEGEL: You begin your book with an interesting perspective, for those of us who have heard often that the economy was humming along quite well until unexpectedly it went over a cliff a couple of years ago. From a global perspective, this has been a couple of decades. It's been an era of economic crises.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: That's right. From a global perspective, we've had one financial crisis after another. Back in the United States, the last crisis, of course, was the S&L financial crisis that cost us several hundred billion dollars and was very expensive for our economy as well. But abroad, we had the Mexican crisis in 1994, a crisis in Thailand, in Indonesia, in Korea, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Russia.
So the banks have consistently done a bad job in assessing creditworthiness. They've consistently been bailed out by public institutions. So this is not the first crisis, and we should keep that in mind.
SIEGEL: And you would say that when those crises occurred, the remedies that we proposed or demanded were not the remedies that we implemented here.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: In fact, just the opposite. When East Asia went into a crisis, we and the IMF demanded that they raise interest rates, that they cut back expenditures, that they raise taxes, that they not bail out their banks.
There's a lot of bitterness today in Asia and other developing countries because of the seeming hypocrisy, the difference between what we demanded of those countries and the way we behaved ourselves here in the United States in this crisis.
SIEGEL: Joseph Stiglitz, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Mr.�STIGLITZ: Well, thank you.
SIEGEL: Joseph Stiglitz is the author of "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy."
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: This is NPR.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The United Nations has regrouped by the airport after its headquarters collapsed in the earthquake.
David Wimhurst is director of public information for MINUSTAH, the U.N. mission in Haiti. We spoke earlier today and I asked about the efforts to dig survivors out of the U.N. headquarters.
Mr. DAVID WIMHURST (Director of Public Information, MINUSTAH): We've had teams working nonstop under floodlights at our collapsed headquarters. And they've been working very hard to lift off the very heavy concrete slabs that cover the wreckage. And these have been an impediment until we were able to cut through them and get a crane in to lift them up. And now we are going down into the building. And all I can tell you is we are recovering more bodies, but I cannot give you account yet, I'm afraid.
BLOCK: Have you found any survivors as you've gotten farther into that building?
Mr. WIMHURST: Well, we did have the miracle of yesterday, where we found a survivor four meters below the lowest rubble level - a security officer from Estonia, who walked out unscathed once the rubble had been lifted off him. He was in a space. He had air to breathe. He was covered in dust, of course, and extremely tired. And, but he had a radio, so we were able to keep in touch with him. And then the dogs that were brought in by the expert teams sniffed him out. But since then there have been no other live recoveries.
BLOCK: And, again, among the missing is the chief of mission there for the U.N.
Mr. WIMHURST: Yes. We still have not been able officially confirm or, you know, we haven't, you know, found him yet.
BLOCK: What about the U.N. peacekeeping force itself - I think 7,000 people plus 2,000 police(ph), where are they and what's their mission right now?
Mr. WIMHURST: All of the uniformed personnel are deployed in security operations in and around the city of Port-au-Prince. We are patrolling night and day with the National Police of Haiti, which has been somewhat decimated. I mean, they've had their police stations have collapsed and they have many injuries. But we're patrolling everywhere as much as we can. I mean, there are some areas are inaccessible. We simply can't get in because of the crushed houses.
And we are maintaining calm and law and order. There's been some sporadic episodes of looting. But I emphasize sporadic. We're also distributing as much as we can in its form, some water and medical aid where needed.
The key is that if you have a secure environment, you can then really move the humanitarian aid in fast. And that's really what we're doing. Already the not just on that, the World Food Programs were feeding at least 8,000 families a day, and they're quickly accelerate to at least 60,000 families a day.
BLOCK: Would part of the mission become collecting the bodies from the streets?
Mr. WIMHURST: Yes, we will certainly move to do that. In fact, we have started doing it. The question is where to take them. People are bringing bodies out onto the streets for the simple reason that they need to move them away from where they're living, even if it's in some rubble. The city itself is picking up bodies. They have trucks that are going around picking up bodies. And the prime minister said yesterday that they've already buried 7,000 in mass graves.
BLOCK: And what is your understanding of where those bodies are to be taken?
Mr. WIMHURST: Right now they're being taken to a site outside of the city. But we're looking to find new areas that can be used for this purpose. But it's not enough, so other sites have to be created.
BLOCK: You mentioned the National Police, which you said have been decimated. How would you describe at this point what is left of the Haitian government and how it's able to perform?
Mr. WIMHURST: The Haitian government is functioning on a daily basis, believe it or not. Even though the prime minister's offices have been demolished, and the president's palace has gone down and the ministries have collapsed, in spite of all that, they've regrouped very fast. They meet every day at 7:00 in the morning. We attend the meeting. It's down in a location very close to where we are near the airport, so we're close connection with each other. Our job is to support them to the max.
BLOCK: Mr. Wimhurst, we've all heard voices of Haitians there in the capitol, in Port-au-Prince, saying they have seen no government assistance and said they have been left to fend for themselves. And we're now three days after the earthquake. Do you fear that the longer this goes on, that the situation gets more and more untenable and dangerous?
Mr. WIMHURST: Inevitably after an event like this in which, you know, suddenly people are deprived of food and water and shelter, inevitably they're going to look to organizations like the United Nations for immediate assistance. But we can't bring assistance to two million people in 24 hours. It's simply impossible. So it's going to take place over time.
BLOCK: David Wimhurst, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. WIMHURST: Thank you.
BLOCK: David Wimhurst is director of public information for the U.N. in Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The U.N. says its secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will visit Haiti on Sunday. You can find photos and more news of relief efforts at npr.org.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In Haiti, the window is closing to find victims in the rubble alive. Three days after the earthquake, international search and rescue teams are working with heavy equipment and search dogs, while Haitians dig with their hands in hopes of findings survivors. Meanwhile, Haitian government workers are burying thousands of dead in mass graves.
SIEGEL: We'll be hearing about different aspects of the disaster in Haiti throughout this program. First this hour, one effort to find survivors. The Hotel Montana used to be one of the nicest places to stay in the capital, Port-au-Prince. It is now flattened.
NPR's Jason Beaubien was there overnight and this morning as elite rescue teams from France, Spain and the U.S. pulled seven people out of the hotel.
(Soundbite of vehicle)
Unidentified Man: (unintelligible) clear, everybody off.
JASON BEAUBIEN: More than two and a half days after the quake struck, members of a search and rescue team from Fairfax County, Virginia, carried American Dan Wooley out of the wreckage of the Montana Hotel. Earlier in the morning, they'd plucked Haitian Lucson Mondesir from the massive pile of concrete. Wooley and Mondesir were trapped side by side in adjacent elevator cars. In the darkness, they talked and encouraged each other until the rescue teams arrived. When Wooley emerged, Mondesir - in his dust-covered bell hop uniform - was standing outside to greet him. And for the first time, they could see each other.
Mr. DAN WOOLEY: Hey, it's so good to meet you, man. Give your address to someone for me, okay?
Mr. LUCSON MONDESIR: Okay, okay. All right.
Mr. WOOLEY: Okay, I want to stay in touch with you. So good to meet you.
Mr. MONDESIR: Yeah.
BEAUBIEN: Wooley and Mondesir were deep in the wreckage at the bottom of two elevator shafts that had flipped on their sides.
Mr. MONDESIR: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Mondesir said the darkness was terrifying and he started to hallucinate. He said he and Wooley encouraged each other throughout the ordeal.
Mr. MONDESIR: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Wooley, who had injured his leg, was whisked away to a clinic.
BEAUBIEN: Mondesir was walking around, posing for photos with the rescue workers and talking to the press. He said he and Wooley always believed they would be saved.
(Soundbite of beep)
BEAUBIEN: The rescue crews worked throughout the night to try to reach at least eight people believed to be alive in the remains of the hotel.
Mr. REINHARD RIEDL: My name is Reinhard Riedl and I am married to Nadine Cardozo-Reidl, the co-owner of the Montana.
BEAUBIEN: His wife, Nadine, he said, was one of the ones trapped. Riedl stood in front of a huge, jutting slab of concrete that used to be the hotel roof. And he was waiting.
Mr. RIEDL: My wife is still alive, which was very uncertain this morning. And yesterday, all day long, they didn't know where she is, actually. So, right now I feel relieved, and everything else is secondary.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BEAUBIEN: The search and rescue crews had to prop up parts of the wreckage to reach the pockets where people were still alive. Under klieg lights, the team members burrowed in and out of the pile of concrete chunks.
BEAUBIEN: Sam Gray, who is a firefighter from Fairfax County, Virginia, was one of them.
Mr. SAM GRAY (Firefighter, Virginia): It was quite a shock to go in through the dark and actually see somebody's hand poke out all of a sudden, which is normally the first thing you see. That's always a strange sight to see.
BEAUBIEN: Gray says they had been working for three days straight, and his team managed to pull three people out alive. But he said it's hard to savor these victories because there is so much destruction and death around them - even inside the wreckage.
Mr. GRAY: There'd be bodies right next to the people that are alive - right next to, laying on top of - you know, one alive, one not alive. And of course, that has a pretty big impact.
BEAUBIEN: All across the Haitian capital, buildings have collapsed - some completely, others partially. Search and rescue crews are trying to extract a group of people from inside a supermarket. After the quake, they had made calls from their cell phones for help. With so many buildings collapsed and so many people missing, it's possible that thousands survived the quake but are trapped somewhere in the debris. Today, Reinhard Riedl gave up his vigil for his wife. He had gotten word that despite his initial optimism, she had apparently died in the collapse and her body was still inside the hotel.
Mr. RIEDL: It might as well take three or four days to take her out because they have to take all the rubble away.
BEAUBIEN: He is worried now that his wife might get dumped somewhere in a mass grave. Riedl has joined the thousands and thousands of Haitians in mourning for the loss of their loved ones. He was walking back to the hotel to try to make sure his wife's body is properly taken care of.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And we're going to begin our weekly conversation with our regular political commentators with the subject of Haiti. I'm joined by E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Welcome back to both of you. And E. J., first any thoughts on what's happening in Haiti and this country's response to it?
Mr. E. J. DIONNE (Columnist, The Washington Post): Well, you know, I guess what I hope doesn't happen is the fact that Haiti has enormous governance problems, and David wrote about them eloquently today, doesn't become an excuse for us not to help a country that's in great, great trouble. And I'm not in the habit of saying a lot of nice things at this microphone about George W. Bush, but I think one of the things that must be said about him is that he really pushed hard for quite a lot of foreign aid to very poor countries.
And I expect if he were the president, Katrina not withstanding, he would be out there saying we got to help Haiti and I hope his absence doesn't push Republicans and others - it's not partisan - away from giving help to people who really need it.
SIEGEL: David, you wrote today that the devastation in Haiti should lead us to, in your words, rethink our approach to global poverty.
Mr. DAVID BROOKS (Columnist, The New York Times): Yeah. I mean, the first point is this is a poverty issue. It's not a natural disaster issue. We had a 7 magnitude earthquake in this country in the Bay Area some 15 years ago and 63 people were killed. Here we have 45-50,000 people killed. So, it's a poverty issue. And the problem is, first, that we don't really know how to use foreign aid to generate economic growth and reduce poverty. That hasn't worked out so well. We have a lot of people in Haiti doing micro project.
We've about 10,000 people who are NGOs doing micro projects and they're doing wonderful work, but so far it doesn't seem to have amounted to a comprehensive change in the country. And so, to me, this in the medium and long term means we have to think seriously about redoing the way we do aid. And the challenge is redoing our policy of intervention. We've had this long history of anti-colonialism, not trying to be paternalistic, and Haiti was, of course, one of the first great slave revolts. But if we're going to try to create a successful state there, or not a failed state, it seems to me we have to be more intrusive on a multilateral level with local leadership, much more aggressive.
SIEGEL: Okay. I'm sure, we'll hear lots more of course about Haiti on today's program, but I'd like to take you guys now to a domestic matter: a surprisingly close U.S. Senate race, so close that President Obama is hitting the stump on Sunday. He has made a commercial in which he cites his efforts on health care, financial reform, and the environment.
(Soundbite of TV commercial)
President BARACK OBAMA: The outcome of these and other fights will probably rest on one vote in the United State Senate.
SIEGEL: One vote from Massachusetts where Republican Scott Brown is surging in the polls against Democrat Martha Coakley. In this commercial, Brown talks about the stakes of the Massachusetts Senate race in Washington.
(Soundbite of TV commercial)
Mr. SCOTT BROWN (Senate Candidate, Massachusetts, Republican): Recently there has been a tremendous amount of talk on Twitter and Facebook about how I would be the 41st Senator who could stop the national health care bill and its higher taxes, increased spending and more government in our lives.
SIEGEL: Which is just what he would like to stop. E. J. Dionne, is it possible the Senate seat once held by John Kennedy and Edward Kennedy could mark the defeat of health care?
Mr. DIONNE: I mean the short answer is yes, although already in Washington, Democrats are scrambling to figure out how they can get around this if they lose that seat. I mean, I think there are a lot of myths about Massachusetts. If you think that Massachusetts is Cambridge and Martha's Vineyard, you've never been to Dracut, Millis or Gardner. Republicans in open races typically get at least 45 percent of the vote. Secondly, Brown has run a very aggressive kind of exciting campaign, whereas Martha Coakley, she is a statewide elected official.
SIEGEL: She's attorney general.
Mr. DIONNE: The attorney general of the state is not an exciting candidate. So, there have been problems there. And obviously the national mood is not the best for Democrats right now. I think Obama is smart to go up there because he is going to take a huge hit if that race goes badly. He would take that hit even if he didn't up there. If you're about to lose 90 percent of your chips, you might as well go all in. And his approval rating is much higher than the share of the vote Coakley seems to be getting. So it might make a difference.
SIEGEL: David, E. J. says the national tone is not good for Democrats. If this is Massachusetts, what's the rest of the country like for November?
Mr. BROOKS: I guarantee there are a lot of Democratic senators who are asking themselves that very question. I mean, partly it is Coakley. She made the disastrous decision in a year where they have the outsider, she ran an insider establishment campaign, terrible decision, but I think the larger factor is national. You could be a terrible candidate and Democrats should be winning in Massachusetts. It should not be close, so I think we're all stunned that it's close. At the end of the day, I frankly do not thing that Coakley will lose. I happen to think the Democratic machine will get out enough votes. Nonetheless, the fact that it's close means that there is a national reaction which we've talked about before and it's a reaction against health care, it's a reaction against Washington, it's a reaction against everything. And Brown is channeling it. And making health care so specific, means that it won't just be a vague protest vote, this is a protest vote against the health care plan.
Mr. DIONNE: Which is why Barack Obama is going up there to try to make sure he saves it.
SIEGEL: On another matter, E. J., you wrote this week about the administration's dilemma of being - at least perceived as being - too close to Wall Street. Yesterday, the president announced new fees and taxes on the biggest banks and he said this about federal bailout funds.
Pres. OBAMA: We want our money back. And we're going to get it.
SIEGEL: Pretty terse, uncompromising words from president there.
Mr. DIONNE: Yeah. And I guess the short answer is it's about time and I think that this - his - the sense that the administration is too close to Wall Street doesn't just hurt with liberals. It hurts with a lot of middle class people who still don't understand bonuses of the size that people have gotten. But I hope this raises a larger debate. I think that over a period of time, we've been taxing income from manufacturing and services much more heavily than we tax income from the financial industry.
We've really cut capital gains taxes so low, labor gets taxed more heavily, so Warren Buffett likes to say that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his receptionist. So, I hope this particular tax to get back the TARP money is part of a larger discussion to shift the tax burden a little bit more to finance and investment.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, what do you think, is it a new wave of populism in the Obama administration?
Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, I have a confession to make. I have a retirement account and it's held in mutual funds and they're traded on Wall Street. I am part of the Wall Street problem, which I guess is evil these days. So, I feel bad about that, but, you know, I don't think so.
Mr. DIONNE: You don't look like you feel bad about that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BROOKS: You know, I don't think this is going anywhere legislatively, but politically...
SIEGEL: The taxes on...
Mr. BROOKS: No, no, there is no way this will get through the Senate, but what it does is it forces House Republicans to either vote for a tax increase or to vote with the bankers. Either way...
SIEGEL: It's a fee, by the way, according to the White House.
Mr. BROOKS: Excuse me.
SIEGEL: It's a fee.
Mr. BROOKS: A fee - excuse me. But either way, it's a bad vote for House Republicans. I have to say, I don't find Barack Obama too persuasive when he does the populist shtick. I don't think it's the most natural and authentic thing for him.
SIEGEL: What do you think, E. J.?
Mr. DIONNE: Oh, I agree that populism comes very hard to him. It always has. If you go back to the primaries, Hillary Clinton started gaining ground when she sounded much more populist and Obama had to learn populism on the run and he started doing it better. Nonetheless, I think the substance of his policies are such that he shouldn't have a problem with a lot of this stuff, that I think the notion that the very rich in finance have paid too little of their share of the burden is an idea that Barack Obama, the policy wonk, can relate to. And I'd be surprised if this tax, or fee as the administration is calling it, were killed in the end. And in fact Democrats would love to call the bluff of the tea party movement. Are they populists? Are they willing to tax the banks or not?
SIEGEL: Well, on that note, we'll wait and see the fate of the fee or tax proposal in the Senate and see which one of you had it right. E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times, thanks to both of you.
Mr. DIONNE: Thank you.
Mr. BROOKS: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERTS SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The U.S. military does not have good systems to spot the next Nidal Hasan and stop him. That's one of the conclusions of the Pentagon's investigation into the Fort Hood shootings. That report was released today. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling was the first to reveal serious concerns of some of Hasan's Army supervisors. And he now reports that the Pentagon investigation leave some important questions unanswered.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others back on that afternoon in November. And President Obama asked the Pentagon to find out: Should somebody have seen it coming? If so, who? And why didn't they? The secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said here is one big reason why.
Secretary ROBERT GATES (Defense Department): It is clear that as a department, we have not done enough to adapt to the evolving domestic internal security threat to American troops and military facilities that has emerged over the past decade.
ZWERDLING: But the report he released today doesn't go into any details about Nidal Hasan and the officers above him. Gates and the two men who headed the investigation said they can't talk about specifics because the Fort Hood shootings are a criminal case. They did say that some of Hasan's supervisors clearly missed some warning signs and ignored others. The former secretary of the Army, Togo West, wouldn't be more specific, but he said they've sent the details to the commanders running the Army now.
Mr. TOGO WEST (Former Secretary of Army): We said that we thought that several officers responsible for applying the Army's policies to him did not do so, and that we think that that should be referred to the secretary of the Army for considerations of accountability. I think that's as far as you want us to go.
ZWERDLING: Still the report seems to address some other problems that we reported last November. You might remember that the Army sent Hasan to treat soldiers at Fort Hood in the summer of last year. Yet, sources told NPR that more than a year and a half before that, some of his supervisors were so worried about his behavior that they discussed could Nidal Hasan be psychotic. In addition, they felt he was obsessed with Islam. They thought he had extremist Islamic views and he seemed especially obsessed with a Muslim-American soldier who killed two fellow solders in Kuwait after the U.S. invaded Iraq.
Yet, they didn't call Army security. They didn't order Hasan to get a psychiatric evaluation. Instead, they saw Hasan mainly as a teaching challenge: Could they help him do better in his graduate work? The Pentagon report says the military needs to establish clear policies that tell officers, here's the kind of behavior you should lookout for. Here's what to do if you're worried that the person could be a threat.
Mr. WEST: Sometimes, just counseling and a helping hand can help. But other times, there are warning signs that need to be paid attention to and passed along the chain of command, so that those in authority can decide what is the right approach.
ZWERDLING: In fact, that's the main focus of the Pentagon report: how can the military set up new systems, so people can spot a potentially violent colleague in their ranks. But the report basically ignores another question that the Hasan case brought up. How can officers get rid of doctors who don't do a good job taking care of wounded troops? As we've reported, Hasan's main supervisor at Walter Reed thought he was such a bad psychiatrist that he tried to kick him out of the program almost three years ago. He sent a scathing memo to a key medical committee. It denounced Hasan for having a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism.
Yet, higher-ups refused to take action. More than that, they gave Hasan a special fellowship, that's a plum they normally give only to their stars. And then they sent Hasan to Fort Hood to work with some of the most traumatized and vulnerable soldiers in the Army.
Daniel Zwerdling, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Haiti, search and rescue efforts continue, but it's been three days now since the earthquake struck and hopes of finding survivors are dwindling. For the last two days, the Icelandic urban search and rescue team has been hunting for signs of life in the rubble of Port-au-Prince. I spoke earlier today with team leader, Gisli Olafsson. With so many buildings in ruins, I asked him how his team decides where to start.
Mr. GISLI OLAFSSON (Team Leader, Icelandic Urban Search and Rescue Team): You try to focus on buildings where you have a lot of people potentially being in there and that there is reports of the voices coming out from underneath the rubble. Buildings like schools, hospitals, supermarkets, and government buildings where you have a lot of people working.
BLOCK: And yesterday you did have some success at a supermarket that had collapsed. Tell us about that.
Mr. OLAFSSON: Yes, yes. We spent most of yesterday working at a supermarket called the Caribbean Supermarket. And we were quite lucky and happy that we managed to get three women out of there alive. The first two we managed to get out within about an hour of getting there. The third one took quite a lot longer since she was the buried way in the middle of the building which was a four-story building that had totally collapsed. Luckily for her she had been in a space that for some miracle managed to not crush together but to keep what we call a void, which is the areas that we are mainly trying to look in because that's where survivors are.
BLOCK: It seems that there are very few teams right now on the ground doing what you're doing. And I wonder if the window has passed really where search and rescue teams can make a difference if they were to arrive now or in the next couple of days.
Mr. OLAFSSON: Well, during the first day, you know, we only have like four teams that were in operation, but the last night and yesterday afternoon and this morning, we've had a quite a number of teams to show up. So we have about 18 to 20 teams now that are actually working. We often talk about, you know, the initial few 72 hours or so that are the crucial. What really makes the difference is how the buildings are collapsing though. We talk about very often what we call a pancake collapse, which is where the floors simply line up like pancakes. And in that, that kind of a collapse there is very little possibility of finding anybody alive.
But if it's collapsing in such a way that there are voids then that time can be expended a few more days then it's more a question of how long do you survive without food and water.
BLOCK: There must be a difficult calculus that you have to use when decide it's time to leave. That you - there is no more work, no more function you can provide.
Mr. OLAFSSON: Yes. I mean, it's always hard and when we will make a decision to stop searching, which we certainly have not started talking about down here, it is a very difficult decision to make. But we do that with all the other teams that are here. So, it is based on a lot of experience from a lot of people who've gone to a lot of places like this in the past. And when they believe that there is no more chance, that's unfortunately most often true.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Olafsson, thanks for making the time to talk with us today.
Mr. OLAFSSON: Oh, you're welcome.
BLOCK: That's Gisli Olafsson. He is a team leader with the Icelandic urban search and rescue in Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In Haiti, despite aid efforts from around the world, urgent needs are still being met piecemeal. Makeshift medical clinics, most of them outdoors, are struggling to cope with the injured often with few or no medical supplies, and people trapped under rubble are being rescued by their neighbors.
NPR's Greg Allen was at a hospital in the capital, Port-au-Prince, today. He met a young woman there who was pulled from the wreckage of her home three days after the quake.
GREG ALLEN: It's a chaotic scene at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince. Patients who were being treated when the earthquake hit now line the streets and fill the park across from the hospital. They've been joined by people injured in the earthquake; many with terrible injuries are lying on the ground on blankets.
Mr. DENNIS BONNIE: (unintelligible). Be careful. Watch out.
ALLEN: Into that desperate scene today, several men came carrying a young woman partially clothed and covered in dust. They lay her down gently on a wooden pallet under a tree. Dennis Bonnie(ph) said she'd just been pulled from underneath her home's rubble.
Mr. BONNIE: They found her in the (unintelligible). They heard a voice. She cry, help, help, help, and they find her.
ALLEN: Her name is Roberta Joashim(ph). She works at Haiti's National Library and appears to be in remarkably good shape. She's weak and dazed, probably dehydrated after three and a half days trapped in her home's wreckage. She says her hand hurts and her back, but she's able to sit up and talk a little.
Ms. ROBERTA JOASHIM (Employee, Haiti National Library): (Foreign language spoken)
Mr. BONNIE: She was on the bed when the thing happened, but she doesn't understand what happened, really. And then when thinking - she was just begging - to call Jesus, Jesus, and the house collapsed.
(Foreign language spoken)
Ms. JOASHIM: (Foreign language spoken)
ALLEN: Bonnie had just arrived in the park as Joashim was brought in, but immediately pulls out a rare commodity in Port-au-Prince these days: a working cell phone.
You're calling her family?
Mr. BONNIE: Yeah. She want to say to the family she's alive.
ALLEN: Bonnie says she told him her family lives in Gonaives, a town far from Port-au-Prince and largely unaffected by the earthquake. She asks Bonnie to call her closest contact in Port-au-Prince, the pastor of her church. It's a call that's ultimately unsuccessful.
Mr. BONNIE: Yeah, but I tried to contact one of them. You see, I make a call for her, but the people she told me to call died. It's another people to take the phone. He said the pastor has died.
ALLEN: Until a few minutes ago, Dennis Bonnie, Roberta Joashim and the people who helped pull her from the rubble were all strangers. But although it's a nation of nine million people, Haiti is something like a small town where friendships and family connections matter, and where especially now nearly everyone feels a close kinship.
Bonnie stays on the phone, calling friends from Gonaives, asking them to spread the word to her family that Roberta Joashim, a young woman from the provinces, is alive.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Haitian communities far from Haiti, efforts to help are under way. Marianne McCune of member station WNYC has the story of two brothers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, who are set on returning to Haiti. McCune spent the day with them as they collected supplies.
Mr. JOSEPH PIERRE CADET: Okay, my name is Joseph-Pierre Cadet. Nickname: Haitien.
MARIANNE McCUNE: That's the French pronunciation of Haitian.
Mr. CADET: Since I was a little boy, everybody in my neighborhood in Haiti, they saw how much that I love my country so they give me that nickname Haitien.
McCUNE: Joseph-Pierre Cadet says even as a boy, he used to bring food to his neighbors' houses. He hasn't lived there since he was 14, and he's 40 now. But three years ago, he and a friend created a school and youth center in his old neighborhood. Now he wants to get back to Haiti to help the students and to find his mother whom he hasn't heard from yet.
(Soundbite of a vehicle)
Mr. CADET: Me and my brother and my friend, we're planning to travel by Monday.
McCUNE: The problem is there are no flights available. So while they wait, they're using their white construction van to drive around Brooklyn and pick up supplies to either send with an aid agency or carry themselves to Haiti.
Mr. CADET: We cannot depend all the time on people, on outsiders. What about us? Nobody going to change it for you; you have to change it.
McCUNE: They stop in a neighborhood full of wholesale supply stores to buy bottled water. They load eight cases of water into the van, next to cartons of Cup-o-Soups and juice boxes and bags of rice. And they head back to a friend's office where they'll store the stuff. When they get there, Cadet's friend Jean-Claude Denis is waiting downstairs in the wire transfer agency. And he's rattled. He says the last two people who came in to wire money each learned today they lost three family members.
Mr. JEAN-CLAUDE DENIS: That's crazy. And in some places, it's so devastated they can't even use them. They couldn't even wire money to those places yet, because nothing is functioning.
McCUNE: Outside by the van, these four ask all the Haitians who walk by how they're faring. A woman stops to write down the name of a Red Cross Web site Denis has heard about, where people can list missing family members.
Unidentified Woman: I-E-R-P.
Mr. DENIS: E-R-P, that's all.
McCUNE: Denis receives a phone call himself from his niece in Boston, with good news about some cousins.
Mr. DENIS: (Foreign language spoken)
MCCUNE: And then he spots a commotion across the street.
(Soundbite of weeping)
McCUNE: Three passers-by are trying to console a woman who has just received a call. She says her sister and her sister's three children are dead.
(Soundbite of weeping)
McCUNE: A Jamaican immigrant named Diane Joshua calls the woman's work to tell them she won't be in. But she only has the woman's first name.
Ms. DIANE JOSHUA: If you don't see someone come in today, you'll know that person - that's the person I'm talking about. It's horrible. You understand? So I just come to comfort her. It's sad. It's really, really sad.
McCUNE: The day is full of ups and downs. By phone, late in the evening, Joseph-Pierre Cadet says he did reach his mother.
Mr. CADET: When I spoke to her, the first thing she said, son, I'm alive. I'm okay. I said, Mommy, I'm glad that you're okay.
McCUNE: Now he just has to get down there to see her.
For NPR News, I'm Marianne McCune in New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Arielle Jean-Baptiste was born in Haiti. She works with the Haiti Democracy Project in Washington, D.C. And she says she's been thinking a lot in the past few days about what Haitians have lived through: years of natural disaster, political corruption, poverty and violence. All these, she says, has both strengthened and weakened the Haitian national character.
Ms. ARIELLE JEAN-BAPTISTE (Research Associate, Haiti Democracy Project): There's been resilience and resignation. They resign themselves to what they have. They don't demand accountability from their government. There's a saying in Haiti where they say, you know, God is good, and they continue their lives.
It is frustrating to watch because you say to yourself, you know, can they continue to work like that? But they've been doing that for years, for years, and you can't understand it. I've watched it. I've analyzed it myself: Why they accept everything. It's resilience. It's also the fact that we resign - myself, I don't have anything else. They have no other options. And when they don't have any other options, they deal with what they have.
I was in West Africa a couple of times. I was (unintelligible), West Africa when I was a young girl and then I went back about two years ago. The difference is that there's been progress in a lot of the countries in West Africa and Haiti has gone backward. So it is frustrating because there is a certain mindset in Haiti where they get together to get rid of a bad government, but they are unable to get themselves together to build.
But I don't think it's a complicated country to fix. I think that the last 15 years, the Haitians have watched supposedly democracy. Their lives never got better after the election, it got worse, and they've become disillusioned, even more now. And the earthquake gives the opportunity to the international community for the first time to really, really now stop putting a Band-Aid on Haiti. Okay? But it has to be a long-term project and which will make it sustainable.
We should get more involved in agro industry in Haiti and economic growth. The governance is - once people start getting money, putting their kids to school, having a better life, you can have a new generation that will be - they will ask for accountability. Okay? Money in people's pocket is what's important. If not, you have to teach them how to fish. Don't give them things. Anything that's free, people don't take seriously. They do not take seriously.
You can do free now because it's an emergency. After that, pay a dollar. They appreciate it more.
SIEGEL: That's Arielle Jean-Baptiste. She was born in Haiti. She now lives in Washington, D.C.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Haiti faces immense challenges three days after the earthquake. U.S. troops and international organizations have begun handing out food and water, but there are countless logistical difficulties. In a few minutes we'll hear more about the U.S. aid effort from the man who is coordinating it, USAID director Rajiv Shah.
BLOCK: We begin this hour with a tragic scene that's been playing out in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Desperate people are gathering at the morgue in hopes of finding the bodies of loved ones. Numbers are impossible to confirm, but according to the U.N. and Haitian officials, more than 7,000 bodies have gone through the morgue. The vast majority have been buried in a mass grave.
NPR's Carrie Kahn visited the morgue today.
CARRIE KAHN: The city's one-story morgue is full. Authorities don't even try to get all the bodies inside the small building anymore. They just stack them out on the street. The line of corpses stretches to the end of the block, then snakes around the corner.
Mr. SERAFIN RODRIGUEZ(ph): It was very first time I see such a thing like that. (unintelligible) so many people.
KAHN: Serafin Rodriguez has come to the morgue with his brother, Afran Israel (ph). They went inside trying to find their neighbor who died in the earthquake.
Mr. RODRIGUEZ: There are people all, everywhere. If you go in there, you have to lift your feet, first of all, to move, to go in.
KAHN: You have to watch where you walk, you might step on somebody.
Mr. RODRIGUEZ: Yes, yes, yes, because everybody is all around on the ground.
Mr. AFRAN ISRAEL: It's like a dream.
Mr. RODRIGUEZ: Nightmare.
KAHN: The brothers say they have to find her and give their neighbor the dignified funeral that she deserves.
Mr. ISRAEL: When you're in a society, each member in the society is very important for others, and we think that they're important for us too.
KAHN: Dozens of friends and relatives outside the morgue have the same hope for a proper funeral for their loved ones. The crowd outside stand along the wall of a nearby building - the only patch of shade in the heat of the afternoon. Many say they are trying to prepare themselves emotionally before actually stepping inside. This is the second day that Gimone Sisterain(ph) has come looking for his parents. He speaks through a translator.
Mr. GIMONE SISTERAIN: (Through translator) They come driving here. Each time they spend one hour and a half to looking for them.
KAHN: Sisterain says he won't go back in again until tomorrow. He just needs to rest first. As we are talking to him, a small crowd gathers around us hoping we can offer some help. Paol Vatney(ph) shows us a picture of her older brother. She says he was selling shoes in a small stall on the downtown streets when the earthquake struck. A building fell down and crushed him.
Ms. PAOL VATNEY: (Speaking foreign language)
KAHN: She says she's already been inside the morgue, but it was too hard to find him. She says the bodies are decomposing and people's faces have changed so much. Vivian Suslouis(ph) shakes her head. She's here looking for her husband. She says she knows it will be difficult to go inside, but she's prepared to do anything to get his body out. Suslouis says her husband was at work at the time of the quake and should be wearing his plastic covered ID. She speaks through a translator.
Ms. VIVIAN SUSLOUIS: (Through translator) His badge is only on the body where with that one it's more easier to help to find him.
KAHN: The director of Port-au-Prince's main hospital, Dr. Alex Laseg(ph), says about 7,000 bodies have come through the morgue since Tuesday. He says he's doing the best he can to properly dispose of the cadavers. He says officials came last night and took many to a mass gravesite that has been set up outside the capital.
Dr. ALEX LASEG (Hospital Director, Port-au-Prince): It was about 1,000 last night.
KAHN: One thousand last night.
Dr. LASEG: Yeah.
KAHN: Looks like you have 1,000 still there.
Dr. LASEG: Yes. I call in order they could get them.
KAHN: He says he's arranged for more trucks to come today. Relatives come up the street with whatever they can find sturdy enough to take away their loved one's body. One man shows up with a pickup truck with a wooden box in the back. Another comes to the morgue with just a wheelbarrow and a sheet. Abnier Antoine(ph) brought six men with him, many from a funeral home where he just brought a cream-colored casket for his daughter Belin(ph).
(Soundbite of crowd)
KAHN: The men struggle to hold onto the large casket and get it inside a big truck at the end of the street.
Mr. ABNIER ANTOINE: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: Antoine says his daughter was 25 and studying to be a teacher. She was at school in the classroom when the building collapsed. His eyes are full of pain and he looks exhausted.
Mr. ANTOINE: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: He says it's just too much devastation. The men place his daughter's coffin in the back of the truck and slide it all the way to the side. Antoine sighs. They then slide out another coffin from the truck, haul it out and carry it back down the street past all the dead bodies and into the morgue. Antoine had to purchase two coffins, the other one is for his nephew who also was studying at the school and died the day of the quake.
Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
We're joined now by the man named by President Obama to coordinate U.S. aid efforts in Haiti - Rajiv Shah is the new head of the Agency for International Development, or AID. He had been in his job for just five days when the earthquake hit.
Rajiv Shah, welcome back to the program.
Dr. RAJIV SHAH (Director, USAID): Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: You've said the immediate priority in Haiti has been search and rescue, but there are just a handful of U.S. search and rescue teams on the ground now as the window for finding people and saving lives closes. Why so few teams?
Dr. SHAH: Well, actually, we have 24 teams as international effort actively engaged in urban search and rescue. The United States was the first country to get a team in and, in fact, our Fairfax, Virginia team set up a operation at the airport, so that as the other teams came in, they could deploy them to different parts of Port-au-Prince and organize and coordinate the search and rescue effort.
BLOCK: Four U.S. teams you think is enough for the job at hand?
Dr. SHAH: Well, unfortunately, nothing's enough. You know, unfortunately, the window to save lives is 72 hours, and we had two teams on standby so the moment the disaster hit, those teams were deployed. The Haitian government and the United Nations have both asked that we have other teams on standby ready to go in, but they've suggested that they're at capacity.
BLOCK: You've talked about a lot of aid that's on the way to Haiti: food and water and tarps, but so far very little has actually gotten out to the people, three days now, after the earthquake. And we've heard, of course, about the bottleneck at the airport in Port-au-Prince. Can you describe the hurdles of getting the aid that's coming in out to the people quickly?
Dr. SHAH: Sure. Well, it's a very challenging logistics operation. You can think about it in a few phases. I mean, one is you have to identify and be responsive to what the requests for support are. So we've been working very closely with the Haitian government. The President of the United States spoke with the Haitian president, President Preval.
We're also coordinating deeply with partners around the world. And please remember, this is an earthquake that is the worst earthquake they've had in two centuries. And it has destroyed a tremendous amount of infrastructure. So, things we take for granted like landing large aircraft or unloading a plane and moving it so that you can land another one, because it's a very small runway and airport, and, you know, the air traffic control tower had been destroyed in the earthquake. And so traffic control had to be managed so planes didn't collide midair. There are tremendous amount of logistics just getting that in.
BLOCK: The World Food Program says they run the risk of having social unrest very soon - these are their words - unless food and water distribution centers are set up quickly. People are desperate. They're begging in the streets. They have no water and nothing to eat. Does that concern of social unrest - does that concern you as well?
Dr. SHAH: We recognize the extent of this tragedy. We really do. And that is why the president has been so focused on making sure that our response is swift and aggressive. And we are working with the World Food Program, in fact, very, very closely. We have $48 million of food assistance that we have on the way. We are today delivering meals ready to eat and daily rations. And so those are foods that don't require preparation or high-energy formulations and will be deployed through the aircraft carrier. So, we're taking significant, urgent and emergency precautions to make sure we meet food and water needs as quickly as possible.
BLOCK: Dr. Shah, I keep hearing you use the future tense. A lot of these things are things that are coming or will be coming in, and the real question for so many people right now there, of course, you've heard the voices yourself is we need it now. We needed it yesterday. We needed it two days ago.
Dr. SHAH: Yeah, these things are underway and some of these things have already taken place in terms of being delivered, though, the relief operation will steadily increase because it is tough. I mean, roads have to be cleared and the immediate mission and the immediate priority continues to be saving lives. And so we have teams working around the clock drilling through layers of concrete and saving Haitians, Americans and international citizens.
So, you know, it is an all-hands-on-deck effort. It is an aggressive effort. We are not standing by. It is something that we are trying to do with the full force and capacity that we have. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do that in partnership with the Haitian government and with the United Nations, which themselves have suffered some tragic losses through this process.
BLOCK: Dr. Shah, thank you.
Dr. SHAH: Thank you.
BLOCK: Rajiv Shah is head of USAID. He's coordinating the U.S. disaster relief response to Haiti, and he heads there tomorrow with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Congressional Democratic leaders are at the White House again today talking health care. They've been racing to get a bill finished so that the president can tout it in his State of the Union speech. But now they've got a more ominous deadline - next Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts.
NPR's Julie Rovner explains.
JULIE ROVNER: Speaking to House Democrats yesterday afternoon, President Obama said he knows the public has serious doubts about the health care bill.
President BARACK OBAMA: I see the polls. I get 40,000 letters every day and I read a stack of them each night. I catch the occasional blog post or cable clip that breathlessly declares what something means for a political party without really talking much about what it means for a country.
ROVNER: Still, most Democrats are predicting that a final bill will pass. New York's Louise Slaughter says if for no other reason than that having no bill would be even worse.
Representative LOUISE SLAUGHTER (Democrat, New York): The fact that we know we have to do it, that we're not going to get hold of this economy as long as 16 percent of it is going the way it is.
ROVNER: 16 percent of the economy going to health care, that is, and growing each year. But now there's another challenge to the health care effort. In Massachusetts, one of the most Democratic states in the country, a little known Republican, State Senator Scott Brown is in a dead heat in the race to replace the late Senator Edward Kennedy. If Brown wins next Tuesday, he's vowed to become the 41st vote needed to block the bill in the Senate. This afternoon, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denied that the Massachusetts Senate race was affecting the timetable of the negotiations.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; House Speaker): We were on this course of action anyway, because what we wanted to do is to move this legislation because I don't think American people can wait any longer.
ROVNER: Negotiators overcame a huge hurdle yesterday when they reached a deal with organized labor to scale back attacks on high cost health plans. Pelosi blessed the deal today.
Rep. PELOSI: This is something the president wants to have in the bill in principle, and he will. I think the principle is preserved, but the working families and middle class in our country will not feel the negative impact that we fear.
ROVNER: But even if negotiators do get a deal this weekend on the outlines of the bill, its cost still needs to be estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. That means a final vote could still be days or even weeks away.
Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Iraqi elections are coming up in March and while campaigning has not officially begun, political controversy has. Last week a parliamentary committee disqualified one of the most important Sunni Arab politicians from running. The committee charges he's connected to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party.
And as NPR's Quil Lawrence reports from Baghdad, that disqualification could threaten efforts at reconciliation.
QUIL LAWRENCE: Few people in Iraq have no opinion about Salih al-Mutlaq. He's a member of the parliament, a self-described Iraqi nationalist. His opponents call him an unreconstructed supporter of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. In Baghdad's al-Amil neighborhood, a Sunni Arab bastion, he's seen as a native son.
Mr. ABU SARMAD(ph): (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: For political and sectarian reasons, they don't want patriots like him in the government, says Abu Sarmad, who's loading furniture into a delivery truck. He draws a distinction between Mutlaq, who never left Iraq, and exiles, many of them Shiites, who returned with the American invasion.
Mr. SARMAD: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: The ballot box should be the judge of whether these people are true patriots says Abu Sarmad. Mutlaq is part of a coalition that may present a strong challenge to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The disqualification is pure politics, says Rafi Al-Issawi, deputy prime minister of Iraq and a leading member of the same coalition as Mutlaq.
Mr. RAFI AL-ISSAWI (Deputy Prime Minister, Iraq): Talking about the Ba'athists started to be part of their campaigning and part of the play. Some two months ago, all of them started to talk about Ba'ath.
LAWRENCE: Issawi points out that most Iraqi professionals had to join the Ba'ath Party in order to work during Saddam's rule. He claims the disqualification is not legal. Cutting out Mutlaq now after four years in parliament makes no sense, says Issawi, especially during a time when the Iraqi government is promoting reconciliation and even setting free sectarian militants, some with blood on their hands.
Mr. AL-ISSAWI: We are talking about reconciliations, release of detainees. It is not logic to release people and to disqualify others who are participant. Salih al-Mutlaq is a member in the parliament. He's head of a bloc.
LAWRENCE: Anyway, Issawi says, no one realistically thinks that the Ba'ath Party is somehow going to return to Iraq.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: But that's exactly what many Shiite politicians are warning about. Abbas al-Bayati, an MP aligned with Maliki recently went on such a tear against anyone, as he put it, who even smells like a Ba'athist, that the assembled Iraqi journalists told him to take it easy.
(Soundbite of crowd)
LAWRENCE: A chasm divides many Iraqis' views of the past. Some aligned with Salih al-Mutlaq, mostly Sunni Arabs, speak fondly of the Ba'ath system, stopping short only of praising Saddam Hussein. Among some Kurds and Shiite politicians there can be no common ground on that issue.
Mr. SADIQ AL-RIKABI (Senior Adviser, Prime Minister Maliki): What's the meaning of reconciliation? If reconciliation means Ba'ath return back, this is not acceptable.
LAWRENCE: Sadiq al-Rikabi is a senior adviser to Prime Minister Maliki. He stresses that the disqualification is a legal procedure and is now being reviewed by a panel of seven judges who will evaluate the evidence against Mutlaq. But the word Ba'ath means resurrection in Arabic. And Rikabi firmly believes that the Ba'athists are trying to come back to life in Iraq.
Mr. AL-RIKABI: Baath Party has a history of conspiracies, of mass graves, of chemical weapons. And the Iraqis do not forget this history. It is too new. It's too early for them to forget it.
LAWRENCE: Rikabi says he doesn't think Sunni Arabs will boycott the vote if Mutlaq is left out of the running. But small demonstrations have broken out in Sunni dominated cities like Mosul and Ramadi demanding that Mutlaq's name be put on the ballots. A decision by the review panel is expected soon and then there's a chance for an appeal, but that might leave very little time for campaigning before the March 7th elections.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Baghdad.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, time for your comments, and they focus on our coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, in particular one moment from yesterday's program.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
It happened during my conversation with our reporter Jason Beaubien. He was outside the Villa Creole Hotel, and Jason told us how Haitians were bringing their injured children to the hotel because they knew there were doctors staying there, and he noticed one child as he was speaking with us.
(Soundbite of previous broadcast)
JASON BEAUBIEN: There's a girl - sorry - there's a girl right in front of me at the moment. She's covered in bandages. She's laying on just some - what are they? They're from the deck chairs that would be by the pool. She's naked except for what looks like a tablecloth on top of her. She keeps lifting her head and her lips are shaking. Sorry, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's okay.
SIEGEL: I have never been more moved listening to NPR than I was today. That's from Ann Lise(ph) of East Bethel, Minnesota, and she continues: I know that as journalists you need to just report the news and stay neutral emotionally, but Jason's brutally honest reaction to the destruction around him shook me to the core.
BLOCK: Tony Eads of Oak Park, Illinois didn't like what he heard. He writes: It is utterly inappropriate to showcase a reporter's emotional response to a story. It is sensationalistic, it is unprofessional and most importantly, it is not news.
SIEGEL: But overwhelmingly we heard from listeners who were grateful for the way that Jason described what he saw. Alicia Jones(ph) of Santa Monica, California noted a contrast between her workday and what she heard on the radio. She works for Disney's Advanced Projects where she says: We figure out how to make the happiest place on earth. And yet, she continues, tonight as I got into my car, I happened upon Jason Beaubien's report about a little girl. His voice quivered as he described how her lips were trembling and in that single moment, the horrible scale of this tragedy became so human, so personal, he apologized to Melissa. No apologies, Jason, thank you, thank you for making us see.
BLOCK: And Nancy Nash of Newport, Oregon writes this about Jason's account: I respect him for expressing his compassion for that little girl, not only professionally, but as one human being to another. And I thank Jason for allowing me to be momentarily connected to that child in a way I will not soon forget.
SIEGEL: It did a rare thing - that from James Hugas(ph) of Venice, California. It brought the reality of the situation on the ground into my truck as I drove home on the freeway. Hugas continues, I've been moved this evening not just to make a donation to the Red Cross, but also to reconsider the distance I automatically place between myself and the many tragic stories we hear on the news these days.
BLOCK: We appreciate your letters about our program. You can write to us at npr.org. Just click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Countries around the world are contributing to a massive relief operation for Haiti. But despite all the goodwill, aid efforts are hampered by logjams at the airport in Port-au-Prince.
NPR's Jackie Northam has that story.
(Soundbite of airport)
JACKIE NORTHAM: The multitude of problems and frustration surrounding the earthquake relief effort in Haiti are played out at the country's largest airport in Port-au-Prince. Thousands of sick and desperate Haitians wait for a flight out. Meanwhile, supplies and aid workers have difficulty getting in, says Rebecca Gustafson, with DART, the State Department's first-response team for disasters.
Ms. REBECCA GUSTAFSON (DART, State Department): Everyone wants to give. Everyone wants to be a part of this operation. And the biggest thing that I can tell people is it is very difficult right now to get into the airport. And it's very difficult not only once you to get into the airport, but to move things out of the airport.
NORTHAM: The airport in Port-au-Prince is arguably the weak link in the massive relief effort gathering steam. Over the past few days, medical workers, drugs, search and rescue teams and communications specialists have had problems getting into this tiny airport.
Colonel Greg Kane, director of operations for the 18th Airborne Corps, says planes have been stacked several layers high all the way to Miami. He says the airport just doesn't have the capacity for this type of operation.
Colonel GREG KANE (Operations Director, 18th Airborne Corps, U.S. Army): As you can see, there's one taxiway, one runway. And any aircraft that comes in, it takes a long time to download or requires fuel will take up a parking space which will prevent another aircraft from landing.
NORTHAM: Kane says there are only about a dozen parking spaces on the runway. But he says that doesn't mean there should be logjams such as this.
Col. KANE: Back in 1994 when I was here for Restore Democracy, we had aircraft landing, taking off every three to five minutes. And that was an air bridge for 72, 96 hours.
NORTHAM: But Kane says he sees the pace is picking up slowly.
Col. KANE: C-17 is getting ready to back up. That landed right before us, so he's only been on the ground about 40 minutes. He downloaded his vehicles and his equipment pallets and he's heading out. I'm just trying to figure out where is - is that from Little Rock?
NORTHAM: One of the key problems is the control tower at the airport. Its radar and communications systems were damaged in the earthquake. The other factor, military officials quietly say, is the local authorities aren't up to the size or the pace of this operation. Earlier today, the U.S. military in agreement with the Haitian government took control of the airport operations. It's just a basic setup.
Major MATTHEW JONES (U.S. Air Force): And this is our Hard-Sided Expandable Light Air Mobile Shelter. We call it HELAMS. And this is the trailer that provides us all com capability right out of this facility.
NORTHAM: Air Force Major Matthew Jones enters a small military trailer sitting on a grass field next to the airport runway. He says all the logistics for air operations will now be run from this tiny room.
Maj. JONES: You have logistics piece is all from here. And obviously there's nothing to plug into. It's all run from satellite communications and generators for the electricity, which brings its own challenge.
NORTHAM: But Jones says the U.S. control center has the technology and the software to more easily coordinate the increasing numbers of planes, people and supplies coming into Haiti. The priority, he says, is still getting in search and rescue teams and medical workers and supplies. After that, Jones says, comes a wave of food, water and tents expected at a much faster pace than the past few days.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In a natural disaster, phone service can be almost as critical as food and water. In Haiti, phone service was damaged by the quake, but messages are still getting out.
NPR's Martin Kaste explains how.
MARTIN KASTE: One of the first outside aid groups to get to Haiti after the quake was Telecoms Sans Frontieres, or in English, Telecom Without Borders. The group's American representative, Paul Margie, says it was started a decade ago by relief workers who'd been to the war zones in the Balkans.
Mr. PAUL MARGIE (Representative, Telecom Without Borders): They would go and they carried a satphone with them. And again and again, the people wanted access to that satellite phone even more than the clothes or the food that they were bringing. And so they changed and they said, let's make an organization that focuses on the communication.
KASTE: Today in Haiti, they've set up a satphone station at the U.N.'s logistics base. Reached on that line, Binwa Chauxbrier(ph) says they've also provided portable satphones to key people.
Mr.�BINWA CHAUXBRIER: We provided the first satellite line, (unintelligible) phone number to the (unintelligible) prime minister.
KASTE: Now that they've given the prime minister a satphone, the group is planning to set up cyber cafes for regular Haitians where they could make calls and send emails via satellite, but not yet. Chauxbrier says the situation in the streets is still too desperate as people are focused on finding food and water.
Mr.�CHAUXBRIER: (unintelligible) not receiving any water.
(Soundbite of phone cut off)
KASTE: Hello? That's the other problem with satphones besides the audio quality: They'll drop you without warning. The best solution for Haiti long term is a restored commercial phone network, and there are already people working on that.
Mr.�JOHN STANTON (Chairman, Trilogy Partners): Those folks, I'm pretty sure haven't slept in at least 24 and probably 48 hours.
KASTE: John Stanton is chairman of Trilogy Partners, a U.S. company that runs a cell-phone system in Haiti called Voila. Its technicians have already reconnected the network to the outside world. The issue now is keeping local cell towers running. And here, Stanton says, Haiti's poor infrastructure has suddenly become an unexpected advantage.
Mr. STANTON: Haiti is one of the relatively few places in the world where you really can't rely on power at all, commercial power at all. So in every location we have a fuel tank.
KASTE: Those fuel tanks power generators, which means many of the cell towers are up and running right now, even as the city's electricity grid remains a shambles.
Mr.�STANTON: We've got two to three days of fuel at each site. If we can't get to that site because it's inaccessible either the roads are out, or there's too much damage if we can't get a fuel truck there, we will at some point run out of fuel.
KASTE: So right now the priority for these high-tech cell phone companies is keeping up deliveries of old-fashioned diesel. Stanton says most of his company's network is working in Port-au-Prince, and other cell-phone providers are in a similar position. The reason people are having trouble getting through, he says, is that they're overloading the system.
Mr.�STANTON: It's almost impossible to get people to take this advice, but the best thing you can do is if you get a busy signal, give it five minutes or give it 10 minutes and then dial again, rather than to continually hit the send button.
KASTE: And for those who are desperate for just some sign of life from a friend or loved one, Stanton says the most reliable method right now is text messaging. A text uses very little bandwidth and it sits patiently on the network until it has an opportunity to get through. Right now cell phone users in Port-au-Prince report that texting is their most reliable means of talking to each other and to the outside world.
Martin Kaste, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Behind all the recent drama at NBC is one man, Jeff Zucker. The NBC Universal head recently celebrated when the company was bought by Comcast. Now as NPR's David Folkenflik tells us, Zucker's future doesn't look so clear.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Jeff Zucker's rise at NBC has been meteoric. He's credited with turning the "Today Show" into a profit behemoth and NBC News into a consistent ratings leader. But in his time atop the NBC network and its primetime lineup, that's a different tale.
Zucker had promised Conan O'Brien of NBC's "Late Night" that he could take over "The Tonight Show" last year, but Jay Leno's ratings there were still strong. Zucker wanted both in the fold: O'Brien for the future, Leno for now. So he gave Leno a daily, hourlong variety show at 10 p.m. Analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Media Valuation Partners.
Mr.�LARRY GERBRANDT (Media Valuation Partners): What they did at the 10 o'clock time period was pretty much rolling the dice. It was all or nothing. Either all five nights worked or they didn't.
FOLKENFLIK: Snake eyes. Ratings were disappointing for both men, damaging not only the network's bottom line, but the profits of vital late newscasts for local NBC stations. The gamble failed. There's been a public outcry on O'Brien's behalf, and now the disarray at NBC is playing out for all to see on its airwaves. O'Brien told audiences he's trying to sell "The Tonight Show" on Craigslist, and Leno had his own response last night.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Jay Leno Show")
Mr.�JAY LENO (Television Host): As you know, there's a lot of controversy going on here at NBC. Actually, "The Tonight Show" with Conan O'Brien's ratings have gone up. They've gone up. So, you're welcome.
(Soundbite of laughter)
FOLKENFLIK: Now, in a complete reversal of programming decisions Zucker made only a few months ago, Leno is being taken out of that 10 p.m. hour and shoehorned back into that familiar 11:30 slot. But Conan O'Brien has refused to move his own show back to a start after midnight. And now Dick Ebersol, a senior NBC official, has shot back, calling O'Brien gutless in The New York Times.
James Poniewozik is the television and pop culture critic for Time magazine.
Mr.�JAMES PONIEWOZIK (Television and Pop Culture Critic, Time): Jay, they figure, will pull better ratings right now. And I think that NBC is in such a bad situation that they just do not feel they have the luxury of long-term thinking.
FOLKENFLIK: Zucker thought he had made a master stroke. Despite a big paycheck for Leno, his show was far less expensive than the dramatic, hourlong scripted series that had been a hallmark of NBC's must-see TV, shows like "E.R." and "Law & Order."
Mr.�PONIEWOZIK: I would say in Zucker's defense that he's gotten it right about some of the big picture things, about, you know: What are the problems with broadcast TV today? I think that NBC came up with what turned out to be exactly the wrong solutions to those problems.
FOLKENFLIK: Under Zucker, the network has plummeted from first to last, and the NBC brand and "The Tonight Show" aura have been damaged. Poniewozik says the network chief bears responsibility.
Mr. PONIEWOZIK: There's really no way he can disclaim it. He's been running the network in one capacity or another for about the past 10 years. You know, it had come off a decade of dominance, of greatness in the '90s, and now it is in shreds.
FOLKENFLIK: Lawyers for NBC and O'Brien are trying to work out the terms of his departure. As for Zucker, his new bosses at Comcast have said he'll continue to lead NBC after the purchase is approved by regulators.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The perpetually beleaguered sport of boxing looked like it had a dream match a month ago: Manny Pacquiao against Floyd Mayweather, Jr. in a welterweight title bout between two of the best fighters in the world. And then, in a turn of events that seems all too common in this sport, the bout imploded, apparently over the issue of drug testing.
Here to explain all this is our regular Friday sports commentator Stefan Fatsis. Hi, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: And first, tell us about the two fighters, Pacquiao and Mayweather.
FATSIS: Well, The Ring magazine ranks Pacquiao and Mayweather one and two in the world as the best boxers pound for pound. Pacquiao's a remarkable story. He's won championships at seven weight categories. He's taken on stud after stud en route to winning 50 of 55 professional fights, 38 of them by knockout. He is a legend in his homeland, the Philippines. And Mayweather hasn't lost in 40 professional fights. He is brash, loud, colorful. This would've been a great one.
SIEGEL: Sounds like an obvious matchup. What happened?
FATSIS: Well, you know, boxing is controlled by money and this was envisioned as potentially the sport's biggest payday ever. Promoters for the two fighters started negotiating in November. They agreed to stage the fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on March 13th. It was projected to draw a bigger pay-per-view audience than any fight ever. Pacquiao and Mayweather were projected to earn a payday of up to $40 million apiece, and then when it came down to the nitty-gritty of the negotiations, it all fell apart.
SIEGEL: And the nitty-gritty, somewhere near the nitty-gritty, at least, is the issue of drug testing. What's going on here?
FATSIS: Well, the backdrop here is that there was preexisting bad blood between the two sides, as there often is in boxing. Pacquiao's promoter, Bob Arum, had a nasty split from Mayweather a few years back. Mayweather's father, who it should be said is kind of a loose cannon, he had previously implied that Pacquiao had used performance-enhancing drugs. Pacquiao has never tested positive for anything.
Boxers, though, usually get past the trash talk in the name of a payday, and in contract negotiations here, though, Mayweather's side insisted on drug testing that exceeded the standards required by the state of Nevada. They wanted Olympic-style, random blood and urine testing before and after the fight.
Pacquiao's side was offended. Ultimately it sued Mayweather for defamation. They did agree for a while to blood testing up to 24 days before the fight. Mayweather wanted 14 days. The sides wouldn't budge; the fight was off.
SIEGEL: Well, was there anything to this? Did the Mayweather camp have a point about more stringent testing in boxing?
FATSIS: You know, I doubt that this was their intention, to help reform the sport or imply some more stringent standards, but it does raise some interesting issues. Boxing does not have a uniform protocol governing pre-fight medical and drug testing. That is left to the individual states or countries whose requirements vary very widely and some of them are just pretty weak.
Promoters do seem to have the legal ability to contract for additional testing, and that wouldn't be a bad thing. It would help protect fighters and their opponents not only in the case of performance-enhancing drugs but, say, preexisting brain injuries. The problem is it's boxing. Self-interest typically rules the day. Getting two sides to agree on anything is complicated, to say the least.
SIEGEL: So we don't get the big Mayweather-Pacquiao bout. What do we get instead?
FATSIS: Well, incredibly, we get both of them fighting on March 13th against other boxers. You know, only in boxing would something like this happen. Pacquiao is going to take on Joshua Clottey in the big, new Dallas Cowboys football stadium. Mayweather is going to fight an unnamed opponent in Las Vegas, which means that instead of meeting for a title and a record pay-per-view payday, they're going to compete with each other for fan attention. Boxing can't be surprised that mixed martial arts is eating into its audience. It's stuff like this that just turns fans off.
SIEGEL: Will bouts like the ones you're describing, will they actually out-draw mixed martial arts on television?
FATSIS: Yeah, it depends. I mean, mixed martial arts has had bouts of well over a million pay-per-view buys. And one of the reasons that ultimate fighting, which is the main organizer of mixed martial arts is growing is that there's a central body. They cut sponsorship deals. They keep all the fighters in one camp. And boxing does feel threatened.
Back in September, Bob Arum, the Pacquiao promoter, derided the Ultimate Fighting as a bunch of skinhead white guys watching people in the ring who also look like skinhead white guys - and that was before he made a homophobic slur about the sport. That to me is just the first cry of a wounded animal.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.
FATSIS: Thanks a lot, Robert.
SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis, who joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports. And you can hear him some more on slate.com's sports podcast Hang Up and Listen.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The world has geared up to respond full force to Haiti's earthquake disaster. Now, a top priority for disaster specialists is to keep the humanitarian works from gumming up. In particular, they're worried right now about what might be called medical relief gridlock.
NPR's Richard Knox has this report.
RICHARD KNOX: Most of the hospitals in Port-au-Prince have been smashed beyond use. And there are tens of thousands of earthquake victims who urgently need surgery and hospital care, so it's natural that governments and humanitarian agencies around the world are rushing sophisticated pre-packaged field hospitals into the earthquake zone.
But the United Nations today said: Please stop. This is Elisabeth Byrs of the UN.
Ms. ELISABETH BYRS (Spokeswoman for the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs): There are enough mobile hospitals in the pipeline, either on their way to ATO(ph), being sent for the future. So I said, for the moment, please send something else.
KNOX: Byrs is a spokeswoman for an agency called OCHA, the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She says Port-au-Prince is in danger of being overwhelmed by field hospitals.
Ms. BYRS: You have three mobile hospital had been sent by Belgium, a huge one by Israel, another one by Russia.
KNOX: Not to mention others from the Scandinavian countries, from France, Nicaragua and Argentina. Medical disaster specialists learned their lesson about this kind of thing five years ago after the tsunami hit Indonesia.
Ms. BYRS: During the tsunami crisis, aid was pouring from everywhere. You had too many of this and not enough of that. We need to avoid gaps and duplication and not waste the money of the donors.
KNOX: There's a real possibility of field hospitals piling up at the Port-au-Prince airport. Paul Garwood is with the World Health Organization in Geneva.
Mr. PAUL GARWOOD (Communications Officer, World Health Organization Health Action in Crises, Geneva): A field hospital, basically, is a big thing to have to bring into the country then to deliver on, you know, broken up roads, single-lane roads, through heavily earthquake-ravaged area.
It's this kind of realities, practical reality on the ground that spread to the - being this decision that from now on there's no need for field hospitals.
KNOX: What Haiti really needs is more nurses and surgeons especially those who specialize in crush injuries. Many of Haiti's medical personnel were killed Tuesday evening. Medical teams from all over the world are trying to get into Haiti, but there's still a traffic jam at the Port-au-Prince airport, which has only one runway.
A large contingent of U.S. government relief personnel appears to be stranded for a second night on the Turks and Caicos Islands, 150 miles north of Haiti. Wendy Nesheim(ph) is a nurse in that group. She's acting team commander of a disaster assistance team from Georgia.
Ms. WENDY NESHEIM (Nurse): Everybody is ready to go. Our bags have long since been packed and we want to hit the road and go to where we need to, where we can deliver medical care.
KNOX: Veterans say disaster relief always has this kind of hurry up and wait situation, but this one is particularly agonizing.
Richard Knox, NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Britain's shivering through its coldest winter weather in 30 years. The Chinese capital of Beijing had its biggest one-day snowfall since 1951 and much of the U.S. is thawing out from an almost month-long freeze. But in one unexpected place, it's downright balmy - at least relatively speaking - and that place is the North Pole.
It turns out parts of the Arctic are 10 to 15 degrees warmer than they should be at this time of year. So, what's behind the unusual weather?
Mr. MARK SERREZE (Director, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado at Boulder): Well, I think it's all about the Arctic Oscillation.
RAZ: That's Mark Serreze. He is the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
And he joins me from Boulder. Welcome to the program.
Mr. SERREZE: Well, thank you for having me.
RAZ: And I understand that center is where the frozen are chosen.
Mr. SERREZE: That's right. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, where the frozen are chosen.
RAZ: Where the frozen are chosen, okay. So, now that we've uncovered the culprit behind all this extra cold weather, explain what exactly Arctic Oscillation is.
Mr. SERREZE: Well, if we look at the weather patterns over the Northern Hemisphere as a whole, sometimes we find that the surface pressure, the amount of atmospheric pressure we have, is a little lower in the Arctic than it is in the middle latitudes. And then sometimes it shifts, so the Arctic get a little more and the mid-latitudes get a little less.
Well, that shift in atmospheric mass or pressure is really how we define the Arctic Oscillation. But the interesting thing is, is that the shift in pressure are associated with changes in weather that really reverberate throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
RAZ: I'm sure, as you've seen, there have been some sort of climate change -let's call them skeptics - sort of suggesting that this proves climate change. Does it have anything to do with it?
Mr. SERREZE: Well, what we're seeing here has nothing to do with global warming. What we're seeing is crazy weather. At the very same time that we've seen these areas in the middle latitudes with subzero temperatures and big snow storms, the Arctic has been much, much warmer than normal.
RAZ: Now, in December, the Arctic Oscillation went into what's called an extreme negative phase. Is that rare?
Mr. SERREZE: Well, what we've seen this December was certainly exceedingly rare. It would be like if you had a deck of cards and you told someone, well, I'm going to pull the ace of spades out of here and you actually did it, right? Well, having us going through this extreme negative mode is even more rare than something like that.
RAZ: Now, if the Arctic was much warmer over the past few weeks, does that affect the sea ice? I mean, presumably it means that the sea ice will melt more quickly?
Mr. SERREZE: On the one hand, with this extreme phase of the Arctic Oscillation, the Arctic has been very, very warm. That means less ice grows in the winter. On the other hand, the changing pattern of wind means that less ice in the Arctic gets transported out of the Arctic into the North Atlantic where it would melt. So the Arctic kind of holds on to the ice that it has. So, you have these competing effects and who is going to win? We'll probably have the answers of that, say, some time in April. We don't know right now.
RAZ: I mean, do you have a sense of what this might mean for the Arctic and the summer ice melt?
Mr. SERREZE: I think it's going to have an overall negative effect. If you look at the extent of Arctic sea ice and compare it with normal, we're already about a million square kilometers in the hole. In other words, a million square kilometers below average. So, it's not like the ice is really recovering from this.
But we'll see what happens in the spring. The real fascination with climate science is that it's a lot that we do understand, but there's a lot that we still don't.
RAZ: That's Mark Serreze. He is the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Mark Serreze, thanks so much for joining us.
Mr. SERREZE: It's my pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
And as Mark Serreze just said, this winter's Arctic warming isn't related to long-term climate change. But to science writer Alun Anderson, the big picture trend is clear; the Arctic sea ice will eventually disappear. And he's written a book about it. It's called "After the Ice." And Alun Anderson joins me from London.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. ALUN ANDERSON (Author, "After the Ice"): Thank you.
RAZ: You say that climate change is more acute in the Arctic than anywhere else, that it's sort of the canary in the coal mine. Give us an example of what you mean.
Mr. ANDERSON: Well, that's exactly right. And we know that by the fact that the ice there is disappearing so rapidly. You know, every summer now the ice is vanishing from the Arctic at a speed we would never have even thought of a couple of decades ago.
RAZ: You describe something in your book, what you call the Arctic revenge, something that will...
Mr. ANDERSON: Yes.
RAZ: ...affect us living below the Arctic, I presume at some point.
Mr. ANDERSON: Once the tundra that rims the Arctic starts to thaw, what we'll see is greenhouse gases pouring out of that tundra. Already in the warmer points around the Arctic, you'll see very odd bubblings in a lake. What you can do if you're fairly adventurous is reach out over that little pond and light a match above that bubbling and you'll just get a poof of flame.
That is methane bubbling out of lakes as they thaw and microorganisms start to be able to digest basically the humus, the rotten material at the bottom of the lake.
Elsewhere, frozen ground is bubbling out carbon dioxide. These are powerful greenhouse gases. As time goes by, the more it thaws, the more it will pour out, the more the Earth will warm. That's number one. But there are a couple of other things it's got in mind for you too.
RAZ: A couple of other things?
Mr. ANDERSON: There's the well-known one, of course, of sea level rise. Sitting on top of Greenland is a vast icecap. As that melts away, it pours back into the sea and raises sea levels worldwide. If the whole thing melts, sea level rise will be about 23 feet around the world.
RAZ: That's not going to happen overnight, right? I mean, this isn't something that's going to happen in our lifetime?
Mr. ANDERSON: No. It would take hundreds, probably thousands of years for all the ice to melt. But once it really gets going, it will become unstoppable.
RAZ: And the consequences beyond rising sea levels are changes in the weather, for example?
Mr. ANDERSON: Yes. The wider changes will be changes in the weather and so on. But, you know, for the people of the Arctic and the animals that live in the Arctic, I think we've run out of time because the ice they depend on is going. The ice that sits on top of Greenland, not the sea ice, is a little bit different. We have more chance to save that quite definitely. But the ice that fills that ocean is going, and I don't think now that we're able to stop it.
RAZ: How long will it take, based on your estimate, before we reach a point where there is no longer any ice in the Arctic in the summertime?
Mr. ANDERSON: The very earliest estimates are 2013. Other estimates are 2050. But a broad consensus among scientists seems to be 2030 now.
RAZ: Alun Anderson, what will the Arctic look like in the summertime by the middle of this century?
Mr. ANDERSON: Well, it'll be a mostly open sea. And for me, I guess, the biggest shock is, you know, I always think of the polar bears when I think of the Arctic. It just comes automatically. The polar bear is the king of the Arctic, the top predator. It'll be gone. And in its place, we will see killer whales. The killer whale will be the new top predator of the Arctic. A killer whale living in open water will be the symbol of the Arctic, you know, replacing a bear on ice. And that's an astonishing change.
RAZ: Describe for me some of the people that you encountered living above the Arctic Circle. I mean, about half of the people who live in the Arctic Circle are members of an indigenous tribe and the other half - primarily in Russia, as you describe - are people who sort of settled in the area.
Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah. Well, my very first visit to the Arctic was when I landed at a place called Grise Fiord in the very, very northern part of Canada. And there, I was really shocked, because walking on the beach I saw seals that had been hunted, other seals that had been cut up. There was the head of a narwhal with its pointed lance - the one that inspired the myth of the unicorn -sitting there.
This was a real hunting community. And for me, used to shopping in a supermarket, I was just stunned. But a few months later when I understood how the Arctic worked, I did go out hunting seal with some Inuit people and got to have a feel of how they felt and how they lived.
RAZ: And in your book you make the argument that it's not hunting of seals or of the narwhal or the polar bears that is threatening the Arctic but it is human behavior in most of the rest of the world that is destroying the Arctic.
Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, of course. It's the warming that we are generating by filling the air with greenhouse gases that's really hammering the Arctic now. And I have to say it's the third time for them up there. The first wave of southerners were whalers who slaughtered huge numbers of whales and made it very difficult for them to live there. The second wave was air pollution going up south and poisoning the ice, and now we're doing it again with global warming. So, they've had it pretty tough from us southerners.
RAZ: I want to ask you about the politics of the Arctic.
Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah.
RAZ: Because as you write, there are actually serious national security implications for the ice melt, for what's going on in the Arctic, particularly with respect, for example, to U.S.-Russia relations. I mean, there are disputes over who owns what the closer you get to the North Pole, right?
Mr. ANDERSON: Absolutely. You can't claim the actual water, the fish or any sort of territorial right, but you can get everything that's on the sea bottom, which means oil, gas, possibly minerals. So, that's what everybody's after, the rights to those.
I think a very serious problem is developing. As the ice is turning to water, the area becomes much more accessible. As it becomes accessible, you need to be able to police and patrol it. And nobody has the capacity to police and patrol it at the moment.
RAZ: What needs to happen from a policy perspective in your view right now to preserve the Arctic?
Mr. ANDERSON: Two big things. The first is, don't put any more stresses on the Arctic. So, strict regulation on drilling for oil, any ships trying to go through the Arctic, you know, good search and rescue - if there ever were an oil spill let's make sure we could deal with it quickly - so, and let's not do anything else that's going to mess up the Arctic. Control that in a moment. We don't have the rules, the regulations, and we don't have the ships, the planes to look after the place.
And the second thing is, of course, to try to tackle global warming and cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions. And the faster we can do that the better.
RAZ: That's Alun Anderson. He is the former editor-in-chief of New Scientist magazine and the author of the book, "After the Ice: Life, Death and Geopolitics in a New Arctic."
Alun Anderson, thank you very much.
Mr. ANDERSON: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Returning now to the main story we've been following today. The Obama administration is walking a diplomatic tightrope in Haiti, pouring in as much money and support as possible without making it appear as if the U.S. is taking over that country.
NPR's Michele Kelemen has the story.
MICHELE KELEMEN: With U.S. military assets and aid flowing into Haiti and the U.S. Southern Command taking charge of the airport, State Department officials went out of their way this past week to make clear that the U.S. is working with the local government, not supplanting it.
Cheryl Mills, who runs the Haiti task force at the State Department, says the U.S. wants to be a good partner.
Ms. CHERYL MILLS (Counselor, U.S. Department of State): That spirit is the spirit in which people are arriving today. They are not looking in any way to be anything other than a partner to Haiti and ensure Haiti's long-term sustainability and success. And we know that in order to do that well, we can only do that in partnership. We cannot do that by taking over.
KELEMEN: But while U.S. officials say they've stayed in close contact with the Haitian government, many government buildings, including the presidential palace, have collapsed.
And as Mills acknowledged, Haitian police haven't been showing up to work.
Ms. MILLS: Obviously, they've suffered a tremendous trauma themselves. They've no doubt lost family and others. And so, just as any of us in a situation like that would be searching for our families, they, too, are doing that. And I think that is something that is completely human.
KELEMEN: Mills stopped short of saying the U.S. troops on the ground would step in and replace them. She said the U.S. military is there to meet humanitarian needs and to back up the Brazilian-led United Nation's peacekeeping force.
Bob Perito, who runs the Haiti program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says that's what the U.S. should be doing.
Mr. BOB PERITO (Senior Program Officer, U.S. Institute of Peace): The U.N. has the authority under Security Council Resolutions for Haiti, for Haiti's future and for Haiti's recovery. And I don't think that it would be in the U.S. interest to supersede that authority because we have capacities that other people don't have and that the U.N. doesn't have. We want to be helpful, but I don't think that it's really in the U.S. interest to be seen to be taking over.
KELEMEN: Perito says the U.S. and its partners also need to make sure that they're helping rebuild the government's capacity and not just relying on non-governmental groups to provide services to Haitians.
Perito said that was a topic of a panel in Washington even before the earthquake struck.
Mr. PERITO: Is Haiti really the Republic of NGOs, which is often its nickname? You know, they're about 6,000 NGOs that were working in Haiti and Haiti has very weak institutions. And a lot of the public services that you'd expect to have the government provide, in Haiti are provided by non-governmental organizations - the education, health.
KELEMEN: The new administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Rajiv Shah, says one of his goals in Haiti is to help the government become more effective. He said Haiti's health minister just asked the U.S. to help develop a hospital network in Port-au-Prince. He said for now, he is sending in disaster medical teams.
Dr. RAJIV SHAH (Director, United States Agency for International Development): And those teams will be placed in the physical sites where the health ministry would like to begin to develop the infrastructure for a longer term and more sustainable health services provision sector. So that's just one example, but that is the way we hope to work in partnership and in responsiveness to requests from the Haitian government.
KELEMEN: So even as the U.S. brings in more food, water and medical supplies, he says, it's also thinking about the long-term.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
President BARACK OBAMA: At this moment, we're moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history, to save lives and to deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe.
RAZ: That's President Obama just hours ago, announcing that his two predecessors will spearhead a campaign to raise money for Haiti.
This hour, we'll get the latest from Haiti and hear the story of how one American, Rick Santos, survived buried under the rubble.
Mr. RICK SANTOS (President and CEO, IMA World Health): And then that evening was really tough. I mean, the space was starting to actually contract a little bit as the rubble was starting to kind of settle the room - the compartment we were in actually was getting smaller and try to make it through. It was just a very hard night.
RAZ: For the first time since he took the oath of office, President Obama was flanked by former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The White House has now set up a fund where you can contribute. The Web site is clintonbushhaitifund.org.
Pres. OBAMA: As the scope of the destruction became apparent, I spoke to each of these gentlemen, and they each asked the same simple question, how can I help?
Mr. BILL CLINTON (Former United States President): I have no words to say what I feel like. When you - I was in those hotels that collapsed. I had meals with people who are dead.
Mr. GEORGE W. BUSH (Former United States President): I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water, just send your cash.
RAZ: Presidents Obama, Clinton and Bush at the White House today. Haiti's interior minister says 50,000 bodies have already been collected across the country. Tens of thousands more may be buried under the debris landscape that is now Port-au-Prince. The government has now handed over control of the country's main airport to the U.S. military in order to handle the number of aid flights coming in.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived to that airport this afternoon carrying relief supplies.
We begin our coverage with NPR's Carrie Kahn, who's at the airport in Port-au-Prince.
And, Carrie, what is Secretary Clinton planning to offer right away?
CARRIE KAHN: Well, she brought some nominal supplies with her on the C-130 that she flew in from Washington, D.C. She brought about a hundred cases of water and some MREs for the Haitian people, and she also brought some supplies for the U.S. embassy staff.
But what they're talking about is the real guts, the logistical needs that Haiti has and she's talking with the president and asking him exactly what it is. She says the military is prepared to clear up as many bottlenecks as they can and do whatever they need to do.
I think one of the big concerns is the airport and also a seaport so that they can bring in heavy equipment and more equipment faster, because the airport here has just one single small runway...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
KAHN: ...and it gets crowded quick and the traffic piles up quick.
RAZ: All right, Carrie, and I understand that the U.S. military is now in charge of the airport in Port-au-Prince. Is it clear that the U.S. military is there in charge?
KAHN: Yes, it is very clear that they're in charge. Planes are landing quicker and taking off quicker. The runway is not as chaotic as it has been. There seems to be a lot of order.
I did talk to a couple pilots today, some from the Dominican Republic who had just brought in some doctors from all over the world to help out, and they were just saying they were so much more at ease and it wasn't as dangerous as it had been in previous days and things seemed to be running more smoothly. And you can see that.
You can hear loudly, I'm sure, planes taking off and landing every five, 10 minutes here.
RAZ: So there's a clear sense that supplies are now coming in more quickly.
KAHN: I saw some amazing cargo planes come in, park, UN trucks pulled up, soldiers popped out of the back of the cargo planes and just started loading up to the U.N. trucks. And the U.N. trucks were out of the airport. I can't tell you what happened once they got past the gates of the airport. That's where a lot of the problems are now.
I spoke to a USAID worker who said that they feel like they're getting the airport under control. Now, they got to get all the aid out into the streets.
RAZ: Carrie, with respect to recovery efforts, are you seeing major recovery efforts all over the city?
KAHN: I can tell you, Guy, yesterday, I saw one giant Caterpillar front loader truck. I saw one. Today, we saw this flotilla dump trucks coming through the city. It can't even measure up to the immense job ahead for the Haitian people, but at least you see it. You didn't see it for the first three days, and I'm sure that just gives everybody more anxiety, more desperation when you see nothing.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
KAHN: At least you're seeing something.
RAZ: And is there a sense that the supplies and that food are actually being distributed fairly quickly?
KAHN: That's their logistical problem now. I asked the U.S. ambassador to Haiti what is your bottleneck problem now, and he said getting the aid to those distribution centers and then getting the aid to the people. They're getting it done. It's happening, but not nearly as quick as the people need it.
RAZ: What about the fear of violence? There has been some concern, I understand, by Haitian officials that there could be riots.
KAHN: I haven't seen any of that so far. What I did see are very tense situations. I can tell you that the gas stations, it is scary. There is screaming, yelling, pushing, long lines. There isn't enough gas. And people can't get where they need to go. They can't do anything. And so, that increases the frustration level.
RAZ: That's NPR's Carrie Kahn in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Carrie, thanks so much and stay safe.
KAHN: You're welcome.
GUY RAZ, host:
Rick Santos was in Port-au-Prince Tuesday night when the earthquake struck. He was in Haiti to meet with officials from the Health Ministry. Santos heads up IMA World Health. It's a nonprofit that works in the developing world to provide free health care services.
On Tuesday, after an all-day meeting at the Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Santos and his colleagues decided to go for dinner. And just as they started to make their way through the lobby of that hotel, the shaking began.
Mr. RICK SANTOS (President and CEO, IMA World Health): And I looked up at the chandelier and it moved, and literally the next thing I know everything came down, just completely crashing on us.
RAZ: It happened that fast?
Mr. SANTOS: It happened that fast. I would say three seconds, maybe five at the most.
RAZ: And what was the next thing you remembered?
Mr. SANTOS: I just remember just kind of being thrown on the ground and just hard to breathe. There was just dust everywhere. Then I immediately just started looking for my colleagues to see where they were. And we were all in a small area, you know, approximately 8-foot-by-5-foot. If we had been anyplace else, we would've been crushed.
RAZ: So you were surrounded by beams on all sides of you. And presumably, it was dark. You couldn't see well.
Mr. SANTOS: Pitch black. I mean, you couldn't put your hand in front of your face. And I think after we made sure that everyone was alive, we realized two of our colleagues were injured. They were being pinned down by some debris on their legs. And we had cell phones. We had iPhones and BlackBerries, and we click them on and you could then see. I mean, it was pretty much enough light to eliminate nearly the whole space.
RAZ: And you had no food or no water.
Mr. SANTOS: No food, no water.
RAZ: But I read that you actually carried lollipops with you. You had a lollipop.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SANTOS: Yeah. You know, I have two young sons, four and a half and 3. And so, in my computer bag, I always would carry a couple - well, this time it was only one. But, you know, if my son needs motivation to, you know, to do something else or, you know, you - the lollipop is always a good incentive. So I had one in my bag, and really, that was it.
RAZ: And you passed it around and...
Mr. SANTOS: Passed it around.
RAZ: ...shared it with the colleagues that you could reach.
Mr. SANTOS: That's right.
RAZ: You were - of course, you were stuck for about 50 hours. When did you first see signs that a rescue effort was underway?
Mr. SANTOS: Actually, the very first morning we heard somebody with a sledgehammer kind of systematically pounding on the roof looking for pockets and we just - we were starting to scream and to shout. It was probably around -let's see, it was light - maybe at six or seven. It was probably around 9 o'clock that this happened. And I think we were just elated, just completed elated that somebody had already found us. And they were French speaking.
We think they were Haitian. And they basically - they just said, okay, we hear you. How many are you? And are you hurt? So we yelled to the person, there's eight of us and we're hurt. And then nothing for the rest of the day. And I think that night, we were pretty down.
I mean, we were just like, why didn't they come back or why didn't they just at least come back to tell us we've heard you, we're coming or anything? It just -they just left and we heard nothing else.
RAZ: So you were there for two nights. And then, finally, sort of it seemed as if all hope was lost, you actually heard rescue workers again.
Mr. SANTOS: Yes.
RAZ: And what happened?
Mr. SANTOS: Complete jubilation. I mean, just - I think all of us just then at that moment knew we are going to be saved. And we all - I think everyone of us cried. And, you know, people say, you know, that was a really long hour or long four hours. Those were the shortest four hours of my life.
RAZ: The four hours it took for them to remove the rubble to...
Mr. SANTOS: Yes.
RAZ: ...pull you out.
RAZ: Yeah. And actually, it wasn't as simple even to pull us out. I mean, it wasn't - you know, originally, when I thought that what they would to do is try to cut up as much, and we would kind of walk out, in a sense. But really, I was actually dragged by my feet through about two feet of the barrier that had been encapsulating me. And so, they pulled me out once and then I went through another barrier. And we were only, you know, I would say, you know, maybe five yards at the most from the outside. And...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. SANTOS: ...then they carried me in a stretcher kind of up through some more rubble and down through some more rubble. It was just - I was just shocked by how much just concrete was just encapsulating an area that was basically had been previously been open.
RAZ: And can you describe what you saw once you were pulled out of the rubble?
Mr. SANTOS: The level of devastation was incredible. When I was rescued and we were driving down to the embassy, there's groups of people lying in the road sleeping, either afraid to go back into their dwelling because of the aftershocks or because their dwellings were no longer usable. You could see that as we drove down the streets. It was just - there's just so much need there.
It's - and Haiti needs - I mean, they need that. This emergency phase, they really need people to come in and do as much as they can, but also prepare for the next phase. I mean, Haiti has to go through a - the next phase is basically reconstruction and then recovery.
And my hope and my concern is that, you know, there's so much attention to Haiti right, but really, this process that they're beginning again will take years. And that we need to be committed, that the international community needs to be committed for the long-term to really helping Haiti.
RAZ: That's Rick Santos. He is the president IMA World Health and a survivor of Haiti's earthquake. He's now safe at home, back with his family.
Rick Santos, we're so glad you're safe. Thank you.
Mr. SANTOS: Guy, thank you very much.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
And all of us this week have been watching the tragic scenes in Haiti and a reminder of how a moment, a few seconds can bring so much misery.
President RENE PREVAL (Haiti): It's incredible. You have to see it to believe it.
Mr. FELIX AUGUSTIN (Consul General, Haiti): We need people in the medical field to go down to Haiti as soon as they can.
President BARACK OBAMA: To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: That was President Obama this past week. And earlier, Haitian President Rene Preval and the Consul General Felix Augustin.
James Fallows joins me, as he does most Saturdays, for a look past the headlines.
Jim, good to talk to you.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, "The Atlantic Monthly"): Nice to speak with you, Guy.
RAZ: First, Jim, of course, to Haiti and a country that was already facing deprivation on a colossal scale before the earthquake, now seems to be teetering on the edge of total collapse.
Mr. FALLOWS: I think the first way in which we all have to respond is this just is a human disaster of a scale, I think, few of us can remember. I was looking the most recent figures coming out of Haiti, and if they turn out to be tragically true, it would be on a proportional scale as if every single person in the state of Louisiana had drowned during Hurricane Katrina.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FALLOWS: Of course, now, the world and the United States are trying to respond. It made me think of William James' famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he argued that the worst in human experience - war and catastrophe - often brought out the best in human generosity. And he said, wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to have the good part of human nature without the disaster? And that's a thought we have now, too.
RAZ: Indeed, yeah. Jim, of course, there was some other news this past week. And I want to ask you about a story that seems to have left the Chinese government speechless, for the moment at least, that Google, which has been frustrated with privacy issues and government censorship, might just pull out of its biggest potential market in the world.
Mr. FALLOWS: We could talk for an hour about it. But I think there's two elements worth stressing right at the moment. One is the fascinatingly divided reaction within China itself, where there has been some predictable nationalistic reaction, especially by the young netizens, as they're called, saying, Google, good riddance. You couldn't make it here anyway, et cetera, et cetera.
But at the same time, a number of Chinese people have acted mournful and shocked. And it's not so much that this will really make any difference in the information they can get because there are ways to escape the Great Firewall. But symbolically, this seems like a step away from cosmopolitanism, which many people in China want. So that's one thing.
The other is the fact the Chinese government has been essentially silent about this since Google announced this decision. I think that's partly because the Chinese government is known to be fairly weak in immediate crisis management, but also because I think there's now thinking on all sides about whether some accommodation can be worked out to meet all parties' needs and keep Google there.
RAZ: Jim, onto a story that in an ordinary week would get massive coverage. It's been largely obscured by the tragedy in Haiti. But the chiefs of the largest banks testified on Capitol Hill this past week. It's bonus season. Huge bonuses are being doled out. And this week, JPMorgan reported a record profit this past quarter.
Mr. FALLOWS: You know, there was a clich� I loved last year or, what, a year and a half ago as this crisis was deepening where people would say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. FALLOWS: And I think there's increasingly the possibility the crisis that nearly brought the world economy down over the last year and a half maybe wasted in the sense of reform.
While things were falling apart, I had this fascinating interview in China with a man named Gao Xiqing, who essentially is China's money master for the U.S. He invests China's money in the U.S. And he was giving the diagnosis, which seemed very similar to the U.S. diagnosis. The problem was, too much debt, too much money on Wall Street, too much speculation, too little regulation.
And as we come out of the crisis, it looks as if we're surviving it with none of those problems addressed except the too much debt part. But disproportionate payoffs and Wall Street, that is an issue. And I think it's interesting that the administration is trying both symbolically and in substance to address that in some way.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. Well, finally, Jim, to the special election in Massachusetts to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. This was initially written off by Republicans. I mean, Massachusetts, being one of the most liberal states in the union, now it seems the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, might just have a chance to win.
Mr. FALLOWS: This really is almost incredible. The reason we'll all be watching our TVs on Tuesday night to see how this turns out is that our democracy, with its hundreds of years of history, turns out to depend on these really odd and idiosyncratic circumstances of how this bi-election in Massachusetts is going to go, like the butterfly ballots 10 years ago. So I'll be watching, as I assume you will be, too.
RAZ: Indeed. That's our news analyst, "The Atlantic's" James Fallows. You can catch all his latest musings at his blog. That's jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.
Jim, thanks so much.
Mr. FALLOWS: My pleasure, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
The U.S. military is so focused on protecting America from foreign enemies that it misses internal threats like Nidal Hasan. That's the conclusion of the Pentagon's investigation into the Fort Hood shootings that was released yesterday.
Hasan, of course, is the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others in November.
NPR's Daniel Zwerdling has read the report cover to cover, and he joins me now.
Hi, Danny.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Hi, Guy.
RAZ: Danny, soon after the shooting, you broke the story that Hasan's supervisors were worrying about him for years before he went to Fort Hood. Some of them were wondering if he might even be psychotic and yet...
ZWERDLING: That's right.
RAZ: ...no one did anything about it. So what has the report concluded about what went wrong?
ZWERDLING: The report actually is a little disappointing in that respect because a lot of people thought it was going to be some sort of roadmap that said who knew what, who failed to take action, why. And the report does not discuss anything about the Hasan case specifically.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said yesterday that because it's still a criminal investigation, they couldn't have specifics. But as a result, the report is simply a very general roadmap that says, look, from now on, the military needs policies that tell people very precisely, if you see this kind of behavior and you're worried because this person seems to be emotionally unstable, or is acting in a weird way, here's how you should report it.
RAZ: Now, I'm wondering, Danny, isn't there some kind of regulation in the military that says, you know, if you see a service member who - he is sort of behaving in a potentially harmful way, you've got to report it?
ZWERDLING: I would think so, and I've asked many, many people in the military about this and everybody has said I don't know of a single regulation like that. And if there is a regulation like that, it means that it's so buried that nobody knows about it.
I kept asking people, so, why didn't the supervisors who were so upset about Hasan, why didn't they act? And here's what the sources I've talked to say. They said there were a number of reasons.
First of all, remember that Walter Reed and the Military Medical University, where Hasan was training and working, these are teaching institutions.
RAZ: Mmm. Right.
ZWERDLING: And the supervisors who are so upset about him kept saying, well, instead of reporting him to somebody, we should just be trying to help him do better. You know, help him have clearer thinking, help him behave more professionally.
They also kept soul searching, I'm told, because they were worried that they were overreacting to him and judging him because they didn't like his seemingly extremist Islamic views. I asked a few people, so, why didn't Hasan's supervisors, though, at least refer him to a psychiatric evaluation?
RAZ: Right. Right.
ZWERDLING: After all, they're all psychiatrists. And people were just sort of blank. They said, that's a good question.
RAZ: You know, Danny, there seems to be two issues here. I mean, one of course, is whether there were enough warning signs that this guy could be a threat, Nidal Hasan. But the second issue I'm wondering about is why did Army officials keep promoting and assigning the psychiatrist, who supervisors had so many problems with him?
ZWERDLING: You know, actually, almost everybody I've talked to in the medical field in the military says that is probably the most important issue in this case, which so far the Pentagon report has ignored.
There is a part of the report - it hasn't been made public, which is - which Secretary Gates sent to the Army, which apparently does detail who knew what, when and what did they do or not do, and it recommends to the Army secretary that he discipline a bunch of supervisors. But we don't know what discipline means. We don't know who those names are. And, again, the big question is still unanswered: why did the Army assign such a troubled psychiatrist to treat its wounded soldiers?
RAZ: That's NPR's Daniel Zwerdling. Danny, thanks so much.
ZWERDLING: Guy, thanks.
GUY RAZ, host:
On the NBC comedy "30 Rock," a network executive, played by Alec Baldwin, is constantly coming up with schemes to make NBC profitable. Now, one of them is Seinfeld Vision. The idea is to insert a computer-generated animation of Jerry Seinfeld into every one of the network's primetime shows.
(Soundbite of TV show, "30 Rock")
Mr. JERRY SEINFELD (Actor, Comedian): (as himself) Is that really your pitch?
Mr. ALEC BALDWIN (Actor): (as Jack Donaghy) Okay. I get it. This is a two-way street. All right, Jerry, what NBC shows do you want to be digitally inserted into?
Mr. SEINFELD: (as himself) I like "Lost." Is that you guys?
Mr. BALDWIN: (as Jack Donaghy) Jerry, don't be difficult. The fact of the matter is that Seinfeld Vision is perfectly legal and there's nothing you can do to stop us. I'm sorry, but it's business.
RAZ: Now, the real NBC isn't quite desperate enough to try Seinfeld Vision - at least yet - but network President Jeff Zucker has been taking a lot of heat this week for the failure of his big programming innovation - that was moving Jay Leno into primetime last September and now out of it again.
But in at least one classroom at Harvard Business School, Zucker's move has drawn praise. I caught up with Professor Felix Oberholzer and he explained why.
Professor FELIX OBERHOLZER (Business Administration, Harvard Business School): The logic for creating a slot for comedy in primetime I think was impeccable for a business point of view. To fill that slot in primetime with a drama would cost NBC roughly $300 million a year. If comedy does well in this particular slot, the cost of producing "The Jay Leno Show" at primetime is roughly a third of that.
RAZ: Very cheap.
Prof. OBERHOLZER: Well, I don't know if $100 million is very cheap, but it's cheap relative to drama. So, one implication is even if the size of the audience declines quite substantially, economically speaking, this is still a good move. And in particular - so think about NBC not having any great shows at the moment.
RAZ: They don't have anything in the top 30 right now, except for professional football (unintelligible).
Prof. OBERHOLZER: Right. If you look at the top 20, really football is all there is.
RAZ: Yeah/
Prof. OBERHOLZER: What you're going to think about as an executive of NBC or any of the networks really is how are you going to make your business fly in an environment where possibly ad revenues will not come back the way they have in the past because of competition from the Internet, and in an environment where the audience fractures across many activities and many shows.
RAZ: I mean, in a sense, isn't NBC doing precisely what you as a professor at Harvard Business School would suggest your students not do, which is putting short-term profit over long-term value creation?
Prof. OBERHOLZER: I don't think that's right. So, what strikes me as interesting is how little experimentation there is. Think about innovation and comedy. We now get very excited if Mr. Leno is not using a desk. That's about the extent of innovation since the Carson...
RAZ: I was very excited by that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. OBERHOLZER: But it's measured against sort of what innovations could you possibly think of. And so what they're doing is, in large part I would say, the responsible thing. They're trying to think about how can NBC stay a viable player in an economic environment where the cost side's got to move; the cost side has to give.
RAZ: But doesn't there have to be some gestation period? I mean, if you experiment, don't you have to be willing to watch that experiment work or fail over a period of time?
Prof. OBERHOLZER: The problem that's created is the much smaller lead-in effect from primetime into local news. So, this is almost like you and I being in a joint venture. I'm NBC and I'm looking at profitability of my shows. But you're my partner and you're looking at revenues. And what you're seeing is a more profitable but far smaller Jay Leno slot before local news is actually hurting the local affiliates. So...
RAZ: It's hurting the local affiliates because fewer people are watching Leno, so then fewer people are staying to watch the 11 p.m. news.
Prof. OBERHOLZER: That's exactly right. You can - in TV, you cannot think about individual shows in isolation because each show is an important lead-in to the popularity of the next show.
RAZ: So, do you think it's unfair that NBC President Jeff Zucker is being portrayed as this kind of corporate monster?
Prof. OBERHOLZER: There are two things that I like about what he did. First, he seriously thought about the cost side of TV. The second part that I really like is he tried an innovation. Everyone who now claims, oh, we've seen this all along, this could not possibly work, Americans are not used to watching these kinds of shows in primetime, I think there's a good deal of Monday morning quarterbacking that's going on now.
RAZ: Felix Oberholzer is a professor at Harvard Business School.
Felix Oberholzer, thanks so much.
Prof. OBERHOLZER: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
NPR's Joanne Silberner has been trying to get to Haiti for two days now. She is with a disaster medical assistance team from Georgia. Now, that group ended up on a nearby island after plane troubles, and crowding kept them from landing at the Port-au-Prince airport. They've been there for two nights. Joanne sent us this report about how the team is staying occupied while waiting for a flight in.
JOANNE SILBERNER: We (unintelligible) at a luxury resort but the Georgia team really wants to get over to Port-au-Prince. One nurse told me, doing is easier than waiting. The immediate challenge for the medical team is staying sharp, so this morning team leader Wendy Nesham(ph) arranged for some lessons. Three dozen doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like sat in an open air meeting room, complete with resort music. They got a lesson in Haitian Creole from bell captain Maxine Florio(ph).
Mr. MAXINE FLOURIO: The Haitian love when a foreigner ask them, sak passe. Say in Creole, sak passe.
Unidentified Group: Sak passe.
Mr. FLORIO: English, that mean what's going on, how are you?
SILBERNER: They learned how to ask: I'm going to examine you, and does it hurt here?
They got a more somber lesson from team member Jeff Hirsch(ph). He told them the medical needs in Haiti, mostly crush injuries right now, are going to change soon.
Mr. JEFF HIRSCH: If you've been trapped for 72 hours, you haven't had any fluids and you've had some trauma, it's a very poor prognosis if you're still alive when they find you.
SILBERNER: Next up, infectious diseases from unsanitary living conditions. And Hirsch told them the toughest lesson of all is that they can't practice the same level of medicine they've been practicing in the U.S.
Mr. HIRSCH: As much as it tears your heart apart and as much as you would like to help everybody, I got to tell you, it tears me apart to walk past the kid on the street, see them suffer, know I could do something and then just keep walking. But we are not able to give definitive treatment to all the people we would like to treat. We need to treat the sickest that we can turn around and we need to prioritize. And that's the reality. We will save more lives and do more good, and we're not going to be able to deal with every individual case of suffering as much as we would love to. Not going to happen, okay?
SILBERNER: Hirsch tells them it's going to be stressful and difficult and rewarding.
Joanne Silberner, NPR News, Providenciales Island, Turks and Caicos.
GUY RAZ, host:
We've been hearing a lot about Port-au-Prince this hour and over the last few days, but the port city of Jacmel is in trouble as well. The epicenter of the earthquake was right between Jacmel and Port-au-Prince, but the only road into Jacmel has been blocked, so very little relief has come in.
Now, that city is the site of a huge carnival each year, a spectacle described by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat in her book, "After the Dance." We asked her to read an excerpt from the book, and in it she's sitting in a cafe watching the television coverage of the carnival a day later.
Ms. EDWIDGE DANTICAT (Author, "After the Dance"): (Reading) Halfway through our meal, I spot myself briefly on the television screen. I am inside one of those small groups with handheld instrument, a bonape(ph), and we're singing a popular song about someone who loses a hat on the road between the town and the valley of Jacmel.
(Singing foreign language)
(Reading) I leave the town of Jacmel, the song begins, to go to the valley. While arriving at Bene crossroads, my panama hat fell down. My panama hat fell down, my panama hat fell down. Those who come behind me, please pick it up for me.
This had been one of my favorite songs as a child, even before I had ever been to Jacmel. Seeing myself sing it now on that television screen, my head cocked back, my arms draped around people I didn't even know, I had a strange feeling of detachment. Was that really me, so unencumbered, so lively, so free? So, it did happen after all. I had really been there. I had really been in Jacmel.
And even as others had been putting on their masks for carnival, just for one afternoon, I had allowed myself to remove my own.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: That's author Edwidge Danticat reading from her memoir, "After the Dance," about memories of a carnival in the Haitian city of Jacmel.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: We'll be covering the developments in Haiti all weekend long - the relief and recovery efforts. On our Web site, you can see a gallery of images from NPR staff photographer David Gilkey, who's in Port-au-Prince. They're at npr.org. And if you'd like to get involved in relief efforts, we've got a collection of resources at our Web site, that's NPR.org, and just click How to Help.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Thanks for listening.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
A year ago this week, when Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the presidential oath of office, it was often described as the climax of a journey that began 46 years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Doctor MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.
RAZ: That's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, in his famous address at the 1963 March on Washington. And this weekend, we honor Dr. King's legacy with a national holiday.
But according to historian Peniel Joseph, there's another line of succession in African-American leadership, one that reaches from President Obama back to this man.
Mr. MALCOLM X: You've got a right. You've got a right to protect yourself by any means necessary.
(Soundbite of applause)
RAZ: By any means necessary, the words of Malcolm X. Peniel Joseph's new book is called "Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama." And Peniel Joseph joins me from our New York bureau.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. PENIEL JOSEPH (Author, "Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama"): Thank you for having me.
RAZ: You argue that this connection between Barack Obama and the Black Power movement has largely been ignored by historians, by the media, by pundits. Why do you think that is?
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, I think that the connection between Black Power and Barack Obama doesn't fit a neat and simplistic national narrative about the success and evolution of the civil rights struggle. And it's really a narrative that Obama himself contributed to when he invoked Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we think about the Black Power movement, Black Power is usually characterized as a movement of gun-toting militants who practice politics without portfolio and drag down a more promising movement for social justice, in this case the civil rights movement.
And one of the things that I argue in this book is that when we think about Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, at the heart, at the root, these were two organizers who tried to organize at the local and then national level to try to transform American democratic institutions.
RAZ: But there was a violent aspect to it, as well. I mean, Stokely Carmichael was obviously involved with founding the Black Panther movement. I mean, there was definitely a kind of - a hard edge to some of what he was saying.
Mr. JOSEPH: Absolutely. When we think about violence and the rhetoric of Black Power, violence does play a role in the iconography of this movement. But one of the things I argue empirically when we look at the history of the movement, most black power activists were not violent. Most did not use violence in their rhetoric.
So when we think about violence, violence is definitely an important part of this story, but I also think it's one whose legacy, in terms of the movement, has been overstated.
RAZ: I want to hear a clip of what President Obama wrote in his memoir, "Dreams from my Father," about what set Malcolm X apart from other black leaders of the era.
President BARACK OBAMA: (Reading) Only Malcolm X' autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.
Mr. JOSEPH: Peniel Joseph, how important was Malcolm X as an influence, do you think, to Barack Obama?
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, I think Malcolm is really important in the sense that Malcolm is the quintessential, self-made African-American political activist and political icon and leader of the post-war period. So Malcolm is really coming from a really humble background. He grows up in Roxbury, Detroit and Harlem. He becomes a thief, a burglar, a pimp, a dope peddler and is in prison by the time he's 21 in 1946.
And it's really in prison that he becomes a new, different type of person. So when we think about Malcolm X, Malcolm X is a great example of a self-made man, and Barack Obama admires self-made men in American history.
RAZ: Peniel Joseph, you point to Malcolm X' early years as an activist, when he was a community organizer. Is that, in your view, the kind of primary link between President Obama and people like Malcolm X and others you describe, like Stokely Carmichael?
Mr. JOSEPH: Absolutely. I think at their core, they are community organizers. Malcolm organized in the streets of Harlem in the 1950s but also in places like Philadelphia and Detroit. And Stokely Carmichael is a quintessential civil-rights-organizer-turned-black-power-militant in the 1960s.
RAZ: Stokely Carmichael coined the term Black Power. And I want to play a bit of a speech he gave around that time, in the year 1966.
Mr. CARMICHAEL: Now, we are engaged in a psychological struggle in this country, and that is whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction to it.
(Soundbite of applause)
Mr. CARMICHAEL: And we maintain whether they like it or not, we're going to use the word black power and let them address themselves to that.
RAZ: Peniel Joseph, you acknowledge in the book that this kind of tone is very different, of course, from the message that President Obama delivered as a candidate and delivers as president, yet you argue that people like Stokely Carmichael helped pave the way for the future president.
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, when we think about the black power movement, people like Carmichael actually transform our understanding and definition of black identity. They also transformed the sphere of politics. So, before the black power movement, there's no Congressional Black Caucus. There isn't a generation of black mayors and black politicians. It's black power militants who really precipitate the utilization of racial solidarity to bring black elected officials prominence.
RAZ: In your view, which legacy is more responsible for the ascendency of President Obama, the legacy of Malcolm X, or the legacy of Dr. King?
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, I would answer that by saying, really, I do believe it's both equally. I think Dr. King and his vision of a transcendent, multiracial, multicultural democracy is pivotal in shaping both Obama, but also shaping race relations and opportunities that allowed Obama to go to Harvard, that allowed Obama to go to Columbia and to become president of the United States.
But I also believe that Malcolm X and his envelope-pushing critique of American democracy gave people like King room to operate and maneuver and also helped mobilize political protests that actually transformed political and educational and social institutions on the ground in ways that played a particularly important role in getting Obama elected, as well.
RAZ: Peniel Joseph teaches history at Tufts University. His new book is called "Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama."
Peniel Joseph, thank you so much.
Mr. JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
Tonight in Frankfurt, Germany, about 2,000 people attended a rock, hip-hop, gospel, half-English, half-German musical extravaganza with the unashamedly kitschy title "Hope: The Obama Musical Story."
(Soundbite of musical, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story")
Unidentified People (Actors): (As characters) (Singing foreign language)
RAZ: Gilbert and Sullivan this is not. And Randall Hutchins, the American writer and composer behind the musical, admits he's not necessarily making high art. The idea to write an Obama-inspired musical came to him in 2008, just after the election.
Mr. RANDALL HUTCHINS (Author and composer, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story"): You know, it was a very electric time. There was a lot of electricity in the air and positivity. It was so inspiring. And, you know, of course Obama's message was very inspiring. You know, people have different feelings now, but you know, we're talking about history.
RAZ: So describe the story of the musical.
Mr. HUTCHINS: It's kind of everyday people in - living in Chicago, a Chicago community, and each one of them represents a stereotypical situation that people were having in 2008, you know, with job loss and, you know, losing their homes and stuff.
(Soundbite of musical, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story")
Unidentified People: (As characters) (Singing) (Unintelligible).
Unidentified Man (Actor): (As President Barack Obama) (Singing) Here come the house (unintelligible).
Mr. HUTCHINS: It was chaotic, you know. We were in chaos at the time, and we are still in somewhat chaos. But we go from chaos to actually having some hope. So we take a look at the election from their vantage point.
RAZ: I want to play a clip of the song "Am I Enough?" for a moment.
(Soundbite of musical, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story")
(Soundbite of song, "Am I Enough?")
Unidentified Woman #1 (Actor): (As Michelle Obama) (Singing) How will I know that I'm enough for him?
RAZ: Randall Hutchins, let me try to describe this scene. I believe it is an actress playing Michelle Obama, and she's singing about her love for Barack Obama. How do you think the president would sort of feel about this fictional version of his personal life?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HUTCHINS: I don't know. I always get a little - he strikes me as a guy kind of like myself. I would be kind of bashful about somebody doing a musical that centers around something about me. But the way this is done is not at all times flattering to him. So, I don't know. He might want to punch me on some scenes, and he might want to hug me on other scenes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HUTCHINS: So, you know, it's a mixture, you know.
RAZ: Why do this in Germany? Why not put it on here in the United States?
Mr. HUTCHINS: Well, I'd probably get shot, for one, you know, right now.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HUTCHINS: No, but remember when I started in the end of 2008, things were a little different. And I just happened to be living here in Germany at the time.
RAZ: Do you think that Germans will appreciate it more than Americans might?
Mr. HUTCHINS: I think so. Europe has a much more global perspective on the situation back home, where you are, and I understand the fact that, you know, my family included, people are impatient. People on the ground there are living this catastrophic situation. They're not looking at things with a global view, a world view. They're looking at it like I live in Detroit, and it sucks.
But here, they deal with a little bit more of the situation idealistically, and so they remain supportive.
(Soundbite of musical, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story")
Unidentified People (Actors): (As characters) (Singing) Rock the vote, turn your vote over.
Mr. HUTCHINS: Now, I'm not a politician. I'm not a social activist or a political activist. I'm a musician and songwriter. He inspired me because he inspired the people, and it's really the people that inspired me. I saw change in America.
RAZ: Randall Hutchins is the author and composer of "Hope: The Obama Musical Story," which premiered tonight in Frankfurt, Germany.
Randall Hutchins, thanks for joining us.
Mr. HUTCHINS: Thanks a lot.
(Soundbite of musical, "Hope: The Obama Musical Story")
Unidentified People (Actors): (As characters) (Singing) Rock the vote, turn your vote over.
GUY RAZ, host:
(Soundbite of song, "Kiss")
Mr. KILLIAN MANSFIELD (Singer): (Singing) You don't have to be beautiful to turn me on.
RAZ: A young, ukulele-playing prodigy by the name of Killian Mansfield is the voice you're hearing. He's singing the classic Prince song, "Kiss." It's off his debut record called "Somewhere Else," and sadly, it was Killian Mansfield's last album, as well.
Last August, at age 16, Killian Mansfield succumbed to a rare form of cancer he'd been battling since the age of 11. But about six months beforehand, he decided to fulfill one final wish: to record an album with his musical heroes. And the result is an eclectic collection of folk blues and rock songs performed by musicians like John Sebastian, from the Lovin' Spoonful; Dr. John and the B-52's Kate Pierson.
Killian's mom, Barbara Mansfield, helped wrangle many of those artists, including Laurel Masse, one of the founders of the Manhattan Transfer. She met Killian a few years earlier when he attended a music camp in the Catskills. I spoke with the two women a few days ago about the project, and Barbara began by describing the kind of kid Killian was.
Ms. BARBARA MANSFIELD: He was a funny guy and a very artistic person and someone who was mortified that he would ever be defined by the disease that so preoccupied everyone else about him for the last five years of his life.
RAZ: Laurel Masse, how did you come across Killian and his mother, Barbara Mansfield, the Mansfield family?
Ms. MASSE: I'm one of the instructors at Jay Ungar and Molly Mason's Swing Music Camp. And Killian first showed up three years ago. I mean, he was clearly already ill, and he was not stopped by that at all. And because he was not stopped by that at all, the people around him were not stopped by that at all.
RAZ: Tell me about where the idea for this record, "Somewhere Else," came from. How did it come about?
Ms. MANSFIELD: Killian had spent a horrendous hospitalization, during which time we thought that he would not be coming home from the hospital.
RAZ: This is back in 2008.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Yeah - October of 2008. And during that hospitalization, I clearly remember him playing his ukulele for a lot of patients there and having a little bit more fun than I think he was supposed to after he recovered.
Unfortunately, after that, he went right into hospice. So somewhere between recovering and knowing that he was going into hospice, he was doing a lot of music around the hospital, and he said, I want to do it. I'm just going to play the cancer card here. I want to do an album. I want to get a lot of famous people. I want it to benefit the integrative therapies that have so helped me, and I just - I want to do it fast.
RAZ: You've talked about this term - and you use this term, the cancer card. And he actually would use this in a sort of a tongue-in-cheek way.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Mm-hmm. And sometimes he would even go...
(Soundbite of coughing)
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. MASSE: Poor Killian. Poor Killian.
Ms. MANSFIELD: He was very naughty.
RAZ: When you look at the liner notes to this record, it describes how all these songs relate to different parts of Killian's life.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Well, more specifically, in his plan, it was all about weaving it into integrative medicine. The field of integrative medicine is about incorporating things like acupuncture, massage therapy, nutrition, into the whole care.
So, for instance, he has his song that he picked out, "Fishin' Blues," and we didn't even know at the time that John Sebastian did a version of that - had done so a long time ago with the Lovin' Spoonful - and his idea was to use that as an explanation for what it feels like to get acupuncture. It kind of feels like an electrical impulse in the muscles when it begins to work, and he said he always thought that felt like going fishing.
(Soundbite of song, "Fishin' Blues")
Mr. JOHN SEBASTIAN (Singer): (Singing) Come on, baby, come on down. I'm goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin', and you can come fishin' too.
RAZ: Laurel Masse, I want to talk about the song that you recorded with Killian on the album, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies."
(Soundbite of song, "Blue Skies")
Ms. MASSE: (Singing) Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see.
RAZ: And of course, that's Killian's ukulele in the background. Laurel Masse, what do you remember about the recording sessions with Killian?
Ms. MASSE: The session? It was just easy. I'd already known him for a little while so I felt really comfortable with him at all times. It was a remarkable quality that he had.
RAZ: Barbara Mansfield, I can only imagine how sort of difficult it must have been emotionally during those recording sessions, I mean, the sort of the highs and lows of that period of time. What was the - sort of the mood and the atmosphere during that period?
Ms. MANSFIELD: Well, Killian set a really high bar. And it was a bar that was clearly defined by determination. And one of the later - the last recording session was Levon Helm's studio. That was a difficult day because Killian was so excited, and Levon was so warm and wonderful.
But Killian was in a lot of pain, and he barely got through playing the ukulele. There was a lot of weighing in my mind of how much morphine to administer so that he could still be present for the experience but to mitigate the pain, and that was hard.
(Soundbite of song, "Fire in My Pocket")
Unidentified Man #1 (Singer): (Singing) If I had money in my pocket.
Unidentified People: (Singing) Oh, yeah.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Some money in pocket.
Unidentified People: Oh, yeah.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) If I had money in my pocket, money in my pocket, I could buy her love tonight.
RAZ: And that's "Fire In My Pocket" on the record. At that point, you all knew that he might not make it. I mean, there was a kind of a sense of urgency in getting this finished.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Oh, yeah.
RAZ: Were you ever worried that you wouldn't actually finish it in time?
Ms. MANSFIELD: Yeah. I thought that there was a good chance that it wouldn't be finished. And it was actually sort of miraculous that he got to hear and touch the album before he died.
RAZ: Barbara Mansfield, why did Killian call this record "Somewhere Else"?
Ms. MANSFIELD: He wanted to have a group of songs that were transporting to anyone who listened and were not about being in a bad place or not expressing what it was like to be in a bad place but about, you know, being somewhere else.
When that came about, I immediately had an idea about the title song, and I asked him if he would let me write one. And he said, as long as it's one of your blues songs, because I don't like the other ones.
(Soundbite of song, "Somewhere Else")
Unidentified Woman #1 (Singer): (Singing) I'm going fishing on Jupiter. The air is ever so clean and clear. I love the way that the morning (unintelligible). I am somewhere else.
Ms. MANSFIELD: The lyrics, I'm going fishing on Jupiter, was a story that he and I liked a lot. There was a film star, Lash La Rue, and when Lash was, I think fading in his final years, somebody asked him: what do you want to do, Lash? And he said: I want to go fishing on Jupiter.
RAZ: The last track on the record is the other track where Killian sang lead vocals, and he originally didn't want his voice on this.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. MANSFIELD: No. He was such a pain in the ass about that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. MASSE: Can we say that on the radio?
Ms. MANSFIELD: He sort of just had gotten over the point where his voice was changing. And I think he was a little self-conscious about the way his voice sounded.
RAZ: It was changing because of the tumors in his throat.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Well, there was that, but he just got over puberty.
RAZ: Oh, yeah.
Ms. MANSFIELD: So, you know, there was the changes that happen to every young man. And there was substantial obstacles in terms of the growth of the tumors in his mouth and his throat, and that made it, you know, difficult. But I think it was his perception of his voice that he struggled with.
(Soundbite of song, "If I Can Dream")
Mr. MANSFIELD: (Singing) If I can dream of a better land where all my brothers walk hand in hand, why, oh why, oh why can't my dreams come true.
RAZ: It's a song that was written by Walter Earl Brown but made famous, of course, by Elvis Presley. And it's probably appropriate that we're going to end the show today with this song because it's inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. Can you tell us about how Killian became a fan of this song, "If I Can Dream"?
Ms. MANSFIELD: He was playing this when he was told he was told he was going to be entering hospice care during that terrible hospitalization in October of 2008. And he was screaming this song at the top of his lungs. And when we talked about it, he was attracted because he said, Elvis sounds so wrecked and barely there in it, and yet it's such a strong song.
(Soundbite of song, "If I Can Dream")
RAZ: That's Barbara Mansfield and Laurel Masse, speaking about the record "Somewhere Else," a project put together by musician Killian Mansfield, who died last August.
Barbara Mansfield, Laurel Masse, thank you so much.
Ms. MANSFIELD: Thank you.
Ms. MASSE: And thank you.
(Soundbite of song, "If I Can Dream")
Mr. MANSFIELD: (Singing) But as long as a man has the faith to dream, he can receive his soul and can fly.
RAZ: You can hear full versions of several songs off the album and learn more about the Killian Mansfield Foundation at nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of song, "If I Can Dream")
Mr. MANSFIELD: (Singing) Still I am sure that the answer, answer's gonna come somehow. Out there in the dark there's a beckoning candle, yeah. And while I can think...
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Thanks for listening and have a great week.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
President Obama went to Massachusetts this afternoon, making a last-minute push to save a Democratic Senate candidate and, quite possibly, to save his own political agenda as well.
Democrat Martha Coakley is in a suddenly tight race for the Senate seat that was held for almost half a century by the late Ted Kennedy. If she loses to Republican Scott Brown on Tuesday, that would eliminate the critical 60th vote in the Democrat's Senate majority. And it could endanger the president's health care initiative.
NPR's Scott Horsley is in Boston with the president.
And, Scott, this campaign trip was sort of an 11th-hour decision for the White House, right?
SCOTT HORSLEY: That's right, Guy. For most of the last week, the White House had been saying the president would not make a personal campaign appearance on behalf of Martha Coakley. But on Friday, they did an abrupt about-face and said that the president would make this trip. That shows just how close the race is and how high the stakes are for the administration.
RAZ: So what's the president's pitch here, Scott?
HORSLEY: Well, interestingly, he's not talking a whole lot about health care. That is one of the issues he mentions. But they have really sort of put their focus on the proposal that the administration rolled out last week, to impose a new tax on the biggest banks. That's something that Martha Coakley supports and that her Republican opponent opposes. And I think it's a measure of how ambivalent the voters are about health care overhaul.
RAZ: What about the Republican candidate Scott Brown? What was he doing today?
HORSLEY: He's having his own rally in Worcester this afternoon. He has some of his own star power. He's got former Red Sox Curt Schilling here. He's got the Boston College star, Doug Flutie, and the actor who played Cliff on "Cheers."
RAZ: Mm-hmm. That's NPR's Scott Horsley.
Scott, thanks so much.
HORSLEY: My pleasure.
RAZ: And before he arrived in Massachusetts with the president, Scott prepared a report for us, A Day in the Life of Mr. Obama, which, as you will hear, is a kind of microcosm for what he dealt with all year long.
President BARACK OBAMA: Good morning, everybody.
HORSLEY: It was just after 10 o'clock Thursday morning when President Obama spoke to reporters in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. Flanked by his secretaries of Defense and State, Mr. Obama said the early reports from Haiti were nothing less than devastating.
Pres. OBAMA: I've directed my administration to launch a swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives and support the recovery in Haiti.
HORSLEY: Earlier that morning, the president met in the Oval Office with his national security team. This was a moment that called out for American leadership, he said. It was also a chance for the president to show his own leadership as commander and comforter-in-chief.
Pres. OBAMA: To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.
HORSLEY: It was a powerful moment for the president. It was also perhaps the least controversial moment in Mr. Obama's day. Less than two hours later, he was back in front of the microphones, this time with the Treasury secretary at his side. Mr. Obama announced plans for a new tax on the nation's biggest banks, aimed at recovering some $90 billion that was spent on the government's bailout effort.
Pres. OBAMA: We want our money back and we're going to get it.
HORSLEY: The president, who has been accused of doing more to help Wall Street than working people, took on a populist tone he rarely uses. He said he's particularly determined to go after big banks because of the multimillion-dollar paychecks they've been writing to some of their employees.
Pres. OBAMA: If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers.
HORSLEY: Unlike the Haitian relief effort, the proposed bank tax is just a proposal. It would have to clear Congress and a phalanx of bank lobbyists in order to take effect.
While the president was in the spotlight making his pitch, aides were working behind the scenes on another legislative priority - health care - and using just the kind of backroom bargaining tactics that candidate Obama once promised to avoid.
After winning concessions in those negotiations, labor unions dropped their opposition to a tax on so-called Cadillac insurance policies. The deal was announced about 4:30 in the afternoon, just as Mr. Obama headed to Capitol Hill for a pre-arranged meeting with House Democrats.
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. OBAMA: Thank you, House of Representatives. Thank you. Thank you very much.
HORSLEY: The big Democratic majority in the House has given Mr. Obama most of what he wanted this past year: a big stimulus program, energy legislation and a health care bill. But it hasn't come easily for either the White House or the lawmakers. Mr. Obama tried to reassure the restless members of his party that if they hang together, they won't get hung out to dry.
Pres. OBAMA: I know that some of the fights we've been going through have been tough. I know that some of you have gotten beaten up at home. Some of the fights that we're going to go through this year are going to be tough as well. But just remember why each of us got into public service in the first place -we found something that was worth fighting for.
HORSLEY: The president, who began his career as a community organizer, now finds himself trying to hold many different communities together. One moment, he's directing an international response to an epic earthquake. The next, he's trying to bridge fault lines in his own party.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi witnessed the juggling act this past week. She told House Democrats Thursday how Mr. Obama spearheaded marathon health care negotiations, while periodically ducking out of the room to consult a military adviser or talk with a foreign leader about Haiti.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; Speaker of the House): We saw leadership. We saw compassion. We saw American values. We saw President Barack Obama.
(Soundbite of applause)
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama didn't have much time to savor the applause of his fellow Democrats. A few hours later, he was back at the White House for another round of health care talks. His 360th workday as president finally ended just before 1 a.m.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Group: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
RAZ: The choir this morning at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church here in Washington, D.C. It was there where a 27-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech in 1956, just weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
Today, it was where President Obama paid tribute to King and where he reflected on the past year. Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Mr. Obama's inauguration.
President BARACK OBAMA: There was a hope shared by many that life would be better from the moment that I swore that oath. Of course, as we meet here today, one year later, we know the promise of that moment has not yet been fully fulfilled.
RAZ: This hour, we'll take a look at the president's year in office, his challenges ahead, and why one historian believes Mr. Obama owes his rise in part to the Black Power movement.
GUY RAZ, host:
But first to Haiti and another Sunday service.
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: Thousands attended mass in Port-au-Prince today outside that city's shattered main cathedral. Priests offered communion in the street beside the remains of that church.
NPR's Jason Beaubien was there and sent us this report.
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
JASON BEAUBIEN: Most of the congregation had slept outside last night, in parks, churchyards and other open spaces after their homes were destroyed in the earthquake. About 100 people gathered in a street with the wreckage of the once grand Our Lady of Assumption Cathedral behind them. Several thick exterior walls of the building are still standing. An image of Jesus in a huge stained glass window somehow remains intact.
Father Eric Toussaint gave the sermon through a megaphone.
Reverend ERIC TOUSSAINT: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Even if our cathedral falls, even if many buildings in our country collapse, it doesn't mean that the country is destroyed, Father Toussaint told the crowd on the pavement. It doesn't mean that our church is destroyed. It doesn't mean that our community is destroyed. The church is us, and we are the church.
The quake killed tens of thousands of people, including the archbishop of Port-au-Prince. Looking around this devastated city, with its shattered buildings and displaced people, many residents say it is destroyed. Some even say they've lost faith.
Just before the service, Louis Shaw Wistaux(ph) is weeping in front of the cathedral.
Ms. LOUIS SHAW WISTAUX: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Speaking to our translator, Wistaux says this church was where she used to come to get her strength.
Ms. WISTAUX: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Woman: She said she doesn't know how she will survive because she's in the street. She doesn't have anywhere else to go, anyplace to pray.
BEAUBIEN: Wistaux lost her house and four members of her family in the temblor and says she's now living, like so many others, outside.
Father Toussaint says this is why he decided to hold mass out in the street, to bring a displaced congregation back together.
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
BEAUBIEN: The residents raised their voices, as well as their arms, up towards the United Nations and U.S. helicopters that are finally ferrying relief supplies into Port-au-Prince. When the father told the congregation to greet their neighbors, the Haitians also clasped hands with the foreign reporters and photographers who were there to work. Neighbors hugged neighbors who they hadn't seen since the quake. And for a moment, they could have been in any church instead of in a decimated city with the stench of death all around them.
Reverend EDWARD SAINT LOUIS(ph): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: A second priest, Father Edward Saint Louis, said the situation is hard for us. Most of you don't have a house anymore. Even if you have something called a house, you're afraid to get inside of it. But he called on the residents of Port-au-Prince to not give up hope.
Rev. SAINT LOUIS: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: It could happen that you will lose faith, Father Saint Louis said. People may say they don't want to serve God anymore because where was he when this happened to us? But know that there's nothing that happens in this life that doesn't have a meaning.
Rev. SAINT LOUIS: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Father Saint Louis ended the service by saying that he can't wish them a nice day or a pleasant Sunday. He said he can only tell them to be strong.
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
BEAUBIEN: Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
Unidentified Group: (Singing in foreign language)
GUY RAZ, host:
NPR's Jackie Northam joins me now from the town of Leogane. She's with one of the first rescue teams to reach close to the epicenter of where the earthquake struck last week.
And, Jackie, what are you seeing there?
JACKIE NORTHAM: I'm outside a school that has been absolutely flattened by the earthquake, and there are a lot of local people trying to pick through here, as well as the search and rescue team that I'm traveling with right now. There are very strong indications that there are still survivors under this school right now.
Leogane is about 40 miles outside of Port-au-Prince, Guy. It's along the coastline, and it's extremely close to the epicenter.
RAZ: And so, what are the differences between what you saw in Port-au-Prince and what you're seeing now in Leogane?
NORTHAM: Well, essentially, when the reconnaissance teams came out here, they said that 80 percent of this city of 40,000 people is destroyed; 80 percent of this city is destroyed.
You know, in Port-au-Prince, you get large pockets of the city that are completely smashed, the buildings have collapsed in that. But once you start leaving Port-au-Prince and you start heading towards Leogane, you get whole stretches of road where buildings have completely been flattened, and that carries out all into the city. Certainly, this place has just been really hit by this earthquake very badly.
RAZ: Can you describe what the journey was like from Port-au-Prince to Leogane?
NORTHAM: Actually, the road was much better than they thought it was. The big problem here, though, is time. Everything takes time here. You know, there's so many people wandering the streets right now. There's so many aid agencies, people trying to get help to the Haitians. Now, the streets are really very clogged right now.
The other problem, though, Guy is, is that there are many, many search and rescue teams from all over the world finally getting in here. The problem is there isn't really one point of contact for organization. I spoke with many of the teams this morning and they all express frustration about this. They didn't know who was in charge, who was trying to organize security versus who's got the equipment, that type of thing.
So they're coming in, all these search teams, but it doesn't mean they're actually getting out there any faster. And as we all know, time is absolutely of the essence right now.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. Jackie, describe what the security situation is like in that area. Are there any signs of violence or maybe impending violence in the area?
NORTHAM: When they gave us the rundown this morning - and they had just come back from an assessment of this place. They came in by chopper. In fact, they said that the locals here, they were not aggressive whatsoever. We were seeing very clear signs of this in Port-au-Prince yesterday.
And the other thing that's very interesting here is the local people are taking it upon themselves to try to find people perhaps still under these buildings. This is particularly dangerous. If you look at these buildings, they're hanging, you know, at 90-degree angles in some cases, just ready to go with the next tremor.
So it's better here as far as security, but there's still a lot of problems here. This place has been really hit badly.
RAZ: That's NPR's Jackie Northam, who is close to the epicenter of where that earthquake struck in Haiti last week. She's in the town of Leogane.
Jackie, thanks so much and please stay safe.
NORTHAM: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
The numbers of dead in Haiti are overwhelming. The Red Cross puts the total so far at 50,000. Local government estimates are far higher. But every single death is an individual tragedy, one that leaves devastated family and friends.
NPR's Greg Allen heard one of those personal stories through a chance encounter at the Port-au-Prince airport.
GREG ALLEN: Wisdom Isahoro(ph) isn't from Haiti. He's Nigerian, a good-looking guy who appears to be in his early 20s. Since he graduated from college, he's been living and working in Port-au-Prince at his uncle's shoe factory. They made belts, shoes and leather bags in the city's Wibison(ph) neighborhood until the afternoon of January 12. Isahoro was in the shoe factory when the earthquake hit.
Mr. WISDOM ISAHORO: Suddenly, I realized (unintelligible) shaking. So I was up on top of the building. So eventually, I had to jump. The minute I jump, I saw everything. It's like everything is falling. I didn't believe my eyes, but I need to jump to save my life. When I came out, I saw the only - my uncle's son, the only son. The wife, my uncle, everybody is inside the building. Everything gets collapsed, the cars, they're back at the front of the garage, everything got collapsed. So...
ALLEN: But your uncle?
Mr. ISAHORO: My uncle? No. No, they didn't survive, with the wife. They didn't survive right now.
ALLEN: Your uncle and his wife both were killed.
Mr. ISAHORO: Yeah, they were dead right now.
ALLEN: Isahoro was waiting uncertainly outside the airport in Port-au-Prince when I met him. He was looking for a flight to get out of the country, he said to anywhere.
Mr. ISAHORO: I don't know where to go, anyway. I just want to leave this place to anywhere I can get myself for now.
ALLEN: Were you there when they pulled your uncle and his wife?
Mr. ISAHORO: Yeah, I was there. I was there. I was there.
ALLEN: What happened?
Mr. ISAHORO: (Unintelligible).
ALLEN: Did they use heavy equipment or just shovels and hammers?
Mr. ISAHORO: Oh, they use a digger.
ALLEN: A digger?
Mr. ISAHORO: Yeah, a digger. But the wife leg was cut, you know? We didn't see the legs. So all we saw is - the body. But it's only my uncle that had the complete body.
ALLEN: Yeah. And then you get them, and did you know what to do with the bodies then? I mean, what did you do with them?
Mr. ISAHORO: Just tied them up.
ALLEN: Tied them up.
Mr. ISAHORO: Yeah.
ALLEN: Yeah.
Mr. ISAHORO: We put them at the roadside. Those are people that carry the dead body. They had to carry.
ALLEN: So you left them on the roadside?
Asking questions is what reporters do. We gather information, write our stories and move on. Left behind are the people whose stories we tell.
When I last saw Wisdom Isahoro, he was sitting on the curb at the Port-au-Prince airport, his head in his arms, sobbing.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
GUY RAZ, host:
NPR's Mara Liasson has been charting the first year of the Obama presidency, and she's with me in the studio.
Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON: Hello, Guy.
RAZ: How would you sum up that year for the president?
LIASSON: Well, Barack Obama is a president who came into office facing a huge set of unprecedented problems - a collapsing financial system, the worst recession since the Great Depression, two wars. And on top of all the things he had to do, the crises and the emergencies, he also had an incredibly ambitious agenda of his own: health care, energy, financial re-regulation. And now that we're at the end of this year, he passed a lot of it.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: He did put a lot of points on the legislative scoreboard, but it came at a tremendous cost. He had to use a lot of political capital to do it. And I think it's also fair to say that the change he talked about, the end to petty grievances and recriminations, certainly didn't come to pass.
RAZ: And reflected in his poll numbers, whether fair or not. Originally, he was at around 70 percent approval, now down to 50 percent, just under that.
LIASSON: Yes. Obviously, he started at an unnaturally high level.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: But being under 50 is the danger zone for presidents as they enter the midterm elections. The presidential approval rating and the unemployment rate are probably the two most significant indicators of how a majority party will fare in the midterms.
RAZ: Now, Mara, presumably with the midterm elections looming - and historically, it's a losing race for the party in power - the Democrats have to be somewhat worried.
LIASSON: They are facing a difficult midterm election, possibly 20 to 30 seats losing in the House and anywhere from two to seven in the Senate. It is normal and historical for a majority party president to lose seats in both houses. But what the Democrats have to worry about is losing control of one or more houses of Congress.
RAZ: Mara, recently, Congressional Quarterly, the nonpartisan publication, did a study looking at President Obama's first year. It concluded that he was more successful in getting more legislation passed in his first year than any other president since World War II. It seems pretty significant. So why would the White House care all that much about the poll numbers at this point?
LIASSON: Because voters don't decide on who they're going to vote for based on the number of laws that a president has passed. The fact that President Obama has been successful in passing a lot of legislation and getting it through Congress certainly is a success by one historical measure. But as I said, he did it by spending a tremendous amount of political capital.
One of the things you do see in the polls - there's a new Quinnipiac poll out that shows that health care, the popularity of the president's health care proposal is at 34 percent.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: In other words, maybe it's the sausage-making and what the public has seen Congress do to get this bill passed that has really turned them off.
I think over time, the White House would argue, these pieces of legislation will be popular over time. Right now, they're not.
RAZ: So they're taking a long view.
LIASSON: They have to.
RAZ: That's NPR's Mara Liasson.
Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Early on, college students were among the most enthusiastic backers of candidate Barack Obama. They volunteered for the campaign and voted in greater numbers than ever before.
Now, as Mr. Obama's first year in office draws to a close, reporter Joel Rose visited Penn State University to gauge the political temperature before this year's elections.
JOEL ROSE: Tucked away in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, far from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, Penn State is not a campus renowned for its political activism. But on Election Day 2008, the line to vote at the student center, known as The Hub, stretched out the door.
Ms. JESSICA PELLICIOTTA (President, Penn State College Democrats): Thousands of students lined up to vote, down around the building. I mean, this is a pretty big building.
ROSE: Jessica Pelliciotta is president of Penn State College Democrats. She spent weeks registering students to vote and then badgering them to turn out on Election Day. When the polls closed, Pelliciotta joined the impromptu parade around the campus.
Ms. PELLICIOTTA: We were able to turn Centre County blue, which is a huge accomplishment. I mean, we're the blue speck in the red sea, so we were ecstatic about it.
ROSE: But that won't be an easy thing to pull off again. Conversations at The Hub this week suggest that enthusiasm for the 2010 midterm elections is, well, modest.
Did you vote in 2008?
Ms. TEROI PETERKIN(ph) (Student, Penn State University): Yes.
ROSE: Are you going to vote this year?
Ms. PETERKIN: I hope to.
ROSE: But you're not sure.
Ms. PETERKIN: Yeah.
ROSE: Teroi Peterkin is eating lunch at The Hub with some friends. They all voted for Obama, and while they haven't given up on him yet, you can definitely sense a little impatience. Here's Kalid Brandon Hatcher(ph).
Mr. KALID BRANDON HATCHER (Student, Penn State University): Truthfully, I think he's doing all right.
ROSE: Just all right?
Mr. HATCHER: I'll give him, as a grade, he'll get like a C plus.
ROSE: Where does he need to improve?
Mr. HATCHER: The jobs and help schools lower the tuition. That's the two most basic things: jobs and help the schools out.
ROSE: In-state tuition at Penn State is set to go up almost five percent next year. That's an issue many students care about deeply. But not as many seem to get excited about the health care overhaul. Even competitive races for the governor's mansion and the U.S. Senate seat don't seem to resonate, says Cameron Clay(ph).
Mr. CAMERON CLAY (Student, Penn State University): I feel like up here, a lot of people aren't going to vote as much for the senators just because it's not as big a deal as the presidential vote is, and then with the whole, you know, first woman and first African-American, I don't think that the turnout is going to be anywhere near as much as it was for the presidential vote at all.
ROSE: Still, there's some evidence that high turnout among young voters in 2008 could have lasting implications. Eric Plutzer teaches political science at Penn State.
Professor ERIC PLUTZER (Political Science, Penn State University): If young people are coaxed into getting registered early in the process, and they actually get out to vote in their first eligible election, their turnout rates will be higher four years later, eight years later, even 20 years later. So early participation among young people is a gift that keeps on giving.
ROSE: But Plutzer says that's only true for presidential elections. Turnout among young voters is historically lower in midterm elections, when there's less attention from the media and the national party. That hasn't stopped the Penn State College Democrats from trying to get their peers motivated. Jessica Pelliciotta just finished hosting a campaign event for one of the party's gubernatorial candidates.
Ms. PELLICIOTTA: I believe there's 20 people in attendance. And when you're on a campus of 40,000, it's so frustrating, especially when the candidates come here expecting to see bigger crowds.
ROSE: That's a frustration Democratic candidates may come to share, especially if they're counting on the youth vote that helped carry Barack Obama to the White House.
For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The genre of memoir has been troublesome in publishing recently. The truthfulness of many bestsellers has been called into question. Well, now, the South African author and Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee, has offered up a book that plays with the idea of memoir.
He's written a novel called "Summertime," about himself. Actually, the novel is about a young biographer researching a book about the late writer John Coetzee. It's a little confusing, but Alan Cheuse explains in this review.
ALAN CHEUSE: The book begins with a lot of smoke and mirrors. The major premise of the plot: The much-lauded South African novelist has died, and there's a biographer going around interviewing people, mostly alert and sensitive women, about his life before his great literary success.
The results of these interviews make up most of this intriguingly designed novel. A learned but restrained fellow, Coetzee, many of the interviewees, old girlfriends, some family members, testify. He was also standoffish, with little social sense, but he spoke and wrote good English. Alas, a bad lover, one of them puts it. Though his Afrikaner cousin Margot points out in her emotional session, his concern for his ailing father shows through, as does his love of the South African outback.
Toward the end, the biographer pushes one of his former lovers, a French academic who was his colleague at university, to make an assessment of Coetzee's work. In general, she says, his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, too easy, too lacking in passion.
Well, not in this new book, with its candor and frank design and intricate passions on display.
SIEGEL: The latest novel by J.M. Coetzee is called "Summertime." Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Most of the art that hangs in American museums came as gifts from private collectors. Since the 19th century, collectors such as J.P. Morgan, Solomon Guggenheim, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and generations of Rockefellers have donated to museums or built their own. And a big part of a museum director's job is cultivating people who will eventually give the museum their art.
But as Kate Taylor reports, that task has gotten more complicated.
KATE TAYLOR: Think of it this way: People build art collections partly as a kind of self-expression. Whether they collect Renaissance drawings or African masks or big, shiny balloon animals by Jeff Koons, whatever it is means something to them. So when collectors think about donating their treasures, they don't do it lightly. And recently, it seems, they've gotten even pickier.
Mr. DON FISHER (Founder, The Gap): You want to show your own art. Otherwise, what do you do with it? You got to sell it or you give it away and people leave it in the basement. I don't want to have our art in the basement.
TAYLOR: That's Gap founder Don Fisher from an online interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. He was explaining why he wanted to build his own museum, rather than give his collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Mr. FISHER: I have such a big collection. For them to show it all the time and for me to have any kind of control over it was not what they wanted.
TAYLOR: So Fisher proposed building a museum in a national park in the city, but that idea ran into opposition from local activists. So last summer, while he was battling cancer, Fisher dropped the plan and started talking with SFMoMA.
Just two days before Fisher died, the museum announced that he and his wife, Doris, had agreed to lend their collection for 25 years. The museum is going to build a new wing, with the Fisher family making a donation both towards the construction and towards the museum's endowment.
SFMoMA's director, Neal Benezra, acknowledges that the arrangement is unusual since the museum won't own the art outright. But he says curators will get to treat it pretty much as if they did.
Mr. NEAL BENEZRA (Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art): We will manage it, we will oversee it, we'll conserve it, exhibit it, educate the public about it, in just the same way we do our own collection.
TAYLOR: The feeling in the art world seems to be that SFMoMA made a pretty good deal. But it doesn't always work out that way. Several years ago, billionaire Eli Broad gave the Los Angeles County Museum of Art $56 million to build a new building. As part of the deal, Broad got to choose the architect and the building was named after him.
LACMA hoped that in the long run, Broad would donate the artwork to fill it.
Mr. ELI BROAD: We've actually interviewed five architects privately for this site, and we've now made a final selection.
TAYLOR: Eli Broad is not talking about the LACMA museum designed by Renzo Piano. He's talking about a new museum he's now planning to build to show his collection, which he did not donate to LACMA. His new museum will be run by a foundation that Broad had already set up to loan artwork to museums.
Mr. BROAD: We will lend it to any museum, and they can keep it for as long as they want it, as long as they have it on their walls displayed to the public.
TAYLOR: Broad is planning to leave his foundation with a $200 million endowment, almost twice the size of LACMA's. And given the high cost of buying, storing and insuring art these days, Broad thinks that borrowing, rather than owning art, might be the way of the future for museums.
Mr. BROAD: We're going to bear the burden of insurance. We're going to bear the burden of conservation. So we're really relieving museums of those responsibilities and those costs.
TAYLOR: For LACMA, being stuck with a building named after Broad while the collector plans a competing museum across town has been a little embarrassing. But Max Anderson says LACMA is not alone in making compromises in order to woo a collector who will pay for a new building or a crowd-pleasing show.
Mr. MAX ANDERSON (Director, Indianapolis Museum of Art): When do you draw a line around what you're not doing in order to make room for something that's easier to stage, not doing scholarship, not doing controversial exhibitions, not doing exhibitions which aren't guaranteed to have commercial success?
TAYLOR: Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is concerned about developments like those at the New Museum in New York. Last fall, the New Museum announced that it was going to do a series of exhibitions devoted to private collections, starting in February with a collection of the Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou. The exhibition raises a range of thorny issues.
So, here's Erik Ledbetter, the director of ethics at the American Association of Museums, to tell us about his organization's guidelines for what not to do in putting on a show.
Mr. ERIK LEDBETTER (Director of Ethics, American Association of Museums): Make sure that there's no perceived conflict of interest through the relationship with the lender - for example, the lender being on the museum board. Don't take any money from sale of the object after the show. And finally, curatorial control. Make sure the museum keeps authority over the content of the exhibition.
TAYLOR: The New Museum strikes out on two of those three counts. First, Joannou is on the museum's board. And second, instead of the show being curated by one of the museum staff, it's being curated by one of the artists in the collection, Jeff Koons, who's also good friends with Joannou.
The museum's director, Lisa Phillips, defends the show. She says that today, museums have to work with private collectors.
Ms. LISA PHILLIPS (Director, The New Museum): Part of what is feeding into this is the rise over the last 20 years of the private foundation museum and many collectors deciding on their own to open their own facilities and do their own programs, which in some cases are really at a similar level of programming as traditional institutions.
TAYLOR: If that's the case, what's the point of museums having their own collections or their own curatorial staff organizing shows? Maybe in the long run they can just become venues for shows from private collections organized by curators who are paid by the collectors.
But one thing museums, as they exist, are well-equipped to deal with - and private foundations aren't necessarily - is changes in taste.
Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says that some contemporary work will probably end up in the basement and for good reason.
Mr. MICHAEL GOVAN (Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art): There is a lot of contemporary art in the world. There's a proliferation of collectors of contemporary art. And there isn't enough space in the museums we have to show all of it. So part of it is that time will take its course and cull those works in each era down to a smaller number that the public and art historians consider valuable for the long term.
TAYLOR: That winnowing process isn't something most collectors want to think about. They want to see their taste validated. To that end, they're delighted to see their art in a museum. They just want to know when they can pick it up.
For NPR News, I'm Kate Taylor in New York.
ROBERT SIGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is filling up with troops, doctors and other aid workers. The bottleneck at the airport has eased. But even so, the aid effort faces enormous challenges delivering food, water and shelter to throngs of desperate people. And while we've been hearing about the situation in Port-au-Prince since last week, other cities in Haiti have also been devastated.
NPR's Jackie Northam traveled with a search-and-rescue team to one of them.
(Soundbite of vehicle)
JACKIE NORTHAM: Much of the road to the city of Leogane, about 40 miles due west of Port-au-Prince, is surprisingly smooth, given the ferocity of the earthquake. But the closer you get to Leogane, the greater the devastation. The city is very near the quake's epicenter. And as you drive into Leogane, it seems every house, every building, either collapsed or is teetering at a dangerous angle. The people in this city of 160,000, seem almost in shock. They stand in groups and gaze at the destruction. The parks in Leogane are starting to fill with makeshift tents.
Unidentified Group: (Foreign language spoken)
NORTHAM: Members of a joint British and Icelandic search-and-rescue team quickly set up a command center in the middle of an empty field.
Unidentified Man #1: We're saving (unintelligible), over.
Unidentified Man #2: No, this is just (unintelligible).
Unidentified Man #1: Your signal loud and clear.
NORTHAM: This is the first search-and-rescue team to arrive in Leogane, about five days after the earthquake. A reconnaissance team assessed that 80 percent of the city was destroyed. This team must quickly get the lay of the land � the maps don't include many of the smaller streets. And they need to prioritize what buildings to go to first. They rely on the local people for information.
Unidentified Man #3: There are a couple of dead bodies (unintelligible).
Mr. MAGNUS HAKONARSON (Rescue Worker): Do you know the last time anyone heard from somebody inside the building?
Mr. HAKONARSON: No, there is no - there is no survivor. I don't think they survived. Of course, people say, there's a survivor inside of it.
NORTHAM: This young fellow tells an Icelandic rescue worker, Magnus Hakonarson, what he probably doesn't want to hear.
Unidentified Man #3: If you're looking for survivor, I don't think you're going to find a survivor around here. I don't really think so, they're all dead. I think you're a little bit late.
Mr. HAKONARSON: Yes, we are late here.
NORTHAM: But at another nearby school, there is a whisper of hope. Forty to 50 children were in the school when its roof collapsed. Up to a dozen were pulled out alive several days ago. But there could be an air pocket. The kids might not have food or water, but some could still be alive. Members of the Icelandic search-and-rescue team walk over the roof � now at ground level and set up sensitive listening devices, then ask a local man to yell out to the children through a large hole in the roof.
Unidentified Man #4: (Foreign language spoken)
NORTHAM: The listening devices are so sensitive, they can pick up the sound of faint scratching if it's quiet. That's difficult in this area.
Unidentified Man #5: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #6: (Foreign language spoken)
NORTHAM: Rescue workers still can't make out if anyone is alive. But with up to 35 children under the rubble, they're not stopping.
(Soundbite of jackhammer)
NORTHAM: Jackhammers pound large holes into the roof and then cameras are inserted. It's a long process. The locals watch intently and stay out of the way.
(Soundbite of weeping)
NORTHAM: Among them, is an aunt of one of the children under the roof, a 10-year-old named Brittany. She watches as the rescue workers bring in a search dog.
(Soundbite of dog barking)
NORTHAM: But the dog shows no sign it's detected a living being under the rubble. A notice is spray-painted on the wall outside the former school, saying the building was searched and that no survivors were found. The Icelandic and British rescue team were due to search Leogane for up to three days, but pull out after the first. It's clear they are too late to pull any survivors from the rubble here, and they are needed elsewhere.
Jackie Northam, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
It's common wisdom that Haiti was a disaster zone even before the earthquake. Generations of dictators stripped the nation of wealth and resources. More recent flirtations with democracy have been punctuated by coups and corruption. The current president, Rene Preval, has been criticized for keeping a low profile post-earthquake.
Joining us to talk about the political landscape of Haiti is Laurent Dubois, who is a professor of history at Duke University and an expert on Haitian politics. Welcome to the program, Professor Dubois.
Professor LAURENT DUBOIS (Professor of History, Duke University): Thank you.
SIEGEL: And let me ask you, I know that this is your field of study, but if there were a short answer to the question, why Haiti has not been able to develop some stable form of democratic self rule over all these years, what is it? Why? What do you say?
Prof. DUBOIS: Well, I think it's useful. I'm a historian, of course. I think it's useful to take the long view. This is a country that's born out of slave revolution in an ocean of slavery, right? It's born in 1804. Everywhere else is dominated by slave-owning empires. So, from its birth, it's been a source of kind of tension in some ways or it's been seen as dangerous by many elites. And the Haitian elite has been constantly dealing with both these extremely strong forces from outside, as well as an extremely serious set of conflicts within Haiti itself. And that balancing act has been extremely difficult from the beginning.
SIEGEL: How would you describe the historic role of the United States in Haiti?
Prof. DUBOIS: Well, the U.S. has been involved with Haiti from the very, very beginning, starting especially with the U.S. occupation - the 20-year occupation in 1915. The U.S. has been a very dominant force in Haiti. And our next - our engagement now is just one in a very, very long series of extremely deep engagements with Haiti. Haiti and the United States have been incredibly connected through migration and politics. So, there's really no way to escape that connection. And the question is what we do with it.
SIEGEL: If you can, can you explain to people what role the former president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, plays in Haitian life to this day, several years after his removal from the presidency?
Prof. DUBOIS: Mm-hmm. Well, Aristide - the just, the biography and story of Aristide is such a dramatic and important one and it's one that, of course, is extremely tied to Haitian politics because of where he came out of. He was a priest in the poor neighborhoods in Haiti. He was a symbol of so much hope of resistance against the military regimes. And the various things that happened since are still a matter of debate. So, people - you know, people who are still very strongly supporters of Aristide see the way that he was treated by the international community, the choices of the United States, of the IMF and of other forces as having really kind of demolished and destroyed any possibility of change. For people who are more critical of Aristide, he's seen as somebody who made a lot of mistakes himself and really he is to blame for much of what happened within the country.
SIEGEL: One legacy of President Aristide is his disbanding of the army.
Prof. DUBOIS: So Aristide, on his return, having been expelled by a coup essentially organized by the Haitian Army, disbanded the Haitian Army. And essentially the idea was that this army had been mostly a force of it, for internal oppression. It's true that the modern Haitian Army really was created by the U.S. occupation in the 1920s or so, as an army to fight against internal insurrection against the U.S. occupation. So, it has that lineage. Of course, people will now point to the fact that not having that kind of force obviously is maybe a disadvantage during a moment of disaster like this one.
SIEGEL: So where does the current president, Rene Preval, where does he fit in in Haitian politics with respect to Aristide, with respect of former coup plotters against Aristide? How would you describe his position?
Prof. DUBOIS: Well, Preval was part of the movement with Aristide. And, I mean, he is considered as someone of a much more lower profile and was not, you know, is a charismatic speaker and so forth in the way that Aristide was, I think hailed by many people outside of Haiti as someone who would, you know, understand the bureaucratic context and so forth. But he's certainly still continues some of that movement. Now there are fissures within that party as well that continue to activate Haitian politics. But he's certainly - you know, he comes out of the last movement and that's still in many ways what helps define his stature in Haitian society.
SIEGEL: What had been Aristide's movement.
Prof. DUBOIS: Yeah, which had been Aristide's movement.
SIEGEL: Professor Laurent Dubois, professor of history at Duke University, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Prof. DUBOIS: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, more information about dots that were not connected in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Abdulmutallab is the 23-year-old Nigerian who was taken into custody on Christmas Day after an apparent attempt to blow up a Northwest airliner. Over the next few days it came out that U.S. intelligence had been warned by his father that he was off in Yemen involved with jihadist groups there, and that U.S. intelligence had picked up word out of Yemen about a Nigerian who was about to do something. Well, now the New York Times is reporting that U.S. intelligence had picked up a lot more than that and still failed to connect the dots. Mark Mazzetti is one of the Times' reporters who worked on today's story. Welcome to the program once again.
Mr. MARK MAZZETTI (Reporter, New York Times): Thank you.
SIEGEL: Let's go back to September. You report that the U.S. was tipped off to what kind of explosive device might be used on an airplane.
Mr. MAZZETTI: It was an explosive device that was used on an attack on a Saudi Prince that was an attack in September. It was an explosive device actually hidden in the person's undergarments. And this was an attack with a similar type of chemical that was ultimately used by Mr. Abdulmutallab in December.
SIEGEL: And someone from the U.N., I gather, had briefed U.S. people saying this could be on an airplane if it�
Mr. MAZZETTI: Yes. There were some indications that this could be used, this could be brought in through security on an airplane. And there were some U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials who gave similar warnings.
SIEGEL: You also write about an intercepted communication in early November from Yemen in which people spoke of a man named Umar Farouk who might be doing something.
Mr. MAZZETTI: Yeah. This is an interesting part of the story because actually the intercept occurred in August, we think by an intelligence service of an American ally, but it actually didn't get into the U.S. system until November. So there was a delay of several months where this tip about an Umar Farouk possibly planning or being involved in a future operation came through.
SIEGEL: You also quote a senior administration official, saying that intercepts picked up the date December 25th as sometime when something might be done. And also that al-Qaida people in Yemen were talking about how to get somebody out of that region and into the West.
Mr. MAZZETTI: Right. This is part of a, sort of, stream of intelligence that was coming in in November and December warning of something. There was a lot of concern about an attack inside of Yemen against perhaps the American embassy. So, there was - inside the Obama administration, there was a lot of concern about that. At the same time, as you said, there were some interesting intelligence intercepts discussing al-Qaida trying to get someone out, possibly an attack against the West, not inside Yemen. So - and it was all sort of coalescing around this date of December 25th.
SIEGEL: Now, then you report this. There, of course, was some research into Abdulmutallab after his father had gone to U.S. authorities in Nigeria, and here's what you write today: a draft memorandum on Mr. Abdulmutallab circulated through the CIA, but was still sitting in the computer of a junior CIA analyst, waiting until a photo of the young Nigerian was located. Unbeknownst to the analyst, officials told the Times, Mr. Abdulmutallab's photo had already been delivered to other counterterrorism agencies.
Mr. MAZZETTI: That's right. The CIA had earlier sent some information about Mr. Abdulmutallab that had come from his father through the counterterrorism system. Now, the CIA says this information was already in the system. We had passed it along. But others say, well, if this memo had actually been circulated in its final form that could have raised some flags and at least put him on some kind of a watch list that kept him off the plane.
SIEGEL: I guess, this is a question about data entry. I mean, is there some system by which if the words Nigerian and Yemen are put in one report that you would logically find that in a search and they might come up�
Mr. MAZZETTI: And Umar Farouk as well.
SIEGEL: And Umar Farouk as well as�
Mr. MAZZETTI: Yeah, that's what, to the layperson, it sort of puzzles people about how we have Google alerts to send us things after you key-in certain words, and why this wouldn't have happened in this case, it's still little bit of a mystery.
SIEGEL: Mark Mazzetti, of the New York Times, thanks a lot for talking with us.
Mr. MAZZETTI: Thank you very much.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: Today, technology and disaster. In Haiti, tech has played a vital role in relief and recovery efforts. Moments after the quake struck, eyewitness accounts and photos of the devastation spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter. Just today, President Obama sent his first official tweet from the headquarters of the American Red Cross, where he was touring its disaster operation center. We've also seen phone carriers make it easy to text donations. And Google created a Haiti missing-persons widget, which allows anyone in the world to search a database of missing people in Haiti.
Omar Gallaga joins us now to talk more about this. He is the technology-culture reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. Welcome back, Omar.
Mr. OMAR GALLAGA (Reporter, Technology-Culture, Austin American-Statesman): Thanks for having me, Robert.
SIEGEL: And let's start with Google's missing-persons widget. How does that work?
Mr. GALLAGA: Well, a widget is a tool that can be embedded on other Web sites. So, you can just take the code and then put it on any Web site where people can get to it directly. And it's at haiticrisis.appspot.com. And what it's doing is it's aggregating all of the missing-persons databases. So, for instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross has one. What Google did was set up this widget to scrape all of the missing-persons databases, so you can type in a name or register the name of a missing person and find all of that information in one place.
SIEGEL: And do we know if indeed many families have found information about their relatives using this?
Mr. GALLAGA: I haven't heard much about that yet, but it's definitely the place to start.
SIEGEL: How has technology made fundraising for Haiti any different than for other natural disasters that came before this?
Mr. GALLAGA: Oh, you know, a little over a year ago, we talked about the way nonprofits are utilizing technology to make donations easier and also to help donors keep track of where that money is going. And this is really the first major natural disaster since then where we've seen that go into action. And I think the best example is certainly the texting campaign. As of this morning, 13 million has been raised of people texting the number 90999 and texting the word Haiti to that number.
I believe in 2009, four million had been raised for all charities for all causes. So, already just in a few days, we've already seen a huge outpouring of $10 donations through that campaign.
SIEGEL: Well, comparing what you've seen happen in response to the Haiti earthquake and, say, the tsunami in 2004, in terms of the tech community's response, how would you describe the difference?
Mr. GALLAGA: Five, six years ago in 2004 with the tsunamis, we didn't have social media. For instance, we didn't have Twitter and Facebook for people to kind of spread the word and mobilize their friends and get people involved. We weren't getting as immediate video in Twitter accounts and people kind of documenting what was happening. So, we weren't seeing as much of the devastation as quickly as we are with this incident.
And within the tech community, I mean, I'm seeing a lot of tech companies donating, but also techies coming together to find solutions to make donations easier or to find other ways to help. There was a - what's called a CrisisCamp set up over the weekend on Saturday in multiple cities and in D.C. and Silicon Valley, London, and Colorado. And this was just geeks getting together to try to find ways to do mapping or to help speed up the databases to try to make things even easier.
So, I - it's been rare that I have seen such an outpouring of help from geeks, even in the video-game world. In the game Halo 3, if you set your game avatar to a heart, the company that makes the video game will donate to Haiti relief. So, even in these quarters, where you wouldn't expect people to be involved or to donate or to care, we are seeing definitely an outpouring of support.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Omar.
Mr. GALLAGA: Thanks for having me, Robert. And, of course, we are going to be linking to all of these news events and to resources where you can find more information about this on the All Tech Considered blog at npr.org/alltech.
SIEGEL: That's Omar Gallaga, the technology-culture reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and also for All Tech Considered.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Musicians and music fans gathered by the tens of thousands this past weekend in Anaheim, California. They were attending the Annual NAMM Show, that's the National Association of Music Merchants. The show is the music industry's biggest exhibition of new products.
Contributor Steve Proffitt has more.
STEVE PROFFITT: Acres and acres of booths, lots of long hair and soul patches. It seems like anyone whoever thought about being a musician was here. With over 1,500 exhibitors, there was something for virtually every musical taste and budget - at the lower end, apps for the iPhone.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: This is GrooveMaker, a little app that provides audio loops and beats to let you make your own grooves.
Ms. STAR ACCROMON(ph): GrooveMaker have been on the market for only four and half months now. But it has had over half a million downloads, making it one of the most popular applications on the market.
PROFFITT: GrooveMaker Star Accromon says there's a version you can download for free.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: At the other end of the scale, the Eigenharp Alpha. It's a $6,000 digital wonder made in Britain.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: Four inches wide, maybe three feet long, the Eigenharp has 128 programmable, touch-sensitive keys.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: Of course, it can do techno pop, but it also has a breath controller: a pipe the player blows in. This can help create some highly nuanced musical sounds.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: Eigenharpist David Kemp says having this instrument means he can perform live. Before it, he'd have to layer together sounds one by one using racks of equipment and computers.
Mr. DAVID KEMP (Musician): You'd have a bank of faders and you would be sitting behind a laptop, but now you can improvise a bit and it's - kind of makes it a little bit more fun and spontaneous.
PROFFITT: The Eigenharp could easily take a lifetime to master. Fortunately, there are simpler and cheaper alternatives like the Beams.
(Soundbite of music)
PROFFITT: This thing looks like a big W. You put it on a table, you move your hands around in each U and laser beams trigger different sounds. At 200 bucks, the price was right for show attendee Joe Parker(ph) of La Jolla, California. He picked one up to take home.
Mr. JOE PARKER: I think it's a great educational tool. And I'm looking forward to trying it out, having my daughter try it out. She is three and a half. I think this is a lot of fun.
PROFFITT: So, wait a minute. Did you buy it for yourself or for your three and a half year old?
Mr. PARKER: Yeah, the official story is it's for my daughter, but everyone knows it's for me.
PROFFITT: While it's digital technology that seems to drive both sales and imagination, at least one item demonstrates there is still room for innovation in a product that has no LEDs or microchips.
(Soundbite of song, "Those Were the Days")
Mr. MIKE STUART(ph): This is like a show that's mostly about technology, but here you have an instrument which is completely analog. It's the size of a child's recorder. It's a remarkable instrument. It has a reed upon it. And so, when you play upon it, you sound like you're playing upon a reed, which is a rather remarkable sound indeed.
PROFFITT: That's Mike Stuart playing the pocket-sized Pocket Sax: Fifty-nine bucks, batteries not included, batteries not required.
(Soundbite of music)
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Man: Pretty good, pretty good.
PROFFITT: For NPR News, I'm Steve Proffitt.
SIEGEL: This is NPR.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And in the Haitian capital, people are struggling to find some semblance of normalcy. They're finding bits and pieces here and there. Some gas stations reopened today and outdoor markets were busy. At the same time, dead bodies still wait to be picked up on the side of the road and tens of thousands of them are being buried in mass graves.
(Soundbite of a funeral procession)
SIEGEL: Today, a small funeral procession made its way up an avenue in Petionville.
As NPR's Greg Allen reports, funerals are rare in Haiti these days.
GREG ALLEN: Sabillia Seville(ph) died the day after the earthquake. Her daughter Francias Le Saint(ph) says it was from injuries received when stones and concrete blocks fell on her. Le Saint and her daughters were taking Seville for burial at the Petionville Cemetery. I asked if they considered leaving her body to be picked up for mass burial.
Ms. FRANCIAS LE SAINT: (Through Translator) Yeah, no. They have their own graveyard. They are not going to bury her by the road.
ALLEN: There are fewer bodies by the side of the road now, but every day more of the dead are pulled from the rubble and left out in the elements, waiting for pickup. Not far from the funeral procession, black smoke plumes up from a fire next to a building that's collapsed.
This is something you can see all over the city now in Port-au-Prince. We're in Petionville, near a store where they pulled some bodies out. They hadn't been picked up now, and people are burning them.
For days, large dump trucks have been roaming the city, picking up corpses. To find where they're going, we head north of the city. Several miles out of town, we begin seeing piles of rubble, some that also contain the bodies of earthquake victims.
Sixteen-year-old Saint-Pierre Peterson(ph) was picking through some of the rubble, looking for scrap metal.
Mr. SAINT-PIERRE PETERSON: (Through translator) Yeah, when the tractor pick them, they pick them along with the gravel. They just drop them here.
ALLEN: Most of the trucks carrying bodies are headed a few miles further, to a site the Haitian government has set aside to receive the dead.
About a half hour outside of Port-au-Prince, there's a place called Titania(ph). It's a large site where there's heavy equipment working, digging large mass graves. Drivers who pick up bodies around the city come out here in their dump trucks. They've already dumped many bodies here. No one can really say how many. Right now, there's several more large mass graves dug, and we're waiting for more bodies to be delivered.
Along with bodies, the dump trucks also bring rubble here. A backhoe digs through a pile of stone, concrete block and rebar, checking for earthquake victims.
No sooner is a pile of rubble dumped here than people from the area run in and start pulling pieces of scrap metal out here that they'll sell to try to make a living.
A large Haitian construction company is in charge of sorting through the rubble and bringing the dead here for burial.
Fulton Faulkier(ph) is a bulldozer operator. He says his home is destroyed. He, his wife and five children are sleeping out in the open. He doesn't like the work but says it's his job.
Mr. FULTON FAULKIER: (Through translator) Yesterday night, they buried 900 children. And for grownups, it was about 2,000.
ALLEN: This is the second mass gravesite open so far. The first one was filled with bodies and closed. Faulkier says he has no idea how many Haitians have been buried so far.
Nearby, one of the truck drivers, Lagos Chaperone(ph), is waiting to go out to pick up more rubble and more bodies. She says she doesn't find the work difficult, and I ask her, why not?
Ms. LAGOS CHAPERONE: (Through translator) Yes, because they are my fellow citizen. I cannot leave them in the street. We come to help them.
ALLEN: It's clear that Chaperone will be picking up earthquake victims for some time to come. Estimates of the dead range from 50,000 to 200,000 people. The workers here say they don't know how long the burial will continue, but they're making plans to open several more mass gravesites.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has his hands full with health care and now, add to his agenda, a fight for his political life. Senator Reid, a Democrat of Nevada, is facing a tough re-election battle and that was the case even before the revelation of a controversial statement that he made. He told the authors of a new book that Barack Obama was able to win the presidency because he is light-skinned and speaks without, what Reid called, a Negro dialect.
NPR's Ted Robbins went to Las Vegas and has this story on the challenges the Senate majority leader faces.
TED ROBBINS: The 250 guests at the African-Americans for Harry Reid kick-off luncheon are not likely to vote for anyone else this November. But they were still talking about his remarks. At least one speaker, Clark County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly, even pondered how Martin Luther King would have reacted.
Commissioner LAWRENCE WEEKLY (Clark County, Nevada): What would Dr. King say to Senator Harry Reid right now?
Unidentified Woman #1: All right.
Commissioner WEEKLY: I believe - this isn't my own thoughts - I believe that Dr. King would say, all is forgiven.
Unidentified Man: All is forgiven.
Commissioner WEEKLY: All is forgiven. Let's move on, you brilliant, faithful servant.
(Soundbite of applause)
ROBBINS: African-Americans make up just eight percent of Nevada's population, but Harry Reid is likely to need every vote in November. One recent poll shows him with a statewide approval rating below 35 percent. Another shows him trailing potential Republican challengers.
To see why he's struggling right now, let's go across town to the Egg Works Restaurant, south of the Las Vegas Strip.
Unidentified Woman #2: Can I get a wheat and a rye dry, please?
Unidentified Woman #3: Yup.
ROBBINS: This is a locals restaurant. All kinds of people are here: Democrats, Republicans, black, white, Hispanic, young and old. Some, like Mary Ellis(ph) and Gareth Davey(ph) like what Harry Reid is doing in Washington.
Mr. GARETH DAVEY: He's all about the reform of health care, you know? And he'll get our vote because of that more than anything because we don't have health care. And at the same time, we have two children who don't have health care.
ROBBINS: Others at the Egg Works are not Reid fans. Allie Sturgis(ph) and Heather Hall(ph) were actually talking about Harry Reid before I walked up. Hall is a Republican. She thinks since Reid became Senate majority leader, he's been more of a partisan Washington Democrat than an advocate for his home state. And Hall says Nevada needs an advocate.
Ms. HEATHER HALL: We're number one in foreclosures. We have, I think, it's the second highest unemployment rate in the country. And there's a lot of things going on in Nevada that really a lot of people are affected in a very negative way. And I don't see his role there trying to help us.
ROBBINS: Allie Sturgis is a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid has become arrogant. She's looking for someone else to support.
Ms. ALLIE STURGIS: I'm hoping that there's somebody out there that can do a better job. I'm hoping that somebody will rise to the occasion and do what's right for Nevada, instead of themselves.
ROBBINS: That's the perception Harry Reid is facing. Las Vegas columnist and political commentator John Ralston calls it Reid fatigue.
Mr. JOHN RALSTON (Political Columnist): He's been in office here for 40 years. He's not a guy who can go out and energize people because of his personality. He'd rather be in a backroom somewhere. He's not a traditional politician. And you just have the unpopularity of the Democratic agenda right now, and that explains a lot.
ROBBINS: Eleven Republicans are running for their party's nomination. They will bloody one another by the June primary. Then whoever emerges will face Reid who's reportedly raising $25 million for the general campaign. And Nevada Democrats have one of the best political organizations in the country. So no one is counting Harry Reid out, but he'll have to run a mistake-free campaign from now on in order to win a fifth term in the Senate.
Ted Robbins, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
One year ago this week, people poured into Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama. James Linton organized a caravan of four buses from Louisville, Kentucky. As he told NPR then, the group was very excited.
Mr. JAMES LINTON (Owner, Expressions of You Coffeehouse & Gallery): We're going to be riding into history and we can't wait to get there.
SIEGEL: NPR's Ina Jaffe traveled to Washington with Linton and his group, most of whom were African-American. Recently, she got together with him and some of his friends and family to find out how this past year has matched up to their expectations.
INA JAFFE: The departure point for last year's bus convoy was James Linton's coffee shop called Expressions of You. It's a neighborhood hangout where you can find a poetry slam on Saturday night and the perfect BLT on a frosty afternoon. And it's where we met again to talk about the past year.
Linton says there was so much excitement in the African-American community about Barack Obama's candidacy that he started setting up the bus trip nine months before the election, before Barack Obama had even nailed down the nomination.
Mr. LINTON: I had to max out my credit cards. And when I ran out of credit cards, I called my parents and said, hey, guess what? I need to use your credit cards.
JAFFE: Don't worry, the buses were filled and Linton's credit cards were paid off. One of the passengers was Christopher 2X. He says the scene on the National Mall that day was beyond anything he could have imagined.
Mr. CHRISTOPHER 2X: Something you've never seen before: People from all different walks of life felt a level of calm and peace, like I don't think they've ever could have felt before with those many individuals concentrated in one area.
JAFFE: 2X says he returned to Louisville with renewed energy that he's applied to his work with young people. A strong sense of connection to Barack Obama's message that day also inspired James Linton to start some new programs when he got home.
Mr. LINTON: We have a men's meeting. About 50 to 60 guys would meet here, you know, every Tuesday night, to be better fathers, better husbands, more involved in the community. We went back and grabbed some of the kids who had dropped out of high school and got those kids now going back to school. And we're creating now an after-school program.
JAFFE: Which starts February 1st. But not everyone has been able to maintain that post-inauguration spirit, says 2X.
Mr. 2X: I host two different radio shows and the feedback we've been getting is that there has been a lack of enthusiasm amongst young black voters who participated in the '08 election.
JAFFE: It's not just young people who are disillusioned, says James Linton's mother, Joyce Porter(ph). She sees widespread impatience with the president throughout the African-American community.
Ms. JOYCE PORTER: They want to see change. And in their minds, they don't see it. They want it to come soon. They want it right now. And he can't do it right now. It's too big for that.
JAFFE: For this group, there's a long list of unrealized hopes: better race relations, less dysfunction in Washington and an improved economy. James Linton applauds the president's fight for health care reform, but he says in this community, there are other things equally, if not more important.
Mr. LINTON: We need to place that same state of emergency on jobs. There's so many people unemployed who can't take care of themselves, can't take care of their families and their loved ones. People need the work.
JAFFE: But it's not all Barack Obama's fault, added Joyce's husband, Cordon Porter(ph), the Republicans have to take a lot of the blame.
Mr. CORDON PORTER: They said they were the party who'd just say no, and they've raised some success in stopping what he's trying to do with just saying no.
JAFFE: So, here's a little friendly advice for the president from Joyce Porter.
Ms. PORTER: Now, he needs to stop doing this bipartisan stuff because it's -they're not going to work with him. He might as well face it. They're not going to work with him.
JAFFE: None of this means she isn't still thrilled that an African-American is now president of the United States. For Cordon Porter, that rises above any disappointments.
Mr. PORTER: One thing that I can always say, just like I told you, we can be anything we want to be. And that means a lot to me.
JAFFE: Porter thinks there's still plenty of time for Barack Obama to turn into a great president, but if he doesn't...
Mr. PORTER: I'm still going to be proud of him.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Man: Hell of a ride.
Mr. PORTER: That's right.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Man: Hell of a ride.
JAFFE: Ina Jaffe, NPR News, Louisville, Kentucky.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Louis Menand is a New Yorker writer and a Harvard professor. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History back in 2002 for his book "The Metaphysical Club." Well, now, Menand has written a book for a series called "Issues of Our Time," a book about higher education. It's called "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.
Menand is a professor of English, and he's especially interested in higher education in the humanities. One issue he addresses is how a PhD in literature became both more common and more difficult to achieve, even as the number of jobs for PhDs in literature declined.
Menand says there are several reasons for that.
Professor LOUIS MENAND (Author, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University"): One is that there was an enormous increase in the number of universities in the United States between 1945 and 1970. It was what people in the business of higher education call the golden age of American universities, this enormous amount of increase of undergraduates, even bigger amount of increase of graduate students, and an enormous number of new campuses opened up in the 1950s and 1960s.
And this expansion expanded the number of doctoral programs so that a new institution, in order to establish more credibility for itself in the higher education system, would add doctoral programs in various subjects and start awarding PhDs. So this caused a ballooning of the number of people with PhDs who were going on the market, looking for jobs as professors, college teachers.
Then after 1970, the system started to slow down and even go backwards, and you ended up with an enormous number of PhDs for a declining number of slots.
SIEGEL: But that decline is 40 years under way. We say since 1970. That's a long time ago. You'd think the numbers would have ratcheted down over that time.
Prof. MENAND: Yeah, it's astonishing to me that the number of PhDs awarded has been going up pretty steadily since the 1970s, and the number of job openings has more or less been going down. It seems to be a process that people have a very hard time reversing.
The other piece of it, which is even more amazing to me, is that the time it takes to get the PhD has been increasing steadily since the 1970s so that the median time to get a PhD in a humanities discipline, like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years. Half of people who get PhDs...
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Prof. MENAND: ...in those fields take more than nine years to get the degree.
Now, if you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen? And there are a number of factors involved in that. One obviously is the job market. Another is the fact of part-time hiring. That is, a lot of graduate students teach college students, and they do it quite full time for very little money because they are still enrolled as students in their institutions.
The median age for people getting a degree in the humanities, getting a PhD, is 35.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Prof. MENAND: So if you think about that, it's really - it's an astonishingly long apprenticeship in a profession that really shouldn't require that much training.
SIEGEL: So it sounds like the number of PhDs being awarded in those fields is driven as much by the number of professors who teach graduate students and who assign them dissertations as it is by the possibility for ever getting a job being one of those people.
Prof. MENAND: Yeah, it's true. There have been several studies, long-term studies, of career outcomes of people who've gotten PhDs. And one of those studies showed that of people who got PhDs in English - and only about half the people who enroll in graduate programs in English actually get the PhD - only five percent of those ended up teaching in research universities, which is really what we're training our students to do.
So there's a real disjunction between the training students receive to become research scholars and the kind of teaching that most of them will end up doing, which don't involve training graduate students and generally don't involve a huge amount of research. But they still need the PhD to get those jobs.
SIEGEL: After your brief detour in law school - I gather you spent a year in law school - how many years was it getting your PhD in English at Columbia University?
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: And how old were you when you emerged with it?
Prof. MENAND: Yeah, I went to law school for not very good reasons. When I graduated from college, I stayed only a year and then I went to graduate school in English at Columbia. I was six years getting my degree. And I was, I guess, 28 when I got my first job.
SIEGEL: Well, six years would be a sprint by contemporary standards too.
Prof. MENAND: Yeah. That actually - in the '60s, that was the norm, about four and a half years in the sciences and about six years in the humanities. So you can see how far we've come since that time.
SIEGEL: Well, Louis Menand, author of "The Marketplace of Ideas," thank you very much for talking with us about it.
Prof. MENAND: Thank you, Robert.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The U.S. is in the process of moving thousands of troops into Haiti.
(Soundbite of helicopter)
SIEGEL: One of the most visible signs of the U.S. presence: Navy Sea Hawk helicopters ferrying in supplies. Many Haitians and many in the international community are looking to the U.S. to take the lead in the relief and recovery effort.
NPR's Jason Beaubien has been talking with the military and other American authorities in Port-au-Prince.
Unidentified Man: If you people here do not back up, nobody is going to get processed.
JASON BEAUBIEN: The Americans haven't just taken over Haitian air traffic control, they're also running security at the airport. A mob of people, many waving American passports were trying desperately to get into the airport to catch a flight out of the battered Haitian capital. Out on the tarmac, pallets of relief supplies are being loaded off a massive Russian cargo plane. At the western edge of the airport, soldiers in the 82nd Airborne are loading boxes of food and water to Navy helicopters. Captain Phil Schneider is an assistant operations officer with the 82nd Airborne.
Captain PHIL SCHNEIDER (Assistant Operations Officer, 82nd Airborne): We have a series of nine distribution centers that we coordinated through the Navy, and we're bringing food and water to those locations.
BEAUBIEN: He says the 82nd Airborne's mission would be to provide security and logistical assistance so relief agencies can operate in the city. In downtown Port-au-Prince, looting broke out today as people tore through the remnants of shops that had crumbled in the quake. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, at the airport this morning said the U.S. is ramping up its humanitarian response.
Mr. KENNETH MERTEN (U.S. Ambassador to Haiti): We have an aircraft career that's just outside of Port-au-Prince about 25 miles offshore, maybe not even that much, with loads of helicopters onboard. That's these helicopters you're hearing, seeing here that are dropping off food and other items.
BEAUBIEN: He says the U.S. Coast Guard has two ships in the port. The U.S. Air Force is running the airport. About 1,000 members of the 82nd Airborne are on the ground, and the Marines are expected to land late tonight or tomorrow. Ambassador Merten says the focus of U.S. efforts is going to be assisting in the aid effort and that the primary responsibility for security still remains with the Haitian police.
Mr. MERTEN: Obviously their capabilities have been degraded because they've had very heavy losses as several police commissaries were flattened, full with officers.
BEAUBIEN: He says the U.S. will step in on security only if needed and if asked to by the Haitian government. The ambassador says it's still hard to comprehend the scale of the destruction here.
(Soundbite of helicopter)
Mr. MERTEN: I flew over Port-au-Prince the first time yesterday since the earthquake. And it looks like those pictures you see of Tokyo after World War II. Blocks just vaporized, just dust, tragic.
BEAUBIEN: Aid groups estimate that at least 300,000 people have been left homeless from the quake. In addition, much of the infrastructure in the capital is destroyed. The port is inoperable. Even businesses that weren't crushed remain closed. Banks and grocery stores are shuttered. This morning, a fire broke out at the Pasta Mama Spaghetti Factory, ruining one more local source of food. Standing outside the factory, Belsins Pierre Joslene(ph) says he's been living on the street for the past week and he hasn't seen any aid deliveries.
Mr. BELSINS PIERRE JOSLENE: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: In our neighborhood, there hasn't been any help yet, nothing, he says. But he adds that he's confident that the Americans will come soon to share with the Haitian people.
SIEGEL: That report from NPR's Jason Beaubien in Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Jason joins us now for more on this question of aid. Jason, from what you've seen on the ground there and in other humanitarian crises that you've covered, would you say that there has been a slow response to Haiti's needs?
JASON BEAUBIEN: You have to understand that this earthquake knocked out the port. The airport has been taken over by the U.S. Air Force, so they're now running things that took them a while to get that up and going. I think it is unrealistic to think that you are going to have a huge influx of food and water. It has been a little slow in terms of medical supplies, things like that which aren't as bulky. I think that the questions that people are raising about this being a bit on the slow side in terms of those such things, it is fair. But the logistical challenges are huge. This city was incredibly damaged and that's a lot of what's causing the bottlenecks in terms of aid delivery.
SIEGEL: If bottlenecks are now easing, why are they easing? What's happened to increase the flow of aid?
BEAUBIEN: I'm not quite sure that the bottlenecks are easing. I just think that people are actually getting their logistics up and running. There's lot of aid sitting at the airport and I think that basically what's happening is that the aid agencies and the U.S. military and the U.N. are finally getting that aid from the airport out to some degree. I have to say, we still have not seen very many distributions. But I think what's happening is that these systems are getting up and one week after the quake, it looks like that the aid is about ready to start flowing into the streets.
SIEGEL: Also, can you give us some sense of the road, or roads, I don't know the area, from the airport into the city or out to Carrefour on the west side of the city?
BEAUBIEN: The airport is basically in the city, that isn't an issue and there are roads that are completely functional between the airport and the city itself. Out to Carrefour, those roads are actually in really rough shape. And there have also been civilians setting up road blocks on them. From what I hear, they've been allowing aid agencies to go through, but they've been either demanding money or making other problems for civilians who are trying to move along those roads. And then at a certain - the roads are just completely destroyed and you can only pass them on motorcycles.
SIEGEL: NPR's Jason Beaubien in Port-au-Prince. Jason, take care, thanks.
BEAUBIEN: Thank you, Robert.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
It is difficult to grasp the level of devastation in Haiti after last week's earthquake without some understanding of Haiti before the quake. We pulled together a few numbers for context and they paint a picture of a country that in many ways had already been devastated for decades by poverty and by political mismanagement. For starters, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Before the quake, the country had a population just over nine million, of those, approximately seven million lived on two dollars a day or less.
The labor force is largely based on agriculture, mostly small-scale subsistence farmers. It's not easy to calculate the unemployment rate, but it has been estimated at somewhere around 70 or 80 percent. And one final number for you: The U.N. puts together what it calls a Human Development Index. It ranks countries based on life expectancy, education and standard of living. Of the 182 countries on the list, Haiti ranks 149th, just below Papua New Guinea and just above Sudan.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
One of the big political surprises this month has been the Senate race in Massachusetts. The vote is tomorrow. For Democrats and for President Obama, the stakes are huge. It's the race to fill the seat that was held for almost half a century by the late Edward Kennedy. And all of a sudden, it seems that the Republican candidate could win in a state that tends to vote very democratic. A Republican win would give the GOP enough votes in the Senate to defeat health care legislation and voters in Massachusets say the race between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown is not just about their state.
Ms. SARAH LEMARE(ph): I feel like it is a referendum on the health care reform because, you know, it will be a vote that could block the reform.
Mr. ZACK BRUNO(ph): For me it has a certain significance because I think, you know, Ted Kennedy was a wonderful man and stood for a lot of good things. For me, I think that, you know, his view should be, or his ideas should be passed on.
Mr. JEREMY KELLY(ph): I mean, in Coakley's eyes, I always see references to the Republicans as a whole preventing Brown from getting that 41st vote. I mean, so, these are definitely national issues.
SIEGEL: That was Jeremy Kelly, along with Zack Bruno and Sarah Lemare speaking today in Boston. And we put the question of how nationally significant this race is to Fred Thys who's a political reporter from member station WBUR in Boston. I asked Thys if the race is seen there as a referendum on President Obama.
FRED THYS: My sense from talking to voters this weekend is that, especially the Scott Brown voters, they seem to be angry about certain things in the Obama administration. Exactly, yes, they are upset about the pace at which they see health care moving through Congress. They think it's going too quickly. They are concerned about spending. They feel that there's just too much spending going on in Washington, that the deficits are out of control.
SIEGEL: Now, on health care there's a special relationship with Massachusetts because the state has a health care reform regimen already in place.
THYS: It does. And what I found going around with these two candidates is that some of the Brown supporters are with him precisely because of our experiment with health care here. They object, in particular, to being forced to take out health insurance, which we have to do here, it's mandatory. That's the only way we can get universal health care coverage.
SIEGEL: Is it really a Tea Party style campaign in Massachusetts?
THYS: There are many people with Tea Party T-shirts at Scott Brown events and in his campaign headquarters. They all are from Massachusetts. I have yet to meet a single person who was not from Massachusetts. So, while he may be getting assistance from out of state, there's very much a homegrown feel to his campaign here.
SIEGEL: Now, on the Democratic side, the Democrats have said, well, President Obama was there over the weekend. You can't get much bigger than that. Have they managed to galvanize Democrats and have they managed to get Massachusetts Democrats to feel that this really is about Washington and not just about Massachusetts?
THYS: Certainly President Obama had the biggest crowds this weekend. Many, many people who were not able even to get into the rally with him. Massachusetts Democrats are very much aware that a lot is on the line tomorrow. And I think it took them a while. They've been telling me, as I've gone around with Coakley, it may have taken them a while to realize this, but the barrage of television ads, the national attention on this race, they say, has awakened them and will ensure that they turn out at the polls tomorrow.
SIEGEL: Typically, what's the difference between a Coakley event and a Scott Brown event?
THYS: The Coakley events are rather subdued. There are middle-aged people who are committed Democrats ready to volunteer, in look of some bit of a pep talk from Coakley. Whereas the Brown rallies, you come there expecting a small crowd and you end up seeing this huge crowd showing up all of a sudden. And it's a mix of people. They're the curious, they are the, you know, diehard Republicans, some of the Tea Party folks and then just people who've been turned off also by some of the negative advertising that's come from the Democratic side against Scott Brown.
SIEGEL: The conventional wisdom seems to be that Scott Brown has run a very effective campaign and Martha Coakley has not been the most effective candidate. Does that seem to be what most people think when they follow the campaigns or is that too simple?
THYS: You know, just before President Obama was here, former President Clinton was here on Friday campaigning for Coakley. And at that event, again, mainly middle-aged women, in this case, attending the Coakley event with Bill Clinton. Women were telling me that they felt that Martha Coakley had not done a good job at running her race, that she'd been asleep at the wheel, so to speak, taking the race for granted and only awoke when the polls first started to show that Scott Brown was within striking distance.
SIEGEL: That's Fred Thys, political reporter from member station WBUR in Boston. Fred, thanks a lot.
THYS: Glad to do it, Robert.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
This is from Abraham Flexner's description of kind of American school that he reported on 100 years ago. The schools, he wrote, were essentially private ventures, money making in spirit and object. Income was simply divided among the lecturers. No applicant for instruction who could pay his fees or sign his note was turned down. Secretarial school or barber college or anyone-can-learn-to-draw art school? None of the above. Flexner was describing medical education in the United States and Canada.
The report that he issued for the Carnegie Foundation published in 1910 led to the reform of medical schools. And in this centennial year of the Flexner report, we've invited Paul Starr, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, to talk about it. He's written extensively about the history of American medicine. Welcome to the program.
Professor PAUL STARR (Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University): Good to be with you, Robert.
SIEGEL: First, who was Abraham Flexner?
Prof. STARR: Abraham Flexner, curiously enough, was not a doctor. His brother, Simon Flexner, was a very distinguished physician. He was, however, an expert in education. He played an important role in the reform, not only of medical education, but much more broadly of scientific research.
SIEGEL: How did the Flexner report of 1910 change American medical education? What did he find and how did people react to it?
Prof. STARR: Well, during the 19th century, Americans were distrustful of expertise. There were, through the mid 19th century, no effective medical licensing laws, no regulation of medical practice or medical education. And so the whole field was thrown open to all kinds of practitioners of various medical sects and various kinds of entrepreneurs, who set up schools as money-making ventures, just as Flexner said in the passage you quoted.
SIEGEL: There were some medical schools affiliated with universities, but then there were these proprietary schools all over the country.
Prof. STARR: Yes. Medical schools at universities had themselves gone through a major transformation in the late 19th century with the introduction of laboratory sciences and other more advanced fields, but many other schools had not undergone that transformation. They were still back in the old-fashioned mode.
SIEGEL: I was looking at Flexner's autobiography, which he published in 1940, and he was recalling some of the incidents of his study trip. And one of them, he says, I recall that when in Salem, Washington, I asked the dean of the medical school whether the school possessed a physiological laboratory. He replied, surely, I have it upstairs, I'll bring it you. And he went up and brought down a small sphygmograph, an instrument designed to register the movement of the pulse, he said, or to test blood pressure, I guess. That was passing for medical school early in the last century.
Prof. STARR: Yes, because, again, there had been no regulations. So, many schools had no laboratories whatsoever. Things were changing already at the time when Flexner did his report. And sometimes people attribute the entire change that medicine underwent to Flexner, but that's not true. Licensing laws were being strengthened. People were aware that changes needed to take place, and Flexner helped to consolidate a movement that was already underway.
SIEGEL: Some of the reforms that Flexner proposed that seem like no-brainers today, but medical schools should be for college graduates, for example.
Prof STARR: Uh-huh.
SIEGEL: Or there should be some kind of experience with dissection, actual looking at the body while you're in medical school.
Prof. STARR: Yes. All of those things made a great deal of sense, but at the same time, what they meant is that there would be new financial obstacles because medical education would become more expensive. It would become more exclusive and that was, on the whole, a necessary change. Unfortunately, it did result in a decline in the supply of doctors and that had very long term, unfortunate consequences for America.
SIEGEL: So we're witnessing sometime early in the 20th century a change from a well-intentioned, good-natured local physician, who didn't have much training, frankly, to a kind of a trained scientist with a real medical degree.
Prof. STARR: That was the vision. That was Flexner's idea that science had to be brought to the bedside. And his report played a very positive role in doing that.
SIEGEL: Was the Carnegie Foundation so influential that a report from an educator who'd been sent around the country to look at medical schools could have that much influence on the way the country trained doctors?
Prof. STARR: I think what you have to bear in mind is that at that time in 1910, American society was undergoing a revolution, in many different respects, as a result of science. The airplane had just been invented. The automobile was coming into use. The telephone was coming into use. People were seeing everyday life transformed by science and technology. They began to have more faith in science than they had before. And the old distrust of professionals as monopolists that ran through the 19th century began to dissipate. And instead, people began to place their trust in science. I think that's why Flexner had so much influence.
SIEGEL: Paul Starr, thanks so much for talking with us today.
Prof. STARR: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
One of the most successful fast food pioneers has died, the man behind Taco Bell. His restaurants became the country's largest Mexican fast food chain with more than 36 million customers a week.
NPR's Howard Berkes has this remembrance of Glen Bell Jr.
HOWARD BERKES: Most people know Taco Bell either for the food, like the quickie deep-fried chalupa or the talking dog, the Spanish-speaking Chihuahua searching for his Taco Bell.
(Soundbite of TV ad)
Unidentified Man: Yo quiero Taco Bell.
BERKES: Well, Taco Bell founder Glen Bell didn't have anything to do with either, at least directly. Bell started the Mexican fast food chain in 1962 after trying to emulate McDonald's with burgers and hotdogs. Bell switched to takeout tacos to make his restaurants different. And he was so successful that PepsiCo bought Taco Bell 16 years later for stock worth $125 million. Yum brands owns the chain now and still draws from Bell's approach, according to Blair Chancey, editor of QSR magazine, which tracks the quick service restaurant business.
Ms. BLAIR CHANCEY (Editor, QSR): I can see he really started that whole entrepreneurial spirit early on. Now, I mean, they have funky ad campaigns, and they try really new different things, but that was something that he established earlier on that that was inherent in the culture of the brand.
BERKES: Chancey also credits Bell with making Mexican fast food a national phenomenon with more than 5,000 Taco Bells and competitors like Taco Time and Chipotle.
Ms. CHANCEY: It probably couldn't have happened if Taco Bell hadn't come on the scene first and really introduced people to Mexican food. This was a chain that came out of California, but you have to think that people on the East Coast now eat Taco Bell, where normally if they hadn't been taught about this type of food before, they probably wouldn't have ever even tried it.
BERKES: Like or hate Mexican fast food, Glen Bell deserves much of the credit or the blame. Bell died at his home in California yesterday at age 86.
Howard Berkes, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
Google's threat last week to pull out of China was just one chapter in the complicated story of China's relationship with the Internet. Chinese authorities have brought a heavy hand to controlling the environment, not only for Google, but for Chinese Internet firms.
As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing, the government's approach shows it has a different vision for the Internet than other countries.
(Soundbite of office)
ANTHONY KUHN: On a Friday night, Beijing IT professionals gather in a corporate office to discuss the implications of Google's threat to quit China. The desks are strewn with cans of Tsingtao beer and iPhones. There's a young blogger nicknamed White Crow(ph) in jeans and a baseball cap. He recalls other U.S. Internet companies, such as eBay and Yahoo, which have left the Chinese market in defeat - at least in his eyes. But he speaks approvingly of what he considers Google sticking to its principles.
Mr. WHITE CROW: (Chinese spoken)
(Soundbite of laughter)
KUHN: Google went out like a man, he says.
Sitting nearby is IT worker Jao Gong(ph). When Google first threatened to pull out of China, he was one of the first to lay flowers outside Google's China headquarters in Beijing.
Mr. JAO GONG: (Through Translator) The long-term policy of censorship has made it very difficult for an entire industry to develop. We were already very angry at this. The government has been increasing its control over us like boiling frogs in a pot. When this incident occurred, we felt it was our duty to speak out.
KUHN: Last year, China tightened Internet management and shut down a number of popular Web sites with little explanation. For example, in addition to blocking the popular microblogging site Twitter, it also blocked several Chinese imitators. It then allowed the Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper to open its own heavily-censored Twitter clone.
IT blogger Huang Boa(ph) says there's often a profit motive behind China's Internet controls.
Mr. HUANG BOA: (Through translator) Censorship comes first and clears the way. Then state-owned firms rush in to grab up the profits.
KUHN: Huang says that the Internet in recent years has seen a rise in interactive social networking sites. But Chinese authorities, he says, envision an Internet that they can more easily control.
Mr. BOA: (Through Translator) My advice to startups is if it involves user-generated content, you'd best not do it. It's too risky. The government can kill off your venture for any reason it chooses.
KUHN: Not long after Google threatened to pull out of China, state broadcaster, China Central Television, launched its own Internet search engine.
Former President of Yahoo! China, Xie Wen, says that government-created Web sites aren't competitive. He says that CCTV search engine is hardly capable of threatening Google.
Mr. XIE WEN (Former President, Yahoo! China): (Through translator) It doesn't even do a good job of finding content on CCTV's own Web site. In the Information Age, you can't rely on authority, monopoly and control over resources to succeed.
KUHN: Blogger Huang Boa says that Beijing is unlikely to back down in the face of what it considers a challenge from Google. He's concerned that if Google leaves China, the government might even take revenge by blocking Chinese Internet users' access to Google Web sites overseas. Many analysts are already watching to see how Chinese competitors may profit from Google's departure. Xie Wen says that any glee at Google's misfortune is shortsighted.
Mr. WEN: (Through translator) When the free flow of information is suppressed, what use is it if your product is technically superior? When the whole market is constricted, being number one is worth much less.
KUHN: The U.S. is expected to launch a formal diplomatic protest this week over the cyber attacks that Google says could prompt it to pull out of China.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Musicians in one of the country's premier orchestras have gone on strike. The Cleveland Orchestra says it's having financial problems and it's asked musicians to take a temporary pay cut. Instead, they walked out last midnight, saying that any cut would endanger the quality of the ensemble.
Dan Bobkoff of member station WCPN has the story.
(Soundbite of music)
DAN BOBKOFF: The Cleveland Orchestra kept its promise to play its free annual Martin Luther King Day concert last night to a sold out crowd. Then, at midnight, with no agreement with management, the musicians kept another promise: They went on strike.
Unidentified Man #1: Double reeds. They're both double reeds.
Unidentified Man #2: Yeah.
BOBKOFF: This morning, about half of the orchestra's players stood outside Severance Hall, telling the public why they stopped working for the first time in 30 years.
Mr. JEFF RATHBUN (Oboist, Cleveland Symphony Orchestra): The purpose of the whole institution is to put a world-class ensemble on stage.
BOBKOFF: That's oboist Jeff Rathbun, who heads the musicians' negotiating committee. At issue here is management's proposal that the musicians take a one-year, five percent pay cut. Management points to a $2 million deficit and dwindling endowment as reasons for the musicians to accept concessions. The union proposes maintaining players' current salaries through August, arguing that they've already made numerous concessions over the past few years.
But Rathbun says accepting the new cuts would be the beginning of the end of the orchestra's status as a destination orchestra.
Mr. RATHBUN: We will go down a slippery slope of not being able to attract the best talent here, just like any sports team wouldn't be able to attract the best talent if they were trying to build a championship team.
BOBKOFF: Until now, the Cleveland Orchestra's reputation thrived both here in Cleveland and around the world. But as finances have been hammered both by the economy and by diminishing interest in classical music, concerts now rarely sell out.
Gary Hanson is the orchestra's executive director.
Mr. GARY HANSON (Executive Director, Cleveland Orchestra): We've been struggling against the economy of this community and then with the global economic downturn. In 2008, our situation became one in which everybody needed to make a sacrifice.
BOBKOFF: Hanson and the rest of the management staff took pay cuts last year, and he says the union musicians should share in the sacrifice. The players, who generally make in the low six figures, say their pay has fallen behind their peers. The orchestra currently ranks seventh in compensation behind those in cities like Boston and San Francisco. But Hanson says Cleveland's low cost of living should also be considered.
Mr. HANSON: Financial stability is at least as important to artistic excellence as is compensation comparisons with musicians in larger cities.
BOBKOFF: The Cleveland Orchestra isn't the only one with a labor dispute. The Seattle Symphony musicians may also strike soon.
At last night's concert, Clarence Gilmore seemed to support management's side of the dispute.
Mr. CLARENCE GILMORE: Everywhere in the United States we have to take some sort of concession or cut and it's happening all over. So I don't see why the orchestra or people in Northeast Ohio think that they could be exempt from it.
BOBKOFF: But Brenda Ellner says the musicians need support at all costs.
Ms. BRENDA ELLNER: We have to dig deep. If this is what the musicians need, we need to find a way to reconcile this.
BOBKOFF: Longtime music critic Tim Page is a professor at the University of Southern California. He says a strike like this could cause lasting damage.
Professor TIM PAGE (Journalism and Music, University of Southern California; Music Critic): Strikes tend to leave long memories between players and management. They're never good things and a lot of healing is necessary.
BOBKOFF: The strike has already canceled tonight's planned concert at Indiana University, part of a new residency program there. And next week, the orchestra is scheduled to travel to Miami for its lucrative annual concert series. That, too, is now in doubt.
For NPR News, I'm Dan Bobkoff in Cleveland.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
(Soundbite of applause)
SIEGEL: That's how the first family was welcomed this morning at So Others Might Eat, a D.C. social service organization blocks away from the White House. President Barack Obama, sporting a green apron and the obligatory food service gloves, helped serve hot meals to the homeless, one way that he marked today's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified People: (Singing) Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
SIEGEL: At King's home church in Atlanta, the mood was both celebratory and cautionary.
Princeton scholar Cornel West contrasted the civil rights leader and the nation's first black president.
Dr. CORNEL WEST (Professor, Princeton University): Brother Barack is the smiling, friendly face of the American government. Forty years ago that's the government that hunted Martin down. That's the progress that we made. But the same kind of accountability must be put forward to ensure that poor people and working people have - ought to be at the center of a policy, job creation, at the center of our policy. And it's going to be difficult to have a peace prize if you're a war president. It's going to be very difficult. We're going to help you. We love you. But we're going to keep you accountable, too.
SIEGEL: Cornel West speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church today, the church where Martin Luther King preached from 1960 until his assassination in 1968.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Google's announcement last week followed revelations that its computers had been hacked. And Google said a primary goal of the attack had been to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But the hackers also targeted many other companies. It was a case of industrial espionage.
As NPR's Tom Gjelten reports, it may have been as much about stealing from rivals as snooping on dissidents.
TOM GJELTEN: For cyber espionage experts, the big news in Google's announcement came in one sentence. The company said the penetration of its computer system by Chinese hackers, quote, "resulted in the theft of intellectual property." Those words say a lot. Intellectual property means knowledge and ideas, what makes innovation possible - everything from secret formulas to computer codes. Google is among the most innovative companies on the planet and someone in China has been stealing its secrets.
James Mulvenon, a China expert at the Defense Group consultancy, thinks this is the real story behind Google's announced threat to pull out of China.
Dr. JAMES MULVENON (Director, Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, Defense Group Inc.): For Google to have made such a profound decision to turn its back on the fastest growing economy in the world, it had to have been more than a bunch of dissident email accounts.
GJELTEN: The background here is China's determination to catch up and pass its Western rivals economically and militarily. But it's an authoritarian country with a legal and economic environment not always conducive to creativity. It's hard to imagine a company like Google or Microsoft or Apple starting on its own in China. So, how can the Chinese develop cutting edge technology? Well, they can acquire it by whatever means necessary from the Western companies that already have it.
James Mulvenon says Google and other companies may be getting tired of the Chinese going after their assets.
Dr. MULVENON: Western multinational companies are just finding it increasingly hard to do business in China, make profit in China, when facing a government that is so systematically trying to transfer innovation to China, using, seemingly, every tool at its disposal to do that.
GJELTEN: Transferring innovation, from West to East. The official U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recently highlighted what it said was China's increasingly aggressive efforts to obtain U.S. technology through stepped-up cyber theft.
Larry Wortzel, a longtime China espionage expert, is a commission member. He says the Chinese have penetrated many U.S. defense companies with the intention of stealing U.S. technology secrets.
Dr. LARRY WORTZEL (Vice Chairman, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission ): It saves them money. It saves them their own research and development effort. And it leapfrogs Chinese industries ahead, even though they may not have put the money into the research.
GJELTEN: Countries steal secrets from each other all the time. But the Chinese are virtually unmatched when it comes to cyber theft.
Mr. STEPHEN SPOONAMORE (CEO, ABS Materials): They are so sophisticated. They are so amazingly, complexly driven in the process.
GJELTEN: Stephen Spoonamore is a high-tech entrepreneur who's worked for years defending his clients from Chinese hackers. He's among the best in the business, but he's ready to give up. The Chinese are so good at breaking into other people's computer systems, he says, that it's almost impossible to keep them out.
Mr. SPOONAMORE: If you create 50 or 60 or 70 units of a few dozen very good hackers apiece and then you add rows and rows and rows of control room monitors...
GJELTEN: With techs watching the monitors to catch openings in your adversary's computer operations.
Mr. SPOONAMORE: If you pair those two things up and run it 24/7, you're going to win.
GJELTEN: The key question, of course, is who exactly is behind these attacks? Given speed-of-light transactions on the Internet, it's hard to identify the source of a cyber attack with certainty. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said circumstantial and forensic evidence strongly indicates the involvement of Chinese state or state-supported entities. Again, commission member Larry Wortzel.
Dr. WORTZEL: When you see human espionage directed against specific technologies like quiet submarine drive systems, like naval propulsion systems and cyber attacks to extract exactly the same information, a reasonable analyst would conclude that that's probably government-directed.
GJELTEN: Human spies and computer hackers looking for defense secrets at the same time. Who but a government would be directing an effort like that? It's a glimpse of 21st-century cyber warfare.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
Arsonists and looters are rampaging in Haiti's capital tonight. One week after a devastating earthquake, the desperate and the opportunistic are swarming smashed shops, torching buildings, and battling one another over what little can be found in the heart of Port-au-Prince's commercial district.
NPR's David Gilkey says police units are firing into the air over their heads but that it's not doing anything to stop the chaos. David, tell us what you saw today and where you saw them in Port-au-Prince.
DAVID GILKEY: Well, the area we're talking about, if you sort of draw a line toward the water from the presidential palace is the commercial district. And we went in there at about 3:00 this afternoon. We've been going in there every afternoon usually to look at rescues and what people are doing with the devastation.
We've noticed the looting picking up and sort of a level of tension rising over the last couple of evenings. This afternoon, it was completely out of hand. I mean, there was very, very little police presence.
The UN force here is Brazilian. They weren't really doing anything to stop it. Numerous sort of building and structure fires set by the people that are looting, and probably the saddest one of all was one of the older churches, not the main Catholic church but one that's about three blocks from it was torched.
And while we were standing in front of it burning to the ground, I mean it really was sort of an apocalyptic scene downtown today. You know, that we were in this one sort of store that had completely collapsed but was on fire, and they were sort of hauling out rolls and rolls and rolls of clothing material through this fire. It was just - it was incredible. And then there's just thousands of people roaming on the street.
SIEGEL: When you speak of looting, are people looting necessities out of stores? Are they looting food and water? Are they taking appliances or goods? What are you seeing people walking off with?
GILKEY: It's definitely not durable goods. I mean, it's sort of anything that they can get their hands on. The food and the water, any of those stores that contain sort of perishable items, that stuff was gone, I think, the first day.
And the bizarre thing is that they're having to essentially tunnel into these buildings to get these stuff. And so it's not as though they're breaking down a door and going in and cleaning the shelves out. They're having to sort of burrow in - through a little hole in the roof, create a passageway and start passing the stuff out. But most of the things that they're getting out of these buildings are, you know, useless for any sort of daily life.
SIEGEL: You mentioned Brazilian troops in that district being a part of the UN force. Is there any sign of any U.S. forces at all in the area?
GILKEY: The only U.S. forces we have seen have been at the airport where it appears that that's sort of their staging area and they're going to push out from there to certain areas in the city. Patrolling the streets, no. The only ones patrolling the streets, and I wouldn't say that the UN troops are necessarily patrolling the streets, they're more providing security for some of the rescue teams that are still searching for people.
Really, any sort of level of security is left to the Haitian police, and it's just - it's impossible. They can stand on a street corner and a block away there's a street fight, people are hitting each other with sticks over a box of whatever and there's looting going on.
So it's just - it's a numbers game. When you have tens of thousands of people sort of roaming the streets aimlessly, what are going to do? It's impossible right now.
SIEGEL: NPR's David Gilkey in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Thanks a lot, David.
GILKEY: Thank you, Robert.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And now to issues of war and mental health. Scientists have found high levels of mental health problems among troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Now they're studying the families of those fighters.
NPR's Joseph Shapiro reports on a new study of Army wives.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO: The report in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that Army wives report a lot of stress when their husbands are sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. And the longer the deployment, the more likely the wife is to experience depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and other mental health problems.
That deployment creates stress shouldn't come as a surprise. Still, the study is welcome news for Army wives like Keli Lowman of Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Ms. KELI LOWMAN: There is no surprise. But it seems to be surprising to the wives themselves, especially newly married spouses or spouses that have not experienced a deployment before. You will have a sense of worry like you've never felt before.
SHAPIRO: There's more worry when troops face second, third, fourth deployments and more. Over just three years, Keli Lowman's husband, James, was sent to Afghanistan twice and then to Iraq.
Ms. LOWMAN: It's a continuing stress. We are a constant ready force. So you may exchange the distress of he's leaving, for the stress of he's gone; to the excitement that he's coming home, to the stress of he's going to leave again in 12 months.
SHAPIRO: And after her husband, a helicopter pilot, was severely injured, there's been even more stress. She followed him to hospitals from the East Coast to the West, leaving their young daughter with friends and family. There was stress as James fought for his life, and still today as he deals with traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
Keli Lowman sought help from her Army doctor at Fort Bragg.
Ms. LOWMAN: I actually just walked into the clinic in tears one day, and I just explained that I was having anxiety, I was having panic attacks. And I was handed three prescriptions: One for something to sleep, something for anxiety, something for depression. But there was no support. It was just, take these, you'll feel better.
SHAPIRO: Only later did she get free counseling from a sympathetic, local therapist, then support from other Army wives and advice on how to cope from the Wounded Warrior Project, a group that now employs Lowman to seek out other troubled Army wives.
Alyssa Mansfield, at RTI International, is the co-author of the study that showed widespread mental health problems among wives whose husbands are sent to war.
Dr. ALYSSA MANSFIELD (RTI International): What we found was that the wives of soldiers who were deployed were more likely to have mental health diagnoses than wives of soldiers who were not deployed. And not only was it deployment versus non-deployment, but also the length of deployment that turned out to be a factor.
SHAPIRO: Mansfield studied the records of 250,000 Army wives who went to Army health clinics. But that means she wasn't able to measure women who had the same problems but didn't go see a doctor.
Ms. MANSFIELD: We already know that there's a stigma associated with seeking help for mental health problems in military personnel, that the wives may feel that way as well. For that reason, we actually believe that our estimates are conservative, that the problems might actually be greater than what we found in this study.
SHAPIRO: Army wife Keli Lowman agrees there's a lot of stigma that keeps Army wives from getting care.
Ms. LOWMAN: You're viewed as weaker or a complainer by other wives because everybody is in the same situation. All of our husbands are gone. When you hear one that is exceptionally loud about complaining of her two children or, you know, just things are so awful for her, you get very aggravated because you're in the same situation. But everybody deals with the situations differently.
SHAPIRO: The study of Army wives looked at medical records up to 2006. Since then, the Army has added dozens of therapists and even made counseling available by telephone. To reduce stigma, sometimes there's no record kept of who gets therapy. Free daycare is now available for stressed-out mothers whose husbands are at war. And the military has reduced the length of those deployments.
Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Today is the deadline for states to apply for what the Obama administration is calling, the Race to the Top fund. The money will go to education. About 40 states have been competing for $4.3 billion. And today, President Obama tossed in another $1.3 billion.
As NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports, the money comes with lots of strings attached.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Cash-starved states would love to get their hands on as much federal aid as they can for their schools. But instead of just giving it to them, President Obama is having them compete for it.
President BARACK OBAMA: Over the past few months, we've seen such a positive response that today I'm announcing our intention to make a major new investment, more than $1.3 billion in this year's budget to continue the race to the top.
SANCHEZ: Even with the extra money though, some critics refuse to rubber stamp Mr. Obama's reform agenda. Tom Dooher, head of Education Minnesota, the state's largest teachers' union, says the competition for Race to the Top funds has been coercive.
Mr. TOM DOOHER (President, Education Minnesota): And our teachers are very cautious because they don't have money in their schools. Their superintendents are telling them this might be the only money we get for a number of years, let's go for it. But we shouldn't have the pursuit of money be our blind stampede to something that doesn't really help students.
SANCHEZ: Besides, says Dooher, teachers in Minnesota had little or no input. So, his union decided not to endorse their state's application. Teachers and local school officials in California, Kansas, Florida, Michigan, and Indiana also withheld their support. Another dozen states, including Texas, didn't even apply, either because the money came with more federal oversight or because some states simply weren't sold on the reforms the Obama administration is pushing.
Mr. ARNE DUNCAN (Department of Education): Frankly, (unintelligible) I could care less it was a tough sale or not. It's the right thing to do.
SANCHEZ: U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Sec. DUNCAN: You know, all this money is obviously voluntary. If states don't want to apply, don't want to compete, they have every right not to do that. But I will tell you that when we put literally billions of dollars on the table that you'll see people more than step up.
SANCHEZ: Here's what Duncan wants states to do with the money. They must shut down failing schools and open lots more privately-run charter schools, develop tougher tests tied to higher academic standards, collect better data with which to track and report students' progress, make teacher education and training more rigorous and from now on, link teacher evaluation to students' performance in test scores. If it sounds prescriptive that's because it is, says North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue.
Governor BEV PERDUE (North Carolina): And, you know, I have been very critical of the things that in Race to the Top that I found unacceptable in terms of cookie-cutter approach, in terms of lack of the capacity to let a state do what they want us to do. But at the end of the day, we all have to do what's best for this country's future.
SANCHEZ: North Carolina did apply and could get $400 million in Race to the Top funds, even if it means changing the state's educational priorities, which is exactly what some states have done to have a better shot of getting Race to the Top funds. About a dozen states have thus far removed caps on the number of new charter schools. Others will allow schools to evaluate teachers based on student's performance in test scores. That's a huge concession, however, that only one of the nation's two powerful teachers' unions has agreed to. Despite opposition for many from of its rank and file, the American Federation of Teachers says it now supports the idea.
Ms. RANDI WEINGARTEN (President, American Federation of Teachers): Who of us understand that teacher evaluation is broken and needs to change?
SANCHEZ: AFT President Randi Weingarten.
Ms. WEINGARTEN: The issue for us though comes down to collaboration and working together.
SANCHEZ: For its part, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, has not come in it. The $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funds will be dispersed after two rounds of competition in April and at the end of the year. The additional $1.3 billion President Obama announced today will be added to his 2011 budget request.
Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Finally this hour, an appreciation of folk singer and songwriter Kate McGarrigle. She died last night in Montreal of cancer, at age 63. Kate McGarrigle may be best remembered by an older generation as one-half of the McGarrigle Sisters. For younger listeners, she's known as the mother of two contemporary musicians, Martha and Rufus Wainwright.
NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.
(Soundbite of music)
NEDA ULABY: Kate McGarrigle came from one of those rare families that actually sing at home.
(Soundbite of song, "My Town")
Ms. KATE MCGARRIGLE (Musician): (Singing) When I awake, I think of you.
ULABY: The French-Canadian sisters with the distinctive last name tapped into a deep vein of folk music, running north up the range of the Appalachians past the New Brunswick-Quebec border.
In 1996, Kate McGarrigle told NPR about the mountainous village where she grew up.
Ms. MCGARRIGLE: This is way up in the northeast corner of Quebec, just at the tip of Maine. And it has like, railway tracks and kind of evergreens and cliffs and rushing rivers.
(Soundbite of song, "Matapedia")
Ms. MCGARRIGLE: (Singing) Once upon a time two kids in love in a car were flying over mountains trying to catch a boat that'd take them up river to home.
ULABY: Kate McGarrigle drew on the drama of the natural environment in her music, but also on the drama of family life. She and her sister Anna left the Montreal folk scene after Kate met and married Loudon Wainwright III. He inspired some of the songs on the sisters' first album, like the one about when he left.
(Soundbite of song, "Go Leave")
Ms. MCGARRIGLE: (Singing) Go leave, she's better than me. Or at least she is stronger.
Ms. SARAH LISS (Arts Producer, Canadian Broadcasting Corp.): They're just so honest and so frank. There's a kind of candor in their songs.
ULABY: Sarah Liss is an arts producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And like a lot of younger Canadians, she really got to know Kate McGarrigle through the music of her two children, Martha and Rufus Wainwright.
Ms. LISS: Their love and their admiration for their mother is so tremendous and so profound.
ULABY: Mothering was far more important to Kate McGarrigle than a musical career. The story goes, she once blew off an important concert promoter to take her kids to a puppet show.
For the sisters, music was the antithesis of business. Even though Melody Maker magazine called the McGarrigle Sisters' debut the best album of 1976, Kate McGarrigle ultimately produced less than a dozen records. Still, she inspired her kids to make music about her, says Sarah Liss, like one song by Martha Wainwright.
Ms. LISS: "In the Middle of the Night." It's a big, swooping song with huge, dramatic riffs and kind of caterwauling vocals, and it's a song about her mother's struggle with cancer.
(Soundbite of song, "In the Middle of the Night")
Ms. MARTHA WAINWRIGHT (Singing) In the middle of the night comes a knockin' at my door.
ULABY: Martha frequently performed with her mother, as did Rufus Wainwright. Here's how he described singing with her in an interview today.
Mr. RUFUS WAINWRIGHT (Musician): Formidable.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WAINWRIGHT: It was always very professional, even when we were 4.
ULABY: Rufus Wainwright says his mother died peacefully.
Mr. WAINWRIGHT: It was really fantastic. I mean, of course I wish it hadn't have happened, but she did die at home.
ULABY: Surrounded by family and dear friends.
Mr. WAINWRIGHT: And my dad was there. We got to sing a lot of songs. And she really responded to some of them she liked, some of them she didn't.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ULABY: You could tell how deeply music was in his mother's life, says Rufus Wainwright, by how it reached into her hazy state and grabbed her soul and gave her joy.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(Soundbite of song, "Go Leave")
Ms. MCGARRIGLE: (Singing) When I'm gone. When I'm gone. When I'm gone. When I'm gone, when I'm gone. Oh, when I'm gone, when I'm gone.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
And in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the first medical teams sponsored by the U.S. government has gotten to work. Today it began performing surgery. The group is working out of a partly destroyed technical school next to a soccer field, where about 2,000 refugees are living in tents and lean-tos.
NPR's Joanne Silberner has been spending time with the medical team.
JOANNE SILBERNER: I'm in the first medical facility put up by the U.S. National Disaster Medical System. It's a 19 by 35 foot vinyl tent with eight cots and fluorescent lighting. There are shelves at both ends with all sorts of medical equipment, a shoe bag full of surgical tape and IV supplies, and an obstetrics kit.
Outside the school compound, there is a line of people sitting or lying on dirty blankets, waiting to be seen. At the head of the line is 35-year-old DeAuguste LeFitte(ph). He says the doctors saw him yesterday.
Mr. DEAUGUSTE LEFITTE: (Foreign language spoken)
SILBERNER: He says a wall fell on him. Four of the fingers of his left hand are cut and very swollen, and he has a big bruise on the back of his head. He got bandaged up before he came to the clinic. He's waiting to get his bandage changed. A three-inch square patch of gauze taped to his right shoulder, and blood is oozing through and there are flies around it.
Mr. LEFITTE: (Foreign language spoken)
SILBERNER: And he says he's hoping to heal up and go find his family, and he's very glad the clinic is here.
Inside the compound, past two of the 30 soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, there are a total of three emergency rooms and two operating rooms. In one of the E.R.s, a mother is hugging her little girl.
(Soundbite of crying child)
SILBERNER: The girl has a badly infected wound across her right ankle, extending up into the middle of her leg.
(Soundbite of crying child)
SILBERNER: Two hundred and sixty-five medical professionals have been sent to Haiti by the U.S. government. There are five medical teams and a surgical one. Right now, they are just starting to establish four or five hospitals like these in Port-au-Prince. The surgical team got to this school yesterday, a day after the medical team. They're doing their very first operation - fixing broken bones today.
Peter Allen is a paramedic and public information officer.
Mr. PETER ALLEN (Paramedic, Public Information Officer): For the most part, they're traumatic injuries: fractures, lacerations, burns. Then there are some medical issues: abdominal injuries.
SILBERNER: And a baby was born here just a half hour after it opened, to a woman who's been living in the soccer field nearby, who was having trouble giving birth.
The teams staffing these hospitals trained throughout the year. They were ready to go when the earthquake hit and most got to Haiti Thursday. But they were stuck camping on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy, as the organizers of the disaster response struggled for several days to find transportation and security.
Yesterday, Andrew Stevermer, the commander of the Incident Response Coordinating Team for the Department of Health and Human Services, said...
Captain ANDREW STEVERMER (Commander, Incident Response Coordination Team): I think it's going as quickly as it can go, given the challenges we're having with our limiting factors of transportation and security.
SILBERNER: They have had a hard time finding enough security guards to accompany the teams, he says.
Patrick Cadillac(ph), who commands part of the surgical unit and helps them get here, says he understands.
Mr. PATRICK CADILLAC: We're used to a lot of bureaucracy and the difficulties of trying to go different places in the middle of a disaster. So we're used to the hurry up and wait mechanism. That's part of how the system works.
SILBERNER: But many of the team's paid volunteers who've left their jobs for two weeks or more, to live and work under some very harsh conditions, said off the record that they were very frustrated by all of the delays.
(Unintelligible), like Patrick Cadillac, they're happy to be finally helping.
Mr. CADILLAC: I'm very glad that we're here.
SILBERNER: They're looking forward to a busy time, he says.
Joanne Silberner, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
And now to the least likely sponsorship in Olympic sports: Tonight, the comedian Stephen Colbert plans to again feature the U.S. speedskating team on his TV show. Colbert decided to sponsor the team after it lost a major corporate backer to bankruptcy.
NPR's Howard Berkes reports on this mix of comedy and competition.
HOWARD BERKES: The bankrupt bank left a $300,000 hole in U.S. Speedskating's ice just as the big push to next month's Olympics began. Then came the phone call from New York and the November 2nd cablecast of "The Colbert Report."
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Colbert Report")
Mr. STEPHEN COLBERT (Host, "The Colbert Report"): OK, Bob. Bob, is this possible, can the Colbert Nation sponsor U.S. Speedskating?
Mr. BOB CROWLEY (CEO, U.S. Speedskating): Yes, absolutely.
Mr. COLBERT: Where do I sign?
Mr. CROWLEY: Right here.
BERKES: That was U.S. Speedskating CEO Bob Crowley getting Stephen Colbert's signature on the sponsorship papers.
Mr. CROWLEY: Our budget would've had to have been cut in a number of key areas. For U.S. Speedskating, this has been a lifesaver - literally. BERKES: Now, Stephen Colbert didn't put up any of his own money. Instead, he begged his viewers to send in checks.
Mr. COLBERT: We have got to step up and make sure that it is America's 38-inch thighs on that metal platform.
BERKES: Speedskating is now part of Colbert's blustering comic send-ups of real, bloviating talk show hosts. Here he is with short track medal prospect Katherine Reutter.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Colbert Report")
Mr. COLBERT: Let's trash talk the Summer Games for just a second.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. KATHERINE REUTTER (U.S. Speedskater): Let's do it. OK.
Mr. COLBERT: OK? Guys like Michael Phelps, how easy is it to swim through water? You run on top of water with samurai swords strapped to your feet.
Ms. REUTTER: I thank you. Thank you for saying that.
Mr. COLBERT: Doesn't that seem harder?
Ms. REUTTER: Definitely.
BERKES: Reutter is a very serious, hard-training skater who can describe in exquisite detail the technical, physical and psychological challenges of her sport.
Ms. REUTTER: I always want to present myself as a poised athlete, someone who is intelligent and hard-working. And I want for people to be able to relate to me in that way.
BERKES: Colbert did ask Reutter about her training regimen. And then she asked him to sign his name on her billboard thighs, as she freely calls them. Stunts like that make some wonder whether skaters lose their dignity with the Colbert connection.
Long-track star Shani Davis called Colbert a jerk.
Tripp Mickle is the Olympic beat writer for Sports Business Journal.
Mr. TRIPP MICKLE (Writer, Sports Business Journal): You've got to be wary of partnering with people who might make these sports sticky almost, you know, just something that they aren't, and make them too much about a joke and not about what they really are.
BERKES: And when Sports Illustrated put a speedskater on its cover, it wasn't Katherine Reutter. It was Stephen Colbert, head to toe in a skintight, Team USA racing suit. But Mickle believes Colbert has not crossed the line so far, and Reutter agrees.
Ms. REUTTER: At the very beginning, we were all a little worried that like, maybe he'd poke fun at us. We didn't want our life dream to be turned into something that got poked fun at on Comedy Central. But that has never happened. Like, I feel like I have more support and more people believe in me because of this show.
BERKES: The sponsorship has had its challenges. At first, Colbert wanted his face on those billboard thighs. But given their varied dimensions and the flexed material, well, he'd have cheeks stretched wide like silly putty. So he went for the Colbert Nation logo instead.
And then there's the nasty diss from Shani David.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Colbert Report")
Mr. COLBERT: I challenge you to a speedskating race any rink, any time, any distance - as long as I get a thousand-meter head start.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. COLBERT: If I win, I get your spot on the U.S. Olympic team. But if you win, you get an autographed copy of my Sports Illustrated cover.
BERKES: Colbert and Davis did race, and the results are shown on tonight's show. Close to 10,000 Colbert viewers sent in more than $300,000, making up for the bankrupt bank. But this is a one-time-only deal. U.S. Speedskating still has to find a real sponsor with a long-term commitment. There's hope that the "Colbert Report's" exposure will make that easier.
Howard Berkes, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
NASA is just months away from ending its space shuttle program. The shuttles have been flying for nearly 30 years. And if you've ever had to clean out a house you've lived in for a long time, you can imagine how much stuff NASA has accumulated over those three decades.
NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on how the agency is trying to make sure each piece of history finds a home.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: About four years ago, when it became clear that the shuttle program would be ending in 2010, NASA started trying to figure out what parts of its huge inventory might be worth saving. Joel Kearns is the transition manager for space operations at NASA headquarters.
Mr. JOEL KEARNS (Transition Manager, Space Operations, NASA): I was really surprised that everyone had a different opinion of what was a valuable artifact and what wasn't.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He is an engineer, so he personally likes old computers.
Mr. KEARNS: So whenever I would see these on the list, I would look at that and say, oh, some museum's really going to want that; that looks like an artifact. Well, many other people looked at that and said, that is the most boring looking black box. I would never want anything like that in my local museum. But they came up with things that I never thought people would find value in.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Things like windows for the space shuttles. A museum could use one of those to make a cockpit display. So, a precious artifact may be in the eye of the beholder, and Kearns says there's a lot of decisions to be made.
Mr. KEARNS: The whole space shuttle program has about - over a million line items of personal property that they have on their books. And that ranges from nuts and bolts and little pieces of computer parts, all the way up to the space shuttle orbiters themselves.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: NASA has three space shuttles. Space Shuttle Discovery has already been promised to the Smithsonian. So far, about 20 organizations have put in requests for a shuttle. The shuttle itself is free, but whoever gets one will be expected to cough up about $29 million to prepare and transport it. NASA should announce the lucky winners of Endeavor and Atlantis this spring. Meanwhile, NASA is putting other shuttle goodies up on a Web site so that educational institutions can browse through them, places like museums, universities and science centers - the public need not apply. Jerry Phillips works on the Web site for NASA. He showed me how you just log in, click on shuttle, and see a list of categories.
(Soundbite of typing)
Mr. JERRY PHILLIPS (Web Site Builder, NASA): For instance, let's look at what we have available for clothing, special-purpose clothing. It shows that we have four items.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: You can see a photo of dirty deerskin gloves that astronauts used in orbit. There's shorts and shirts. We click around and see items in other categories, like exercise equipment and shuttle parts.
Mr. PHILLIPS: Now when you see this, you could actually, just like an eBay shopping experience, you could add this to a shopping cart and go through a full checkout procedure.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Unlike shopping at Amazon.com, a request does not guarantee getting an item. A special committee decides where each item will go. NASA's visitor centers in the Smithsonian get first dibs. About 900 items went up last October, and every single one had a taker. Today, the agency posted another 2,500 bits of history to the Web site.
Ms. VALERIE NEAL (Curator, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum): This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Valerie Neal is a curator with the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Ms. NEAL: A program of this significance ends once a generation.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Neal says back when Apollo ended, NASA just boxed everything up and sent it to the Smithsonian. This time, the Smithsonian has to be more selective. It's planning to request only about 500 items. Curators have to decide now what historians and museum goers will want to see decades into the future.
Ms. NEAL: So, we're really trying to play this mind game of figuring out for the long term what's really important and why, and can we get it?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She showed me her wish list. It includes technical things, like a piece of orange insulating foam from the shuttle's fuel tank; things associated with famous space fliers, like Shannon Lucid; plus everyday things, like astronauts' favorite space food.
Ms. NEAL: They love the shrimp cocktail. Why shrimp cocktail?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. NEAL: We don't have shrimp cocktail in the collection yet, so I specifically would like to get a shrimp cocktail, if they're not all eaten up.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Just last week, Neal was headed to Houston to look at a crew training module to see how it could be made into a museum display. She says it can be odd to size up equipment that's still in use. NASA workers usually have a couple of different reactions.
Ms. NEAL: One, there is a kind of sense of regret that the shuttle program is coming to an end because people have been living it for 30 years. And then the other is that they say, these are artifacts? This is just stuff. You know, this is what we work with every day.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But if they're going to have to stop working with it every day, they're at least glad to know they'll be able to visit it in a museum.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand, hosting the program from California for the next two weeks.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
We begin this hour with the deployment of U.S. troops to Haiti. Soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division landed today in the compound surrounding the crumbled National Palace. And some Marines have arrived, but they haven't yet hit the streets. Aid deliveries are still only reaching a tiny portion of the desperate population. Authorities say one and a half million residents of the capital are out of their homes.
NPR's Jason Beaubien reports from Port-au-Prince.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Hundreds of Haitians gathered outside the wrought-iron gates of the National Palace to watch the U.S. soldiers inside. At another time, the sight of heavily armed American troops standing in front of the toppled National Palace may have caused outrage. But today, many Haitians welcomed it.
Ms. DARLENE JEAN(ph): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Darlene Jean says the arrival of the Americans gives her hope. The Haitian government can't do anything for us right now, she says. Most of the Haitian government offices collapsed in the quake, and there's been only a few Haitian police in the street. If the American government didn't come in, she says, you might as well bury us because we are already dead. Jean says she lost her older brother and her house in the quake. She says if she had the money for bus fare, she'd go out to her parents' village, but the quake left her with nothing.
Unidentified Man #1: No problem.
Unidentified Man #2: Who are these people? Stop, stop, stop.
(Soundbite of bus)
BEAUBIEN: At the General Hospital, troops from the 82nd Airborne took over security at the front gate and insisted that people were no longer allowed to wander in and out for no reason. The soldiers also distributed food and water at the city's golf course, where thousands of people are sleeping out in the open. Navy helicopters ferried relief supplies in from the USS Carl Vinson. And for the first time, some U.S. soldiers also guarded street corners near where there's been heavy looting.
(Soundbite of vehicle)
BEAUBIEN: Reginald Lucian(ph) also said he is happy to finally see the American presence on the streets, but he's still upset about past U.S. actions towards Haiti, particularly the removal of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004.
Mr. REGINALD LUCIAN: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: When Bill Clinton was president, he said he was going to build many miles of roads in Haiti, but he didn't do it, Lucian said. Now, Barack Obama sends Clinton as one of the persons to lead what's going on here. It's his chance to prove himself. But the one person the people are really waiting for is Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Former President Bill Clinton is actually the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, not President Obama's envoy, as many Haitians seem to think. Clinton was in Haiti yesterday, surveying the damage.
With more troops on the street, things felt calmer today in downtown Port-au-Prince, where yesterday there had been extensive looting. Traffic ground to a halt as more people ventured out into the debris-strewn roadways. People sold bananas and tomatoes and fresh bread by the side of the road. At least one supermarket reopened, but with guards armed with shotguns at the front door. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to live out on the streets, and many say they haven't seen any relief deliveries.
Ms. MARY ANDREA LAMBROSE(ph): Nothing, nothing where I live - nothing. They have no food, no water, nothing.
BEAUBIEN: Mary Andrea Lambrose, who used to live in Florida, says people are getting desperate.
Ms. LAMBERT: Right now, my neighbor let me wear this clothes. I don't have nothing. My brother died. My son and my daughter
BEAUBIEN: The 40-year-old Lambrose says she is glad to see the American soldiers. She wants to see even more Americans coming. The Haitian government simply doesn't have the resources, she says, to rebuild her shattered city.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
We go now to Jacmel. It's a city about 20 miles south of the capital. Before the earthquake, it was a jewel on Haiti's southern coast. It had colorful French colonial architecture, and tourists flocked to its quiet beaches. Today, a lot of Jacmel is in ruins. It wasn't until Friday, three days after the earthquake, that emergency help finally arrived in Jacmel.
NPR's Greg Allen is there. And Greg, why did it take three days for help to begin arriving in Jacmel?
GREG ALLEN: Well, Madeleine, what I've seen is, before this and other disasters like Katrina, you know, you always think aid should arrive immediately, but it just - logistically it takes some time to get it off the ground and here. Here in Jacmel, people the day after the earthquake and on Thursday, were saying where is the aid? It did start arriving on Friday and by now, the USAID has got steady shipments coming in here. The airport is now open to relief flights 24 hours a day. There are aid groups here providing food, water and other support. And you have - the Canadian Navy is here with a ship offshore. They just arrived last night. And they've started deploying troops around town who are basically just cleaning up the streets, making the streets passable to traffic.
BRAND: And Greg, you came from Port-au-Prince, where we've seen images of terrible destruction and disaster. How do you compare it to Jacmel?
ALLEN: Well, I came to Jacmel prepared for a city in ruins and there certainly are ruins here. The old part of the city is demolished. But in terms of the devastation we saw, it's nothing compared to what we saw in Port-au-Prince, where neighborhood after neighborhood you have dead bodies still trapped in rubble. You have, you know, bodies on the street. You have mass graves. There's nothing like that here. Most of the dead, I'm told, have already been pulled from the rubble. There is a school that they had - believe might have as many as a couple of hundred students in it still., They have not been able to get in there and get the bodies.
So, the death toll is right now, they're saying, in the hundreds. And the streets don't look anywhere near as bad as they are in Port-au-Prince. Also, the encampments are much smaller and much more livable than the ones we're seeing spring up in Port-au-Prince.
BRAND: And what has happened to these famous buildings, this beautiful colonial architecture?
ALLEN: Well, you know, Jacmel was a city that's built on the south coast of Haiti, right on the sea. And just up from the water, you have the old part of the city. It's built on sand, they say. The upper part of the city is built on rock. And that other upper part of the city, most of the residential areas, they came through it much better. The old part of the city, the buildings were very old from - the mid-19th century - and many of them just totally collapsed. And almost every case, there was severe damage. You've got - iron balustrades have fallen off the building, whole walls have collapsed, and whole streets are just filled with rubble. And it will take an amazing amount of work to get this place back on its feet again.
BRAND: And you said earlier that there was a Canadian ship docked offshore, providing aid. Why has Jacmel become the focus of Canadian aid?
LLEN: There are historic ties between Canada and Jacmel. Apparently, some Canadian officials trace their heritage here. And I think partly because of that, Haiti asked Canada to make Jacmel the focus of their aid efforts. And, of course, it is an important city. It's Haiti's fourth largest city. It's a very important cultural jewel. And the Canadians are here, already on the ground, and look to be - like they're going to be doing what they can to help bring it back.
BRAND: A lot of people in the capital, in Port-au-Prince, have been leaving the city because they're not getting any help and they're looking for some aid and looking for shelter. Are they coming to Jacmel?
ALLEN: We went over to the bus station here in Jacmel, and buses are arriving steadily every hour, unloading lots of people from Port-au-Prince. We talked to people who got off, and they said, of course, I'm going back to my home. Anyone who's from the provinces is getting out of Port-au-Prince and going back to where they're from. If you have any family ties anywhere, they say people will leave the city and go back to where their family are in the provinces. They think that's a better way to survive. So, we're just starting today to see an influx here in Jacmel.
In Port-au-Prince, we're seeing many people get - at the bus stations leaving the city. It will be interesting to see what happens to these provincial towns and small villages in the months ahead as people leave Port-au-Prince. Their services and their facilities could be overtaxed. And that's something we will have to watch.
BRAND: Greg, thank you.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
BRAND: That's NPR's Greg Allen. He is in Jacmel, a city on the southern coast of Haiti.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
It's time now for your comments. Yesterday in an update on Haiti, we said that arsonists and looters were rampaging in Port-au-Prince.
NPR's David Gilkey witnessed buildings burning, and people hauling goods out of stores.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
References to looting angered some of you. Delafield DuBoyce(ph) of El Prado, New Mexico, reflected what many of you wrote.
BLOCK: He writes: Tunneling into collapsed buildings could equally be described be as recycling. Rich storeowners aren't going to salvage that stuff. They'll all claim a total loss. Why shouldn't desperately poor people who have lost everything be allowed to scrape together some trash to rebuild their lives?
BRAND: And now to a very different topic. Yesterday, we talked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand about his new book on higher education. Menand talked about how much longer it takes these days to get a Ph.D.
Professor LOUIS MENAND (English and American Literature and Language, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University): The median time to get a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years. If you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen?
BLOCK: Well, someone with a medical degree didn't think Menand had the numbers quite right. Robert Lynch(ph) is a doctor in St. Louis.
BRAND: He writes: The suggestion that a doctor can cut people open after four years of medical school is a distortion of reality. After four years of medical school, a student typically takes a three- to five-year residency and may then specialize by training for another three years. Thus, a pediatric cardiologist will be 10 years post-undergraduate school before being eligible for certification. While I agree that medical and English advance-degree training wastes time, the comparison was not really representative.
BLOCK: We appreciate your letters. Please write to us by going to npr.org and clicking "Contact Us" at the bottom of the page.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
A year ago tomorrow, President Obama took the oath of office. We're spending some time this week looking back at his first year.
NPR's Debbie Elliott traveled recently to Columbia, South Carolina, to check back in with a woman she met at the Democratic National Convention. Her name is Diane Sumpter. She grew up in the South during segregation.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT: Diane Sumpter is an activist.
(Soundbite of crowd)
ELLIOTT: Whether its public schools, the Democratic Party or the NAACP, if there's something going on, you're likely to find her in the middle of it. Like yesterday's King Day March in Columbia, a protest to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House.
Ms. DIANE SUMPTER (Activist): ...you know? And I do this for my grandchildren. You know, those black feet are tired.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. SUMPTER: But if somebody got to walk for them - they can't walk for themselves - so that they know we stand on history.
ELLIOTT: Sumpter, who is 62, remembers drinking from water fountains labeled "colored only," and participating in civil rights marches as a child in Jacksonville, Florida. She was a delegate for Ted Kennedy in 1980. In 2008, she supported Hillary Clinton. But when Barack Obama won the nomination, she was elated.
Here she is from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Ms. SUMPTER: Never in my wildest dream did I even consider during my lifetime that this country would be willing to take this step and choose or elect an African-American.
(Soundbite of cheering)
Ms. SUMPTER: I'm now - I'm believing it now.
ELLIOTT: Sumpter, who owns a management consulting firm in Columbia, is proud of that milestone today.
Ms. SUMPTER: I believe it now. I believe it 100 percent that we have a president who won, who I think has done a phenomenal job.
ELLIOTT: Sumpter believes President Obama is living up to his campaign promises, even in these daunting times. She's frustrated with the progress on health care but doesn't blame the president.
Ms. SUMPTER: There is a mood and an effort to continuously pull, twist and create confusion, and that's what I think is part of the result I've seen from having an African-American president. There is a color element in this country that I think for the first time we are having to come stark and look at it.
Just even look at what they want to call the president. They don't always say President Obama. You know, all of a sudden, there's a familiarity. I never did get to calling George Bush, George.
ELLIOTT: She's also concerned that from the Democratic side, expectations may have been too high for what President Obama can accomplish.
State Representative Todd Rutherford of Columbia has those high expectations. And while he thinks Mr. Obama will learn from this year's experiences, he worries it could be even harder to push his agenda next year.
State Representative TODD RUTHERFORD (Democrat, South Carolina): And I would have liked to have seen him grab that health-care debate by the horns very early on, and marshal it through.
ELLIOTT: Rutherford, who is 39, was one of the first South Carolina Democrats to get behind the Obama campaign. He says this first year in the White House has been quite a lesson for the president.
State Rep. RUTHERFORD: He got a chance to see what it's like to govern. I think he started off trying to find the middle. And I think that the Republicans punished him for it - and they continue to.
ELLIOTT: Rutherford and another African-American state representative, Leon Howard of Columbia, say in some ways the Obama presidency has been a setback for race relations.
State Representative LEON HOWARD (Democrat, South Carolina): Here in South Carolina, I think we're experiencing what we call an Obama backlash, where there are Caucasians in leadership who say to African-Americans - not verbally but mentally - you have your black president, but we're still in charge of corporate America; we're still in charge of state government.
ELLIOTT: Columbia Hospital executive Vince Ford says black voters helped put President Obama in office but have yet to benefit.
Mr. VINCE FORD (Senior Vice President, Community Services, Palmetto Health): We can celebrate the success of having an African-American president. But truth be told, I mean, we still live shorter life spans, there's still an achievement gap anywhere in the country, we're still disproportionately incarcerated. I mean, here we are in 2010, and we're still lagging way behind in every statistical category that you can think of, and we're headed south.
ELLIOTT: For Diane Sumpter, that means there's still more work to be done.
Ms. SUMPTER: So I'm going to march 'til I die. And then I'm going to fight, too.
ELLIOTT: Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Columbia, South Carolina.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been immensely expensive, not just here in the U.S. but also in Britain. The U.K. is deep in debt, and it's in the process of reviewing defense spending. That review is pitting the leaders of the army and Royal Navy against each other in a debate over the future of the armed forces.
NPR's Rob Gifford has the story from London.
ROB GIFFORD: The last full British defense review was held in 1998. And since then, Britain has found itself fighting in ways that were not envisaged and certainly not budgeted for back then. Now with another review looming, as Britain's finances have hit rock bottom, the head of the British army, General Sir David Richards, has called for fundamental changes in the British military.
Drawing on his experience as overall commander of international forces in Southern Afghanistan, Richards has said Britain needs less-expensive hardware, such as warships and fighter jets, and more specialized soldiers using better intelligence and the latest technology. Richards takes the lessons of Iraq and particularly Afghanistan as a guide, and says it's time for a dramatic shift in military doctrine, much like the one from mounted cavalry to tanks at the time of World War I.
Rear Admiral Chris Parry is a former senior adviser at the Ministry of Defence. He says if Britain is not going to fight traditional wars against other states, it does need a new kind of military.
Rear Admiral CHRIS PARRY (Former Adviser, Ministry of Defence): Are we going to go and sit on somebody else's country and make it right, with all the cost in terms of manpower and treasure that that implies? Or are we going to go for something more subtle, high impact, as David Richards says, but lower footprints? We're not going to sit on people's countries again in the future, making things right. We just can't afford it, I would suggest. And so what we're going to have to do is say, where do we best put our investment?
GIFFORD: The answer to that question, though, from the top brass in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force is very different. Navy chiefs especially now fear that plans for two new aircraft carriers, and replacements for Britain's Trident Submarine Nuclear Missile System, could fall victim to cuts in the defense review.
The head of the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, says Britain's interests are dependent on a fleet that can operate worldwide.
Admiral Sir MARK STANHOPE (First Sea Lord, Chief of Naval Staff): It is important to realize that Afghanistan is not the only game in town or, indeed, the only model for future engagement.
GIFFORD: Admiral Stanhope says the military must be ready for surprises and strategic shocks, such as the Falklands War in 1982.
Adm. Sir STANHOPE: The Falklands War was such an event. It came from left field. The implications of that is the need to consider the likelihood of crises of all types developing in the near term, and to ensure that we are ready to respond at short notice to the unexpected.
GIFFORD: Even before the global financial crisis, the British military was facing a black hole in its procurement budget of tens of billions of dollars. And unpopular cuts will almost certainly be made by the next government after a general election expected in the spring.
Admiral Chris Parry sites a historical comparison from 1907 that he thinks the government should remember.
Rear Adm. PARRY: Lord Townshend, after the Boer War, for example, said: Look, we've got a new type of enemy for a new century. We've been facing an army of the people that is among the people, and it's hard to tell from non-combatants fighting a new sort of war. Well, that sounds very much like General Richards' vision. And yet 1907, 1914 - seven years later, we were in the biggest global conflict in history. And I think it's incredibly dangerous to say what's happened before will never happen again.
GIFFORD: Though a lot of the discussion will undoubtedly sound like internal military politics and jostling for funds, all military leaders say they agree that the defense review needs to work out how Britain defines its national interest ,and work out how that can best be secured, rather than focusing first on what Britain can and can't afford.
Rob Gifford, NPR News, London.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
Now, we're going back to the Dark Ages to learn something about the American economy today. We often hear that America's global dominance is coming to an end, and history offers a scary model: Rome.
When Rome fell, Europe collapsed into the miserable Dark Ages. But as Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money explained, the Dark Ages might not have been so dark, economically speaking.
CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Do you want to know why we've all been taught that the Dark Ages were so dark? It's all about spices.
ADAM DAVIDSON: Spices can tell you a clear, quick, economic story. You walk into a spice store.
JOFFE-WALT: Like Penzeys in Grand Central Station in Manhattan.
Mr. TOM STANDAGE (Author, "An Edible History of Humanity"): So here, we see ginger from China, anise seeds from Spain, caraway seeds from Poland.
DAVIDSON: This is Tom Standage. He wrote "An Edible History of Humanity," and he says, look at this. You have spices from all over the world. Clearly, you're trading with the whole world. You're doing well.
JOFFE-WALT: Ancient Rome was like that, too. They also loved spices, maybe even more than us. They smothered their food with them.
DAVIDSON: Mm, delicious. But then it's the Dark Ages. From around 500 to around 1000 A.D., all after Rome fell, dinner was bland, and so was lunch. Spices, or at least any evidence of them, almost completely disappears.
Mr. STANDAGE: Well, if you can't see the spices, it's a question of, you know, is absence of evidence evidence of absence? And does it mean that trade really has fallen off?
DAVIDSON: Well, that's exactly the question we are trying to figure out today. So now, we have to leave the spice store. We have to go back to the studio and talk to Michael McCormick. He's a historian at Harvard who thinks he's found some alternative to spices to figure out just what was going on in the Dark Ages.
Professor MICHAEL McCORMICK (Department of History, Harvard University): Rats are fantastic. I'm talking about the black rat, Rattus rattus.
JOFFE-WALT: Rat bones. McCormick tells us rat bones are completely changing our view of the Dark Ages.
DAVIDSON: That's because if they didn't have spices, it doesn't necessarily mean that Europeans in the Dark Ages were not trading with the rest of the world. Rat bones, it seems, prove that, in fact, they were.
JOFFE-WALT: Because rats like to go where people go.
Prof. McCORMICK: They like us. They're very fond of us. They like to be close to us, or as you may have noticed.
(Soundbite of laughter)
DAVIDSON: Right. We don't like them very much, but they like us.
Prof. McCORMACK: The feeling's not mutual.
DAVIDSON: See, Rattus rattus, the black rat, is not particularly ambitious.
JOFFE-WALT: No. They won't travel more than a few hundred feet from where they're born, at least not on their own four feet.
Prof. McCORMICK: They don't mind being transported passively, especially if they're in a nice, dark, moist place with lots of grain, like the bottom of a ship.
JOFFE-WALT: So a rat is born in, say, Alexandria, Egypt, rides a trading ship to Italy, dies. And 1,500 years later, some archaeology grad student digs up its tiny little bones, and suddenly we know, someone in Egypt was trading with someone in Italy.
DAVIDSON: For centuries, we had so little information about the economy of the Dark Ages. We had almost no spices. There were so few texts having anything to do with economics. Right, Mike?
Prof. McCORMICK: Very few texts.
JOFFE-WALT: And so, all the big historians, the text books I read in college...
DAVIDSON: Yeah, same for me.
JOFFE-WALT: Yeah, they all assumed, hey, they had no spices, they weren't writing about trade. They must have been broke, isolated, sad little economies.
DAVIDSON: But then those rat bones showed there was all sorts of trade going on.
JOFFE-WALT: And not just rat bones. There's this new diving technology, and we've been finding all these shipwrecks from that period.
DAVIDSON: The Internet also new innovation has transformed scholarly collaboration.
JOFFE-WALT: There are new discoveries all the time, big ones.
Dr. KEVIN LEAHY (British Museum): Well, I got an email, and the email was headed, wow, with an incredible number of exclamation marks after it. And I nearly fell off my chair. I never, ever expected to see anything like this.
JOFFE-WALT: Kevin Leahy is from the British Museum, and he's talking about the mother of all so-you-think-you-knew-the-Dark-Ages discoveries.
DAVIDSON: You might remember this one. Just last summer, they found 1,800 gold pieces from 7th century Anglo-Saxon England. This one find is something like three times bigger than all the artifacts from that period combined.
JOFFE-WALT: And it and the rat bones and the texts all have one clear message: These early Medieval folks who we've all pitied all these years, so broke and alone, they were rich.
DAVIDSON: At least richer than we thought they were.
JOFFE-WALT: Yeah. And they were doing business all over the globe.
DAVIDSON: At least the part of the globe that they knew about.
Dr. LEAHY: The Dark Ages really are misnamed.
DAVIDSON: They weren't so dark, and they weren't all that sunny, either.
JOFFE-WALT: Let's call them gray.
DAVIDSON: The Gray Ages, and let's keep looking for rat bones.
I'm Adam Davidson.
JOFFE-WALT: And I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Flake, the Creme Egg, the Crunchie, the Curly Wurly, these are all brands of the British candy maker Cadbury's, now likely to be stamped with the brand Kraft. If Cadbury's shareholders accept a takeover bid from the American company, the $20 million deal will create the world's biggest chocolate maker.
As Vicki Barker reports from London, many people in Britain are already mourning the loss of a national treasure.
(Soundbite of television show, "BBC Breakfast")
Ms. SIAN WILLIAMS (Presenter): Hello, this is "Breakfast" with Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams.
Mr. BILL TURNBULL (Presenter): Britain's biggest chocolate firm could be swallowed up by the Americans.
Ms. WILLIAMS: After all-night talks...
VICKI BARKER: It isn't just knee-jerk nationalism, not just that, anyway. Cadbury has hold a special place in many Britons' heart. Even the famously unsentimental former British trade minister, Lord Digby Jones, couldn't hide his dismay at the deal.
Lord DIGBY JONES (Former Trade Minister, Great Britain): My big wish is that Kraft get it when they see what made Cadbury the iconic brand they wanted to buy, and that's its people, its reputation. That's what Cadbury's is, and they're buying something that's more than just a chocolate company.
BARKER: Almost from its beginnings in 1824, Cadbury has been more than just a chocolate company. Its founder, John Cadbury, came from a long line of wealthy Quakers. He believed chocolate drinks could woo the working class away from alcohol.
In 1879, the Cadbury family created a model village for their workers called Bournville in rolling countryside, away from industrial smoke and fumes.
Cadbury pioneered pension schemes and joint worker-management committees and provided medical services long before socialized medicine came to Britain.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Man: Midday break, the big punctuation mark in the day.
BARKER: Generations of Britons grew up eating Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate, Cadbury's famous Creme Egg and other delights.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Woman: Haven't you heard of Cadbury's Caramel?
BARKER: But ultimately, Cadbury fell to the desire of the world's candy companies to gobble each other up in a not-so-sweet quest to survive. Four months after firmly rejecting a lower offer from Kraft, Cadbury's current chairman, Roger Carr, says the time and the price are right.
Mr. ROGER CARR (Chairman, Cadbury PLC): And I think Cadbury was exactly what Kraft needed and indeed does need. I think providing our shareholders receive a value, it's been a good outcome.
BARKER: Prime Minister Gordon Brown today urged Kraft to hold on to Cadbury's U.K. workforce, but it's feared many, if not most of the company's 4,500 British jobs may go. And this is one deal Cadbury's workers will not have a say in. In Bournville today, someone's erected a sign saying: Kraft, go to hell.
For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And from California, I'm Madeleine Brand. I'll be hosting for the next two weeks.
BLOCK: And it's great to hear you again on the program, Madeleine. Welcome back.
BRAND: Well, thanks Melissa. It's great to be back. And let's check in with politics today. They were waiting for the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race. That could decide the fate of the health care overhaul bill in Washington. And if he wins, Republican Scott Brown has vowed to become the key vote to block a final version of the bill.
As NPR's Julie Rovner reports, Democrats are scrambling for Plan B.
JULIE ROVNER: At his weekly briefing with reporters this morning, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer insisted that negotiations between the House and Senate on a final health bill are proceeding on schedule.
Representative STENY HOYER (Democrat, Maryland): I'm not going to anticipate or speculate or hypothesize on what may or may not happen in Massachusetts today. I am very hopeful and my expectation is that Attorney General Coakley will be elected to the United States Senate.
ROVNER: That would be Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate who's lost a double-digit lead in the polls in the past few weeks. But behind the scenes, Democrats have been scrambling to put together options to pass a health overhaul bill if Coakley loses. The easiest option is to simply finish the current negotiations and get a bill to the president. They should have about two weeks before the Massachusetts election is certified. Hoyer didn't hesitate when he was asked if he thought negotiations could be done by then.
Rep. HOYER: Yes.
ROVNER: After that, though, things get considerably less simple. The next option, says Bill Hoagland...
Mr. BILL HOAGLAND (Lobbyist, CIGNA): You could have the House hold their no's and vote for the Senate passed bill and get it to the president with the understanding that through forthcoming must-pass legislation, you start making modifications to the Senate passed bill.
ROVNER: Hoagland, a longtime Senate Republican budget aide and now a lobbyist for insurance giant CIGNA, says he doesn't consider that option very likely. That's because there are so many aspects of the Senate bill that House Democrats don't like. The Senate bill, for example, doesn't have a government sponsored insurance option. It includes a controversial tax on high-cost health plans and it's far less generous in terms of subsidies for lower middle income Americans, which brings up a third possibility: budget reconciliation.
Republicans call it the nuclear option because it doesn't allow senators to filibuster and only requires 51 votes to pass. The bad news says, Hoagland, is that it would basically require lawmakers to start the process over again. A new health bill would have to go back through committees and floor debate.
Mr. HOAGLAND: This probably stretches it into the spring. But it clearly is an option, it's still available to the president and to the Congress until a new budget resolution is adopted.
ROVNER: Hoagland says even the insurance industry, which opposes key elements, said the bill is now under discussion, wants to see something settled as soon as possible.
Mr. HOAGLAND: There comes a point when you just want some clarity so we can make plans going forward. And while, yes, there are things that the industry has not been happy with, there are other things that we've been prepared to get on with.
ROVNER: Things like eliminating restrictions on preexisting conditions. Meanwhile, Ron Pollack of Families USA has come up with a Plan D he thinks might work. He would have the House vote almost simultaneously on the Senate passed health bill and a separate bill that would embody the negotiated changes. That second bill would be in the form of a budget reconciliation bill, which would only need 51 votes in the Senate.
Mr. RON POLLACK (Executive Director, Families USA): This clearly works, I believe that it can happen quickly. And I think it can end up with a very good result.
ROVNER: And, says Pollack, it might even have an advantage over the current negotiations by letting some reluctant moderate Democrats in the Senate simply vote no.
Mr. POLLACK: So, I think it frees up the negotiators to come up with an agreement that's more to the liking of the House and Senate leadership and the president.
ROVNER: Of course, what Democrats really want is Plan A, for Coakley to win in Massachusetts so they don't have to worry about any of these contingencies.
Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Democrats' worries about Massachusetts are in stark contrast to their mood this time last year. It was the eve of President Obama's inauguration festival time for Democrats. For Republicans it was something else - a reminder of the drubbing they had taken at the polls. Well, these days Republicans are energized, and as we just heard, not only in their traditional strongholds.
NPR's Don Gonyea reports.
Don Gonyea: The state of the Republican Party 12 months ago was beyond spin. Jack Pitney, once a GOP policy analyst, is a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Professor JACK PITNEY (GOP Policy Analyst, Claremont McKenna College): Republicans a year ago were on their backs. The president had steamrollered them in the election. And there were serious people talking about the possibility of a long-term Republican decline. Now a year later the Republicans seem to be resurgent.
GONYEA: And today, the sound of that resurgence comes in the form of a little-known Massachusetts state senator named Scott Brown.
Senator SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): Massachusetts wants real reform and not this trillion dollar Obama health care that is being forced on the American people.
GONYEA: Polls show Brown erased a 30-point deficit in his bid for the late Ted Kennedy Senate seat. Toss in GOP wins in governors races in New Jersey and Virginia this past November both offices that were previously held by Democrats and Republicans are feeling much better. But Jack Pitney does offer some caution.
Prof. PITNEY: Republicans are the beneficiaries of the dissatisfaction, even though you can't really point to a whole lot that the Republican Party as a whole has done to draw the electorate to their side. The Republicans are gaining because the Democrats are losing.
GONYEA: And Republicans are getting back to basics, says Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana.
Governor MITCH DANIELS (Indiana): We gave up our birthright on spending and fiscal matters. And I think we're properly disciplined for it by the voters nationally.
GONYEA: Stuart Rothenberg publishes the Rothenberg Political Report. He says that internally the party seems to be moving beyond the drama of the George W. Bush era with its wars and ballooning deficit and, finally, financial crisis.
Mr. STUART ROTHENBERG (Rothenberg Political Report): There's a sense that they've turned the page on the Bush years that the future is going to be better than it is now and in the past. And, really, the most important thing is that all Republicans seem to agree that they don't like the Obama agenda, and particularly that they don't like the Democratic congressional agenda.
GONYEA: Still, the public's opinion of Republicans remains very low. An NBC Wall Street Journal poll last month shows that 25 percent have a positive view of the party, while 35 percent have a positive view of Democrats. And the GOP continues to lose ground among minorities and the young. But what is indisputable is that conservatives have their energy back. The first signs came in the form of anger over the White House push on health care.
(Soundbite of rally)
Unidentified People: Here we are, here we are
GONYEA: This is from a late summer Washington rally by the so-called Tea Party movement. Tea Partiers warn of tax hikes and a government takeover of health care, of death panels and onerous costs to small business. Their activism has been widely welcomed on the right, but the movement has also threatened some Republicans mounting challenges in upcoming primary elections. In Congress, Republicans have hung together, opposing the stimulus package and the health care bill, almost without exception. That pushback is important, says Eric Cantor of Virginia, the number two Republican in the House.
Representative ERIC CANTOR (Republican, Virginia): There is a fear of unfettered power. There's a fear that there is no check and balance on one-party rule in Washington.
GONYEA: But Indiana Governor Daniels says the party has to be careful, that just saying no to what the president proposes isn't sufficient. He says the party needs to continue put forth its own policy solutions.
Gov. DANIELS: Even if no one pays them much heed for now, it's very important to get in the habit of doing that. Because our opportunity to really have a chance to do those things may come again.
GONYEA: Republican leadership remains a problem on the road back. There's no one face, nor even a core group. Some look to Sarah Palin, to National Chairman Michael Steele, Dick Cheney, or to media figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. And it's possible none of these names will ever be on a ballot in the future. But for now, the Republican faithful feel good to be back in the game, getting a chance to celebrate again and looking forward to the midterm elections in November.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
In Haiti, aid is flowing, though still not quickly enough for some. Today, a shipment of food from Catholic Relief Services is being distributed at a makeshift camp. It's set up on the Petionville Club Golf Course, that's in Port-au-Prince. And joining us now from that camp is Lane Hartill of Catholic Relief Services. And I understand that the U.S. military is there now. The forces there have secured the camp and how is the distribution of aid proceeding?
Mr. LANE HARTILL (Catholic Relief Services): It's going well. Let me describe what's happening in front of me. There's about 50 soldiers from the, I believe, it's the 82nd Airborne, and they're offloading trucks, packets of water. They've formed a line. They're passing the water down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, there are maybe 2,000 Haitians waiting, children are coming in, women picking up some bottles of water and moving on. We're also delivering food kits. In the food kits there's things like sardines, granola bars, juice, mixed nuts, peanut butter. It's enough for a family of five for a couple of days. That stuff is also being delivered.
BRAND: And how many Haitians are there?
Mr. HARTILL: Right in front of me, I would say about 2,000 are lined up right now watching this aid flow in. In the makeshift camp itself, there is an estimation, some people say around 20,000 and obviously it grows at night when people come here to sleep.
BRAND: Now, we've seen images of chaos unfolding in other parts of the city when aid is being distributed. Is that not happening there? It sounds like it's pretty orderly.
Mr. HARTILL: It's fairly orderly, thanks to the U.S. military. They formed a cordon, they're standing down there. The people seem to be, you know, they obviously want food, that's for sure. But they're making their way in. They're getting water. They're getting food. Obviously there are some frustrations. But it is being pulled off. People are getting food now, so I think that's the most important thing.
BRAND: And what are you hearing from the Haitians themselves because we've heard from them over the past several days, fury, actually, at the pace of aid and what are they telling you now?
Mr. HARTILL: Yeah. It's clear, frustration is mounting. You know, there's a lack of water in the city, there's a lack of fuel, definitely a lack of medicine. Logistically, it's difficult to get aid to secure sights. But that is why it's so great that we're here at the golf course with the help of the U.S. military. It's secure, and people are getting aid.
BRAND: Now, you have worked on the ground in other disasters, I understand.
Mr. HARTILL: I have been in various places in West Africa, flooding, for example. But I've never seen anything on this scale. There's just so many people that lost houses and also those whose houses have been damaged and they're afraid to sleep in them. You know, it's one thing to see pictures on TV, but it's quite another thing to be here and see Haitians when you drive down the streets. Makeshift signs are going up saying: SOS, we need help, we need food, we need water. So it's clear that people are getting desperate.
BRAND: Lane Hartill, thank you very much and best of luck to you.
Mr. HARTILL: Thanks for having me.
BRAND: That's Lane Hartill of Catholic Relief Services. He spoke to us from the Petionville Club Golf Course in Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
Now a new book about presidential power. It's written by a man made famous - or infamous, depending upon your political persuasion - for helping expand President Bush's powers after 9/11. He is John Yoo. From 2001 to 2003, he was a lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. When he was there, John Yoo wrote a number of controversial memos. They justified, among other things, the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and warrantless wiretaps. His new book is called "Crisis And Command."
I recently spoke with John Yoo about those memos, any regrets he may have - he does have one, and why he thinks it's important for a president to be so powerful.
Professor JOHN YOO (Law, University of California, Berkeley; Author, "Crisis And Command"): We need a powerful president because we have periods of emergency, crisis and even war where we need part of the government that can act quickly in response, that the powerful president isn't necessary all the time. It's someone who we need to come forward and address unforeseen events and circumstances.
BRAND: You argue in the book that the greatest presidents come forward during times of crisis to do that, to seize power when they can, and to expand the role of the executive.
Prof. YOO: That's right. You look at who most scholars think are our greatest presidents, men like Washington, Lincoln and FDR. These are presidents who were no shrinking violets. They embraced their power. They used their powers vigorously to attack the challenges of their day and often - or sometimes in direct conflict with the Congress and the Supreme Court.
The other thing is that we have had bad presidents. And one thing I try to do in "Crisis And Command" is write about some of our bad presidents. And often, they were people who when confronted by these same challenges, retreated and shrunk into a shell, and asked Congress or the courts to take the lead.
BRAND: But when we were looking at what is commonly called the war on terrorism, it's often seen as an unending war. And so, how do these powers get put back in the bottle if you have an unending war?
Prof. YOO: I share your concerns. And the hard thing is how do we figure out when the war against al-Qaida, the war with other terrorist groups is going to be over, when they're not a nation state. There's no territory to conquer. There's no armies to fight in the field. How do we know when the war is over? I think that's a very fair and difficult question because it's that point when the president's powers will recede.
BRAND: I wonder if you've reconsidered the validity of any of the measures that you supported in your memos just after 9/11. It was in the flush of this terrorist attack, when feelings were running very high. It's now eight years passed. And I'm wondering, for example, with the approval of secret wire tapping, of not abiding by Geneva, of getting rid of habeas corpus, do you have any regrets?
Prof. YOO: Obviously I think about it a lot. I think we should always have an open mind and, you know, be willing to reconsider evidence in new light to see whether we should've done something differently. The only thing I regret was just the pressure of time that we had to act under.
The problem was we had to make all these decisions in such a short period of time under the pressure of circumstances. And, of course, one would always like the luxury to have more time to think it through, but I think under those circumstances, I probably would do the same things again.
BRAND: You wrote: The definition of torture is the victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injuries, so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result. Where did you get that definition?
Prof. YOO: Well, when we did these memos in the Office of Legal Counsel, we looked at all kinds of sources. The particular language you read, we borrowed from another statute passed by Congress that contained a definition of what's severe pain and suffering. But we also looked at a lot of other things. If you look at those memos, they also look at foreign countries. They look at states. And they look at past cases in the federal courts. I might add that since those memos, there's been a Federal Court Of Appeals, based in Philadelphia, that has adopted definition that's quite similar to those memos.
BRAND: The statute you mentioned, was that a statute governing treatment of prisoners or...
Prof. YOO: No. You know, I'd be the first to admit, there was no statutes involving treatment of prisoners that was - exactly on point. So I believe this statute involved Medicaid and Medicare, in fact.
BRAND: Why would you pick this definition over any others?
Prof. YOO: Well, the problem is that one worries about picking something that's just purely subjective. And so one thing I think the Justice Department owed the people - the CIA, the people in the National Security Council and the White House were asking us these questions - was to try to be as clear as we could, to try to find a line.
BRAND: So you found this one from a Medicare and Medicaid statute?
Prof. YOO: Yeah, if you look at the memo in its entirety, it's not just that one definition. It fills it out. It provides examples of basically everything that the federal courts had found to be torture in other kinds of cases. And it provided, you know, lists, examples of things that the judges had found to be torture.
BRAND: Even though waterboarding had been described as torture for many, many years - had been used by Pol Pot.
Prof. YOO: Well, you know, one thing I would say is that when - I think waterboarding is, clearly, I think the hardest question. It was the interrogation method, I think if you look at these other memos that were done, came closest to the line. I'll just say this. I mean, I think it's a very difficult question and again, dire situations - it's not all the time and is not just for everybody. It's under these most, I think, emergency situations.
BRAND: As you were writing this book and researching examples of executive power and what's happened during times of crisis, how did you compare the president you worked for, President Bush, with these other presidents? Where would you put him?
Prof. YOO: As you know, in the book itself, I don't want to take a position on where Bush will eventually fall out on the rankings of presidents because it takes decades until we can really be sure. But I think the - what - I'm first to admit is that it really depends on whether what he did were appropriate to the circumstances.
BRAND: What do you think personally?
Prof. YOO: I think President Bush probably will be like a lot of our recent presidents, probably around the average. I think that's around where Bill Clinton and the first President Bush ended up.
BRAND: Where do you think he made a mistake?
Prof. YOO: I think certainly in the area of domestic policy. I think that there were problems and, you know, these are not the areas I really worked on, but I think these are areas where I think the Republicans and the president overspent. They expanded federal programs too far. The Iraq war, obviously, is always going to be question. I personally have never been certain - it was not my job at the time, obviously, but I was never certain whether the Iraq War made sense as a matter of strategy. And I think obviously, that could end up being a mistake. But it's still - we're still in the middle of it.
BRAND: John Yoo, thank you very much.
Prof. YOO: Thanks for having me on.
BRAND: John Yoo. His latest book is called "Crisis and Command." He now teaches law at UC Berkley.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Two days after the earthquake, we talked with businessman Pierre Brisson. He runs a handicraft export company in Port-au-Prince and lives in the affluent suburb of Petionville. When we reached him again today by Skype, he said he's seen only scattered distribution of water, no food, and finding fuel has been a big problem.
Mr. PIERRE BRISSON (Businessman): Some stations are delivering fuel but by gallon, or you have long, long waits. I started in my line yesterday around 5:30 and I was out around 1:00 with some gas to be able to put in the car, and mostly some diesel for the generator.
BLOCK: You mean you got in line at the gas station at 5:00 in the morning?
Mr. BRISSON: Yeah.
BLOCK: And you left at 1:00 in the afternoon?
Mr. BRISSON: That's right.
BLOCK: Eight hours later.
Mr. BRISSON: Yes. And I was among the lucky few because by chance, I found out that station was giving gas. The station where I was, they rationed a little bit. The lucky ones got five gallons. I did get three. But most people have come with their jug, one-gallon jug, to get their little something.
BLOCK: Mr. Brisson, you run a company, the handicraft export company that we mentioned.
Mr. BRISSON: Yeah.
BLOCK: Do you have a sense of - if you had a physical plant, if it survived and any workers, how they're doing?
Mr. BRISSON: Yes, we - my partners and I - we went over there. We looked at the building. It's okay as well as the inside. Fortunately for us, because the building next door collapsed on some people, we were fortunate to have left and closed shop a little bit before the earthquake. So the workers were just on their way home. We have accounted most of them that are okay or alive. Many of them lost all they have. They are in camps, in the tents.
We hope to be able to plan for whatever relief we can come up with. But, of course, the banks are not open. There is no access to money. And the immediate thing is to find food and water for the workers.
You know, one of the great things - big, not great. One of the worst thing, I think, that now, after a week, to contemplate the inability for everyone to plan. It's hard not to be able to plan for next day or the week after. It's just complete void and that's difficult. That's very, very difficult.
You were asking me about the plant, about the workers. Imagine when I went to that town-town yesterday and I saw the (unintelligible) that I went through where there's not one house, one building standing; not one commerce, not one shop standing. And I was thinking of all the people working in that street alone without a job, without any hope for an income whenever. You know, planning is impossible now and that's hard.
BLOCK: And going along with that, I suppose it must be impossible to imagine what Haiti will become, what the future of your country is.
Mr. BRISSON: Huh, I don't know. I really - we don't know. Now, there's in the history, in the north, we had a king - Christopher - at one time. And his motto was: We will rise from the ashes. And we will rise from the ashes. How? I don't know, but we will. We are a people that have been suffering ever since we were born. We made by and we are going to fight. Many will die in between but a country does not die.
BLOCK: Mr. Brisson, it's good to talk to you again. And we'll keep checking in with you.
Mr. BRISSON: Thank you, Melissa. It's nice to talk to you also. You take care.
BLOCK: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Mr. BRISSON: Bye-bye.
BLOCK: That's businessman Pierre Brisson who lives in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
It has already been a brutal winter in many parts of this country and we are only a month into it. It costs a lot of money to keep streets clear of snow and ice.
As Iowa Public Radio's Rob Dillard reports, some cities have already exhausted their entire snow removal budgets.
(Soundbite of snow blower)
ROB DILLARD: On East 6th Street in downtown Des Moines, work crews are doing what they call snow loading. An enormous blower inches along a normally busy thoroughfare, sucking up mounds of dirty snow from curbsides and dumping it into trucks to be hauled away from downtown.
Des Moines Public Works Director Bill Stowe says it's a difficult and expensive job.
Mr. BILL STOWE (Public Works Director, Des Moines): This kind of event for a couple square miles here in the downtown cost nearly a half million dollars each time we do it. We've done it twice now in the last month. So it's a very expensive situation. Typically, in a normal winter we would not do it once, let alone, twice.
DILLARD: One problem for Stowe is that he's already blown through the $3 million the city budget had for snow removal for the entire year.
Mr. STOWE: We're now at a point where we're basically moving it from long-term maintenance accounts over into snow and ice control just to be able to clear the streets and make them safe in the winter.
DILLARD: Des Moines has been buried by three blizzards so far this season, dropping more than 30 inches on the ground twice the normal accumulation. It's been a severe winter in many parts of the country. Ice and snow removal budgets have been depleted in cities and counties nationwide. Kansas City already spent the $2.5 million it allocated for snow removal and now expects to spend as much as $4 million. Officials in Colorado Springs say they won't even bother plowing residential streets until at least six inches fall.
The village of Genesee, Wisconsin with a population of just 7,500 set aside $300,000 for snow removal and that's already gone. The town's clerk, Barbara Whitmore, says it's had to cut back a bit on service.
Ms. BARBARA WHITMORE (Clerk, Genesee, Wisconsin): This year we're looking more at only doing the stop areas, curbs and hills.
DILLARD: Every year the Washington, D.C. based American Public Works Association sponsors a conference where the heads of public works departments discuss the latest in snow and ice removal. A couple of years ago, many griped about the high cost of salt. The group's executive director, Peter King, says he has a feel for what they'll be talking about this year.
Mr. PETER KING (Executive Director, American Public Works Association): I'm thinking it's probably going to be more focused on predictions and how the public safety can be protected when the budget shortfall comes into play.
DILLARD: Meanwhile, back on the streets of Des Moines, public works director Bill Stowe is done with predictions.
Mr. STOWE: We were actually told by distinguished climatologists, including the state climatologist that this would be a relatively easy winter. Clearly, that prognostication didn't work very well. So, we've kind of lost our reliance on long-term forecasts.
DILLARD: In a typical year, which this is not, Des Moines will receive another 20 inches of snow between now and the last snowflake.
For NPR News, I'm Rob Dillard in Des Moines.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
Tonight, a stunning upset in Massachusetts. Republican Scott Brown has won the Senate race to fill the seat of the late Senator Edward Kennedy. Brown defeated the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, who had started the campaign with a double-digit lead in the polls.
And joining us now from a very jubilant Brown headquarters is NPR's Tovia Smith. Tovia, what's happening?
TOVIA SMITH: Well, a lot of people may be asking exactly that question: What exactly is happening here, given the way that we have all been surprised by this election. I think even the Republicans are stunned in this room where I am. No one expected this race to be close; out of nowhere, there's upset. Crowds have been cheering wildly here tonight that a Republican has won the seat that's been held by the Kennedys for - the senator before that, JFK, for more than 50 years. As one put it, the bluest of blue states is now brown town.
And of course, the way Republicans are explaining it is that this is a repudiation for President Obama's plan to overhaul health care. This is a state that's living with its own universal health care, which is still popular here. But I just spoke to former Governor Mitt Romney, who says that Massachusetts' plan is different than what he called Obama care because it doesn't cut Medicare and it doesn't raise taxes. And he says voters wouldn't want the president's version of it. And I have to say, I did hear a lot of that at the polls today, voters who favored standing coverage who say they feared the price tag of the president's plan.
BLOCK: Well, apart from that issue of health care, Tovia, what do you think tipped this campaign? What chipped away at that double-digit lead that Martha Coakley had going in and that made a lot of Democrats, apparently, quite complacent about how this race would come out?
SMITH: Well, you know, the campaign has been on the defensive for a while now about many of the things that they - the way that they ran the campaign. There was a sense that she was very passive, almost as if she felt it was kind of automatic; it was hers. Many voters say they got the sense that she felt entitled to the seat. It was one of the most memorable lines in the campaign -was how Brown said, it's not Kennedy's seat, it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat.
And the Democrats, it's hard to counter that, even employing Kennedy's widow, Vicki Kennedy, to reinforce that even Senator Kennedy thought it was the people's seat. But apparently, the damage was done.
And I believe, also, part of it had to do with her style, you know? She wasn't widely an appealing personality on the campaign trail, if you will. I think that was part of it.
BLOCK: And managed to do - commit the unpardonable sin of committing a gaffe in Red Sox nation.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: She said during an interview that - she said Curt Schilling, who of course, was the famous Red Sox pitcher with bloody socks, who did so well for Red Sox nation, she said that he was a Yankees fan. And her campaign quickly said afterwards that it was just a joke. It was just a joke. But maybe that's part of the kind of stiff personality thing, that she did not pull off the joke in a way that people recognized as one.
BLOCK: Tovia, what do you think this result, again, with the Republican Scott Brown winning that Senate seat from Massachusetts, which has long been in Democratic hands, what does it say about the power and the inclinations of independent voters in Massachusetts, do you think?
SMITH: Well, that is the biggest voting bloc in Massachusetts; 51 percent of voters here are independent. People think that this is a heavily blue state. It is left-leaning, of course. But it is also majority independent, as I say. And I think a lot of people just broke for Scott Brown today, in part because I think there's some frustration with one-party rule here. Massachusetts has had an all-Democratic congressional delegation since 1997.
It's an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. There's been a series of scandalous indictments lately - speaker of the house here. I think there's some frustration with that, and people really wanted to see a Republican in high office here.
BLOCK: OK. Tovia, thanks very much.
SMITH: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Tovia Smith at the victory party for Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Again, Scott Brown has defeated the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to take the seat held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
And of course, the Republican victory in Massachusetts means that the Democrats' 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is over. And this is expected to have vast implications. Joining us now to assess them is NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, let's talk first about health care. Scott Brown has said he will be the Republican's 41st vote against health care. What does it mean for the health-care overhaul bill?
MARA LIASSON: Well, it means that they can't get it through the Senate with 60 votes, as they planned. And they are exploring a whole bunch of other options for passing this thing. I think the first question, before we get to just the tactical strategy for getting it through, is what does this election mean for health care? What was the message?
Now, the Republicans are saying it meant that the electorate has rejected Obama's health-care plan, and he needs to stop pushing it. I think the Democrats so far have decided that they've got to keep going with this, that to not pass their number one priority would be the equivalent of political suicide.
Now, once they decide that, then they have a bunch of - they have a limited group, a very - unpalatable options for pushing it through. The House could just accept the Senate bill in its entirety. That would be something that would make a lot of liberals in the House of Representatives very uncomfortable. And then they could hope that they could get the things that they negotiated in that conference that's been going on for a while, through on the budget. The budget only takes 51 votes. They could get the changes to the Cadillac tax on high-cost health-care plans passed that way. But that would be a pretty heavy lift.
Nancy Pelosi has said, we're going to get health care. She said right now, she doesn't like the idea of just accepting the Senate plan. But it's hard to imagine how else they can get it passed unless they're willing to go the reconciliation route, which means a parliamentary procedure where you pass it in the Senate with just 51 votes. I think that would be absolutely political kryptonite for the Democrats because they would be thumbing their nose, in effect, at the voters.
BLOCK: The nuclear option, maybe.
LIASSON: The nuclear option. I don't think they're thinking seriously about that. Everything I've heard about is trying to get it through, just having the House accept the Senate bill and make the changes on another legislative vehicle.
BLOCK: Mara, let's talk a bit more broadly. Besides health care, does this result, does this one loss of one seat from Massachusetts mean, ultimately, that the Obama administration has to move toward the center, has to get some Republicans on their side since they've lost their filibuster-proof majority, that super majority of 60 votes?
LIASSON: Well, as a practical matter, everything they do next year is going to have to get Republican votes if they don't have 60 votes in the Senate. And up until now, Republicans have been unified in their opposition to everything that Obama wants to do. I don't think you can overestimate the significance of this loss. As one Democrat said to me today, it's more than a wake-up call, it's a blow to the solar plexus.
And what - before we figure out what happens to different pieces of legislation, will this spook Democrats to the point where more of them will retire? Will more moderate Democrats rethink their support for the Obama agenda? Right now, the Democrats are in the circular firing squad phase of this, pointing fingers, blaming Martha Coakley, saying this was local issue, she did a terrible job, the worst case of political malpractice ever. But others are saying this was a referendum on Obama, on health care and on his very big, ambitious agenda.
One thing I think you'll see is a real retrenchment to the economy and jobs, jobs, jobs. You're not going to hear about too many other things from the White House this year. They were already planning on doing that. But I do think that this election drives that home. The people in Massachusetts, the bluest of all blue states, sent a message to Washington that it wasn't listening to them, and they want a focus on the economy.
BLOCK: OK, Mara, thanks very much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's national political correspondent Mara Liasson, again with the news tonight that Republican Scott Brown has defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts for the Senate seat held by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
On Capitol Hill today, not one, not two, but four hearings that focused on the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing. Administration officials accepted blame for intelligence failures and they heard sharp criticism from Republicans over why the suspect is being tried in federal rather than military court.
NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR: A who's who of Obama administration national security officials paraded to the Capitol to answer questions about how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to board Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, the place where the dots should've been connected, set the day's tone appearing before members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Mr. MICHAEL LEITER (Head, National Counterterrorism Center): Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have stepped onto a plane on Christmas Day. The counterterrorism system collectively failed, and I, along with director Blair and Secretary Napolitano and others, want to tell you and the American people the same thing we told the president, that we have to do better.
NAYLOR: As for how the system failed, there was much talk about lists and why the bombing suspect Abdulmutallab's name appeared on some but not others. One reason, State Department official Patrick Kennedy told the Senate Judiciary Committee, was because someone had trouble spelling the suspect's name after his father reported his concerns to the U.S. Embassy.
Mr. PATRICK KENNEDY (Department of State): The Department of State misspelled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name in a visa despite the report. As a result, we did not add the information about his current visa in that report.
NAYLOR: Kennedy said the State Department now has a version of spell check software available to check names after visas are granted. Republicans pressed officials as to why Abdulmutallab is being tried and prosecuted by civilians as a criminal rather than by the military as an enemy combatant. Many GOP senators believe Abdulmutallab would've spilled a lot more information about his possible contacts before military interrogators.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Judiciary Committee that it was a decision made on the fly by FBI agents on the ground in Detroit. That explanation didn't sit well with the senior Republican on the panel, Alabama's Jeff Sessions. First, Mueller.
Mr. ROBERT MUELLER (FBI Director): In this particular case, in fast-moving events, decisions were made appropriately, I believe very appropriately, given the situation.
Senator JEFF SESSIONS (Republican, Alabama): I don't think you can say it's appropriate. We don't know what that individual learned when he was working with al-Qaida, and we may never know because he now has got a lawyer who's telling him to be quiet.
NAYLOR: At the Homeland Security Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair seemed to agree with Republicans. Blair testified he was never consulted about how Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated. He said a special interrogation group for high-value suspects, the so-called HIG formed by the Obama administration, was not convened, in part, he said, because it was designed for suspects arrested overseas.
Mr. DENNIS BLAIR (Director of National Intelligence): We did not invoke the HIG. In this case we should've. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, you know, we didn't put it then. That's what we will do now.
NAYLOR: And now the administration has a new problem on its hands - finding a new nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration. Erroll Southers withdrew his name today. Southers' nomination had been blocked by Republican Senator Jim DeMint, who argued Southers wanted to allow TSA screeners to collectively bargain for a labor agreement. Southers said he was tired of being in limbo.
Mr. ERROLL SOUTHERS (Transportation Security Administration, Counterterrorism Expert): My family and I have endured quite a bit of unexpected turbulence here, as it relates to what we consider to be non-issues regarding my expertise and experience. And, quite frankly, it was just time to move on.
NAYLOR: Southers says the TSA needs a leader now. No indication yet of who the administration is looking at to fill that role.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
Voodoo is playing a central role in helping people in Haiti cope with tragedy after last week's earthquake. Haitian Voodoo is a blend of spirit worship and Catholicism.
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty has more.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Erol Josue lost more than two dozen friends and extended family in the earthquake. He's a Voodoo priest who lives in New York, and he says he spent the past week saying traditional Voodoo prayers.
Mr. EROL JOSUE (Voodoo Priest): We thank God we're still alive, but also pray to give a route, to give a good path for the people who passed away. And also we pray to ask and question to understand what happened.
HAGERTY: Voodoo is called a mystery religion. But Elizabeth McAlister, a Voodoo expert at Wesleyan University, says at its core, the philosophy is really pretty simple.
Professor ELIZABETH MCALISTER (Religion, Wesleyan University): Voodoo in a nutshell is about the idea that everything material has a spiritual dimension that is more really real. Everything living - but even rocks and the Earth -are considered to have spirit and to have a spiritual nature.
HAGERTY: McAlister says there is no unified Voodoo religion. There's no Voodoo pope or central authority, no Voodoo scripture or even a core doctrine.
Prof. McALISTER: It's a religion that really operates through revelation. So people can receive dreams or visions or even be possessed by spirits, and that spirit can tell them something, and that's the revelation.
HAGERTY: And yet Haitian Voodoo takes many of its rituals and beliefs, which came with slaves from Africa, from Western Catholicism. For example, Voodoo believers worship the Grand Master, who is the equivalent of the Christian God. They pray to loa, or spirits, who then intercede with God on their behalf, just as Catholics pray to saints. Voodoo believers also revere their ancestors, who guide them through their daily difficulties.
On the books, 80 percent of Haitians say they are Catholic. But Erol Josue says Voodoo is widespread, just under the surface.
Mr. JOSUE: Haiti is not a Catholic country. Haiti is a Voodoo country.
HAGERTY: Apparently, that's what Pat Robertson thinks as well. The televangelist declared that Haiti has been cursed since 1791 when, he said, Voodoo practitioners made a pact with the devil to rid themselves of French occupiers.
Mr. PAT ROBERTSON (Televangelist): They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. And so, the devil said, OK, it's a deal.
HAGERTY: Josue says that is outrageous. Voodoo does not engage in devil worship. And yet, he says many Haitians are asking why the spirits, who are supposed to protect their country, let so many die. He believes the gods are angry with how Haitians have denuded the forests and mistreated the Earth.
Mr. JOSUE: We Haitian, we believe Haiti, she's a woman. We believe she's a mother. And that mother, that woman who got that pain, she say, enough.
HAGERTY: But even as Haitians mourn the death of tens of thousands of people, Max Beauvoir says Voodoo gives them an eternal perspective. I called Beauvoir, who is the supreme servitor of Voodoo in Haiti, at his home outside of Port-au-Prince.
Mr. MAX BEAUVOIR (Supreme Servitor of Voodoo, Haiti): The Haitian people do not get afraid of death. We are sure that we will come back again.
HAGERTY: After a person dies, he says, he or she goes under the water for a year and a day, then goes on to the next life.
Mr. BEAUVOIR: We believe that everyone lives 16 times: Eight times we live as men, and eight times we live as women.
HAGERTY: During those 16 lives, a person moves from body to body, country to country, gathering wisdom until he or she merges with God.
To help souls pass easily from death to new life, Voodoo priests like Erol Josue preside over requiem ceremonies with water and candles, coffee, and songs like this one.
Mr. JOSUE: (Singing foreign language)
HAGERTY: When death comes unexpectedly, Josue says, it's confusing to the souls. Now, he says, this earthquake has yielded another spiritual tragedy: mass graves.
Mr. JOSUE: We have to make sure we bury our ancestors. We've got to pay respect for them. And put them in the mass grave is no respect for our culture, no respect for our ancestors.
HAGERTY: And so today, he prays and sings to help those souls find their way.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As we heard a moment ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller was on Capitol Hill today to testify about the bureau's counterterrorism efforts, but at the very hour that session was scheduled to begin, the Justice Department's inspector general released a scathing report. It described how the FBI illegally obtained thousands of Americans' telephone records during the Bush administration.
NPR's Ari Shapiro has that story.
ARI SHAPIRO: After 9/11, Congress gave the FBI new authorities to get Americans' phone records. The USA Patriot Act included tools called National Security Letters for the FBI to use in emergencies. When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act several years later, lawmakers added a new provision, telling the Justice Department's inspector general to look into how the FBI was using National Security Letters. And what the inspector general found confirmed privacy advocates' worst fears. Mike German is a former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU.
Mr. MIKE GERMAN (Former FBI Agent, ACLU): When the first audit came out in 2007, the inspector general had discovered wanton abuse of the National Security Letter authority.
SHAPIRO: The FBI illegally obtained thousands of Americans' phone records by lying claiming emergencies where there were none. A second report in 2008 found that the abuse continued after the problems were initially flagged. Now comes this report - nearly 300 pages describing what the inspector general calls an egregious breakdown in the FBI's responsibility to obey the law. Mike German.
Mr. GERMAN: The FBI would use Post-it notes, use face-to-face interactions, emails, you know, just all sorts of informal ways to collect information the FBI had no right to obtain.
SHAPIRO: The report says phone company employees acted like FBI agents. They worked in the FBI building, and agents would do what they called sneak peeks basically looking over a phone company employee's shoulder to get information from a computer screen without going through any formal channels. The report also says the FBI obtained reporters' phone records without getting the attorney general's permission as required. Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says she is disappointed but not surprised.
Ms. LUCY DALGLISH (Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press): It has been relatively unfortunately common, particularly at the FBI, to ignore a lot of the regulations that are on the books when it comes to going after reporters and their sources.
SHAPIRO: At today's hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy confronted FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has been in charge of the bureau since 2001.
Mr. PATRICK LEAHY (Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee): This was not a matter of technical violations. If any one of us did something like this, we'd have to answer to it. This was authorized at high levels within the FBI and continued for years.
SHAPIRO: Leahy asked Mueller...
Mr. LEAHY: Will any FBI officials be sanctioned or punished for these violations of law?
SHAPIRO: Mueller says individuals have been disciplined, but he would not go into detail. And he said the FBI is working to get rid of the information that it obtained illegally.
Mr. MUELLER: We put in place a process to go through every one of those numbers and determine whether we had a valid legal basis to retain that number. And where we did not, it was purged from our system.
SHAPIRO: He said the illegal practices ended in 2006, and the FBI now has more internal controls in place to prevent the problems from happening again.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
About 400,000 Americans have multiple sclerosis. Now, researchers are granting them a longtime wish: drugs, to slow down the disease, that can be taken orally. Up to now, those drugs have had to be injected.
We have our story from NPR's Richard Knox.
RICHARD KNOX: Many patients would love to take a pill instead of an injection to slow down the progress of MS and put off disability. That's why Dr. John Richert of the National MS Society says reports of two such drugs, in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, are big news for these patients. The studies were funded by the drug makers. Richert says the new medicines will be a big improvement.
Dr. JOHN RICHERT (National MS Society): What we've had available the last 16 to 17 years has made a big difference and what we have coming on board now, these are going to make even a larger difference. It's really an important advance.
KNOX: That's because they'll be easier to take.
Dr. RICHERT: People will be more prone to take them early, more prone to stay on the drugs.
KNOX: And it looks like the new pills are better. They reduce the number of flare-ups by more than half. Current drugs only reduce them by about a third. When patients suffer a relapse, their symptoms get worse. It reflects the nerve damage that's going on. Jeffrey Babin was diagnosed with MS nearly seven years ago, when he was 39. It shook his world.
Professor JEFFREY BABIN (University of Pennsylvania): This is a very scary disease and when you have an episode, it is one of the most life-changing and life-reevaluating events.
KNOX: Babin is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He's been free of scary MS relapses for several years now. It might be due to a drug called Copaxone, one of a half dozen that can slow the course of MS. He's grateful for the drug, but he has to inject it every day.
Prof. BABIN: Injections are no fun. Nobody likes to inject themselves. You know, in my case, I wouldn't say that there are any major side effects, but I do get these painful welts at the injection sites.
KNOX: Something he'd be happy to do without. The new pills could be the answer. Dr. Peter Calabresi, of Johns Hopkins Medical School, is an author of one new study. He's excited about the new drugs, but he's cautious.
Dr. PETER CALABRESI (Johns Hopkins University): I'm happy to have a new choice, especially a pill. I think we also need to be careful and not use it too abruptly or too easily.
KNOX: Calabresi says many people think of pills as safer than injections.
Dr. CALABRESI: In reality, these are extremely potent pills that have the potential to cause a variety of serious side effects.
KNOX: Such as skin cancers, vision problems and dangerous infections. That's happened before. The MS drug Tysabri was pulled from the market after some patients got rare brain infections. It was later reintroduced with strict monitoring requirements. In light of that experience, federal regulators may go slow with the two new drugs, called fingolimod and cladribine. Jeffrey Babin, the Pennsylvania MS patient says he will, too.
Prof. BABIN: In spite of the fact that I hate injections, I probably would not leap at the first pill that comes to market. You want to be careful to jump into something new and risk the side effects from something that you haven't tried before.
KNOX: Meanwhile, approval of another new MS drug may come soon. That drug, called fampridine, doesn't prevent the nerve damage of MS, but in about a third of patients it makes their damaged nerves work better so they can walk better.
Richard Knox, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
Port-au-Prince was jolted awake this morning by one of the most powerful aftershocks since last week's earthquake. It sent terrified people racing into the streets. Also, today's sporadic looting intensified. Desperate people scoured stores, searching for food and items they could sell after waiting more than a week for deliveries of relief.
NPR's Jason Beaubien has this story on the chaotic scene in Port-au-Prince.
(Soundbite of crowd)
JASON BEAUBIEN: A crowd of about 200 people swarms around the remains of a grocery store in downtown Port-au-Prince. Young men scramble up slabs of concrete, debris and razor wire to get to a hole in the store's ceiling. They scramble back down with boxes of Pringles, soap, Presidente beer. One man defends his loot from the mob on the street with a champagne bottle; another wields a stick studded with nails. A young girl of about 8 or 9 years old emerges with a bag overflowing with toothpaste, plastic dolls and other goods. The crowd rips it away from her, leaving her empty-handed and in tears
(Soundbite of crying)
BEAUBIEN: At one point, the Haitian police drive by, fire several warning shots into the air, and then the looting continues. David Martine(ph) was standing off to the side of the crowd, munching from a can of Mr. Crisp's tomato-flavored potato chips, which he'd just picked up inside. He says he came down here to hustle and try to get something to eat. Martine says it's complete chaos inside the collapsed supermarket.
Mr. DAVID MARTINE: (Foreign Language Spoken)
Unidentified Man #1: He say it's dangerous out there. People are stabbing, hitting people with sticks in there, you know what I'm saying? So he hurry up and get out, so he's done. He's not going back in there, he says.
BEAUBIEN: Scenes like this flared in various parts of the city's downtown commercial district today. This area was severely damaged by last week's quake. Many buildings have collapsed entirely, and almost all the ones still standing are cracked and crumbling. Around the corner from the supermarket, Jean Tiljean Guillet(ph) was holding a brand new pair of white sneakers that he had just liberated from a toppled shoe store.
Mr. JEAN TILJEAN GUILLET: (Foreign Language Spoken)
BEAUBIEN: You know, it's misery, it's hunger, he says. And nobody is giving us anything. Our houses are broken down. So people are just going in there to get what they can so they can eat. He says he will sell the tennis shoes to try to get food.
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign Language Spoken)
Unidentified Man #3: (Foreign Language Spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Stanley Dura(ph) and his brother are passing out shotgun shells to the local security guards, right next to the historical iron market.
Unidentified Man #4: We've got to give them shells. They don't even got shells.
Unidentified Man #5: They don't even have bullets.
Unidentified Man #4: They don't even have bullets.
BEAUBIEN: Dura is standing in front of his cosmetic store, holding a Glock 9 pistol with the shoulder brace and a clip that holds 33 bullets. A bandolier across his chest is loaded with shotgun shells. He is unloading the contents of his store into a truck while he still can.
Mr. DURA: There's a lot of robberies. So we are trying to get our merchandise out. Thank God, the store is not crashed down so we can take our merchandise out.
BEAUBIEN: Dura says he expects this entire section of downtown Port-au-Prince will have to be bulldozed.
Mr. DURA: They're going to have to flatten everything down because it's not safe anymore. Everything is cracked. So they're going to have to flat down everything.
BEAUBIEN: He doesn't know when the commercial district will be demolished and cleared, but he says the rebuilding of the Haitian capital could take years. And for now, people are using chunks of the rubble to block off sections of roadways on which they can sleep.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
As we just heard from Jason, the earthquake has left Haiti with a severe housing problem. Perhaps a million people have no shelter now. The International Organization for Migration is taking the lead role in solving that problem and their spokeswoman, Niurka Pineiro joins me now from Haiti. And it's been a week now since the earthquake struck. Why are there no tents set up or at least no tents on a massive scale set up to accommodate these one million or so displaced people?
Ms. NIURKA PINEIRO (Spokeswoman, International Organization for Migration): Well, the number one, you have to remember we didn't have any tents on the ground. We had some stocks of non-food items like plastic sheeting, and tarpaulins, and hygiene kits and such that we had prepositioned for the hurricane season, which was very benign last year. So, we began distributing the items that we had. An appeal was sent out on Saturday morning. We've now received millions of dollars and tents are arriving. We've received the first couple of shipments and we are in the process. But it's difficult to set up these tent camps because the government doesn't want certain locations to become permanent settlements. So we need to find places where these people can gather.
As of today, there are some three hundred spontaneous settlements all over the city, some very small, could be up to a hundred people, some have thousands of people.
BRAND: When you say spontaneous settlements, what does that mean?
Ms. PINEIRO: Spontaneous settlements basically means people are they are afraid. They don't want to go back in their homes. So, they have taken whatever piece of cloth they had, a sheet, a piece of plastic, anything and they've put it up, and entire families are living under this one sheet. So, you can imagine with the type of weather we have here - it's 90 degrees today - that this is not a solution. So we, as the lead agency for shelter are saying, okay, assessments are needed. We need to consult with the government. We need to consult with people on the ground. But we need to start delivering these tents as soon as possible.
BRAND: I guess I don't understand now what the hold up is. Because I understand in the immediate days following the earthquake that you had to assess and gather your resources and make appeals for aid, but now it's been a week. And still no massive tent encampments for these people. Where do you see the hold up?
Ms. PINEIRO: Well, the hold up is, we didn't get the tents until Sunday. The first ones came in. So, that was one hold up. You know, the second hold up is basically discussing with the government what they want to do with these people, where we want to put the tents. And what we don't want is just to give tents to people so they can set them up themselves because there needs to be some order. I mean, we're not trying to make this perfect. But, you know, people need to have then facilities where - or latrines. We have to have deliveries of food brought in. So, yes, it has been slow. We agreed to that and we're saying that we're now, you know, ready to start delivering but we cannot just do that ourselves.
BRAND: Are you waiting for the government to say, okay, you can set up your tents in this spot?
Ms. PINEIRO: I mean, we're waiting for government. We're waiting for our partners. We're trying the best that we can to get these tents out to the people. But admittedly there has been a hold up. When we've had hurricane response here in Haiti, which we've done many times, it has been different. People have been able to go to a collecting center and then eventually they go back home. Most of these people, they can never go back to that home. So, we need to find places where we can have a tent set up today but where permanent homes can also be built at the same site.
So, it's a challenge. It's not a justification of what's going on. But it is a challenge. It's chaotic. It's a mess. And hopefully we'll start doing it as soon as we get the go ahead.
BRAND: Ms. Pineiro, thank you very much.
Ms. PINEIRO: All right. Thank you.
BRAND: That's Niurka Pineiro. She is a spokeswoman with the International Organization for Migration. They are the lead agency in setting up tents in Haiti.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
In Washington, health care legislation is basically frozen. That's because of last night's surprise victory for a Republican in the Massachusetts Senate race. Scott Brown campaigned to become the 41st vote Senate Republicans needed to block a final health care bill. And that's left Democrats in both the House and Senate scrambling to figure out how to get a bill to the president's desk.
For some details of that scrambling, we're joined now by NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner. She spent the afternoon on Capitol Hill. Hi, Julie.
JULIE ROVNER: Hey, Madeleine.
BRAND: Well, if you would, describe the mood today among lawmakers.
ROVNER: Well, I think the best word to describe it is shell-shocked. Really, it's not like they didn't see this coming, at least since late last week. But I think the enormity of losing that 60th vote in the Senate didn't really sink in until today. One reporter who was - talked to some lawmakers described it as like being hit by a bus on the way to your wedding. They were, you know, perhaps only hours away from this final compromise House-Senate bill and now it seems there's virtually no way to get that bill passed.
BRAND: So, what are their options?
ROVNER: Well, the leading option that now seems off the table was to try to hurry up and finish those negotiations and jam the bill through both the House and the Senate before Senator-elect Brown got certified and seated because, of course, at least for the next two weeks or so Democrats still do have those 60 votes in the Senate. But both President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today that wasn't going to happen. Here's Senator Reid.
Senator HARRY REID (Democrat, Nevada; Senate Majority Leader): We're not going to rush in to anything as you've heard. We're going to wait until the new Senator arrives before we do anything more on health care.
BRAND: Julie, couldn't the House just pass the Senate bill as it is and send it to the president?
ROVNER: Yes, indeed they could. That's clearly, I think, what the Senate hopes will happen. But there's still a lot of resistance from House Democratic members. There are many, many things that the House Democrats really don't like about the Senate bill. They particularly dislike that so-called Cadillac Tax, the tax on high-cost health plans, the subsidies in the Senate bill for lower-middle income people are much less in the Senate bill than the House bill. Of course, there's no public option, a government-run health plan in the Senate bill.
BRAND: So, a lot of objections for House Democrats. What are the other options?
ROVNER: Well, there is a procedure called budget reconciliation and they did allow for this, you know, as sort of a fall back in last year's budget. It does not allow Senators to filibuster and it only requires 51 votes to get through the Senate. But it has drawbacks too. Everything in it has to be closely related to the budget, so things like creating those insurance marketplaces like exchanges might not be allowed under the reconciliation process. And they would have to use a separate bill, which might or might not be able to get through the Senate.
BRAND: And Julie today, any talk about just giving up saying, you know what, this is impossible? We're just not going to try.
ROVNER: You know, there were some members who said that, you know, the voters have spoken, maybe we shouldn't do health care. But mostly what I heard were people who seem to think they wanted to do something they just aren't sure how to get it done. And one thing that does seem clear is that for the people who were around in 1994, the last time a health care bill tanked after which Democrats lost both the House and Senate for 12 years, they are pretty certain this time that can't be allowed to happen. They better find a way to pass something. Here's how House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman put it.
Mr. HENRY WAXMAN (Democrat, California; Chairman, House Energy and Commerce Committee): People do want it and if the Democrats don't accomplish it, as we did not in 1994, I think there will be hell to pay.
ROVNER: So, I think this is something like the stages of grief for the Democrats. They're going to have to get through the anger and the bargaining and the denial, all the way to acceptance. And eventually, they'll figure out what they're going to do about how to precede on a health care bill.
BRAND: And you will be watching it. Thanks, Julie.
ROVNER: You're very welcome, Madeleine.
BRAND: That's NPR health policy correspondent, Julie Rovner.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
If you think the U.S. took a hit from the global recession, spare a thought for poor old Iceland. It has a population of only 320,000 people and it had become rich as the center of international banking. But Iceland's banks built up massive debts. It all came crashing down in October of 2008.
Now, as NPR's Rob Gifford reports from Reykjavik, people in Iceland are trying to rebuild their economy by getting back to basics.
Mr. STIGODO FRENSSEN(ph) (Factory Owner, Iceland): It's the coolers of the (unintelligible) now.
ROB GIFFORD: Stigodo Frenssen shows visitors around his small factory producing dried fish for export on the western coast on Iceland. It's on a family small holding. The next door is the home of the owner of Iceland's biggest bank that collapsed 15 months ago.
Mr. FRENSSEN: I was struggling then. Then, he was flying helicopters over my head here. This was a very strange thing. Yesterday, he was buying land, farms, buying companies, flying around, having big parties.
GIFFORD: Frenssen and his compatriots struggled in traditional Icelandic industry overshadowed by the banking boom, the building boom and the transformation of the Icelandic economy. To him it was clear it would all end in tears.
Mr. FRENSSEN: I think they forgot what was the basic foundation of the country. They forgot the foundation of their living, which is the fish and the agriculture.
GIFFORD: And Frenssen is not the only one who says that because they forgot this, they pulled the whole country down with them.
Ms. OUSKEDO RIONESS FLOCEDOTIAR(ph) (Soup Kitchen Owner): And there is a (unintelligible) sky over Iceland. And I will say it will be like that for the next five, six, seven, eight years.
GIFFORD: Ouskedo Rioness Flocedotiar runs a soup kitchen in central Reykjavik and she sees everyday the human fallout of the bankers' greed.
Ms. FLOCEDOTIAR: Iceland there has been in the first five seats of the wealthiest country in the world. But now we are seeing thousands of people needing food just to be able to survive. People don't have food for their children.
GIFFORD: The long line outside proves what she is saying. Hundreds of people stand shivering, waiting for the food handout. Among them, 28-year-old Anna Helgadotta(ph) who returned to work last year after having children but did not work long enough to qualify for unemployment benefit before she was laid off.
Ms. ANNA HELGADOTTA: Because I don't (unintelligible) morning. I have a kids and I have to feed them. I have to come here. I don't want it.
GIFFORD: Do you see any signs of improvement in the economy?
Ms. HELGADOTTA: No.
GIFFORD: Do you have hope?
Ms. HELGADOTTA: No. Not anymore. It is just going to be harder and harder and harder.
GIFFORD: Asked what she thinks of the bankers who did this to the country, she lifts up her hand like a gun and pulls the trigger. But the issues facing Iceland these days are not just economic. In 2006, the United States closed down the airbase it had maintained here for nearly 60 years, a move symbolic of the changed world. Iceland was no longer seen as a crucial part of the West's defenses. Cilia Olmosdaughter(ph) is a professor at the University of Iceland.
Professor CILIA OLMOSDAUGHTER (University of Iceland): Icelandic security identity, Icelandic foreign policy have really shaped around and revolved around the American military presence. So, now, we have to figure out where we want to place ourselves in the world, what is our foreign policy going to be? And then the banking crash comes on top of this. And that takes away our economic identity.
(Soundbite of factory)
GIFFORD: Back at the processing factory the fish continue to slop down off the conveyor belt for sorting. Stigodo Frenssen's business is looking up. The depreciation of the Icelandic krona means he gets much more for his exported dried fish. He says his neighbor, the banker, hasn't been flying his helicopter overhead recently. The bankers don't dare show their faces in public now, he says. In fact, some of them have fled the country.
Mr. FRENSSEN: No they had the party, big party and now they have a hangover. They thought it would all come. We were all going to get rich out of, I don't know, nothing. Iceland is fish, has always been. They are now realizing that they have to go through the you know, they have to go to work and they have to cut fish, pile fish, work, work.
GIFFORD: That work ethic is coming back, he says. People are getting back to their roots and remembering what being Icelandic has always been about.
Rob Gifford, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
By the end of the week, some 16,000 U.S. military personnel will be involved in the Haiti relief effort.
NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr says as the U.S. takes the lead in Haiti it should make sure it's role has an international stamp of approval.
DANIEL SCHORR: So far, at least, the Haiti catastrophe has not become a partisan issue as Hurricane Katrina did. It undoubtedly helped that President Obama quickly enlisted ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to spearhead the fundraising effort. But it's important, as reconstruction work begins, that the United States and the family of nations agree on some central authority to supervise what may be the creation of a new state.
President Obama speaks of a path to a brighter future. Under the stopgap arrangement in effect since the earthquake, the United States and the United Nations handle much of the flow of aid in cooperation with the Haitian government, they say. But President Rene Preval's government, for all practical purposes, does not exist. It lies in ruins in the rubble of the presidential palace and the other government buildings.
With American and other foreign forces patrolling the streets of Port-au-Prince and controlling traffic through the airport, Haitian leaders say they hope this will be temporary. What is needed now is some generally accepted authority representing the family of nations. History provides some examples of benign governorship of countries not yet ready for self-government.
I am thinking of the mandate system introduced by the League of Nations after World War I, and the trusteeship system of the United Nations after World War II. Trusteeship, which officially ended in 1994, was a way of guiding countries towards autonomy with shadow governments reporting to the United Nations Trusteeship Council. Among the nations that experienced some version of trusteeship are Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Cambodia.
The United States will undoubtedly bear much of the burden of building back better, as Mr. Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy to Haiti, puts it. But it would be well if America did it under international supervision.
What nobody needs is the United States coming to be perceived by Haitians as an occupying power making the basic decisions about the rebirth of this benighted little country.
This is Daniel Schorr.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And in California, I'm Madeleine Brand.
It's a victory that could mean bad news for Democrats this election year. Republican Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race yesterday. In a moment, we talk with President Obama's chief adviser, David Axelrod.
First, Republican Dick Armey. He was the House majority leader when President Clinton was in office. He now runs a lobbying group called FreedomWorks. It helped Scott Brown win in Massachusetts.
FreedomWorks is part of the conservative Tea Party movement. Armey says activists from that movement recognized Brown could win before the Republican Party did.
Mr. DICK ARMEY (Chairman, FreedomWorks; Former House Majority Leader): Well, of course, you know, the whole race has suffered from the folklore of Massachusetts, that you can't beat a Kennedy in Massachusetts, can't beat a Kennedy legacy in Massachusetts. I think the initial and clearly the lion share of the credit for this race has got to be Scott Brown himself - the nature of the race he ran. He was so energetic, enthusiastic in the race that the grassroots activists just came to respect him and they regarded him. And they sort of govern by a notion we call Armey's axiom: Hard work beats Daddy's money.
He wasn't going to Washington to bring in money. He was getting on the Internet. He was talking to people from Massachusetts. He was funding from local initiatives and he was matching every dollar's worth of money he got with his own effort on the ground. And folks said, you know, look, if he's willing to work that hard, we ought to work for him. So they really pitched in.
BRAND: A lot of people are saying that this race does not go well for the Democrats this election year and that come November they may suffer losses nationwide. How much truth do you give that? How much credence do you give that when you've just said yourself that a lot of it had to do with his personality?
Mr. ARMEY: Well, first of all, the Democrats have been getting a flow of information. They really ought to change the symbol of their party from the donkey to the - what is that bird that sticks its head in the ground? -ostrich.
BRAND: An ostrich.
Mr. ARMEY: Because, look, the anger at the Democrat Party, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and the left-wing initiatives that they've taken on health care, the environment, banking and finance, the automobile takeover, the fact of the matter is we have seen the conservatives, small government activists change the face of Florida Senate election. They clearly delivered a victory in New Jersey in the governor's race.
So I mean, I don't see this as something unique and separate and different than what is going on across the country in races.
BRAND: Well, speaking of races across the country, where will you focus next? Where will the Tea Party movement focus next?
Mr. ARMEY: Well, obviously, you know, the grassroots activist always runs at the sound of the guns. When the guns were in upstate New York, we went up there. When they were in Florida, we got down there for the Rubio race.
What we're seeing now, as things are breaking so badly for the Democrats that they so mean-spiritedly, stubbornly refuse to listen to American people, that there are going to be more opportunities for more exciting races for small government conservative candidates to win and take a liberal government-controlled Democrat out of office. We're going to be spreading our troops quite thin. As wide as they are, as large and as many as they are, they're going to be kept busy in races clear across the country.
BRAND: Dick Armey, thank you very much.
Mr. ARMEY: Thank you, ma'am.
BRAND: That's former Republican Congressman Dick Armey. He runs the lobbying group FreedomWorks, which is affiliated with the Tea Party movement.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And now, the view from the White House. We're joined by David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Obama.
Mr. Axelrod, welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID AXELROD (Senior Adviser to President Barack Obama): Thanks, Melissa. Good to be with you.
BLOCK: We just heard Republican Dick Armey saying that this vote in Massachusetts reflects widespread anger about Democratic policies, on everything from health care, to the environment, to banking, to the auto bailout. Do you see it that way? Does this result in Massachusetts represent a rejection of President Obama's policies one year in?
Mr. AXELROD: Well, Senator Brown said that it was not a referendum on the president. There was a Republican poll that was taken on Election Day in which the vast majority of people said they were not voting to register a protest against the president.
But I do think that there's a great deal of anger out there about the state of the economy in which middle-class people are working harder and harder - if they haven't lost their jobs - just to hold their place. Wages have been flat for a decade. You know, health care costs have doubled; premiums have doubled over the decade. College costs have gone up. Retirement security has eroded. Home values have plummeted.
And so, there's a lot to be angry about. And then they look to Washington and then they see the power of special interests in this town. And these are the same forces that really propelled Barack Obama in office in 2008. So we're well aware of them. This is why we're here. But as the party in power, you bear some of the responsibility for this. Or in people's eyes, you become the fulcrum and we understand that. We understand that as well.
BLOCK: So going along with that message of anger, isn't part of the message also, you haven't fixed things, President Obama? We voted for change and we're not seeing it.
Mr. AXELROD: Yup, that is. There's no question about it. And, you know, a year ago, Melissa, when I heard the economic forecast, I said to the president, you know, we've got some great numbers now, but they're not going to be so great a year from now because we're going to have to govern through the worst economy since the Great Depression, and that's going to be difficult. We're going to have to do some things to try and turn the economy around that are going to be politically difficult. And, indeed, we did.
We had a recovery package that was absolutely essential. And most economists agree it had a lot to do with breaking the back of this recession and the momentum of this recession. And - but it was difficult to do. We had to stabilize the financial industry, and that was a distasteful thing. We had to help the auto industry, because to not do that would have meant hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the middle of a deep recession.
None of these things were politically popular. The president knew that when he did them, but he did the responsible thing. And we also knew that there'd be people on the other side who would try and take advantage of that. So, you know - and then we had a long health care debate that is important to the economic well-being of every middle-class person. But the process has not been very satisfying for anybody.
BLOCK: Let's talk about the future of the health care bill. The president told ABC that Congress should coalesce around core elements of the bill. Doesn't that mean you're scaling back your expectations for what comes out of Congress?
Mr. AXELROD: No. That we have a bill that provides enormous security that's needed for people around the country, people who have insurance and people who don't. The minute the president signs this bill, people with pre-existing conditions will have the ability to get coverage they weren't able to get before.
BLOCK: But you won't have the 60 votes you would need for the bill as it stands now?
Mr. AXELROD: Well, there are a variety of possibilities. The Senate has passed a bill. The House has passed a bill. Certainly, they could embrace each other's bills. So, you know, that is a - there are a number of options that are being discussed. But in no way are we going to give up our fight to reign in the worst excesses of the insurance industry, to hold down the costs that are crushing people across this country, to give pre-existing - people with pre-existing conditions a chance to get insurance, to lengthen the life of Medicare and give people who are on Medicare greater prescription protection.
We're not going to give up that fight because this is essential to the economic stability of middle-class families.
BLOCK: But you are hearing now from Democrats in Congress, saying, you know, slow down. Anthony Weiner is saying the Democratic leadership is whistling past the graveyard, if you think that Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts doesn't mean that you have to rethink the health care plan.
Mr. AXELROD: Well, you know, here's my interpretation of this as someone who's been around politics for a long time. If we walk away from this, all that's going to be remaining is the negative caricature that the insurance industry, with their advertising and their allies in the Republican Party, have placed on it. And what - and that caricature is wildly inconsistent with what is actually in the bill.
And if you look at all of the research, what you see is that when you tell people what's actually in the bill, they're very enthusiastic about it. But they'll never know those benefits and will not be able to campaign on them if we don't pass this bill.
The larger point, of course, is we're here to make a difference for people, to push back on the special interest to do what will enhance people's economic security. This is an essential part of this, so we ought to fulfill that.
BLOCK: David Axelrod, thank you.
Mr. AXELROD: All right. Nice to be with you.
BLOCK: David Axelrod is senior adviser to President Obama.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans have donated more than $275 million to Haiti for earthquake relief.
But as NPR's Pam Fessler reports, it's possible that money may not end up where it should.
PAM FESSLER: President Obama visited American Red Cross offices in Washington Monday and noted that the group had already raised an unprecedented $21 million through a highly publicized text messaging campaign. As photographers' cameras clicked nearby, the president said it was a testimony to American generosity.
President BARACK OBAMA: This is - it's also a testimony, though, to the confidence people have in the Red Cross and ability of using that money wisely, so...
FESSLER: And using the money wisely is something donors need to think about, say those who monitor charitable giving. Ken Berger is president and CEO of the online service Charity Navigator, which analyzes and rates nonprofits.
Mr. KEN BERGER (President & CEO, Charity Navigator): You need to use your head as well as your heart. Your heart motivates you, oftentimes to give in these terrible situations like this, but you've got to use your head so that you don't get ripped off.
FESSLER: His advice? Give only to charities with a proven track record and those willing to show you exactly what they're doing with the money.
Mr. BERGER: Go to their Web site. You have a clear picture of how the money's being used. You want open organizations that are responsive to donors, as well as to the people that they serve.
FESSLER: He recommends that donors give to two kinds of groups: those with strong ties to Haiti, that know the country's needs and have Haitians on staff; and those larger nonprofits with the know-how and infrastructure to carry out a major relief effort, organizations such as the American Red Cross.
But even the Red Cross comes with baggage. It was widely criticized for its handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina and its diversion of donations for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to other programs. Spokesman Roger Lowe says those problems are now fixed.
Mr. ROGER LOWE (Spokesman, American Red Cross): When somebody makes a donation to us, the first thing we do is to check the donor's intent. If the donor says that they want this to go to Haiti, that's where it goes. Before any funds are spent, we establish financial controls and an audit trail so that we can track every single dollar as it moves through the system.
FESSLER: He says his bigger concern for donors is charitable scams. He's heard there are people in the streets collecting money they say is for the Red Cross.
Mr. LOWE: I hope they are. We'd be grateful if they are, and God love them if they are, but it's I'm not sure that I personally would hand some money to somebody standing on a street corner, saying they're collecting for the Red Cross.
FESSLER: Most experts recommend only giving to a charity directly or through a known middleman. Nonprofits know that what happens to donors' funds is key to maintaining the public's trust. Sam Worthington is president and CEO of InterAction, a coalition of the biggest humanitarian aid groups now in Haiti. He says every coalition member has to be certified annually to make sure they meet certain standards.
Mr. SAM WORTHINGTON (President & CEO, InterAction): It ensures that they have the systems in place to manage resources, the people and the program capacity to engage in a disaster like this one.
FESSLER: And that's important, he says, because these groups will be working in Haiti well after the giving public has stopped paying so much attention.
Pam Fessler, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand. Well, log on for free while you can. The New York Times announced today that beginning next year, it will start charging readers for its Web content.
After a long, internal debate, the Times management came up with a meter system. After a number of free visits, a reader will be charged for certain articles. And here to talk about whether this is a good idea, and whether it will save the newspaper business, is Jay Rosen. He's a journalism professor at NYU.
Welcome to the program.
Professor JAY ROSEN (Journalism, New York University): Thank you very much.
BRAND: Well, everyone in the media has been trying to figure out how to make money off the Web, and is this the savior?
Mr. ROSEN: There's really no way to tell yet. It's a gamble by the New York Times. I don't think they know if it's going to work. And we still have a lot of details missing from their plan, so we're just going to have to see what happens.
BRAND: Although there is some history with the New York Times because several years ago, it tried to implement what they call Times Select, where they asked people to pay to read certain columnists, and then they abandoned it, I guess, because it wasn't working.
Mr. ROSEN: Well, it's not exactly true that they abandoned it because it wasn't working. They actually met their targets. They got quite a few people to sign up, and they were earning revenues off Times Select.
However, what they discovered was that the traffic coming from search, mainly from Google to the New York Times, was so strong that they could probably make more money by opening the gates and making themselves very amenable to Google.
BRAND: So now, do they want to give up this accessibility for Google by charging for the content?
Mr. ROSEN: Well, this is the reason they have gone to what's called a metered system where after a certain number of visits, you have to pay. But by having this cushion, they hope to contain the damage and get as many users from Google as possible, and only charge the people who are very heavy users of the site. That's the reason for this metered system.
BRAND: But the Web is a wild and woolly place, and I imagine there are all sorts of ways to get around this.
Mr. ROSEN: There's the threat of people posting content from the Times at blogs and other sites, without authorization. But even more troubling is the possibility that people will just go elsewhere - to, for example, The Guardian's site, which the editor there just yesterday said they plan to remain free; or the Washington Post, which has said it doesn't have plans to charge for content; or indeed, npr.org.
And so these are some of the variables that the Times executives were juggling. And part of the judgment they probably made is that we have authoritative reporting in journalism and to some degree, they are gambling on that itself.
BRAND: That people will be willing to fork over money for this unique content.
Mr. ROSEN: Yes. But there's another issue here, which is that the people who work for the New York Times believe that their journalism should be addressed to the public at large. And one of the things that happens when you start to charge is, you're in effect cutting yourself off from the widest possible public your journalism can reach. And if the real product of the New York Times is its influence, then this is a very risky move with the very heart and soul of the newspaper, which is its ability to affect and influence public conversation.
BRAND: But not to sound too flip about it, those journalists, when faced with a choice of being accessible to the world or having a job, would probably choose the latter.
Mr. ROSEN: Well, that is right. And it is a difficult choice, and that's one reason they agonized about it for more than a year and still haven't really figured out the details.
BRAND: Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and writes the PressThink blog.
Jay Rosen, thank you very much.
Mr. ROSEN: My pleasure.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
We begin this hour with the new reality in national politics. Last night's upset in the Massachusetts Senate race has Republicans rejoicing and Democrats scrambling.
BLOCK: Republican Scott Brown's victory could spell trouble for Democrats in November's midterm elections, as we'll hear in a few minutes. And it has forced the president to recalibrate his agenda on health care.
NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson has that story.
MARA LIASSON: Democrats have a lot of decisions to make about how and whether they push forward with health care legislation. But first, says Scott Brown's pollster Neil Newhouse, they have to absorb the psychological impact of the Massachusetts election. It's a blow that's much more than a wakeup call for Democrats.
Mr. NEIL NEWHOUSE (Pollster): All these Senators who looked at that result yesterday and said, oh my gosh, if it can happen in Massachusetts, which is a tremendously Democratic state, what about me? What about my state? What's gonna happen to me? I mean, I think you're looking at even more retirements, fundraising on the Republican side going through the roof. I mean, this is adding fuel to the fire and it's just going to generate more heat, more enthusiasm for Republicans.
BLOCK: In Boston today, Scott Brown said he rode the same angry anti-incumbent wave that elected Barack Obama last year, only this time the voters' frustration was aimed at the Democrats. Brown didn't take any partisan shots at the president's health care plan. Instead, he said, voters were disgusted by the ugly sausage-making of the legislative process - a process they expected president Obama to change, as he had promised.
Senator SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): People are tired of the business as usual. What does that mean? That means the behind-the-scenes deals, the Nebraska, you know, subsidizing a Medicaid forever. Things like that have just - just drive people crazy. They want to make sure that their elected officials are doing things in a transparent manner.
The main thing that they want is good government back and to be proud of the process. And I think they sent a very, very powerful message that business as usual is not going to be the way we do it.
BLOCK: In an interview with ABC News today, President Obama agreed with some of Brown's analysis.
President BARACK OBAMA: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they're frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years.
BLOCK: But on the Senate floor in Washington, a happy Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell had a much more ideological interpretation of the Massachusetts upset.
Senator Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky; Senate Minority Leader): The American people have made it abundantly clear that they're more interested in shrinking unemployment than expanding government. They're tired of bailouts. They're tired of government spending more than ever at a time when most people are spending less. And they don't want the government taking over health care.
BLOCK: Although the White House and Democratic leaders are considering having the House simply accept the Senate version of health care, one way to pass a bill quickly, a handful of Democrats - liberals and moderates - say it's time to go back to the drawing board. Martin Frost is a former member of the House Democratic leadership.
Mr. MARTIN FROST (Former Congressman): The Democratic Party has got to figure out what's realistic now. The agenda was a little overambitious trying to do too many things at once. And I think what probably has to happen on health care is that they narrow this down to what's doable. I think it would be very difficult for the House just to take the Senate bill and pass it and then say: We'll fix it later.
I think what's more likely is that if they really want to pass something, that they scale this back to basic insurance reform and call the Republicans' bluff. See if the Republicans will vote for anything.
BLOCK: In the ABC interview today, President Obama seemed to endorse that approach. He told Democrats not to jam a new health care overhaul through the Senate. He urged them instead to focus on popular elements that people agree on. He described those core elements as health insurance reform, cost containment and health for small businesses - a signal that the president is rethinking his strategy for passing his number one domestic priority.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
That wind that blew through Massachusetts and swept a Republican to victory is causing shivers among congressional Democrats looking ahead to midterm elections. The Democrats have now lost their filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate. What other losses might be in store?
We've asked Amy Walter to come in and read some political tea leaves for us. She's editor-in-chief of The Hotline, a daily political news service. Amy, welcome back.
Ms. AMY WALTER (Editor-in-Chief, The Hotline): Thank you.
BLOCK: When Scott Brown is seated, the Democrats will have a 59 to 41 majority in the Senate. Elections are still 10 months away. A lot can change, but if you had to guess, would you imagine that majority would slip, would erode still further?
Ms. WALTER: It's absolutely going to slip. The question now is just how far. Earlier this year we were thinking that Democrats were gonna be looking at a 60-plus majority. Now we have to really ratchet that back maybe even down to the low 50s. When you look at the most competitive races out there, in the Senate, almost all of them are held by Democrats. And so the idea now after Massachusetts that anything could be in play is now what's percolating around Washington.
In fact, there were reports today that Mike Pence, congressman from Indiana, pretty high profile and leadership on the Republican side is taking a look at and is being recruited in Indiana to run for United States Senate against Evan Bayh. Now, Evan Bayh's name hasn't been on anybody's target list for a long time. He has $12 million in the bank. He's pretty popular back home. Obviously he was a potential Democratic candidate for president, on the shortlist for vice president, but it's Indiana in a midterm election year. That could be a race that gets put into play and now suddenly we could be looking at Democrats defending 10 or more competitive seats and having a tough time picking up any of the Republican ones.
BLOCK: You would say, though, that Democrats would retain control of the Senate?
Ms. WALTER: At this point they still are favored to retain control of the Senate. You know, to lose the number of seats they need to lose, you know, would mean that not only would Republicans need to run the table, but Democrats do have some opportunities to pick up seats. There's an open seat in Missouri, in Ohio and in New Hampshire. Obviously New Hampshire and Ohio were strong states for President Obama, but Democrats in a bad year could lose those two.
BLOCK: Let's turn to the House side. Do you think we're going to see a number of Democrats looking at the results for Massachusetts saying, you know, I'm not going to run again - my time's up?
Ms. WALTER: Yeah, thanks, this was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I, in fact, I've been talking to Democrats before this election saying, when are we going to know how many more retirements are going to happen? And one said to me: Why don't you call me after the Massachusetts election?
The expectation, of course, is that there will be more retirements, especially from some longtime members who sit in conservative districts, folks who say, I've been here for a while. I've done what I needed to do. The prospect of going through a tough election and losing is not all that appealing to me. The question is: How many of those folks go and how many can Democrats persuade to stay for just one more term? That is a very tough task even for the best recruiters.
BLOCK: What would it take to flip control of the House?
Ms. WALTER: The Democrats would need to lose 41 seats and that seems like such a huge number, but remember in 1994, the last sort of big wave midterm election, Democrats lost 54 seats in the House. The problem with being in the majority right now for Democrats is not only do they control everything, so they get all the blame, but they've won so many seats over the course of 2006 and 2008 that they have a lot of vulnerabilities.
There are a lot of seats that they sit in today in the House that went for President Bush or went for John McCain in the last presidential election that are Republican by nature that have not performed like Republican districts. Many of them have never been in a situation like they're going to be in in 2010, in a bad political environment, a bad economic environment and with their own party in the White House. It's a very different scenario than many of them have ever had to face.
BLOCK: Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of The Hotline. Amy, thanks very much.
Ms. WALTER: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And from California, I'm Madeleine Brand.
One day after his upset win, Senator-elect Scott Brown is coming to Washington from Massachusetts. The Republican is asking the Senate to seat him as soon as possible, even before his election results are certified. He is a relatively unknown politician.
NPR's Tovia Smith has more on him and Scott Brown's plans from Washington.
TOVIA SMITH: Yesterday, Scott Brown was one of just five marginalized Republicans in the Massachusetts State Senate on a somewhat quixotic quest for the national stage. Today, he's not only on that stage, but he's got a starring role as GOP vote number 41 who could derail the president of the United States from advancing any of his agenda, and he may not stop there.
Unidentified Man: Do you think you're presidential timber?
SMITH: That was one of the questions Brown got today from a slew of national reporters in Boston.
Senator-elect SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): Listen, I don't want to be disrespectful, but I haven't even been down to Washington yet.
SMITH: Brown repeatedly made a point today of trying to step away from politics to focus on governance. He struck a much more tempered tone, dropping his hoarse campaign promises to be the 41st vote against the president's plan to overhaul health care and underscoring instead how he voted for a health care mandate in Massachusetts and how not all of the president's plan is bad.
Sen.-elect BROWN: I think that, first of all, just so we're past campaign mode, I think it's important for everyone to get some form of health care. And to just be the 41st senator and bring it back to the drawing board, there were some very good things, as you just pointed out, in the national plan that's being proposed.
SMITH: Brown also struck a conciliatory tone, promising that in D.C. he would represent the Independents who propelled him to victory and would work across the aisle as he's had to do in Massachusetts.
Sen.-elect BROWN: Maybe there's a new breed of Republican coming to Washington. You know, I've always been that way. I always - I mean, you remember, I supported clean elections. I'm a self-imposed term limits person. I believe very, very strongly that we are there to serve the people.
SMITH: The fact that he's somewhat hard to label may have worked in Brown's favor at the polls. He's a charismatic and polished candidate with a wife who's a TV reporter and a daughter who was on "American Idol." But his campaign is an earnest, straight-talking everyman in a pickup truck. He's a former model who once posed nude for Cosmopolitan, but talks more about growing up in a broken home with a mom on welfare.
He's against gay marriage. He stands with business and gun owners, but he supports abortion rights, to an extent, and earns high marks from environmentalists.
Boston University Professor Tom Whalen says Brown is a kind of pragmatist who continues to mean different things to different voters.
Professor TOM WHALEN (Social Sciences, Boston University): I think that's part of his appeal. I mean, people look at him and see who they want to see. And, you know, that puts him more in line with President Obama, I think.
SMITH: It's one reason some experts caution against looking at Brown's victory as a referendum on the president or his plans for health care.
Mr. SCOTT RASMUSSEN (President, Rasmussen Reports): The reality is much more complex than that.
SMITH: Scott Rasmussen polled 1,000 voters last night and he says Brown's win has as much to do with a host of other things, from the economy, to national security, to his opponent's shortcomings.
Mr. RASMUSSEN: It's absolutely an overstatement to say that it's all health care or all Obama. They were contributing factors. I think it's more of a perfect storm.
SMITH: Republican candidates around the country are less eager to paint this as simply a Massachusetts phenomenon. They would rather take a page from Brown's victory playbook and use it for themselves as they plot their own races in November.
Tovia Smith, NPR News, Boston.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This week we've been checking in with people across the country, people we met during the presidential Campaign, to hear their thoughts on President Obama's first year in office.
NPR's Linda Wertheimer traveled to Missouri to reconnect with folks she encountered when Mr. Obama won a close primary race there.
LINDA WERTHEIMER: Back in 2008, we went to a primary night party at the home of Ben and Susie Uchitelle in the community of Clayton, a beautiful close-in suburb of St. Louis with nice old homes and huge old trees. And last night we were there again to see what may have changed.
Betty Van Uum is a longtime activist on women's issues. She says her biggest disappointment is that health care legislation didn't move faster.
Ms. BETTY VAN UUM (Activist): We have enormous majorities. We had an enormous mandate to get that done and by now it should've been done.
WERTHEIMER: Raz Newman(ph), who's a scientist, hoped that the debate on health care might reflect the change she thought President Obama would bring to Washington. But instead she saw the same old horse trading.
Ms. RAZ NEWMAN (Scientist): The health care issue was a litmus test at this point for change. And the way it was handled and the almost bribing that went on, I saw that as the same old thing. I saw no change in the way that that was handled at all.
WERTHEIMER: When we talked to Raz Newman on primary night she told us she voted for Hillary Clinton because she had more experience. And Raz Newman remembered that last night.
Ms. NEWMAN: I'm feeling that some of the worry I had about his experience may be coming to fruition and hopefully things will change as he learns more.
WERTHEIMER: Our hostess, Susan Uchitelle, had another campaign promise in mind. She works on charter schools. She thought the president would already have done something about education. But then, we're a very impatient country, Ms. Uchitelle added.
Sandy MacLean(ph) is another neighbor. He's a Republican. And he is surprisingly satisfied with the president so far.
Mr. SANDY MACLEAN: I don't take campaign promises very seriously. I think I agree with Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard when he said that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I was particularly pleased with the president's stand on the (unintelligible) defense and sending troops over. I was afraid he was going to pull them all out and that would've been a disaster, in my estimation.
WERTHEIMER: Sanford Newman(ph) is a lawyer, married to Raz who spoke earlier. He's also okay with the president's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, even if it was not what Newman wanted or expected because he believes the president made a thoughtful decision.
Mr. SANFORD NEWMAN (Lawyer): I was pleased at the amount of time he took to deliberate over these decisions. And I respect someone who's elected to office, and he has made some very specific promises. And yet, he took the time, and if he's decided that troops should stay longer, I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and that doesn't disappoint me.
WERTHEIMER: But several people clearly hoped and believed the president would have the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan right now. And they are very disappointed.
Harriet Baron is an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ms. HARRIET BARON (Administrator, Washington University): I don't think it's any clearer to us what our goals are, what our limits are. And I think we're losing sight of what we stand for in this fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
WERTHEIMER: Did he do what you thought he would do about those two areas of conflict?
Ms. BARON: He did what I feared he would do.
WERTHEIMER: Foreign policy is the biggest disappointment for Vivian Eveloff, especially the two wars. She runs a program at the University of Missouri that works with women candidates. It seemed so clear, she says, that he would not do what he's doing.
Ms. VIVIAN EVELOFF (Director, Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life, University of Missouri): I think that people who voted for Obama, many of them, which would include me - did it in large part because we really wanted a change in our foreign policy. And I think we have not gotten the change we had hoped for. And I think the economic effects of continuing the war while trying to do all this domestic policy is really very, very difficult. You can't do, really, guns and butter.
WERTHEIMER: All that said, the Obama voters in the room all said that they'd still vote the same way, that they hoped the president will be successful. Several blamed Congress for getting in the way. And they believe that President Obama still represents change, certainly to the outside world, and they're hoping in Washington.
Linda Wertheimer, NPR News, Clayton, Missouri.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Here in L.A. the city is on the verge of adopting sweeping new restrictions on medical marijuana clinics. The city council laid the groundwork yesterday. It gave tentative approval to an ordinance that could put hundreds of pot clinics out of business.
NPR's Mandalit Del Barco has been covering this story. She's here now with the details. And the final vote, Mandalit, is next week, right? But it's really, for all intents and purposes, a done deal, right?
MANDALIT DEL BARCO: That is what it looks like. You know, it's been almost five years since L.A. City Council began talking about regulating the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city. And they've been debating the wording of the new rule for two and half years.
But, you know, Madeleine, Californians voted to allow the compassionate use of medical marijuana back in 1996. And anyone with a doctor's recommendation, not a prescription, but a written recommendation, can use pot in the state. And they're supposed to either grow it themselves or get it from dispensaries, which are supposed to be not-for-profit collectives.
But there's concern that many of them are making a profit. And three years ago, L.A. put a moratorium on dispensaries after 186 of them registered with the city. But even despite that ban, hundreds of pot dispensaries have opened and now you see them everywhere in L.A. In some neighborhoods there are more cannabis clubs than Starbucks.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: Okay. So, they're putting in some new restrictions and what do they look like?
DEL BARCO: Well, the L.A. ordinance puts a cap on the number of dispensaries at 70. But there are some that registered with the city a few years ago and are still in business, and they'd be allowed to continue operating. So there would be far more than 70. All the others, though, would have to close down.
And under the new city rules, dispensaries would have to be located at least 1,000 feet away from places where children congregate, like schools and parks and libraries, and there'd be a buffer zone around hospitals, churches, temples, rehabilitation centers. And since they're supposed to be not-for-profit collectives, the dispensaries would be audited every year. They'd have to close down by 8 p.m. and no one would be able to consume medical marijuana on the premises. And because they're often magnets for thieves, they would have extra security. They say this ordinance would be one of the toughest in the state.
BRAND: And, Mandalit, all these restrictions that you mentioned, I've heard that, in effect, a lot of these dispensaries say, well, we won't be able to operate in the city at all. So, in effect, we're going to have to shut down. Even though we're not being banned explicitly, we won't be able to operate.
DEL BARCO: Yeah. They say there might be almost no place left for these legitimate dispensaries, just maybe a few places in the industrial areas of the city. You know, there aren't that many spots more than 1,000 feet from these schools or parks or libraries. And some people are afraid that the city council's law will just create a huge black market and a lot more underground drug dealers.
BRAND: And what is the likelihood that there will be a legal challenge once this law is passed next week?
DEL BARCO: Well, Madeleine, the city did try to put a lid on medicinal pot before, only to be slapped down in court. So this time the council tried to be cautious about the wording of any new limits. But already dispensary operators are planning to challenge this new ordinance with a lawsuit or even a referendum that would force the city council to put it before the voters.
And because of the city's tight budget, it could be very difficult to pay for auditors and for police to actually enforce the new rules. But regardless of any of these restrictions, the county's DA does plan to go after dispensaries that are selling over the counter, those that are illegal.
BRAND: Thanks, Mandalit.
DEL BARCO: Thank you, Madeleine.
BRAND: That's NPR's Mandalit del Barco reporting on L.A.'s impending crackdown on medical marijuana clinics. And she joined us here at NPR West.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Two best-selling authors died in the past several days, and both of them are associated with one particular city: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Erich Segal was an accomplished classics scholar, but he's best known for the tearjerker "Love Story." And mystery writer Robert Parker was the man behind the Spenser series.
Commentator Mo Lotman reflects on their legacies, and the city that inspired their most popular works.
MO LOTMAN: If you live in or around Cambridge, Massachusetts, the news this week has marked the end of an era. And no, I'm not talking about the Scott Brown Senate victory. Two famous writers with local connections have passed away. One penned the novel and screenplay "Love Story," perhaps the most famous movie ever set here. The other lived in Harvard Square and put his most celebrated character in the alleys and bars of the neighborhood.
On the surface, it would seem the two men have little in common. OK, maybe it's not just on the surface. Erich Segal was a rabbi's son from Brooklyn who eventually moved to England. Robert Parker was born and bred in Massachusetts, served in Korea, and lived on Ash Street in Cambridge until his death.
Segal wrote one enormously successful work, and then largely faded from the spotlight. Parker churned out best-seller after best-seller, some of which were turned into television shows and films. Parker was a gruff but unpretentious family man who named a succession of dogs Pearl and hated academics. Segal was fluent in several languages and a professor at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Oxford.
To get an idea for the difference, just look at who played the leading men in the screen adaptations of their work. With Parker, it's Robert Urich, Tom Selleck and Ed Harris. With Segal, it's Ryan O'Neal.
But Cambridge is a funny place. Like "Love Story's" Oliver Barrett IV and Jenny Cavilleri, it's a marriage between Brahmin and working class - a mix that, like Jenny's owl glasses, shouldn't work, but does.
Harvard has turned out presidents, princes, senators and Supreme Court justices. But it also hired Timothy Leary. A whole generation of psychedelic wanderers have hung out in Harvard Square, as did the founders of Microsoft.
The Boston Bruins drank at the Oxford Grille, where bar brawls would spill out into the street every weekend. But 50 feet away, earnest guitarists sang to hushed audiences in the liquor-free folk club Passim. Jugglers hammed it up for summer strollers, while punks in studded collars lit up doobies on the subway plaza.
Even Parker's Spenser knew that brawn and street smarts was better leavened with a little sophistication. Sure, he was a tough detective and an ex-boxer, but he was also a gourmet who dated a psychologist.
Before he was famous, Robert Parker wrote manuals for Raytheon. A snippet of technical writing for a missile begins: To start, push to start button. Before he was famous, Segal wrote a 300-page essay on the comedy of Roman playwright Plautus.
SSomehow, both of these gentlemen represent Cambridge, Massachusetts, in all its contradictory glory. Here's hoping they're sharing a whiskey - or a lemon spritzer - in the great Harvard Square in the sky.
BLOCK: Commentator Mo Lotman, remembering the late writers Erich Segal and Robert Parker. Lotman is author of "Harvard Square: An Illustrated History Since 1950."
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The TV coverage of the disaster in Haiti has featured some people wearing two hats: reporters who are also doctors. And they're providing medical care on camera. As NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik reports, their dual role raises ethical questions.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Nancy Snyderman is a head and neck surgeon on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School, but she's far better known as a medical correspondent for NBC News. And in Haiti, she's having trouble separating her responsibilities.
Dr. NANCY SNYDERMAN (Head and Neck Surgeon, University of Pennsylvania Medical School; Medical Correspondent, NBC News): I didn't sleep at all the first night I was here, wrestling with just that. I'm usually very careful in the United States that when I'm in the hospital, my journalism hat is not on. And I'm very cognizant of the fact that here, the lines are terribly blurred.
(Soundbite of television program)
Dr. SNYDERMAN: With a broken arm and severe infection, we turn the dining room table you got it? One, two three, OK into an operating table to clean his wound.
FOLKENFLIK: NBC viewers saw Snyderman treat that Haitian man. And other doctor reporters, reporting from Haiti, have also provided emergency care, such as CNN's Sanjay Gupta and ABC's new senior medical editor, Richard Besser.
Besser is the former acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. One story for ABC's "Good Morning America" took an unexpectedly personal turn as Besser aided a very young, pregnant woman who was about to give birth in a camp.
(Soundbite of television program, "Good Morning America")
Dr. RICHARD BESSER (Senior Medical Editor, ABC News): We're trying desperately to find a hospital that might take her. She probably needs to have a Caesarian section because I don't think that this baby will come out on its own.
FOLKENFLIK: Besser says the reporting he's doing is important, but he can't abandon his training as a doctor.
Dr. BESSER: I think it's a false dichotomy to say you will either report on the issue and address a big public health issue, or provide care to this person. I think it was an extremely effective way to do both. But to tell you the truth, had it not been, I would have treated the woman and it just wouldn't have been part of the story.
FOLKENFLIK: The idea of a doctor treating a patient in need seems uncontroversial, yet some media critics and medical ethicists say TV doctors are putting themselves in the story at the expense of their patients and of even good medical practice.
Steven Miles is a doctor and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota. He calls much of the coverage problematic.
Dr. STEVEN MILES (Bioethicist, University of Minnesota): What disturbs me about the media doctors is that they are basically pulling telegenic people out of the queue and giving them exceptional resources.
FOLKENFLIK: Miles was also medical director of the American Refugee Committee, and he's overseen relief efforts in places like Cambodia and Banda Aceh. He says viewers are unaware of the distortions caused by the intervention of the doctor reporters.
Dr. MILES: We don't see the impact of that in terms of soaking up staff time, in terms of the people who are working on the ground, and also the diversion of resources to these patients who are selected for television portrayal.
FOLKENFLIK: But it's not unreasonable to expect reporters with medical training in Haiti to share insights and expertise, says Jonathan Wald. He's the former executive producer of "The NBC Nightly News." Wald says the rules change during crises of this magnitude. But he also warns of the risk of reporting in the first-person medical.
Mr. JONATHAN WALD (Former Executive Producer, "NBC Nightly News"): There's a fine line between a reporter showing what's happening in a given situation, and a reporter putting themselves in a story.
Dr. SNYDERMAN: And therein lies the struggle.
FOLKENFLIK: NBC's Nancy Snyderman.
Dr. SNYDERMAN: What is my job? Where do I make the biggest difference, or should I try to do both? Do I plug as many holes as I can at the moment and then do I scramble back to tell the stories to 6 million people? I think at the end of the day, I'm more comfortable with knowing I'm trying to do both as well as I can.
FOLKENFLIK: Bioethicist Steve Miles argues TV news doctors should simply volunteer with relief groups, and can make themselves available for interviews one hour a day.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block in Washington.
More than half a million inmates are sitting in U.S. jails right now, not necessarily because they're dangerous, not because a judge thinks they're flight risks, not even because they're guilty - they haven't even been tried yet. They're sitting in jail for a basic financial reason: They can't make bail, sometimes as little as $50. Some will wait behind bars for as along as a year before their cases may get to court.
BRAND: Most of these inmates are non-violent men and women charged with small crimes. This year alone, housing them will cost taxpayers $9 billion.
Today, we begin a three-part series examining bail in the U.S. NPR's Laura Sullivan has been exploring the powerful bail industry and she's found that it hurts defendants, their victims and taxpayers. Today's story looks at bail through the lens of one city: Lubbock, Texas. And it begins with one inmate Laura Sullivan first met this past June.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Leslie Chew grew up next to his father on the oil rigs of southern Texas. He still can't read or write. He's a handyman, often finding a place to sleep in the back of his old station wagon, but he gets by; that is, until one night last December when the station wagon got cold and he changed the course of his life.
Mr. LESLIE CHEW: Well, I stole some blankets to try to stay warm.
SULLIVAN: Where did you steal them from?
Mr. CHEW: And I stole them at United, inside of a grocery store. I walked in, got them and turned around and walked right back out of the store. And then he said, excuse me, sir. Come here. So when I turned around to come back, he said, planning to pay for these? I said, no, sir. I don't have no money. Then that's when he arrested me right then.
SULLIVAN: He's been here in a white concrete room at the Lubbock County jail ever since, for 185 days, more than six months altogether. He hasnt been convicted of his crime. He hasnt even been tried yet. He's here because he can't pay his bail. He doesnt have the $3,500 cash deposit he would need to leave with the court, nor does he have the $350 fee he would need to pay a bail bondsman to do it for him. If he did, he could stand up right now and walk out the door.
Is that a lot of money?
Mr. CHEW: To me it is. Like a million dollars to me.
SULLIVAN: When Leslie Chew headed down the grocery aisle and put four $30 blankets under his arm, he set in motion a process almost unique to the United States, a process that rewards the wealthy and punishes the poor, and NPR has found exists almost solely to protect the interests of a powerful bail bonding lobby.
The result is that people with money get out. They go back to their jobs, their families, pay their bills, fight their cases, and according to national studies, face far fewer consequences for their crimes. People without money stay in jail and are left to take whatever offer prosecutors feel like giving them.
Leslie Chew is still waiting for the offer. He's ready to plead guilty and accept his punishment, but court cases take time and prosecutors have only come to visit him only once. Through lunch today, it has cost $7,068 to house, clothe and feed Leslie Chew.
Mr. CHEW: Now, that's a lot of money. That's really too much money, really.
SULLIVAN: Nationwide, taxpayers spent $9 billion last year on people who have been granted bail but can't come up with the money to pay it. And each year that number increases as the nation's jails overflow with petty offenders counties have no room to house and budgets they can no longer afford.
Chew is sitting at a metal table in the middle of the room. The calluses on his hands are leaving marks on the painted steel. He says he's worried that his customers - the people who hire him to fix things, move things and pick things up - are turning to someone else. And he's worried about his car.
Mr. CHEW: It's a '87 station wagon Saturn. It's white with (unintelligible). I was going to get a regular car, but I figured a station wagon would be better, because if I ever get in a bind, I can lay down in the back seat, I have a place to sleep.
SULLIVAN: I can feel Chew's feet begin to tap under the table.
Mr. CHEW: If I lose that car, that's it. I don't know what I would do, 'cause that's how I get around.
SULLIVAN: Chew doesn't know it now, as he waits at this table waiting for lunch, but he's going to lose his customers. And he's going to lose his car. And across this barren room of orange jumpsuits, most of Chew's fellow inmates aren't going to fare much better.
Mr. DOUG CURRINGTON: This here is my bunk, right here.
SULLIVAN: Doug Currington, like Leslie Chew, tried to steal something: a television from Wal-Mart at 2:00 in the morning while high on meth. Currington's time in jail so far: 75 days. Total cost to taxpayers: $2,850. Standing between him and the door: 150 bucks.
Sitting in here, Currington has lost his apartment and his job. His truck has been repossessed, and he has no money to pay child support. And perhaps even more importantly, when it comes to getting punished, he doesn't have the opportunity to show the court he's sorry.
Mr. CURRINGTON: If I can get out, I can go to rehab, I can get my job back, I can work, and I can - when I go to court, my lawyer has something to work with: This guy has been clean. He's voluntarily went to rehab. He hasn't committed another crime. He's had the same job. He's paying his child support. They're not going to throw you back in jail.
SULLIVAN: Currington's gut feeling about his situation is backed up by national statistics: Defendants who make bail do less time. Several defense lawyers in Lubbock told me that if Currington could get out, go to rehab, pay Wal-Mart for their trouble, he would likely get probation. Prosecutors right now are offering him five years in prison.
Mr. CURRINGTON: It's stressful knowing that your life is in over $150, could be swayed one way or another. You know, it's a matter of being free in two hours, if I had $150, to being free in three or four years down the road when I make parole on a 10-year sentence.
SULLIVAN: As I make my way through the jail, everyone seems to have a story like this: A daunting offer from prosecutors, a bail so small most people would just need to get to the ATM. In here, most inmates seem to think they're just hours away from someone - a friend, a relative, maybe a boss - coming to bail them out, like 34-year-old barber Raymond Howard.
Mr. RAYMOND HOWARD: Right now, my family is working on coming up with the bond for me to get out. So I'm praying, you know, not too much longer. Not too much longer.
SULLIVAN: Howard needs $500. He's been here for more than four months so far after he forged a check against a company. Like Doug Currington and Leslie Chew, Raymond Howard has no history of violence and has always shown up for court. That's why he was granted bail. And yet the city of Lubbock has already spent $5,054 to house him.
Lawyers say Howard would likely get time served and probation if he was on the outside. But in here, he has little bargaining power and nothing to show for himself. Prosecutors are offering Howard a sentence so long he catches his breath as he said it.
Mr. HOWARD: They started with seven. Seven years.
SULLIVAN: With three young boys at home, it's almost more than he can bear.
Mr. HOWARD: I love my boys to death. You know, thats pretty much all I have, you know?
SULLIVAN: But despite all his hoping, Raymond Howard's family isn't coming with the $500. In fact, he isn't going to see his three young boys for a very long time.
I took a walk through the jail with Lubbock's Sheriff David Gutierrez, who has since been promoted to the state parole board. In here, it's easy to see the impact of housing all these men.
Sheriff DAVID GUTIERREZ (Lubbock, Texas): We're out of room, completely out of room. Yeah.
SULLIVAN: There are corridors where there used to be windows, cells where there used to be closets.
Sheriff GUTIERREZ: It really needs to be closed. I think you'll see that it's not quite adequate. When you try to bring in today's technology and standards into a 1931 building, it's rather challenging.
SULLIVAN: It wasn't always like this. Twenty years ago, nationally and in Lubbock, most defendants were released on their own recognizance, trusted to show back up. Now most defendants are given bail and most have to pay a bail bondsman to afford it. Considering that the vast majority of non-violent offenders released on their own recognizance have always shown up for trial, it seems like an easy solution for Lubbock. But that is not the solution Lubbock has chosen.
County officials have instead decided to spend $110 million on a brand-new mega jail. And Lubbock is not alone. At least 10 counties every year consider building new jails to ease a near-epidemic of jail overcrowding, according to industry experts.
There is one other solution. It's a county-funded program called pretrial release. Non-violent inmates are released under supervision, often with ankle bracelets, drug testing, or counseling. It costs only a couple dollars a day, compared with the national average of $60 a day in jail.
Lubbock's Chief Deputy Kelly Rowe says pretrial release is an important option and it operates out of the jail's intake area. So we head down there.
Chief Deputy KELLY ROWE (Lubbock, Texas): These are in-bound right here: the ones you sitting down, the ones on the phone, everything have just come in.
SULLIVAN: But when we walk over to the pretrial desk, it's empty - no papers, no pens.
Rowe leaves to inquire. In front of me, two dozen inmates are scattered near a line of pay phones. On the wall is a large sign with the number of every bail bond company in town, in bold letters. There's no phone number for the pretrial release office. Rowe returns and says no one staffed the desk for four, five months.
So where are they?
Chief Deputy�ROWE: It's like anything else we do. I mean, we've got, you know, a thousand functions that we oversee and watch and, you know, are doing and, you know, it stalled and the people responsible for that staff reassigned them or said, here, we want you doing this other job duty.
SULLIVAN: That's not exactly how Lubbock's pretrial officials describe what happened.
Mr.�STEVE HENDERSON: Follow the money. Usually whenever you've got questions of money, you follow the money and they'll help tell you the reasons why some things operate.
SULLIVAN: Steve Henderson runs Lubbock's parole and pretrial release program a block away from the jail, in a small, dark office. He says his shoestring budget can't afford an officer at the jail. He can't even afford to accept collect calls from inmates looking for pretrial help, and that, he says, is exactly how the bail bondsmen want it.
Mr.�HENDERSON: Yeah, they make money and they contribute their influence. I would do more if we had the funding to do more.
SULLIVAN: It's not that Lubbock's bondsmen even want Henderson's clients. Most of them can't afford a bondsman's fees. But Henderson says the bondsmen lobby to keep his program as small and unproductive as possible so no paying customers slip through, even if that means thousands of inmates like Raymond Howard and Leslie Chew wait in jail at taxpayer expense because they never find the money to become paying customers.
Mr.�HENDERSON: The bonding companies make a living. And so that's just the nature of Texas and Lubbock.
SULLIVAN: But it's not just Texas and Lubbock. A review of national lobbying efforts show pretrial release programs across the country are increasingly locked in a losing battle with bonding companies trying to either limit their programs or shut them down entirely.
As Henderson walks me back to his office's lobby, he stops and reads the sign above the door. It says: protecting our community by changing lives.
Mr.�HENDERSON: Jail doesn't do anybody any good. The only thing that jail is good for is to keep the dangerous people away from the people in the community who don't pose a risk.
SULLIVAN: But that is not who is in the nation's jails. Two-thirds of the people in the nation's jails are nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason: They can't afford their bail.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: That's NPR's Laura Sullivan. Her story continues in a moment. We'll hear about the business of bail bonds and how its close ties to politicians keep inmates in jail and push exorbitant costs onto taxpayers.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: This is NPR.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
BRAND: And I'm Madeleine Brand. We return now to our examination of bail and the devastating impact it can have on defendants and taxpayers. NPR's Laura Sullivan continues the story from Lubbock, Texas.
SULLIVAN: Across the street from the Lubbock jail is a row of one-storey offices with painted ads: Student discounts. Lubbock's number one bonds. Inside one of them, Lubbock Bail Bond, three young women work the phones and visitors.
Unidentified Woman #1: Hi, there. Can I help you?
SULLIVAN: This is one of the biggest bonding shops in town. Here's how it works: You're arrested. A judge gives you a $5,000 bail. You don't have $5,000, so you pay Lubbock Bail a nonrefundable fee, at least 10 percent, probably about $500.
Mr.�KEN HERZOG (Office Manager, Lubbock Bail Bond): We put up the total amount, they pay us a premium, and as long as they show up for court, well, we make money.
SULLIVAN: Office manager Ken Herzog says there's about 13 companies for a rather small population of 250,000. He says it's cutthroat: There's no place for even a modest pretrial release program.
Mr.�HERZOG: I've had a little run-in with the pretrial people over here because I was going to make a bond and they went back in and interviewed the person, and they hadn't been in jail very long.
I went and took my bond over there to the jail. They said, well, pretrial's getting them. I said: Oh, no, they ain't. So I went to the judge that signed the motion for pretrial and I told her what was up. And I said they have no business even talking to this person. They pulled their bond, and I got the person out of jail.
SULLIVAN: I ask him if he was talking about Steve Henderson from the pretrial release office.
Mr.�HERZOG: I told him, I says, I do this for a living. I says, you don't do that. And I says, I'll work with you any way I can, but you're not going to get my business. And he backed off.
SULLIVAN: It's unlikely he had much choice. Steve Henderson works for county officials, and county officials are elected. Herzog anticipates my question before I ask it.
Mr.�HERZOG: We take care of the ones who take care of us. We don't want to pay anybody off, per se. We just want to support the people that are trying to help our business.
SULLIVAN: According to Lubbock campaign records, bondsmen make frequent donations to elected officials. Indigent jail inmates do not. We'll talk more about this tomorrow.
The disparity, though, has served the bondsmen well. Here's an example. Bondsmen's main job: bring defendants back to court if they fail to show up. But it turns out most bondsmen aren't doing this job.
Statistically, most bail jumpers are not caught by bondsmen or their bounty hunters. They're caught by sheriff's deputies. Listen to Beni Hemmeline from the Lubbock's district attorney's office.
Ms.�BENI HEMMELINE (District Attorney's Office; Lubbock, Texas): More often than not, the defendants are rearrested on a warrant that's issued after they fail to appear.
SULLIVAN: If the runners are more often than not hauled back in by the sheriff or the police department, how has the bond company provided any service at all?
Ms.�HEMMELINE: Well...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms.�HEMMELINE: You know, it may be that either they can't find them. Or, you know, there's no way - they can't camp at their door 24 hours a day. So they do the best that they can, I think.
SULLIVAN: And here's the other thing. If a defendant does run, the bondsman is supposed to pay up, but that doesn't happen either. Hemmeline says Lubbock usually settles for a far lower amount. In fact, according to the county treasurer, bondsmen usually only pay five percent of the bond when a client runs.
Consider that math for a minute. The bondsmen charge clients at least 10 percent. But if the client runs, they only have to pay the county five.
Are you concerned that it's an awfully good deal for the bail bondsman and maybe not such a good deal for the county?
Ms.�HEMMELINE: We don't want to put the bond companies out of business. Bond companies serve an important purpose.
SULLIVAN: NPR found bondsmen getting similar breaks in other states. In California, bondsmen owe counties $150 million; in New Jersey, a quarter of a million; in Erie, Pennsylvania, for a time, officials simply stopped collecting money.
It is possible to skip the commercial bail bonding business entirely by just paying cash. But it takes hours longer to post a cash bail, and many people don't even know that it's an option, like Sandy Ramirez, who came to Lubbock Bail Bond for her 18-year-old son.
Did you think about paying the full 750 to the court yourself and getting it back when he shows up for trial? You never heard about that?
Ms.�SANDY RAMIREZ: No, I didn't know that. That's awful not to know that.
SULLIVAN: I walked back over to the jail to find out just how many others were like Sandy Ramirez. Deputy Jerry Dossey was manning the bail window.
Deputy JERRY DOSSEY (Lubbock, Texas): How often do they put up a cash bond? Maybe two or three a month.
SULLIVAN: Two or three a month in a place taking 60 commercial bail bonds a day.
Deputy DOSSEY: Sometimes it's hard to scrape up the cash money when you got a family to feed and everything else.
SULLIVAN: Plus, most judges aren't setting bail at what you can afford to pay. They're setting bail 10 times higher than what you can afford to pay a bail bondsman. In the back of the room, I see Leslie Chew, the inmate who needs $350 for stealing blankets. He's mopping the floor. He waves.
Later, I take a ride out to the new jail with Sheriff Gutierrez.
Sheriff Gutierrez: This whole area here is larger than our old jail.
SULLIVAN: The main corridor is almost three football fields long.
Do you ever wonder if you had more people that you could let out on low bail or if you could let people out more on their personal recognizance, then maybe you wouldn't need this facility?
Sheriff GUTIERREZ: The last thing I want to do is continue to keep building beds. I think there should be some opportunities to be able to release them and put them back into society, allow them to do - go to classes or go back to work and report for trial when the trial date comes.
SULLIVAN: But as we're about to leave, Sheriff Gutierrez, who has been elected in three landslide victories over the past 11 years, pauses. And he puts his finger on the risk for any politician to suggest such an alternative even if it means taxpayers save money, even if it means victims will get restitution, even if it means the only reason he can fill this new jail is because the people filling it are poor. He still says it.
Sheriff GUTIERREZ: I don't want you to think that I'm soft on crime. I'm not soft on crime.
SULLIVAN: And the result of that for defendants is devastating.
Six months later and two hours north of Lubbock, the barbed wired of Formby State Prison rises from the cotton fields. In an empty visiting room, Raymond Howard, one of the inmates from the Lubbock jail, is sitting next to the prison's Coke machine.
So here you are.
Mr.�HOWARD: Here I am.
SULLIVAN: His family was never able to come up with his $500 bail for forging a check. His wife and three sons were barely making it themselves.
Mr.�HOWARD: I have a three-year sentence. My heart kind of dropped.
SULLIVAN: If he had made bail, defense attorneys say he would likely have gotten probation. But inside, he had nothing to show he could be trusted with a chance.
Mr.�HOWARD: It was something that I did. You know, it was my mistake, it was my fault. But I didn't have the opportunity to show them. I apologize for what I've done but didn't had a chance. And this is where you wind up.
SULLIVAN: Leslie Chew, the inmate who stole the blankets, didn't walk out of the Lubbock jail until eight months after he arrived, costing taxpayers $9,120. Prosecutors eventually gave him time served for his theft. But there was a condition: He had to plead guilty to a felony.
When he left, he found out his station wagon had been repossessed. Without a place to sleep, he wound up at a homeless shelter. A few months ago, he almost got a job as a maintenance man, but when the owners saw a felony conviction, they pulled the offer.
In October, he walked back into the Lubbock jail and asked the night officer if he could have his old job back, cleaning the jail's floors. But those jobs are reserved for the half a million people in this country who can't make bail. Nobody's seen Leslie Chew since. Laura Sullivan, NPR News.
BRAND: And Laura's series on bail continues tomorrow on MORNING EDITION.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Now we're going to hear from two parts of the world where the U.S. is having a hard time getting what it wants. In a moment, the Middle East but first to Pakistan. Today, that country's army delivered a tough message to the Obama administration: no new military offensives against al-Qaida and the Taliban for at least six months. The Pakistani army says it does not want to be quote, "over-stretched." That announcement came as Defense Sectary Robert Gates went to Pakistan today to push the army to expand its military campaign.
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly is traveling with the Defense secretary.
MARY LOUISE KELLY: Even before his flight to Islamabad took off this morning, Secretary Gates was telling reporters onboard about the message he had planned for Pakistan's generals, go after all the militant groups lurking within your borders or risk the stability of the entire country.
Secretary ROBERT GATES (Department of Defense): What I hope to talk about with my interlocutors is this notion and the reality that you can't ignore one part of this cancer and pretend that they won't have some impact closer to home.
KELLY: I asked Gates, are Pakistanis open to that message?
Sec. GATES: Well, we'll see.
KELLY: And indeed within hours of our landing we did see. A Pakistani army spokesman challenged him, in particular the assertion that al-Qaida, the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban and other extremist groups are all linked. Speaking to reporters at the headquarters of Pakistan's army, Major General Athar Abbas said the situation is not so black and white. And he said the army here needs six months to a year to consolidate gains and regroup before it can launch any new operations. Secretary Gates seemed to anticipate this position. He told reporters essentially it's their country, they are in charge.
Sec. GATES: It's the Pakistanis that have their foot on the accelerator. Not us. And so we have to do this in a way that is comfortable for them and at a pace that they can accommodate and is tolerable for them.
KELLY: Secretary Gates does acknowledge the U.S. has a lot of work to do here to build up trust. To that end, he wrote an op-ed today for one of the country's major newspapers, titled, "Our Commitment to Pakistan." And he sat down later for back-to-back interviews with local TV.
(Soundbite of TV show)
Unidentified Woman: Good evening and welcome to Express's special edition of an interview with the secretary of Defense from the United States
KELLY: The tone was cordial, but the questions were tough and suspicious about U.S. motives in Pakistan. Gates said he'd take the concerns one by one.
Sec. GATES: We have no intention or desire to take over any of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. We have no desire to occupy any part of Pakistan or split up any part of Pakistan. We have no intent to split the Islamic world. And I can keep going because we're aware of these conspiracy theories as much as anyone, and they're all nonsense.
KELLY: Gates was not allowed to escape the local media without one last question, one high in many people's minds.
Unidentified Woman: Where do you believe Osama Bin Laden is?
Sec. GATES: I have no idea. If I knew where he was, he wouldn't be there any longer.
(Soundbite of laughter)
KELLY: Tomorrow, Secretary Gates continues his public diplomacy tour with an address to Pakistani military officers. Gates says he wants to forge quote, "an even closer," relationship with Pakistan. I just think it's useful, he says, to open a dialogue.
Mary Louise Kelly, NPR News, Islamabad.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Here in the U.S., interest in adopting Haitian orphans is soaring.
But as NPRs Jennifer Ludden reports, any large scale adoption effort will be slowed by legal and moral challenges.
JENNIFER LUDDEN: Kelly Rourke runs the Building Arizona Families adoption agency. She's gotten calls from across the country from those moved by Haitis tragedy wanting to become adopted parents. She's also fielded a good deal of misinformation.
Ms. KELLY ROURKE (Director, Building Arizona Families): I received a call from someone stating that they heard that there were orphans that had been flown over, and we could just go and, you know, choose one. And thats not how it works.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LUDDEN: Adoptions from Haiti normally take three years. But with a number of orphanages destroyed, babies and children going without food, sleeping in the open, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security bowed to pressure to help. A humanitarian parole will allow expedited visas for up to 900 orphans whose prospective parents have already been identified and whose adoption process was well underway. A first planeload of more than 50 such children arrived in Pittsburgh this week.
DHS spokesman Matt Chandler says for the untold number of other children left abandoned by the earthquake, it is important that they stay in Haiti.
Mr. MATT CHANDLER (Spokesman, Department of Homeland Security): We remain focused on family reunification and must be vigilant not to separate children from relatives in Haiti who are still alive or displaced or to unknowingly assist criminals who traffic in children in such desperate times.
LUDDEN: Chandler says private flights to rescue children are strongly discouraged. Tom DiFilipo heads the Joint Council on International Childrens Services, an advocacy group for orphans. He says there's good reason for such caution. With the best of intentions, DiFilipo says Western countries have moved too fast after other crises. Take Vietnamese children, adopted abroad after the war there.
Mr. TOM DIFILIPPO (President, Joint Council on International Childrens Services): As they grew up, they wanted to explore their history, where they came from, who their birth parents were. And we found out, unfortunately, that they had living relatives, same thing with the genocide in Rwanda.
LUDDEN: In Haiti, where many bodies are being dumped in mass graves, there will be no official list of the dead. DiFilippo says that will make it tough to verify who's been orphaned.
Mr. DIFILIPPO: What that will require then is for individuals to actually go into communities with pictures or just with conversation, to find out which parents have missing children. Go and meet the child, make sure that its actually the right child.
LUDDEN: DiFilippo says he can imagine that process taking up to a year. In Arizona, adoption agency director Kelly Rourke has no doubt that there will be a huge demand for international adoptions. Already before the earthquake, she says, Haitian orphanages were overflowing. And, in fact, many of the children in them had actually been given up by their parents.
Ms. ROURKE: Because they couldnt feed, or clothe, or take care of their child, and their child was going to die if they didnt do something drastic.
LUDDEN: Despite the crisis now, Rourke says a delay in new adoptions may be a good thing for prospective parents here as well.
Ms. ROURKE: It is a lifetime commitment and families who had not considered adopting before and did not have it on their heart, for them to all of a sudden make a decision, you know, in a 24-hour timeframe, is something that we want to be really cautious about.
LUDDEN: For families who are sure they want to adopt a Haitian child, Rourke says, all she can do for now is put their name on a waiting list.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Reopening dialog is the goal of the Obama administration's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell. He is back in the region trying to start up peace talks again between Israel and the Palestinians.
As NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Jerusalem, Mitchell is facing an uphill battle.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: On the eve of Mitchell's talks here, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said even if there's a peace deal with the Palestinians, Israel will insist on maintaining a presence on the border between the West Bank and Jordan to ensure there is no arms smuggling.
Prime Minister BENJAMIN NETANYAHU (Israel): And I believe that this requires in the case of a future settlement with the Palestinians this will require an Israeli presence on the eastern side of a prospective Palestinian state.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's the latest in a series of demands from both sides that have prevented a resumption of peace talks. The Palestinians say they won't sit down at the negotiating table without a full freeze in Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel has imposed a partial and temporary freeze in the West Bank only. At last night's news conference, Netanyahu said the Palestinians are the ones preventing the two sides from getting into what he called the negotiating tent.
Prime Minister NETANYAHU: The Palestinians have climbed up a tree. They are not in the tent. They are not in the entrance to the tent. They are climbing higher and higher in the tree. And they like it up there. People bring ladders to them we bring ladders to them the higher the ladder, the higher they climb. They should be told fair and square, simply and forthrightly, get into the tent and start negotiating for peace. We are ready to begin. I'm ready to begin.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Netanyahu's comments drew a sharp response from the Palestinians. Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told NPR that Netanyahu is setting his own conditions for the resumption of talks. He noted that the Israeli leader has called for the demilitarization of a future Palestinian state, said Jerusalem is off the table in any discussion and now wants control of the future state's border with Jordan.
Mr. SAEB EREKAT (Chief Negotiator): What they are doing, they are undermining the two-state solution. My option is the two-state solution. There is no other option than the two-state solution. Maybe they don't want me to have a state? I cannot live as their slave.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Erekat said he is asking Mitchell to push the Israelis into resuming negotiations where they left off with the previous government of Ehud Olmert.
Mr. EREKAT: I want to be encouraged by Sen. Mitchell succeeding in bringing us back to the negotiating table, and specifying that negotiations should resume where we left them in December 2008. We were so close.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Netanyahu government had said it doesn't want to be bound by the framework of previous negotiations. Palestinian sources say they have offered to accept a short-term moratorium on Israeli building in East Jerusalem in order to kick start the process. It's an offer that's been rebuffed by Netanyahu, who says Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel. What Senator Mitchell can accomplish on this trip remains to be seen, but one Palestinian negotiator says he is not expecting the visit to break any new ground. Despite the chilly relations between the two sides, Israeli President Shimon Peres told NPR he regularly speaks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the hopes of finding a way to revive the talks.
President SHIMON PERES (Israel): I think he would expect us to do a gesture that can demonstrate in the eyes of his own people what he calls a serious intention to build a Palestinian state. The prime minister feels he did it, so again we have to find bridges.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Israeli press reported this week that in one private conversation, Peres told the Palestinian leader that the continuing impasse could lead to violence. He reportedly warned Abbas that he is playing with fire.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Why use eHarmony or Match.com when there is your dad?
Senator-elect SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): So, I want to thank Ayla and Arianna for their help as well.
(Soundbite of applause)
BRAND: That's Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown during his acceptance speech Tuesday night. Ayla and Arianna are his daughters but that's not all they are.
(Soundbite of applause)
Sen. BROWN: And just in case anybody who is watching throughout the country, yes, they're both available.
(Soundbite of applause)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
To some, that was kind of sweet, one of those oh, Dad moments.
(Soundbite of crowd)
Sen. BROWN: Only kidding, only kidding. Arianna is definitely not available, but Ayla is.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: To others, it was awkward, and to conservative talk show host Glenn Beck it was suspect.
Mr. GLENN BECK (Host, "The Glenn Beck Program"): I want a chastity belt on this man.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BECK: I want his every move watched in Washington.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BECK: I don't trust this guy. No I'm just telling you, it's just a creepy moment.
BRAND: Ayla Brown, the available daughter, says there's nothing creepy about her dad's comments, though she did admit to being slightly embarrassed. The senator-elects older daughter is not new to the national stage. She is a former "American Idol" contestant and she plays basketball for Boston College.
BLOCK: She is also a little busy these days with her Facebook page. Ayla Brown says she received more than a 1,000 friend requests after her father's acceptance speech mostly from single men.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block in Washington, where today, the Supreme Court issued a major and long-awaited ruling on campaign finance. By a five-to-four vote, the court swept aside the century-old ban on corporate spending in elections. The decision potentially transforms the influence of big money in government.
BRAND: It leaves corporations free to spend unlimited amounts of shareholder money to influence elections. And it leaves unions free to do the same with their members' money.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Since 1907, the nation's campaigning finance laws have, for all practical purposes, banned corporate spending on candidate elections. In 1947, the ban was extended to unions and in 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold Law to plug loopholes that had emerged over the years. One provision banned broadcasting a candidate ad 30 days before an election if it was financed with corporate funds. The Supreme Court upheld the law seven years ago citing earlier rulings on corporate spending, but today a decidedly more conservative court with two new Bush appointees now in the mix reversed that ruling.
The decision came in a case brought by a conservative nonprofit group that made a film attacking Hillary Clinton and wanted to run it in a day shortly before the presidential primary campaign. The court agreed today that the film was an attack ad, not an issue ad. But it says that the group should have been able to run the ad as it wished. Writing for the five-justice majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged the longtime ban on corporate spending, but said it is censorship that is vast in its reach and that it should not have been upheld by the court previously.
When government seeks to use its full power to command where a person may get his or her information, said Kennedy, it uses censorship to control thought. The First Amendment right of free speech confirms the freedom to think for ourselves. Joining Kennedy in the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas. Thomas was the lone dissenter from the second part of Kennedy's opinion upholding laws that mandate disclosure of information about who pays for political ads.
Writing for the four dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens called the court's decision a radical departure from 100 years of law. Speaking from the bench in a halting voice, the 89-year-old Stevens accused the majority of ignoring thousands of pages of congressionally compiled evidence about the corruptive influence of corporate money in politics. And he blasted the majority for imposing what he called its own agenda on public policy while ignoring the branch of government charged with making such policy choices: Congress. Nothing in the current law, he insisted, bans corporations from expressing an opinion.
In this case, the nonprofit organization that wanted to use corporate money to fund its ad campaign already had a political action committee of regulated and legal donor funds that could have been used right up to Election Day to fund TV ads. Instead, it wanted to use corporate general treasury funds and for the first time today, the Supreme Court said it could. Joining Stevens in dissent were Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Reaction to the decision was fast and furious. President Obama, in a statement, condemned it as a victory for Wall Street, big banks, big oil, health insurance companies and other powerful interests.
But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell praised the court for quote "restoring the First Amendment rights of corporations and unions." Whether they loved it or hated it, campaign law experts called the decision an earthquake in First Amendment law. Here's Rick Hasen of Loyola Law School, who writes a blog on campaign law.
Professor RICK HASEN (Law, Loyola Law School): It is transformative. It's going to have major effects not only on federal elections, but in state and local elections, including judicial elections across the country. Much more money is going to flow into those elections. That raises concerns about both corruption and inequality.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, 24 states also have corporate spending bans that likely now will be struck down. Hasen, like many other critics of today's ruling, accused the court majority of substituting its judgment for that of Congress.
Prof. HASEN: This is an activist court. It reached out and grabbed this case and used it as a vehicle for transforming First Amendment law.
TOTENBERG: For campaign reformers, today's ruling was a doomsday. Fred Wertheimer has helped craft campaign reform legislation since Watergate.
Mr. FRED WERTHEIMER (Campaign Reform Advocate): This is a disaster for the American people. It's going to unleash unprecedented amounts of corporate influence seeking money on elections. It's going to create unprecedented opportunities for corporate corruption of government decisions. It is a change in the character of our elections and our democracy.
TOTENBERG: Wertheimer said that corporations may now spend $5 or $10 million, for example, to defeat just one or two members of Congress hostile to their interest, and that that will be enough to send a message to the others.
Mr. WERTHEIMER: Now what that does is create fear among all members and it would not take more than a couple of examples of corporations spending enormous amounts to defeat a member who voted wrong to affect the entire psyche of the congressional decision-making process.
TOTENBERG: Jan Baran, who has brought many of the cases challenging campaign regulations in recent decades, says campaign reformers are hyperventilating.
Mr. JAN BARAN (Election Lawyer): It is true that unions and corporations under this opinion will be able to pool their money or spend their money and it could affect an election, but the way it's going to affect election is that it's going to express certain opinions about candidates. And as the court noted today, that's what the First Amendment protects.
TOTENBERG: Brad Smith, another critic of campaign restrictions, agrees.
Mr. BRAD SMITH: At a federal level, I think there is no reason to believe that we're going to see the kind of outpouring that some of the more histrionic horror stories have set. We expect to see more speech. We think that's a good thing, but the idea that corporations are going to devote 10 percent of their profits or something like that to make independent political expenditures is just absurd.
TOTENBERG: So, in terms of the political landscape, who benefits from today's ruling? Most experts including those who applaud the ruling say Republicans will benefit most. Again, Jan Baran.
Mr. BARAN: The potential beneficiary here would be the party or the candidates who are perceived as being more beneficial to free enterprise and business.
TOTENBERG: And Loyola Law School's Rick Hasen.
Prof. HASEN: Republicans are going to benefit on the presidential level because I'm sure they were scratching their heads about how they could match the Obama $745 million campaign fundraising juggernaut that he had in 2008. So now they've got one way to try and equalize things.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
There was strong sentiment on Capitol Hill today, too, about the Supreme Court's ruling.
Senator CHARLES SCHUMER (Democrat, New York): At a time when people are feeling estranged from their democracy, this is going to make it so much the worse. This threatens the viability of our democracy.
BLOCK: That's Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York. While many members of Congress expressed deep concern, others hailed the court's decision as a victory.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook has a sampling of reaction from Capitol Hill.
ANDREA SEABROOK: An unlimited flow of money, an unlimited number of campaign ads anywhere in the country. That's what you'll see, says Senator Schumer, in the wake of today's Supreme Court decision.
Sen. SCHUMER: It's poisonous. It's poisonous to our democracy.
SEABROOK: The court did uphold the restriction prohibiting corporations and unions from making direct campaign contributions. But Schumer said Congress must pass new laws that try to restrain the gusher of cash that's sure to come. Democrats in both chambers, along with some Republicans like Arizona's John McCain, have pledged to come up with new ideas fast. For most Republicans though, today's decision was great news.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): I think the Supreme Court decisions today are a big win for the First Amendment and a step in the right direction.
SEABROOK: House Republican leader John Boehner. In his view, the Constitution's protection of free speech extends to campaign contributions. No organization business, union, whatever should be limited by the government, says Boehner. Instead, he wants groups to disclose every dollar they spend on campaigns.
Rep. BOEHNER: Let the American people decide how much money is enough. Sunshine really does work if you allow it to.
SEABROOK: Then again, this view of free speech gives corporations a giant megaphone, said New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt today. And that could easily reduce the average voter's voice to a squeak. For example, take the congressional district of Kentucky Democrat John Yarmuth. It has one television and radio market Louisville and all campaign ads air there, said Yarmuth.
Representative JOHN YARMUTH (Democrat, Kentucky): If a corporation decided to spend $5 or $10 million in my district the last two weeks of the election, they would buy up every spot that was available.
SEABROOK: Leaving no space for Yarmuth or any other candidate local or regional who wanted to run an ad. So any big company, Yarmuth said, could control any election there.
Representative YARMUTH: I mean, they just write a check. I mean, the implications of this are far greater than just the influence that there might be on a particular election. The implications system-wide are huge and dangerous.
SEABROOK: Yarmuth and others would like to overhaul the public financing of elections, so at least voters can easily tell which candidates are accepting help from big corporations and which are not. Another idea several Democrats talked about today was giving corporate shareholders some say over how their company's campaign cash is spent. Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen says lawmakers have to use today's Supreme Court decision to help voters understand how broken the system is.
Representative CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (Democrat, Maryland): This has got to be a wake-up call to every citizen that they cannot allow the big corporations to call the shots on these elections.
SEABROOK: But with this Supreme Court in place, Democrats will have to draft any new campaign finance rules very carefully, lest they too be struck down.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, The Capitol.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And Im Melissa Block in Washington.
President Obama issued fighting words today with a proposal aimed at banks that have been called too big to fail. Mr. Obama proposed new rules to limit the size of banks and to curb risky activities as part of his vision for a financial regulatory reform.
President BARACK OBAMA: My message to members of Congress of both parties is that we have to get this done. And my message to leaders of the financial industry is to work with us and not against us on needed reforms.
BLOCK: Bank stocks tumbled after the presidents announcement.
As NPRs John Ydstie explains, the new rules are controversial because they could significantly reduce profits at some big banks.
JOHN YDSTIE: The presidents new proposals aim to put more distance between the two arms of banking, taking in deposits as commercial banks do and making risky bets as investment banks do. The rules would prohibit commercial banks and companies that own them, like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, from owning hedge funds and private equity firms. And announcing the rules at the White House today, President Obama took on the tone of a populist reform politician.
Pres. OBAMA: We simply cannot accept a system in which hedge funds or private equity firms inside banks can place huge, risky bets that are subsidized by taxpayers and that could pose a conflict of interest. And we cannot accept a system in which shareholders make money on these operations if the bank wins, but taxpayers foot the bill if the bank loses.
YDSTIE: Since trading for their own benefit, or proprietary trading, as its called, can generate big profits, the new rules may force some firms to choose between owning deposit-taking commercial banks and doing lucrative but risky proprietary trading. The president suggested thats okay.
Pres. OBAMA: If financial firms want to trade for profit, thats something theyre free to do. Indeed doing so responsibly is a good thing for the market and the economy. But these firms should not be allowed to run these hedge funds and private equities funds while running a bank backed by the American people.
YDSTIE: In addition to eliminating some of the risky activities of banks and their holding companies, President Obama wants to limit the overall size of banks too.
Pres. OBAMA: The American people will not be served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms. Thats not good for consumers, its not good for the economy.
YDSTIE: Bank size is already restricted in some ways. For instance, any one bank can hold no more than 10 percent of all the insured deposits in the country. But banks get funding in other ways through uninsured deposits and issuing commercial paper, for instance. The president wants to limit the amount of that kind of funding a single bank can have as well. The big financial institutions and their investors did not respond well to the news, shares in the big banks like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America fell.
Scott Talbott, an industry lobbyist at the Financial Services Roundtable, said if the president wants to reduce risk, taking away the big firms ability to trade for their own accounts wont be helpful.
Mr. SCOTT TALBOTT (Lobbyist, Financial Services Roundtable): Its a tool used to manage risk. And so without that tool in our arsenal, makes it harder, if not impossible, to manage certain risks and thereby decrease them.
YDSTIE: Mr. Obamas proposal today is a victory for presidential adviser Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Hes been advocating a clearer separation of investment and commercial banking activities. But the Reuters News Service reported today that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner thinks the move is putting politics ahead of good economic policy.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And to answer some of the questions the presidents proposal raises, were joined by Greg Ip. He is the U.S. economics editor at the Economist magazine. Hi, Greg.
Mr. GREG IP (Economic Editor, Economist): Hello, Madeleine.
BRAND: Well, could you walk us through exactly what these reforms would mean for the banks? Give us an example with one bank, how would things change?
Mr. IP: Sure. Well, think about what a bank does. They do business on behalf of their customers. For example, theyll take a deposit from you to make a loan to me, or theyll buy and sell stocks and bonds on behalf of companies that need to raise money for investments and for, say, mutual funds and pension funds that want to invest in those stocks and bonds. They'll continue to be able to do that. But banks also trade stocks and bonds and other types of securities to make money for themselves. Thats what the new plan will crack down on. From now on, if youre a bank that has deposits and has the benefits of taxpayer protection for those deposits, you cant do that kind of trading for yourself, what we call proprietary trading.
The other change thats going to happen is that one of the main ways banks fund themselves is they gather deposits from ordinary customers. But under a law that was on the books since the early 1990s, no bank can have more than 10 percent of the deposits in the country. And so to get around that, banks can find other means of financing themselves. They can borrow in the bond market. Obamas plan would basically close off that loophole and make it that much harder for a bank to grow larger.
BRAND: So, would this in effect end proprietary trading?
Mr. IP: Its hard to say at this point. It probably will severely crack down on it because most banks will decide its not worth having the proprietary trading in order to they would rather stick with their regular customer businesses. And its hard to say at this point what effect it will have. But whats happened in the last 10 years and one of the reasons the administration has decided to tackle this is that a lot of banks got tired of the old, dull customer business of taking in deposits and making loans or buying and selling stocks and bonds on behalf of customers. And some, and Goldman Sachs especially, discovered they could make far more money doing proprietary trading. That line of business will basically be over.
BRAND: And a lot of people say, the president included, that that was the main reason for the financial collapse. Would this prevent future similar financial collapses?
Mr. IP: Probably not. There were so many causes to this financial collapse that it would be impossible to pinpoint one in particular. I mean, if you think of some of the firms that failed like AIG and Washington Mutual, they got into trouble by making loans to customers who couldnt pay them back. That wasnt proprietary. That was customer business. It just turned out that they made exceptionally bad decisions. On the other hand, one of the things that caused Bear Stearns to almost collapse was the trading of one of its proprietary hedge funds.
So, it would limit some of that risk taking. But there are many other types of risk taking that will discover. And its possible that the only thing that this will end up doing is pushing that activity out of the banks where regulators have a close eye on them into unregulated institutions, where theyll continue to pose risks to the economy, but we wont have a close eye on them.
BRAND: Well, a lot of people have said we need to return to the Glass-Steagall Act, which was dismantled at the end of the 1990s. Paul Volcker, who is advising the president, has been a big champion of that. So, is this what this is, a remantling, if you will, of Glass-Steagall?
Mr. IP: Not quite. I mean, what Glass-Steagall, which was passed in the early 1930s after the great crash in the beginning of the Great Depression, what it did was it separated commercial banking, which was taking in deposits and making loans from investment banking, which was underwriting stocks and bonds. Under Obamas proposal, investment banking can continue, you can still underwrite stocks and bonds if youre doing it for a customer. You just cant do it if its for yourself.
BRAND: And what does this all mean for you and me, bank customers, when we have our deposits in one of these big banks? What does it mean for us?
Mr. IP: For the typical customer, it shouldnt mean anything. You shouldnt see anything different at all, unless you happen to be a customer who owns one of their hedge funds, in which case, then you wont get to benefit from that hedge fund any longer. But for the vast majority of people who have bank accounts or who borrow because theyre a homeowner, a small business (unintelligible) bank, it shouldnt make any difference at all.
Now, what the banks argue is that its very hard to actually separate what they do on behalf of their customers, from what they do on behalf of themselves. And so this proposal can make it very difficult for them to properly manage their risk and that might hurt their ability to serve their customers.
BRAND: How likely will this be passed in Congress? Its part of a bigger financial bill that is currently stalled in the Senate. So, how likely is it that it'll get through?
Mr. IP: Right now I'd have to say that the odds are pretty low. What we saw as a consequence of the loss of the 60th democratic vote in the Massachusetts election is that any proposal by the administration that doesnt have bipartisan support is going to have a hard time getting through the Senate this year. And Republicans have already raised significant misgivings about a lot of parts of the presidents existing regulatory proposals. In particular, his plan to create a new consumer financial protection agency by adding in yet another proposal, it doesnt make it easier to get that thing past a Senate.
BRAND: Thanks very much.
Mr. IP: Good to talk to you.
BRAND: Thats Greg Ip. He is the U.S. economics editor at the Economist magazine.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Senator-elect Scott Brown came to Washington today. He's the Massachusetts Republican who shattered the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority earlier this week. At the Capitol, Brown's new colleagues from both sides of the aisle welcomed him aboard, though its not clear when he'll be sworn in.
NPRs David Welna has the story from the Capitol.
DAVID WELNA: Scott Brown was the focus of a phalanx of news cameras as he strolled into the Russell Senate Office Building this morning.
Senator-elect SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): Thank you very much for you all coming. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Unidentified Man #1: Thank you.
WELNA: Brown did seem a tad awestruck as he made his way to the office of Arizona Republican John McCain. Once inside, he said it was McCain who last year looked him in the eye there, and encouraged him to seek the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for nearly half a century.
Senator-elect BROWN: And I wanted to pay him the first visit and thank him for that support.
WELNA: Asked by reporters whether hed be the kind of moderate Northeastern Republican who works with Democrats, Brown dodged the question.
Senator-elect BROWN: I want to get an office, get a business card and then, you know, look at the information and make a proper decision based on the facts.
WELNA: Next stop was the office of the senior senator from Massachusetts, Democrat John Kerry. A reporter there wanted to know whether Kerry had been shocked by Browns election.
Senator JOHN KERRY (Democrat, Massachusetts): I hate to say this to my fellow Democrats, but I wasnt shocked.
Unidentified Man #2: Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown...
Unidentified Man #3: Why not?
Senator KERRY: Because I saw it coming.
WELNA: And Kerry did have a few words of advice for the junior Senator-elect from Massachusetts.
Senator KERRY: You have to work across the aisle here to make things happen. Americans dont just elect Democrats and Republicans; they elect people to be responsible with the peoples business. I look forward to working with Scott on that. Hell have his chance to vote for Massachusetts many times over the next few years. And that will define him, not me, not him here today.
WELNA: Brown, who faces a re-election bid the year after next, allowed that he just might work with Democrats on legislation.
Senator-elect BROWN: If I see a bill that is good for my state, Im going to vote for it, and thats my first priority. Other senators represent other states. My initial job is to protect the interest of Massachusetts. And Im not - I dont owe anybody anything.
WELNA: In a later meeting with Brown, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell bestowed a nickname on Brown that closely identified him with the soon-to-be 41-member, GOP caucus.
Senator MITCH MCCONNELL (Republican, Kentucky): When people asked for his autograph, he was writing 41 down. I said, this is a man who understands how the Senate operates. So, henceforth, I will always think of him as 41.
WELNA: Things were just as mirthful when Brown then stopped by to see Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Senator HARRY REID (Democrat, Nevada; Senate Majority Leader): I, of course, welcome you to the Capitol.
Senator-elect Brown: Thank you, Mr. Reid.
Sen. REID: I read an article in here today that because you got elected, my jobs going to be easier. I hope thats the case.
(Soundbite of laughter)
WELNA: Easier because Browns arrival means Reid is no longer expected to keep 60 senators voting together.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Melissa Block.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
Ever since the earthquake, Haitians have been gathering in front the U.S. Embassy desperate to get a flight out of their shattered country. The line seems to grow every day. Today, an estimated 2,000 people stood there. Rumors are flying through the streets that almost any connection to the U.S. can win you a visa.
As NPRs John Burnett reports, many Haitians are in for disappointment.
JOHN BURNETT: Much of the capitol has disintegrated into concrete chunks, but the gleaming white U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince stands virtually untouched. A few light fixtures came loose inside. With its own power, water and sewage treatment, the brand new U.S. embassy is a self-sufficient island of order in the bedlam of post-earthquake Haiti.
They start lining up at the consular office here before sunrise to ask, to beg for transit out of their broken city. Jean Joseph, who's a permanent resident in the U.S., stands in line to get visas for his little brother and sister, 20 and 18, who are not residents. They live here in Haiti.
Mr. JEAN JOSEPH: If you got, like, your parents, like, if you got all your family in U.S. and you got somebody, you know, afraid that you're here in Haiti, they're going to help you.
BURNETT: Theres a rumor making its way around the capital that any Haitian with a relative in the U.S. can join his or her family. But U.S. officials say only Haitians with U.S. passports are being airlifted to the States at U.S. government expense. Lost or buried passports are not a problem, the person will still be in the U.S. database.
Margalita Belhumer is a Haitian-American living in New York City. She was here in her home country visiting when the quake hit nine days ago. She shades her eyes from the tropical sun. The girl squatting at her feet with a threadbare sweater over her head is eight-year-old Melissa.
Ms. MARGALITA BELHUMER: Im seeking to leave with my daughter because, well, usually where she stays, the people there are dead. The place is crumbled down. There is nothing left there. So, I have no way to leave her. So, I cant leave without her.
BURNETT: Margalita says she raised Melissa since the girl was a newborn infant wrapped in a sheet and left on the sidewalk in front of St. Josephs Catholic Church here. Child abandonment by destitute mothers is not uncommon in Haiti. While Belhumer worked at her job as a security guard in New York, she paid a family to take care of Melissa. Belhumer says she's already begun the paperwork to adopt her.
Ms. BELHUMER: I started the adoption process, but I started it last month. But Ive had her since the first day she was born.
BURNETT: Standing nearby her, a slim, courteous schoolteacher named Joseph Etienne has brought 13 members of his family with him to stand in line in the 90-degree heat under the distrustful gaze of the Marine guards.
Mr. JOSEPH ETIENNE (Schoolteacher, Port-au-Prince, Haiti): (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: He says the Etienne family is sleeping under plantain trees since their home was pulverized. The family has no luggage with them, nothing because they lost everything in the quake. And what do they have to convince the consular office that he should let them into the U.S.? The schoolteacher reaches into his pocket and pulls out two slips of paper written with the names and addresses.
Mr. ETIENNE: (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: So he hopes with just names and address of in-laws in New Jersey that theyll let his family of 14 immigrate to the States.
Unidentified Man #1: Yeah, they hope when they go through the line...
BURNETT: Deep within the cool, soundless embassy building is the office of U.S. Ambassador Ken Merten. In the midst of the crisis, the ambassador has been sleeping on a cot in his office with his beagle Sophie taking an easy chair. The ambassador has bad news for the Etienne family.
Ambassador KEN MERTEN (Haiti): We will tell him, unfortunately, sir, theres nothing we can do for you in this case. We are providing humanitarian aid and assistance, as well as, you know, medical assistance and if thats what you need, we hope you can benefit from that. But we are not able to facilitate peoples travel to the United States in a case like that.
BURNETT: After waiting hours in line the Etiennes, Margalita Belhumer and hundreds of other Haitians will have to return tomorrow for an answer to their immigration pleas. A Marine guard cut the line and told them there was no way they'd make it to a consular window today.
Unidentified Man #2: Lets go.
Unidentified Man #3: You guys got to move.
Unidentified Man #2: You guy got to keep going.
John Burnett, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And Im Melissa Block in Washington, where today the Supreme Court created what one veteran court watcher calls a small revolution in campaign finance law. In a sweeping ruling, the court said corporations can spend freely on political campaigns. The justices ruled five-to-four, striking down limits that have been in place for decades. The decision also struck down part of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law from 2002.
We're going to hear two points of view now. In a moment, a longtime advocate of campaign finance reform, Fred Wertheimer. But, first, to Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House. He's an opponent of campaign finance reform. And, Mr. Gingrich, would it be fair to say you are elated by today's Supreme Court ruling?
Mr. NEWT GINGRICH (Former Speaker of the House): Well, Im delighted. And I think I would say that the real campaign finance reform under our Constitution would be to allow anyone to give unlimited amounts of after-tax money, with the understanding that they would file every night on the Internet what they're spending and how they're spending it, so everybody could see who was involved.
But the convoluted, very complex system that we built over the last 30 years has primarily been anti-middle class. It's been anti-middle class candidates. If you're going to retain constitutional freedom and allow people to criticize their politicians effectively and allow them to be engaged effectively, I think you want to really be engaged in allowing the maximum of resources to be in politics, not the minimum.
I think the fundamental underlying model of bureaucratic finance reform has been wrong. And it's not that Im against reform, but the reform we need is to liberate the American people to criticize their politicians.
BLOCK: And you say that liberation would mean no restrictions on campaign funding at all.
Mr. GINGRICH: I think as long as it's after tax money and as long as it's filed every night after the - on the Internet, that it would be actually very, very helpful.
BLOCK: You say that campaign finance restrictions are anti-middle-class. Im curious how you see this ruling as helping the middle class, as opposed to giving a lot more power to big business. The president said today this is a major victory for powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.
Mr. GINGRICH: Well, the president was elected in part by labor unions who massed their resources of people, who have no choice but to have their money taken out of their dues. The president spent money that was donated through to a variety of organizations, including MoveOn.org, by very, very rich people.
Now, all Im saying is you as a citizen ought to the right to complain about your incumbent congressman, or your incumbent senator, or your incumbent president - and you should not be constrained by the government, you should not risk criminal proceedings. And thats what the Founding Fathers wrote. Thats why the First Amendment has the right of free speech and it has been I think stunningly perverted by the kind of regulations we've had over the last 30 years, and theyve been profoundly wrong.
BLOCK: You're saying that this ruling affects the average citizen expressing his or her voice, as opposed to corporations being allowed to spend freely.
Mr. GINGRICH: Im saying that it allows you to have a middle-class candidate go out and find allies and supporters who are able to help them match the rich. And able to help them match the incumbent. Remember, incumbents run with millions of dollars in congressional staff, congressional franking, congressional travel. And they have all the advantages of being able to issue statements from their incumbent office. And the challenger - the person out there who's the citizen who's rebelling, who wants to change things - is at an enormous disadvantage in taking on incumbents.
This will, in fact, level the playing field and allow middle-class candidates to begin to have an opportunity to raise the resources to take on the powerful and the rich.
BLOCK: Mr. Gingrich, when you bowed out of the presidential race in 2007, you mentioned McCain-Feingold as a reason. You said it penalizes being a citizen, that you couldnt campaign and at the same time run your group, American Solutions.
Do you think this ruling today changes that? And does that mean you might be a candidate in 2012?
Mr. GINGRICH: I actually dont know yet. Our attorneys are looking at the ruling, but it's a pretty long ruling and they haven't figured out what it means. But this is a different setting than 2008 and we would certainly look at it in a different way.
I do think this ruling makes it easier for, you know, pro free enterprise conservatives who are critical of government to acquire the resources to take on very, very wealthy liberals who want to buy seats.
BLOCK: And would that include you? Are you now thinking more seriously about a campaign?
Mr. GINGRICH: I might. We have to wait and see. If there's a movement for real change and if there's a real sense that we can recruit candidates at every level to change things, then (unintelligible), I would certainly have to look at it very seriously..
BLOCK: Newt Gingrich, thank you.
Mr. GINGRICH: Thank you.
BLOCK: Republican Newt Gingrich is former speaker of the House. He now chairs the group American Solutions, a conservative political advocacy organization.
And now we're joined by Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of the non-profit group Democracy 21, which is dedicated to campaign finance reform.
Fred Wertheimer, Newt Gingrich just now described his reaction to the ruling today as delighted. Whats yours?
Mr. FRED WERTHEIMER (Founder/President, Democracy 21): Well, my reaction is that this is an absolute disaster for the American people. With the stroke of a pen, five justices just wiped out a century of American history. I am anything but pleased with this decision. This is the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in the history of the Supreme Court.
BLOCK: We just heard Newt Gingrich saying that the system as it is now is broken. And that if anything, it's anti-middle class the way it is now. That this ruling, in his view, levels the playing field for middle-class candidates, not for billionaires who can self-finance their campaign.
What do you make of that argument?
Mr. WERTHEIMER: Well, I think I start off from the standpoint of citizens and the idea that this levels the playing field for citizens is dead wrong. What this decision means is major banks, major insurance companies, major drug companies, major energy companies can spend five or $10 million or more directly to elect or defeat a federal candidate.
Now, what that means is a member of Congress or a candidate that is sitting there, knowing that if they vote against the interests of these major corporations, they will be blown out of the water by expensive campaigns the likes of which we have never seen.
BLOCK: The court's ruling today, though, doesnt apply just to corporations, right? Labor unions would also now be free to spend too.
Mr. WERTHEIMER: It applies to labor unions, and they will have similar opportunities to exercise influence buying corruption. But of course the labor unions simply are in a different world than corporations when it comes to the assets they have available. Labor unions are tiny compared to the corporate interests in this country and the assets they hold.
You know, the court reversed decisions from 1990, 2003 and 2007 without any changed circumstances to justify these abrupt reversals. The only change we've had is in the makeup of the court, and the Supreme Court is not supposed to issue decisions based on who happens to be on the Supreme Court for the moment. If thats the case, we will just have to wait till one of these justices leaves the court, and then assume we can get back the century-old history that has upheld these protections against corruption.
BLOCK: What do you expect to be emerging from Congress in the form of legislation that might blunt the impact of this ruling on campaign finance?
Mr. WERTHEIMER: Well, we want to see Congress explore all options to see what can be done to re-impose some restrictions on corporations and labor unions, in their efforts to spend money in federal campaigns.
This opinion will not stand the test of time or history, in my judgment. It simply will not. It is alien to everything that has come before it for the last century and beyond. And it is completely inconsistent with the interest of the American people in having a government free from corruption.
BLOCK: Fred Wertheimer is founder and president of the non-profit group Democracy 21. Mr. Wertheimer, thank you.
Mr. WERTHEIMER: Thank you.
BLOCK: And at our Web site you can find analysis of today's Court decision, along with a timeline tracing the evolution of campaign finance law. Thats at NPR.org.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Angel Island has been called the Ellis Island of the West. It's in the San Francisco Bay and was the first immigration station here in the West. Today is the 100th anniversary of its opening. To celebrate, 100 people were sworn in as new American citizens at Angel Island today. In the past, immigrants received a decidedly less enthusiastic welcome.
Nina Thorsen of member station KQED reports.
Unidentified Man: Burkina Faso...
NINA THORSEN: Today's 100 new citizens came from 44 different countries.
Unidentified Man: China, Czech Republic, Egypt...
THORSEN: No doubt each of them could tell a story of sacrifices and difficulties along the road to America. The immigration process isnt easy. But it's much easier than the path taken by those who came through the Angel Island immigration station before it closed in 1940.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mostly from Asia, were processed there, and in the days when most Asians were not allowed to become citizens, the reception they found at Angel Island was not welcoming. Li-King Ji-Wan(ph) was a little girl when she arrived in the 1930s, and she was lucky. Her father was already a citizen.
Ms.�LI-KING JI-WAN: My mother and three sisters stayed on Angel Island four, five days. That was a very short period because the other people who were there told us some of them had been there three months, one year and they were really kind of worried.
THORSEN: The other inmates had reason to be worried. Many of them would be sent back to their countries of origin. Asian immigration was limited in the first half of the 20th century by federal laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. Many found the only way in was to deceive the immigration officers.
Buck Gee(ph) is president of the nonprofit that helps fund the historic site and the son of an Angel Island immigrant.
Mr.�BUCK GEE: It's not like Ellis Island, where people were just registered to come in. No Chinese could come in California unless you were an American citizen. So what people did is they essentially bought papers to enter the country, claiming they were the son of an American citizen. And so people spent time on the island being interrogated to see if, in fact, they could confirm or not they were the people they claimed they were.
THORSEN: Today, Angel Island is a California state park. It's a popular day trip from San Francisco, just a ferry boat ride away, next to Alcatraz. Visitors can hike or picnic, or they can check out the remains of the immigration station, now a museum and national historic landmark. There, they can read the poetry scratched onto the walls of the barracks where Asian immigrants were detained.
At today's ceremony, translations of some of them were read by poets, including Janice Mirikitani. Her grandparents came from Japan.
Ms.�JANICE MIRIKITANI (Poet): She yearns for her beloved husband in the picture, yet upon arrival, she sees only the heartless immigration official.
THORSEN: The laws which kept Asians from becoming citizens were repealed decades ago, but Buck Gee of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation says the experience of people like his father is still meaningful.
Mr.�GEE: America has a sort of mixed view of immigrants and new immigrants, you know, both their value and their threat. That's why the issue, you know, is still around today.
THORSEN: For NPR News, I'm Nina Thorsen in San Francisco.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Today the former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards admitted that he fathered a child out of wedlock. Edwards had earlier confessed to having an affair with a woman who worked on his 2008 presidential campaign but until now, he had denied paternity even after the National Enquirer printed a blurry photo of him holding the baby.
From Edwards' home state of North Carolina, NPR's Adam Hochberg reports.
ADAM HOCHBERG: Edwards' friends say he's hoping to move forward with his life after this latest in his drawn-out series of confessions. It was more than a year ago that Edwards first admitted he had a relationship with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.
Originally, he confessed only to a one-time affair. Later, it became clear they were together longer. And now, in a written statement, he's finally confirmed what the tabloids have said all along, that he fathered Hunter's now almost 2-year-old daughter.
Edwards' attorney, Wade Smith, says the ex-senator has been wrestling with making the announcement for months, but Smith describes the situation as complex.
Mr.�WADE SMITH (Attorney): There are a lot of people involved. It isn't just John. I mean, he can't just bodaciously make this announcement. He has to think about, how do other people feel? And whereas you could certainly accuse John of just thinking about himself at times in the past, in this instance, he thought about other people.
HOCHBERG: In his statement, Edwards said he hopes his daughter Frances Quinn Hunter will forgive him for his initial denial that he's her father. He apologized to those he's disappointed and hurt. And Smith, who's been Edwards' friend and mentor for decades, described him as lonely and sad.
Mr.�SMITH: He is absolutely as sorry about the whole last year and a half or two years as he can be. It's a train wreck. And so it hasn't been easy for him. It's been very hard for him. And he suffered a lot.
HOCHBERG: Edwards himself has been keeping a low profile. A spokeswoman said he's not granting interviews. Smith says Edwards is headed to Haiti to take part in relief efforts.
Last month, the former senator was in El Salvador, working with a Christian group called Homes from the Heart. And in a video on the group's Web site, he said he's dedicating himself to charity work.
Former Senator JOHN EDWARDS (Democrat, South Carolina): I am not here about politics. I am no longer a politician running for any office. I'm here, hopefully to join with you, in this cause that is the cause of my life - is to help all those who are suffering.
(Soundbite of applause)
HOCHBERG: But moving on from his personal scandal will be a challenge. Edwards' family situation is unstable, to put it mildly. His wife, Elizabeth, continues to battle terminal cancer. Their marital struggles were detailed in a recent, political tell-all book.
Meanwhile, another book is due soon by Andrew Young, a campaign aide who initially claimed he was the father of Rielle Hunter's baby, a claim he says Edwards pressured him to make. In the book, Young alleges Edwards asked him to fake a paternity test.
As Edwards' reputation has unraveled, some of his longtime associates have become almost numb to the revelations. And Edwards' former political consultant, Gary Pearce, says people who once were close to the ex-senator now are repulsed by his behavior.
Mr.�GARY PEARCE (Political Consultant): They feel betrayed. They feel like they put a lot of trust in him, and it's beyond disappointment. It is a real sense of betrayal and anger. And also, I think a lot of people feel now like they just sort of wish they could take a shower and make this thing go away.
HOCHBERG: In an interview with the Associated Press, Elizabeth Edwards said the whole family is relieved that her husband made the announcement. She said she doesn't know what's next for her and John, and refused to address media reports that they've separated. Harrison Hickman, who was Edwards' campaign pollster, says he spoke with Elizabeth earlier this week.
Mr.�HARRISON HICKMAN (Pollster): She certainly was supportive of this announcement being made, and would like to get on with her life without worrying about every time you open the door, there being a camera stuck in your face.
HOCHBERG: On top of all of his personal turmoil, Edwards also remains the subject of a criminal investigation. A federal grand jury is examining a series of payments his political supporters allegedly funneled to Rielle Hunter during the campaign to help keep her quiet about the affair. Wade Smith, Edwards' attorney, refused to comment on the case, but Hickman says Edwards seems to have little concern that the scandal will result in criminal charges.
Adam Hochberg, NPR News, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
John Edwards' family mess has provided a lot of fodder for late-night talk show jokes, but lately the talk shows themselves have been the mess. Today, NBC came to something approaching a resolution over the fate of Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.
NPR's Neda Ulaby reports on the $45 million deal.
NEDA ULABY: Conan O'Brien will get over $33 million from NBC, with the rest as severance to his staff. But the real payoff has been the audiences.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Tonight Show")
Mr.�CONAN O'BRIEN (Television Host): This is crazy. Over the past week, ratings for our "Tonight Show" are up by 50 percent.
(Soundbite of applause)
ULABY: It's been voyeuristically fun to watch talk show hosts take sides, flaunt dirty laundry and lay ancient rivalries bare, like David Letterman's.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Late Show with David Letterman")
Mr.�DAVID LETTERMAN (Television Host): When we came over here to CBS, Jay "Big Jaw" Leno had "The Tonight Show."
Unidentified Man: Yeah, big jaw.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ULABY: Last night, Leno hit back, alluding not so subtly to Letterman's workplace affairs.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Jay Leno Show")
Mr.�JAY LENO (Television Host): Letterman's been hammering me every night.
Mr. KEVIN EUBANKS (Musician): Yeah, that's weird.
Mr.�LENO: Oh, going after me. Hey Kevin, you know what's the best way to get Letterman to ignore you?
Mr. EUBANKS: What's that?
Mr.�LENO: Marry him. OK, that's the best way.
ULABY: Enough with the sniping, says TV critic Eric Deggans.
Mr.�ERIC DEGGANS (Television Critic): It's about time.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ULABY: Time for this increasingly ugly chapter of TV history to be over.
Mr.�DEGGANS: This has been the most public, most bruising, most disintegrating battle in the recent history of network television.
ULABY: But Deggans says one vital question remains.
Mr.�DEGGANS: Can the network who dug the biggest hole in recent history get itself out?
ULABY: Now, it's important to note that NBC was not hemorrhaging money just because of the miserable ratings earned by Leno and O'Brien. But NBC affiliates were, and they complained vociferously. Mark DiSantos(ph) runs an NBC affiliate in Peoria, Illinois.
Mr.�MARK DISANTOS: The changes that were made that affected "The Tonight Show" and the 9 o'clock lead-in to our late news have changed some viewing habits.
ULABY: But DiSantos hopes, now a deal has been struck, his late-night viewers will eventually come home. O'Brien's last show is on Friday, and NBC starts broadcasting the Winter Olympics a week after that. Maybe the dust will have settled by the time Leno brings back "The Tonight Show" on March 1st. Meanwhile, O'Brien cannot work on TV until September, but Deggans says rumors have him going to cable then, or Fox.
Mr.�DEGGANS: What we're hearing now is that creative people at Fox love the idea of bringing him in, but the executives are not sure.
ULABY: It's hard to blame them, given the way O'Brien's gone after NBC executives in the past few weeks.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Tonight Show")
Mr.�O'BRIEN: We're going to introduce new comedy bits that aren't so much funny as they are crazy expensive.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ULABY: Last night, O'Brien said before NBC kicks him off, he plans to run up the bills in the most absurd ways he can think of, like bringing in a last-minute new character, an insanely expensive sports car dressed up like a mouse, to the music of The Rolling Stones.
(Soundbite of TV show, "The Tonight Show")
(Soundbite of music)
Mr.�O'BRIEN: Is it crazy expensive to play on the air, not to mention the rights to re-air this clip on the Internet? Hell, yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ULABY: Alas, O'Brien will not be legally allowed to make fun of NBC after leaving the network.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
Now we conclude a three-part series on problems with the American bail system. More than half the people sitting in jail right now are there because they are poor. They can't make bail. This year, housing and feeding them while they wait trial will cost taxpayers $9 billion.
There's another option, county-run programs called pretrial release. Defendants get out of jail with ankle bracelets for monitoring for as low as two tax dollars a day. It's a solution Broward County, Florida turned to three years ago. Almost immediately, the county's overcrowded jail became a spacious money-saver. And yet, two years later, Broward's commissioners voted to gut the program.
NPR's Laura Sullivan explores why and she finds a powerful lobby dismantling pretrial programs nationwide.
LAURA SULLIVAN: The process of bail in Broward County begins in the early morning hours on Judge John Hurley's desk.
Judge JOHN HURLEY (Broward County, Florida): I'm looking at the arrest reports from last night in a stack about eight inches high, and I just flip through them.
SULLIVAN: The night's lawlessness is laid out before him.
Judge HURLEY: Eighty percent of it I'll fly through: trespassing, sleeping in the park, drinking in public, didn't pay a traffic ticket. My job is to make sure that I keep the dangerous people in and let the people who are not dangerous out.
SULLIVAN: To do that, he's got basically three choices. He can release defendants on their own recognizance, trust them to show up for court. Or he can grant them bail. Many won't be able to afford the bail Hurley sets, so they'll pay a bail bondsman a nonrefundable fee to do it for them.
And then there's the third option: pretrial release, a county-funded program letting people out of jail with ankle bracelets monitoring or even drug testing. It used to be one of Hurley's favorite options. But these days he doesn't get to use it very often. The program, he says, has been too cut back to handle many defendants.
Judge HURLEY: The bondsmen think the pretrial is stealing their business. But I don't want to get into the mix. I don't want to get into the political aspect of this.
SULLIVAN: Just how bail bonding became political in Broward has sent shockwaves through pretrial programs across the country. Industry experts say powerful bail lobbying groups have begun using Broward as a roadmap of how to squash similar programs elsewhere, even though public records show the programs have saved taxpayers millions of dollars.
Here in Broward, the once thriving pretrial release program now operates out of barren offices across from a courthouse. Officers like Bret Gibson monitor their few clients by tracking them on computers.
Officer BRET GIBSON (Broward County, Florida): It immediately shows me what's going on with this client.
SULLIVAN: Some offenders just have to call in. Some wear ankle bracelets. Others use GPS tracking, like the woman Gibson is following on his screen.
Ofc. GIBSON: They came home four minutes late. They were supposed to be home at 2:30. They came home at 2:34.
SULLIVAN: The woman texts that she is now in the house, which a circle on a map is confirming is, in fact, true. For this woman, and for many others like her charge with petty offenses, this program is the difference between spending months in jail waiting for a court date and being able to save her job, pay her bills, keep her home and see her family.
For the county, this program or at least the way it used to be means something else: saving a lot of money. Pretrial costs about a couple dollars day per inmate. Jail costs $115.
Kristina Gulick runs the program.
Ms. KRISTINA GULICK (Community Control Director, Broward County): It costs a quarter of every county tax dollar to run our jail system in Broward County and it's the largest single expense to any county taxpayer.
SULLIVAN: But it wasn't just the money. Three years ago, the Broward County jail was so full, a judge called the conditions unconstitutional. The county needed a $70 million new jail. Instead, commissioners voted to expand pretrial release. Within a year, the population plunged so dramatically, the sheriff closed an entire wing of the old jail, saving $20 million a year. And according to court records, defendants were still showing up for court. Commissioners lauded the program, called it a success. Then a year ago, at a mundane January meeting, the same commissioners voted to gut it.
Unidentified Woman: All those in favor of item four, signify by aye.
Unidentified People: Aye.
Unidentified Woman: Oppose, signify by nay. Item number four passes.
SULLIVAN: Item number four, a bill putting strict limits on who can qualify for pretrial release, cutting the program by several hundred defendants. Broward's pretrial officials were stunned, so was the county's public defender Howard Finkelstein.
Mr. HOWARD FINKELSTEIN (Public Defender): I don't know whether what happened was illegal or unethical. I can tell you it stinks all the way to the rafters.
SULLIVAN: Who, they wondered, could possibly be against their program? It turns out, in Broward County, 135 people. To be exact: 135 bondsmen who had them completely outmatched.
Mr. WAYNE SPATH (Bail Bondsman): We're tenacious. We do our job.
SULLIVAN: Wayne Spath led the charge of Broward's bail bondsmen to get the pretrial program cut back.
Mr. SPATH: People should not just be released from jail and get a free ride. I mean, this is the way the system's got to work.
SULLIVAN: Spath argues that pretrial release costs too much money. And plus, he says, it was hurting their business. So he and the other bondsmen did what any self-respecting private business group would do: They hired a lobbyist.
Mr. ROB BOOK (Attorney): To be perfectly arrogant about it, I'm considered, if not the best, certainly one of the best in the state.
SULLIVAN: Ron Book has been lobbying for bondsmen in Florida for more than a decade. He quickly went to work. According to campaign records, Book, Spath and more than a dozen other bondsmen spread almost $23,000 across the council in the year before the bill was passed. Fifteen bondsmen cut checks worth more than $5,000 to the now Council Mayor Ken Keechl, just five days before the vote.
Keechl and several other commissioners declined NPR's repeated requests for an interview. At the council meeting, they said they were concerned that Broward's pretrial program cost more than those of nearby counties. And they vigorously denied campaign contributions played any role.
Book had his work cut out for him. Broward's own county attorney wrote a memo warning commissioners that limiting pretrial could be unconstitutional. But Book worked behind the scenes. He met with commissioners, and according to county records obtained by NPR, had unusual access. Turns out he was working for the bondsmen at the same time he was already working for the commissioners as their lobbyist. He says that wasn't a conflict.
Mr. BOOK: I've never tried to mislead the public on the issue. The truth is I have a client: the bail bondsmen. The truth is my client is an alternative to pretrial release. The fact of the matter is my clients are held accountable. I've never been more right from a public perspective than I am on this issue.
Mr. FINKELSTEIN: Don't pee on me and tell me it's raining.
SULLIVAN: Public Defender Howard Finkelstein is feeling the brunt of the cutbacks. He says every day he has to meet with more of his clients behind bars clients who might once have been candidates for pretrial release. Hundreds are stuck in jail, he says, because the bondsmen are hoping they'll find the money to become paying customers.
Finkelstein says it's true that pretrial release costs taxpayers money. But he says it costs millions more to leave indigent defendants in jail because they can't afford a bondsman's fees.
Mr. FINKELSTEIN: Don't tell me that you're doing this for the good of the people. You're doing it for your own good, and that's fine, but then you shouldn't have a seat at the table when public policy is made.
SULLIVAN: In recent years, that seat at the table has grown larger, not just in Broward, but nationwide. Bondsmen have lobbied to cut back local pretrial programs from Texas to California, pushed for legislation in five states limiting pretrial's resources and lobbied Congress so they won't have to pay up if a client commits a new crime.
Behind them, the bondsmen have a powerful special interest group and millions of dollars. Pretrial release agencies have a smattering of public employees and the remnants of their once thriving programs.
Laura Sullivan, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
BRAND: At our Web site, NPR.org, you can find a graph showing the big impact of Broward's pretrial release program, and you can find the other stories in that series, again, NPR.org.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
In the coming weeks, aid agencies in Haiti will begin planning how to rebuild the country. People who know Haiti worry that money could be wasted if entrenched problems aren't addressed. In a moment, I'll talk with a human rights lawyer about why the rebuilding should focus on the areas outside the capital city.
First, to NPR's Christopher Joyce, who reports on some of the obstacles to long-term recovery.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: When Rajiv Shah, the head of the Agency for International Development, met with reporters after the earthquake, he emphasized that the U.S. government would collaborate with, not replace, Haitian authorities.
Dr. RAJIV SHAH (Administrator, Agency for International Development): That is the way we hope to work, in partnership and in responsiveness, to request from the Haitian government.
JOYCE: That could be a problem, says Gerald Murray. Murray is an anthropologist at the University of Florida, who's worked in Haiti for three decades, advising international banks and organizations on aid projects. He says a lot of money has been wasted.
Professor GERALD MURRAY (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida): A bad scenario would be one in which some Haitian government officials insist that any aid be channeled through them, that they have authority to send crews to where they want them to go. And it would be a terrible outcome.
JOYCE: Murray is talking about long-term aid, not emergency help. He says he's interviewed thousands of Haitians and they tell him they don't want foreign aid going to the Haitian government. They prefer that nongovernmental organizations handle it.
Prof. MURRAY: You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If you use that strategy - many of the NGOs are foreign NGOs - you know, you are not developing the institutions of the country. But if you do, do your duty and give the money to the Haitian government, it will disappear.
JOYCE: Murray adds that NGOs have their own problems. They sometimes misspend the money themselves on things like overhead or travel. Murray suggests that the decline of agriculture exacerbated the quake's toll. Haitians left the countryside for Port-au-Prince, creating a dense population in poorly built housing that couldn't withstand the quake.
Prof. MURRAY: The village I lived in, people were still planning a future for their children on the farm. They would try to acquire more land and purchase more land. Now it is more common to find people selling land to finance emigration.
JOYCE: Emigration not only to Port-au-Prince but to Haiti's neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which is not eager to see more Haitian immigrants. Murray says the quake will probably propel even more Haitians to leave the country.
Anthropologist Glenn Smucker, who advises USAID and international banks on Haiti, says soil erosion is the main culprit in this social breakdown. Most of Haiti's forests have been cut for fuel and the soil just washes away. Smucker also says farmers have switched from growing coffee to crops like corn and beans that have to be replanted every year.
Mr. GLENN SMUCKER (Adviser, Agency for International Development): Farmers on the upper slopes, for example, plant erosion-intensive crops because they have few choices. They live right on the edge of existence.
JOYCE: Smucker says too many Haitians now live in harm's way: on those steep, eroded slopes, or in floodplains along the coast.
Mr. SMUCKER: You have then all of the ingredients for a major disaster and for death and loss of housing literally every time it rain.
JOYCE: And it can rain a lot there. Haiti lies smack in the middle of hurricane territory and has suffered through several deadly storms in recent years.
Alex Fischer, a political scientist at Columbia University, was discussing agricultural aid with Haitian officials in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit. He was evacuated the next day. Fischer says rural Haitians depend on imported food, either bought or donated, that comes through Port-au-Prince.
Mr. ALEX FISCHER (Political Scientist, Columbia University): Now that those lifelines are cut off, there's major questions on how to sustain the system of food and not allow for starvation.
JOYCE: Fischer said the Haitian government and aid groups were making plans to fight erosion by planting timber and fruit trees or building retaining walls on steep slopes. Those efforts are now on hold. Whether they'll resume depends on how post-quake aid for Haiti is spent.
Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Now a review of a movie that's actually in movie theaters now. "Creation" opens today in some cities. It's a drama about Charles Darwin. Darwin is played by Paul Bettany, perhaps best known for his role in "A Beautiful Mind."
As our critic Bob Mondello explains, "Creation" is a movie about Darwin's struggle with religion, and it's a movie that struggled in the U.S. to find a distributor.
BOB MONDELLO: A movie about the evolution of the theory of evolution and one that hopes to find an audience in the U.S. If "Creation" had been made in Hollywood, there'd be much tip-toeing around the subject of religion, but it's from Britain, and it makes the science-faith debate central right from the start, when Charles Darwin explains to his 10-year-old daughter Annie why he's been stalling for years on his treatise "On the Origin of Species."
(Soundbite of film, "Creation")
(Soundbite of music)
Ms.�MARTHA WEST (Actor): (As Annie Darwin) What are you so scared of?
Mr.�PAUL BETTANY (Actor): (As Charles Darwin) Suppose the whole world stopped believing that God had any sort of plan for us, nothing mattered: not love, trust, faith or honor, only brute survival. Apart from anything else, it would break your mother's heart.
MONDELLO: And therein lies the film. Deeply religious Emma Darwin is hardly anti-science. She kind of gets a kick out of her husband's habit of writing every gurgle down as their 10 children go through infancy. But she's also concerned about his soul and where his research may be taking him.
(Soundbite of film, "Creation")
Ms.�JENNIFER CONNELLY (Actor): (As Emma Darwin) Charles, do you not care that you may never pass through the gates of heaven and that you and I may be separated for all eternity?
Mr.�BETTANY: (As Charles) Well, of course I care, of course I do. What do you think has kept me in limbo all these years? I'm a scientist, and I dare not study for the fear of seeing more clearly what is already as plain as day to me.
MONDELLO: Faith versus�science, neatly wrapped up as a Darwinian domestic dispute. Director Jon Amiel, working from a book by Darwin's great-great grandson, animates this idea with sharp performances by real-life spouses Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, and also with arresting visuals, as the biologist bonds with a captive orangutan and as he and his daughter are subjected to the ghastly medical quackery of hydrotherapy.
Purists might argue about some Victorian spirit-world story elements involving Annie, but if the film takes some liberties, they generally make sense dramatically: picturing Darwin's voyages not when they happened, for instance, but when he tells his kids bedtime stories about them, or using time-lapse photography to illustrate scientific leaps he's on the verge of making.
In fact, given its subject matter, "Creation" arguably should be bolder and more shocking if it wants to survive among the fittest at the multiplex. Audiences may not regard a straightforward biopic as a natural selection.
But "Creation" has ample grace on its side. And as many have noted, if you're not at least a little shocked by the audacity of what Darwin did, chances are you don't understand it. I'm Bob Mondello.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
Here in Los Angeles, we've long had star tours where you can get a peek at the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But aside from being the entertainment capital of the world, L.A. is also the gang capital of the world. And now there's a tour to show that side of the city. For $65, organizers promise you'll, quote, "experience areas that were forbidden until now." Unable to resist, we recently joined the tour on its inaugural trip, and talked to a few of the people waiting to board the bus.
Mr. BERT RIETVELD: You go to Paris to see things and understand that culture, and go to other places to understand it and this is so close by.
BRAND: Bert Rietveld is Dutch, but he's lived in Los Angeles for 20 years. Still, he'd never ventured into South Central.
Mr. RIETVELD: Probably because I always thought, well, you can't really go there on your own.
BRAND: Why not?
Mr. RIETVELD: It seemed too dangerous. I once took a wrong turn off the freeway, and I ended up in some neighborhoods where I thought, hmm, better get out of here as quickly as possible.
BRAND: From the safely of an air conditioned bus, Rietveld is eager to learn the ins and outs of thug life.
Mr. RIETVELD: What are the Crips, what are the Bloods, what is graffiti? I had never thought about what is graffiti. I just thought it was just weird paintings on the wall.
BRAND: Another passenger on the tour today is Daniel Auld. He is a young backpacker from Australia.
Mr. DANIEL AULD: I have been traveling for nine months. And I spent a lot of time in India, and I lived in an orphanage for a few months on this trip, so it's just a natural extension to see this part of L.A.
BRAND: What about the other part sights of L.A.: the Hollywood sign, the Hollywood Boulevard?
Mr. AULD: You know, I've done that on my previous trips here. And yeah, they make a good Facebook photo album, but that's about it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: Our tour guide today is Alfred Lomas. He is covered in tattoos from his neck on down. He used to be part of the Florencia 13 gang, but has turned his life around and now works to stop gang violence. Lomas sees his tour as helping toward that goal. He says the steep admission fee will go back into the community, and he says by bringing outsiders into gang areas, he's encouraging rebuilding and investment.
Mr. ALFRED LOMAS (Tour Guide): Are you excited?
Unidentified Group: Yes.
Mr. LOMAS: Excited, all right. Good deal.
BRAND: Lomas has his critics who say this tour amounts to exploitation or some put it, ghettotainment. In response, Lomas nixed his original plan to take the tour through housing projects and to give passengers a T-shirt that said: I got shot in South Central. Still, Lomas uses the supposed danger of the tour as a marketing tactic and encourages passengers to get their picture taken with the ex-gang members he's recruited to sit next to the tourists on the bus.
Mr. LOMAS: If you take a Hollywood tour, you'll probably see Brad Pitt's house, but you'll never really get a chance to take a picture with Brad Pitt. Here, you have an opportunity to take pictures, to meet and interface with individuals that are influential in their gang communities, but have made that effort to change.
BRAND: Finally, the bus departs and Lomas takes us over the L.A. River, which he explains is a favorite target of gang members' graffiti. And then we drive by the huge L.A. County jail.
Mr. LOMAS: If we look to our right, you will see what is known as the unofficial jail to over 120,000 gang members. I can safely say that everybody on this bus with gang intervention has been housed there at one time or another, including myself.
BRAND: It's around here that the tour is ground to a halt by the most L.A. of experiences bad traffic. Lomas doesn't miss a beat. He pops in a DVD on the bus's entertainment system. It's a documentary of L.A. gangs. All quite meta we're watching a movie about L.A. gangs while we're on a tour that's supposed to show us L.A. gangs. Midway through the movie, we are interrupted by reality.
Mr. LOMAS: If you look to your immediate right, you'll see Compton Avenue with a bullet hole on it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: Aside from the bullet hole, this looks like a pretty unremarkable working class neighborhood on a quiet Saturday morning. Almost no one is on the street. There's a Starbucks a couple of blocks away. Still, we aren't allowed to get out of the bus, and we keep going to something called the Pico Union Graffiti Lab. It's a place where people in the neighborhood can legally spray paint on the walls.
(Soundbite of shaking paint can)
BRAND: One of the artists here is Moz-art. He's been decorating the city with graffiti since he was a kid. He's creating what he calls a quick burner of an abbreviation of his name, Mo. He says he's in a crew of artists, not to be confused with a gang. As far as what he thinks of this gang tour?
MOZ-ART (Graffiti Artist): It could be looked at two ways, like, you know, it's (unintelligible) being pried upon, you know, stared at, you know, like some kind of sideshow. And on the flip side of that, it could be looked at as a positive thing, you know, it's going to give people a closer eye of to see what goes on in the hood. I'm not
BRAND: Do you feel like you're being looked like an animal in a zoo?
MOZ-ART: No, not really, you know, because I know who I am.
BRAND: And that was about as close as we got to experiencing life in the hood.
Mr. LOMAS: If we could work our way back on the bus - you guys are awesome, wonderful. This is something to write home about, huh?
BRAND: Lomas escorts everyone back on the bus and we spend some more time in traffic. After it's all over, Aussie tourist Daniel Auld, gives us his assessment.
Mr. AULD: The most important thing about this tour that it, you know, it was to reinforce the fact that these guys are human.
BRAND: But having signed a frightening release form at the beginning of the tour warning that it was inherently dangerous, Auld was hoping for a little more excitement.
Mr. AULD: The scariest part of that tour was being on the freeway. I think that was the only time we were in danger in the whole tour.
BRAND: For his part, Lomas is happy to have the tour finish without incident. He calls today a success and he is planning another L.A. Gang Tour next month.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Vice President Joe Biden is in Iraq. He's trying to mediate a political crisis there. Iraq has elections coming up in March. A parliamentary committee disqualified more than 500 candidates because of alleged ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath party. Now, charges of political manipulation are casting doubt on the election's credibility. Vice President Biden is pushing for a compromise that will allow a successful election and also allows U.S. soldiers to begin a major draw down.
NPR's Quil Lawrence reports from Baghdad.
QUIL LAWRENCE: The list of barred candidates drafted by the Accountability and Justice Committee began as rumor. At first only 17 names leaked to the public, including prominent Sunni Arabs. Concerns spread across Sunni Iraq that Shiites in government were trying to cut them out of the race. The full list of banned candidates trickled out in the local press this week in a confusing array of full family names that even Iraqis have trouble deciphering.
With details still emerging, high-level Iraqi officials have tried to assure the public that this is not a crisis and not an attack on Sunnis. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
President JALAL TALABANI (Iraq): It will not be a main crisis, but it is a little bit exaggerated. There are also Sunni Arabs participating in the election.
LAWRENCE: Talabani has asked the Iraq Supreme Court to rule on whether the committee's actions are even legal. The original de-Baathification committee was created in 2003 by the American occupational authority. Its goal was to separate the real marshals of Saddam Hussein's repressive state from the hundreds of thousands who had joined the party under duress.
The committee was renamed two years ago, but parliament never got around to selecting new officers. So the chairman stayed in place: Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi is a former CIA asset and a primary source of the faulty information that led the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
Nowadays he's seen to be closer to America's main rival in the region: Iran. According to U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, Iran may be involved in creating this latest crisis. But Hill says the full list includes Shiites as well as Sunnis.
Ambassador CHRIS HILL (Iraq): The list is not just a list of Sunnis, it's a list of people who are alleged to have been involved with the Baath party. And so there are both Shiite and Sunni on the list. The problem will be if there's not adequate transparency, certainly there are some Sunni groups who feel this may be targeted at them.
LAWRENCE: That lack of transparency has led to uncertainty and unease among Iraqi citizens and politicians alike. Omar Mashhadani is a Sunni politician. He says that the de-Baathification committee is abusing its power.
Mr. OMAR MASHHADANI (Sunni politician, Iraq): I believe that it is in their authority, but they use it in political way in very crucial time just very few weeks before the election. I don't believe that they are honest to deal with this.
LAWRENCE: Mashhadani claims that Iran is pushing the committee to cut out certain politicians specifically Saleh al-Mutlak, a leading member of a secular coalition that has presented a challenge to the two largest Shiite parties. On the other hand, he believes the Americans are overreacting in their scramble to make sure the Iraqi elections go forward.
Mr. MASHHADANI: The American side now is pushing for getting al-Mutlak back. And that's obvious. They are doing that very sharply to get him back into the election in any legal or illegal way.
LAWRENCE: Ambassador Hill categorically denied pushing for anything but a credible election. But the U.S. is walking a fine line between offering advice and giving the perception of meddling. Washington sent Vice President Biden to Baghdad in hopes of a middle path.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has tentatively endorsed the list of disqualifications, but has urged that the public wait for an appeals process to be completed. So far the net result may be more disillusionment with politics.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
(Soundbite of vehicles)
(Soundbite of bell)
LAWRENCE: Just outside the gates of the parliament at Baghdad's famous Haider Double falafel restaurant, Ali Ahmad, a 21-year-old waiter says, it's hard to trust anyone in politics.
Mr. ALI AHMAD: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: I'm sure the elections will go ahead, he says, but how do we tell the honorable people from the thieves and liars?
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Baghdad.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
When the earthquake hit Haiti last week, more than 40,000 Americans were living there. Many of them are Haitian-Americans, including some who retired in the country of their birth.
NPR's Corey Flintoff has the story of one such man he encountered in a wrecked hillside slum.
COREY FLINTOFF: People gather when you do interviews on the street, especially people in deep distress like the ones who surround us in the ruined district called Carrefour-Feuilles. One man is insistent, he is speaking through an interpreter.
Unidentified Man: Things can be very important. There is an American lying here, he's very sick. They call for American people to come in, and he would like to go. He's so sick, but they cannot help him.
FLINTOFF: The man leads the way through a courtyard jammed with people who have lost their homes. The American proves to be an aged man lying on a mattress, half naked under a thin blanket. A plastic tube trails out from under the blanket, emptying into a urine-spattered bucket. He's hard of hearing, confused and irritated by the crowd around him. In response to shouted questions from an interpreter, he says his name was Yves Malbranche.
Mr. YVES MALBRANCHE: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: He is 86 and frail, but when asked where he comes from, he speaks up.
Mr. MALBRANCHE: Belmont Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, senior citizen.
FLINTOFF: Belmont Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, senior citizen. American citizen, too, though he says his passport has expired and he somehow never got around to renewing it. He says proudly that he has his Medicare and Social Security cards. Mr. Malbranche says he moved back to Haiti in 2004 to live with a brother who has since died of cancer.
Ms. MARIE-CARMEL BARTELME: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: A neighbor, Marie-Carmel Bartelme, says that she is helping to take care of him. He has a nephew in the U.S. who helped to arrange for his medical care in the past, but since the earthquake, no one has been able to contact him.
Ms. BARTELME: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Marie-Carmel says Mr. Malbranche is sleeping outside because his house is damaged and too dangerous to stay in. It's noisy, crowded and dirty in the courtyard.
Mr. MALBRANCHE: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Annoyed, Mr. Malbranche shoos away a crowd of curious children.
Mr. MALBRANCHE: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: He says he regrets the decision to come back to his homeland and only wants one thing.
Mr. MALBRANCHE: (Through translator) I wanted to go back to the United States.
FLINTOFF: Yves Malbranche, old and ill, lying outside a house he can't use, in a ruined, chaotic city, a senior citizen, an American citizen, and he wants to go home.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
A meteorite crashed through the roof of a doctor's office in Virginia earlier this week. No one was hurt. Still, it's a reminder of the space rocks that bombard our planet. They are usually really tiny. A few years ago, Congress told NASA to conduct a search for the big ones that might cause serious damage if they hit Earth.
But as we hear from NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce, a new report says there is no way NASA will meet its deadline.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Congress wants NASA to be looking for icy comets and rocky asteroids close to earth that are bigger than about 450 feet across -bigger than, say, a football field. NASA is supposed to find 90 percent of them by the year 2020, but here is the problem.
Professor MICHAEL A'HEARN (University of Maryland): No matter what we do, it's now too late to meet the 2020 deadline that Congress set four or five years ago.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Michael A'Hearn is an expert on comets and asteroids at the University of Maryland. He served on a National Research Council committee that's just put out a new report called, Defending Planet Earth. He says Congress didn't give NASA any special funding for the search, and the agency didn't ask for any.
Prof. A'HEARN: If you've set a deadline and then don't fund it, it's not going to happen.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says NASA could finish the job close to the deadline if it built and launched a new space telescope. Or, it could construct a new ground-based telescope and reach the goal by 2030. But either way, this would cost money.
Prof. A'HEARN: You're talking about a billion dollars over 20 years. That's $50 million a year.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Far more than the $4 million a year that NASA currently spends. He says how much the government wants to devote to these searches is fundamentally a political decision. A huge impact that could wipe out humanity comes along only once in a hundred million years. But a strike that could potentially flatten, say, a city might occur as often as once every few centuries. A NASA official said the agency has just received the new report and it will take a couple of months to study it and respond to the committee.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
The words are repeated multiple times today by President Obama: I won't stop fighting. He was on a trip to Ohio to talk about jobs and the economy. His trip capped off a nightmare week for the White House and for Democrats. The loss of one Senate seat from Massachusetts has thrown the president's top priorities into disarray. In a moment, we'll dissect the damage with our regular political commentators.
First, NPR's Don Gonyea reports on the president's visit to the town of Elyria.
DON GONYEA: Northeast Ohio has seen steel and other manufacturing jobs disappear and the president came here to answer those who say he's not done enough for working people in his first year in office.
President BARACK OBAMA: If you ask the average person, what was the Recovery Act, the stimulus package, they'd say, the bank bailout. So let me just be clear here: The Recovery Act was cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families 15 different tax cuts for working families, seven different tax cuts for small businesses so they can start up and grow and hire.
GONYEA: The president said he's not given up on overhauling health care. He cited his proposals this week to put tough new restrictions on banking practices, and noted that he's accused of interfering with banks.
Pres. OBAMA: No, I just want to have some rules in place so that when these guys make dumb decisions, you don't end up having to foot the bill.
GONYEA: The president took questions from the audience. One came from a woman who owns a truck driving school that's hurting.
Unidentified Woman: In the past few months, we've had a number of people on a daily basis coming into our school that's unemployed, but there are no training funds for truck driver training. And I want to know why that has changed.
GONYEA: The president said he couldn't specifically address her situation, though he said the stimulus package does contain retraining money. Then he used the moment to take on another common criticism of his administration.
Pres. OBAMA: You know, Obama is just trying to perpetrate big government. What big government exactly have we been trying to perpetrate here? We're trying to fund those guys who want to go to truck driving school. We want to make sure that they've got some money to get trained for a job in the private sector.
GONYEA: The president always tells his audiences he enjoys getting out of Washington. This week, he seemed genuinely thrilled to get back to the scenes and themes of his campaign days.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, the White House.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
It's not been a good week for the president or for Democrats for that matter. And we have a lot to discuss with our regular political commentators: E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Welcome both of you.
Mr. E.J. DIONNE (Columnist, The Washington Post): Good to be with you.
Mr. DAVID BROOKS (Columnist, The New York Times): Good to be with you.
BRAND: Well we just heard from President Obama in Ohio. He sounded, I thought, a little bit defensive. He focused on the economy in a real-people kind way. And David, are we seeing the White House trying to come out as a populist now, as re-embracing this populist tone?
Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. He's dropping the Gs again - Truck drivin' school. He's gone from Mr. Reinhold Niebuhr to Huey Long based on one election. I don't think it's a particularly good tactic on two levels. One, it's not genuine. He's not a genuine populist. He's a thoughtful articulate guy who went to Harvard Law School. I just generally don't think politicians should fake it. And he's trying to fake it. Second, I don't think he's at any point since the Massachusetts election said I hear you. I understand that maybe we misread the country, maybe we need to adjust. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California did a big readjustment and it paid off. Bill Clinton did a big readjustment and it paid off. He has, I think, dodged around a lot of the complaints that people had in Massachusetts and people frankly have around the country, which is they have an intense distrust of Washington. And he has done everything in the year to magnify that distrust.
BRAND: However, a lot of people were saying after the Massachusetts election that this was a referendum on populist anger.
Mr. DIONNE: You know, a lot depends on how you asses what happened in Massachusetts and how big you think it is. I mean, first it's got to be said, Scott Brown ran a great campaign, Martha Coakley's campaign was flawed. The national party was asleep. That's all true and they've really got to fix their political operation. But I think the larger message is that if you look at Barack Obama in 2008, he excited progressive voters and won over the middle. What you saw in Massachusetts is that progressive voters were dispirited and he was losing the middle.
And he's not going to solve his problem unless he fixes both ends of that equation. And David may argue that he is not a populist politician at heart and I agree that temperamentally he is much more policy guy and an intellectual than a populist politician. But the policies he is in favor of, especially now, when he started making adjustments before Massachusetts, are populist in the sense that they tip against the very wealthy in the society and toward other people and he's finally making that clear.
Before he looked too close to Wall Street, he is fixing that. The health care bill stood - sat around forever and started looking to people like a bottle of curdled milk and that was a major mistake. I think they've got to pass that and get it out of the way. And he suffered from the contradictions - and here's where that word fight comes in. He was saying, I'm going to do a lot of big things and I'm going to work with the Republicans. Well, guess what? The Republicans are against a lot of what he wants to do. And if he wants to get things done, he is going to have to pick some fights and so I think that word fight you're going to hear a lot between now and next November.
BRAND: And yet you have a column this week, E.J., where you say that the Senate race exposes the contradictions of Obamaism. What do you mean by that?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, just what I said in terms of this promise of, you know, I'm going to work with everybody and I am going to fight for these big changes. And that couldn't - you know, I think they stuck so long to a bipartisan message that the Republicans were making hay with these middle-of-the-road independent voters without hearing a coherent narrative from Obama about how he was changing things. If you really want big change, you've got to make a consistent argument the way Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan hit a real bad patch in an economic downturn. Yet he made a consistent argument against the failed liberal policies of the past as he saw those. You have not heard that from Obama. I expect in the next ten months to Election Day you will.
BRAND: And David, I imagine that you disagree. You have a column today where you say that Obama is hubris defeated caution.
Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. I mean, this is a country that has an intense distrust of government almost at historic levels. And I think they thought Barack Obama would transform Washington, get rid of the silly, you know, deals and the things that go on. And instead, he has done those sort of deals with pharmaceutical companies and unions and key senators. He's involved in a health care plan which concentrates enormous amounts of power in Washington. The health care plan was the single biggest issue on voters' minds according to the final polls in Massachusetts.
It's tremendously unpopular with the country. If you average the latest polls, 40 percent or so say it's - they support it, 51-52 percent say they oppose it. So, this has become an albatross. And I have to say just hanging around Capitol Hill in the last few days since Massachusetts, after the vote, I thought well, maybe there's a 55 percent chance health care goes down completely. Now, having spent time on Capitol Hill, I have to say I have to think it's a 75 percent or 80 percent chance that nothing at all happens. I personally don't think that's a good deal, but that's the mood, that's the reaction among the political class to what's happening in the country.
BRAND: And E.J., what do you think that the president should do about that, given that grim reality?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, I think there is slightly - I would put the odds slightly better at getting health care done. There are some ideas around about how the Senate and the House can figure out a way to pass it. I think it's a political risk to pass it because of its unpopularity now, but I think the risk of not passing it is greater. Both Houses voted for it. Either you believe in this thing or you don't. And I think Democrats will looks feckless if they invest a whole year in this and don't get it passed, don't get something substantial passed.
There's one other reason, by the way, why I think a populist message is going to start to resonate and that is this truly outrageous Supreme Court decision this week that essentially opened the floodgates to corporate money, ripping though precedents of 30 years and really about 100 years of practice. You know, I was reminded this week that Justice Roberts talked about how a judge is like an umpire calling the balls and strikes. In this case of judicial activism, what you had is a conservative group of umpires canceling the game and just making up the score themselves. And I think this issue, it's a first-time campaign finance issues are going to have a real substantive base.
BRAND: And David, do you agree?
Mr. BROOKS: First on the health care, I think the country is saying, listen to us, listen to us, respect us. I think if the Democrats don't show any sign of listening and they just push through this bill, they are courting a disaster. On the campaign finance decision, I actually thinks it's a very bad decision for the country, one. But I don't think it's essentially going to be too bad for the Democrats. What do corporations want from government? They want subsidies and they want to block competition. Both parties seem to like to do that when they get donations.
BRAND: All right. We'll have to leave it there. Thank you both for joining us. Our weekly political commentators, David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post.
Mr. DIONNE: Thank you.
Mr. BROOKS: Thank you.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Among those thinking ahead to the future of Haiti is William O'Neill. He's a human rights lawyer and an adviser to the United Nations. He visited Haiti in December, just before the earthquake. He thinks the disaster could open up some opportunities.
Mr. WILLIAM O'NEILL (Human Rights Lawyer; Adviser, United Nations): What we're seeing right now is a fairly significant exodus from Port-au-Prince, which I think is a good thing. Port-au-Prince was extremely overcrowded; 10 times as many people there as it was meant to ever accommodate. So I think if many of these people end up able to stay in the countryside - reestablish and have meaningful lives out in the countryside - that will also ease, in a way, some of the challenges facing Port-au-Prince.
BRAND: But if they are in the countryside, that means they will have to have jobs in the countryside. And isn't that the reason why they went to Port-au-Prince in the first place, is they had no work?
Mr. O'NEILL: Yes, and that is also going to be a major component, I hope, of Haiti's reconstruction. In a way, it's - all of us should really be thinking about reimagining Haiti. Obviously, that's first of all up to the Haitians. But Haiti, until quite recently, was overwhelmingly an agricultural country, where people lived off the land, farmed and were able to survive - more than survive - and do reasonably well.
It's only in the last 30, 40 years, partly under - because of policies by Duvalier - father and son - that really made the rural life almost impossible, and a focus on the city and especially Port-au-Prince so that development aid -everyone focused on - people call it the Republic of Port-au-Prince. So much focus and emphasis and money and attention was put into Port-au-Prince and the countryside really literally withered away.
I think it's a time for everyone to reconsider: How can you reconstitute the Haitian countryside, make it a viable place where people do have options and choices? All of that is going to have to be part of this, as I'm saying, a reimagining of Haiti.
BRAND: And who will do that reimagining and who will lead the reconstruction efforts on that level?
Mr. O'NEILL: Ideally, you want to have the Haitian state take the lead. And I think there are some remnants in some of the ministries that will be able to do this. But to be honest, I mean we can't have wishful thinking here, they will need an enormous amount of help. And I don't just mean money and resources, but they will need intellectual help, expertise, skills. It can come from within Haiti.
There's extremely talented and educated folks in Haiti willing to pitch in. They've largely been marginalized by all kinds of politics and elite control of the economy, again, for all of these decades. And I hope that's something that, in a way, this earthquake may have unblocked.
And two, you have the Haitian diaspora: a large, highly educated talented group of people outside Haiti that have garnered many of the skills that will be necessary to help the country rebuild. And then clearly the international community and here, the U.S., has to play a leading, major role in all of this. I think that we can't pretend that Haiti can do this by themselves, not after such a disaster.
BRAND: You're describing something that is actually what it appears to be is an absolute reimagining of a society, of a country from the bottom up. I mean, just starting over almost.
Do you think that Haiti is capable of doing that?
Mr. O'NEILL: I think not only is it capable, but I think many, many Haitians want it. You're already hearing - I'm listening to some of the radio stations that are able to function in Port-au-Prince over the Internet - and you're already hearing people calling in saying: This did not work. This country was broken and damaged. And now is a chance, in a way, to fix it.
BRAND: Are you optimistic that this can happen this time when it obviously hasn't happened in the past?
Mr. O'NEILL: I'm thinking this is a disaster on such a scale that has created such destruction in Haiti, that in a way maybe it has literally cleared the way for the kind of new, novel, revolutionary approaches to Haiti that it might really work this time, and the unprecedented attention and support from outside.
I think it's vitally important that we have both President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, both of them deeply involved with Haiti for many years, in such key positions both internationally and in the U.S. government. And then you have, I think, the dynamism and talents of Haitians themselves, as I said both inside and outside the country, that really, I think, finally want to get their country to a place where they think it belongs after 206 years, frankly, of mostly disaster.
BRAND: William O'Neill is a lawyer specializing in humanitarian, human rights and refugee law. He advises the United Nations on conflict prevention.
Thank you very much.
Mr. O'NEILL: Thank you.
BRAND: And we have more coverage of Haiti elsewhere in the program. Also at NPR.org, you can see pictures taken by our photographers in Haiti, and you can find more news about rescue and relief efforts.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
If President Obama had his way, the Guantanamo Bay Prison would be closed by now. A year ago, he signed an executive order to empty the prison. The administration did not meet that deadline but now, it's taken another step towards that goal. A task force has been reviewing each detainee's file, and now it has recommendations about where each prisoner should go.
NPR's Ari Shapiro reports.
ARI SHAPIRO: The task force included people from agencies across the federal government: State, Justice, the Pentagon, Homeland Security and more.
First, the team took months assembling a file for each detainee. Those records were scattered in various departments during the last administration. Then the team went through the files one by one, deciding whether each prisoner was best suited for trial, release or indefinite detention. Now, an administration official says the task force is done.
With almost 200 men left at Guantanamo, here's how the numbers break down: About 110 are designated for transfer to their home countries or another country. Another 35 or so will be put on trial in either military or civilian court, and about 50 detainees will be held indefinitely without trial - most likely at a federal prison in Illinois.
Mr.�VIJAY PADMANABHAN (Cardozo Law School): It's fantastic that the government, after this many years, has finally completed the task of categorizing individuals into these three categories.
SHAPIRO: Vijay Padmanabhan of Cardozo Law School worked on detainee issues at the State Department under President Bush.
Mr.�PADMANABHAN: I know that when the Bush administration was looking at this issue, we - for a long time - had the problem of not having a clear handle on how many individuals fell into which particular category.
SHAPIRO: But putting the detainees in categories does not mean Guantanamo will close right away. Some Yemeni detainees, for example, are cleared to be sent home, but the Obama administration has suspended transfers to Yemen because the country is too unstable. Republicans in Congress plan to fight the administration's efforts to bring detainees to the United States for civilian trials. And in what may be the most controversial category, human rights groups are challenging the administration's plans to hold detainees indefinitely.
Mr.�JAMEEL JAFFER (Director, National Security Project, American Civil Liberties Union): If we keep the policy of indefinite detention in place, then closing Guantanamo, I think, is purely cosmetic.
SHAPIRO: Jameel Jaffer runs the ACLU's National Security Project.
Mr.�JAFFER: We have never had this kind of indefinite detention without charge or trial on U.S. soil. This is something that's entirely new, and that's the proposal.
SHAPIRO: The United States has held enemies without trial during a war before, but this is not a typical war. Glenn Sulmasy of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy is author of the book "The National Security Court System."
Mr. GLENN SULMASY (Author, "The National Security Court System): The problem with the law of war analysis in this area is that normally, you hold someone in a law of war position until cessation of hostilities, until the war ends. In this case, in this war against al-Qaida, it's a generational war or longer, and that means we're essentially having these folks held until they die.
SHAPIRO: The administration wants a judge to occasionally check in on those men to make sure they're still dangerous. Attorney General Eric Holder sketched the rough outline of a plan at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last June.
Mr. ERIC HOLDER (Attorney General, Obama Administration): The thought we had was that it would be some kind of review with regard to the initial determination, and then a periodic review with regard to whether or not that person should be continued - to be detained.
SHAPIRO: So far, the administration has not provided much more detail than that. Setting up that system is just one more item on the president's closing Guantanamo to-do list.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand. The Sundance Film Festival kicked off last night, and it could not have come at a worse time for independent film. It seems harder than ever to get small films made and harder still to get them into theaters. Most of the major studios have closed their indie divisions, and the recession has all but dried up financing for these films.
Many of the ones that do make it, they debut at Sundance. And we're joined now by John Cooper. He's the new director of the Sundance Film Festival. He joins us from Park City, Utah. Welcome to the program.
Mr.�JOHN COOPER (Director, Sundance Film Festival): Hey, thank you.
BRAND: Is it really that bad out there for people who make indie films?
Mr.�COOPER: You know, you'd think it was. With that intro, I started to get depressed for a second, but actually not. I think it's actually a very optimistic time for independent film. We did go through, you know, not without our bumps and bruises right now, but if you look at our submission numbers this year - those are the people that, you know, submitted films that weren't made under the studio system - it was actually the same amount of films this year and even more, especially in the shorts categories. So it's not a bad time for creativity. It's just a bad time for all the ways you connect with an audience.
BRAND: In other words getting them seen.
Mr.�COOPER: Right, and those old traditional methods of getting films seen are changing daily.
BRAND: What are the options, then, for independent filmmakers because as we've said, many film studios have shut down their independent divisions, and there's not a lot of financing out there during this recession. So what are their options?
Mr.�COOPER: Yeah, that's true. Financing is difficult. What a lot of filmmakers are doing are going lower budget. They're using technology in their favor in the way they're going to put out their films.
BRAND: So distributing online, that kind of thing?
Mr.�COOPER: Yep, online, marketing online in particular. What kind of I think killed a lot of the independent industry, as we call it, was really that marketing dollars and how much it takes to reach an audience, and that's all it's all up for grabs right now. It's all changing rapidly.
We have many films at our festival that are actually using the festival platform as a leaping-off point to actually launch their films into the marketplace. They're not waiting to be picked up and then many months later make it into theaters. A lot of them are just jumping right into the direct-to-audience technology platforms.
BRAND: Tell us some of your favorites that you've seen at the festival this year.
Mr.�COOPER: You know, I don't like to talk, like, in those terms so much because, you know, it's kind of like they're all my children at this point. Let's talk about interesting films. How about that?
BRAND: Okay.
Mr.�COOPER: We have a film "Holy Rollers," which is about Hasidic Jews who deal ecstasy out of Amsterdam, which is sort of a fascinating story. We have...
BRAND: Is this a documentary or a feature film?
Mr.�COOPER: No, that's a fictioned(ph) film.
BRAND: Okay.
Mr.�COOPER: We have "The Company Men," which is premiering tonight, which is about downsizing company and these three sort of powerful men in this company that find themselves, you know, out of work and what that does to their masculinity. That's with Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones.
There's some wonderful documentaries, of course. Documentaries are a big part of who we are, everything from "Restrepo," which is about Afghanistan and being with a unit on a hilltop in Afghanistan that takes hits every single day, "A Small Act," which is a beautiful film of how one woman's donation to this fund changed this person's life who went on to change many, many other people's lives in Kenya. It just goes on.
BRAND: You're a brand new director of the Sundance Film Festival, the first new one in 20 years. How are you going to change it?
Mr.�COOPER: Yeah, that's sort of true, and it sort of isn't. I've actually worked for the film festival for 20 years.
BRAND: Oh, okay.
Mr.�COOPER: So I like to say, you know, whatever was wrong with the festival, I'm both I also might be the blame. So I went back to the drawing board a little bit, and I wanted to talk to our stakeholders, and that's the fans that come to the festival. And I also listened a lot. I listened a lot to the filmmakers, the filmmaking community.
We added this new section called Next, which is for no- and low-budget filmmaking. That was new. We changed our opening night up to make it a little less formal, and we launched right into our competition last night, which is was very exciting.
And we're doing a new program, which is Sundance Film Festival USA, where we're taking eight films that are premiering at the festival and taking them out to eight cities across America. That was designed to plant a stake in the ground and a place to really talk about the notion of film in our culture and what it means in our society to have art in general in our society. It's something that we're grossly neglecting in our national dialogue.
BRAND: John Cooper is the director of the Sundance Film Festival, which lasts until next Sunday. Thank you very much.
Mr.�COOPER: Thank you.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
Food and shelter are critical needs in Haiti right now. In a moment, the challenges of delivering millions of meals. We'll talk with the woman in charge of the U.N. World Food Program. First, the problem of shelter. An estimated 1.5 million people are homeless after last week's earthquake. Some of them have left the capital on their own. Now the Haitian government plans to move hundreds of thousands more out of Port-au-Prince.
As NPR's Jason Beaubien reports, areas are being prepped to become huge homeless camps.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Brazilian soldiers today were leveling an area northeast of Port-au-Prince that they hope will hold 30,000 people by this weekend. But with only two bulldozers the task appears daunting, if not overly optimistic. Haitian officials say they're moving forward on a plan to erect tent cities on the periphery of the capital that could hold almost a half a million people.
Ms. MARIE LAURENCE JOCELYN-LASSEGUE (Minister of Communication, Haiti): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Marie Laurence Jocelyn-Lassegue is the Haitian minister of communication. She says Haiti doesn't have enough tents right now and they're waiting for international donors to send more. The press conference was held under a mango tree in a police station by the airport. Haitian President Rene Preval's government has temporarily set up shop here after most government buildings were destroyed.
Ms. JOCELYN-LASSEGUE: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: We don't really know how many people we can accommodate, Jocelyn-Lassegue says. But we're going to try to have tents that can sleep 5 to 10 people so families can stay together.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Before dawn, U.N. troops from Brazil started handing out water and food in front of the collapsed national palace. By 8:30 this morning, some 4,000 people were standing in a line that stretched for blocks. At first the Brazilians were giving each person a bottle of water and a small grocery bag of food including tuna fish or canned meat. As their stocks dwindled, Linx Rafael(ph) only got a bottle of water and a small packet of World Food Program biscuits.
Mr. LINX RAFAEL: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: They make us think they're going to give us milk, Rafael says. We are hungry. There's a lot of our family dead. But we are not going to give up because we are Haitians. Rafael says he'd jump at the chance to move out of the park where he's been sleeping with hundreds of other people since the quake.
Mr. RAFAEL: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Going to a camp is not a problem for me, Rafael says. The night is cold here. I'm sick. Sleeping out here is not good for my health. But some of the other young men around him grow suspicious when I say that this is a plan by the Haitian government. If the Haitian government is running the camps, they say, they'll leave us out there to die.
Even government officials acknowledge that the camps will be run by some international organization, although it's still unclear who that will be. Matt Marek, the country representative for the American Red Cross in Haiti says people are going to be displaced for years.
Mr. MATT MAREK (Representative, American Red Cross): There's just no way around it. People are going to have to live in camps.
BEAUBIEN: Marek says the camps will not be ideal for many people, but they will be better than having hundreds of thousands of people living amid the wreckage without access to food, water, toilets or shelter. He says the international community needs to come up quickly with a plan for well-managed camps until...
Mr. MAREK: The town can be rebuilt, until the city can be rebuilt, until, you know, we can take a serious look at how individuals are going to, you know, be able to build back better their homes.
BEAUBIEN: Even as construction crews start clearing space for tent cities, details of the camp plan are sketchy. Officials say what's eminently clear is that the hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims currently sleeping outside here cannot stay on the streets.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
As tens of thousands of Haitians settle in tent camps for the foreseeable future, relief agencies are figuring out how to deliver services to them. The U.N.'s World Food Program is the lead agency for supplying food in Haiti. Josette Sheeran is the executive director and she joins me from Port-au-Prince. Your organization says it's delivered more than four million meals to some 250,000 people. And that sounds like a lot of food, but still not enough. What's your plan for the coming weeks and months?
Ms. JOSETTE SHEERAN (Executive Director, United Nations World Food Program): Well, we're going to need to scale up in a huge way and continue to do so. We know that the breakdown in the supply chain system here is enormous. There wasn't a great infrastructure to start with, but everything has been devastated. It's like a war zone. So I've been through the city looking at distribution points, looking at pipeline points, looking at the port, looking at the airport and how things can flow in. And there's a total devastation to the supply chain. So we're worried not only about those affected by the earthquake but also as a food importing nation, the flow of food to the general population.
BRAND: You say you've been around the country looking at the supply chain. What are the major problems? Where are the weakest links?
Ms. SHEERAN: In Port-au-Prince alone I tried we drove two kilometers. It took two hours to do so today. So, as we were driving, a house collapsed right in front of us and poured rocks onto the street. None of the buildings are stable. None of the infrastructure is stable here in the city and just passing through roads can be an enormous task.
BRAND: What about airdrops?
Ms. SHEERAN: Well, you can't airdrop into a city. We've been using helicopter swing drops outside of Port-au-Prince and to some of the more remote areas. This can be very efficient and effective. And we can go right from airplane cargo directly out to these towns. But in the city we cannot bring helicopters close in. Usually you can't anyway, but especially with the instability of the buildings.
BRAND: Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are now fleeing Port-au-Prince for the countryside. Is that going to make it more difficult for you to deliver aid to them?
Ms. SHEERAN: Well, we're certainly changing our distribution patterns to try to keep up with the needs of people who are moving. Just to give you a sense of this, 90 percent of the World Food Program staff is homeless. People are sleeping on the streets and then coming in and working. We distributed to 30,000 people on the second day and those distributors were people with no home, who had lost their children and family and loved ones. And so there's a lack of shelter here. Even the World Food Program headquarters yesterday with the tremors cracked over and sustained much further damage.
BRAND: I understand that you met today with Haiti's president, Rene Preval. Did you get the sense that he is able to meet these challenges, willing to meet these challenges?
Ms. SHEERAN: Well, I met with the prime minister and the president in their morning staff meeting which was held in a courtyard because they don't have a building or a meeting room large enough to hold a meeting with all the key actors bringing in assistance here. But I will tell you that I saw very strong resolve and determination and we're discussing major food operations with them. I found them both very engaged and determined to stay ahead of the humanitarian needs there.
BRAND: There has been a lot of criticism. I'm sure you've heard over how slow and, at times, chaotic the distribution of food aid has been. Obviously the World Food Program is no stranger to working in disaster areas. Why did it seem to be so chaotic this time in Haiti?
Ms. SHEERAN: Well, just think about this. So, what happened in the earthquake is hundreds upon thousands of buildings down and roads blocked. Not only that, the food supply systems were cut off, including most of the markets and other things. I went to the market today completely buried. You have to bring food in from somewhere. It has to come in from overseas. So we've been bringing food in and that pipeline has to prime up. So I think the logistics of this have just been a nightmare. We've handed bigger numbers. In Darfur every day we need to reach up to four million people with food, for example.
But it may be our most complex in the total loan out of the supply chain system and needing to recreate that from scratch. And I will just point out I'm living in a tent. We're all living in tents. We didn't until two days ago have functional phone systems. And we're doing all of our planning under a tree because we don't have offices here. Trying to operate as best we can.
BRAND: Josette Sheeran is the executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program. She spoke to us from Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Thank you very much.
Ms. SHEERAN: Bye-bye.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Here in Southern California we've gotten about a year's worth of rain just this week, plus the storms have brought tornados, heavy snow and mudslides. And it's not over yet, as NPR's Ina Jaffe reports.
INA JAFFE: The only thing predictable about the series of storms this week is that they'd be bad in different ways in different places. There were tornados north of L.A. To the south along the coast, there were water spouts. Mountain roads have been closed due to heavy snow. More than 1,000 households in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were ordered to evacuate because of the possibility of mudslides. And this afternoon, hail pounded down on NPR West. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said today that states of emergency had been declared for six counties.
Governor ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (California): We'll do everything that we can in a joint effort in order to help the people, to protect the properties and to protect lives. That's the bottom line here.
JAFFE: Authorities have now lifted evacuation orders for almost all L.A. County foothill residents. As it turned out, only about half actually complied with the orders. That may have been partly due to evacuation fatigue. These same people had to get out last fall during the massive station fire that incinerated the mountains above their homes. One couple told Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that they were prepared to leave quickly if conditions deteriorated.
Mayor ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA (Los Angeles): They had their car on and they were ready to leave, they said. But once that mudslide or the water breaks, their car is not going to be able to move fast enough, nor are they.
JAFFE: The foothill communities appeared to have dodged a bullet, says Sue Cannon, a mudslide expert with the United States Geological Service.
Ms. SUE CANNON (Mudslide Expert, United States Geological Service): Especially on Wednesday, the storm for Wednesday was forecast to be the big one. And we watched it move in on the radar and it sort of split and went around the burned area.
JAFFE: Another reason that the foothill stayed safe was because of a system of basins put in across the mountains back in the 1930s. Cannon says they filled up with stuff that otherwise might have been coursing through street and homes.
Ms. CANNON: Boulders, trees, tree trunks.
JAFFE: But the winter has a long way to go. L.A. County Sheriff's Department Chief Neal Tyler says people who live below the burn area shouldn't get complacent.
Chief NEAL TYLER (L.A. County Sheriff's Department): My message to anybody who feels that merely because they didn't see a massive disaster this time means they don't need to leave next time is that it's very shortsighted and dangerous.
JAFFE: This week's storms caused no end of worry and complaint, but not for everyone.
Mr. DAVID FREEMAN (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power): This - like mana from heaven.
JAFFE: Says David Freeman, acting head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. California is been in a drought, but this week's storms only brought L.A.'s rainfall up to about average. So, Freeman isn't celebrating.
Mr. FREEMAN: No matter how much it rains and how much it snows, we are still in a tight water situation.
JAFFE: After this week though, it's hard to imagine that Los Angeles could be short of water.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
People who closely watch the White House and its policies say something changed yesterday. President Obama proposed new rules to curb the growth of banks.
And as NPR's John Ydstie reports, that signals the reemergence of a legendary financial thinker as a major player in White House policy.
JOHN YDSTIE: Eighty-two-year-old Paul Volcker is a hard man to ignore. He's six feet seven inches tall, has a big voice and is the closest thing to a superhero in the world of economics. As Federal Reserve chairman back in the early 1980s, Volcker grabbed a dangerous inflation dragon by the throat and strangled it.
But after naming Volcker the chairman of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board more than a year ago, President Obama seemed to have tuned him out for most of the past year. That is until the president announced his new bank reforms yesterday.
President BARACK OBAMA: I'm proposing a simple and common sense reform, which we're calling the Volcker rule after this tall guy behind me. Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds or...
YDSTIE: Volcker had been advocating restrictions on risky bank behavior in speeches, interviews and testimony for much of the past year, including in this appearance late in September before the House Financial Services Committee.
Mr. PAUL VOLCKER (Chairman, Economic Recovery Advisory Board): I would prohibit them from sponsoring and capitalizing hedge funds, private equity funds and I would have particularly strict supervision enforced by capital and collateral requirements toward proprietary trading in securities and derivatives.
YDSTIE: But the White House point person on regulatory reform, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, seemed to have a different view. During a September 10th visit to Capitol Hill, he said proprietary trading by banks wasn't a big factor in the recent financial crisis. Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, now at the Peterson Institute, believes Volcker's reemergence is significant.
Mr. SIMON JOHNSON (Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics): This is a dramatic change in policy away from the Geithner approach, which has been followed over the past year, which is primarily being very nice to banks, towards the Volcker approach, which is being tough, but I think very fair and completely reasonable.
YDSTIE: Some skeptics dismissed the administration's new proposal as politically calculated bank bashing. Indeed it was announced as Goldman Sachs, a bank that received billions in government support reported record profits and huge bonuses. And it came a day after a populist backlash in Massachusetts handed Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Republican. Nonetheless, Simon Johnson thinks the administration's move could shift the debate and reinvigorate a bogged down financial reform effort in Congress.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
In a Wichita courtroom today, prosecutors began laying out a violent narrative of the murder of George Tiller. He was a Kansas doctor who performed abortions. And we should warn you, parts of this story may be upsetting to some of you. Today was the first day of testimony in the trial of the man accused of shooting Dr. Tiller. Scott Roeder has admitted to killing George Tiller at his church. He says he did it to protect unborn children.
NPR's Kathy Lohr reports from Wichita.
KATHY LOHR: District Attorney Nola Foulston began the state's murder case, listing evidence she says jurors will hear about the warm, spring day when George Tiller was gunned down at his church last May. Foulston says several eyewitnesses will testify about what they saw and heard.
Ms. NOLA FOULSTON (District Attorney): And unexpectedly, a sound was heard, described by many as like the popping of a balloon.
LOHR: After Tiller fell to the floor, Foulston says two ushers ran after the suspect. Roeder is also charged with threatening them before fleeing in his Ford Taurus. Church members got the car's license plate, which eventually led police to Roeder. Foulston says jurors will see photos and drawings, tapes and surveillance video proving the first degree murder charge.
Ms.�FOULSTON: You will see a pair of black tennis shoes, black tennis shoes that he was wearing that had red spattering on them. We will later learn that the spattering was the blood of George Tiller.
LOHR: Prosecutors never mentioned abortion or anything related to Tiller's clinic where abortions were performed. The defense declined to offer an opening statement. Public defenders can reserve the time to talk to the jury when they begin presenting their case. Roeder doesn't have to put on any evidence at all.
He sat calmly in the courtroom wearing a dark jacket and a light blue shirt, at times scribbling notes on a legal pad. Some legal experts say the defense really had nothing to gain and didn't want to tip their hand about what kind of evidence they may offer. Prosecutors wasted no time opening their case with the 911 call made moments after the shooting.
(Soundbite of 911 call)
Unidentified Woman #1: He's been shot.
Unidentified Woman #2: Ma'am, who was the suspect?
Unidentified Woman #1: I don't know.
Unidentified Woman #2: Do you know?
Unidentified Woman #1: I don't know.
Unidentified Woman #2: (unintelligible)
Unidentified Woman #1: (unintelligible)
Unidentified Woman #2: How old do you think he is?
Unidentified Woman #1: I don't know. I don't know. He turned around, he was half balding.
LOHR: Prosecutors also showed a gruesome photo of Tiller lying on his side in the church entryway. Blood covered his face and a bloody pool surrounded his head. Prosecutors say this is a clear-cut case of premeditated murder, and they say the defense should not be allowed to present evidence that could lead to a lesser, voluntary manslaughter charge.
Judge Warren Wilbert has already ruled that Roeder cannot use a justifiable homicide defense. And today he reiterated that he would not rule out any evidence before he sees what the defense wants to present.
Judge WARREN WILBERT: As the gatekeeper of the evidence, it's my responsibility at the end of trial to determine if there's sufficient evidence to instruct the jury on any lesser included offense of voluntary manslaughter. But to preemptively deal with that matter at this time is premature, inappropriate and would invite error.
LOHR: Groups on both sides of the abortion issue are watching the case closely. And women's health clinics in the area have increased security. The trial is expected to take about two weeks.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Wichita.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
It was late last night in Spokane, Washington when figure skater Sasha Cohen took a big step in her bid to compete in the Winter Olympics for a third time. She is 25 years old now. She placed second in the short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
Our regular sports commentator Stefan Fatsis joins us now to discuss that and other Olympic matters. Hi, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Madeleine.
BRAND: Well, women's figure skating seems to grab the headlines every four years. It's quite popular. This year seems to be no exception with Sasha Cohen, and well, she did pretty well last night for an old lady.
FATSIS: Yes she did. It was really sort of a big - take that - to all of these teenagers that are challenging her and also these doubting fans and reporters who love to create drama in figure skating. And shortly after winning the silver medal in Turin in 2006, Cohen stopped skating competitively. Then she began a comeback, but she had some injuries. She dropped out of events. And she talked very little, which only fed the media machine.
Then last night, she skated a clean, typically graceful performance. The crowd loved it. She's second behind a 16-year-old Mirai Nagasu and just ahead of a 17-year-old Rachael Flatt.
BRAND: So, pretty exciting for people to watch out here on the West Coast, but pretty difficult for you guys out there in the East.
FATSIS: Yeah, it was. Cohen didn't finish skating until around 2 a.m. Eastern Time this morning. And the scheduling was curious, given how much figure skating and Olympics broadcaster, NBC, are banking on Cohen for a competitive and an audience revival.
There just aren't that many stars right now in the sport, so much so that the United States qualified to send just two women instead of three to Vancouver next month. And the spots will be determined tomorrow when Cohen and the others skate their long programs and that will be in primetime on NBC from 9 to 11.
BRAND: Okay, let's talk about the business of the Olympics. NBC recently announced it will lose probably around $200 million on the Olympics. That seems like a pretty staggering figure, $200 million.
FATSIS: Yeah, plain and simple, NBC overbid for these games. They paid $820 million. They made this deal seven years ago. That was $207 million more than it had paid for the Turin games.
Now, NBC anticipated that advertising would continue to grow, the network would turn a profit, as it almost always has on the Olympics. Instead we get a recession, a collapse of some key advertising sectors like autos and finance, consolidation in beer and telecoms.
NBC will show 435 hours of coverage on broadcast and cable, plus another 400 hours online. And that does translate to more sales opportunities, but it can't make up for the decline in the advertising market, and the online sales market just isn't mature enough to make much of a difference.
BRAND: And then there's that little late-night problem. But anyway, you were at the last Winter Olympics and you got to know some of the athletes then. Any of them coming back for the Vancouver games?
FATSIS: Yeah, a bunch of them are. One guy that's coming back that I talked to for a while was Todd Lodwick. He's a Nordic combined skier - that's the ski-jumping and cross-country skiing. And I watched him cry at the end of what was supposed to be his last race after four Olympics. And, well, Lodwick decided to come out of retirement and now he's a favorite to become the first American ever to medal in Nordic combined.
One of my other favorite athletes was a woman named Sarah Konrad. She was 38 years old at the time, the first American to compete in two separate winter events, cross-country skiing and biathlon. She has retired, but she's going to be at the games as a volunteer working with athletes as part of the U.S. delegation.
BRAND: And Stefan, you always hear about how participating in the Olympics is life-changing for the athletes. Is that true?
FATSIS: I think it is. I spoke this morning with a luger named Samantha Retrosi, whom I wrote about in Turin, where she crashed just horribly in front of her terrified parents. Retrosi decided to retire shortly afterward, not because of the crash, but because she wanted to move on with her life.
Most people don't think about how all-consuming it is to be an Olympian. Retrosi was 11 when she started luging. Now she's 24. she's a college junior and aspiring journalist, and she's very clear that being an Olympian has made her more driven, focused and determined and more mature. She said that after you've been an Olympian, it's kind of hard to relate to the concerns of the typical undergraduate.
BRAND: Okay, thank you Stefan.
FATSIS: Thanks, Madeleine.
BRAND: Stefan Fatsis joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports. And we'll have more Olympic stories on next week. Our co-host Melissa Block will be reporting from Lake Placid, New York. Athletes there are competing to represent the U.S. in the Winter Olympics' newest event, it's called the ski cross.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
It's been a topsy-turvy week for a number of assumptions. Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, and now San Francisco is not the gayest city in America. According to the Advocate that's a gay magazine - the gayest city is Atlanta, followed by Burlington, Vermont, Iowa City and Bloomington, Indiana.
Mike Albo wrote the article. He's here now. And all I can say is what?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�MIKE ALBO (Writer): I know, it's kind of crazy, right? Basically we were trying to be a little bit counterintuitive with this article, and we just dumped a bunch of numbers and statistics together and came up with this sort of wacky list of places that are actually more gay than you think.
BRAND: Yeah, a lot more gay than you think. So, what are the statistics that you dumped in?
Mr.�ALBO: We basically took probably the most official one that is actually kind of like the hard numbers, a table of the percentage of gay and lesbian households, coupled households in different areas. That's a census data because there isn't any statistical stuff about single people. And then we added a bunch of, sort of, other statistics like marriage laws.
We gave points to whether there were marriage laws or not, the number of gay politicians and then we added sort of some fun stuff like number of gay bars, number of cruising areas and also number of gay titles on the town's Netflix list.
BRAND: What are gay titles? Like, what, "Mommie Dearest?"
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�ALBO: I think that would probably be considered one. Yeah, you know, those and, you know, maybe "Brokeback Mountain," some other more gay and lesbian titles.
BRAND: Well, Bloomington and fabulousness just doesn't go hand in hand for me. But anyway, what are some of the other cities on your list?
Mr.�ALBO: Other cities: Portland, Maine; Seattle; Asheville, North Carolina; Austin, Texas, which is kind of not surprising. In a lot of ways, these are places that are kind of mimicking what New York and San Francisco were, you know, back in the '70s. They're becoming, kind of, magnet centers for people nearby to go to and maybe feel more comfortable about being out. They just happen to be in smaller towns now.
But I think it does interestingly point out how easy it is now to find how gay and lesbian are more identified these days, how they're sort of more vocal, they're more active in their towns and how it's easier to find numbers, whether they're, you know, Netflix lists or number of gay hook-up profiles online, there's ways to find data more than ever before.
BRAND: What's been the reaction to your article, maybe from people who live in New York, San Francisco, Provincetown?
Mr.�ALBO: Yeah, a lot of people have written in angry that their town isn't on the list. And you know, of course, you know, New York and Provincetown and San Francisco and L.A. are hugely gay places and incredibly fun to be to live there. I live in New York and I love it there. But I just think it's sort of fun that to see how per capita and statistically how some places may have more gay people than you think.
BRAND: So you're doing it per capita. It's not overall gayness.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr.�ALBO: No. Yeah, if you wanted to go there and read the gay aura of a town. I mean, you know, some people, I've noticed on the comment boards some of the people being, like, Bloomington, are you kidding me? It's so boring here. Or, like, Iowa City, there's only one gay bar here.
But then again, you know, what measures gayness? Like, maybe there's one gay bar, but there's a ton of gay couples and a really great cruising spot there, too. Who knows? Who knows what measures gayness, I guess.
BRAND: Mike Albo, his article "Gayest Cities in America" is in the February issue of the Advocate. Thanks, Mike.
Mr.�ALBO: Thank you so much.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
The band Spoon is a bit of a rarity in rock music, both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. But it took more than a decade for Spoon to get there. The band came together in Austin, Texas in 1993, and five years later they signed on with a major label, Elektra.
But in the sea of alternative acts of the day, Spoon wasn't really able to stand out enough - at least for the label - and after one record, Elektra dropped the band. Now, that's usually where the story ends for most rock acts.
(Soundbite of song, "The Underdog")
Mr. BRITT DANIEL (Lead Singer, Spoon): (Singing) You got no fears of the underdog, that's why you will not survive.
RAZ: In Spoon's case, though, they carried on and signed with a smaller label, Merge Records. And by 2000, the band finally started getting some serious attention.
(Soundbite of song, "Take the Fifth")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) But I'll take the fifth, I'll take the fifth, oh.
RAZ: But it still took seven more years before Spoon would land on Billboard's Top 10. And with most of the band members now hovering around the age of 40, Spoon has now become one of the hottest names in music. Their latest record was released on Tuesday. It's called "Transference."
(Soundbite of song, "Written in Reverse")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) And I'm writing in reverse, you know it could be worse. I'm not standing here. I'm not standing here.
RAZ: We sat down with the guys who founded the band - front man Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno. And Daniel told me this record is really a throwback to their early sound.
Mr. DANIEL: I think we were just feeling our way as we went along. And we definitely didn't know how we wanted to make it when we started it. We did something what we end up normally doing - we started recording a couple of songs very early with another producer and then we discarded them. That seems to always happen. And then we recorded a couple with our long-time producer, Mike McCarthy - didn't like the way they were sounding necessarily.
Mr. JIM ENO (Drummer, Spoon): And the other thing is Mike, you know, had a couple other projects, right, and we, you know, wanted to make progress on our record, too. So...
Mr. DANIEL: Yeah, he's a very busy man.
Mr. ENO: Yeah. So, we felt like, you know, we're not going to sit around for three months. We're going to try to make progress on this thing.
Mr. DANIEL: I just remember at one point where we tried to record this one song "Trouble Comes Running" a couple of times and just weren't really getting a spirited take. And nothing was beating this cassette version that we had done in a practice space. When we recorded that, we were just trying to keep track of our progress, you know, learning the song. But we just never got a take as good again.
And I just remembered saying, you know, guys, we should maybe just use that cassette.
(Soundbite of song, "Trouble Comes Running")
RAZ: You guys eventually just produced it on your own. This is the first time you guys have produced one of your albums without a producer. I've read that you wanted this album to be uglier. What did you mean by that?
Mr. DANIEL: When you're working with another producer, you're trying to please two different aesthetics. You know, the band and the producers, and that's a great way to make a record. You can come up with a lot of things that you wouldn't have thought of on your own. But there's another way of making it, which is just to kind of be hardcore and just do it exactly the way one entity wants to do it.
And that's kind of the way I felt in the long run where I felt like we should do this record. And, you know, if that meant that it was somewhat more amateurish, then that was fine. You know, I wanted to live with those kind of bits of humanity.
(Soundbite of song, "Trouble Comes Running")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) I got taken away by a heavenly hoax, to a heavenly place. I been running with...
RAZ: There's a song on the record The Guardian newspaper in Britain wrote about, "Mystery Zone," which sounds like the song you two have been hoping to stumble over for the past decade, sort of this epic sound without being bombastic, those are the words of The Guardian.
Mr. DANIEL: I hadn't heard that yet. I don't think we've ever been accused of being bombastic. I'd like to get bombastic some time. We just never have gone there, I guess.
(Soundbite of song, "Mystery Zone")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) Well, times that we met, we'll go back, we'll go back there. The mystery zone, ooh, to the mystery zone...
RAZ: There's a song on this record that it discovers as a kind of a ballad. I think that's not necessarily the best way to describe it but it's a beautiful song, "Good Night Laura." And I'm wondering if you guys can talk about that song. Because it seems to me that anyone listening to your music for the past 10 years or longer would hear that song, "Goodnight Laura," and say, this is not a Spoon song.
Mr. DANIEL: Sort of a lullaby, right? Yeah. Some of my favorite songs have always been those kind that are kind of comforting songs, like, "Don't Worry, Baby," by the Beach Boys, you know? That's not the kind of song that gets written enough where, you know, it's just like, you know, that appreciation of love, you know, and someone making things all right.
(Soundbite of song, "Goodnight Laura")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) Goodnight, Laura. Don't you know, you've been awake so now it's time for sleeping. Good night, Laura, close your eyes. Your worries are meant to stop for now. You know they're not for keeping. If you want to fall asleep, be very still. And you close your eyes and slow yourself and let the worry leave you. And let go of it all just for this evening. All right...
RAZ: I want to ask you guys a question, not about this album, but about your career. And I want to start with you, Jim Eno. You and Britt Daniel co-founded this band in the early '90s when you were, obviously, much younger. Your last record in 2007 made it to number 10 on the Billboard charts, which is pretty extraordinary. Jim Eno, how different do you think your lives would have been if this success happened when you guys were in your 20s?
Mr. ENO: I don't know. I mean...
Mr. DANIEL: Jim, you wouldn't be alive anymore, you wild man.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ENO: True. That's true. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we would take everything for granted or something, you know?
Mr. DANIEL: Yeah, I see that happen a lot.
Mr. ENO: I mean, you'd start believing the hype or something. I don't know. I personally don't take anything for granted because it's been so long, you know?
Mr. DANIEL: I think, yeah, because it was a slow build and we would see very small steps of increased success along the way that we kind of got a kick out of each one of them. And, you know, I have seen a lot of bands that would come right of the gate, sell, you know, whatever, a couple hundred thousand records with their first record or a million, you know, and you see them on stage maybe six months later and they seemed bored and they don't feel like...they're like, yes, we are this great and we don't need to prove it to anybody, you know?
RAZ: And you guys sort of feel like you still have to prove it every time.
Mr. DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Don't I?
Mr. ENO: Yeah. Yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: Britt Daniel and Jim Eno are founding members of the band Spoon. Their new record is called "Transference."
Britt, Jim, thanks and good luck.
Mr. DANIEL: Thanks for having us.
Mr. ENO: Yeah. Thank you.
Mr. DANIEL: It's really nice to talk to you.
(Soundbite of song, "Nobody Gets Me But You")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) Nobody gets what I'm saying. Must be some way to convey, but no one else remembers my name, just the parts that I play. Nobody gets...
RAZ: You can hear full-length versions of a few tracks off Spoon's new album at our Web site. That's nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of song, "Nobody Gets Me But You")
Mr. DANIEL: (Singing) Nobody gets me but you. No one gets what I'm doing. Everyone else seems...
RAZ: And that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, host:
So, here's the scene: there is a man or a woman hunched over a keyboard tapping in codes and commands, maybe to steal some sensitive information or hack into a government database. And then, inevitably, a message flashes right up on the computer monitor:
(Soundbite of beeping)
RAZ: Access denied. This movie scene is such a cliche it's practically expected in every thriller or action film. And yet if you look at those sophisticated computer interfaces in films like "Mission Impossible" or "The Bourne Identity," well, they don't really resemble anything that exists in the real world.
Our producer, Petra Mayer, has been digging around trying to find out why what you see on a movie screen looks nothing like what you've got on your computer at home.
And, Petra, what did you find?
PETRA MAYER: Well, I found a guy called Mark Coleran, and he's a visual interface designer. And he's one of the guys that thinks up those computer screens that you see in movies. And so what he told me is when you see that big red access denied and it's flashing and it's blinking, the idea for that actually comes from video games, and it all goes back to the '80s. So, do you remember "WarGames?"
RAZ: With Matthew Broderick, right.
MAYER: Mm-hmm. Exactly. And that came out in 1983. And you have to remember back then not everybody had a computer at home. They weren't all that familiar with what computer screens looked like. But what Mark Coleran told me is they did know about video games.
Mr. MARK COLERAN (Visual Interface Designer): So, that's where design cues came from, games. So, it's like the game over thing is a big word that splashes across the screen and tells you exactly what is, you know, happening. And that is the whole point of those things, is, you know, is to tell a story. How do you tell somebody in two seconds on screen that they can't get into that thing?
RAZ: By putting access denied on the computer screen.
MAYER: Exactly.
RAZ: Now, Mark Coleran, we should say, did not work on "WarGames," right?
MAYER: No. I think that was a little before his time.
RAZ: Okay. So, what movies has he worked on?
MAYER: A ton of blockbusters - "The Bourne Identity," "Tomb Raider," "Mission: Impossible 3," "Children of Men," "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."
RAZ: Wow.
MAYER: Have you ever seen the last Bourne movie, "The Bourne Ultimatum"?
RAZ: Yeah.
MAYER: Right. So, there's a scene where Matt Damon is in London and he's trying to meet a reporter at Waterloo Station.
RAZ: Right. Matt Damon's a CIA agent. They're trying to kill him.
MAYER: Um-hum, right. So, he and this reporter are on the run from CIA assassins in the middle of Waterloo Station.
RAZ: Right. And there's a shot of CIA operatives, like, you know, watching him on a surveillance feed.
MAYER: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
(Soundbite of movie, "The Bourne Ultimatum")
Unidentified Man (Actor): (As character) Give me all of CCTV's eyes.
MAYER: So, you hear right there the head CIA guy is saying, you know, get me the surveillance video from the station. And the technicians are clicking, clicking, clicking, and then there it is, it's on their monitor screens.
So, what's actually happening is, you know, those technicians, they're actors, right? They're just clicking away on dummy keyboards. They're not connected to anything. And Mark Coleran and a bunch of guys like him are sitting off the set and they're - what they're doing is when a CIA guy says get me that video, he just presses a button on his computer and, beep, there it is on screen.
Mr. COLERAN: So, it looks like they're interacting with the device but what is actually happening is we're watching them do what they do and we have ways of controlling it and firing it off and cueing it up. So, it looks like they're doing stuff in real time.
RAZ: Now, a minute ago, Petra, you mentioned that Mark Coleran worked on that film "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They play a married couple who are both assassins, right?
MAYER: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: And there's a scene, I remember, in that film where Brad Pitt's computer pops up and it is the most ridiculous computer I have ever seen.
(Soundbite of movie, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith")
Unidentified Woman: Hello, John.
Mr. BRAD PITT (Actor): (as John Smith) Morning, Blair(ph).
RAZ: It's got this sort of triple panel monitor, rises out of his desk, speaks to him. I covered the Pentagon, Petra. I've been to Northern Command. I've seen some pretty cool computers but this is just so over the top. I mean, all these mini-windows, real-time views, graphics.
MAYER: Yeah. But, you know, you'd be surprised how many of these things actually end up on the market at some point. I mean, Mark Coleran told me, you know, he's looking at video games but he's also looking at prototypes from companies like Microsoft and, you know, things that are going on in university software labs. And occasionally, something will end up on the market that looks like an awful lot like, you know, something that he designed for a movie.
RAZ: Like what?
MAYER: Do you remember that movie "The Island" with Ewan McGregor?
RAZ: Yeah.
MAYER: Yeah. It came out a couple of years ago. Mark Coleran designed a tabletop, sort of a touch screen interactive table top screen. And a few months later, Microsoft came out with this thing called the Surface Computer.
RAZ: Oh, yeah.
MAYER: Yeah. Which was pretty much the same thing. So, you know, you never know. One of these days you might end up with as fancy a set up as Brad Pitt.
RAZ: That's our producer, Petra Mayer.
Petra, thanks.
MAYER: You're welcome.
RAZ: And you can see a slideshow of some of Mark Coleran's famous movie computer screens at our Web site. That's npr.org.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
To most of us, this sound is the sound of irrelevance.
(Soundbite of clicking)
RAZ: That's a VHS tape going into a VCR. But to Dmitri Simakis, it's the sound of angels dancing in heaven. Okay, maybe not angels, but it's a sound he's very familiar with.
Every weekend or free afternoon he gets, Simakis and his buddies troll through bargain bins at charity shops and hang out at yard sales looking for old VHS tapes. But more specifically, they're looking for video gold: moments recorded on VHS - maybe a local newscast or a high school play or a commercial. Clips that they then snip together and post online. They call their project "Everything is Terrible." And Dmitri Simakis joins me from our studios at NPR West.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. DMITRI SIMAKIS: Thank you for having me.
RAZ: With some of these videos that you posted onto your Web site, you've sort of turned some of these people into celebrities. I'm thinking particularly of this woman in the video called, "So Your Cat Wants a Massage."
Mr. SIMAKIS: Yes. Yes.
RAZ: And this is literally a three-minute video of a woman explaining how you can give your cat a massage.
(Soundbite of video)
Ms. MARYJEAN BALLMER: If we understood fluently, our cats would tell us that petting is passe because your cat wants a massage. No oils or lotions are needed.
RAZ: This has three-quarters of a million hits. The woman has gone onto Letterman. How did you find this video?
Mr. SIMAKIS: This one was found in Chicago, Illinois by actually our intern, Lur(ph). And immediately when you watch it, of course, it's so wonderful.
RAZ: And he found it at, like, a thrift shop and he just popped it in the VHS?
Mr. SIMAKIS: I believe so. Yeah. We've actually spoken to Maryjean. She's a wonderful woman. She...
RAZ: Oh, her name is Maryjean?
Mr. SIMAKIS: Yeah, Maryjean Ballmer, I believe. And just her seeing it and getting it, what we were doing was wonderful. You know, some people, I think, take it the wrong way, especially, you know, YouTube can be a very negative place. But she really understood - no, this is funny. I haven't seen this in probably 15 years. Thank you for bringing this back.
RAZ: Okay. So, how did this whole project, Everything is Terrible, how did it get started?
Mr. SIMAKIS: Everyone in the group actually is from Ohio. And over the years we sort of just, you know, as video stores would be closing and as, you know, it got very cold in Athens, Ohio - the winters were not kind to us - and so we'd spend a lot of time just indoors sitting around trying to kind of outdo each other with the worst VHS tape or the most ridiculous movie or whatever, and just finding the most inspiring VHS tapes we can find.
RAZ: Inspiring tapes that what, sort of tell us about who we are, who we were, you know, at this certain period in our history?
Mr. SIMAKIS: I think that's a big part of it. I think it's the excess that we had, it's the instance that we had at that time. But really you just have this amazing little time capsule where it's like, this happened and no one's ever going to see it again. We have to bring it back. It's this obsession with us at this point. It's an addiction, really.
RAZ: There's another clip that we're going to play - it's got to be in the early or mid-'90s. It's like, three women meeting for lunch and they're talking about this new, crazy thing.
(Soundbite of video)
Unidentified Woman #1: Are you on the Internet?
Unidentified Woman #2: Internet for techno geeks with spreadsheets?
Unidentified Woman #3: Oh no, you need the power.
Unidentified Woman #1: We're Moms on the Net. We became Moms on the Net because there are so many resources available on the Internet for moms and their families.
Mr. SIMAKIS: This was a tape called "What the Heck's the 'Net?" And how did they do it, what was the point, who bought it, who sold it? It's just such a mystery, and we love that tape. I mean, that tape is just a gold mine of just a lost era. You know, I mean, the tape is also only a little over 10 years old. I believe it's from, like, 1996, maybe? It's not that long ago. And it shows, like, how fast things have progressed. They're talking about w-w-dot-this and w-w-dot-that. And it's just so hilarious looking back on it and it's not even that old.
RAZ: Dmitri Simakis, recently you asked people who followed your Web site to send in their copies of the film "Jerry Maguire."
Mr. SIMAKIS: Yes.
RAZ: And I guess you've already received hundreds of them. Why do you want VHS copies of "Jerry Maguire?"
Mr. SIMAKIS: We always have noticed since the beginning that there seems to be nothing but just "Jerry Maguire" tapes filling our nation's thrift stores and...
RAZ: Is that right?
Mr. SIMAKIS: ...these stores.
RAZ: "Jerry Maguire" tapes all over the place?
Mr. SIMAKIS: It is insane. And it's a big bright red VHS tape. So you look at it right from the side, your eyes immediately focus on it. And I'm telling you, we could go to a thrift store in D.C., one out here in Los Angeles, one in Jacksonville, Florida, I guarantee you there will be more "Jerry Maguire" than anything else. I have no idea why. It was a very popular movie, I understand that, but so was, you don't see "Titanic." You don't see, you know, "Laurence of Arabia." You just see "Jerry Maguire."
RAZ: "Jerry Maguire" on VHS tape.
Mr. SIMAKIS: All the time. All the time. And so our goal is to have the world's largest collection since their departure at the factory.
RAZ: You know, some people want to, you know, cure diseases and others want to collect all the "Jerry Maguires."
Mr. SIMAKIS: Exactly.
RAZ: That's Dmitri Simakis. He is with the group Everything is Terrible, and he joined me from our studios at NPR West in California.
Dmitri Simakis, thanks so much.
Mr. SIMAKIS: Thanks for having me.
RAZ: And the Everything is Terrible folks also do live shows of their favorite clips. The next one is February 1 in Chicago. And for any of you who want to brush up on your cat massage techniques, you can find a link to that video at our Web site, npr.org.
GUY RAZ, host:
Back in Haiti, despite the very real concerns about getting food, water and medicine to victims of the earthquake, commerce is slowly returning to the streets of Port-au-Prince. From upscale supermarkets to street sellers with baskets on their heads, some goods are becoming available, at least for those who have money to buy.
NPR's Corey Flintoff reports from Haiti's capital.
COREY FLINTOFF: This is the apex of shopping in Haiti right now, the relatively undamaged Big Star Market in the upscale suburb of Petionville.
Stock boys tear open cartons of goods from the back of the store. People walk the air-conditioned aisles, loading their carts with groceries and cleaning products. There's even a display of heart-shaped candy boxes for Valentine's Day.
Mr. ERVIN BERTOL (Manager, Big Star Market): (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: The manager, Ervin Bertol, says the store has been open for three days now. He's selling the merchandise that was in the store before the quake. After that, he says, there's no immediate prospect for more, because his distributors were ruined.
Mr. BERTOL: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: If there is no more merchandise to be had, he says, he may have to close the doors.
The Big Star Market is a big exception to the rule in Port-au-Prince. Most people in the city have always done their shopping here, in open markets or from vendors who line the pavements of major streets.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: That's where food first began to reappear after the earthquake, in the form of produce brought from the countryside: sugarcane, yams and plantains. Within days, people had begun to reopen stands and carts selling all sorts of groceries, from the rice and beans that are Haitian staples to canned goods, pasta, sugar and flour.
This is a street in the Canape Vert neighborhood. Vendors like Vella Pierre have set up stands on the pavement.
Ms. VELLA PIERRE: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Pierre says she was able to buy some goods from a supplier and get back into business two days ago. Shaded by an umbrella, she pours meal from a big sack into plastic bags, each big enough to hold about a cup. That's because most of her customers can only afford to buy in small quantities. She says she's given credit to some people who used to be her regulars.
(Soundbite of traffic)
FLINTOFF: The next rung down on the retail chain is occupied by sellers like Claudette Diagen, who displays her wares on a rickety stand in the slum district of Carrefour-Feuilles. Her stock consists of a few shopworn bags of spaghetti, a basket of wrapped candies and some battered canned goods.
Ms. CLAUDETTE DIAGEN: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Diagen says greedy wholesalers like the disaster because it gives them an excuse to raise prices. The cost of a few ounces of spaghetti, for example, is about $4 American, two and a half times as high as it used to be. Four dollars is twice what most Haitian families used to earn in a day.
Ms. DIAGEN: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: When many people hear that price, she says, they just walk away and don't come back again.
Among the people looking on is 42-year-old Clemendina, a small woman whose skin has a dry, ashy look.
Ms. CLEMENDINA: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: She has eight children, she says. Her husband was injured in the quake, and the family's house has collapsed.
We see the food here, she says, but we have no money. We feel like eating, but we cannot buy anything.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Mourners gathered today in Port-au-Prince for the funeral of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot and Charles Benoit, a vicar. Both died in the January 12 earthquake. More than a thousand people attended the mass, including the country's president, Rene Preval. Haitian authorities now expect the death toll could rise to 200,000. Several reports today said that the official search for survivors is over, but Haiti's communications minister, Marie-Laurence Lasseque, said that's just not true.
Ms. MARIE-LAURENCE LASSEQUE (Communications Minister, Haiti): For now, we're still looking for people. And when we stop, we'll say that loudly.
RAZ: In a moment, some commercial life returns to the Haitian capital, but first, to a story of survival and music.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: You're hearing Cesar Franck's violin sonata in A major, and it's one of several pieces Haitian violinist, Romel Joseph, played in his mind, note for note, as he sat trapped under the rubble of his music school for 18 hours. Joseph was the founder and headmaster of the New Victorian School. And back in 2000 - January 12, 2000, to be precise - the school accidentally burned down. He rebuilt it. And 10 years later to the day, the earthquake struck.
Romel Joseph is a Juilliard-trained violinist. He's almost completely blind. And on the day of the quake, he was on the third floor of the school. His young wife, pregnant at the time, was also inside. She did not survive. After his rescue, Joseph was flown to Miami for surgery. He spoke with me from his bed at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Mr. ROMEL JOSEPH (Violinist): I remember when I was opening the door to get out and I heard this rumbling shakiness, pulled the (unintelligible) of my hand and the earth opened - and the ground opens, and then that's basically all I remember.
RAZ: You were - I understand you were lying under the rubble...
Mr. JOSEPH: Yes.
RAZ: ...something like 18 hours.
Mr. JOSEPH: Eighteen hours, yes.
RAZ: Part of your leg was trapped by the remains of the school that you had built twice. What did you do to keep yourself sane and hopeful?
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, at first, I was trying to see if I could get out because I figured there has to be opening somewhere. Even though I couldn't move right foot, but I, you know, try to find out what's around, and I realized I couldn't get out at all. So, you know, then you go through the whole - basically I'm going to die because I'm locked up. I can see there is no way out. I was completely surrounded by concrete, like big cement blocks.
RAZ: While you were trapped under the rubble, were you thinking about the music?
Mr. JOSEPH: Yeah. In fact, the music took maybe two-thirds of my time there.
RAZ: It was going through your head?
Mr. JOSEPH: No, what I did was I just schedule my time. I schedule my time 20 minutes to pray and meditate and then I picked the concerto or sonata for the rest of the hour to perform. When I say to perform, it sounds funny, but what you do is like, for example, if I perform the Franck sonata, which is 35 minutes long in my recital at Juilliard, then I would bring myself to that time, and that allows me not only to kill time, but also to mentally take myself out of the space where I was and to be in a more pleasant and positive space.
RAZ: You're performing that sonata note for note in your mind.
Mr. JOSEPH: Yes. It is note for note. That does a lot of things psychologically. It lowers the pain because you're not dealing with pain. You're dealing with pain. A lot of it is mental. And then at the same time, the next thing I know, (unintelligible) two o'clock, it's 2:40. So you kill 40 minutes right there. Then the next hour I did the Tchaikovsky concerto, that takes another hour. So the whole goal was to have a schedule all my minutes were busy.
RAZ: Hmm. Mr. Joseph, how many students attend the New Victorian School?
Mr. JOSEPH: About 298.
RAZ: And were any of the students in the school at the time?
Mr. JOSEPH: No, because they have to leave by three o'clock.
RAZ: So it was just you and your wife in the building.
Mr. JOSEPH: It was me, my wife and my friends. Just about six of us were in the building, luckily.
RAZ: Your wife, Mr. Joseph, did not make it, and we're very, very sorry for your loss.
Mr. JOSEPH: Oh, thank you very, very much. I mean, I saw her. I told her I'd be right back. I went to give a message, but we know the first floor went under the - and people would describe the earthquake to you who were on the streets, it's a certain time the earth just - the ground just opens up and then closed back up.
RAZ: Mr. Joseph, your hand was badly injured in the earthquake. What are your doctors telling you about whether you'll still be able to play the violin after your recovery?
Mr. JOSEPH: The doctor who did the surgery last night, he said, I bend your fingers and they - basically, all they did was put their fingers in the places, where they were supposed to be, and I have to wait at least a week so they can see what conditions they are and then they'll probably make a plate or something so that the healing continue. And I should be able to play again and teach. Because when you teach, you have to play for your students.
RAZ: You faced a test with your school in 2000 when it was burned down. And to the day - 10 years to the day - it was destroyed in the earthquake...
Mr. JOSEPH: Yes.
RAZ: ...for the second time. Will you return to Haiti once your surgeries are complete? I mean, what now for the future of the school and for you?
Mr. JOSEPH: Well, the school is a very important part of my life as far as offering education, especially in Haiti, I mean, where you have very little art education and music and the literacy level is so, you know, very low. So I feel more than ever it's important that Haiti needs all the schools that it can get. And we are going to reconstruct the school as soon as possible. We're going to start it, even the construction will not be complete or whatever, but the school will go on and test our design to see how powerful your will is.
RAZ: Hmm.
Mr. JOSEPH: So if you are a person that's weak willed, then you will fail your test and then that's that. But I need more than an earthquake to make me stop my work in Haiti.
RAZ: That's Romel Joseph speaking to me from a hospital bed in Miami. He survived the January 12 earthquake, but his wife and the music school he built did not.
Romel Joseph, thank you for sharing your story and I'm so sorry for your loss.
Mr. JOSEPH: Oh, thank you. But the life goes on; everything moves on and everything is going to - everything will be perfect.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
And for Republicans, a new hero this week - a man already being called by the nickname 41.
(Soundbite of applause)
Senator-Elect SCOTT BROWN (Republican, Massachusetts): I thank the people of Massachusetts for electing me as your next United States senator.
(Soundbite of cheers and applause)
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; Speaker of the House): While the results of the Massachusetts election may have diminished by one in the number of senators in the Senate, it has not diminished the need for affordable quality health care reform.
RAZ: House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Massachusetts' Senator-elect Scott Brown. Brown, of course, replaces the late Ted Kennedy and becomes the Republican's crucial 41st vote in the Senate.
Our news analyst, James Fallows, has been following this story and others for us this weekend.
Jim, well, let's start with the aftermath of that election in Massachusetts. Does it mean that effectively, President Obama's ambitions have to be scaled back?
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, "The Atlantic Monthly"): Well, certainly, this is a different chapter of the Obama presidency starting now. And you and I have talked before about how much of modern politics seems to depend on fluke. The only reason that these Democrats have had a super majority of 60 votes for the last few months is the switch of Arlen Specter - his switch of parties - and then the Al Franken cliffhanger in Minnesota, and now from another sort of semi-fluke back to 41 votes for the Republicans.
We talked, too, about the long cycle of politics, that Ronald Reagan was less popular at this stage in his presidency than Obama is now. And certainly, he went on to be successful. And Bill Clinton suffered a catastrophic defeat in his first midterm election. So there are prospects for Barack Obama, but clearly things are very different in what he can plan now. And we have the stage set for yet another very high-stakes Obama speech, with the State of the Union Address next week.
RAZ: I mean, Jim, at this point, do you suspect President Obama will be taking a page out of Bill Clinton's handbook, circa 1994?
Mr. FALLOWS: I think he'll probably take one from both the Clinton and the Reagan handbooks. The Reagan handbook was essentially to get the economy going again, and then popularity returns. That was Clinton's strategy, too. The other thing that I think Clinton effectively did was to sort of distinguish his personal brand from the Democratic Party brand, so much of the resentment of the Democratic Party officials. But Clinton did that. He obviously was reelected in a landslide in 1996. So I think that we'll see some of those tactics applied, too.
RAZ: Jim, a story that quite possibly obscures most everything else that's happened politically in the last few months: a decision by the Supreme Court to lift the restrictions on the amount of money corporations can spend for election campaigns.
Mr. FALLOWS: It was surprising in its process because the Supreme Court sort of went out of its way to answer a question that the case didn't necessarily ask. It could have been cited on much narrower grounds. But instead, they had this sweeping decision essentially eliminating constraints on corporate financing of political activity and, surprising, in its consequences, too, because so many state laws and so many federal laws are essentially out the window now.
In a very short-term, what it means is another problem for the Democrats in this year's midterm elections. In the long-term, we just don't know yet.
RAZ: You know, I remember watching this sort of sci-fi movies in the '80s, like sort of films like "Blade Runner," where you see this future that is dominated by corporate advertising. And in some ways, this appears to be life imitating art.
Mr. FALLOWS: Well, certainly, the case against this decision is that it's one more step towards corporatized political life. It's not as if corporations in the U.S. or around the world are short on political influence now. And this decision, by essentially saying there's no legitimate distinction between a person's right of free speech and corporations' right of free speech, including political participation, to those who oppose it, as I do, it is one more step towards what you're describing.
RAZ: Jim, I'm curious what you made of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom because, of course, you follow events in China very closely. And she called Internet freedom a basic human right. She criticized China for restricting what its citizens can and cannot see online, and it's causing quite a stir in China. This speech would not have made news in the United States, really, unless the Chinese criticized it.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yeah, I think this is like what Americans politicians have said for 25 years, in saying we have to deal with China in many ways, but there are things we don't like about its political system.
The reason, I think, it made news was, number one, the Google story, which has been very big in China and around the world; and number two, at least, to my knowledge, it's the first time there was this clear connection between saying we think - that regardless of what the national policies might be - we believe that free expression and free access to the Internet is some kind of basic human right. And that is a kind of new escalation of the argument that I at least hadn't heard before.
RAZ: That's our news analyst, James Fallow. He's also the national correspondent for "The Atlantic," where he also writes a blog.
Jim, thanks very much.
Mr. FALLOWS: My pleasure, Guy. Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Historian Garry Wills believes that since World War II, Americans had been living under an abnormal constitutional system, a system, he says, that's granted more and more power to the president each year, power that allows the commander-in-chief to sometimes make law using executive orders, or to keep information from the public by citing national security. And that authority, he says, comes from one thing: the bomb.
There is only one person in America who can authorize the use of it and it is, of course, the president.
Garry Wills calls it bomb power and it's the title of his new book.
Garry Wills, welcome to the program.
Mr. GARRY WILLS (Author, "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State"): Thank you for having me.
RAZ: You write that the bomb, the atom bomb, is a source of what you call the modern national security state, the cult of the commander-in-chief, the system of classifying information, monopoly on the use of the bomb, expansion of state secrets.
Mr. WILLS: That's right. In every war, there has been an accumulation of power in the executive. But after other wars, we resume the constitutional system. For instance, the suspension of habeas corpus by Lincoln was condemned by Supreme Court afterward. That didn't happen with the bomb.
We had a great big secret to keep and we had to spy on others and on ourselves to make sure that it was being kept. So that now we have over 800 military bases around the world; many of them secret, many of them funded in unconstitutional ways without congressional oversight.
RAZ: So the source of what you regard as unchecked presidential power really begins with the Manhattan Project.
Mr. WILLS: Right. Los Alamos was an immense undertaking with thousands and thousands of people involved, and it was kept entirely from Congress. All of this was unconstitutional. It was outside the chain of military command.
Leslie Groves, the man in charge, was a dictator. He had spies. He had assassination teams...
RAZ: And Leslie Groves was an Army general at the time.
Mr. WILLS: That's right. He was the general put in charge of the whole project and given practically unlimited powers. And it was successful. That's what astounded and encouraged people to imitate it. So that now we have the use of unmandated funds, the deception of Congress, domestic surveillance, all of the things that Leslie Groves pioneered.
RAZ: Garry Wills, isn't there an argument to be made, though, that there are certain things that have to be kept secret and only the president and his top advisers can know about them?
Mr. WILLS: That's true of a certain number of things, but an extraordinarily small, and it's usually a matter of time. One of the arguments used in the Pentagon Papers case was this tells about our troop deployments. And the lawyers who defended the publication said, those are troop deployments years and years ago, you know?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WILLS: That doesn't matter now. That's not a secret worth keeping anymore.
RAZ: I mean, in your view, the president should be nothing more than sort of the first among equals? Or do you think the president has sort of become a kind of something beyond a sort of a Roman consul, may be even a Roman emperor?
Mr. WILLS: Well, we're treating him that way more and more. The commander-in-chief was a neglected cause of the Constitution up until World War II. Because what the Constitution says is that the president is the commander-in-chief of the military forces and of the militias when they are called into national service, which only Congress can do, by the way. So he's not my commander-in-chief. He's not your commander-in-chief. And yet, the language has now grown up that he is. That's part of this whole militarization of the office.
You know, it's an interesting thing, when the president gets off his helicopter or his plane now, he returns the salute of the Marines. That's a new thing. Dwight Eisenhower was a general, he didn't do that.
RAZ: Hmm.
Mr. WILLS: Ronald Reagan was not a general and he'd started doing that and you can't stop it now. Once that kind of thing starts - if Obama stopped it, they would say, oh, he's unpatriotic. He's not continuing the practices of his predecessors.
RAZ: President Obama campaigned on a platform of openness. He was critical of the expansion of executive power. Has President Obama, in your view, started to kind of roll back this cult of the commander-in-chief?
Mr. WILLS: Feebly. What happens is when a president comes in, he discovers what has been kept secret. Namely, what a huge worldwide apparatus he has. And what they start saying to him right away is, don't dismantle us. It took us a long time to build this up. You're going to need us at some point.
And so, right away, we had the Obama administration saying, well, we'll have to consider. Maybe we should keep renditions. Maybe we should keep military tribunals. Maybe we should delay closing Guantanamo.
RAZ: Is there any way, in your view, to undo some of that expansive executive power? Or now that it already has expanded to the point where it is today, it can only move in one direction.
Mr. WILLS: Well, the latter seems more likely. Paul Nitze, who spent his life building up the nuclear arsenal and urging its use, by the end of his life said, these things don't really ensure our security after all. We should get rid of them. Probably that's the only way we'll ever get rid of bomb power to get rid of the bomb.
RAZ: That's historian Garry Wills. His new book is "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State."
Garry Wills, thank you very much.
Mr. WILLS: It's my pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
Here's a question Dennis Antoine has been asking himself for years: how do you do your job when your job is to represent a country that few in Washington really care about, let alone know about? Dennis Antoine spent 13 years as Grenada's ambassador to the United States. Now, he's written a how-to guide to help disoriented diplomats hit the ground running and leap over the common pitfalls of diplomacy.
The book is called "Effective Diplomacy," and Ambassador Antoine joins me here in the studio to talk about it.
Welcome.
Ambassador DENIS ANTOINE (Grenada): Thank you, Guy. I'm pleased to be here.
RAZ: Why did you decide to write this how-to guide for diplomats? Was there anything out there like this?
Amb. ANTOINE: Well, you must understand that it is one thing being appointed ambassador and it's another thing being able to function effectively in a maze, as I call it. Washington, D.C. is not as small in the context of diplomacy as it appears.
And so, based on the competing interest for the attention of the United States, small countries like Grenada had to find a way to be effective, to be heard.
RAZ: So when you arrived here from Grenada, how difficult was it for you to get anybody at the State Department to pay attention to you as the ambassador? I mean, could you meet with high-level people at the State Department?
Amb. ANTOINE: No. There is so much - there is so high you can go, so far you can go, because when you put the scale of need for your presence at State Department, it is represented in a collective process. Please take note that the United States deals with the Caribbean on original basis.
For example, there is one ambassador for the Eastern Caribbean. There is one desk for the Eastern Caribbean.
RAZ: This is at the State Department.
Amb. ANTOINE: Yeah, the State Department. So...
RAZ: So, this one person is dealing with...
Amb. ANTOINE: ...one person deals with...
RAZ: ...all of these...
Amb. ANTOINE: ...five countries of the Eastern Caribbean. Let's say, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, Grenada - they have one person.
RAZ: So, you decided to write this book for people who were coming to Washington in similar circumstances (unintelligible).
Amb. ANTOINE: Exactly. Exactly.
RAZ: One of the recommendations you make is that a new diplomat should either get a very good driver or a very good GPS unit. You write: do not underestimate the danger of being foreign and disoriented in the Washington, D.C. area, even while sporting diplomatic tag. It sounds like you might have had a bad driving experience yourself.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: What happened?
Amb. ANTOINE: Oh, my goodness. I have had more than one bad driving experience. But we had a driver and we were heading south on 395, and he's not aware of where he was going. He stood at a halt in the middle of traffic and panicked. And the entire traffic, left, right and center, was betting him, get off.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Amb. ANTOINE: Luckily, one of my consuls who were in the car with him really had to take over and sort of guide him off the road. And so that's why I talked about the importance of a good driver. You are at the mercy, at risk of being killed (unintelligible).
RAZ: Now, what are the crucial events a new ambassador should attend, both to be taken seriously and to get a feel for the country?
Mr. ANTOINE: I really feel, top of the line, you should not miss the joint session of Congress. And then outside of Washington, I do feel that there are some unique opportunities. I spoke leisurely about Senator Grassley's tour of Iowa.
RAZ: Yes. I was surprised to learn about this. Senator Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, offers a tour to diplomats, a tour of Iowa.
Amb. ANTOINE: Yes, indeed. And he does home stay. He would put a diplomat or an ambassador to stay in the home of one of his constituents.
RAZ: And you did that.
Amb. ANTOINE: Of course, I did that.
RAZ: And did you stay with somebody at night?
Amb. ANTOINE: Most certainly. It is refreshing to get an insight as to the real constituency. And from there in the Midwest, you understand that Washington is moved from there - the millions of dollars in trade. And you get to understand exactly what this imbalance in trade, where it's coming from, what is the importance of these industries back in the Midwest are there?
RAZ: So there are all of these people in Iowa who are boarding ambassadors from around the world?
Amb. ANTOINE: Well, I wouldn't say boarding. I think it is cultural exchange. I think it provides for. But, of course, it's boarding. At a time, you get a chance to sit and get a good country lunch, a meal. And those are some of the things that give you better understanding.
RAZ: Ambassador Antoine, in 2004, your country, Grenada, was devastated by Hurricane Ivan, flattened, in a way that sort of brings to mind what happened in Haiti. You write that when disaster strikes the homeland of a diplomat it can be one of the most stressful, isolating and emotional experiences of your life. What advice would you give to your Haitian counterparts now?
Amb. ANTOINE: I've been talking to my Haitian ambassadors, my former colleagues, Ambassador Joseph and (unintelligible) in Washington here. And I think it is one of the most lonely period in an ambassador's life where you're not sure whether your own family is alive, where there is any way that you would contact your leaders. You become a leader in isolation, and so it is an occasion for pulling up a group of support mechanism around you.
And it includes putting in place and ensuring that you have the cooperation of partners - partners that can deliver contributions to credible international agencies. They are the front line in disaster in the Caribbean. And so, thank you for asking and I hope the world, as it is, is focused on Haiti.
RAZ: Denis Antoine spent 13 years as Grenada's ambassador to the United States. He's now International Programs director at the University of the District of Columbia.
Ambassador Antoine, thanks so much for joining us.
Amb. ANTOINE: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, this next story is also about a photograph, a much older one, actually a daguerreotype from the mid-19th century.
Mr. JACK WILGUS: We've had that daguerreotype. It's always been one of our favorites for close to 40 years.
RAZ: It's one of the first daguerreotypes Jack Wilgus and his wife Beverly got their hands on when they started a collection of old photos back in the 1960s. Now, this particular photo is of a well-dressed, handsome man with a closed eye, and he's holding a metal rod. And for 40 years, Beverly and Jack Wilgus thought the man was a whaler. But then, last year, they started scanning their old photos and posting them to the online photo sharing site Flickr, and someone noticed that whaler.
Ms. BEVERLY WILGUS: It was actually a comment on the photograph.
RAZ: That photo, the person wrote, is probably Phineas Gage. And who, you might ask, was Phineas Gage?
Mr. DOMINIC HALL (Curator, Warren Anatomical Museum, Harvard Medical School): One of the most famous medical cases that you know by name.
RAZ: That's Dominic Hall. He is the curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School.
Mr. HALL: I talk about Phineas Gage every single day in some context or another.
RAZ: On September 13, 1848, 25-year-old Phineas Gage was blasting rocks to make way for what would become the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont.
Mr. HALL: That day, well, he was doing this process called tamping, which is essentially they're drilling holes in large rock, packing in some sort of explosive powder, packing sand on top of that explosive powder. They're laying a fuse and then, you know, they're detonating the fuse.
RAZ: And he was using a handmade tamping iron to pack those explosives, a three and a half foot long iron rod about an inch in diameter.
Mr. HALL: You get a couple of different accounts of what happens, but something clearly goes wrong, and a spark sets off the charge, and the rod is actually fired through Gage's head. It goes all the way through, comes out the top of his skull and lands about 30 yards away.
RAZ: The other workers quickly gathered around Phineas Gage as he lay on the ground.
Mr. HALL: Yeah. They certainly think he's - most likely going to die. He - but he is actually able to, with the help of other people, make it over to an oxcart. He sits up in the oxcart and travels to a local inn where he was staying, and that's where he's attended by these physicians, but he actually never loses consciousness at this point.
RAZ: He's awake the whole time.
Mr. HALL: He's awake the whole time. He's able to describe his injury.
RAZ: For three months, a local doctor named John Harlow worked on Gage. It was a crude form of what we might now call neurosurgery. And over the next year or so, Harlow started to notice changes in Gage's personality.
Mr. HALL: Before, he gets described as businesslike, friendly, maybe efficient, responsible. He's good at managing his team on the railroad. After the accident, he's occasionally referred to as childlike, vulgar. He has definitely has some social problems.
RAZ: Harlow eventually brought Gage to Harvard Medical School to be studied. The students even made a plaster cast of his head which, along with the iron rod and his actual skull, are still on display at the medical school's museum.
Anyway, Gage is examined, and a paper gets published about his condition.
Mr. HALL: Then he becomes this literal textbook case. He becomes the textbook example.
RAZ: The textbook example of a posttraumatic personality change. And over the next decade or so, Gage drifted. He spent some of that time as a curiosity act. He worked as a coach driver in Chile, and then he wound up in San Francisco, living with his mother. And in 1860, at the age of 36, Phineas Gage died, the result of seizures, most likely related to the accident more than a decade earlier.
And up until last year, no one alive really knew what Phineas Gage actually looked like because there were no known photographs or paintings of him, that is until Beverly Wilgus emailed that scan of her daguerreotype to Dominic Hall at Harvard with a simple question.
Ms. WILGUS: Could this be Phineas Gage? And that started the dialogue.
RAZ: They compared the scars in the image with Gage's skull, and they looked at the iron rod in the photograph and the tamping iron at Harvard's museum, both of which seemed to be engraved with the same inscription.
Mr. HALL: This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, September 14, 1848.
RAZ: Dominic Hall was stunned.
Mr. HALL: It's sort of funny, but I have this sort of close relationship with Phineas Gage because of how often I look at his case and think about his case and talk about his case with other people. And so, before, when you're really thinking of Gage, you think of a skull, or you think of a life case, but now there's this image.
RAZ: And you can see that image at our Web site. That's npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
THE KIEV CHAMBER CHOIR (Choir group): (Singing foreign language)
GUY RAZ, host:
You're hearing a recording of the Kiev Chamber Choir, singing at the Cathedral of the Ascension in the Ukrainian capital. It's a timeless sound; it could come from the 14th century, and yet this piece was written just a few years ago. And it's a brand new recording, one of several new releases our classical music producer Tom Huizenga has been listening to these past few weeks. And Tom's in the studio with me.
Good to have you back.
TOM HUIZENGA: Great to be here, Guy.
RAZ: So Tom, before we get to some of the other new recordings you brought in today, let's start with this amazing piece we're hearing by the Kiev Chamber Orchestra.
HUIZENGA: It's by Valentin Silvestrov, who's in his early '70s, and he's a Kiev native. Early in his career, he was a very competent avant-gardist. And he had a change of heart in the '70s and became a little more spiritual, a little more romantic, more lyrical. And just a few years ago, he wrote a bunch of sacred music for this choir.
And the great thing about it is the special effects that he gets. For one thing, he likes to set up these pieces antiphonally. So you have a single voice kind of emerging from the sonic ether that he creates by manipulating overtone singing and this very reverberant cathedral that they're in.
(Soundbite of music)
The KIEV CHAMBER CHOIR: (Singing foreign language)
RAZ: Tom, I was listening to this piece on my headphones last night, and it really took me back to a time when I covered Eastern Europe as a reporter, that sort of, that sound of Orthodox churches.
HUIZENGA: It does like you mentioned, it does have that timeless sound. And it is kind of like Brian Eno said about his ambient music is I find this as listenable as it is ignorable. So you can listen to it on headphones and really soak in all the odd and subtle effects that Silvestrov uses. And I was doing the dishes last night with it on the background. That was a kind of sonic wallpaper.
RAZ: It is a really magical sound, Tom. That's the Kiev Chamber Choir performing the music of Valentine Silvestrov. The album is called "Sacred Works."
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Tom, let's move a bit south from Ukraine now, down to Ottoman Istanbul and a new record by the Spanish musician Jordi Savall.
HUIZENGA: Well, Guy, I have a prepared a statement I would like to read.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: Okay, please do.
HUIZENGA: Jordi Savall is a god.
(Soundbite of laughter)
HUIZENGA: You know how you have these artists, maybe they're authors or movie stars or directors that you just, you're so in awe of their fierce intelligence that you practically worship them? Well, that's how I feel about Jordi Savall, who - he's a guy, actually, who's best known for playing this antiquated, old instrument called the viola da gamba, the precursor to our modern-day cello. And he plays a lot of Baroque music, Bach and some other unknown composers with his band, The Hesperion XXI, but this new record is something that is a very far cry from Johann Sebastian Bach.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: And Thomas, you say Jordi Savall is a composer and a musician who's really influenced by Baroque music, also by medieval music, primarily European music. What drew him to the music of the East or, you know, used to be called the Orient?
HUIZENGA: Well, he's always interesting in facilitating these dialogues between Eastern and Western traditions. And for this new record, what better locale to focus on than Istanbul, which is a city that sits half - literally half in Asia and half in Europe? And for centuries, it's been this incredible melting pot of ideas and religions and art.
And for this new record, he's gone back to this manuscript of 355 pieces collected by a guy named Cantemir who was active in Istanbul in about 1700, who collected and codified what is essentially Ottoman classical music of the time.
RAZ: So these are not original compositions by Jordi Savall.
HUIZENGA: No. These are compositions that date way, way back to the early 18th century. And it's just fascinating music, and it really moves out.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: That's Jordi Savall, leading his ensemble, Hesperion XXI, from his new album "Istanbul."
NPR's classical musical producer Tom Huizenga is in the studio with me, and he's playing some interesting new recordings that have crossed his desk recently.
And, Tom, I think we're already hearing the next piece you've picked.
(Soundbite of song, "September Canons")
HUIZENGA: It's by Ingram Marshall, who's in his early 60s, I think about now, and it's "September Canons" is the name of the piece. And the record collects four works that span about 30 years of Ingram Marshall's composing career, from 1972 to 2002. This music we're hearing now is Marshall's lament on the September 11 attacks.
But if you come to the piece without knowing that fact - like I did I just threw it in the CD player and thought, wow, this is a great piece from Ingram Marshall I haven't heard before, I think it works perfectly, powerfully on its own.
(Soundbite of song, "September Canons")
RAZ: It seems like there's some electronic processing going on here in this piece.
HUIZENGA: Absolutely. Marshall composes for normal symphony orchestras and everything, but he also embraces, like, new technology. So this piece is scored for amplified violin, just wonderfully played by Todd Reynolds in this recording, and then digital delays, digital loops and processing.
So even though it sounds like it has a big body of strings in it, these are all processed strings. And I love how the piece just kind of rises and falls throughout its 13 minutes. It's very hard to excerpt it, really. You need to let the whole piece wash over you. But Todd Reynolds' violin soars keeps soaring upward with these plucked notes, and then at one point, everything falls away. It kind of falls back to earth.
And then, later, there's a segment where tons of these little plucked notes start falling like shards of music back to the ground. It's quite stunning, actually. Very powerful music, I think.
(Soundbite of song, "September Canon")
RAZ: That's violinist Todd Reynolds, performing in a piece called "September Canons," composed by Ingram Marshall.
Tom, let's take a listen to something else you brought in.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: When I heard this, I thought Schubert.
RAZ: That's right. It is Schubert, a really great melody there, one of his impromptus, and it's played by Imogen Cooper, a British pianist. She gave a number of all Schubert recitals at the South Bank Center in London and they put them on CD. It's a two-CD set, and she plays some of Schubert's shorter pieces and a couple of his major late-career sonatas, and she plays them to perfection, I think.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: There are obviously thousands of Schubert recordings. What makes this unique? What's so different about Cooper's recording?
HUIZENGA: To me, she's a natural Schubert player. And one of the reasons is because she came to Schubert through his songs. He wrote 600 songs. And Cooper has accompanied many great Schubert leader singers, especially Wolfgang Holzmair. So she has like a mainline right into that lyric part, that songful part of Schubert part and also the bittersweet part also. So she really makes that piano sing.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Tom, we have time for one more, and I begged you to bring this in because the story is so unbelievable.
(Soundbite of music)
HUIZENGA: Okay. Well, you remember the guy who wrote "Peter and the Wolf," right?
RAZ: Prokofiev.
HUIZENGA: Sergei Prokofiev. Well, this is Sergei Prokofiev's grandson, Gabriel Prokofiev, who is a performer, a DJ, a composer.
RAZ: A DJ and composer.
HUIZENGA: And composer. He's a classically trained composer, and he has written a "Concerto for Turntables & Orchestra" for the London-based artist called DJ Yoda.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Tom, I just got to wonder what Grandpa Sergei would think: classical music on ecstasy?
HUIZENGA: Well, it's a collision of sorts, I guess, between hip hop and classical. But it's really not that much different, if you think of it, than Joseph Haydn, who wove in a Croatian folk song at the end of his 104th symphony. It's a contemporary composer working with a tradition and working with contemporary music.
RAZ: With DJ Yoda.
HUIZENGA: Yes. I think it works.
RAZ: That's NPR's classical music producer Tom Huizenga. He pops into our program from time to time to share some of the new recordings that cross his desk. You can hear all of the pieces we've discussed. They're at our Web site, nprmusic.org.
Tom, I think I'm going to crank up the base on this new Prokofiev.
HUIZENGA: Go for it, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Thanks for listening, and have a great week.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, before Flash was born, back in the 1980s, TV watchers couldn't avoid this commercial.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Unidentified Man: OK, last time. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?
RAZ: That campaign from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America arrived just about the time the drug methamphetamine started to become a bigger problem. And since then, meth has ravaged many small towns and rural areas.
Tom Allman is the sheriff in one of those places, Mendocino County in Northern California. And he was trying to figure out a way to keep kids from even trying the drug. So he turned to a computer programmer named Laslo Vespremi, and he asked him to develop software that would digitally alter images of those kids, to show them what they'd look like after using meth.
Teenagers sit down in front of a computer screen, and one of Sheriff Allman's staffers tells them:
Mr. TOM ALLMAN (Sheriff, Mendocino County, California): We're going to take a picture of you. You're young. You're vibrant. You have great-looking skin. Your hair is there, your teeth are there. But we want to show you what you would look like after six months, one year, three years of using meth. And the software that Laslo designed morphs it into the physiological effects that meth causes: the open scabs, the droopy skin, the hair loss. If I could choose one phrase to say what this program does, it strikes at the vanity of teenagers.
RAZ: Hmm. You have been in law enforcement for almost 30 years, I understand, and it's safe to say you've seen a lot of teenagers and drug use over the years. What is it about methamphetamine that has law-enforcement officers so concerned?
Mr. ALLMAN: The addiction to methamphetamine is over 90 percent after the first-time use.
RAZ: Wow.
Mr. ALLMAN: And my goal is to just stop that first-time use. I live in a small town of Willits, where the population is less than 5,000. And I'm going to tell you, I do not know of a single person who could not relate to me of a connection they have with a friend or family member that methamphetamine has been involved with.
RAZ: Sheriff Allman, what kind of reactions have you been getting from students who have undergone this digital transformation to see themselves as meth addicts - what they might look like?
Mr. ALLMAN: The emotions we get from kids go from being scared - and some kids start crying when they see the devastating effect that meth can do to their complexion. And when I say we strike at the vanity, that's exactly what's happened. It was the way to crack the nut, to say, this could happen to you.
RAZ: Whether or not this was your intention, there is kind of a fear aspect to this program. How can you be sure that it will work, that that message will stick with those kids?
Mr. ALLMAN: Well, I can't be sure of it. And our intent was not to use scare tactics, because scare tactics don't work. And the commercial that you played at the beginning of your program of the frying egg, that didn't work, and the "Just Say No" didn't work.
So we don't know what does work. But I can tell you that the software is having more of a positive effect than anything that I've ever been involved with on the drug fight.
RAZ: That's Tom Allman. He's the sheriff of Mendocino County, and he joined me from member station KZYX in Philo, California.
Sheriff Allman, thank you so much.
Mr. ALLMAN: Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: And you can see an example of how my face was digitally altered at our Web site, npr.org.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Right up until the very end, Anne Boleyn professed her innocence. A few days before she was beheaded for plotting to kill her husband, Henry VIII, the fallen queen stood before her accusers.
Ms. ALISON WEIR (Author, "The Lady in the Tower"): (Reading) My lords, I will not say your sentence is unjust nor presume that my reasons can prevail against your convictions. I'm willing to believe that you have sufficient reasons for what you have done, but then they must be other than those which have been produced in court for I am clear of all the offenses which you then laid to my charge.
RAZ: On May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on the grounds of the Tower of London. Eleven days later, the king married his third wife, Jane Seymour. Now, a lot of ink has been spilled about the Tudor dynasty and Anne Boleyn, and writer Alison Weird has been among the most prolific. She's written historical novels based on that period, but her latest is what she calls a forensic investigation into the last four months of Anne Boleyn's life, something that's never been done before.
This is a history book but written with all the intrigue and tension of a novel. It's called "The Lady in the Tower." And Alison Weir is in London.
Welcome to the program.
Ms. WEIR: Hi, Guy.
RAZ: This book reads almost like it was written by a private investigator or maybe a lawyer trying to build a case for Anne...
Ms. WEIR: That's what it felt like.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: Trying to build a case for her, for Anne Boleyn. What were you hoping to prove?
Ms. WEIR: I was hoping to look at the case in unprecedented detail, to go into have that scope, to have a whole book in which to write about four months and to see if I could get any closer to what was probably the truth.
RAZ: Were you, I mean, as you eventually did, trying to acquit her of the charges?
Ms. WEIR: No. In fact, you have to clear your mind when you do something like this of all previous conceptions about it, look at the evidence anew. And in this case, I was able to study sources that other people had ignored incredibly, and then at the end, you can make your conclusions from that.
RAZ: Given that historians have looked at all of these documents and records for hundreds of years and written about Anne Boleyn, were you sort of wondering whether there was anything new to discover about her?
Ms. WEIR: Yes, I was. But in a way, it's good to have the scope to tell that story in unprecedented detail, even if nothing new comes out of it. I wasn't looking for anything new to come out of it. I was wondering if anything would, and it did.
RAZ: Many people associate Anne Boleyn with England's Protestant reformation. But you write that Anne was actually trying to restrain Henry VIII from pushing the reformation too far, too fast.
Ms. WEIR: Yes. It was Thomas Cromwell she was trying to restrain. Thomas Cromwell was the king's principal secretary and the man who was probably the architect of her downfall.
Ms. WEIR: Henry VIII of course endorsed the coming dissolution of the monasteries, but Cromwell wanted their wealth to go into the royal coffers, as did the king. Anne wanted that wealth used for either reform of the monasteries or for education and charitable purposes.
RAZ: Now, Thomas Cromwell, who of course was Henry VIII's main advisor, he was the person who really built a case against Anne Boleyn. Before we talk about the case, I want to ask you why he was after her.
Ms. WEIR: Originally, he'd been her supporter. But by 1535, a year before her downfall, they'd become rivals, and probably this has something to do with his planned measures in respect to the monasteries.
Also, I think he saw her as a threat to his own power. His natural inclinations tended towards an alliance with the emperor who was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, and Anne would be an obstacle to that.
RAZ: Talk about how Thomas Cromwell built the case against Anne.
Ms. WEIR: Well, some of the first evidence is said to have come to him from abroad, from the French court. We don't know what it was, but he himself said that there were rumors going around the queen's household about her infidelities and that her servants became so shocked that they couldn't keep it to themselves any longer. And they came and, you know, revealed what they had heard to himself and other members of the privy council. And thereafter, interrogations took place of every member of her household.
RAZ: Many historians have looked at the evidence and have concluded that it was, at best, flawed but most likely just wrong, just made up.
Ms. WEIR: That's true.
RAZ: What do you make of it? I mean, when you actually look at the evidence, was it I mean, you come to the conclusion that it was wrong, but it was - was it actually crafted in a way that was convincing?
Ms. WEIR: The problem is most of the evidence doesn't survive. But it was sufficient at the time to convince the king, Cromwell and 97 judges and jurors that Anne was guilty.
But if you look at the surviving evidence, and a lot of it's inferential or circumstantial, and you look at the reasons for her innocence in the case for her guilt, you will find an overwhelming case for her innocence almost to be conclusive.
RAZ: Now, Alison Weir, tourists who go to the Tower of London will see the place where Anne Boleyn was killed. They'll see the place where it's thought she was buried. They will see the tower, which of course is why your book is named "The Lady in the Tower." You've uncovered information to suggest that a lot of what we thought we knew is wrong.
Ms. WEIR: Yes. I was quite astonished, actually, to uncover this. All these revelations came towards the end of my research. I did discover quite a few things about her imprisonment, namely that she wasn't executed where people think she was. She wasn't imprisoned where people think she was. She's not buried where people think she was.
The executioner, I now know, I've been able to establish, was sent for before her trial, thus preempting the verdict.
RAZ: That's Alison Weir. She's the author of the new biography "The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn." And she joined me from our studio in London.
Alison Weir, thank you.
Ms. WEIR: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
If this was the Internet 15 years ago...
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: ...then this is the Internet today.
(Soundbite of videogame)
RAZ: What was once a collection of static pages has become a kind of theme park of fully interactive Web sites, videos and games that play right in your browser, and much of that is thanks to a program called Flash. It's the subject of today's installment of The Net at 40, our occasional series about the history and culture of the Internet.
Now, the Flash Player is what allows you to watch videos on things like YouTube and Hulu and to see things like this.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) This land is your land, this land is my land. I'm a Texas tiger, you're a liberal wiener.
RAZ: This was the famous JibJab cartoon from the 2004 election, and it was made with Flash. The program is integrated into a bunch of Web applications like TurboTax, not to mention many of those online games that make the workplace a little less productive.
(Soundbite of videogame)
Mr. TOM FULP (Founder, Newgrounds): It definitely made the Internet more fun and more lively. It would have been a much more static and quiet place if not for Flash.
RAZ: That's Tom Fulp. He founded the online Flash community called Newgrounds.
Mr. FULP: Whether you're good at drawing or good at programming or good at music, you can inject that talent into Flash in some form to create something.
RAZ: And the man who dreamed up Flash? His name is Jonathan Gay. Seventeen years ago, he had a tiny start-up software company, and he was designing a drawing program for what was the latest technology back then: the tablet computer.
Mr. JONATHAN GAY (Co-Creator, Flash): A lot of architects actually liked the software. But the tablet computers didn't take off, so we had to try a different approach.
RAZ: So how did the idea come about to develop Flash?
Mr. GAY: One of the key inspirations is we were at a trade show, SIGGRAPH, where all the 3-D guys making 3-D animations for movies go every year. And a lot of people told us our drawing program would make a great animation program. And we thought, that's kind of a good idea. It'd be fun to do, but, you know, there's only so many people wanting to make videotapes.
RAZ: But then he thought about this new thing that looked like it might catch on: the World Wide Web.
Mr. GAY: We became aware of it and said, hey, maybe we could put it over the Internet.
RAZ: The program was originally called FutureSplash. Later, its name was shortened to Flash. And it became an immediate success. Microsoft and Disney both used it to redesign their Web sites. And by 2002, Flash began to support video. And it was what the folks behind YouTube decided to use when they launched their Web site three years later.
Again, here's Jonathan Gay.
Mr. GAY: One of the key differentiators with Flash that really made it, you know, one of the standards for video on the Internet is the fact that the video plays right in the Web browser. The other video technologies were really separate players that you had to download and, you know, activate separately.
RAZ: Now, Flash isn't without its critics or its minor annoyances. For example, have you ever tried to open a Web page and had one of these pop up on you?
Unidentified Man #2: Congratulations, you've been selected to receive two iPod Nanos.
RAZ: You can thank Flash for that as well.
GUY RAZ, host:
Either way, Republicans are interpreting last week's victory in Massachusetts as a preview for their fortunes this fall. Here's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Senator MITCH McCONNELL (Republican, Kentucky; Senate Minority Leader): This was in many ways a national referendum, principally on the major issue we're wrestling with here in the Congress, which is whether or not the government should take over one-sixth of our economy, slash Medicare about half a trillion dollars, raise taxes by half a trillion dollars and drive insurance rates up for most of the rest of our country.
RAZ: I spoke with Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist and adviser to the campaigns of former President George W. Bush. He said a Republican comeback, written off just a few months ago, is a real possibility, but he acknowledged that 10 months is a lifetime in politics.
Mr. MARK McKINNON (Republican Strategist; Vice Chairman, Public Strategies, Inc.): Well, it is a long time, but it's rather remarkable that the Republican Party and Republican candidates have as much enthusiasm and energy as they do right now and optimism about the midterms.
So Republican strategy right now is to try and draft on the energy that's out there because there's a lot of anger and frustration among voters, and Republicans will clearly tap into that, as Scott Brown just did in Massachusetts.
RAZ: Obviously, that election in Massachusetts had an energizing effect. What do you make of the Supreme Court decision that will allow corporations to spend as much as they like on campaigns? Are Republicans looking at that as an advantage for their party?
Mr. McKINNON: I think it's a horrendous decision. It's good for big labor unions, it's good for big business, and it's lousy for voters. I think that that decision itself makes voters even angrier. I think people look and, you know, they're throwing up their arms, saying it doesn't matter what we do, some you know, the federal government in some shape, form or fashion is just going to do whatever it wants to do.
RAZ: Let's talk about the Tea Party movement for a moment because, of course, the movement poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the Republican Party. You have recently written that tea is the new Kool-Aid for Republicans.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: How does the GOP tap into that without alienating a broader range of voters?
Mr. McKINNON: Well, it's a very tricky ritual going on right now. You know, the Tea Party is a first of all, it is a significant movement, and I think the media and some pundits have tried to write it off as a bunch of cranks or something. But, in fact, it's really a very legitimate and fairly significant swath of voters out there.
It's an opportunity and a challenge for the Republican Party because most of those voters are conservatives. But the problem is for the Republican Party is that the Republican Party brand is so damaged. People - they have a lot of problems with the Republican Party, and that's why the Tea Party is getting a lot of significant traction. But the Tea Party itself goes out of its way not to identify itself as Republican. And they're quite careful about, you know, what Republicans get associated with the movement, too, although that's tricky itself, too, because it is a legitimate grassroots movement, and there's no real central organizing people or function of the Tea Party.
RAZ: Mark McKinnon, you'll recall that in the 2008 campaign, some Republican candidates for the Senate and the House actually ran images of then-candidate Obama in their ads to kind of burnish their image. Is there a sense now that Republicans will sort of begin to define themselves as the anti-Obama party?
Mr. McKINNON: I don't know. I think it might be a mistake because President Obama, despite the problems and despite the numbers of the Democratic Party, remains very popular personally. And one of the things that Scott Brown did that I hope that other Republicans will watch is that he really didn't attack President Obama himself.
He attacked the policies, and he attacked the programs. But I think he understood that, you know, a lot of America really, you know, has a pretty favorable opinion about the president, even though they don't really like what's going on.
RAZ: That's Mark McKinnon. He is a Republican strategist and vice chairman of a consulting firm called Public Strategies, Incorporated, in Austin, Texas.
Mark McKinnon, thanks for joining us.
Mr. McKINNON: Hey, thank you for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Sometime before the year 2013, there's a better than even chance a terror group will set off a chemical or biological weapon somewhere in the world. That was the conclusion reached a little more than a year ago by an independent commission that's been studying ways to prevent an attack on the United States.
The bipartisan panel is chaired by former Senators Bob Graham and Jim Talent. And this week, the two men will release a report card that evaluates whether the country is better prepared to prevent and possibly cope with a major terror attack than it's been in previous years.
Both men join me now. Senator Graham, Senator Talent, welcome to the program.
Mr. BOB GRAHAM (Former Democratic Senator, Florida; Co-Chair, Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism): Thank you, Guy.
Mr. JIM TALENT (Former Republican Senator, Missouri; Co-Chair, Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism): Thank you very much, Guy.
RAZ: Let me start with you, Senator Graham. Your prediction about the possibility of a chemical or biological weapon being unleashed by a terror group before 2013, do you believe that threat has diminished somewhat?
Mr. GRAHAM: No. We found in 2008 that the threat had been growing over the preceding years, and I believe it has grown further in 2009. Factors like the increasing sophistication of the organization of al-Qaida, the increasing access to the materials necessary for a nuclear but particularly a biological weapon, access to those persons with the skill level to convert pathogens into a weapon, have all grown in the past 12 months.
RAZ: How do we know that these organizations could easily obtain and weaponize biological agents and maybe even possibly release them inside the United States?
Mr. GRAHAM: Well, we got our source of information as to capabilities largely from our intelligence agencies who have found a pattern of laboratories and scientists under the control of terrorist organizations who are working towards achieving what has been a long stated objective of those organizations, which is to have a weapon of mass destruction.
RAZ: But with so much money and resources being funneled into intelligence gathering since September 11, 2001, how easy would it be for a terror operative to get into the United States, produce anthrax in this country and then begin to distribute it? I mean, wouldn't that person be tracked or followed or even prevented from coming into the country? Senator Talent?
Mr. TALENT: You'd hope so. And look, we break up a lot of these attacks. Eventually, they're going to defeat the intel apparatus. It's a hugely important capability, but you also need the ability to respond. So in effect, you turn these you defang these attacks, if you will, by the ability to respond quickly.
We just saw with H1N1, Guy, with a six months notice of an epidemic, we didn't have the capacity to stockpile nearly enough vaccine.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. TALENT: So this is why we've been focusing on the bio along with concerns about intel and other capabilities.
RAZ: Clearly, the report that's coming out this week is sounding the alarm bells, in a sense. But I'm wondering, since your commission started its work in 2008, have you actually seen improvements among government agencies in preparing for a possible attack or in trying to prevent an attack?
Mr. GRAHAM: I think the answer is yes. And my assessment is most of those areas have been on the nuclear side. It's not solely within our control. We have to persuade other people like the North Koreans and the Iranians and the Russians to take action that will reduce the prospect of proliferation.
We are particularly focused on those things that are within our control, and they're the kind of issues that Jim has just described. It's within our control to have an adequate supply of the appropriate therapeutics and a means to disseminate them under emergency circumstances.
RAZ: What would be the one thing that the government could do fairly quickly and easily immediately to begin to address some of your concerns, Senator Talent?
Mr. TALENT: I'd love to see the president set a goal of being completely prepared for the likely bioweapons within a reasonable period of time, you know, three to five years. If you could do that in the top 25 cities, you could take bioweapons really off the list of weapons of mass destruction, and I think it's fully doable.
Mr. GRAHAM: And, Guy, we're going to make our report on Tuesday. Fortuitously on Wednesday, the president gives his State of the Union speech. I think an early test of how seriously this issue is being seen will be the level of attention and the nature of the attention the president gives to this matter when he speaks to the nation Wednesday night.
RAZ: That's former Florida senator, Democrat Bob Graham; and former Missouri senator, Republican Jim Talent. Together, they head up the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism.
Gentlemen, thank you so much.
Mr. GRAHAM: Thank you.
Mr. TALENT: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.
Just a few days before President Obama delivers his first State of the Union Address, the White House is looking to take control of the Democratic Party's strategy ahead of the crucial midterm elections this fall.
Republican Scott Brown's Senate victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday was a wakeup call, a moment that caught the administration off guard. But even before the polls closed, President Obama had started to reposition himself. And, by the end of the week, he sounded more like a populist president who didn't bail out the big banks, but a man who's taking them on.
(Soundbite of applause)
President BARACK OBAMA: We want our money back, and we're going to get your money back, every dime.
RAZ: At a town hall meeting in Ohio this past week, the president was asked about job creation, and it was there where he started to hint at some of his irritation over the way he believes his message has been distorted.
Pres. OBAMA: That's why I get so frustrated when we have these ideological debates in Washington where people start saying how, oh, you know, Obama's just trying to perpetrate big government. What big government exactly have we been trying to perpetrate here? We're trying to fund those guys who want to go truck driving school. We want to make sure that they've got some money to get trained for a job in the private sector.
RAZ: Team Obama, the folks who organized one of the most successful campaigns in modern presidential history, has been called back.
Reporter Jeff Zeleny broke the story that appears in today's New York Times.
Mr. JEFF ZELENY (Reporter, The New York Times): The president was very frustrated and angry about the politics. That's one thing that they did well during the campaign, and why isn't it sort of working as smoothly here.
So he called David Plouffe, his trusted confidante, into the Oval Office on Tuesday and said basically help fix this. There is a view that there's not enough oversight and coordination among all the various Democratic entities. So he's been brought in as an outside adviser who will work outside the White House to sort of get a handle on their political challenges.
RAZ: Tell me what you expect, based on your reporting, what you expect David Plouffe's people to begin to do immediately and specifically, aside from looking at the polls. I mean, are they going to start to try to energize the grassroots and the people who essentially elected Barack Obama?
Mr. ZELENY: It is one frustration of the Obama organization, if you will, that all the grassroots volunteers, all the you know, this army that he built has not necessarily been there for them, and there have been many reasons for that.
Why should they be when they've been disappointed on health care, disappointed on the Afghanistan decision, et cetera. So one thing that they're going to do, I think, is just by bringing David Plouffe sort of into the fold. He will sort of manage that more and see exactly what he can do on the ground in some places.
But even more than that, I'm told that they're going to be bringing, you know, people who are working at different parts of the government and sending them out to Ohio perhaps. All of these people will probably take leaves of absences, which is very common in Washington during an election year, and they are going to try and rebuild, to the extent they can, the presidential campaign.
But it's clear that this can only do so much. These are tactics we're talking about. It's not just a tactical problem that the Democrats are having. It's a messaging problem and a policy problem.
RAZ: Now, Bill Clinton in 1994, after the midterm election, seemed to sort of divorced himself, in a sense, from the Democratic Party and focused more on the Bill Clinton brand. In this case, it seems like President Obama and his staff are trying to make sure that they are coordinating the overall Democratic effort in 2010. Is that what's happening?
Mr. ZELENY: It is what's happening. And it's because the midterm elections are so important to everything else following in the presidency of Barack Obama. We still don't know at this point if he'll be a one-term president or a two-term president. But if their majorities are significantly weakened, what if Democrats were to lose the House of Representatives? Boy, that would change the picture entirely and signal real problems for him politically.
So in a way, their fortunes are completely intertwined here. So he cannot really divorce himself from the party per se. He needs them, and he needs to preserve the majority.
RAZ: Looking ahead this week, the president will be giving his State of the Union Address to Congress on Wednesday. Should we expect something maybe a bit more defiant from the president or maybe something almost entirely conciliatory?
Mr. ZELENY: I think if possible, they're going to try and strike both. I mean, you're not going to hear a 100-point plan for what he's going to do. It's going to be very simplified and streamlined. He's going to try and create jobs, try and improve the economy.
Of course, he's been saying that for a long time, but I think we're going to hear what the White House is calling a return to first principles. What does that mean? Basically a return to some of the rhetoric and the ideas, you know, and the notion that he campaigned and won on.
And they keep saying that he needs to sort of rekindle his connection with the American people. So I think he'll try and see him see him try and do that. But I think he will be a little bit defiant. I mean, he knows the country and the electorate is angry. So they're trying to be angry, too.
The big challenge here, though, it doesn't work as easily when you're in the White House because he ran on a campaign of change and hope. Well, now, if people want change, that means not him.
RAZ: That's Jeff Zeleny. He's one of the White House correspondents for the New York Times.
Jeff, thanks so much.
Mr. ZELENY: Thank you.
RAZ: Now, another president, also a Democrat, faced a surprisingly similar set of circumstances in 1994. Bill Clinton went into his first State of the Union Address with a 54 percent approval rating, just slightly higher than Mr. Obama's now. Take a listen to Mr. Clinton's speech back then.
President BILL CLINTON: Though we are making a difference, our work has just begun. Many Americans still haven't felt the impact of what we've done. The recovery still hasn't touched every community or created enough jobs.
RAZ: Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Mr. SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL (Former Senior Adviser to President Bill Clinton; Author, "The Clinton Wars"): There was a perception of him as illegitimate politically, generationally, culturally. Obama faces that, too.
RAZ: That's Sidney Blumenthal. He was an adviser to President Clinton and the author of the definitive account of that administration, "The Clinton Wars." Blumenthal says that after the 1994 midterms, when the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, Clinton decided to change his approach.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL: He wanted to fast forward the Republican agenda, which he believed would not be popular with the public, and adopt some of the external trappings of what they were saying in order to use against them.
RAZ: So Clinton agreed to balance the budget and later overhaul welfare, moves that weren't entirely popular with his own party, but they did allow Clinton to achieve victories with Republican support. And some political strategists now wonder whether Mr. Obama ought to take a page out of the Clinton playbook from that time.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
To Yemen now, which has been in the news since al-Qaida there claimed responsibility for the failed attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner. It so happens Yemen's government had renewed its war on al-Qaida with airstrikes a full eight days before that Christmas Day attack.
Analysts say it was a sharp change of direction for a government that had been reluctant to take on al-Qaida and it led to a huge spike in promised military aid from the Obama administration.
NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from San'a.
PETER KENYON: Yemen's decision to attack suspected al-Qaida operatives came as a pleasant surprise to Western counterterrorism officials. On Dec. 17th, Yemeni forces, with U.S. assistance, launched raids and airstrikes against al-Qaida targets. More airstrikes followed a week later, targeting what officials said was a meeting of top regional al-Qaida operatives.
For years Washington had been urging President Ali Abdullah Saleh to deal with the growing al-Qaida presence in Yemen. And for years Yemeni officials countered that they were too busy battling Shiite rebels in the northern Saada province and a secessionist movement in the south. They also feared a backlash from their own conservatives.
Mr. ABDUL-MAJID AL-ZINDANI: (Foreign language spoken)
KENYON: This was the hard-line sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani warning Muslim worshippers in a San'a mosque recently about, quote, "secret agreements that would allow the U.S. military to bomb Yemenis from unmanned aircraft" and calling for jihad if foreign forces invade Yemen.
Independent political analyst Abdulghani al-Iryani says despite their political worries, Yemen's leaders finally decided that neither conservative public sentiment, nor the northern rebellion in Saada was sufficient reason to ignore the al-Qaida threat.
Mr. ABDULGHANI AL-IRYANI (Political Analyst): The government has been avoiding this war for a long time, under the pretext that there is a war in Saada, which is actually a completely unnecessary war that they could stop at any time. And because of fears that there is some kind of a power base for terrorism in Yemen, and they didn't want to antagonize it.
KENYON: The argument among government supporters in San'a has been that attacking al-Qaida, which has insinuated itself among the conservative tribes in remote parts of the country, would provoke a popular backlash that could seriously destabilize the government.
Analyst al-Iryani says so far the reaction to this series of strikes proves that such fears had no basis.
Mr. AL-IRYANI: Nothing. And, in fact, if you look at facts on the ground, the ideological base for al-Qaida is not in Yemen. It's in Saudi Arabia. The funding for al-Qaida comes from Saudi Arabia. And I'm convinced that the leadership, the real leadership, is still in Saudi Arabia. I don't think we need to worry about a popular backlash against the government for fighting terrorism.
KENYON: Other analysts caution, however, that while Yemeni tribes have no natural affinity with al-Qaida, airstrikes that produce large numbers of civilian casualties will be powerful recruiting tools for the militants.
Saeed Obaid al-Jamhi is the author of a book on al-Qaida in Yemen.
Mr. SAEED OBAID AL-JAMHI (Author, "Al Qa'eda: Establishment, Ideological Background and Contiguity"): (Through translator) If the U.S. makes the same mistakes it made in both Iraq and Afghanistan, this of course will drive the people into a rage. They will join an alliance with al-Qaida.
KENYON: Yemeni officials say there's another reason for the recent strikes, which have continued this month. Al-Qaida operatives were including Yemeni targets in their plots. The December 17th operations, for instance, are believed to have thwarted a plan to send four al-Qaida suicide bombers into San'a to attack either Yemeni or Western institutions.
Whatever the initial motivation, analysts say the result of Yemen's newfound determination to root out al-Qaida operatives will be a massive influx of security aid from the U.S. That, they say, will have two effects. It should encourage Yemen to keep up the fight and it will tie the Obama administration ever more closely to a regime that has been criticized for widespread corruption.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, San'a.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Im Robert Siegel. And its time now for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: If the rumors have it right, and in this case they probably do, Apple will introduce a slate computer, sometimes called a tablet, later this week. Other tech companies are expected to follow suit later this year.
NPRs Laura Sydell reports on what a slate computer is and why anyone would want one.
LAURA SYDELL: If youre not sure what a slate computer is, you arent alone. A few years back, many HP executives couldnt really figure it out either.
Mr. PHIL McKINNEY (Chief Technology Officer, HPs Personal Systems Group): Im trying to convey what a slate device was five years ago. Little hard to get the executives understand, you know, what would be the use for that slate.
SYDELL: So, HPs Phil McKinney took them on a trip to the final frontier.
(Soundbite of movie, Star Trek)
Unidentified Man: These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
SYDELL: For many years, slate computers have been popping up in Star Trek. In the show, they are flat computers without keyboards used to enter data and retrieve information.
Mr. McKINNEY: The future for slates is youll have slates just laying around the house. Youll just have them laying around the office. Youll be able to pick up that slate. You should be able to connect to your information. You should be able to have the interactive experience that you want.
SYDELL: For slates, the future is now. McKinney says even though there have been attempts to market them over the last decade...
Mr. McKINNEY: What youre seeing is really a perfect storm of innovation from the standpoint of processors, operating system, touch technologies and the ability to bring that all together to hit a mainstream price point.
SYDELL: At this years Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed an HP slate during his keynote address.
Mr. STEVE BALLMER (CEO, Microsoft): I think many customers are going to be very, very excited about.
SYDELL: It was thin, about the size of a novel with an all glass front. It offered up everything that Amazons Kindle eReader has, but more.
Mr. BALLMER: As you see, I can flip through the book, using the touch experience. I can experience the book in full color. I can, of course, go and buy and download more content from Amazon.
SYDELL: There are long standing rumors that Microsoft will release a new slate computer of its own. In an interview with NPR, Microsofts Ballmer played down the size of the market.
Mr. BALLMER: Well sell 300 million PCs in the next year. There will be 150 million smartphones sold in the next year. And most of the forecast are for single-digit millions maybe of slate computers.
SYDELL: But theres a good chance that Apple is going to try to prove Ballmer wrong. Right now, rumors are flying that Apple will release a slate PC later this week. Gartner Research analyst Mike McGuire says theres a reason so many people are excited about a new Apple product.
Mr. MIKE McGUIRE (Analyst, Gartner Research): What Apple does is it takes those existing paradigms that are nice, functional devices and turn them into something unique. It may look familiar, but the total experience it delivers is unique.
SYDELL: The iPod was not the first MP3 player, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. But Apple made them popular. McGuire believes an Apple slate is likely to offer not just books but videos, music and movies, all with interactivity and an Internet connection. So, imagine youre watching a movie on your slate, you cant remember the name of the particular actor.
Mr. McGUIRE: And instead of having to go like scan through the movie to the end credits, just say wait a minute, title of the movie, you know, whos the guy in the blue suit.
SYDELL: When Dr. Jakob Nielsen, an expert on technology usability, tries to describe a slate PC, he doesnt look to science fiction, he goes directly to magic, Harry Potter.
(Soundbite of music)
Dr. JAKOB NIELSEN (Usability Consultant): The newspaper is called The Daily Prophet. It comes with these photographs that are all kind of moving images because of the magic of Harry Potter and the wizards. But in a tablet, all the photos could be - could be video clips.
SYDELL: Nielsen sees two possible technological hurdles for Apple or any company to overcome. Tablet PCs cant be too expensive, and they have to have enough battery life. Still if Apple nails it, at least some analysts believe that tens of millions of people will buy slate and tablet PCs this year.
Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Ladies, you know how men seem to be in love with their gadgets? Does all their gear make them more or less attractive? Science suggests that the answer is more.
And guys, before you run out and upgrade your smart phones, take note of this: The technology in this next story refers to stone axes and other basic tools of agriculture. And the smitten women are the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric Europe.
NPR's Richard Harris explains.
RICHARD HARRIS: In these days of electronic gizmos and biotech, we don't necessarily think of farming and animal herding as cutting-edge technologies. But when people in the Near East developed them about 10,000 years ago, it changed everything.
Professor MARK JOBLING (Department of Genetics, University of Leicester): You can regard it as the most important cultural change in the history of modern humans.
HARRIS: Mark Jobling is at the University of Leicester in England.
Prof. JOBLING: It allowed people to generate their own food and populations to grow and society to become specialized and so on.
HARRIS: It was the foundation of modern civilization, so there's more than a little interest in understanding just how agriculture spread from where it originated, which was in present-day Turkey and Iraq.
Over about 4,000 years, these transforming technologies moved west, throughout all of Europe. The question is whether just the ideas swept the continent or whether the farmers themselves did.
Prof. JOBLING: We certainly know that the technology moved, so the evidence for whether the people moved or not has come a lot from genetic research in modern populations.
HARRIS: And that brings us to the story of the guys with their agricultural know-how. To track their movements, Jobling and his colleagues have been tracing the genetics of the Y chromosome, which is passed only from father to son. And in his new study in the journal PLoS Biology, he concludes that farming men did, indeed, move from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East all across Europe.
But here's the strange part. He did not see that pattern of westward movement of women when he looked at genes handed down exclusively from mothers.
Prof. JOBLING: And some people think, well, one of them must be wrong. They've got to be the same. But our view really is, well, why should they be, because they reflect the different sexes. And we know that men and women have behaved differently today and in the past.
HARRIS: In this case, Jobling sees a couple of possible explanations. He says maybe only farming men went west to seek their fortunes and left the farming women behind. As they moved west, the men made families with the hunter-gatherer women. Another possibility:
Prof. JOBLING: More likely that as the populations expanded from the Near East, they contained men and women. But then the indigenous people, the hunter-gatherers who were already in Europe, the women were incorporated into these societies and had offspring.
HARRIS: Men can have more kids than women, presuming they aren't monogamous, so their genes would spread much faster than the genes of any women who were traveling with them. And it seems the women in Europe welcomed the farmers with open arms.
In fact, the finding implies that the hunter-gatherer men of Europe were the real losers here. They couldn't compete with the Johnny-come-latelies who knew how to grow grain and tend animals, so their genes faded from the population.
The result is the genetic pattern we see in many Europeans today: male genes from farmers who hailed from the Near East and female genes mostly from women who had been hunter-gatherers in Europe after the last Ice Age.
So, to the punch line: Does technology make men more sexy?
Dr. PETER UNDERHILL (Department of Genetics, Stanford University): That would be one way to interpret it.
HARRIS: That's Peter Underhill at Stanford University. And he says sex appeal isn't the only possible reason.
Dr. UNDERHILL: Might be in terms of not just physical appearance but in terms of ability to provide for offspring.
HARRIS: So the farmer's daughters and sons would have more to eat and therefore would be more likely to survive and spread their genes to future generations. Underhill says the British study makes a pretty strong case for that.
Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona has found the same sort of story in how agriculture spread both in Africa and Japan.
Dr. MICHAEL HAMMER (Biotechnology Research Scientist, University of Arizona): Again, the Y chromosome shows a very clear pattern that looks like it's reflecting the spread of agriculture into Japan, starting about 2,100, 2,300 years ago.
HARRIS: And once again, it appears that men moved in on a population of women and outcompeted the men who where there already. So, assuming these scientists are reading the genes right, technology really can make a guy more attractive.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
(Soundbite of song, "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy")
Mr. KENNY CHESNEY (Singer): (Singing) She thinks my tractor's sexy. It really turns her on. She's almost never left me while I'm chugging along.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Now a story about a cable TV producer, a professor, an international pop superstar, and the two dead economists who brought them all together.
Alex Blumberg from our Planet Money team tells us what happened.
ALEX BLUMBERG: John Papola works for Spike TV, the cable channel for guys, which specializes in ultimate fighting championship and bikini specials. But John, hes interested in other things, like macroeconomics.
Hes really into this one podcast called EconTalk, put up by an Econ professor named Russ Roberts. EconTalk deals a lot with the ideas of two rival economists, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek.
Keynes basically invented the idea of a stimulus package, Hayek would have opposed it. And it killed John Papola, the TV producer, that heres the government spending all this money on the stimulus and the popular media isnt talking about the underlying economics of it, like Russ Robert does on his podcasts. And then John remembered, wait a minute. I work in the media.
Mr. JOHN PAPOLA (Executive Producer, Spike TV): So I called Russ in like April of 2009 and said Im this producer, marketing person from Spike TV. I really like to work together on some kind of video project to, you know, dive into economics using visuals and entertainment value and not just lectures. It was actually Russ said jokingly what if we did a rap song.
BLUMBERG: Nine months later, what started as a joke is now a reality, making its worldwide debut right here, right now on NPR.
(Soundbite of song, Fear the Boom and Bust)
Unidentified Group: (Singing) John Maynard Keynes. Yeah, F. A. Hayek. Yeah, were opposed. We oppose each other philosophically in the same studio. Weve been going back and forth for a century. I want to steer markets. I want them set free. Theres a boom and bust cycle, and good reason to fear it. Blame low interest rates. No, its the animal spirits.
BLUMBERG: Did you imagine Keynes and Hayek come back to life? They had an economics conference together and they go out for a night on the town, going (unintelligible) drinking and rolling with their entourages, theyre at the basics of their theories. Keynes sings about the need for government spending to lift us out of recession. Hayek counters that borrowing money will come back to haunt us in the end. Like any good rap, they sling insults.
Heres Hayek getting up a good diss on Keynes.
(Soundbite of song, Fear the Boom and Bust)
Unidentified Group: (Singing) ...all red. In the long run, my friend, its your theory that stay. So, sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like infective, prepare to schooled in my Austrian perspective.
BLUMBERG: Russ Roberts and John Papola had never written a rap before. Its unclear whether Russ had even heard one, although he did have some composing experience.
Mr. RUSS ROBERTS (EconTalk): I once took a class in how to write for the musical from Charles Strauss, who wrote Annie. And I audited the class and wrote song for it.
BLUMBERG: The video is actually really good. The production values are as high as anything you might see in MTV. And both John and Russ know the economics inside and out. But lets be honest, none of us here at Planet Money are experts on what makes a good pop song. We had no idea if regular music fans would like it.
And this is where we get to the international pop star. About a week ago, right exactly at the moment when Russ walked into the NPR studios with his laptop to show us the video, the flashiest, most famous-looking pop star appeared right there in our midst. Her name is Kesha. She was there to be interviewed by NPRs Scott Simon because she has the number one single in the world right now, Tick Tock.
(Soundbite of song, Tick Tock)
KESHA (Singer): (Singing) Im talking pedicure on our toes, toes. Trying on all our clothes, clothes.
BLUMBERG: So, here we had a question about Russ and Johns song. And now, we had arguably one of the worlds leading pop music authorities right there in the next studio. Kesha was psyched to help us out, although she was little worried were going to make fun of her. So, Russ tried to reassure her in a very academic way by giving her a test, but it worked.
Mr. ROBERTS: So, Ill name a couple of people you tell me if they are economist, say economist, not economist, okay?
Ms. KESHA: Would you help me?
Mr. ROBERTS: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Ms. KESHA: Not an economist.
Mr. ROBERTS: Okay, John Maynard Keynes?
Ms. KESHA: Totally an economist.
Mr. ROBERTS: See? Thats all we need to know.
BLUMBERG: So with that, Russ pressed play, (unintelligible) start and, sorry, Russ, (unintelligible) economist huddled around a pretty messy NPR conference table and watched the action unfold onscreen. I was nervous for Russ. I thought Kesha would make fun of him. But she watched the entire thing and she seemed pretty absorbed. Then the moment of truth, the song ended. All eyes turned to Kesha, who is unequivocal.
Ms. KESHA: Its like legit. And its really good raps.
Mr. ROBERTS: Thank you.
Ms. KESHA: Its really good rapping. Its the animal sprit, I remember it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. KESHA: Im impressed.
BLUMBERG: Kesha has rendered her judgment. Now you can render yours. We linked the video on our Web site, npr.org/money.
For NPR News, Im Alex Blumberg.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
What makes a voice great? It's a question NPR is tackling in a year-long series called 50 Great Voices. We took your nominations and came up with a list. Some of the voices we'll profile are beautiful, some are soulful and some just slap you across the face, as is the case with our first great voice. It's Iggy Pop.
NPR's Robert Smith reports.
ROBERT SMITH: Okay, punk rock haters, put your earplugs in now.
(Soundbite of song, "Search & Destroy")
SMITH: Iggy and the Stooges, 1973 sounds as nasty and as raw as it did almost four decades ago.
(Soundbite of song, "Search & Destroy")
Mr. IGGY POP (Singer): (Singing) I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.
SMITH: I know you haters didn't actually put in your earplugs, and you're probably writing complaint letters right now. Just know this: Iggy Pop still doesn't care what you think.
Mr. POP: After how many years I've been doing this, I've never been willing to either bait myself or justify myself. I don't have to.
SMITH: See, here's the thing. Up until the era of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, a great voice was usually one that charmed the audience, made the girls swoon or the men jealous. Iggy proved that a voice could be a weapon.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. POP: Let's hear it for the singer. I am the greatest.
SMITH: On this cold Detroit night in 1974, Iggy is once again waging war using his vocal chords. Half of the audience worships him; the other half wants to kill him. Bottles and cups come hurtling out of the crowd.
Mr. POP: Grenades, eggs they want to through at the stage, come on.
SMITH: Iggy doesn't remember a lot about that night. They were high on some hard drug or another. They'd been touring relentlessly for months.
Mr. POP: It was just a big, heavy night. It was the Wild West.
Paper cups. Oh, my. We're getting violent.
SMITH: Iggy had been punched out by bikers at a show the night before. And on this night, he had dared them to come back. And Iggy just stood there, bare chested as usual, taunting the crowd. By the end, he wouldn't even play his own music. Iggy told the crowd he was going to do a 55-minute version of "Louie Louie."
(Soundbite of song, "Louie Louie")
Mr. POP: I never thought it would come to this, baby.
SMITH: It is a gorgeous raw mess, a raunchy version of the classic that I can't play on the radio. So let's just skip to the end.
Mr. POP: Thank you very much to the person who threw this glass bottle at my head. It nearly killed me, but you missed again, so you have to keep trying next week.
SMITH: Sorry, suckers. There wasn't going to be a next week. The band broke up that night in 1974. The original punk rockers missed out on the worldwide punk revolution by a couple of years, well sort of.
The Stooges' three albums and this final performance would be listened to over and over again by the guys who would later form The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones. The voice of Iggy Pop would be their muse. He made nothing seem more exciting than provoking a crowd to frenzy and mayhem. So, where did Iggy learn this technique? Easy: Frank Sinatra.
Mr. POP: I'll never forget riding in the back of my parents' Cadillac, and my father was singing along.
(Singing) Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you if you're young at heart.
And I thought, gee, I'd like to do that, you know?
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: It wasn't the tone, necessarily, that he wanted to imitate. It was the distinctiveness of the voice.
Mr. POP: People tend to jump on the bandwagon, and the bandwagon at that time was, like, dumb members of the British yob classes growing their hair and butchering the American blues or quasi-classical adaptations of prog rock, bleh.
SMITH: So were you sitting around going, I don't want to sound like that, I don't want to sound like that. I want to sound like that?
Mr. POP: Yes. Yes. Exactly. It was very important what not to do. It has to get up off the couch, walk around and be original.
(Soundbite of song, "No Fun")
SMITH: When the Stooges released their first album in 1969, they stripped away rock to the bare essentials: a couple of notes, a few chords, good to go.
(Soundbite of song, "No Fun")
Mr. POP: (Singing) No fun, my babe. No fun.
SMITH: Iggy sang about suburban teenage hell: boredom and alienation.
(Soundbite of song, "No Fun")
Mr. POP: (Singing) No fun to hang around. Feeling that same old way.
SMITH: Iggy didn't follow that punk rock road, though. He got lost. Then he followed David Bowie to Berlin for the nightclubbing and "Lust for Life" eras. He dabbled in ska, new wave, finally recorded that album of standards he always wanted to do. But the spirit of the original Iggy lives on wherever bored teenagers gather to listen to painfully loud music.
(Soundbite of music)
SMITH: It's a Saturday afternoon, the all-ages punk rock show on the Lower East Side: Mohawks, leather jackets, singers without shirts diving into the crowd. And Iggy's there, too, at least on the iPods.
Milo Geary(ph) is 18 years old.
Mr. MILO GEARY: The sound of his voice is good because he's a lot slimier, kind of, than the stuff that was out like that. He was dirtier sounding. He was meaner. It was more authentic and unprofessional sounding.
SMITH: Catch that? Forty years in rock music and you still get described by a teenager as authentic. Iggy endures. In fact, he's back on tour this summer, still bares his chest, stage-dives. At 62 years old, the voice is stronger than ever, but it is missing something.
Mr. POP: The part you can't get is the attitude. I've got the same kid in me, but when he was ignorant, he was more compellingly dangerous vocally, and I can't quite get to that place.
SMITH: So he'll have to settle for another kind of place. Iggy Pop and The Stooges will be inducted this year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bring on the bottles.
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Trijicon Incorporated makes telescopic sites for rifles being used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 1995, the company has stamped references to Bible passages on those sites. The company announced last week it would drop the Biblical references after the Pentagon raised concerns.
Benjamin Busch served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, including two tours in Iraq. He's glad to see the references go.
Mr. BENJAMIN BUSCH (U.S. Marine Corps): As a Marine invading Iraq in 2003, I thought we actively separated church and state from our motives. I know that Scripture embedded in the obscure numbers on rifle scopes may seem like a small detail and that Trijicon likely intended no particular malice by placing Biblical references on its equipment.
Like 2COR4:6 represents 2 Corinthians 4:6: For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
There seems to have been neither marketing nor secrecy associated with the presence of these inscriptions. But these are not innocent times, and the codes are still messages printed and sent out. These notes have now been read, exposed. And we have the baggage of explaining ourselves to peoples convinced that many of our actions are motivated by religion instead of self-defense, justice or altruism.
As a Marine, I aimed at Iraq through rifle scopes, my vision amplified. When viewing other cultures, even enemies, I think we should be wary of seeing them through a lens marked by religion.
The United States is fighting Islamic extremists. But we are not Christian extremists. When I returned for my second tour in 2005, we were in the embattled city of Ramadi, and we fought jihadists, tribal factions and criminals alongside almost entirely Muslim Iraqi soldiers. It was impossible to segregate the ambitions of singular religions then.
Although the rifle equipment was stamped as a private act by a private company, it was sold to governments and therefore unavoidably and knowingly coupled with politics. Biblical quotes were thoughtfully chosen, thoughtful enough not to be allowed as innocent of larger context.
By branding weapons with Christian messages, there's a deep and ugly blending of religion, politics and bloodshed, and it has unwittingly painted our government and military with the embarrassing language of crusade.
America is largely composed of people who consider themselves Christian. But I did not go onward as a Christian soldier. I went forth as an American, a Marine. I was sent by my country to fight a threat and thereafter with the best intentions of democracy, not theocracy.
Our efforts in the Middle East were complicated enough, and small symbols are examined carefully by our opponents. Based on my understanding of the teachings of Christ, he would be very disappointed to see his Gospel assigned to war of any kind.
I leave you with a verse that has not been stamped on our weapons: And I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, Matthew 5:44.
(Soundbite of music)
BRAND: Benjamin Busch served in the Marine Corps for 15 years. To comment on his essay, go to the opinion section of npr.org.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From the moment the earthquake struck Haiti, one radio station has stayed on the air, a lifeline for Haitians in Port-au-Prince and around the world via the Internet. Signal FM has transformed into a community bulletin board for missing persons reports, rescues, body collection, survival tips and solace.
NPR's John Burnett reports on the owner who has become a hero, among many Haitian heroes, over the past two weeks.
JOHN BURNETT: The first clue that Signal FM is a station that's close to its audience is the graffiti on the outside of the building: Viv Mario, Long Live Mario.
That would be Mario Viau, the 52-year-old owner and general manager, debonair and solidly built, sitting at his desk inside the station he started 18 years ago.
Mr. MARIO VIAU (Owner, Signal FM): You know, we were just like the phone. We were the phone of the country. Like, there were people on one side and people on the other side, and we were just the instrument in the middle that was saying exactly what was going on in Haiti.
BURNETT: When the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, Signal FM was playing "Hotel California." The earth groaned and the building shuddered, but just before the terrified DJ ran out, he had the presence of mind to hit the repeat button. So for the first 30 minutes of Port-au-Prince's descent into hell, the only thing you could hear on the radio was the Eagles' standard over and over and over.
The DJ who was on the air at the moment, Jean Gary Apollon, considers it a miracle the building held together and the antenna, located on a hilltop five miles away, never toppled.
Mr. JEAN GARY APOLLON (DJ, Signal FM): (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: All the other radio stations were knocked off the air, Apollon says. We have the luck to keep broadcasting. God gave us the ability to stay on the air for the Haitian people and the whole world.
With all the capital's newspapers and TV stations down, too, Signal FM was all there was. Frantic listeners trekked to the station in the suburb of Petionville, seeking news of lost loved ones.
Mario Viau remembers one case in particular. The station put a woman on the air who said that her husband was alive under the ruins of a bank building. She begged rescuers to search for him. They went and looked to no avail. He was presumed dead. But the woman came back to the station. Viau was not sure if her husband had called or texted her. They again gave her the microphone. She said: My husband is alive in the bank. Please, please go and dig him out.
Mr. VIAU: And eight days after, she came here with her husband. That guy gave me a hug that I will never forget. That guy almost choked me to death. He was holding me, so happy, telling me: Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
BURNETT: As the days went on, Signal FM told Haitians how to begin to handle their catastrophe. Doctors, engineers, seismologists and clergymen went on the air. They told people what to do with dead bodies, where it was safe to sleep, what to do about natural gas leaks, where they could locate medicine and food, and where to find God amid the agony.
For the time being, the station has changed its format from entertainment to information. And when they do play music, says Mario Viau:
Mr. VIAU: We try to play music that are appropriate to our situation, what we're living. We have a lot of dead people, so we're not going to put - no more hot music on the air on our station for a long time.
(Soundbite of music)
BURNETT: Today, Signal FM's staff of 23 reporters and announcers, with even more in the provinces, is the largest corps of journalists in Haiti. Many of them have lost their homes, and some have had family members killed.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: But they're on the air day and night telling Haitians what's happening in their calamitous nation. On Saturday, the big news was the huge funeral for the Catholic archbishop killed in the quake.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
(Soundbite of siren)
BURNETT: Outside in the streets of Petionville, people are still coming to the station to hand messages to the guard at the door, who passes them to the announcers.
Ms. ANDREA ANSENNE: (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: This radio station is really important because it's the first one that gave us the news. I don't know what we would have done without it, says Andrea Ansenne, standing in front of the station building. I came here for my niece to see if she's still alive. I would like to hear from her.
With tens of thousands of dead in the capital, does she really believe Signal FM can help her find her niece?
Ms. ANSENNE: (Foreign language spoken)
BURNETT: Mrs. Ansenne replies, I came here earlier with the names of four relatives, and they appeared. So here I am again.
John Burnett, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeline Brand. It's just two and a half weeks until the 2010 Winter Olympic Games open in Vancouver, and this year, there's one thrilling sport making its Olympic debut: ski cross. Our co-host Melissa Block went up to Lake Placid, New York, to check it out.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Ski cross is super fast, supercharged skiing. It's also really dangerous and really, really fun to watch.
Unidentified Man #1: Attention.
(Soundbite of starting gun)
BLOCK: The skiers come out of the gates four at a time, so four skiers competing for space on this narrow, twisty course. They're jockeying for position. Course is about half a mile long, and they will finish it in 50 seconds or so, getting up to speeds of 50 miles an hour. Lots of twists and turns and lots of bumps and jumps along the way.
Listen to how U.S. skiers Caitlin Ciccone and Daron Rahlves describe the sport.
Ms. CAITLIN CICCONE (Skier): It's just four people going out of the gate. It's like a roller derby on skis.
Mr. DARON RAHLVES (Skier): Three - I want to say motocross, NASCAR and bull riding.
BLOCK: First one to the bottom wins.
Mr. RAHLVES: It's exciting. I love it. It's just one of those, like, new sports that definitely gets the blood boiling.
BLOCK: And at 50 miles an hour, that means lots of collisions along the sharp turns and jumps. As one observer tells me, it's a carnage fest. Skier Jonny Moseley won Olympic gold in moguls in 1998. He tells me he tried ski cross but stopped.
Mr. JONNY MOSELEY (Skier): Yeah. Racing in a crowd is a whole another story. And it's scary, and that's, you know, one of the reasons I didn't continue doing it because it was scary, because the factor here that you don't deal with normally when you're competing is that somebody can take you out.
You know, you could have a season-ending injury, a career-ending injury, and it wasn't your fault.
BLOCK: And Olympian Daron Rahlves has seen his share of brutality on the slopes.
Mr. RAHLVES: You're getting beat up. There isn't one event that goes by that somebody hasn't really got, you know, injured pretty bad. I mean, because it's you're not always in control. It's the hardest thing about the sport.
BLOCK: Here in Lake Placid at this weekend's Nature Valley World Cup Ski Cross Final, it doesn't take long before a skier is in trouble.
Unidentified People: Whoa.
Unidentified Woman: (BEEP) What happened? (BEEP). What happened?
Unidentified Man #2: What happened?
Unidentified Man #3: Oh, man.
BLOCK: Okay, we've just seen an example of how dangerous and unpredictable ski cross can be. One of the men coming down in a heat of four just went over the jumps, went completely off the course, flying through the air off the course. We're seeing members of his team skiing down. And just now, one of the medical staff with a sled heading down to take him away.
Dr. WILLIAM SMITH (Orthopedic Surgeon and Medical Director, Nature Valley World Cup Ski): Well, it's all very Newtonian, of course. A moving object stays at motion, that is, unless acted upon by some external force, of course.
BLOCK: Like another ski cross...
Dr. SMITH: Yes, like another skier cross or a berm or a fence.
BLOCK: I met Dr. William Smith halfway along the course during the qualifications on Saturday. He's an orthopedic surgeon and medical director for this world cup.
Dr. SMITH: We worry, of course, about life-threatening and potentially catastrophic injuries most. Fortunately, those are very rare, but we do see people fall and hit their heads so we worry about concussion. An unconscious athlete's always a concern for a cervical spine injury. And then it tends to be more isolated extremity trauma.
Unidentified Man #1: Attention.
(Soundbite of screaming)
BLOCK: The best chance for a U.S. ski cross medal at the Olympics could rest with 36-year-old Daron Rahlves, considered among the best U.S. downhill racers ever. The Vancouver games will be his fourth Olympics. He competed before in slalom, downhill and super G but never medaled. And he retired from Alpine racing.
But now at age 36, the father of young twins, Daron Rahlves is coming back in ski cross.
Mr. RAHLVES: Racing gates is fun, but this is like, when you're with other guys, like there's so much happening, and a good course, it's awesome. And it's - people would be lying to you if, you know, they said they didn't have fun doing it. I haven't heard of anybody that doesn't have fun doing it.
BLOCK: Another top potential medal contender for the U.S. in ski cross is four-time Olympian Casey Puckett. He's endured a shocking number of spectacular crashes. And just two weeks ago, he separated his shoulder at a world cup event in France. He had surgery and still hopes to be competing in Vancouver next month.
Tyler Shepherd is the coach of the U.S. ski cross team, looking ahead to the Olympics.
Mr. TYLER SHEPHERD (Coach, United States Olympic Ski Cross Team): There's a lot on the line this year, and people are certainly gearing up for the big day in February when we get to debut skier cross to the world.
BLOCK: You know, as the coach, and looking at what's happened to Casey Puckett, who's had so many accidents and is just recovering from surgery again, do you ever worry that this is just too dangerous, that the courses are just too tough?
Mr. SHEPHERD: No.
BLOCK: No.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SHEPHERD: They do it to themselves. I mean, if they don't want to do it, they can give me the bib and they can go home. Certainly, we want everyone to be safe and not have injuries, but, you know, at a certain point you've got to know what you're doing out there in order to compete on the world cup.
(Soundbite of applause)
BLOCK: At the finish line, big excitement as the racers fly through the final jumps. In the semi-finals, Daron Rahlves is behind in the final stretch, but then...
Unidentified Man #1: And there he is right there trying to make his move. Is he going to do it? He's trying to do the same thing that we saw the last race, and it looks as though he has taken over. What a move, Daron Rahlves. I mean, that was the gnarliest path of the game right there. Daron Rahlves.
BLOCK: Daron Rahlves finished first in that heat, ended up fourth in the finals. His spot is guaranteed for Vancouver.
Unidentified Man #1: What a move by Daron Rahlves.
BLOCK: I find nine-year-old Madison Crochina(ph) of Stillwater, New York, watching the finals in a ski suit with a fuzzy cow covering helmet. Her pronouncement on ski cross:
Ms. MADISON CROCHINA: It was really cool.
BLOCK: Her father, Chris(ph), tells me Madison is ranked number one in the Adirondacks in ski cross for girls nine and under.
Mr. CHRIS CROCHINA: Well, I asked her, watching a couple of guys coming down in the sled today, if she still wanted to do it, and she says yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CROCHINA: So it's a little different. It's more humbling watching your kid doing it than doing it yourself, I think.
Unidentified Man #1: Let's hear it one more time for our athletes that made this weekend so special. Make sure to look for them in less than a month at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And the U.S. Olympic Ski Cross Team will be officially announced tomorrow. But Madeleine, there's another story coming out of this world cup here in Lake Placid this weekend, and that's the number of injuries during these ski cross races.
Yesterday, there were four skiers taken off the mountain on sleds, and that crash that I described in my story, we later found out it was a French skier. He was medivacced out. He fractured a vertebra in his neck, and he does have a spinal cord injury. He could be paralyzed.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Melissa, what does this mean, then, for this event at the Olympics?
BLOCK: Well, this world cup was the last qualifying event before the Olympics. There was a lot of pressure, as you can imagine, on these athletes to do well enough to get a spot on their country's team. Organizers told me this was a challenging course. They knew that. They did hear concerns from coaches, and they made changes to the course to try to make it more safe.
And remember, Madeleine, they added ski cross, this daredevil sport, to the Olympics to attract a younger audience, and that's a constant balancing act. How do you design a ski cross course that's going to be challenging enough for the best athletes and where part of the thrill of watching it is knowing that anything can happen and at the same time keep the athletes safe?
BRAND: All right. Our own Melissa Block in Lake Placid.
And Melissa, we'll hear more from you tomorrow.
BLOCK: That's right.
BRAND: Melissa Block in Lake Placid, thank you.
BLOCK: You bet.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And in California, I'm Madeleine Brand.
The alliance between the U.S. and Japan is showing signs of strain. And once again, U.S. military bases are the source of that strain. Most bases are on the southern island of Okinawa. Now voters in one town there, along with their newly-elected mayor, are saying enough.
NPR's Anthony Kuhn has their story.
Mayor-Elect SUSUMU INAMINE (Nago, Japan): (Foreign language spoken)
(Soundbite of cheering)
ANTHONY KUHN: A cheer goes up for Susumu Inamine, mayor-elect of the small city of Nago. At his headquarters Sunday night, supporters congratulate him and then dig into platters of sashimi and tempura.
In 2006, Tokyo and Washington agreed to relocate the Futenma Marine Air Corps Base to Nago from the crowded city down south. Inamine says his victory over the incumbent sends a clear message to Tokyo and Washington.
Mayor-Elect INAMINE: (Through translator) Seventy-five percent of U.S military bases in Japan are in Okinawa. Moving a base within Okinawa is unreasonable. Right now people are discussing reducing armed forces and bases. Relocating doesn't make sense when we should be reducing.
KUHN: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said today that he would reconsider the relocation plan in light of Inamine's win, then resolve the issue by May as promised. Before becoming prime minister, Hatoyama had said he wanted to relocate the base out of Okinawa or out of Japan.
Earlier this month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell insisted that the relocation should go ahead. But...
Mr. KURT CAMPBELL (Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of State): At the same time, we do not wish to appear intransigent. And indeed, we've tried to be very clear that our door is open for dialogue and discussions on a whole host of matters.
(Soundbite of rushing water)
KUHN: Inamine's win went over well in Nago's Henoko district. The new air base would be built on reclaimed land here, where dugongs and sea turtles now swim in turquoise blue waters.
Mr. SAKAI TOYAMA: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: Sakai Toyama is one of a band of residents who have maintained a beachside vigil for more than eight years just to make sure construction on the base doesn't start.
Mr. TOYAMA: (Through translator) I'm worried about two things. One is that the bases are close to residential areas, and I'm afraid of a plane crash and loud noise. The other is that it could damage nature here.
(Soundbite of plane)
KUHN: An F-15 Eagle takes off from U.S. Air Force Base Kadena in southern Okinawa. Bombers took off from Kadena for missions during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Local anger at the local U.S. military presence has occasionally exploded into protest, such as in 1995 when three U.S. servicemen raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl.
Mr. MASAHIDE OTA (Former Governor, Okinawa, Japan): We would say that the U.S.-Japan alliance has been maintained at the sacrifice of Okinawan people.
KUHN: Masahide Ota was governor of Okinawa in the 1990s. As a high school student in 1945, he witnessed the Battle of Okinawa in which nearly a third of the island's population perished. Ota says most Japanese actually want the bases - just not in their backyards on the Japanese mainland. Okinawans would fight for a better deal in the legislature, Ota says, but they only have 9 out of 732 representatives.
Mr. OTA: Democracy, you know, always majority rules. Nine people would say we don't want military bases. But majority said, oh, we want military base. So, at the name of democracy, we cannot solve the problems forever. It's really a cynical thing, you know?
KUHN: Okinawa was administered by the U.S. from 1945 to 1972. During that time, Ota says, U.S. and Japanese officials showered supporters of the military bases with money and pork barrel construction projects. Previous mayors in Nago have supported the bases saying it's both in the national interest and good for the local economy. Retired cement company manager, Yasunari Yamashiro, is an adviser to the former mayor of Nago who lost in Sunday's election.
Mr. YASUNARI YAMASHIRO (Former Adviser to Yoshikazu Shimabukuro): (Through translator) Look at Nago, it's so rural. There are few jobs and incomes are low. Young people, they all move to the cities and never come back. We are increasingly isolated. Our former mayors have always tried to develop this small city, which is why I support the incumbent.
KUHN: These debates are likely to continue throughout the year as Okinawan citizens go to the polls to elect several mayors and a new governor.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Tokyo.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
And we begin this hour in Baghdad with a series of brazen suicide attacks. The targets: three hotels frequented by foreigners. The coordinated bombings left three dozen people dead and more than 70 wounded.
NPRs bureau is not far from one of the targets and was damaged in the attack. Our own Lourdes Garcia-Navarro was there and she filed this report.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: First, came the shooting...
(Soundbite of gunshots)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...several insurgents attacking the front gate of the Hamra Hotel, then a minibus packed with explosives pushed through detonating just yards away from the main entrance.
(Soundbite of explosion)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hamra Hotel is popular with Western journalists. Several major news organizations are based there. Wissam Mahmoud works for NBC. He was standing on the balcony when the attack unfolded.
Mr. WISSAM MAHMOUD (Journalist, NBC News): I saw the guards shooting for some insurgents, then minibus stopped there and then its a bomb. I dont know whats happened after that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The insurgents had sophisticated weapons, he says, and they overwhelmed the hotels security guards.
Unidentified Woman #1: Just minutes after a massive explosion at the Hamra Hotel, right in front of me is a large crater. The police right now are going through the rubble trying to look for any survivors. It looks like an earthquake has hit this area.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Two women are found underneath the debris. They hovel out screaming. The face of one of them is covered in white dust mixed with long streaks of red blood.
Unidentified Woman #2: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: May God kill the government, she shouts. Around her are mangled cars and chunks of flesh. A severed leg lies on the ground trampled by the crowd. The insurgents targeted the Sheraton Hotel and the Babylon Hotel as well in the same neighborhood of Qurada(ph).
The blast all happened within 10 minutes of each other, clearly a well coordinated attack on places known to house foreigners. Iraqs elections are scheduled for March 7th and security has become one of the main campaign issues. If the bombings were meant to show that the Iraqi government is not up to the task of protecting this city, then they succeeded at least here.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Miserable, this is miserable. This is a disaster situation. Look at what happened, he says. The man declined to give his name, but the sentiment was echoed by many of the victims of the attack.
Unidentified Woman #3: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Everyone here is our family, she says. We are all Iraqis. All of them are our sons. Security has improved across Iraq in recent years, but militants still have the ability to carry out spectacular attacks. The U.S. military has warned there could be an uptick in violence as the election draws near.
But U.S. Forces were nowhere to be seen in the direct aftermath of the Hamra bombing. They are no longer the first responders after withdrawing from Iraqs cities. And so, Iraqs security forces and the Iraqi government was the target of most peoples ire.
And what remained at the lobby of the Hamra Hotel, Wissam Mahmoud said, he felt he would be secure here, standing amid the torn curtains, blown out windows and splintered doors, he clutched his wounded arm.
Mr. MAHMOUD: Weve always felt this place is safer place in Baghdad, but now no place safe, no place safe.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Baghdad.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Also in Iraq today, the man who was known as Chemical Ali is dead. The government executed Ali Hassan al-Majid shortly after convicting him for the 1988 poison gas attack on the town of Halabja.
NPRs Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE: Ali Hassan al-Majid was a cousin of Saddam Hussein and, in many cases, acted as his executioner. Through the 1980s when Baghdad waged a war of ethnic cleansing against Iraqs Kurdish population, Majid was made military ruler of the northern Kurdish region and ordered the poison gas attacks that killed thousands, including the chemical attack on town of Halabja, where 5,000 Kurdish civilians died in one day.
In audio recordings, Majid is heard bragging about how the international community would take no action, and he earned the macabre nickname Ali Chem Ali or Chemical Ali. Majid was also appointed military of governor of Kuwait for a brief period after the Iraqi invasion in 1990, during which Kuwait city was looted and largely destroyed.
After the U.S. military drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait but left Saddam Hussein in power, Majid presided over the repression of the 1991 Shiite uprising in southern Iraq when tens of thousands are believed to have died. Iraqi state television broadcast pictures of the hanging several hours after the execution.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Baghdad.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The last few years have seen a lot of people lose money in real estate. But the loss people are talking about in New York today is in a class by itself.
A New York investment group said that its walking away from its purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two sprawling apartment complexes on the East Side of Manhattan. The move marks the collapse of the biggest residential real estate deal in U.S. history.
NPRs Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI: Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were built by the insurance company MetLife after World War II for returning veterans. And over time, they have become iconic properties, 11,000 apartment units spread over 80 leafy acres in the heart of the city.
But when a group of investors led by Tishman Speyer decided to buy the complexes in 2006, a lot of people were startled by the price they paid, $5.4 billion, much of it borrowed. Sam Chandan is president of Real Estate Econometrics.
Dr. SAM CHANDAN (President and Chief Economist, Real Estate Econometrics): Embedded in the underwriting was a very, very optimistic set of assumptions around how cash flow would grow, around how the New York market would perform.
ZARROLI: At the time, New York City was easing its rent control laws and the new owners figured theyd be able to charge market rents for the properties. But residents fought them in court and won. At the same time, the real estate market was losing steam in New York, and the owners had trouble paying off their debt.
Today, the company said it would surrender control of the complexes to their lenders. The decision leaves the legal status of the complexes up in the air. Long-time resident Peter Vecsey who writes for the New York Post says a lot of people are worried, especially the elderly.
Mr. PETER VECSEY (Columnist, New York Post): What do they do? Theyve been having trouble worrying about being forced out, you know, the last few years ever since it was sold. And so, everything like this makes everybody nervous, no question.
ZARROLI: But the big losers will be the investors. They included Tishman Speyer which is expected to walk away from an investment worth $112 million, and several big pension funds like the California Public Employee Retirement System.
Peter Slatin is editorial director of Real Capital Analytics. He says theres a lesson in whats happened to the two complexes.
Mr. PETER SLATIN (Editorial Director, Real Capital Analytics): To me, this is emblematic of the extremes of the last cycle when investors really lost sight of the value of real state as an income producing asset and saw it as speculative investment on a grand scale.
ZARROLI: Slatin says with the commercial real estate market as weak as it is right now, this wont be the last property to go under, though few of the deals that collapsed will be as big as this one.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Like the Apple tablet, Googles Nexus One smartphone was the source of considerable excitement ahead of its release earlier this month. But whats happened since could service an object lesson for any company riding a wave of high tech expectations.
Omar Gallaga joins us now, as he does most Mondays. Hes the technology culture reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. And Omar, when Google introduce the Nexus One smartphone earlier this month, it was build as a super phone that could go head to head with the iPhone. How is it selling?
Mr. OMAR GALLAGA (Technology Culture Reporter, Austin American-Statesman): Well, not as well as expected considering all the hype and the reporting that people did on it. One estimate put it at 20,000 phones sold in the first week, which sounds pretty good. But compare that to the 1.6 million Apple iPhone 3Gs that were sold last summer, and the 250,000 Droid phones that were sold late last year in the first week.
So, really Google has not sold like gangbusters, at least not early on. And I think part of that might be because they are sounding exclusively online. You cant go to a store and buy a Nexus One phone. I think thats part of the issue is people want to hold the phone in their hand and check it out for themselves. And also, you know, an unlocked version of it is over $500, which is a bit steep considering all the competitions thats going on right now in the smartphone market.
SIEGEL: And those who have bought the Nexus One, what do they say about it?
Mr. GALLAGA: Well, the phone itself has gotten pretty good reviews, but there have been some problems, most importantly with customer support. Google is not a hardware company. Theyre not used to fielding calls on things that dont work hardware-wise. So, people are being bounced back between T-Mobile which is right now the only provider that uses the Nexus One. And with Google, there have been some 3G issues with Internet connectivity that people have reported, even touch screen issues.
And also, theres the issue of double termination fees. If you break your contract with T-Mobile on the Nexus One, you not only get slapped with a termination fee from T-Mobile, but also one from Google. So, a lot of issues with this launch that has not been exactly as smooth as you might expect from a company like Google.
SIEGEL: Omar, theres an obvious gadget battle going on here between Google and Apple. Google enhanced the Nexus One ahead of the big Consumer Electronic Show. Now, Apple is poised to announce not only its new tablet mid-week, but rumor has it that its rolling out even more. Fill us in on the rumors.
Mr. GALLAGA: Right. Apart from this rumored tablet, Apple usually rolls out quite a bit of products when they do these big events. And some of the things people are most excited about that there are still, you know, obviously rumors are a new iPhone version which definitely - the last three years weve seen new versions of the iPhone every summer, so that definitely will be on track for Apple. And this would have a 4.0 version of the iPhone OS. So, people are very excited about what new features might be in existing iPhones and this theoretical new iPhone that would probably debut in the summer.
And theres the big rumor of whether this phone might even be in the Verizon network that AT&T might lose its exclusivity to carry the iPhone. So thats one rumor, and then there is the rumor about MacBook Pro that may have new hardware from Intel, new faster processors from that line. And also a new version of iLife which definitely goes along with Apples pattern of introducing a new version of this software that comes bundled with every Mac every year.
SIEGEL: Omar, thanks for bringing us up to date.
Mr. GALLAGA: Thanks for having me, Robert. And well have links to all this information and all the tablet rumors on the All Tech Considered blog at npr.org/alltech.
SIEGEL: Okay. Omar Gallaga covers technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Youre listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And in Washington, I'm Robert Siegel.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it the beginning of a conversation about Haiti's future. She was speaking at a daylong conference in Montr�al, where diplomats and aid organizations gathered to discuss Haiti's long-term needs after the recent earthquake. Today's meeting will be followed by an international donors conference that Clinton said will be held in New York in March.
BRAND: NPR's Michele Kelemen joins us now from Montr�al.
And, Michele, what's the message Secretary Clinton wants to get across at this meeting?
MICHELE KELEMEN: Well, she came here saying that there's been a strong commitment, a strong outpouring from countries, donor nations that are concerned about what's happening in Haiti. But she said donors really have to come up with a way to better coordinate. This was a problem before the earthquake even, she said.
And so, the idea is to come up with, as she put it, a mechanism to funnel aid money, one that's transparent, one that's accountable. And she says donors have to be ready for this transition from the emergency aid they're providing right now to rebuilding aid. And they have to be ready to commit for the long term.
BRAND: And I'm wondering if this gathering in Montr�al came up with some concrete proposals on how to do that, on how to coordinate the rebuilding effort for the long term.
KELEMEN: Well, the host, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said this is really in the early stages. There's going to be a real donors conference in the coming weeks. This was the first step. And there clearly is still a debate in the corridors here about who's going to take the lead, how it's all going to be coordinated. And even how much, I mean, you've been hearing talk about a $10-billion aid package for five years. The Haitian prime minister was here talking about the need to rebuild this country from five to 10 years.
You know, the U.N. is obviously going to be central, but it suffered terrible losses. The secretary said that the U.N. death toll could top 300 by the time this is all over. The international financial institutions are here: the World Bank, IMF. They're all making big loans. And the Inter-American Development Bank, which survived the earthquake, is also playing a key role and will likely play a key role in the weeks ahead.
BRAND: The Haitian government was essentially destroyed. The presidential palace, the parliament, government ministries all wrecked. There's essentially no functioning government there in Haiti.
What sort of proposals are there now for helping the Haitian government get back on its feet?
KELEMEN: I mean, it is a real problem. Everyone - the secretary on down - keep saying that you have to have the Haitian government set the priorities and take a lead in the rebuilding. But practically, as you said, a lot of the government buildings were demolished. We've heard stories about the Inter-American Development Bank getting satphones for cabinet ministers, just so they could communicate with each other, or the Organization of American States offering space for the Foreign Ministry.
The U.N. is now talking about hiring about 300 Haitians to help government ministries function and get back on their feet. Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is here in Montr�al and he told the meeting that the whole country has changed, that, you know, many people are going back to the countryside. So it's, you know, time to reassess the future of Port-au-Prince, but also, you know, figure out ways to create jobs throughout the country and have a more balanced approach to development.
BRAND: NPR's Michele Kelemen speaking to us from Montr�al, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is discussing with other world diplomats the future of Haiti.
Thank you very much.
KELEMEN: You're welcome.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
President Obama set his sights today on the middle class. He offered several small scale proposals aimed at helping struggling middle class families pay for childcare, college and retirement. Aides say that will be a key theme for Mr. Obama when he delivers his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
NPRs Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY: Middle class anxiety was one of the factors that helped propel Barack Obama into the White House last year and gave Democrats their big majorities in the House and Senate. Now that same anxiety is working against the president as he tries to combat a double digit unemployment rate.
President BARACK OBAMA: Creating good sustainable jobs is the single most important thing we can do to rebuild the middle class. And I wont rest until we're doing just that. But we also need to reverse the overall erosion in middle-class security.
HORSLEY: In his upcoming budget, Mr. Obama will adopt a series of proposals from a middle class task force led by Vice President Biden. He has spent the last year studying problems like the rising cost of college and the shrinking manufacturing base. Mr. Obama says all these problems date back long before the latest economic down turn.
Pres. OBAMA: Too many Americans have known their own painful recessions long before any economist declared that there was a recession. Weve just come through what was one of the most difficult decades the middle class has ever faced a decade in which median income fell and our economy lost about as many jobs as it gained.
HORSLEY: By addressing those challenges in his State of the Union speech this week, Mr. Obama hopes to convince anxious voters that he understands what they're going through and remind them that the countrys economic problems didnt begin when he or congressional Democrats took control of the government. The specific proposals offered by the president today include larger tax credits to help middle-class families pay for childcare and additional support for those who are caring for elderly relatives.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says the health is targeted to the so-called sandwich generation, some 12 million of whom are caring for children and parents at the same time.
Secretary KATHLEEN SEBELIUS (Department of Health and Human Services): As a working mom, whos been in the work for several time when my children were growing up and the daughter of an 88-year-old father, Im very sensitive to both of these issues and struggles. And I think health and assistance in those two areas is something that really does take a huge strain off families who are trying to be good parents and good workers at the same time.
HORSLEY: Another measure outlined by the president today would make it easier for college graduates to pay off their student loans. Payments would be capped at 10 percent of a graduates discretionary income and any remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years or just 10 if a graduate goes into public service. The administration also hopes to encourage more retirement savings by offering a partial match to savers making up to $85,000, a year.
In addition, Vice President Biden wants to require employers to automatically enroll workers in a retirement savings account, unless the worker decides to opt out.
Vice President JOE BIDEN: Its a simple proposition when you do that, people, if youre automatically enrolled, they save a great deal more.
HORSLEY: None of these proposals is as sweeping or ambitious as overhauling health care or building a new clean energy economy. Mr. Obama acknowledged these small ticket items wont solve all the problems of the middle class. But he said he hopes they would help them at least reclaim some of the economic security that slipped away in recent years.
Pres. OBAMA: In the end, thats how Joe and I measure progress not by how the markets are doing, but by how the American people are doing. Its about whether they see some progress in their own lives.
HORSLEY: And thats how many Americans will ultimately judge this president.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
As in comedy, timing is everything when it comes to politics. The timing this week of a Senate vote on a second term for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is creating a headache for President Obama. Bernankes term expires on Sunday. Mr. Obama wants him to stay on, but some Senate Democrats are bulking.
As NPRs David Welna reports, Bernankes fate could now be up to Republicans.
DAVID WELNA: For many Democrats, its not easy to embrace the man former President Bush appointed to head the Federal Reserve. But late last week, as more and more of them declared they would not vote for another term for Ben Bernanke, Senate Democratic leaders were pressed by an increasingly worried White House to back him.
No. 2 Democrat Dick Durbin went from being undecided on Bernanke to endorsing him. After meeting with the embattled nominee today at the capital, Durbin explained his change of heart.
Senator DICK DURBIN (Democrat, Illinois): I thought, Durbin, is this a protest vote? Is that what it's all about? And if that's so, is it sensible? Is it the right for us? And I don't think it's the right thing to do from my point of view. I respect my colleagues who see it differently. But I think it's more important for us to make sure that we have his leadership in place. I think the president has made a good judgment.
WELNA: That Senate Democrats remain divided over Bernanke does not surprise Claremont McKenna political scientist Jack Pitney. He says President Obama put them in a tough position, asking them to reconfirm a man seen as a strong ally of Wall Street even as the president is distancing himself from Wall Street.
Professor JACK PITNEY (American Politics, Claremont McKenna College): The president is simultaneously trying to appease Wall Street and demonize Wall Street. Politically thats a very difficult trick to pull off. And a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill are caught in the crossfire.
WELNA: At least four Senate Democrats say theyll oppose Bernanke. One of them, Oregons Jeff Merkley, denounced the Fed chairman on the Senate floor.
Senator JEFFREY MERKLEY (Democrat, Oregon): He has been at the table of economic policymaking in this country for eight years when mistake after mistake after mistake has been made. That is how the house was set on fire. And now that its burned to the ground, we dont need a fireman to rebuild the house, we need a carpenter.
WELNA: And North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan said Bernanke rebuffed him and eight other senators when they wrote the Fed chairman last summer. They demanded to know which investment banks borrowed money, how much and on what terms after the Fed opened a brand new loan window for those banks.
Senator BYRON DORGAN (Democrat, North Dakota): And he wrote back to us and says, I dont intend to tell you that, dont intend to tell the Congress and dont intend to tell the American people, despite the fact that he said transparency is a big issue for him. Well, apparently not on this issue.
WELNA: Several senators have holds on Bernankes renomination, meaning at least 60 votes are needed to bring it up but not all 60 in the democratic caucus can be counted on. So some Republican votes will be required. But Claremont McKennas Pitney says Republicans cant be counted on either.
Prof. PITNEY: In a sense, its a free vote for Republicans. Bernanke was a Bush appointee, but Republicans dont have a whole lot of residual loyalty to President Bush.
WELNA: Today, Arizona Republican John McCain issued a statement saying he for one will vote against reconfirming Bernanke. Here's McCain yesterday on Face the Nation.
Senator JOHN MCCAIN (Republican, Arizona): Im very skeptical about his nomination. Im worried that if his nomination is turned down, the effect that it might have. But the fact is that Chairman Bernanke was in charge when we hit the iceberg and his policies were partially responsible for the meltdown that we experienced. I think that he should be held accountable.
WELNA: Other Republicans have also vowed to oppose Bernanke. Still, No. 2 Democrat Durbin says a vote should occur this week.
Sen. Durbin: I haven't predicted with certainty on anything, what's going to happen. But I do believe that we're moving forward. And with Republican support, this nomination will be approved.
WELNA: Is so, President Obama would be spared yet another setback.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Yesterday featured two great NFL conference championships which set the stage for the Super Bowl in two weeks: the Indianapolis Colts beat the New York Jets. So they return to the Super Bowl. And the New Orleans Saints make their first appearance in the Super Bowl. They beat the Minnesota Vikings.
It was such a great weekend for quarterbacks, we thought we'd check in with a very good former NFL quarterback, Joe Theismann, formerly of the Washington Redskins, nowadays host of Playbook on the NFL Network. Welcome to the program.
Mr. JOE THEISMAN (Host, Playbook): Thank you, Robert. I appreciate that.
SIEGEL: I want you to talk, first of all, about the quarterbacks we saw in that AFC championship game, Peyton Manning and Mark Sanchez.
Mr. THEISMAN: You had two completely different individuals. One is a four time MVP League and the Super Bowl champion and then the other one is a young man who's just played his 18th football game. So you were at both ends of the spectrum in that game. And the Colts obviously rely so much on Peyton to be able to carry them and he does such a great job carrying them on his shoulders.
And then you had Mark Sanchez on the other side, who the Jets do everything to make sure that he doesnt have to have the responsibility of the success or failure of the football team. So, two different types of approaches, two different quarterbacks, but then again I thought Peyton Manning was just absolutely his usual self, I mean, he plays at such a high level on such a consistent basis.
SIEGEL: Okay, now the NFC Championship game featured Brett Favre, quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings and Drew Brees who, in the post game photos, I can see is a half a helmet shorter than Brett Favre, the great veteran quarterback. What did you think of that game?
Mr. THEISMANN: I thought that was an unbelievable football - and they lived up by believe to the expectations of a shootout early and then it settled into a tremendous defensive battle. Robert, I will tell you this. Ive played 15 years of professional football. I got hurt in 1985. Ive been out of the game some 25 years. So, if you take approximately 40 years of professional football, I have never seen one man take the beating that Brett Favre took yesterday.
SIEGEL: And he's been taking a beating for a long time.
Mr. THEISMANN: He has been doing - I mean, he is 40 years old and he certainly has nothing to prove in anyones mind. He's the toughest guy. He's the most entertaining guy. He is everything to this game. I mean, he really have lifted the spirit of professional football on his shoulders this year with everyone rooting for him.
Drew Brees on the other hand, I didnt think played near to the level that weve seen him play all year - in large part because the Minnesota Vikings defense is that good. I thought the receivers were - they had jelly fingers most of the day. I mean, they never really caught a clean ball. I would expect a much better game from the Saints and a much better performance than we saw, even though they won.
SIEGEL: Let me just ask you one other question. Which statement is closer to the truth, since I guess they're both cliches of watching big football games: number one, the Super Bowl, just another game. They could've played him five weeks, six weeks ago or this is unlike anything else you do, something is phenomenally different about quarterbacking the team in the Super Bowl.
Mr. THEISMANN: It is phenomenally different than anything he has ever done, especially at the quarterback position. The game tends to speed up at each level. I think Mark Sanchez found that out in the game yesterday against the Indianapolis Colts, the young Jets quarterback. He had to get rid of the ball faster. The Super Bowl takes it to another notch. But when it comes to playing the quarter back position, its an interesting dynamic because what you want to do is in your mind the game has to slow down, but basically you know that everything has to speed up. So, it's slow it down in your mind, particularly make it move faster.
I can tell you that it was the single greatest football moment of my life having had the opportunity to walk off that football field and know that all that hard work, all the dreams as a young child had now come true. It is not just another football game.
SIEGEL: Well, Joe Theismann, thanks a lot for talking with us about football.
Mr. THEISMANN: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: Joe Theismann speaking with us from Las Vegas. He's now the host of Playbook on the NFL network.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
Wal-Mart has announced its cutting about 11,000 jobs at its Sams Club stores. Most in those cuts involve people who do in-store product demonstrations.
But as NPRs Chris Arnold reports, not all those jobs are going away, some will be outsourced.
CHRIS ARNOLD: If youve ever been to a discount bulk shopping store like Sams Club or Costco, youve probably noticed that there are plenty of people offering you free samples. After all, if youre going to buy a 10-pound block of cheese or a giant bag of coffee, it helps to note what it actually tastes like, and everybody likes free food. Tom Vanick(ph) was shopping at a Sams Club in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Mr. TOM VANICK: My kids like to eat the free samples and it usually gets us out of waiting in line for a hot dog or a pizza afterwards.
ARNOLD: Sams Club has an average of 20 workers at every store doing these demos, many are part time and about 10,000 of these workers have just been told that they will no longer be working for the nations largest private employer. Wal-Mart says an outside firm will be managing the in-store demos from now on. Given the economy rate now, customer Edie Brown(ph) says that thats sad news.
Ms. EDIE BROWN: I dont think that they can do as good a job as people who are here in the store because they really know their customers here.
ARNOLD: Sams Club said the move is aimed at boosting sales and did not mention cost cutting, which makes it sound like Wal-Mart just thinks this outsourced company will do a better job. But some people are skeptical.
Mr. CHARLES FISHMAN (Author, The Wal-Mart Effect): If Wal-Mart was just worried about, you know, we want somebody to do it better, well, to me, given Wal-Marts brilliance at execution, thats not a credible description of whats going on here.
ARNOLD: Charles Fishman is the author of book The Wal-Mart Effect, which looks at Wal-Marts influence on the economy. He says that Costco has been doing better than Sams Club. And he thinks that Wal-Marts trying to figure out how to cut costs and make its Sams Club stores more profitable. Maybe they dont need so many people giving out samples and maybe they dont need so many Sams Clubs.
Mr. FISHMAN: Two weeks ago they closed 10 Sams Clubs. In the whole history of Wal-Mart in North America, they only closed, like, two stores or three stores. It simply never happened.
ARNOLD: Sure, some older stores shut down, but they're almost always replaced by newer ones. Overall, Wal-Mart is healthy. Even during the recession, people have been looking to save money. They've been shopping at Wal-Mart, and the company has actually been hiring about 2,000 workers in the U.S. every month.
Mr. FISHMAN: In 2008 and 2009, thats 56,000 new jobs. Thats added jobs thats more than the total of people who work at Google and Amazon combined. Theyre Wal-Mart jobs. Theyre not Google jobs, of course.
ARNOLD: But thats a lot of jobs during a recession when many Americans are desperately looking for any kind of work that they can get. Still, union backed Wal-Mart watchdog groups have a lot of questions. Its not yet clear if this will mean pay cuts and cuts in benefits for workers even if they manage to get rehired by the outside company.
Chris Arnold, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Democrats are still in shock after the Supreme Court ruling last week that allowed corporations to start spending money on political campaigns. But the same decision also dealt a setback to some conservative activists by upholding laws that require disclosure of political donors.
NPRs Peter Overby reports.
PETER OVERBY: Writing the courts opinion in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission, Justice Anthony Kennedy said transparency enables voters to make informed decisions and to weigh different speakers and messages. Tara Malloy is a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, which defends campaign finance laws. She says that part of the opinion is a silver lining.
Ms. TARA MALLOY (Lawyer, Campaign Legal Center): If anything, the court seemed to almost herald disclosure.
OVERBY: Most politicians have always seemed to like disclosure. Last week, House Republication leader John Boehner did what GOP leaders in Congress have often done: He quoted a long ago liberal Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): I have always believed that sunshine was the best disinfectant.
OVERBY: Even the lawyer who filed the lawsuit for the Citizens United group, James Bopp, says he generally agrees but not completely.
Mr. JAMES BOPP (Lawyer): There is nothing to disinfect when were talking about the average citizen or an advocacy group that is simply speaking out about issues that they are concerned about.
OVERBY: Bopp and other conservative activists are challenging disclosure laws in the same way they contest other campaign finance statutes. Until last week, they seemed to be making headway. Bopp won a milestone case at the Supreme Court in 2007. And then...
Ms. MALLOY: There was a whole rash of challenges filed shortly before the 2008 elections.
OVERBY: Again, Tara Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center. She points to disclosure cases now pending in federal court in North Carolina and in state courts in Ohio and West Virginia. She says the Citizens United decision will help defenders of disclosure requirements. Conservatives make two broad points against disclosure. First, they say donors have a First Amendment right to both political speech and anonymity, especially if the money is small or doesnt go directly to candidates. Paul Lehto disagrees. He's a liberal legal scholar in Michigan.
Mr. PAUL LEHTO (Liberal Legal Scholar): When you enter the public square, I mean, in all different kinds of areas of the law, you waive to a large, if not, total extent any reasonable expectation of privacy.
OVERBY: The second argument against disclosure is more concrete. Some donors say they face retaliation from opponents who track them down through disclosure filings. James Bopp says nothing in the Citizens United opinion weakens that argument.
Mr. BOPP: One thing that we are paying attention to that the court said is that you need some specific allegations that theres a potential for harassment and intimidation.
OVERBY: And those allegations are central in two cases the Supreme Court addressed this month. It agreed to hear a case from Washington State where voters signed a petition to block gay marriages by ballot initiatives. They dont want their names disclosed. And in California, gay plaintiffs are challenging the states ban on gay marriage. Defenders of the ban say that video from the courtroom could set them up for retaliation from gay marriage advocates. Five justices voted to block videos of the trial. The retaliation argument rests on some established precedents, including a lawsuit brought by the Socialist Workers Party in 1982.
California lawyer William Lacy said hes compared the facts in Socialist Workers with the current cases in California and Washington.
Mr. WILLIAM LACY (Lawyer): And I can tell you that the harassment thats been reported against donors to the ban on the same-sex marriage has been far worse than any of the facts that were put before the Supreme Court in the Socialist Workers exemption.
OVERBY: But heres an important difference. The Washington and California cases are about ideological advocates, and the Supreme Court seems sympathetic. The campaign finance cases involve people who give money. And the court now sounds rather more skeptical, even as it permits unlimited spending by corporations.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
If the tabloids and nightly cable TV lineups are any indication, Americans are fascinated with failed marriages. After her own difficult divorce, novelist Louise Erdrich writes about a very difficult marriage in her new novel "Shadow Tag."
And our reviewer Alan Cheuse says the novel makes him just a tad uncomfortable.
ALAN CHEUSE: Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors. That's the way the country song about the secrets of marriage would have it. In her new novel, Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich opens those doors. Her marriage to writer Michael Dorris ended in a frenzy of accusations of adultery and child abuse. Dorris eventually committed suicide.
In "Shadow Tag," Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.
Gil's project is to paint Irene in pose after pose after pose: clothed, naked, from above, from behind, up close and at a distance. He makes his reputation from this work while driving Irene and their three children to the edge of despair. Does he stay or does he go? The question overshadows everything that happens in the novel.
The title speaks to their tormented back and forth. Irene sees it as similar to a game played in the snow after dark under street lamps in which the goal is to step on each other's shadow.
As the marriage lurches to a terrible ending, Erdrich shifts point of view from Irene to Gil to the children. The reader is left to ponder the misery of knowing a lot about a mystery some folks would say is better left unspoken.
SIEGEL: The novel is "Shadow Tag" by Louise Erdrich. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And in California, Im Madeleine Brand.
Its been two weeks since a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti. The country has been flooded with emergency aid from foreign governments, the U.N. and lots of NGOs.
In the chaotic aftermath, it wasnt always clear who was in charge of the recovery effort until now. Yesterday in Montreal, the U.N announced a new coordination plan for Haiti. Tony Banbury had a hand in creating that plan. Hes the acting deputy head of the U.N. mission in Haiti.
Mr. TONY BANBURY (Acting Deputy Head, U.N. Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti): As of today, we open something called the Joint Operations and Tasking Center. That center will receive all the priority requirements from the humanitarian community: food, water, shelter, et cetera. And in that center, they will send someone from the humanitarian community, someone from the U.N. military, someone from the U.N. police, someone from the U.S. military and they will take on all those requirements and figure out how to meet them there.
Its the one place where all the operations will come together in Port-au-Prince. And with that in place as of today, Im confident that we are going to be delivering well-coordinated, well-planned operations.
BRAND: I supposed that youre at a very sensitive juncture right now when it comes to planning for relief because, as weve seen in other natural disasters, relief efforts can, down the road, end up actually harming the population when these relief camps become permanent.
Mr. BANBURY: That is a big concern for us and thats why its so essential to have this coordination architecture in place so the entire range of response from the capitals and down to the field is done in an intelligent manner with experts providing good advice. Shelter and camps is a great example. There had been a proposal to start building camps for 100,000 people. But the rainy season is coming, there are huge water sanitation issues, huge public security issues there. If we have a tent city that turns into a slum and we have to dedicate security resources to it and draw it away from, say, relief efforts, that has big and bad implications. And so we are determined to avoid all of the common mistakes weve seen in the past.
BRAND: So, even if it means that people would have to spend a few more days, maybe weeks sleeping on the streets, its better that that happens rather than tent camps are hastily put up that then turn into long-term slums.
Mr. BANBURY: One of the greatest challenges after a sudden-onset natural disaster is that the relief community, the United Nations, we have to do everything at the same time. The Haitian people dont have a day to wait. They deserve and need tents now, but we shouldnt rush to a longer-term solution until we have a very good one, and were discussing what the solution should be with the government now.
BRAND: Are all the NGOs on board with this plan or some of them just going to operate independently?
Mr. BANBURY: Im sure some will operate independently. And thats not such a bad thing necessarily. If there is an NGO thats long established in Haiti is perhaps focused on small geographical area, is very adept at delivery of certain kind of service, they dont necessarily need to be part of this much bigger complex operation that has been developed.
What needs to be avoided is the kind of thing that happened today, where someone sends in a ship and puts it off the port of Port-au-Prince with the best of intentions to provide relief supplies, but its not through an established organization. Theres no one to receive it. It clogs up the port. It disrupts distribution channels. And that type of initiative does complicate the smooth operations were trying to develop.
BRAND: I want to ask you what its like for you to personally work there. The U.N. mission building was destroyed in the earthquake and many of your colleagues were killed. Whats it like for you to come to work now in Port-au-Prince?
Mr. BANBURY: For a U.N. peacekeeper, I think Haiti is the worst place to be now and the best place to be now. And its so hard to be here because friends of ours were killed. I have replaced someone who died in the earthquake. And the people here have all lost a friend. And its difficult. But the Haitian people need our help and this is where we want to be.
And so, people are working until midnight every night. Were sleeping on cots in an office. There were about 80 of us sharing a shower. But spirits are high and theres a strong, strong commitment to do whatever we can to bring help to the Haitian people. And were getting the job done.
BRAND: Well, thank you very much.
Mr. BANBURY: Its been a pleasure speaking with you.
BRAND: Thats Tony Banbury. Hes the acting deputy head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is turning her attention from Haiti to other major U.S. priorities, namely Afghanistan and Yemen. She's heading to London for meetings on both of those countries.
NPR's Michele Kelemen is traveling with her.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Secretary Clinton recently unveiled a 30-page strategy paper that lays out the long-term goals of U.S. development experts in Afghanistan. She said civilians will stay long after U.S. troops leave. And she's clearly hoping other countries will make similar commitments and bring to London, as she put it, in diplo-speak, some deliverables.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (State Department): In other words, really tangible commitments coming out of the conference by many different parties who will attend.
KELEMEN: Officials from countries surrounding Afghanistan and other major stakeholders are also gathering to hear how Afghan President Hamid Karzai plans to tackle corruption. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who was in Washington last week, said better governance is key.
Secretary DAVID MILIBAND (British Foreign Secretary): It's important to recognize that the Afghan government doesn't just need to avoid being outgunned by the insurgency, it must not be out-governed by the insurgency either. For us, that speaks first for the need to tackle corruption at all levels. Secondly, to achieve much greater focus on district and provincial governance.
KELEMEN: Miliband said he's expecting Karzai to lay out more details on how he hopes to persuade some insurgents to lay down their arms. Secretary Clinton in an interview this week said ultimately any conflict has to have a political resolution, but the U.S. wants a clearer understanding of what Karzai has in mind.
Sec. CLINTON: There are two end states that are being discussed. One's called reintegration, which has done a lot on the battlefield. Our military did this in Iraq. They will do it again in Afghanistan with the same kind of approach. Then there's reconciliation, which would really look at seeing whether or not any level of leadership of the Taliban would be willing to reenter the political system inside Afghanistan, eschewing violence, turning away from al-Qaida.
KELEMEN: James Dobbins, of the RAND Corporation, says the U.S. is skeptical that Taliban fighters will give up their fight in return for anything Karzai could offer, but rank-and-file fighters may leave if the price is right.
Mr. JAMES DOBBINS (RAND Corporation): Offer them an alternative from continuing to take their Taliban salary, and the Taliban salaries are actually pretty good. And that's a question of resources. I think, for instance, one of the things Japan is going to announce is a substantial donation to fund that kind of a reintegration program.
KELEMEN: Helping Yemen control al-Qaida, as well as its own internal conflicts is the topic of the first meeting in London. Secretary Clinton says this will be a chance for countries that have an interest in Yemen to brainstorm.
Sec. CLINTON: They are coming together to discuss security and development one without the other doesn't work. We'll be making clear to the representatives of the government of Yemen what we expect and how we intend to work with them.
KELEMEN: The international community needs to speak with one voice, according to Christopher Boucek, an expert on Yemen at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One thing the U.S. can do is push for a ceasefire in a conflict in northern Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been actively involved in helping Yemen put down a rebellion.
Dr. CHRISTOPHER BOUCEK (Yemen Expert, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): This is rapidly accelerating Yemen's economic collapse because they're spending money at such an alarming rate, and every dollar that gets spent fighting this civil war, which the Yemeni government cannot win, is a dollar that's not spent on fighting terrorism or dealing with a post-oil economy or thinking about water or any of the other issues.
KELEMEN: The meeting in London, which will include the Saudis and other Gulf states, is a chance, as he put it, to get ahead of a rapidly deteriorating situation.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
Some good news and some bad news today out of the Congressional Budget Office. The good news: this year's deficit is a bit lower than last year's. The bad news: it's still more than one and a third trillion dollars. President Obama and Congress agree that something should be done, but a bipartisan commission that would have presumably done something got shot down in the Senate today. And President's Obama's proposal to freeze discretionary spending for three years is receiving a lukewarm response.
NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA: Like a prophet crying out in the wilderness, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad has been admonishing his colleagues for months to empower a commission to make the difficult choices Congress can't seem to make. Conrad's aim is to bring greater balance to the budget both by cutting spending and by raising taxes.
Senator KENT CONRAD (Democrat, North Dakota): Anybody who says we don't have to do anything, we can just keep on doing what we're doing, has got their head in the sand. Social Security and Medicare are both cash negative today. They are both headed for insolvency. Those who say we don't have to do anything, they are guaranteeing a disaster.
WELNA: The 18 member commission Conrad has proposed would be made up almost entirely of sitting lawmakers whose members would be appointed by congressional leaders of both parties and the president. Their recommendations would be voted on by Congress without any amendments and would only pass with 60 percent of the votes in each chamber. Judd Gregg who's the top Republican on the budget panel joined Conrad in proposing the commission.
Senator JUDD GREGG (Republican, New Hampshire): Regular order doesn't work around here. So unless you have fast track approval, unless you have an up or down vote, unless you have no amendments and unless you have balanced commission of a supermajority to report, you don't get bipartisanship, you don't get fairness and you don't get action.
WELNA: But Max Baucus, who chairs the Tax Writing Finance Committee, vehemently opposed the deficit commission. He said lawmakers were elected to make precisely the kind of hard choices needed to cut deficits.
Senator MAX BAUCUS (Democrat, Montana): Regular order does work here: 1990, 1993, 1997, Congress passed reconciliation budget resolutions that worked. And I believe, frankly, that we have it within ourselves as senators can do the same again.
WELNA: Fifty-three Senators including 13 Republicans voted for the commission, but that was short the 60 votes needed. As a fallback, President Obama is expected to name such a commission, but Congress would not be bound to vote on its recommendations. In another move to cut deficits, President Obama is expected to announce in his State of the Union address tomorrow a three-year freeze in spending that would exclude defense and entitlement expenditures. The president's proposal got a cool reception today from Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Senator HARRY REID (Democrat, Nevada; Senate Majority Leader): We'll have to look and see what the president is talking about cutting. We have to make sure that we have money for education. We have to make sure we have money to take care of our civil society.
WELNA: Republicans generally hailed the proposed spending freeze as a step in the right direction. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did so with a caveat.
Senator MITCH MCCONNELL (Republican, Kentucky; Senate Minority Leader): I think any indication the administration is trying to reduce to spending is a good thing, but we've been on quite a binge over the last 12 months and it's going to take a lot more than just this kind of modest freeze to get us back on the right track.
WELNA: McConnell and other Republicans say one way to rein in spending is not to raise the ceiling on the national debt by $1.9 trillion as the White House has requested. They'd rather do it in small increments forcing Democrats to take a series of tough votes this election year.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
The British soul singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae made a big splash when she debuted in 2006 with her single "Put Your Records On."
(Soundbite of song, "Put Your Records On")
Ms. CORINNE BAILEY RAE (Singer): (Singing) Girl, put your records on. Tell me your favorite song. You go ahead let your hair down.
BRAND: The album landed on the Billboard charts. It sold millions of copies, and Corinne Bailey Rae earned a handful of Grammy nominations. Now she's back with her second album. It's called "The Sea."
Reviewer Tom Moon says this album is even more impressive than her debut.
TOM MOON: When a young singer has a hit right out of the gate, the way Corinne Bailey Rae did, you can usually guess what comes next: more of the same. It's understandable. These days, nobody in the music business likes to mess with success. That's one reason Bailey Rae's follow-up is so interesting. It's hardly a replica of what worked last time.
(Soundbite of song, "I'd Do It All Again")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) Ooh, you did it all again, you broke another skin. It's hard to believe this time, hard to believe that my heart, my heart's an open door. You got all...
MOON: Bailey Rae's second effort is a massive leap forward. As a songwriter, she's taking on deeper, more serious subjects, and she's become an absolutely fearless singer.
(Soundbite of song, "I'd Do It All Again")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) And I'd do it all again. I'd do it all again. I'd do it all again. I'd do it all again. You try sometimes, but it won't stop. You got my heart and my head's lost, oh, yeah. I've been burning down these candles for love, for love. So weary...
MOON: For a while after her debut, Bailey Rae was living the dream. She toured all over the world and collaborated with several of her idols, including legendary singer Al Green. Then, in early 2008, while she was working on this album, her husband died suddenly.
(Soundbite of song, "Are You Here")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) He's a real live wire. He's the best of his kind.
MOON: Bailey Rae spent months in seclusion. She says that when she returned to work, she was surprised to discover that songs she'd completed before the tragedy still resonated. She'd already been writing about grief. The title track describes a canoeing accident in which Bailey Rae's grandfather died. She pushed herself further in that direction, writing several songs that remember her late husband. This one's called "Are You Here"
(Soundbite of song, "Are You Here?")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) And he comes to lay me down in a garden of tuberose's.
MOON: Sadness runs throughout Bailey Rae's second album. It even lurks between the lines of upbeat tunes that showcase her fierce, intensely rhythmic delivery.
(Soundbite of song, "Paper Dolls")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) All my life, all my life, it's not right. Nobody told me I could do something. Nobody told me I could be something, yeah. I am trying. I am trying. There is no right. Nobody told me I could do something. Nobody told me I could be something.
MOON: Armchair pop culture psychologists will say that Bailey Rae's growth is the direct result of the death of her husband. That's an inevitable conclusion, but it shortchanges her.
What I hear in her mesmerizing vocals and the album's delicate blend of jazz, soul and pop is a profound artistic restlessness. She didn't just confront her grief. She pushed past whatever worked before until she landed on a sound that's thrilling and, at times, even bold.
(Soundbite of song, "I Would Like to Call it Beauty")
BRAND: The new album from Corinne Bailey Rae is called "The Sea." Our reviewer is Tom Moon. You can hear the entire album at npr.org.
(Soundbite of song, "I Would Like to Call it Beauty")
Ms. RAE: (Singing) So young...
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand. The Olympics are a mammoth industry. Next month's Winter Games in Vancouver will cost more than $1.5 billion; 5,500 athletes from more than 80 countries will compete. We're going to hear now about a time when the Olympics were much simpler and much smaller. Our co-host, Melissa Block, is visiting an earlier Olympic host city.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Well, a small town really, Lake Placid, New York, nestled in the Adirondack Mountains. Just a few thousand people live here, and it cherishes its bragging rights. Tiny Lake Placid considers itself the winter sports capital of the world, home to not one but two Olympics.
(Soundbite of archival footage)
(Soundbite of applause)
Governor FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (Democrat, New York): I welcome you, the representatives of many of our sister nations, to this, the opening of the third Winter Olympic Games.
BLOCK: In 1932, then-New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Lake Placid games. Lake Placid hosted the games again in 1980, the year the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the Miracle on Ice.
(Soundbite of hockey game)
Mr. SANDY CALIGIORE (Sports Announcer): (Unintelligible). They thought it was impossible. The United States has upset the Soviet Union. I can't believe it. This is a miracle. I can't believe it.
BLOCK: That's longtime Lake Placidian Sandy Caligiore calling the 1980 game for the local radio station WNBZ. I meet up with him in the shadow of that hockey arena. We lace up some skates and glide onto the 400-meter Olympic speed skating oval. It's outdoors, uncovered, where more history was made in 1980.
Mr. CALIGIORE: We are, right here, literally in the footsteps of where Eric Heiden won his five gold medals in 1980, you know?
BLOCK: It feels very small-town America. We're right on Main Street.
Mr. CALIGIORE: Yeah. This is it. And, you know, back in those days, Melissa, this was really the last of the really small, intimate Olympic Winter Games.
BLOCK: And Sandy, right here to our right is Lake Placid High School built right next to the ice.
Mr. CALIGIORE: Right.
BLOCK: Kids here would be in class looking out at this oval, thinking maybe, I could be Eric Heiden.
Mr. CALIGIORE: Well, and this is one of the great things about Lake Placid, that you let your mind wander if you're a kid. And, you know, there's every reason to think that you can achieve greatness because you have access to a venue such as this.
BLOCK: I'm not feeling quite like Eric Heiden tonight.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: I don't know about you, Sandy.
Mr. CALIGIORE: No, no, no. They'll never mistake us.
BLOCK: But not bad for a public radio host.
Mr. CALIGIORE: Right.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: Last Friday night, it seemed all of Lake Placid turned out to watch a World Cup aerials competition, an Olympic qualifying event. The cold night air glittered with silver crystals like magic dust as skiers flew and twisted and slipped under a quarter moon.
Unidentified Man: Here we go. With exactly (unintelligible). He's from Canada.
(Soundbite of cheering)
BLOCK: Amanda Rondo(ph) of nearby Au Sable Forks had bundled up her four-year-old daughter Katie(ph) to come watch. Katie has been skiing since she was 19 months old. And her mom says in a town like Lake Placid, which churns out Winter Olympians like crazy, an Olympic future for Katie seem possible.
Ms. AMANDA RONDO: Oh, yeah. It's definitely, I would think, would be in reach. I mean, just state-of-the-art facilities and so much knowledge and passion behind it that we have up here.
BLOCK: The Lake Placid area has sent at least one athlete to every Winter Olympics since they began in 1924. And it's no wonder when you look around, everywhere you go here, you are surrounded by active Olympic training venues.
You think you want to try ski jump? Go on over to the terrifying 26-story-tall jump on the outskirts of the village. Tempted by bobsled or luge? Their competition tracks are here, too. This year, the Lake Placid area will send 10 athletes to Vancouver, some have been competing against each other for decades.
Ms. HELEN DEMONG: This is a picture that was taken when the boys were approximately nine, 10 years old. And you can see on the podium, first place is Lowell Bailey. Second place is Bill Demong. Third place is Timmy Burke.
BLOCK: And they're all going to Vancouver.
Ms. DEMONG: They're all going to Vancouver.
BLOCK: That's Helen Demong. Her son Bill is a world champion in Nordic combined. That's cross-country skiing and ski jumping. Bill's buddies, Tim Burke and Lowell Bailey, are strong Olympic contenders in biathlon, which combines cross-country and rifle shooting. Helen Demong says winter sports are just in these kids' blood.
Ms. DEMONG: I was eight months pregnant with Bill at the 1980 Olympics. And I remember patting my belly, thinking, this is my Olympic baby.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DEMONG: It worked.
BLOCK: And Elizabeth Bailey remembers her husband skiing the back country with baby Lowell on his back.
Ms. ELIZABETH BAILEY: I remember Lowell could barely say much except faster, faster, Pop. I'm sure, Jack, you probably had Tim on your back.
Mr. JACK BURKE: Sure.
Ms. BAILEY: And so these kids grew up, like before they could ski, skiing.
Mr. BURKE: There's not a lot of the typical distractions that you might have if you're in a more populated area.
BLOCK: This is Jack Burke, Tim's dad.
Mr. BURKE: They couldn't go to a mall if they wanted to.
BLOCK: Yeah, the U.S. has never won a medal in either biathlon or Nordic combined. So Helen Demong says hopes are riding high on these local athletes.
Ms. DEMONG: Because we have been the underdog for so long, if they medal, it will bring it to the attention of Americans. That's what speaks to Americans: results.
BLOCK: And these Olympic parents say their kids would love to see another wave of young athletes fall in love with these sports and come up behind them.
I'm Melissa Block in Lake Placid, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Its going to take some time before the U.N. gets its coordination framework in place and working. Meanwhile, the Haitian government says it hopes to go ahead with plans to move hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors out of makeshift settlements. They would head to camps on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where they can receive food, shelter and medical aid. Many people now living on the streets of the capital say theyre willing to go.
But as NPRs Corey Flintoff reports from Port-au-Prince with the move to camps comes some very real risks.
COREY FLINTOFF: Jacques Geson and 10 members of his family have been sleeping in the dust for two weeks. Theyre packed side by side with hundreds of other earthquake survivors in the park across from Haitis ruined National Palace. They say theyve heard of the Haitian governments plan to move them to camps outside the city, but Geson has some questions.
Mr. JACQUES GESON: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: I know we have huge needs here, he says, but if theyre going to take us somewhere else, theyll have to give us a roof, food and even money.
The 63-year-old is mistrustful of his government and the international aid mission. People in the camp say the only humanitarian aid theyve received so far is water.
The plight of people like Geson and his family is one of the things that makes the idea of moving survivors out of the capital seem appealing. Officials estimate that there are more than 650 makeshift settlements scattered throughout the city, and some say it would be far simpler to provide food, medical services and safety in formal camps.
Mr. RICK BAUER (Engineering Adviser, Oxfam): Its very easy to deliver aid to camps. Theyre all right there. We call it the truck and chuck syndrome. You just fill up your truck, and you chuck it out the other side to give it to people, and you say its a job done.
FLINTOFF: Thats Rick Bauer, an engineering adviser for the British-based charity Oxfam. He says one idea being discussed would put thousands of survivors in a two-phase camp. One part of the camp would be temporary, with families in tents. Residents would be hired to help build permanent housing in another part, providing a source of income for the survivors.
Mr. BAUER: Sounds good in principle, but in reality its a lot more difficult and complicated to put into practice.
FLINTOFF: Especially in Haiti, Bauer says, where peoples normal social organization in neighborhoods has been so severely disrupted. He says theres a risk that violent Haitian gangs could take control of the camps, as they did in the slums of Port-au-Prince just a few years ago.
Bauer says that in addition to planning for relocating people, the aid mission ought to be thinking about how it can work with survivors to keep them in their neighborhoods. He says one rough estimate is that 70 percent of people in some areas could, with some money and technical assistance, repair their houses well enough to make at least one or two rooms safe to live in for the next six months or so. That could buy time, he says, to help neighborhood groups restore the life of the city.
(Soundbite of crowd)
FLINTOFF: Returning to a damaged house doesnt sound appealing, especially when aftershocks rumble every day. But Augustin Ernst, living with his family of four in the camp by the National Palace, says moving away from the city would be hard, too.
Mr. AUGUSTIN ERNST: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: We dont want to stay here, he says, waving at the camp but we have no choice. I was born here, and this is what I know. I dont want to go anywhere else.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Its tempting, but now illegal. The Obama administration today banned texting while driving for many commercial truck and bus drivers. The national ban was announced by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and it takes effect immediately.
NPRs Brian Naylor reports on the administration today banned texting while driving for many commercial truck and bus drivers. The national ban was announced by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and it takes effect immediately.
NPRs Brian Naylor reports on the administrations latest efforts in its fight against distracted driving.
BRIAN NAYLOR: LaHood says texting and driving has become an epidemic. So much so, its necessary to ban the practice by commercial truck and bus drivers.
Secretary RAY LAHOOD (Department of Transportation): Today, we are sending a strong message. We dont merely expect you to share the road responsibly with other travelers, we will require you to do so.
NAYLOR: LaHood cited studies which show texting drivers are about 23 times more likely to get into a crash or near miss than drivers not distracted. Texting drivers take their eyes off the road for an average of nearly five seconds which at 55 miles per hour means the driver is traveling the length of a football field plus the end zones without looking at the road.
Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. have laws in place banning texting. The new federal ban affects all truck drivers and bus operators with more than eight passengers. Those who found in violation will be subject to a $2,750 fine. But LaHood can see its enforcement wont be easy.
Sec. LAHOOD: Its the most difficult thing that we face right now, the enforcement part. That really is. And D.C. is a classic example of it. Just drive around and everybodys got a cell phone in their ear. And its illegal.
NAYLOR: The commercial truck industry supports the new ban. The president of the American Trucking Associations, Bill Graves, appeared at todays news conference alongside LaHood and other administration officials. He said the prohibition on texting on hand-held devices was appropriate, but he indicated further steps by the government might be more problematic.
Mr. BILL GRAVES (President and CEO, American Trucking Associations): I think, you know, the agency and all of us face a challenge in getting to that point to where we can be assured that were never distracted in our car and our commercial vehicle because that becomes, you know, when we turn our radio on and when we try to eat our cheeseburger while were driving along, I mean, there are things that are going to be difficult to get your arms around.
NAYLOR: LaHood has made distracted driving a focus of his attention as transportation secretary and he hopes to go further. The next step is a rule that would ban truckers from using what are known as fleet management devices, which are essentially on-board computers that issue truck drivers delivery pick up instructions and are wired with a GPS device for directions.
The agency is also considering a rule to ban all cell phone use by commercial drivers. LaHood also expressed concern over the auto industrys increasing fascination with Internet capable devices. Ford recently introduced a system that can turn a car into a mobile Internet hotspot. Other manufactures are developing on-board Web browser, restaurant guides and 3D maps. LaHood is clearly frustrated.
Sec. LAHOOD: When Ive suggested to our people, we have a little sit down with the auto manufacturers and talk to them about this. To put more technology doesnt meet the high standard that Ive been talking about. It just simply doesnt. You cant drive safely when youre trying to adjust your GPS system or the radio.
NAYLOR: The Obama administration has already banned texting by federal employees driving government vehicles. And a measure has been introduced in the Senate that would require all states to ban texting while driving or lose a portion of their federal highway funds.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor weighed in today on a controversial decision by her former colleagues on the high court. She said that judicial independence in state courts will be severely compromised by last weeks ruling striking down bans on corporate spending on elections. More than 80 percent of state judges are elected. And while these elections used to be low-profile affairs, big money has transformed them in recent years.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Since her retirement five years ago, OConnor has traveled the country, tirelessly defending the idea of judicial independence. As she put it today, two of the complaints that the nations founders had against King George centered on the absence of judicial independence in the colonial courts.
Ms. SANDRA DAY OCONNOR (Former Supreme Court Justice): The founders realized there has to be someplace where being right is more important than being popular or powerful, and where fairness trumps strength. And in our country, that place is supposed to be the courtroom.
TOTENBERG: But unlike in the federal system where judges have life tenure, in most states, judges must stand for competitive election on a regular basis. And in recent years, special-interest spending has grown exponentially in state judicial elections, with the record amount of money spent being nearly $14.5 million for a single judicial seat in Alabama.
Today, speaking at a conference at Georgetown University, Justice OConnor said the situation is likely to get worse with last weeks Supreme Court decision.
Ms. OCONNOR: And invalidating some of the existing checks on campaign spending, the majority in Citizens United has signaled that the problem of campaign contributions in judicial elections might get considerably worse and quite slim.
TOTENBERG: The flaw in the system of judicial election, she said, is that theyre aimed at holding candidates accountable, not at insulating them from political influence.
Ms. OCONNOR: Increasingly expensive and negative campaigns for judicial office erode both the impartiality of the judiciary and the publics perception of that.
TOTENBERG: OConnor said that in her view, theres only one fix for the system now.
Ms. OCONNOR: The best way to stop the damage done by judicial elections is, probably, to go to a somewhat different system.
TOTENBERG: She recommended the so-called merit selection system used in a dozen states, in which a committee of lawyers and lay people recommend a slate of qualified individuals to the governor for appointment. And once appointed, judges stand for retention elections at regular intervals.
In striking down the ban on corporate contributions last week, the Supreme Court reversed a major campaign finance decision written by OConnor just seven years ago, and her displeasure was palpable. Ignoring the role of special-interest money, particularly in judicial election, she said, is like ignoring an alligator in your bath tub.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
Tomorrow night, President Obama will address Congress on the State of the Union. He's expected to present his plans to help people hurt by the recession and high unemployment, and his plans to hasten the recovery.
SIEGEL: Last week, I went in search of the recovery in one small Ohio City. Chillicothe, Ohio, is 45 miles due south of the state capital, Columbus. I went there in the fall of 2008 when the economy was slowing down. And this time, as I did then, I went to the local chamber of commerce's monthly gathering called Business After Business.
Unidentified Man: First and foremost, Happy New Year, everybody. Happy New Year.
Unidentified Group: Happy New Year.
Unidentified Man: We're 20 days into it, but our first BAB of the year, and I really, really want to thank our sponsors tonight.
SIEGEL: This month, the BAB, as it's known, was at the old Pump House, an art center in the park along the Scioto River. Local merchants shared tales of modest successes in the big downturn: the downtown gift shop owner who had a strong Christmas season, the auto dealer who says he had a good December, the men who sell locks and burglar alarms who haven't suffered at all - hard times, after all, breed property crime.
But as the chamber's president, Marvin Jones, tells it, the big picture for Chillicothe, a city of 22,000, and surrounding Ross County, is anything but bright.
Mr. MARVIN JONES (President and CEO, Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce): Unemployment rate here is about 12.5 percent, I want to say.
SIEGEL: It's above the national average.
Mr. JONES: Above the national average.
SIEGEL: And a year ago, October, back in 2008?
Mr. JONES: It was probably around 8 percent at that point.
SIEGEL: So that's a 50 percent increase in unemployment.
Mr. JONES: Yeah, it is. Right. Right. It's about 400 more people unemployed in our county, on the basis of about - a labor force of about 34,000.
SIEGEL: Housing, what's happened with foreclosures since a year ago, October?
Mr. JONES: Unfortunately, with the foreclosures in Ross County, almost 500 recorded here in 2009. And as far as I can tell, that's an all-time high. And it's probably about - oh, maybe 60 or 70 above 2008. So obviously, we have felt that.
SIEGEL: Have you seen any stimulus money in Chillicothe or in Ross County?
Mr. JONES: We were fortunate enough that we had a shovel-ready project with our Ohio 104, Route 104 project, on the north side of town. It has probably helped a few jobs in terms of I know the concrete supplier is local, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the other jobs are local also.
SIEGEL: I visited Chillicothe's three biggest employers to get their sense of the economy. There is still some very successful manufacturing going on here. For example, at the state-of-the-art Kenworth Truck assembly plant. This year, workers faced occasional layoffs at Kenworth. The company reduced its 401(k) match but has now restored most of the cut.
Scott Blue, the plant manager, says the demand for big trucks plummeted last year.
Mr. SCOTT BLUE (Manager, Kenworth Truck Company): 2006 was the peak year. That was the year that we just built more trucks than we've ever built ever before in our history. And so, we were in excess of 100 trucks a day here at this facility. Now we're just 60 percent of that.
SIEGEL: I was here in October 2008. And at that time, I guess what had been expectations for even more production had run into the reality of the slowing economy.
Mr. BLUE: I guess we all kind of had the same expectations. We thought that things would be better and things would continue to improve, but they certainly didn't.
SIEGEL: Scott Blue says, in recent years, the average demand throughout the country for trucks was running at about 200,000 to 225,000 trucks per year. Last year, it sunk to 100,000.
Mr. BLUE: And the projection for 2010 now is between 110 and 140,000. So the industry is still very much depressed, and it relates to the economy, I think, and the amount of freight that's moving and so forth.
SIEGEL: Those are the numbers. For Joyce Underhill(ph), Robert Call(ph) and Mike Miller(ph), those numbers add up to caution in how they spend and save, and concern about the economy that awaits their children. They're all senior blue-collar workers at the Kenworth Truck Plant. They all make around 50,000 a year and they've all put children in or through college.
Mike Miller, who also works a family farm, has two kids in college.
Mr. MIKE MILLER: It's been tough. It's just one thing after another. You have to, you know, watch your P's and Q's and try to keep the kids on the straight and narrow, so...
SIEGEL: Do you sense there's a recovery? Joyce, do you sense that the economy, however bad it's been in the past year, is turning around and getting better now?
Ms. JOYCE UNDERHILL: I don't think it's gotten any better. It's about the same. It's slow. It's very slow. I know that this time last year, we were laid off, off and on, you know, weeks at a time.
SIEGEL: That's a major way you would feel...
Ms. UNDERHILL: Correct.
SIEGEL: ...the strength of the economy? Other ways that you sense it?
Ms. UNDERHILL: Well, I've had two girls graduate college in the last three years and they actually are employed. I have a daughter that's a third grade teacher, and then the other one that's out - she had to move out of the area, though. She's living in Chicago. So that - you know, she had to go look for work elsewhere.
SIEGEL: Rob, do you sense we're in a recovery now?
Mr. ROBERT CALL: I think we've bottomed out. But - and like Joyce said, a year ago, we were working from day to day and from week to week not knowing if we're going to have work. So now, we've - I've got - I personally have a little more sense of security. My wife and I, both, we have saved a lot, you know, for - in case something does happen, we've got that to fall back on.
I've got, what, three or four months, you know, security in the bank to where I've kind of - my thought process has changed somewhat as far as my spending goes. We've not taken a vacation in a couple of years. But the word out on the floor, we've got several guys that could retire now who are afraid to retire because the unsecurity, you know, of what tomorrow holds as well.
SIEGEL: 'Cause those guys who are putting off retirement are also preventing some 20-something from taking a job at the plant.
Mr. CALL: Correct. It's like a double-edged sword.
SIEGEL: Joyce, for you, decisions that are altered by the recession?
Ms. UNDERHILL: Oh, yes. Major purchases, auto purchases, appliances, anything in the household. You know, you need to say, do I need to spend this? Do I really need to spend this now or do I want to wait? So, you know, you wait. And then also with retirement, I would love to retire in, like, five years. But, you know, with our 401(k) and the match, and it just kind of, you know, threw a wrench into things that you were planning on doing later on that you're not actually going to be able to do right away.
SIEGEL: Mike, for you?
Mr. MILLER: You know, it's been a huge change as far as the things we have to do. As far as me, as cutting back, we've had to. I mean, through buying purchases, just farm machinery and just, you know, making this go and patching this and maybe letting that go and things like that.
And retirement-wise, I think it's harder and harder to save today, nowadays. Fifteen years ago, I noticed what I used to put back made less money and I put more money back. And now it's rougher and rougher and rougher to save anything in this country. And I just - I don't know. It just seems like you turn on the evening news and it's - they're not in touch with what's going out here in reality with the people out here in this country.
SIEGEL: Well, does the experience of this past year of recession, does it leave you at all optimistic about things? Are you worried? How would you describe your mood about the economy? Joyce?
Ms. UNDERHILL: No, I don't worry. I don't worry about it. I don't lose any sleep over it because it's beyond my control.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. UNDERHILL: So I, you know, I just take it in stride.
SIEGEL: Mike?
Mr. MILLER: I work for my kids and I'll tell you why I say that is, you know, I'm 51 years old. And I'm hopefully seeing a light at the end of tunnel here. But I worry for - and I try to stay positive. But down deep inside, you know, me and my wife sit down and talk about this many times: What's facing them? What are we leaving them? Is the jobs going to be there for them?
SIEGEL: Rob Call, what about you?
Mr. CALL: You know, I worry, just like Mike said. You know, my kids are my primary drive, so I worry about their future. But as far as myself, you know, Joyce touched on it: What can you do? You really can't do anything about it other than, you know, live life. Life goes on.
SIEGEL: If there were some message about the economy that you hoped members of Congress or members of the administration took on board, what would it be?
Mr. MILLER: If - I would say try to get out here and listen to the people and get us back to where we used to be as far as having good jobs in this country. Good manufacturing jobs.
SIEGEL: Mike, thank you.
Joyce, one message for Washington to hear from you.
Ms. UNDERHILL: I think they need to focus on the people and what they need. And the political things, they need to put aside and try to focus on the American people and taking care of us.
SIEGEL: And, Rob?
Mr. CALL: Yes. The blue-collar people are the people that run this country, drive every aspect of the economy and everything. And that's us, the working people. They need not to lose touch with reality as far as who we are and what we need.
SIEGEL: That's Robert Call. He, Joyce Underhill and Mike Miller all work at the Kenworth Truck assembly plant.
Chillicothe, Ohio's other big private sector employer is also a manufacturer: the Glatfelter Paper Company.
(Soundbite of machinery)
SIEGEL: Every hour, paper machine number 12 turns pulp into another gigantic 25-foot roll of paper, paper fit for hardcover books to be printed on. Each roll weighs 30 tons. The CEO, John Blind, says, these days, it feels like a bit of a recovery.
Mr. JOHN BLIND (Glatfelter Paper Company): Our projections are it's going to be a slow recovery, but we're starting to see improvement in the demand for our products.
SIEGEL: John Blind has more than just a recession to worry about. Glatfelter makes carbonless copy paper, a product that's been targeted by Mexico in a trade dispute. It's used by hospitals, so if medical records ever go electronic, and if Kindles make hardcopy books obsolescent, then some of Glatfelter's main products are in trouble. Blind says the company saw the recession coming early in 2008 and cut back production to avoid mounting inventories.
Mr. BLIND: So we actually had to temporarily lay off some people to get through that, okay? And we continued to take market-driven downtime from about November of 2008 through June of 2009, at which time our demand started to pick up and we were able to call back a majority of the people that were laid off for those temporary times.
SIEGEL: How does your workforce today compare with, say, the beginning of 2008?
Mr. BLIND: I think it's probably down 50, something like that, from the beginning of 2008, maybe a little bit more.
SIEGEL: Well, that's 50 out of...
Mr. BLIND: Out of 1,450.
SIEGEL: The biggest employer in Chillicothe employs just over 2,000, and it's a place where you can hear a rare sound around town in these recessionary times: construction.
(Soundbite of construction)
SIEGEL: The Adena Medical Center is adding a new wing. This floor will be a women's and children's center when it opens this spring. Between Adena and a VA hospital nearby, health care is the growth sector here, as it is in so much of the country. Even so, CEO Mark Shuter says last year, the medical center felt the recession, and it's still feeling it.
Mr. MARK SHUTER (Chief Executive Officer, Adena Medical Center): To say there's a recovery, you know, I see no evidence of that.
SIEGEL: One measure of economic activity is jobs, how many people you employ.
Mr. SHUTER: To me, that would be the - probably the litmus test. You know, we've been growing by adding a roughly 200 employees a year. You know, we've slowed down to the tune of probably 70 positions. We employ 2,200.
SIEGEL: So you're down about 70 positions over the year.
Mr. SHUTER: Right. Mm-hmm. Right.
SIEGEL: After typically having grown by a couple hundred.
Mr. SHUTER: By 200. What's very unusual about this recession, I've never seen a recession impact people's use of the health care system. This one did. So for people to keep calling this a recession, you know, it does need some qualifier, the great recession. Call it something.
SIEGEL: And when you start seeing job growth, that's the recovery?
Mr. SHUTER: To me, it's all about jobs. I'll say we're out of the recession when I'm back to growing 200 jobs a year.
SIEGEL: The last time I was in Chillicothe, Ohio, in October 2008, the question was: Is it a recession yet? And the answer was yes. This year, the question is: Is this a recovery yet? And in Chillicothe, Ohio, the answer is still no.
(Soundbite of music)
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
With the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl both on the horizon, what better time than now, we thought, to talk about baseball, actually, baseball grass.
The lawn and garden company Scotts Miracle-Gro has signed a deal with Major League Baseball. And under the deal, fans will be able to buy grass seed blends to match those used at some of their favorite ballparks.
John Price is a brand manager for Scotts, and he joins us now from Bloomington, Indiana. Welcome to the program, Mr. Price.
Mr. JOHN PRICE (Brand Manager, Scotts Miracle-Gro): Hi, Robert. Thank you.
SIEGEL: And yeah, a have a lot of customers hoping for a little bit of, say, Wrigley Field in their backyard. Where did this idea come from?
Mr. PRICE: That's right. You know, baseball is such a great fit for Scotts. You know, we know that baseball fans are - tend to be homeowners and that's really our target audience. And so, what better way to marry people that love having a great lawn with tapping into a sport that people love as well that features a great lawn. So that's kind of where the idea came about.
SIEGEL: I went online and looked at pictures as best I could of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, and I admit to being very indifferent when it comes to the lawn. But even so, I just couldn't see much difference between the grass at those two ballparks. Is there?
Mr. PRICE: You know, these Major League Baseball groundskeepers just are at the, you know, top of their game. They do an incredible job with these fields. And so, you know, between the looks of the two parks and the kind of Scotts grass seed they use, there's not a lot of difference between those two. But the differences tend to be much more dramatic when you go in different parts of the country.
SIEGEL: Ah ha. What's an outlier here that we might...
Mr. PRICE: An outlier would be more teams like Atlanta, Texas, Florida, California, they just - where different grass types tend to be prominent, and the groundskeepers tend to use different grass seed varieties on the field.
SIEGEL: But would fans generally then be limited to a grass seed that's used probably in a local ballpark because that's what grows in their part of the country?
Mr. PRICE: There are broader, kind of, agronomic bans than just the limited city. But what we would do, it's important for us to, you know, make it clear to the fan where they, you know, where they could use the Fenway Park grass seed. So you could use Fenway Park grass seed in Columbus, Ohio, for example, and you would have great results. If you used it in the Deep South, for example, you know, that wouldn't be the best grass seed for you. So...
SIEGEL: Is the seed that you're going to market as Wrigley Field grass seed, is that something I could also buy just called, you know, X22 and it's the same seed you're already selling?
Mr. PRICE: No, absolutely not. I mean, these are very premium, top-of-the-line varieties, you know, we supply to our Major League Baseball partners and until now haven't been available to the consumer market. So this is definitely not something that you'd be able to buy off the shelf.
SIEGEL: How much more would a bag of seed cost because it's a premium ballpark blend, say, than generic?
Mr. PRICE: Sure. The Major League Baseball grass seed will tend to be about an $8 premium to our turf builder line.
SIEGEL: Do you get a cap with it or something that can match your blend?
Mr. PRICE: You know, not yet. We are looking at some different options to, you know, deliver a promotional item with it. But, you know, we think that the product itself has incredibly strong appeal, and consumers are really going to get excited to bring, you know, the field back to their lawn and have a piece of Wrigley Field or Fenway Park on their home lawn.
SIEGEL: And when might they actually be able to do this?
Mr. PRICE: The products will be available by opening day. So you'll see them start showing up in the stores in March.
SIEGEL: You could actually be playing on this lawn by summer.
Mr. PRICE: Exactly. And it will take a few weeks for the grass seed to establish. And you'll definitely be able to have Wiffle Ball games on your own Fenway Park within a few months.
SIEGEL: It definitely beats putting, say, a dome over your front lawn.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. PRICE: Definitely.
SIEGEL: Okay. Well, John Price, thank you very much for talking with us.
Mr. PRICE: Thank you. I appreciate it.
SIEGEL: That's John Price, who is brand manager for Scotts Miracle-Gro, talking about new blends of grass seed that will match those used at major league ballparks.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
What a difference one seat in the U.S. Senate makes. With the Republican Scott Brown winning in Massachusetts, the GOP now has 41 senators and a renewed confidence in its prospects and its opposition to President Obama. So, what could the president say in his State of the Union address tomorrow night that might constructively reach across the aisle? Well, joining me to address that question is the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, that's the number three spot in the Senate GOP leadership, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Welcome.
Senator LAMAR ALEXANDER (Republican, Tennessee): Thank you.
SIEGEL: Welcome once again. First, health care. If there are now 41 votes to block a health care vote, is the bill as it exists in the Senate dead or is there anything the president could say to resuscitate, say, part of it?
Sen. ALEXANDER: Well, nothing is ever dead in the Senate. What I hope the president does, Robert, in his State of the Union address is talk about jobs, debt, terror and if he stopped right there it'd suit me fine, because if he focused on those three and got them in a better direction, then we could deal with health care.
SIEGEL: But he's got to say something about this gigantic bill that reflects (unintelligible) right now.
Sen. ALEXANDER: Well, he does, but I think what he should say is that the lesson the first year is that I have taken too many big bites out of too many big apples and our big problem is jobs, our second is debt, our third is terror. I ask you to work with me on those. President Eisenhower a long time ago in 1952 said I shall go to Korea. There were lot of other problems in the country, but he focused on that, ended the Korean War, and the people appreciated it. I think if President Obama focused on jobs in the same way Eisenhower focused on Korea, he'd be successful and the country would be more successful.
SIEGEL: You said focus on debt. The president is expected to propose a spending freeze on the non-defense, non-entitlement federal spending. Do you welcome that?
Sen. ALEXANDER: I do. But it's only a very small step. The big problem is the entitlement program - the automatic spending - that's what's driving us into debt and that's what we need to be focused on.
SIEGEL: Back to health care, though. If indeed the president doesn't speak of health care and simply chalks it up to experience, it's the status quo for another year at least. Do you regard the status quo as preferable to reforms that have been discussed or is there some mix of Republican priorities and Democratic priorities that could be approved shortly and that would be better than what we have now?
Sen. ALEXANDER: What Republicans have suggested was setting a clear goal of reducing health care costs and taking six steps. Just one of those, for example, was to allow small businesses to pool their resources to offer health insurance to their employees.
SIEGEL: But realistically, are we at a moment when if Republicans could see three of their six steps combined with three things that Democrats like and that you might not like that much, are we at a time when that actually can make sausage in the legislature? Or is this a time when nothing is going to happen?
Sen. ALEXANDER: Well, we could, but wouldn't it be better to say can't we find three things we all agree on? I would think allowing insurance to be sold across state lines to increase competition, reduce prices might be one of them. Usually, we agree on...
SIEGEL: But some people would say in that case, the risk you run is that the least regulatory state, the elusive state might put out insurance policies, might regulate them and there would be a race to the bottom and everybody would buy policies from state X where they don't do much in the way of regulating insurance.
Sen. ALEXANDER: Well, that's true, but that's a problem you would have to address in the legislation, but permitting more competition across state lines might be the better result. I think on any of these proposals, the difference between Democrats and Republicans isn't just left versus right. It's step-by-step versus comprehensive in our goals.
SIEGEL: But when you speak of Republican modesty and the step-by-step approaches to be problems, say on energy, the GOP's energy plan that you've spoken of...
Sen. ALEXANDER: Yep.
SIEGEL: ...it's 100 new nuclear energy plans would make half the country's vehicles electric, drill offshore, it's different from cap and trade. It doesn't sounds very modest. It sounds like a huge program.
Sen. ALEXANDER: Well, it's four steps, though. Each of those four steps is not a big surprise. It's these 2,700 page bills that are big surprise. I'll give you another example, something called America Competes, which we worked in a bipartisan way on in 2007. We asked the national academies what 10 steps could we take to keep our nation competitive? They gave us 20. We passed most of them. It was far-reaching, but it was step by step.
SIEGEL: Will you vote for Ben Bernanke's confirmation as Fed chairman?
Sen. ALEXANDER: I will. I think we're lucky to have had him at that job at a time when we very nearly slid into a great depression.
SIEGEL: A little over a year ago, the Senate defeated a move to deny then President-elect Obama access to $350 billion in bank bailout money and TARP funds. There were more Democrats who broke with Mr. Obama than there were Republicans who supported him. You were one of the handful of Republicans who supported the incoming administration getting the TARP money. Do you now regret that vote?
Sen. ALEXANDER: I do not. I gave both President Bush and President Obama unprecedented authority to deal with an unprecedented problem. Now I think we should end TARP. That would save $300 billion. I think we should get the government out of the automobile business by declaring a stock dividend giving all that General Motors stock to everybody who paid taxes last April 15th.
SIEGEL: But you accept the - I'll call it the narrative of what's happened with the financial crisis, which is we were on the brink of a much larger crisis than we have experienced, the extraordinary measures that were taken, the amount of federal funds that were committed were necessary to avert a real calamity.
Sen. ALEXANDER: The actions of the Federal Reserve Board, I think, were. I did not think the so-called stimulus bill, which was mainly a big spending bill, was a wise step. I thought that just ran up the debt, didn't help increase the number of jobs in the country in any significant way.
SIEGEL: Just before you go, in Tennessee, is there a recovery right now from the recession? Are things getting better?
Sen. ALEXANDER: Barely. Tennessee still has about 11 percent unemployment. We're not sliding backwards anymore, but we're not getting much better yet.
SIEGEL: Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. Thanks very much for talking with us.
Sen. ALEXANDER: Robert, thank you very much.
(Soundbite of song, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown")
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is foggy mountain breakdown, the iconic bluegrass instrumental played by legendary duo Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. In the 1940s and '50s, Flatt and Scruggs, along with a handful of other bluegrass musicians, popularized world roots music. Though Lester Flatt has been dead some three decades, today the House of Representatives honored him.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook was there.
ANDREA SEABROOK: These days Lincoln Davis is a Congressman from Tennessee. But in the late 1940s, he was an American boy in the rural South.
Representative Lincoln Davis (Democrat, Tennessee): Listening to a radio operated by battery on a Saturday night was one of the special times when the family got together, but certainly for this particular occasion for that hour-long session, The Grand Ole Opry.
SEABROOK: That's where he first heard Lester Flatt's unmistakable voice.
(Soundbite of song, "The Ballad of Jed Clampett")
FLATT AND SCAGGS (Band): (Singing) Come and listen to my story about a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.
SEABROOK: This is how most people know Flatt's playing, the theme song to "The Beverly Hillbillies." Its real title is "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." When he was a boy in rural Tennessee, Flatt sang in the church choir and taught himself to play the guitar. In 1945, he joined Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys, that where he met Earl Scruggs. Congressmen Davis, who now represents the area Flatt was born in, says the music and the musician are as important to American culture as its best writers and painters.
Rep. DAVIS: He gave us, all of us who live in America and all of those of us who love bluegrass music on a Saturday night, our Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and gospel music on Sunday night, this bluegrass style.
SEABROOK: The House of Representatives voted unanimously to honor Lester Flatt today. And though he died some 30 years ago, one can only hope he's up in that great bluegrass band in the sky.
(Soundbite of song, "Bluegrass in Heaven")
FLATT AND SCAGGS: (Singing) Yes, there'll be bluegrass in heaven, took (unintelligible) by and by. Bluegrass in heaven in the sky, in the sky.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, the Capitol.
(Soundbite of song, "Bluegrass in Heaven")
FLATT AND SCAGGS: (Singing) ...banjo drinking. I'm going to be a member of a (unintelligible) bluegrass band.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
First, there was the text messaging campaign, then the star-studded telephone. Over the past two weeks, there have been countless ways to donate to the relief effort in Haiti after the devastating earthquake there. But just how generous have Americans been? I put that question to Melissa Brown. She's associate director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Professor MELISSA BROWN (Associate Director of Research, Indiana University Center on Philanthropy): Madeleine, it's really fascinating. The Haitian relief giving so far has outstripped the amount of giving that we saw after the attacks of 9/11 in this country, which is the first major relief effort that was tracked. Those data come from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. But we're now above that level. We have 518 million, almost, in just 13 days since the disaster.
BRAND: What do you account for that? Why is that?
Prof. BROWN: Well, I do think that Americans are particularly generous. We've seen this over and over. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina was 831 million. I think that we have become familiar with this type of giving. And we are very moved by what we see in the media and hear on the radio. The kinds of stories that have been broadcast have really helped us understand the urgent needs there. And we're responding with a tremendous sense of altruism and hope for this very devastated country that's the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.
BRAND: So you think it was actually images that we saw on TV or the stories we heard on the radio that moved people to donate that just touched the heartstrings?
Prof. BROWN: There is a great deal of research that shows that people have high levels of empathy that they can identify with the victims of disasters, especially when they see those pictures. But I also think that the fact that we have the text messaging coming into play now so that people's immediate altruistic response: I don't have to wait till I find a donation bucket, hit the bank or a boot that's being passed by a firefighter. I can actually just text to any one of the numbers that's been publicized anytime I'm moved. When people are moved by that sense of urgent care for other people, they want to act right away. And I think that we've become more practiced now, that we have systems set up now to help that - support that kind of giving.
BRAND: And as you say, the technology helps them act immediately with texting.
Prof. BROWN: Absolutely. We know that after 9/11 the phone lines and the Internet were deluged. They were jammed. People could not make the gifts as quickly as they wanted to. And this mobile giving phenomenon has really taken off. That's at least 30 million that we can show has come through that vehicle.
BRAND: And I suppose what also makes this level of giving more remarkable is that we're in the middle of a recession right now. People don't have as much these days to give as they did in the past.
Prof. BROWN: We have seen over and over that people dig deep. The attacks of 9/11 actually also occurred during a recession and people dug pretty deep to give after those events. The average gift in these kinds of disasters has been in the range of $125. And most gifts, the median amount is actually $50. So if you think about your own budget, it's pretty easy to find a way to come up with $50 for most people who are working to dig into their pockets, give up a couple of lattes, whatever to make up that difference.
BRAND: Melissa Brown is with the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Thank you.
Prof. BROWN: Thank you so much.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel in Washington, where tomorrow, President Obama delivers his State of the Union message.
One big question is what he will say and then do about health care. We asked two health care economists with different political backgrounds what they think is feasible in the way of health care legislation, now that there are 41 Republican votes against the Senate Democrats' bill.
In a moment we'll hear from Gail Wilensky, who has chaired Republicans on health policy. First, Professor Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton, who says the Senate bill is still worth passing.
Professor UWE REINHARDT (Economics, Princeton University): The idea of taking the Senate bill, have the House endorse it and then pass it into law is not as far-fetched as even the president seem to have make it appear, because the Senate bill does many of the things Americans want. Americans need help buying health insurance. Well, it does that. Americans don't want the premiums based on their own health status, the bill outlaws that. Americans don't want rescission, that is, having their insurance canceled after an illness strikes, this bill outlaws that.
SIEGEL: But it's not as though the administration or Democrats in the House or the Senate have not been describing these bills for the past year. We've heard a tremendous amount. President talks about them every week, it seems.
Prof. REINHARDT: Well, there's a difference between oratory and pedagogy. Oratory means to string the emotions of people. Pedagogy means you actually teach people carefully. I haven't seen either from the Senate, which is, of course, not even their job, or from this president an attempt to really explain to the people what's in the bill.
I give speeches and I have that in two slides. I can explain it really quite simply. And I'm stunned that the president has not either thought about it or taken the time to do it to tell people: These are the things that bug you and here is precisely what this bill does about it. Everything that was communicated seemed that there was chaos, that there were sleazy deals.
Of course there is log rolling. Log rolling in the Congress is an old American tradition. It wasn't invented by the Senate bill. I don't know why the president never became the teacher of the people and always resorts either to two modes. One is oratory and the other one is sort of graduate school seminars, which are fine for eggheads like me. But they're not good for people who drive in their car and need different pedagogic devices. They need anecdotes. They need metaphors. None of that the president uses.
SIEGEL: Let's say the Republicans say, you know what's always near the top of our list when it comes to health care. It's tort reform. It's reforming the system of malpractice insurance in the country, which President Obama only went so far as to say, okay, maybe some pilot projects to look at alternative ways of dispute resolution.
Are the Democrats capable, or would it be worth it, even if it's for a small share of the health care dollars, to meet the Republicans halfway on that question?
Prof. REINHARDT: I think they should have. I think at the very least it was discourteous not to have done it. But I believe the recent CBO report on malpractice shows it would actually yield savings if we had major reform. There are some great ideas out on this. They've been out, actually, for 20 or more years. It's called alternative dispute resolution that takes this roulette wheel of jury rooms out of the proceedings and separates whether a patient got hurt and needs help from whether a physician was negligent.
All of these ideas are out there. And for a comprehensive health insurance bill not to have embraced that facet of it is actually rather inexcusable.
SIEGEL: Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Prof. REINHARDT: It's been my pleasure, Bob.
And now, Gail Wilensky, who is a health care economist who served as White House health policy adviser to President George H.W. Bush, ran Medicare and Medicaid and later served as an adviser on health policy to Senator John McCain during his run for the White House.
Thanks a lot for joining us. Welcome.
Dr. GAIL WILENSKY (Health Care Economist): My pleasure to be with you.
SIEGEL: Uwe Reinhardt's reading of where we stand now is the Senate health care bill is a good bill. It's been very badly sold by President Obama. But if he could get the message down pat, it would still be a good solution to our problems. What do you say?
Dr. WILENSKY: There are three significant problems in health care. The Senate bill primarily focused on one and did it reasonably well, that is, expanding coverage to a substantial number of the uninsured. Did very little for the other two, which is slowing health care spending and improving the value and the quality for what we spend.
Those are extremely important, much harder problems. Disappointing that we were making so little progress even when health care reform was looking more promising.
SIEGEL: What right now do you think - speaking of promising, what do you think the prospects are? Is it simply finished, and in another year, perhaps Washington will take another swing at it? Or is there something that can be revived from what now is on Capitol Hill?
Dr. WILENSKY: I believe there are three options and none of them are terribly appealing. Nothing is done. Unfortunately, the problems remain. The challenges are there. So that's a problem. There is a bill that is pushed through reconciliation, the budget process.
SIEGEL: You mean without needing 60 votes in the Senate.
Dr. WILENSKY: Without needing 60 votes. That would be a very big mistake. The public is already feeling that they're not getting the kind of change they were promised in terms of how Washington does its business. This would only reinforce that.
A third is to have an incremental bill. That won't be so easy to do. Medicaid expansion for some of the uninsured, insurance reforms, maybe a few other changes won't satisfy the Democratic base. It won't be easy to get, but it's probably the most possible of those three. I hope there'll be an attempt.
SIEGEL: Do you think there are Republican votes for such bills?
Dr. WILENSKY: It will be hard. It will be harder now than it would've been a year ago. There's a lot of jaundiced views. People like Orrin Hatch, who have had a history of being a part of bipartisan bills, walked away very angrily from what was going on in the Senate, one of the great losses that Senator Kennedy was not actively involved in the health care reform debate. It's possible. It will be hard. It's worth the effort.
SIEGEL: Professor Reinhardt agreed that it was a great mistake on the part of the Democrats not to have some nod toward malpractice reform in their approach to health care. Do you agree?
Dr. WILENSKY: I do agree. I think if you want to have physicians practice in a more conservative way, if you want to have hospitals be a little less aggressive, you've got to provide them with some assurance that they won't be sued if there's a bad outcome. Can use the interest in evidence-based medicine so that if physicians in hospitals introduce some patient safety measures approved by the Institute of Medicine and follow the guidelines of the various specialty societies, they should be protected unless there's some kind of criminal negligence.
SIEGEL: If the alternative to all of this - if one possible alternative is status quo, how bad is that?
Dr. WILENSKY: It's very bad. We have challenges we must take on. Fifteen percent of the population, almost 50 million, about 45 million right now without health insurance coverage is a serious problem to the individuals and the communities where they live. And it's wrong.
But we also have, for all of us that have coverage, unsustainable growth in health care spending, already at 17 percent of our GDP and growing. And we have a lot of quality problems. We don't get what we need at the right time with patient safety measures. We really have to take these issues on, and they're hard. They won't be easy to fix.
SIEGEL: Gail Wilensky, thank you very much for talking with us.
Dr. WILENSKY: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: That's health care economist Gail Wilensky. We also heard from Professor Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Vote counting is under way in Sri Lanka. The Indian Ocean island held its presidential election today. It's the country's first since the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels last year and the end of a bloody decades-long civil war.
NPR's Philip Reeves has been in the capital, Colombo, sampling the public mood.
PHILIP REEVES: In a battered schoolroom, sitting behind some ancient looking children's desk, a group of election officials processes the final ballots of the day. Since early morning, there's been a steady flow of people. Jeokat David(ph) rushed to get here before this polling station closed, yet speaking on the street outside, he doesn't sound very enthusiastic about electing his next president.
Mr. JEOKAT DAVID: I guess we don't have much of a choice, do we?
REEVES: Though there are 22 candidates, that choice boiled down to two men. One is the incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa. As president, Rajapaksa was in charge when Sri Lankan forces finally annihilated the island's Tamil Tiger separatists last May. The other is General Sarath Fonseka. Fonseka was commander of the victorious army. Both belong to Sri Lanka's Sinhalese population.
The unenthusiastic voter, Jeokat David, is a Tamil. Neither candidate appeals much to him. Even so, he was determined to vote.
Mr. DAVID: Well, it's my right. And even a single vote could count at the last moment. Who knows?
REEVES: He chose Fonseka. At the last presidential election in 2005, the Tamil Tigers ordered the island's Tamil minority to boycott the poll. This time around, with a likely split in the Sinhalese vote, the Tamils might just turn out to be kingmakers.
Down on the beach in Colombo, some soldiers wander around, cradling their guns and keeping an eye on the local fishermen. Tens of thousands of police and soldiers were out on the island's streets today, trying to ensure peaceful elections. There were some incidents. Overall, though, there was no major violence.
Nearby, Abaratha Jiata(ph) is hanging out with some friends, enjoying a day off from his job as a civil servant. He's Sinhalese. He's rooting for Rajapaksa, whom he credits with winning the war.
Mr. ABARATHA JIATA: (Foreign language spoken).
REEVES: With the conflict over, people can now walk Sri Lanka's streets without fear, he explains. Sri Lanka's civil war has left many scars and lots of unresolved issues. Many thousands of civilians were killed. Accusations of war crimes have been leveled against both sides in the conflict. Many Tamils, displaced by the war in the north and east, are still waiting to return home. Many of them feel marginalized and dispossessed. Yet for a lot of Sri Lankans, this election's also about other issues.
(Soundbite of motor vehicle)
REEVES: Preshur Sabernash(ph) is a 21-year-old Tamil business management student. He says it's also about the pocketbook.
Mr. PRESHUR SABERNASH: People expected that after the war, the economy would be grown, and the standard of living would be grown, would become higher, but it doesn't. That didn't happen. And we still face price increase, inflation resulting, and we still live like, we still live in poverty.
REEVES: Philip Reeves, NPR News, Colombo.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Finally this hour, some of your comments on yesterday's program. Our new series, 50 Great Voices, sparked debate at npr.org about what great means.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Yesterday's voice was that of Iggy Pop. We said he proved a voice could be a weapon.
(Soundbite of song, "Search & Destroy")
Mr. IGGY POP (Singer): (Singing) I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.
BRAND: Iggy Pop's voice took Dennis Vasilesku(ph) of Chicago back to his youth, well, not back so far. He's not that old.
SIEGEL: He writes: I'm 25 and first listened to him when I was 20. To me, Iggy Pop is musical nihilism, combining childish mischief with adult ennui and teenage contempt. Hearing his music, it's like his voice slouches down, yawns and puts its arm around you.
BRAND: Oh, give me a break. That was the response from Mike Whitsett(ph) of Spring, Texas. He posted this comment at our Web site: Iggy Pop is one of the 50 greatest voices? I can hardly wait for the other 49.
SIEGEL: We should note the series is officially 50 Great Voices, not 50 greatest voices.
BRAND: Well, Whitsett continues his critique: Iggy Pop never used his voice as a weapon. He used his stage antics, his pose as a provocateur to crowds, and his outrageous and public substance abuse to get attention.
SIEGEL: Well, beyond your assessments of Iggy Pop's greatness or lack thereof, we also received a lot of comments like this one from Kim Weiss(ph) of Boynton Beach, Florida. She writes: I found it ironic that you aired almost no singing of his, lots of talking, a few background shouts here and there. But if you're touting a great voice, wouldn't you want your audience to hear it?
BRAND: All right, you asked for it, you got it. We'll let Iggy Pop's voice carry us out of this segment. Thanks for your emails and your comments posted at our Web site, npr.org.
(Soundbite of song, "No Fun")
Mr. POP: (Singing) Well, maybe go out, maybe stay home. Well, maybe call Mom on the telephone. Well, come on. Well, come on. Well, come on. Well, come on. Well, come on.
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Here in California, some people were disappointed when the Supreme Court ruled that video from the gay marriage trial in San Francisco could not be uploaded.
But Scott Shafer from member station KQED in San Francisco met one person for whom the courts decision means job security.
SCOTT SHAFER: Vicki Behringer is an artist and a journalist. You know, when you watch a television story of a trial and see drawings or paintings of the witnesses and the judge, well, Behringer is painting those each day in the federal trial challenging Proposition 8, Californias ban on gay marriage.
Ms. VICKI BEHRINGER (Journalist; Courtroom Artist): So far this morning, I have a drawing of the first witness, which would be Professor Gregory Herrick(ph).
SHAFER: Each day during breaks in the trial, Behringer walks into the media room at the federal courthouse in San Francisco with her latest 8 by 10 water color paintings and tapes them onto a white wall. The courtroom artist has one of the best seats in the house.
For the Prop 8 trial, Behringer is working in the jury box, just a few feet from all the main characters in the drama. This trial has no jury. So, she has plenty of room to work.
Ms. BEHRINGER: First of all, I do some pencil sketching. Then I ink the picture with the ink lines and then I do watercolor. And now I put them up on the wall and my clients photograph them.
SHAFER: Once her paintings are taped off in the media room, TV cameras crowd around them to shoot the images for the evening news. Behringer earned a degree in design 30 years ago and she wanted to become a fashion illustrator. But fate or what she calls a series of magical circumstances, led her to become a courtroom artist in 1990. She says it was a perfect fit for an impatient artist like her.
Ms. BEHRINGER: The turnaround time on the art is really fast. So, I have to have it done rapidly, which means once its done, its done and I cant go back and fix it.
SHAFER: Since Behringer has been in the courtroom, her list of assignments includes some of the most notorious and publicized trials of the past two decades.
Ms. BEHRINGER: The Unabomber, Richard Allen Davis, Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Barry Bonds...
SHAFER: These trials can be drone on for weeks, even months. But there are moments of drama in each trial that stick with Behringer years after the verdict is rendered.
Ms. BEHRINGER: Laci Petersons mom got on the stand and she was just wailing at Scott Peterson, and the whole courtroom was crying. And I mean I saw I literally saw teardrops from the reporter next to me falling on his notepads.
SHAFER: How do you convey that?
Ms. BEHRINGER: I put lots of red around her and her face was just very, a very extreme emotion on her face and her hands were up. She was very upset.
SHAFER: That courtroom drama in Behringers paintings isnt lost on Dean Johnson. Hes a lawyer and legal analyst for the ABC affiliate in San Francisco.
Mr. DEAN JOHNSON (Legal Analyst, ABC7 News San Francisco): She captures the emotional and relational aspects of whats going on in the courtroom. Its more impressionistic, and it gives you a sense of how the various participants figure emotionally and how the roles operate within the courtroom.
SHAFER: Her paintings generally depict all the characters in one scene: the judge, the questioning attorney and the witness. I asked if she ever hears from any of the people she paints. Do they like her work or complain about it?
Ms. BEHRINGER: I get people joking around with me like that, not so much the judges, but a lot of the attorneys will say something funny, like, hey, you made me thinner than I am or, you know, hey, you gave me more hair.
SHAFER: So, after studying all the characters in this historic trial, how does Vicki Behringer think its going to turn out?
Ms. BEHRINGER: I have no idea what the judge is going to do. I never do. I never know what the jury is going to do, and I never know what the judge is going to do.
SHAFER: But if that decision comes down in the courtroom, she will have a watercolor painting to capture it.
For NPR News, Im Scott Shafer in San Francisco.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Twenty-five-year-old James O'Keefe made a name for himself last year. You may remember that he and a woman dressed up as a pimp and a prostitute and then filmed themselves at ACORN housing offices getting aid. It created a national scandal.
Now, O'Keefe finds himself in the national spotlight again. He and three other men are charged with trying to sneak into the office of democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and tap her phones.
For details, I'm joined now by reporter Eileen Fleming in New Orleans. She was at the courthouse this afternoon. And Eileen, what does the FBI say exactly that O'Keefe and his associates were up to?
EILEEN FLEMING: We're not exactly sure. One affidavit that's filed with the court says that the suspects were, quote, "manipulating," unquote, the headset in Senator Landrieu's office. Then said they'd need access to the main telephone system and they were sent to the general services administration office.
The repair guys said they didn't have ID and then all four left. They were apprehended outside the building and arrested. And outside the courthouse, the federal marshal described the arrest.
Unidentified Man: It is my understanding that they were asking a number of probing questions about certain information that members of the general public, who were just seeking the assistance of (unintelligible) agency may not ask. And that certainly, you know, triggered some suspicion on behalf of the persons involved, which and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit for bringing that to our attention and allowing this to come to a speedy resolution.
BRAND: And Eileen, remind us again the role that James O'Keefe has played in the past. He's certainly no stranger to, well, to dressing up, I guess, and to operating in a clandestine fashion.
FLEMING: No, he's, basically the man considered the brains behind an undercover video operation that targeted ACORN last year, where he dressed up as a pimp, like you say, and a friend was dressed up as a prostitute, and they were getting tax advice from ACORN staffers. And this actually had he had an effect, because in September, Congress blocked previously approved funds from going to the group. And ACORN got about 10 percent of its funds from the federal government grants.
BRAND: All right, in this case, in the Mary Landrieu case, who's representing them?
FLEMING: Well, a local attorney said he was called in at the last moment to represent three of the defendants, and he said none had a criminal record. Eddie Castaing said he's not even sure who's paying him.
Mr. EDDIE CASTAING (Attorney): I have no idea. I haven't been paid a penny. As a matter of fact, I gave one of them 60 bucks so he could take a cab from St. Bernard, wherever they're going to stay. So I'm out of pocket $60 on this. If you know somebody who wants to pay me, tell them to step up to the plate.
FLEMING: In fact, one of the defendants is the son of William Flanagan, who's the acting U.S. attorney here for the western district of Louisiana.
BRAND: Eileen, what kind of punishment would O'Keefe and the other three face if they are convicted?
FLEMING: Well, the charge carries a maximum term of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release following any term that they serve in jail.
BRAND: That's reporter Eileen Fleming in New Orleans. Thanks, Eileen.
FLEMING: My pleasure.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Today, Toyota told its dealers to stop selling eight models of cars and trucks. Last week, the automaker announced a recall of 2.3 million of the vehicles because of problems with the accelerator pedal sticking. Those vehicles include the 2010 Highlander, the 2009 and '10 RAV4, Corolla and Matrix, as well as wider model year recalls on the Avalon, Camry, Tundra and Sequoia.
For more on what this means for Toyota, I'm joined by Paul Eisenstein. He's editor of the auto industry Web site, thedetroitbureau.com.
Hi, Paul.
Mr. PAUL EISENSTEIN (Editor, TheDetroitBureau.com): Hi.
BRAND: So this is not the first time we are hearing about a Toyota vehicle recall. Tell us what's been happening.
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Well, Toyota has been slammed with recalls this last year. In fact, in 2009, they recalled something like four times more vehicles than they ever have in a single year here in the United States - more than four million in total.
BRAND: So this involves a sticking accelerator and also a floor mat problem?
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Well, yeah, it - we want to separate the two. The recall that they announced last October after the fiery death of a California state trooper and his family involved floor mats that can stick the technical term is entrap the accelerator pedal and leading vehicles to go out of control. This new problem involves the accelerator pedals themselves. They can apparently stick wide open and make it very difficult to stop as well.
Some of the vehicles involved in the current recall, the new one, are also involved in the previous recall.
BRAND: So, total, how many vehicles are we talking about?
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Well, if you added up the numbers, it's somewhere north of six-and-a-half million vehicles. But, again, some of them are involved. You know, the same vehicle may be recalled for two different repairs. So if you take out the overlap, you're still talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of five million.
BRAND: And what about today's announcement? What does that mean, that dealers should stop selling these eight models?
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Well, we're all trying to figure out exactly what this means. It certainly is going to be a problem. You've got a company that sells an awful lot of cars. It actually sold more cars in retail in December than General Motors did. And now it's telling its dealers to stop selling some of the most important products in its lineup. Plus, it's shutting down a number of factories, including, you know, five factories here in North America, at least the lines that produced these models. So it's really going to throw that company and its dealers into chaos.
BRAND: There have been complaints for a number of years now, I understand, from consumers about this accelerator problem. Has Toyota been slow to acknowledge it?
Mr. EISENSTEIN: They've clearly been slow to acknowledge it. And it took that fiery death of a California trooper last year to push them into making the recall - the first recall of 3.8 million vehicles because of the floor mat problem. This newer recall, they appear to be much more sensitive to problems with accelerator sticking, so they move pretty quickly. But it appears that they've got some other problems, and now they're trying to decide just how fast they're going to have to respond to yet another series of complaints about quality and reliability.
BRAND: With the Prius, too.
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Yeah. We broke a story just before the New Year about a problem that's apparently involving the third generation Prius, which is the face of Toyota. It now appears that, at least under some conditions, people are reporting that when they're braking, if they hit a pothole or a bump, the brakes can essentially release. And this is a real problem. If you're in a tight traffic situation and your brakes suddenly let go, you may not have enough time to reapply them.
BRAND: Thanks, Paul.
Mr. EISENSTEIN: Good to be with you.
BRAND: That's Paul Eisenstein, he's the editor of the auto industry Web site, thedetroitbureau.com. And we've been talking about Toyota's announcement today that it will stop selling eight models of cars and trucks.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Earlier this hour, we heard about the launch of Apple's new product, the iPad. Among many functions, it's a device for buying and reading books. And the publishing industry is hoping the iPad will do for books what the iPod did for music.
But author Eric Weiner is worried about the growing popularity of the e-book and not necessarily for reasons you might expect.
Mr. ERIC WEINER (Author): The other day, I was in a cafe when I noticed a woman reading a Kindle, Amazon's clunky, oddly quaint e-reader. Do you like it, I asked? Yes, she said, beaming. It's great. I can travel with 200 books, a library at my fingertips.
Being an insecure author - is there any other kind - I asked if my book happened, just happened, to be among those lucky 200. She punched a few keys on her Kindle and up popped my book. Well, not my book exactly, but the same words that appear in my book. There's a difference.
The printed word has a permanence, a finality to it that digital ink lacks. Digital words are provisional, always subject to change. Call me Ishmael. No, no, call me Brad. Yes, that's much better.
Much of the talk about e-books has focused either on technical issues or questions of pricing, but that misses the point. The technology will improve, especially now that Apple is in the game, and I'm confident that I'll still get my fair share from each e-book sold. But as an author, I'm not after your money. Well, not only your money.
I have my sights on a much more precious commodity: your time. We enter into an unspoken pact, you and I: give me a few hours, stolen moments on the subway or after the kids are asleep, and I promise to inform and entertain you. Frankly, that's always been a tough sell, given the sundry ways you can spend your time, but at least I had a fighting chance. Curled up with a pinot noir and my book, your attention was mine to lose. Not anymore.
The new generation of e-books will, in essence, merge the laptop and the book. Now, if my narrative starts to drag or I digress, readers can click onto their favorite news site to see what's up with health care or click onto TMZ to see what's up with Brangelina. How do I compete with that?
I realize that, no, you can't stop progress. And, yes, I suppose I could take the I-don't-care-how-they-read-me-as-long-as-they-read-me approach. But that would be naive. Technologies are not neutral. They come with a bias. Not a political bias, a narrative bias.
A news story broadcast on television, an acutely visual medium, is different from the same story published in a newspaper or broadcast on radio. Form is function. Someone reading a book on their Kindle has a fundamentally different experience from someone reading the same book the old-fashioned way.
The fact is that books are special. Why else are we so careful not to bend their spines? Why else do we grant them honored space in our living rooms, our bedrooms? I can't see people expressing the same reverence for the flashing bits of data that flicker across their e-reader - and don't even get me started on what this means for book signings.
Yes, it's wonderful to have a library at our fingertips. But the digital library is a noisy, crowded place filled with sports stars and politicians and celebrities. I'm afraid you might not even notice that I'm there, too.
BRAND: Eric Weiner is the author of "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World." He's also a former NPR reporter, and you can comment on his essay at the opinion section at npr.org.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
If you go into a toy store and look at those little, plastic dinosaurs, you'll see a rainbow of colors: yellow stripes, red armored plates, bright blue wings, all imaginary, some toy company's vision of the past. But now, scientists say they have found evidence from about 125 million years ago of one real dinosaur's color. It's a kind of orange.
NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce has the story.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Scientists know a lot about dinosaurs from fossils, but the color of dinosaurs has always been unknowable, at least that's what paleontologist Mike Benton always told his students at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
Professor MIKE BENTON (Earth Sciences, University of Bristol): This was the one point at which we had to give up.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Because fossils tend to preserve an animal's hard parts, like bones and teeth, and not soft parts like skin.
Recently, though, scientists have discovered a bunch of dinosaurs covered with primitive feathers, and feathers are made of tough proteins.
Prof. BENTON: And, in fact, they can survive even in conditions where other internal organs, you know, muscles and guts and brains and so on, will disappear.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Unfortunately, these fossilized, ancient feathers just look like rock.
Prof. BENTON: When you look at the feathers, you don't know what the colors were. The feathers are a mixture of brownish colors. They're just preserved either as sort of dirty, whitish, beige kind of color and a kind of darker, equally dirty kind of brownish color.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Benton and his colleagues wondered if they could get clues about the original color by looking at tiny structures inside the fossilized feathers. After all, they knew that in the feathers of living birds, some color comes from pigments called melanins.
Prof. BENTON: When it goes into a hair or a feather, the melanin is actually contained within a kind of capsule.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And the shape of the capsule depends on the color.
Prof. BENTON: The black or dark brown kind of melanin goes into a somewhat sausage-shaped capsule.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: While a reddish-brown, ginger kind of melanin goes into a round capsule shaped like a ball. With this in mind, the researchers used a sophisticated, powerful microscope to peer inside primitive feathers on a turkey-sized dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx.
Prof. BENTON: It's a flesh-eater. It's got sharp little teeth in its mouth and it's got grabby little hands. It's a two-legged dinosaur, so very slender limbs. It's got a sort of straightish backbone and a long, thin tail.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Fossils show that this tail was ringed with dark bands of primitive feathers that look like bristles. And inside these short bristles, Benton and his colleagues found ball-shaped melanin capsules. That's the shape associated with the reddish-brown, ginger color.
Prof. BENTON: These dark stripes, as far as we can tell, were exclusively ginger.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In between these ginger stripes, he said there probably were white feathers, but these white ones would have had less structural strength and would not have been preserved like the ginger-colored feathers.
Prof. BENTON: And so, this early dinosaur, with its long, thin tail had ginger and white stripes up the tail. For the first time ever, we have evidence, we believe fairly watertight evidence of the original color.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: These results are reported in the journal Nature, and they're incredibly cool and surprising, at least according to Thomas Holtz. He's a paleontologist at the University of Maryland.
Dr. THOMAS HOLTZ (Paleontologist; Department of Geology, University of Maryland): This study begins to bring the colors of dinosaurs out of the realm of artistry and into the realm of science.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But Holtz says this approach will only be possible for feathers and maybe scales on those dinosaurs that are exceptionally well-preserved in fossils. That doesn't include one he studies - T. Rex.
Dr. HOLTZ: I would love to know if Tyrannosaurus was green or brown or, you know, chartreuse. It's unlikely that I'll ever know or that anyone will ever know the colors of some of our favorite dinosaurs.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: For these extinct creatures, it looks like artists will continue to be limited only by their imagination, not by science.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Imagine the Pope, dressed in his white robes and wearing his half-moon glasses, hunched over a laptop blogging, probably not gonna happen, although Benedict XVI does have a Facebook page.
But in a recent message, he called on priests to proclaim the Gospel through blogs, videos and Web sites.
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: The call to blog took a lot of people by surprise. After all, the 82-year-old pope from Bavaria is better known for his conservative doctrine and revival of the Latin Mass than for his computer savvy.
At first, Father James Martin was startled as well. He's author of "The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything" and blogs each day for the Catholic magazine America. But then Martin thought: Surely Jesus would blog if he were on the Earth today. He didn't sit at home and wait for people to come to him.
The Reverend JAMES MARTIN (Author, "The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything"): He went out and he met people, you know, by the Sea of Galilee who were fishing. He went into tax collectors' booths. He went into synagogues. He went all over the place. And so we need to, sort of figuratively speaking, go out to the ends of the Earth, which includes right now the blogosphere.
HAGERTY: Now, the Pope has not announced his own blog, but if he does, he might be wise to listen to the experts.
Ms. ELIZABETH SCALIA (Blogger, The Anchoress): As a blogger, let me just say, I have some advice for his holiness, the first being now if I link to you, you must link back to me.
HAGERTY: There are rules of reciprocation, says Elizabeth Scalia. Scalia, no relation to the justice, writes a blog called The Anchoress, which appears on the Web site of the Catholic magazine First Things. She adds: The Pope should aim high.
Ms. SCALIA: He should try to get linked by the bigger blogs. He should try to be linked by, for example, Instapundit and the Huffington Post because if he gets the exposure there, then he can up his blog ad rates.
HAGERTY: Presumably, ad revenue is not high on the Pope's list, although there are a few bankrupt dioceses in the United States that could use some money. Scalia says while blogging is not heavy lifting, the Pope should prepare himself for the unrelenting pressure to post.
Ms. SCALIA: You have to blog every day, and he's an 80-something-year-old guy, so maybe he's not always going to want to blog. So he should have some videos, some favorite YouTube videos that he can just slap up there when he's feeling kind of tired, you know, like the parade scene from Ferris Bueller. Slap that up there and that's a day's blogging.
HAGERTY: Of course, a blogging pope would also have to adjust to the style of the Internet. Benedict is a German theologian famous for his long academic treatises peppered with footnotes. How to adapt?
The Rev. MARTIN: Think hot links and not footnotes.
HAGERTY: Father Jim Martin.
The Rev. MARTIN: He can if he wants to, he can write a couple of paragraphs on, say, St. Augustine, or Origen, or St. Athanasius, and instead of having, you know, 50 footnotes, have 50 hot links, and people tend to like that on the blogosphere.
HAGERTY: Martin has another piece of advice: be charitable. The Internet can be vicious, but he must refrain from ad hominem attacks. So should the Pope allow comments?
(Soundbite of laughter)
The Rev. MARTIN: Only if he has a thick skin. I would say there's two kinds of angry people. There's angry people and then there's religiously angry people. And the religiously angry people tend to be angrier than the angry people.
HAGERTY: Still, David Weinberger sees some dangers ahead. Weinberger writes about politics and culture on his Joho the Blog. He says if the Pope wants to spread the Christian message, he might be surprised at the result.
Mr. DAVID WEINBERGER (Blogger, Joho the Blog): Putting a message out over the Internet is exactly the same thing as losing total control of your message. People take it up, they republish it, they make fun of it, they contextualize it. The simple message becomes incredibly complex.
HAGERTY: Which raises the question: Can something as nuanced as God's word be tweeted?
Mr. WEINBERGER: Trying to boil things down into tweetable form has a long history.
HAGERTY: Weinberger cites a theologian of his own tradition - Moses and his 10 Commandments: Don't murder, don't lie, don't steal, et cetera. They easily fit into Twitter's 140 character limit. And what about the Sermon on the Mount? Well, that'll require a hyperlink.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Even before the earthquake, Haiti was by far the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. The unemployment rate has been estimated at around 70 percent.
Now as Tamara Keith tells us from Port-au-Prince, Haitians are frantically searching for work.
(Soundbite of crowd)
TAMARA KEITH: On a busy Port-au-Prince street near the airport, a couple of hundred people, mostly young men, have gathered hoping to get a job. Twenty-seven-year-old Dennis Jeanne Evena stands out in part because she's a woman wearing a skirt in a sea of men. She says she's helping make a list of those looking for work. Others are doing the same thing. It almost looks like theyre filling out job applications, only, there arent any jobs. She says a man told her to make the list that perhaps he could get them hired.
Ms. DENNIS JEANNE EVENA: (Through translator) I am searching for a job. And because I can write, I am just writing for some people. So I write our names and our numbers, what we do. So in case they want us, they can contact us.
KEITH: This is a hopeless exercise and yet she's making this list with so much purpose. The man who asked her to take the names doesnt even have a job himself. His name is Nelson Nerva.
Mr. NELSON NERVA: (Through translator) We started to create the list, but no one said we should create the list.
KEITH: He admits the list is wishful thinking, said his only plan is to hand it to some U.N. soldiers stationed nearby in hopes they'll do something with it.
Mr. NERVA: (Through translator) We just here that foreigners came, and they're looking for people that can help, that can do something.
(Soundbite of crowd)
KEITH: At an industrial park, the scene is frantic. There are maybe 100 men here pushing up against a fence outside of a T-shirt factory. Theres a crack in the building so large that you can see inside. There's no telling whether it will reopen or even whether its safe to go in and, yet, 45-year-old Marcelin Gesson wants to work here. He's come here every day for five days hoping to find work or at least some food. And he says hell keep coming.
Mr. MARCELIN GESSON: (Through translator) We know the factory doesnt pay people well, but were still here to see if they'll take us in. We have families and children to feed. We're just looking for something.
KEITH: Before the quake, workers at this factory made just $4 a day and some complained they hadnt been paid in months. Despite all this, the garment industry was one of the bright spots in the Haitian economy. Gesson hasnt had a job in six months. But today his search is more urgent than before. Twenty-five-year-old Florrisant Jameson was at work when the quake hit. He was a manager at a factory that made capri pants.
Mr. FLORRSANT JAMESON: (Through translator) I saw a wall come down and ran out, and some people were already injured. I had the chance to run out quickly.
KEITH: His job prospects crumbled right along with the factory. Like so many, Jameson says he needs a job to buy food for his family and eventually to rebuild.
Mr. JAMESON: (Through translator) Things are really hard. I dont have a house, it collapsed. I have a cousin that was living with me, and he got injured his legs broke. My wife and two girls are fine, but were living in streets in a tent.
KEITH: He's wearing dark washed jeans, a New York ball cap and headphones around his neck. His sharp all-American outfit belies the desperation.
Mr. JAMESON: (Through translator) I desperately need a job. Thats why I go out to find one to bring food. When I leave in the morning, I tell my wife Im going out to look for work. I dont know what Ill find.
KEITH: Before the earthquake, things were not easy. More than two-thirds of the population didnt have a formal job. Many here say the economy needs to be rebuild and remade right along with all the shattered buildings.
Tamara Keith, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
Some scientists say we are natural-born runners, that our body has evolved to run. Now, the leading proponent of the so-called human runner school concludes that we do it more efficiently without shoes.
NPRs Christopher Joyce has this story on barefoot running.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: Anthropologist Dan Lieberman says human ancestors needed to run well - away from big animals and after small, tasty ones, for example. He based that view on fossil bones.
Lately, though, hes been studying runners, living ones. It started at a lecture he gave before the Boston Marathon. A barefoot runner - someone who runs long distances without shoes - peppered the professor with questions he couldnt answer. So Lieberman took him to his lab at Harvard University. He had him run over a flat, metal plate that measures the collisional force of a footfall. Lieberman says runners generate a lot of collisional force.
Professor DAN LIEBERMAN (Anthropologist): Most runners, when they land and they heel strike - they land on their heel - they generate this sudden impulse, this sharp spike of force. So its like somebody hitting you on the heel with a hammer about one-and-a-half to three times your body weight.
JOYCE: Lieberman was surprised by the extremely low force readings made by the barefoot runner.
Prof. LIEBERMAN: He ran across the force plate and he didnt have it. And I thought, gee, thats really amazing and it kind of makes sense because that spike of force hurts, and I wonder if other barefoot runners do that.
JOYCE: So Lieberman tested several groups of runners: Kenyans whod been walking and running barefoot all their lives, and Americans who grew up walking and running in shoes, and some who switched from shoes to running barefoot. He found that runners in shoes usually land heel-first. Barefoot runners land farther forward, either on the ball of their foot or somewhere in the middle of the foot, and then the heel comes down. That spreads the impact force across the foot, ankle and lower leg muscles. There' s less sudden vertical force shooting up the leg that way.
Also, people who switched from shoes to barefoot running eventually, without prompting, adopted the barefoot style. Lieberman, who runs marathons himself, says the reason is simple.
Prof. LIEBERMAN: Its pain avoidance. Its very easy to do. And your body naturally tells you what to do.
JOYCE: Running shoes dampen the shock of a heel-first landing. So, Lieberman says, thats probably why shoed people run that way. But is that the most efficient way to run? Lieberman thinks not.
Prof. LIEBERMAN: Turns out that the way in which barefoot runners run seems to store up more energy.
JOYCE: To understand how that works, I talked with anthropologist Brian Richmond at George Washington University. He points out that the human foot has an arch with ligaments inside that stretch and contract with every footfall.
Professor BRIAN RICHMOND (Anthropologist, George Washington University): It allows the arch of the foot and the calf muscles to act as a better spring and to store up energy, and then give it back in the beginning of the next step.
JOYCE: Think of a compressed mattress spring pushed down and then released. Richmond agrees with Lieberman that the front-first landing of barefoot running probably capitalizes on that spring mechanism more than heel-first landing - it gets more spring out of the spring.
Richmond, in fact, has discovered fossilized footprints dating back a million and a half years. Those human ancestors who left them had an arch. They were walking when they left the prints. But Richmond now suspects that when they ran, they landed front-first.
Prof. RICHMOND: It looks like this is how our ancestors have been running for a million years or more. Its only been in the last 10,000 years weve had any kind of shoes, really.
JOYCE: Lieberman published his findings in the journal Nature. He received research funding from a company that makes minimal shoes, which mimic barefoot conditions. He adds that he received no personal income from the company. He also says hes not taking sides over which style of running is better or safer.
Prof. LIEBERMAN: I think we have to be really careful about what we do and we dont know. We have not done any injury studies, so this is not an injury study.
JOYCE: That, he says, is next.
Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And in Washington, Im Robert Siegel.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been spending a lot of time testifying in front of angry members of Congress. Hes been quizzed about many aspects of the financial crisis. And today, he faced questions about the bailout of the insurance company, AIG. The federal government poured billions of dollars into AIG at the height of the financial crisis.
As NPRs Jim Zarroli reports, today, lawmakers pressed Geithner on concerns about transparency and about how the bailout money was used.
JIM ZARROLI: Members of Congress were scathing in their denunciation of the AIG bailout and in the way the bailout money was spent. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the taxpayers propped up the hollow shell of AIG by stuffing it with money. And the rest of Wall Street came by and looted the corpse.
But Secretary Geithner held his ground. AIG had underwritten a massive number of derivatives contracts in virtually every corner of the global economy. And he said letting it to fall would have had terrible consequences.
Secretary TIMOTHY GEITHNER (Department of Treasury): The Federal Reserve faced a terrible choice to support AIG putting billions of dollars of taxpayer resource at risk or to let AIG fail and accept potentially catastrophic damage to the economy. We were not willing to accept such a catastrophe.
ZARROLI: Geithner headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time and played a pivotal role in federal efforts to contain the crisis. He said the Fed had allowed Lehman Brothers to go under, but AIG was different. It was an insurance company, and so the Feds lines of authority werent as clear.
Sec. GEITHNER: If the rules had been stable, everything had been fine, we werent on the edge of the worse recession in generations, then we could have been afforded to be completely indifferent to the fate of AIG or all those institutions.
ZARROLI: But the committees main focus was on what happened to the $180 billion that has been funneled to AIG, much of it went to pay off AIGs trading partners called counter parties. One congressman said the whole thing stinks to high haven. Geithner told Congressman Dennis Kucinich that forcing AIG to renege on the contracts would have pushed it into default.
Sec. GEITHNER: There was no way, financial, legal or otherwise, we could have imposed haircuts, selectively default on any of those institutions without the risk of downgrade and default. And that is the only reason...
Representative DENNIS KUCINICH (Democrat, Ohio): I just want to say, Mr. Secretary, since when does saving the system require the taxpayers to give a better deal than the market would normally deliver? Yet, you know, that is what the New York Fed did.
ZARROLI: The payments to counterparties have been especially controversial because they included foreign banks like Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, but also the politically well-connected Goldman Sachs. Several of its alumni helped keep positions at the Fed and the Treasury Department including then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who also testified today. Paulson said he played no role in discussions over how much of Goldmans claims should be paid off.
Mr. HENRY PAULSON: My concern here was not about counterparty claims when we rescued AIG. My concern was about what was going to happen to the American economy and the American people.
ZARROLI: But it was Geithner who took the brunt of the committees criticism. He was asked repeatedly about the decision to conceal key details of the AIG bailout from the public. And like Paulson, he insisted that he had played no role in the talks. By then, he said, he had been appointed Treasury secretary and had withdrawn from day to day management at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
At times, the exchanges grew heated when one congressman told Geithner that he should never have been appointed Treasury secretary, he bristled with anger.
Sec. GEITHNER: I have worked in public service all my life. I have never been a politician. I have served my country as carefully and ably as I can. And it is a great privilege to me for me to work with this president to help repair the damage that was here when we took office.
ZARROLI: Geithner said AIG had grown so big by underwriting billions of dollars in contracts it didnt have collateral for. And he said that should never have been allowed to the happen. If Congress really wants to prevent a repeat of the AIG debacle, he said, it needs to think about passing financial market reforms. Geithner did acknowledge that he wondered often about whether regulators had made the right decision during the financial meltdown. But he also said he was ultimately proud of the decision to bailout AIG and that the meltdown would have been much graver if nothing had been done.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
President Obama will be talking jobs, jobs, jobs tonight during his State of the Union address. Getting the unemployment rate down is key to the economys recovery, so hes fixing the housing problem. After all, the housing collapse was at the roots of the financial meltdown.
In December, sales of existing homes suffered their worse drop in 40 years. Still, overall sales for 2009 were up compared to the year before, thanks in large part to the first time homebuyers credit.
Well, should the government be doing more to help the housing industry? For answers, weve called on William Wheaton. Hes a professor of economics and urban studies and planning at the MIT Center for Real Estate. Welcome to the program.
Professor WILLIAM WHEATON (Economics and Urban Studies and Planning, MIT Center for Real Estate): Thank you very much.
BRAND: And do you think the president is doing enough to fix housing market?
Prof. WHEATON: Well, unfortunately, theres not a lot that actually can be done. Many of the foreclosures that we have going on right now are really due to job losses. Unfortunately, the best to way fix that is to fix the economy.
BRAND: Cant the government do something in terms of mitigating the rate of foreclosures? It does have several federal programs aimed at doing that, although by many estimations not too successful.
Prof. WHEATON: Well, I think thats the problem. Almost every proposal to help fix the situation has a severe drawback. Mortgage lenders dont really like to fix mortgages because they find a large fraction of mortgages fix themselves. And they also find that once they fix a mortgage, theres a fairly high probability of re-defaulting. So, youre just going to have to really strong arm, I mean, if you want to get anything done there.
And another proposal is that the government should simply provide some cash assistance to pay peoples mortgages who are temporarily unemployed that has the disadvantage of creating an incentive not to go back to work. So, its just its really not easy to fix this.
BRAND: So there isnt a way, you dont think, for the government to shape a response by the mortgage industry to say we are going to take a whole bunch of these mortgages that are underwater, which means that people owe more than the house is worth and rewrite them and write down the principle.
Prof. WHEATON: I actually dont think that very many of these mortgages that are technically underwater are going to default. There are several recent research reports that suggest that people will have to have a great deal of negative acuity 30, 40, 50 percent before theres even a small probability that theyre actually going to walk from the house that they were trying to build a life in and default. I know theres a lot of press that suggest theres a wave of 5, 10, 15 million people who are underwater who could default. We think virtually none of those people are going to default.
BRAND: Thats interesting, because many of them have defaulted already.
Prof. WHEATON: The data actually shows that the very vast majority of people that have defaulted have defaulted because they cant afford the payment, because theyve lost their jobs, some things happen to their familys situation as opposed to people who can afford the payment, but technically are underwater. Their house is worth 20 percent or 15 percent less than their mortgage.
BRAND: What this going to happen when the first-time homebuyers credit expires at the end of April and interest rates might go up?
Prof. WHEATON: Interest rates might go up considerably, and I think thats something that really worries the Fed chairman greatly. Im guessing that most of the people that are in negative acuity territory at this point are probably on fixed rate mortgages. So, Im a little more concerned about what rising rates would do to the new buyers of homes that have actually all of a sudden come out of the woodwork and are purchasing homes like crazy.
I think they could be greatly dissuaded if mortgage rates rise from five to six to seven to eight percent. And I think both Treasury and the Fed are working very hard to try and minimize the effect of rising interest rates on mortgage rates.
BRAND: Will you be looking for anything tonight from President Obama regarding housing?
Prof. WHEATON: I hope he can pull some little magic trick out of his sleeve to help the people that are unemployed at least stay in their house for some extra 12 months or 18 months to see if they can get back on their feet. Thats always a problem during recessions, and that would make me very happy.
BRAND: We have been talking about real estate and the housing market with William Wheaton. He is a professor of economics and urban studies and planning at the MIT Center for Real Estate. Thank you very much.
Prof. WHEATON: Delighted to have been here.
DANIEL SCHORR: Shakespeare might have had the Democrats in mind when he wrote in Hamlet that sorrows come not in single spies, but in battalions.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr.
SCHORR: In his address tonight, President Obama is as much concerned about the state of his party in the wake of the stunning loss of Ted Kennedys seat as he is about the state of the union.
In The Hill newspaper today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that Massachusetts may have changed the math in the congressional lineup, but we will fight on. Fight has become a chosen word in Democratic parlance. In his speech in Ohio last week, reacting to the loss of the Massachusetts seat, the president used the word fight or fighting a total of 22 times, and one can expect a combative president tonight embracing a disaffected electorate.
But the impact of Massachusetts is becoming evident. Joseph Biden III has suddenly bowed out of the race for his fathers Senate seat in Delaware. Arkansas Representative Marion Berry has announced his retirement. And up to a dozen other House members are reportedly considering an exit strategy.
The Massachusetts setback came not singly, but after the Democrats had lost the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. The immediate effect was to inspire the almost-leaderless Republicans, although opinion polls indicate that disillusionment with Democrats does not add up to an embrace of Republicans.
The voters are in a plague on both your houses mood. But its the Democrats, still formally in command of Congress, who need help if anything is to be enacted from health care reform to a freeze on domestic spending. For the president, this represents a special challenge.
In an interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC, he said that he would rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. The question is whether resurgent Republicans and even independents will allow him to be an effective president.
In these volatile times, change could come quickly. But for now, these seem to be dark days for Democrats.
This is Daniel Schorr.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
So, the science of barefoot running may now be clearer, but what about the business? Companies spend fortunes every year advertising the latest running shoes, and we buy them by the millions.
Kristian Foden-Vencil, of Oregon Public Broadcasting, has some reaction to the barefoot running news from what we might call Americas athletic shoe capital.
KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL: The Portland Metropolitan area is where Nike is based. Adidas has its U.S. headquarters here, as do other athletic brands like Columbia Sportswear and LaCrosse. So news that running barefoot may put less stress on your feet might be expected to put the cat among the local pigeons.
(Soundbite of bells)
FODEN-VENCIL: But at the place where local runners go to buy their shoes, the owner of the predictably named Portland Running Company, Dave Harkin, exhibits a runner's calm.
Mr. DAVE HARKIN (Owner, Portland Running Company): Americans especially, were not set up to run barefoot.
FODEN-VENCIL: The bottom line, he says, is that if youre a dedicated runner, youre going to get injured because the whole idea is to push the limit. And ever since Nike first created a spongy sole using a waffle iron, shoe companies have been using technology to try and reduce those injuries. Harkin concedes running barefoot is good for you. But, he says, with all the glass, stones and assorted litter on American streets, its not going to reduce injuries.
Mr. HAWKING: I think if we made everybody run barefoot, there would be a slaughter of experience. People come back and be not only really, really sore, but other things take place when you run barefoot that arent that great.
FODEN-VENCIL: Local running blogger Heather Daniel agrees.
Ms. HEATHER DANIEL (Blogger, HeatherDaniel.org): You know, back in the day, we werent running on concrete. We were running on the plains that were in nicely padded forests or something - you can imagine something like that. Now, we have concrete and asphalt, and thats just really not nice to your feet.
FODEN-VENCIL: And what are you hearing from businesses - Nike, Adidas, Reebok? Have you heard of how theyre reacting?
Mr. DANIEL: You know, when you look at Nike, a lot of their new shoes, at least their shoes that the runners are interested in, are very minimal. I think the idea is that they want to move toward that - when you look at the Nike Free, which is another style of shoe thats supposed to simulate barefoot running.
FODEN-VENCIL: Its true. Picking up a Nike Free is odd. You expect the weight of a standard, 14-ounce shoe. But at about 5 ounces, it feels very insubstantial.
So, is Nike worried about the new study? They dont seem to be quaking in their boots. In a written statement, they say runners have unique needs that require various levels of structure, support and cushioning, and that they offer different shoes to serve different types of runners.
Predictably, other companies are trying to take advantage of the barefoot-running movement. Lebron sells what can only be described as a toe sock made of thin rubber. Each little piggy gets its own pad, and the idea is that it's like running barefoot, but youre protected if you tread on dog poo.
(Soundbite of beep)
FODEN-VENCIL: The outdoor store REI sells them. And Thomas Bussell(ph) is both a salesman and an evangelist.
Mr. THOMAS BUSSELL (Salesman, REI): People seem to be loving them. I think this barefoot movement has definitely gained some steam.
FODEN-VENCIL: So, companies here dont think this new revelation is going to put them out of business. They think dedicated runners may incorporate some barefoot running into their weekly regiment. But the rest of us can be relied on to buy fancy athletic shoes in preparation for that run - even if we never quite make it off the couch.
For NPR News, Im Kristian Foden-Vencil in Portland.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
Back when I was a college student here, tuition at UC Berkeley was so cheap you could put it on your credit card. I remember my parents paying around $1,300 a year. My dad said it was the best deal in education around: Ivy League academics for a tenth of the price. That was in the 1980s, right around the time "Flashdance" came out. Flash forward, and now going to Berkeley or any other University of California school costs more than 10 grand a year. Still a deal compared to private schools, but not as easy to put on your credit card.
There's been a steady erosion in state funding for the UC system to the point where last year at the height of the budget crisis, the state's contribution to UC was cut by $637 million. That meant staff layoffs, faculty furloughs, canceled classes. And now, many here in California are wondering whether the state's once peerless public university system can ever recover.
One of the stars of that system is UCLA. It's widely considered one of the top research universities in the country. We went there to get a feel for how the budget cuts are playing out on campus.
Unidentified Man: (Unintelligible).
BRAND: Just inside the entrance of Haines Hall Room A18 is a placard that reads Maximum Capacity: 82. One hundred and five students have enrolled in the class, Introduction to European Politics. The professor is Michael Lofchie.
Professor MICHAEL LOFCHIE (Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles): So we have a conception of legitimacy that the legitimacy of a government springs from below.
BRAND: Professor Lofchie has been with UCLA's political science department since 1964. He loves his job, even when it means teaching a lecture course without TAs, which is the case now. No teaching assistants means the students don't get a chance to discuss the material outside of class. So at the end of the hour, those with questions grab a few moments with their professor.
ALICE(ph): I'm Alice, by the way.
Prof. LOFCHIE: I know it.
ALICE: Hi. Okay. In the (unintelligible) reading, he was talking about...
BRAND: It's not the class size that worries Lofchie. It's the fact that many students can't get into the courses they want. UCLA has had to cancel more than 100 classes in the last year. Others, like the one we attended, have restricted enrollment because of the TA shortage. It creates a situation, Lofchie says, that's painful to watch.
Prof. LOFCHIE: The beginning of every term becomes a scramble to get into courses. If I'm not in on what they call the first pass, the first round of enrollment, can I beg? Can I plead? Can I email the professor? Can I find some way to cudgel my way into a class?
BRAND: What was your experience? What did the students ask you?
Prof. LOFCHIE: It's terrible. Students come to you, or they email you, or they telephone you and they say, I need this class because it's a prerequisite for the political science major. Or, I need this class because it's a prerequisite for certain upper division courses, and I can't take that next step until I am able to take this class.
So part of what I think is most objectionable about this new environment that we live in is that the interface between the budget crisis and the student falls on the faculty members, so that instead of talking to students about the European social model and whether it would work in the United States, I'm very busy explaining to students why I can't let them into the course.
BRAND: So what do you think is going to happen?
Prof. LOFCHIE: I'm not optimistic. Having seen this university in the '60s, I now find myself commenting on the fact that the past really was better in the university. Students really did get a better education. I hope it improves before I retire. But there's no guarantee that things will get better.
Professor BOB SAMUELS (University of California, Los Angeles): Are there any questions?
BRAND: Across campus, Bob Samuels has a class of 25, mostly freshmen. They're dressed in jeans, sneakers, and blue and gold UCLA sweatshirts.
Prof. SAMUELS: When you're writing your papers, I don't want you to just quote things just to quote them. I want you to critically interact with the material.
BRAND: All UCLA students have to take this writing course. And yet, last summer, all 23 faculty in the writing department received layoff notices. They said, you're teaching obligations will officially cease as of June 30, 2010. Should this situation change, you will, of course, be contacted.
Bob Samuels has not yet been contacted. He thinks he has a 50/50 chance of keeping his job.
Prof. SAMUELS: They haven't suspended the writing requirement. They were thinking of doing that and they haven't done that yet, so they're going to still need writing faculty. It's just a question of how many and, you know, how big the classes gets. They already increased our class size 25 percent this year.
BRAND: In addition to teaching, Bob Samuels is also the head of the union that represents lecturers and librarians. So you can imagine he's got a few bones to pick with the school's administration, which recently announced a student tuition hike of 32 percent.
Prof. SAMUELS: I think a lot of people are waking up and seeing that the university does have a lot of resources. Last year, UC system had a record year of revenue. It brought in a lot of money through the federal stimulus money. It brought in a lot of extra grant money, has incredibly profitable units, the medical unit.
One of the questions is, you know, are they sharing the money? And also, we feel that undergraduate education is constantly being shortchanged, and it really is a question of priorities.
BRAND: Later, at the student union, I meet with two of Samuels' students. First year neuroscience major Rami Bashur(ph) and second year engineering major Robin Armstrong(ph).
Mr. ROBIN ARMSTRONG: Taking classes is one of the most stressful things here.
BRAND: That's Robin.
Mr. ARMSTRONG: As an engineering student, my entire schedule for the next four years is basically mapped out. And I really don't have that much leeway. If I ever can't take a class, I'm basically here for five years, which is difficult because my parents are paying for my entire tuition here.
BRAND: And he says they might have to postpone their retirement if he goes longer than four years. And some of the classes he's in aren't what they used to be.
Mr. ARMSTRONG: I'm in material science right now and it used to be material science with a lab. And now we don't get that part.
BRAND: So much for the real-world experience, Robin says.
Now, the other student, Rami Bashur, is in a different situation. Financial aid covers some of his fees. He works to cover the rest.
Mr. RAMI BASHUR: When you have a job, you don't work just like one or two shifts, four hours a week and whatnot. You have like 20 hours or more and you can't easily fit that into your schedule.
BRAND: Rami wants to go to med school, but he's worried about getting into the math, chemistry and physics classes he'll need for that. Like Robin, he's afraid he won't finish in four years.
Mr. BASHUR: I'm considering about my major. Do I want to take stick with neuroscience or do I want to switch to a major that I can graduate quickly? I was thinking at first of double majoring in Arabic and neuroscience. But now, that's out of the question because I don't have the money nor time to do that.
BRAND: Close to two-thirds of UCLA students receive some sort of financial aid. Even during this epic budget crisis, tuition is covered in full for students whose families earn under $60,000 a year. And that'll be raised to 70,000 starting in the fall.
And still, for some, it's not enough. I leave the food court and head over to the building next door, which houses a small food pantry in a closet.
Ms. TUE NGUYEN(ph): This is pretty much the closet. So small effort, but it goes a long way.
BRAND: Tue Nguyen is a recent grad who now works on campus. Part of her job is operating this pantry.
Ms. NGUYEN: A lot of the foods that we usually ask most of the donors that help out is anything that students could easily heat up or, you know, instant Cup O Noodles or pastas and cereals, things like that, things that are easily transferable. And they can come in, check us out between classes in order to have something to eat.
BRAND: Next to the refrigerator, there's a notebook. It's filled with words of thanks from students who used the pantry and details about their circumstances. Some are sleeping in their cars or crashing on friends' couches. Some are undocumented students who don't qualify for financial aid. Some simply don't have the $5 or $10 it would cost to buy lunch.
Many can claim this:
Ms. ANDREA ORTEGA(ph): I'm the first one in my family to come to college.
BRAND: Andrea Ortega is a fourth year student majoring in Chicano studies with minors in math and film.
Ms. ORTEGA: With the budget crisis recently, my dad got laid off. So he wasn't working until recently, so my family was going through a huge struggle. I mean, and even though I get financial aid, I just get it for my tuition. I really don't have that much more money to, like, spend. And what I do, like I ration it out on food and I have to pay for my rent 'cause I live too far to commute.
BRAND: So pretty regularly, she grabs that Cup O Noodles to keep her going on campus. She's close to graduation, but the cost of education is still on her mind.
Ms. ORTEGA: Please don't raise our tuition anymore 'cause how are my brother and sister going to be in school, too? 'Cause my brother is graduating this year, and how is he going to go to school when he won't be able to afford it? And he has dreams, too.
BRAND: So that was the view from campus. For a response from the administration, we've called on Mark Yudof. He's the president of the entire University of California system, which encompasses all 10 UC campuses.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. MARK YUDOF (President, University of California): Thank you very much, Madeleine.
BRAND: Well, first of all, how would you respond to Andrea Ortega, who really can't afford to actually buy food on a regular basis? She uses the food pantry.
Mr. YUDOF: Well, what I would respond is we've got her covered. We have a Blue and Gold program, and if you have a family income of under $70,000, you don't pay any - what other people would call tuition, period. We can't control the whole world. We - you know, housing prices and food prices and transportation, she may be struggling, but the university has really taken care of students. Not only low-income students, but well into the middle class.
BRAND: All right. Well, let's also address the concerns of Bob Samuels. He's a writing professor - writing lecturer, actually.
Mr. YUDOF: Well, I'm familiar with Mr. Samuels' point of view, and he's wrong. All money is not green in the university. You can't take the Lawrence Berkeley Lab money and use it for something else. It's just wishful thinking.
The problem is we get $2.6 billion from the state. We're down from $3.4 billion, and that's the core money for undergraduate education: the Spanish department, the anthropology department, all the wonderful things that we need to do. And we're struggling to come up with the money to sustain that basic undergraduate education.
BRAND: What do you think about this idea that's been floated, separating the top UC schools - Berkeley, UCLA, for example - from the rest of them and making them more like private schools?
Mr. YUDOF: Well, I wouldn't make them more like private. You know, I mean, if you look around, you know, our 10,300 next year is not remotely like Stanford or Princeton.
To answer your question directly, I think everything is on the table to think about. Our backs are to the wall, and I don't reject it out of hand, but I don't endorse it either.
The second thing I would say is if you adopted a plan like that, you would have to have some sort of redistribution. We need to worry about Merced, we need to worry about Riverside and some of the other campuses. A portion of that, whatever income was obtained from that method, would have to be returned to the campuses to help build them into great research universities, enable them to flourish.
BRAND: Do you agree with some people who are worried, some people like the professor who's on our piece earlier, who really worries that in the past, education in the UC system was indeed a lot better than it is today and that it won't get better for a long, long time?
Mr. YUDOF: Well, I partly agree and disagree. I agree that it is worrisome that over the last 20 years, we have half as much money to spend per student. That is very worrisome. And ultimately, that goes to quality issues.
But look at this place. I mean, Berkeley still has huge numbers of top 10 departments. UCLA is one of the great universities. San Diego is a great graduate medical complex, as well as other things.
My job is to make sure that the professor's prediction is not true, that we preserve all these things and continue our growth.
BRAND: That's Mark Yudof, president of the University of California.
Back in 1960, California created the master plan for higher education. It promised that a quality, affordable college education would be available to anyone who qualified, no matter what their financial situation. It's a legacy from much happier economic times or, as some might say, it's merely a quaint artifact.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Toyota dealers have a big challenge on their hands. The automaker has told them to temporarily stop selling some of their most popular vehicles. Toyota said yesterday that it would take a hiatus in manufacturing those cars and trucks because of safety concerns.
As NPR's Frank Langfitt reports, the situation is making dealers scramble and taking a toll on Toyota's reputation for quality.
FRANK LANGFITT: There are eight different models on Toyota's no-sell list. They include recent versions of its most popular vehicles such as the Corolla and the RAV4. Toyota says in rare instances, people have complained that accelerators stick. Rose Bayat spent much of this morning trying to explain Toyota's move.
Ms. ROSE BAYAT (Vice President, Darcars): I personally have spoken with at least 10 customers today on the telephone.
LANGFITT: Bayat is a vice president with Darcars, which has four Toyota dealerships in the Washington, D.C. area. She says none of her customers have complained of sticky accelerators. But here's her advice via Toyota to anyone who runs into the problem.
Ms. BAYAT: You would place the vehicle in neutral and then you would firmly apply both of your feet on the brake pedal. Do not pump the pedal, just firmly apply the brakes, which will slow the vehicle down, and then you can pull to the side of the road.
LANGFITT: And call a tow truck. Toyota did not respond to requests for comment. Bayat says she doesn't know how long her company won't be able to sell certain models or how long it will take to fix the problem, but she says customers should feel comfortable continuing to drive their cars. Bayat says that's what she's doing.
Ms. BAYAT: I will drive a Toyota Camry home.
LANGFITT: And what year?
Ms. BAYAT: 2010.
LANGFITT: And it's part of the recall.
Ms. BAYAT: Yes.
LANGFITT: And you're not worried.
Ms. BAYAT: No.
LANGFITT: Toyota's decision to halt sales follows two recalls involving a total of nearly five million vehicles. Late last year, the company recalled vehicles because of concerns some accelerators were sticking to floor mats. The problem has been linked to a crash in San Diego that killed four people.
Toyota told owners to remove floor mats, but since then, the company has found evidence a small number of accelerators are sticking on their own.
Professor JEFFREY LIKER (Industrial and operations Engineering, University of Michigan; Author, "The Toyota Way"): It gets kind of spongy, where instead of just flipping back up, it moves up slowly.
LANGFITT: This is Jeffrey Liker. He's a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Michigan and author of "The Toyota Way." Liker recently spoke with Toyota's officials about the accelerators. He says the company thinks the problem is related to weather and wear.
Prof. LIKER: Apparently, it's moisture, and the humidity interacts with some material, and if it's worn, then there's some problem with the pedal sticking. And there have not been any accidents, but people are shocked when their pedal doesn't come back when it's supposed to.
LANGFITT: The accelerators were not built by Toyota but by a supplier named CTS based in Indiana. Today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the Obama administration pressed for the halt in Toyota sales. Auto analysts say the company did the right thing but should have moved earlier. Jeremy Anwyl is with edmunds.com, the car consumer Web site.
Mr. JEREMY ANWYL (CEO, Edmunds.com): Before yesterday, they were kind of catching up all the time, and that's just like the death of 1,000 cuts. So they've taken a bold move. I think they have the opportunity now to get in front of this and, in so doing, repair their reputation. But the next couple of days are going to be critical because there is this sort of information vacuum and they need to get out there with, you know, solid answers.
LANGFITT: Toyota is shutting down five plants in North America next week to investigate the problem. Rough estimates suggest the affected models account for more than half the company's revenue in the U.S. Jeremy Anwyl says the recalls and lost sales could end up costing Toyota billions of dollars.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
President Barack Obama heads up to Capitol Hill tonight to deliver his first State of the Union address. With unemployment at 10 percent and health care at a stalemate, the White House is on the defensive. But we expect the president to say that he'll still push for that major legislative initiative of his and that he'll propose programs to create new jobs as well.
NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins me now. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON: Hi, Robert.
SIEGEL: And we should say at the outset that we were both at the White House today getting a sense of the presidents thinking. How would you describe what he has to do today?
LIASSON: Well, he has to do a lot. He has to reconnect with the middle class, convince them he has a plan to create jobs and turn the economy around, somehow acknowledge what happened in Massachusetts without abandoning his agenda and angering his own base. And while he's at it, he has to explain how he plans to control the deficit. Its a very, very tall order. Its kind of a daunting political task tonight. And I actually cant think of a president whos given a State of the Union facing a more difficult political landscape.
SIEGEL: On health care, I havent heard the idea that thats it, its over. We're finished with health care. They want at least give it one more go.
LIASSON: I think the way he's going to treat health care, they dont really know what to do on health care. The Democrats in the White House are still trying to figure it out. I think the idea is that he will say that everybody is taking a deep breath, stepping back. That certainly is the message from Capitol Hill. They are still assessing whats doable, whats passable. I mean, push it through on reconciliation, there are a lot of Democrats, moderate ones, in the Senate who are absolutely opposed to that.
SIEGEL: Yeah, that would be without getting 60 votes.
LIASSON: Right. Do something more minimal, a package of the quote, "just be popular parts." Of course its unclear if the popular parts hang together without a lot of other infrastructure and whether Republicans would vote for anything.
SIEGEL: Yeah. The Republicans now have 41 votes. President Obama is clearly frustrated by whats happened in the Senate where every item nowadays needs 60 votes to end debate and therefore pass. How does he address Republicans in that situation?
LIASSON: The White House is intent on making the Republicans, now that they have 41 votes, accountable. They're even being referred to up there as the governing party. I mean, that they have a responsibility for governing because they have the veto.
SIEGEL: So they can prevent anything from happening.
LIASSON: Yes, they can prevent anything from happening. And I think the White House is very frustrated. The public hasnt seemed to have held the Republicans accountable even as they have blocked, up until now, so many of the presidents initiatives. I think that the president is going to both reach out to them because he knows that his brand and something that the public likes is bipartisanship, an effort to meet in the center, but he's also going to challenge them.
SIEGEL: In fact, he's going to say, when you Republicans had only 40 seats in the Senate, okay, you could it was our fault that we couldnt get things done with 41, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
LIASSON: I think there's going to be some version of that.
SIEGEL: You said there is no prior experience you can think back to. And you watched more than one president in the White House. No prior experience that Mr. Obama may draw upon?
LIASSON: Well, here's the problem with that. I've been wracking my brains on the prior experiences. And, of course, I thought about Bill Clinton, who lost both houses of Congress and came back with a very powerful State of the Union address in 1995 that set him up nicely to win reelection. He triangulated. And he said we can work together or you can send me a bunch of bills and then we'll rack up a pile of vetoes.
He showed some strength. He pushed back against them. But he did triangulate. But he had someone to triangulate with. The president still has his own party very much in control of both houses of Congress. Ronald Reagan, I think is the model that the White House would look to more. He stayed the course wasnt necessarily defiant, but he stayed the course, took a big hit in the midterms, came back and got reelected.
SIEGEL: People at the White House like to say that when he was at 42 percent, he was a dithering old man in the eyes of the media. When he got reelected in 1984, he was the great communicator.
LIASSON: Something like that they hope will happen to President Obama.
SIEGEL: NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you, Robert.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
While the president and Congress debate difficult financial questions, Oregon has taken an unusual step of its own. Yesterday, voters there approved tax increases on corporations and on the rich.
Our story comes from Chris Lehman of the Northwest News Network.
CHRIS LEHMAN: Political activist Steve Novick could hardly contain himself. As one of the most public supporters of the tax hikes, Novick rallied the crowd gathered at a Portland concert hall Tuesday night by imitating a baseball announcer calling a game-winning home run.
Mr. STEVE NOVICK (Political Activist): Oregon voters had a large rally with a left field stance, and they're going crazy.
(Soundbite of cheering)
Mr. NOVICK: They're going crazy.
(Soundbite of cheering)
LEHMAN: Oregon voters usually reject tax hikes. They voted down higher income taxes twice in the past decade alone. Theyve repeatedly shut down efforts at creating a states sales tax. But this time, supporters drove home the message that the taxes narrowly targeted corporations and the state's wealthiest - just two percent of taxpayers.
Individuals who make more than 125,000 and families who earn more than a quarter million will pay more taxes. Corporations will pay anywhere from as low as $150 to as much as $100,000 more depending on profitability. Portland software developer, David Vernier, supports the tax hikes, even though it means more money out of his pocket.
Mr. DAVID VERNIER (Software Developer): Sure, its going to cost us some taxes, but I need to have that highway patrolman on the road keeping the drunk drivers under control. We want to have schools open.
LEHMAN: Opponents say its bad policy to raise taxes on businesses during tough economic times. Oregons unemployment rate is among the nations highest, at 11 percent, and the business funded group fighting the measures claim the hikes would lead to tens of thousands of layoffs. Pat McCormick is spokesman for the group. He says supporters unfairly painted businesses as greedy fat cats.
Mr. PAT MCCORMICK (Spokesman, Conkling Fiskum & McCormick): They went after businesses in Oregon as though they were Wall Street bankers and credit card companies and called them such. They went after people they said were rich and trying to generate that sort of a class warfare distinction that said those folks arent doing their fair share, really didnt reflect the kind of Oregon standards that I think weve seen in the past and thats disappointing.
LEHMAN: But it wasnt voter rage against big business that fueled this vote, says longtime Oregon political analyst Jim Moore with Pacific University. It had more to do with a broke state government.
Professor JIM MOORE (Political Science, Pacific University): If there was anger, it was anger that people have seen Oregon cut back its government, basically nonstop since the early 1990s. And with the recession, more people saw the effects of that.
LEHMAN: The legislature already cut $2 billion from last years spending plan and would've had to cut an additional $700 million if these measures had failed.
(Soundbite of applause)
LEHMAN: But even as supporters celebrated their victory, legislative leaders were quick to warn the results only mean the continuation of state services at their current cutback levels. Democratic House Speaker Dave Hunt.
Speaker DAVE HUNT (Oregon House of Representatives): Our schools are not where they need to be. Our health care system is not where it needs to be. Our public safety services are not where they need to be. And our - the health of our business (unintelligible) is not where it needs to be. In all those cases, though, this moves the ball forward tonight, but weve got more work to do.
(Soundbite of cheering)
LEHMAN: Hunt said lawmakers will consider ways to reform Oregons tax systems during a month long special session that starts next week.
For NPR News, Im Chris Lehman in Salem, Oregon.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Apple calls it magical. The companys new iPad unveiled today by Steve Jobs.
Mr. STEVE JOBS (CEO, Apple): Now, the reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because weve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
BRAND: Steve Jobs put to rest weeks of rumors and speculation with his presentation today in San Francisco.
NPRs Laura Sydell was there. And Laura, you actually got to use one of these iPads. How magical is it?
LAURA SYDELL: It got up and flew away after I was done.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SYDELL: No, Im just kidding. Its nice. I didnt - I have to say, it didnt quite live up to the hype for me. But then again, how could anything? And, also, the name iPad, I doubt there were any women in the room when they came up with that one, you know.
SYDELL: Yeah, theres a lot of talk about that on the blogosphere.
BRAND: And also the way it looks because it looks like just a big giant iPhone.
SYDELL: And, you know, it is in many ways like a big giant iPhone. The touch screen is a little nicer. You can do this it's got this great kind of pinching action that brings you in and out of, say, photos and books. And its about a half-inch think and its about 9.7 inch multi-touch screen. And I would say that it has an operating system, well, actually, they told me - the operating system is pretty much the same one as the iPhone and its got the same 140,000 applications that you can get for the iPhone. Now people are going to make apps that are special for it. But in many ways, yeah, it is. It has a virtual keypad, but much larger, like the iPhone, although you can get an attachable keyboard for this.
BRAND: And you can't make phone calls with it.
SYDELL: No. It is not a phone and it does not have a camera. So that actually gives less functionality than the iPhone.
BRAND: Well, what else can you do with it?
SYDELL: Its a great gaming device. They did show how - there were specific things you could do because of the size of the screen, right. Say, if youre doing a racing game, you know, you could shift gears with the touch of your finger. And like the much smaller iPhone, you know, you can tilt it, move it and so you can sort of steer and do things like that. You can watch video on it. Here's the big new thing, which is that you can read books on it. And it actually is a very nice eReader. It has an OLED backlit screen, so it looks really nice, you can change pages with your finger, put it in landscape mode, so like it is - like a book. You can see two pages at once.
So, that was nice. They did not talk about pricing for books. As of right now, it seems like they had deals with most of the major publishing houses. But Random House hasnt signed on. What weve heard is that pricing will be established by the publishers themselves, which is different from the Kindle. So, that does make it different from an iPhone, is just how it works as a reader.
BRAND: And there has always been, as you say, a lot of hype, a lot of anticipation leading up to an Apple product launch. But it just seemed like weve been hearing about this tablet rumor forever.
SYDELL: Years?
BRAND: Years.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: Yeah, I know.
SYDELL: Years, Madeleine. I know, I think, you know, it really reached a level of frenzy and in part I think its because the iPod and the iPhone were so incredibly successful that they really changed the categories. And people are wondering if, okay, is this going to be a device, once again, that takes existing technologies, you know, there were mp3 players before the iPod. There were smartphones before the iPhone. It is going to change a whole category, in this case, the tablet computer eReaders.
And so I think that had something to do with the hype around this - was just that sense. Also, there's a hope maybe it will save newspapers. The New York Times was there, they have an app, you know. The New York Times is probably going to start to charge. So there's a question as to whether or not this might be able to really help magazines and periodicals as we move into the digital age. A lot of people are looking in those industries, are hoping it will do what iTunes did for the music industry.
BRAND: And people want to know, how much is it going to cost?
SYDELL: Oh, yes. The big question, not bad, $499 for the cheapest one, but you got to have a WiFi plan if you want to use it everywhere, but - and up to $829 for the most expensive, which has 3G.
BRAND: All right, thanks very much. Thats NPRs Laura Sydell in San Francisco talking about the new Apple iPad.
MADELEINE BRAND host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel.
Small, poor and isolated is the country of Yemen - has rarely been the focus of international attention, but these days, Yemen is of great of concern. Today, its the focus of an international conference in London, a conference attended by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Participants are talking about ways to support Yemens fight against radical Islamists and on top of that list is the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen, which claimed responsibility for the failed airplane bombing on Christmas Day.
NPRs Rob Gifford has the story.
ROB GIFFORD: Hillary Clinton arrived in London this morning prepared for two conferences on two crucial and in some ways similar countries: Yemen and Afghanistan. The fact that al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula claimed that alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was trained in Yemen, has meant a surge of U.S. interest in the country. Secretary Clinton used the meeting focusing on Yemen today to launch a new international grouping called the Friends of Yemen that will include the G8 countries and Yemens neighbors in the Gulf. She said a stable Yemen was in everyones interest.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): The situation in Yemen is of particular concern. It does truly affect all of us in a very direct way. So with the leadership of our partners in the Arab world, Friends of Yemen everywhere stand ready to assist the Yemeni government and people.
GIFFORD: This was not a conference to throw more money at Yemen. Today was about finding ways to use money already pledged to fight radicalism and to lay out a list of needed economic and political reforms. Some of the biggest problems in the country are simply to do with poverty, which is pushing some Yemenis into the arms of radical groups. Nearly 50 percent of young people under the age of 25 are unemployed and 50 percent of the population is illiterate. Basic services such as running water and electricity are scarce. But, said Hillary Clinton, at least in the documents that the Yemeni government presented to her, it appeared to be confronting its problems honestly.
Sec. CLINTON: In fact, there was a category of statistics that was labeled Appalling Indicators. Ive gone to a lot of international meetings and I have worked with many, many governments over many years, but that struck me, and I want to commend the foreign minister and the prime minister.
GIFFORD: The Yemeni foreign minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi responded in kind thanking Secretary Clinton and the host, British foreign secretary David Miliband, for their assistance offered to Yemen and saying that his government was committed to the reforms that Clinton, who he referred to as Her Excellency, had just laid out.
Mr. ABU BAKR AL-QIRBI (Foreign Minister, Yemen): This commitment also stems from our belief that challenges we are facing now cannot be remedied unless we implement this agenda of reforms and the 10 points that Her Excellency alluded to.
GIFFORD: The mood of cooperation changed, though, at the end of the news conference with the question for foreign minister al-Qirbi about whether Yemen was responsible for the radicalization of the alleged bomber of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day.
Mr. AL-QIRBI: We said he spent in London four years and he spent in Yemen one year. Where did the radicalization take place?
GIFFORD: Overall, though, the tone was cooperative, but the new Friends of Yemen will be watching to see whether any of the Yemeni governments spoken commitment to confront radicalism and poverty are put into practice.
Rob Gifford, NPR News, London.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel in Washington, where today the city is in the midst of one of its favorite parlor games: anticipating the president's State of the Union message. Among the challenges for Mr. Obama, articulating something memorable and meaningful.
The two most recent presidents left us with these phrases.
President BILL CLINTON: The era of big government is over.
(Soundbite of cheering)
President GEORGE W. BUSH: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.
SIEGEL: So much for ghosts of States of the Union past. We now turn to the one in our immediate future. We've asked a group of Democrats to give us blueprints for what they want to hear when President Obama addresses a joint session of Congress and the nation later this evening. And we're going to begin outside of Washington with Pat Waak, who is chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. Welcome to the program.
Ms. PAT WAAK (Chair, Colorado Democratic Party): Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
SIEGEL: What's something that President Obama could say, which if he then followed up on and did, might make a difference with Colorado voters?
Ms. WAAK: Well, I think, first, he has to remind the country and Colorado voters in particular that he inherited a $1.3 trillion debt, and we would have gone into a depression if he hadn't done what he's done so far. But I think he does need to focus on the middle class in this speech and talk about how we are going to stimulate rise in jobs and a decrease in the deficit. Those are things that people really care about deeply.
SIEGEL: It's important to you, I gather, what tone the president takes in the speech. Not just the substance of what he says, but the tone of it.
Ms. WAAK: I think he's got to be a feisty leader. You know, he's - I like the fact that he's calm and cool to some - I mean, I expect that in my leader. I certainly wouldn't want him, you know, jumping up and down and screaming. But I actually think he has to take a really firm tone.
I think one of the real follow-ups to the president's State of the Union is we in the states have got to get the truth out to people. Because what's happened is that there's this massive spin that's going on, which is not just spin. They're outright lies that are taking place. And I hope that the president gets up there and says: tell the truth, here's what the facts are, here's the direction we're going to go and you're either on board or you're not, but this ship is sailing.
Pat Waak, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, thanks so much for talking with us today.
Ms. WAAK: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Labor has been one of President Obama's most important allies. Steve Rosenthal used to be political director of the AFL-CIO. He's now a political consultant to Democrats in Washington.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. STEVE ROSENTHAL (Former Political Director, AFL-CIO): Thank you.
SIEGEL: What most do you want to hear from the president in the State of the Union?
Mr. ROSENTHAL: I think it's really critical that the president put down a marker around jobs. There's no question that that's what Americans are crying for. We're looking at a situation right now where somewhere in the neighborhood of 27 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. This is a crisis.
They've seen Congress and the White House spring into action to help AIG, spring into action to help Lehman Brothers, and they're wondering when they're going to spring into action to help, you know, typical Americans.
SIEGEL: Well, they sprung into action with the stimulus and no one expects the administration to approve another big stimulus or to get one through the Congress. What can they do to bring down unemployment?
Mr. ROSENTHAL: They can't afford to tinker. And they really need to go big to do something big. They need to be doing things that create jobs immediately. You know, you look at our roads, our bridges, our light rail systems, there's a lot that can be done immediately to start to create jobs fast. But if they tinker and do something small, it's really not going to help. And believe it or not, I think there is a taste on voters' part to see these guys do something very, very big.
SIEGEL: If you heard this evening any echo of the sentiment that the era of big government is over, you would say, wrong, that's the wrong track (unintelligible).
Mr. ROSENTHAL: It's exactly the wrong direction to go in, because if they do small things, it's not going to have much impact. The Democrats have to be seen as champions of jobs. It's the right thing for America right now and it's the right thing for the party.
SIEGEL: Steve Rosenthal, political consultant, former political director of the AFL-CIO, thank you very much for talking with us.
Mr. ROSENTHAL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Now to someone who's actually been closely involved in preparing State of the Union speeches. Mike McCurry is former press secretary to President Clinton, now a lobbyist here in Washington. Welcome to the program.
Mr. MICHAEL MCCURRY (Former Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton): Nice to be with you.
SIEGEL: What do you want to hear in the State of the Union?
Mr. MCCURRY: Well, something inspirational, hopeful, optimistic. Something that takes us back to that amazing day on the Mall just over a year ago, where Barack Obama really, I think, brought the country together and said, we're going to do things in a different way. We need to get back some of that sense of idealism, because we've lost that. It's been a very angry, bitter, sulfurous climate here in Washington.
SIEGEL: Do you want to hear somebody who's angry at the people to make them angry and feisty?
Mr. MCCURRY: No, I don't. I don't want to hear kind of faux populism. I want that sense that we can solve these problems and rise above some of our divisions. I also want to hear the president figuratively talk to that aisle that he walks down. He doesn't need to talk to the fringes. He needs to talk to Americans.
We're mostly out there in the middle and looking for solutions, and looking to make some progress on these issues that we've been dealing with for a long time.
SIEGEL: What do you think is the wisest thing he could say about health care at this stage of the debate?
Mr. MCCURRY: That it's a mess, the debate, that we've got some good ideas and we know some things that we need to do. And that we can come together and get those done. I think if he figuratively offers the Republicans a chance to work together in a bipartisan way, he's going to have to do something, maybe tort reform or something that demonstrates that serious.
I doubt that's going to happen just because I think this debate has been so polarized now. So I think it will mostly be - let's do what we can, let's move on, let's get to the real subject, which is: How do we create jobs and strengthen this economy?
SIEGEL: At the top of this segment, we heard President Clinton's words about the era of big government being over. That was after the Republican victory of 1994, huge setback.
Mr. MCCURRY: And apparently, a little premature.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: A little bit premature. Is it a moment for President Obama to signal some similar acknowledgement of big change because the Democrats lost the Senate seat in Massachusetts?
Mr. MCCURRY: I think it's a moment of some contrition and a moment for some humility. We didn't get done all of the changes that we had promised the American people. But there are things that the tool of government can do effectively and we have to use that tool wisely. I think that's the direction he'll go.
SIEGEL: Mike McCurry, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. MCCURRY: Great.
SIEGEL: Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, now a Washington lobbyist.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Finally, we thought we'd leave the experts and Washington. Youth Radio's King Anyi Howell lives in Los Angeles. Like many young black men, he's paid extra attention to President Obama's first year in office. And he'll be paying even closer attention tonight.
Mr. KING ANYI HOWELL (Youth Radio): After a full year of presidency, tonight is Barack Obama's chance to address the issues that are keeping Americans up at night, besides Conan O'Brien reruns.
I'll be tuning in from a local cafe, drinking something that has absolutely nothing to do with tea or tea parties, waiting for the president to drop some wisdom, something to ease my stress about the direction in which our county is heading.
You remember a year ago when 52.9 percent of Americans felt that our county's first black president was our white knight? People said that he brought the nation together. And those of us who attended the inauguration in D.C. last year might remember being crammed together. We froze our collective buns off that morning because we believed Obama possessed that certain something. The something that would lead millions of unemployed Americans to the light at the end of the tunnel, as opposed to leading us into the light of an oncoming too-big-to-fail bailout locomotive.
But a year later, no one knows if the bottom of our great recession is in sight. We're still fighting two wars abroad. And what the heck happened to health care for all Americans?
I'm uninsured because insurance costs too much. I think the country could benefit from universal coverage, but only if it's well managed. If public health care is run as marvelously as some of our other institutions, like public schools, I'll take my chances with death.
I'm also part of the generation of young people who were instrumental in ushering the president into the presidency. Obama called us too important to fail. And tonight I'd like him to do something most presidents haven't done and actually speak to us. These times are the toughest my age group has ever seen, and we'd like to know exactly what he's going to do about it and how we can help.
And finally, I want President Obama to address a different war on terror, the terror that's inside each of us who struggle to pay the bills or care for our kids. Sure, I want a plan of action, but he might have to do one better and holla at us. Mr. President, inspire me.
(Soundbite of music)
BRAND: That's King Anyi Howell of Youth Radio. And you can listen to the president's State of the Union speech at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific on many NPR stations and at NPR.org.
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
For years, network broadcasters have kept the Super Bowl free of political advocacy commercials, but this week CBS reversed its stance. CBS is planning to air a Super Bowl ad dealing with abortion.
NPR's Sam Sanders explains how football's biggest game has become the site of another sort of contest.
SAM SANDERS: The Super Bowl is supposed to be that one big, fun event each year when everyone can gather around the television for a good time. Even the commercials are supposed to be entertaining.
Ms. LISA BRENNEMAN: You're having a Super Bowl party to watch, like, commercials about beer and stuff that you're already going to buy, and nachos, you know?
SANDERS: That's Lisa Brenneman, a football fan meeting with friends at a sports bar in Washington, D.C. She and her friends say they look forward to commercials with dancing animals and goofy jokes. They're not looking to debate political issues during a Super Bowl party.
Ms. BRENNEMAN: That's not really where your level of thought is.
SANDERS: But this year, Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group that opposes abortion, wants to inject a serious topic into the Super Bowl. The group plans to air a commercial featuring Florida Gators' star quarterback Tim Tebow.
The Heisman Trophy winner appears in the ad with his mother, Pam. The two talk about her choice not to abort Tebow when she became ill during her 1987 pregnancy on a mission trip in the Philippines. Doctors urged her to end her pregnancy for medical reasons. She refused.
Focus on the Family is paying for the 30-second spot. Ads are selling for up to $3 million. Focus on the Family's spokesman, Gary Schneeberger, says the group's ad is not political.
Mr. GARY SCHNEEBERGER (Spokesman, Focus on the Family): There's nothing controversial about it, there's nothing political about it. It is simply a very inspirational 30 seconds about celebrating life and celebrating families.
SANDERS: In the past, CBS has refused to run advocacy ads from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the United Church of Christ and moveon.org. Abortion rights groups pointed out that long-standing ban. They want CBS to pull the Tebow ad. They also warn that CBS might alienate viewers by showing divisive commercials. As the controversy grew louder, CBS issued a new policy: the broadcaster now says it accepts advocacy ads, that are produced, quote, "reasonably." CBS' new policy may reflect the tough economy.
Scott Kelley, a sports marketing expert, thinks demand for Super Bowl ads is off. Before, broadcasters had no financial need to accept controversial commercials.
Professor SCOTT KELLEY (Director, Center for Sports Marketing, University of Kentucky): They had demand for ad time that typically exceeded the ad spots they had. And so, they could avoid the controversy, if at all possible, and didn't have to go down that road.
SANDERS: Back at the sports bar in Washington, D.C., Joseph Spilatro says he's not eager to see broadcasters open the door to controversial ads.
Mr. JOSEPH SPILATRO: I expect them to be funny and fun. I'm not really wanting to watch issue-based commercials during a Super Bowl game.
SANDERS: Whether these beer commercials are actually funny is yet another controversy.
Sam Sanders, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
We go to London now. It's been playing host to an international conference on Afghanistan. Today, the president of Afghanistan laid out an ambitious agenda to fight corruption and win over some of the Taliban. Dozens of countries represented at the conference say they back him. Britain's prime minister says he hopes to turn the tide against the insurgency by the middle of next year.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Afghan President Hamid Karzai hit on all the themes that donors wanted to hear. He said he would make a big push to fight corruption in his country by streamlining the bureaucracy and empowering an oversight body. And he laid out plans to try to lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency.
President HAMID KARZAI (Afghanistan): Reconciliation and reintegration is what Afghans agree on. We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers who are not part of al-Qaida or other terrorist networks, who accept Afghans' constitution. To do this we would establish a national council for peace and reconciliation.
KELEMEN: And donor nations will help pay, according to the host of today's conference, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Prime Minister GORDON BROWN (United Kingdom): We are today establishing an international trust fund to finance this Afghan-led peace and reintegration program, to provide an economic alternative to those who have none. But for those insurgents who refuse to accept the conditions of reintegration, we have no choice but to pursue them militarily.
KELEMEN: The idea of today's conference, Brown said, was not only to better coordinate international military and civilian efforts but also to set out a road map for a transition, putting Afghans in charge of their security district by district.
Karzai said he would spare no effort to try to be in a position for Afghans to take charge of security all over the country within five years.
Civil society activists raised doubts that Karzai will be able to deliver. And Wazhma Frogh, of the Afghan Women's Network, said she's particularly worried about the reconciliation efforts, saying the international community seems to be looking for an exit route and forgetting about how the Taliban terrorized women.
Ms. WAZHMA FROGH (Country Director, Global Rights; Afghan Women's Network): It's not that we are against peace or reconciliation. It's just that how can peace be brought without justice, without human rights, and without the half of the population's contribution? It's just impossible.
KELEMEN: At her news conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid tribute to Frogh and several other women, all dressed in green headscarves, and made clear that the U.S. is committed to promoting women's rights. But she also backed plans to try to lure away Taliban foot soldiers and Karzai's plans to have a peace gathering known as a jirga.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): The starting premise is you don't make peace with your friends. You have to be willing to engage with your enemies if you expect to create a situation that ends an insurgency, or so marginalizes the remaining insurgents that it doesn't pose a threat to the stability and security of the people.
KELEMEN: Today's conference brought together donors and all of Afghanistan's neighbors, except for one: Iran didn't send its foreign minister, not even its ambassador in London. Britain called that inexplicable, and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, saw it as a missed opportunity.
Ms. CATHERINE ASHTON (Foreign Policy Chief, European Union): I think it would be nice if they had been there. I think people in the room were keen that they'd be invited and hoped that they would be here. They have an important role to play in the region.
KELEMEN: While Iran was absent, it was the topic of conversation in many of Secretary Clinton's meetings today as she pushes for more sanctions to pressure Iran to scale back its nuclear ambitions.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, London.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, its ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
Toward the end of a State of the Union address that focused on jobs and the economy, President Obama had this to say.
President BARACK OBAMA: This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
BRAND: The president was talking about the 1993 law known as Dont Ask, Dont Tell that prohibits gays from serving openly in the military.
NPRs Tom Bowman reports on just how hard itll be to change.
TOM BOWMAN: President Obama has vowed to end Dont Ask, Dont Tell before. So last night, gay rights advocates like Aubrey Sarvis were hoping for something more.
Mr. AUBREY SARVIS (Executive Director, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network): I would have liked to have heard more specifics.
BOWMAN: Sarvis heads the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group created to end Dont Ask, Dont Tell.
Mr. SARVIS: But weve come to learn in the past year that thats not the presidents style.
BOWMAN: One person taking the lead in Congress is Representative Patrick Murphy. Hes a Pennsylvania Democrat and Iraq war veteran. Murphy says Dont Ask, Dont Tell is forcing good people out of ranks - helicopter mechanics, Arab linguists, medics, at a time when polls show strong support inside the military for repeal. But Murphy lacks enough support in Congress. He has 187 supporters to change the law, but he needs dozens more for majority.
Representative PATRICK MURPHY (Democrat, Pennsylvania): Washington now is a tough place to make change happen.
BOWMAN: There was no Senate sponsor for this. Doesnt that tell you that it does lack political support?
Rep. MURPHY: I think Congress needs to get a backbone. Its up to Congress to overturn that law. Its not even the presidents responsibility.
BOWMAN: Congress is looking to the military for advice. But the Joint Chiefs are decidedly cool to repealing the law while fighting two wars. They fear allowing gays to serve openly could harm morale, even cause some sergeants and officers to resign. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said last year he favors a go slow approach even if Dont Ask, Dont Tell comes to an end.
Admiral MIKE MULLEN (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staffs): Should this occur, I think we need to implement it in a way that recognizes the challenges and the stress that were under right now.
BOWMAN: The White House is looking at several options. One calls for attaching the repeal of Dont Ask, Dont Tell to the annual defense bill, a measure Congress must pass. Another option: keep the law, but carry it out in a more humane way. That means making it harder to kick someone out just for being gay.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
No country in the world has a stronger interest in Afghanistan than neighboring Pakistan. And with the London conference under way, we've invited Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, to give us some sense of Pakistan's stake in whats happening there.
Hi, welcome to the program once again.
Ambassador HUSAIN HAQQANI (Pakistan): Pleasure being here, as always.
SIEGEL: First, al-Qaida and its Taliban allies are based in your country. The Pakistani army says it can't stage any new offensive for six months or a year now until they can consolidate gains already accomplished.
Can you appreciate the frustration of the U.S. military thinking that Pakistan ought to do something more soon?
Ambassador HAQQANI: I think we have a shared frustration that the Taliban and al-Qaida move between the mountainous regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan and manage to have the support of some of the people living there. It is unfair to characterize it as an al-Qaida or Taliban base in Pakistan because the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military and the Pakistani people want to fight these people.
SIEGEL: On the military side, the U.S. is reported to have stepped up drone strikes on Taliban targets on Pakistani soil. Whats Pakistan's attitude?
Ambassador HAQQANI: Pakistan prefers to do everything on the Pakistani side of the border itself. And the reason is very simple: We have a military capability in certain areas and in some areas we lack certain technical capabilities, and we would like that technical capability for ourselves.
At the same time, you must also understand that when you have unarmed aerial vehicles drop missiles, taking out people, and it infuriates public opinion, then obviously the Pakistani government has to say - has to stand by Pakistani public opinion. That said, both governments understand the need for dealing with individuals who pose a threat to global peace and security.
SIEGEL: But would it be any better for the Pakistani government to be the army thats dropping the missiles on Taliban targets and then for you to be hitting the occasional innocent bystander?
Ambassador HAQQANI: Well, I think that that is a matter that has to best be dealt with by our respective intelligence services and our militaries as to what is the best manner. The government of Pakistan has repeatedly said that we would also like to have the capability to be able to identify and take out targets on ground.
SIEGEL: Does the fact of the London conference, or what youve heard out of the London conference, persuade you that whatever the outcome in the war against al-Qaida, that the U.S. and NATO and other European countries will not walk out on the region the way they did after the defeat of the Soviet Union?
Ambassador HAQQANI: I think only time will prove whether the United States and the Europeans walk out or do not walk out. That said, my understanding from interaction with senior officials in the United States is that the Obama administration does not wish to walk away from Afghanistan, that it understands the cost of doing so, and that nobody wants a Central Asian Somalia or a failed state as a legacy.
SIEGEL: Yeah.
Ambassador HAQQANI: After all, they don't want anybody plotting and planning attacks against America sitting in Afghanistan.
SIEGEL: But, Ambassador Haqqani, you can appreciate the mixed message Americans who read the newspapers follow, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan are very concerned that the U.S. should not simply leave Afghanistan the way it left Afghanistan after the war against the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, I just heard a very senior official in the administration talk about how the U.S. reputation in the world has improved just about everywhere, with the notable exception of Pakistan, where we have a real problem.
Do you want us there or do you want us out?
Ambassador HAQQANI: Oh. Look, most Pakistanis also say, in the same opinion polls there, most Pakistanis express reservations about the United States. When asked that question - do you want the United States to be a friend of Pakistan? - they say, yes, we do.
But if there are reservations about the manner of engagement, then that is something we can work upon. And, in fact, I consider that my job description. Im trying to find a way in which we can keep American engagement in our region but in a way in which it finds support of the people of Pakistan and the support in some (unintelligible) people of Afghanistan.
SIEGEL: Ambassador Haqqani, thank you very much for talking with us.
Ambassador HAQQANI: Pleasure, as always.
SIEGEL: Husain Haqqani is Pakistan's ambassador to the United States.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand. The winners of the 52nd Grammy Awards will be announced on Sunday. The very idea of an old-style awards ceremony, where a select group of industry insiders picks the winners, flies in the face of such popular shows as "American Idol," where viewers help crown the next superstar.
Joel Rose reports on the Grammy's fight to be relevant.
JOEL ROSE: The Grammy Awards do make some nods in the direction of audience participation. This year, you can vote for which song Bon Jovi should play during the show on Sunday night. Here's my vote.
(Soundbite of song, "Livin' On A Prayer")
BON JOVI (Rock Band): (Singing) Oh, we're halfway there. Oh, livin' on a prayer.
ROSE: The slogan of this year's Grammy marketing campaign is "We're All Fans." The matching Web site includes something called a FanBuzz Visualizer, which turns fan posts and tweets into images of your favorite superstars. This newfound interest in social media doesn't surprise Slate pop critic Jonah Weiner.
Mr.�JONAH WEINER (Pop Critic, Slate.com): You can't be giving out awards and not have the success of a show like "American Idol" in mind and all its attendant buzzwords like, you know, democratization and crowd-sourcing. Those words sell.
So if they're trying to sort of apply them topically to the awards, well, that makes sense. Whether or not it's changing the process of how an award gets in a musician's hands, it doesn't seem like it is.
Mr.�NEIL PORTNOW (President, Recording Academy): The voting by peers is at the heart of what makes the Grammy what it is.
ROSE: Neil Portnow is president of the Recording Academy, which produces the annual Grammy telecast. Portnow says he's all for audience participation, just not when it comes to handing out actual Grammys.
Mr.�PORTNOW: When you think about a Grammy Award, it's a peer award. It's given based on a voting membership that qualifies in order to vote. So when somebody receives a Grammy, they look upon that as sort of the ultimate compliment. It's the pinnacle of awards, and that all really emanates from the process.
ROSE: In theory, the Grammys are supposed to recognize what's good, not just what's popular. But several factors conspire against the awards. The voting members musicians, record producers, engineers and executives tend to be older than the average pop-music fan. And there are more than 100 different categories of Grammys. Because the voters may not know a lot of the nominees, they seem to rely on name recognition or nostalgia when casting their votes. Slate's Jonah Weiner says that can lead to some head-scratching decisions.
Mr.�WEINER: What the Grammys sort of promises is that there will be that sort of expert opinion. I think in practice, they sort of lose some of that sense of authority because their nominations historically reflect this mixture of popular opinion and weird, left-field choices that make the Academy seem out of touch.
(Soundbite of music)
ROSE: In 2001, for instance, the Academy bypassed Radiohead, Eminem and Beck to give Album of the Year to Steely Dan.
(Soundbite of song, Gaslighting Abbie)
STEELY DAN (Group): (Singing) Lovin' all the beautiful work we've done, cara mia, its barely July. If we keep on boppin' until Labor Day, Li'l Miss Abbie, bye-bye.
ROSE: When it comes to being in touch, the Grammys are also hamstrung by the eligibility rules. To qualify for the January awards, an album has to come out before Labor Day of the year before. That pretty much excludes a lot of the high-profile records, labels schedule for release before the holidays. So they turn up at the Grammys more than a year later. Still, Los Angeles Times pop critic Ann Powers says most pop fans don't seem too upset.
Ms.�ANN POWERS (Pop Critic, Los Angeles Times): What's being shut out is the music elites, you know, the critics, the tastemakers, the hipsters who don't see themselves reflected at the top of that ticket. Those are the people who've always been alienated by the Grammys and continue to be. But I think for the average music fan, they're seeing what they like.
ROSE: Powers says that over the last few years, the Grammys have done a better job of reflecting the tastes of mainstream pop consumers. This year, for instance, the top categories are dominated by a trio of pop divas: Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Lady Gaga.
(Soundbite of song, Poker Face)
Ms. LADY GAGA (Singer): (Singing) Oh, oh, oh, Ill get him hot, show him what I got. Cant read my, cant read my, no, he cant read my poker face. Shes got to love nobody. Cant read my, cant read my, no, he cant read my poker face...
ROSE: For this year, anyway, Ann Powers says the Grammys are recognizing music that's both popular and interesting. And she thinks the awards really aren't that different from "American Idol." The Grammys employ a secret committee to pick the nominees in the top four categories; on "American Idol," producers make their choices before the show goes on the air.
Ms.�POWERS: "American Idol" offers basically the illusion of democracy. The singers the fans get to vote on in a show like Idol, you know, go through a heavy pre-selection process. I think Idol has created this illusion of fan involvement. It's real fan involvement in a very narrow sphere.
ROSE: We may all be fans, but that doesn't mean our votes really count.
For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Some climate change skeptics explained their doubts by citing temperature trends. They point out that global temperatures have plateaued over the past 10 years. Well now, a new study has found at least a partial explanation why.
And as NPRs Richard Harris reports, the answer is above our heads.
RICHARD HARRIS: Global warming has not stopped. The last decade is the warmest since temperature record keeping began, and 2009 was one of the warmest years ever recorded. But if you look over the course of the last decade, there is no strong warming trend in that time period. Susan Solomon at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado says that leads to an obvious question.
Dr. SUSAN SOLOMON (Senior Scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): People very reasonably have asked me, you know, why is it that in the last decade, it just doesnt look like its gotten that much warmer, even though CO2 has continued to increase, and in fact has increased quite fast.
HARRIS: The short answer is theres lots of natural variability in the climate. Tropical ocean patterns called El Ninos and La Ninas can have strong warming or cooling effects. The sun even gets slightly brighter or dimmer. And now, Solomon pinpoints another cause in a new study. It has to do with vapor way up high in the stratosphere.
Dr. SOLOMON: There have been some surprising changes in stratospheric water vapor that have really packed a wallop as far as surface climate goes.
HARRIS: It turns out, starting in the year 2000, a narrow layer of the stratosphere dried out quite rapidly. And water in the atmosphere traps heat, like glass in a greenhouse. So less stratospheric water means less warming.
Dr. SOLOMON: Its amazing that the stratosphere, which is so far removed from the surface, can exert such a big effect.
HARRIS: In fact, Solomon calculates that the loss of water in the stratosphere has offset about a quarter of the warming that would otherwise have occurred.
Dr. SOLOMON: I hasten to say it is not the whole answer probably to the reason why there has been so little obvious warming in the last decade, but I think it's probably a part of it.
HARRIS: Solomon figures that the stratosphere is dry because there have been fewer towering thunderstorms in the tropics to push water up there.
But Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University says this is almost certainly a temporary state of affairs.
Professor ANDREW DESSLER (Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University): This cant keep cooling or offsetting carbon dioxide forever.
HARRIS: Not forever since, first, the stratosphere can get only so dry. And second, the weather patterns that caused the stratosphere to dry out are bound to change. So this is clearly part of a shorter-term variation in the climate. Dessler compares it to the gyrations of the stock market.
Prof. DESSLER: Youve got sort of day-to-day or month-to-month ups and downs, but theres this long-term trend, whether its going up and down, and thats really what you care about in the stock market and in the climate.
HARRIS: Still, its very useful to identify the factors that drive the short-term ups and downs. That way you arent fooled into thinking that a temporary change is actually part of a long-term trend.
Prof. DESSLER: You can often be confused with what looks like a trend, that may go on for a long time, but turns out not to be a trend. I mean the housing market, thats the problem in a nutshell. People saw it was going up. They thought it was going up forever, but it wasnt.
HARRIS: The long-term trend of climate change is obvious. The most recent decade was the hotter than the 1990s, the 1990s were hotter than the 1980s, and so on. And Susan Solomon says the science behind that long-term trend is well understood, and water in the stratosphere is not driving it.
Dr. SOLOMON: But its really helpful and fascinating, I think, to better understand the ups and downs that may happen from one year to another, from one decade to another. Theres a lot more that we need to understand there.
HARRIS: Her new research published online in Science magazine is a piece of that puzzle.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The punk band The Ramones never won a Grammy, despite their strong influence on rock music. There is a new book out about lead singer Joey Ramone, who died of lymphoma nine year ago. It's called "I Slept with Joey Ramone." It's by Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh. Reviewer Meredith Ochs thinks the book has as much to say about family as it does about music.
MEREDITH OCHS: All his life, Mickey Leigh lived in the shadow of his older, taller, weirder brother, Joey Ramone. Both worshiped rock 'n' roll, both became musicians, but only one became a rock icon.
(Soundbite of song, Hey Ho, Lets Go)
THE RAMONES (Music Group): Hey, ho, let's go. Hey, ho, let's go. Hey, ho, let's go.
OCHS: Their story begins in Forest Hills, Queens, with a sweet, brotherly relationship as the two boys guide one another through the complexities of childhood and adolescence. Mickey emerges as an ordinary kid, while Joey suffers from numerous health issues.
Mickey details his brother's obsessive-compulsive disorder and weak physical constitution, but he also succeeds at putting them into the context of Joey's life.
Joey feels and looks like a freak, but he turns his condition into one of rock's most enduring images: the long, gangly front man, hanging on his mic stand in a black leather jacket, ripped jeans and his trademark round glasses.
Mickey watches the birth of punk rock from the sidelines. As his brother ascends to fame, Mickey puts band after band together, only to see each one fall apart. Joey hires his brother as a roadie, a backup singer, a musical collaborator.
But while The Ramones' legend grows, Mickey works odd jobs, from cab driver to bartender to pot dealer. Mickey asks for royalties, for contacts, for help with his own music projects. Joey says no. For the most part, their family sides with Joey, who is at once more powerful and more needy than his little brother.
Mickey may have longed for Joey's rock-star status, but here we learn that Joey may have longed for the relative normalcy of his brother's life. Sibling rivalry is a great metaphor for the complex relationship between bandmates, particularly in this book; the infighting within The Ramones was even more bitter and agonizing than the squabbles between Mickey and Joey.
At times, the brothers would be spotted in New York City nightclubs standing back to back and not speaking. But when Joey becomes terminally ill, Mickey is there for him; his bandmates are not. Death may be the great equalizer, but Mickey Leigh makes the point that in the end, your family love them, hate them or both is all you've got.
(Soundbite of song, Were A Happy Family)
THE RAMONES: (Singing) Were a happy family. Were a happy family. Were a happy family, me, mom and daddy.
SIEGEL: Our reviewer, Meredith Ochs, is a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She reviewed "I Slept with Joey Ramone" by Mickey Leigh.
(Soundbite of song, Were A Happy Family)
THE RAMONES: (Singing) We're in all the magazines, gulpin' down thorazines. We ain't got no friends. Our troubles never end. No Christmas cards to send, daddy likes men. Daddy's telling lies, baby's eating flies, mommy's on pills, baby's got the chills. I'm friends with the President. I'm friends with the Pope
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand in California.
President Obama took his job's message from last night's State of the Union address on the road today. He traveled to Florida to announce $8 billion in federal money for high-speed rail. Its all part of his push to create jobs by greening the U.S. economy. Mr. Obama was joined by Vice President Biden at a town hall in Tampa. The event was designed to allow the president to speak directly to Americans and to address their worries about the economy. NPR's Don Gonyea reports from Tampa.
DON GONYEA: This trip and others the president has taken recently seem designed to convey a sense that Mr. Obama not only understands but that he remains committed to doing the things he talked about during the campaign, back when Mr. Obama seemed to have the Midas touch when it came to communication, before he had to govern.
When Mr. Obama took the stage today, he acknowledged his slumping poll numbers as he struggled to get health care legislation passed and seeing the jobs picture remain bleak.
President BARACK OBAMA: I make no apology for trying to fix stuff that's hard...
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. OBAMA: ...because - I'll be honest with you. I'll be honest with you. Joe and I are both pretty smart politicians. We've been at this a while. The easiest way to keep your poll numbers high is to say nothing and to do nothing that offends anybody.
GONYEA: And as he did last night during his State of the Union address, the president insisted he wants to work with Republicans who are willing to work with him.
Pres. OBAMA: I want the Republicans off the sidelines. I want them working with us to solve problems facing working families, not to score points. I want a partnership. What we cant do, though - here is what Im not opened to: I dont want gridlock on issue after issue after issue...
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. Obama: ...when there are so many urgent problems to solve.
GONYEA: Then came questions from the audience. As is often the case with town halls, they are unpredictable. If the White House's topic of the day was high-speed rail and the economy, questions came from the audience on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on same-sex marriage, and on ways to help convicted felons readjust to society. His toughest question on the economy came from a small business owner frustrated that he cant get a loan.
Unidentified Man: And I speak for all businesses in the United States.
(Soundbite of applause)
Unidentified Man: We are tired of dealing with things. And I dont understand, and this is my question for you is that why cant you use the SBA just like you lent directly to Wall Street, you lent directly to the automakers, you lent directly to the banks, why cant the government make small businesses available directly to us?
GONYEA: The president said the government is giving more money to the Small Business Administration to make loans more easy to get. And he said fees and red tape have been waived.
Pres. OBAMA: The challenge that we got is that even SBA loans are generally run not by the SBA. The SBA essentially works with local banks, community banks, neighborhood banks to process the loan and essentially the SBA underwrites the loan.
GONYEA: The questioner's frustration was evident. He shook his head as the president spoke.
Pres. Obama: But, well, I am absolutely sympathetic to what you're saying because I'm hearing it everywhere I go.
GONYEA: The president was warmly received here in Tampa except for the large knot of Tea Party protesters his motorcade passed through on his way to the sports complex where the town hall was held. He ended the event with a call for greater civility in Washington. But he acknowledged too that he doesnt expect that to happen overnight.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Tampa.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now a reaction to what President Obama has said last night in his State of the Union about health care and other matters from Representative Henry Waxman. He's the California Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and he was very active in developing the House version of a health care overhaul. Welcome to the program once again.
Representative HENRY WAXMAN (Democrat, California): Thank you, pleased to be with you.
SIEGEL: The message from the White House seems to be lets catch our breath on health care and see if the Republicans have any good ideas. Realistically speaking, is there any chance now of getting from where you are now to passing a big health care bill before the 2010 election?
Rep. WAXMAN: I think we will pass a big health care bill. I think the president will insist that we keep the promise. We're going to have to figure out a different route now that we dont have 60 Democrats, but the Republicans are not helping us.
SIEGEL: But given their solid opposition to the Senate bill, which would seem to be an easier pill to swallow than your House bill, are we talking about how hard it is to pass a bill, or rather there's not going to be a bill, lets see whose fault its going to be in the eye of the voters?
Rep. WAXMAN: Well, I think the Republicans started off from the very beginning trying to make sure there was no bill so that Obama, the Democrats would be blamed for failure. And if there was a bill, they would try to stir people up so that they wouldnt like it and they would blame the Democrats for a bill that they might not like in one respect or another.
But what the president set out to do and what he enumerated so clearly - to cover all Americans with health insurance, to hold down the cost of health care so that those who are insured can stop the premium increases, Medicare system would be enhanced and not subject to dramatic reductions because we cant afford it, the deficit would be reduced because health care cost can be contained - these are important objectives. And I think if we are going to still achieve them, well have to use other devices like asking the majority to make a decision in the House and the Senate.
SIEGEL: Through what's called reconciliation. Can the Democrats get a health care bill through the Congress with less than 60 votes in the Senate by using whatever their procedure is of reconciliation? If the poll still show the public opposed to that bill, that is, do you need to see some kind of revival in public opinion of support for what Democrats want in the way of health care in order to proceed further?
Rep. WAXMAN: I think polls reflect public opinion at the moment those polls were taken. And I think the public was outraged at Nebraska getting a special deal, somebody else getting a hospital, the people were going have to pay taxes on their health insurance. And that drove them over the edge after being pounded by the anti-health care propaganda that the political right wing have been funding.
SIEGEL: So if thats the case and those things were taken out of the bill, then you should see result in polls changing and...
Rep. WAXMAN: Well, I think we will. And I think when we get a bill into law and people start understanding whats in the bill, not the few things they dislike but the many things that they will like: People shouldnt be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. If they cant afford health insurance, well try to help them pay for it. Well get everybody covered and make sure that we can hold down health care costs for the future. There are a lot of very worthwhile and popular things in this bill and we got to get the public to understand that, focus on it, and then I think well see the kind of support that this health care bill deserves.
SIEGEL: But what about your Democratic colleagues who dont come from safe Democratic seats and who have just managed to get into the House, what if they tell you, look, my constituents arent your Californians and we could pass this and then lose the majority because people like me and my fellow blue dogs are going to get voted out of office?
Rep. WAXMAN: I would say to those members that are most worried about it, their districts are the ones that would benefit the most with this health insurance bill because invariably those districts have the largest number of people that are uninsured. And Ill get reelected because my district is very heavily Democratic. But they are not going to get reelected based on going home and telling people: I voted against health care and we got nothing done. I dont think people are going to say: Thats great, I think you are exactly who I want to be in government because you cant get things done.
SIEGEL: Well, Henry Waxman, thank you very much for talking with us.
Rep. WAXMAN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Congressman Henry Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
The moment Steve Jobs uttered the word iPad yesterday I thought who came up with that? We joked on the program that maybe there werent any women in the room when that got decided, and maybe they didnt watch this 2005 comedy sketch from MADtv either.
(Soundbite of show, MADtv)
Unidentified Woman #1: (as Character) Why use a maxi pad when theres the new iPad from Apple.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Woman #2: (as Character) IPad?
Unidentified Woman #1: (as Character) With the new iPad, I could hook up my Apple to my peach and I can download protection up to a thousand periods.
Unidentified Woman #2: (as Character) I like that.
Unidentified Woman #1: (as Character) And with wireless Bluetooth technology, iPad sets you up for fast uploading without all that water bloating.
Unidentified Woman #2: (as Character) Oh, wow. Thats great.
BRAND: That sketch has been all over the Internet since Apple announced the iPad. The writers are here with us now. Bruce McCoy is here in the studio in Culver City and Tami Sagher joins us from New York. Welcome.
Mr. BRUCE McCOY (Writer, MADtv): Hello.
Ms. TAMI SAGHER (Writer, MADtv): Hi.
BRAND: Where were you when you first heard that Apple had actually named their device the iPad?
Mr. McCOY: You know, first thing yesterday morning, even before it was announced, I thought maybe someone leaked it. I saw it on the Internet, I think on Twitter perhaps.
Ms. SAGHER: Yeah, I found out from Bruce, actually from his Twitter because he tweeted a couple of minutes before it was announced that if it is called iPad, then he wants a residual check.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. SAGHER: And I was like, oh, this might be something.
BRAND: And how did you two come up with the sketch?
Mr. McCOY: Well, at MADtv, we always loved puns, some people think it the lowest form of humor. Personally, I think its the greatest source of comedy. And were bantering around ideas, someone said, oh, instead of an iPod, what about an iPad? And Tami and I thought, what if we merge an iPod commercial and one of those horrible feminine hygiene products commercials. And the end result was the commercial for the iPad.
BRAND: And also at that time the iPod commercial was really big, right? It was on TV everywhere.
Ms. SAGHER: The big thing was the silhouette dancing at the end. And that was actually the trickiest thing we had to do for that commercial is explaining to the art department our vision for that.
Bruce, I think you remember there were a lot of discussions of where exactly this device was going. And it actually contributed to our tagline for it which was...
(Soundbite of show, MADtv)
Unidentified Woman #1: (as Character) The new Apple iPad, please dont make us explain how it works.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: Yeah, thats one of my favorite parts is seeing those black silhouetted females, all-female dancers with the iPads.
Ms. SAGHER: Yeah.
BRAND: Exactly. So you two worked on this together?
Mr. McCOY: We did. This one we wrote rather quickly, which I think is usually a sign of a good sketch, when it just kind of flows right out of you, no pun intended. Im sorry. But, you know, it was kind of a silly idea we could use as many puns about feminine hygiene products and computers as we could. And we crammed them into a minute and a half.
BRAND: Apple itself, I think, is very spoofable, right?
Mr. McCOY: They really are. Weve done other Apple spoofs on the show. And as soon as we heard the name iPad, you know, everyone across the world, thats where your mind went to.
Ms. SAGHER: I think you nailed it when you said, oh, there must not have been a woman in the room when they said this because its just, its so obvious. Its so obvious that we wrote it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRAND: So obvious you wrote it five years ago.
Ms. SAGHER: Right.
BRAND: All right, thanks, you guys.
Mr. McCOY: Thank you.
Ms. SAGHER: Thank you.
BRAND: Bruce McCoy and Tami Sagher wrote the MADtv sketch on the iPad. You can see it at out ALL TECH CONSIDERED blog at npr.org/alltech.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, its ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And Im Madeleine Brand.
It was an upside down day in the global auto business. The worlds top car maker, Toyota is extending an already giant recall to Europe and to China.
Meanwhile, in beleaguered Detroit, there were actual profits. This morning, Ford announced its first profitable year since 2005.
To make sense all of this, we turn now to Frank Langfitt. He covers the auto industry for NPR. And, Frank, these two stories one day blip, something temporary or is there something more going on here?
FRANK LANGFITT: Madeleine, there is more going on here. What youre seeing really is the global auto industry in flux. Lets start with Toyota.
You know, Toyota won over a generation of consumers from Ford, General Motors, the other Detroit company Chrysler with quality. But in recent years, Toyota has been expanding really fast and its had more quality problems. Now, its got this mushrooming recall with faulty accelerator assemblies. Now, its millions of recalls and the concern is some of these pedals seem to the sticking a little bit, not coming up quickly enough and could cause accidents.
So, what Toyota has done is its halted sales of eight models in the U.S. and announced a recall in China of about 75,000 vehicles today, and its planning of recall in Europe. Now, this is definitely going to cost the company probably billions of dollars. But more importantly, its scaring consumers and its hurting Toyotas reputation.
BRAND: So, what is the company doing now to fix this accelerator problem?
LANGFITT: Weve been talking to the company and also some sources and they say the problem seems to be a mixture of wear and condensation inside the assembly, and is kind of spongy. So, when you take your foot off the pedal, in some rare instances, it doesnt spring up.
Now, Toyota says its actually got a fix for the problem. The company that made it, made these accelerators called CTS. Its in Indiana. And it started sending new accelerators to factories last week. But this is a recall, as I said, its in the millions.
So, Toyota has to find a way for dealers to repair these things one by one. Theyre working on a solution, hope to find it soon. But then they have to share it with the government. And obviously to do all these fixes, its going to take a long time.
BRAND: And, Frank, beyond this current accelerator problem, whats been the story recently at Toyota?
LANGFITT: You know, the Toyota brand has always been about quality. I mean thats why people buy the cars primarily, not because of the way they look. But a few years back, Toyota decided it really wanted to take aim at GM and become the biggest automaker in the world. They started building full-sized pickup trucks, rolling out a lot of new models.
But along the way, quality for which it was really known began to slip. And this is according to consumer reports. And theyve been watching this very, very carefully.
And to give you an example, it got so bad that even last year the head of Toyota admitted that the company had just expanded too fast.
BRAND: Now, I wonder if theres any shout outs in Detroit. Are other automakers trying to take advantage of Toyotas problems now?
LANGFITT: Absolutely, and very quickly. Both GM and Ford are offering cash back for some Toyota trade-ins. You know, the global auto industry, its really a cut-throat business.
BRAND: Well, lets turn to Ford then. The company had some good news today. It said it made nearly $3 billion last year. How did they do that?
LANGFITT: Well, you know, before the recession, Alan Mulally, hes the Ford CEO, he mortgaged the company, borrowed more than $20 billion and he used that to kind of weather the storm, all the bad sales that weve seen in the last 12, 18 months. And he also took the money to investment in new products.
Well now, Ford has a good lineup of quality products coming out. Theyve been gaining market share which, you know, as we began this conversation as Toyota shows fortunes can change really fast in this business. Ford does have a huge amount of debt. Its far more than GM and Chrysler, which were able to kind of get rid of a lot of their debt in bankruptcy.
So, one of the question going forward is, you know, as Ford begins to pay off more and more of this debt, does it have enough money to continue to invest in product and kind of keep on a roll here.
BRAND: Frank, thank you.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Madeleine.
BRAND: Thats NPRs Frank Langfitt. He covers the auto industry.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
It's a big day for rail advocates. In Tampa today, President Obama announced $8 billion in grants for 13 high-speed rail corridors across the country. Many of the grants aren't actually for high-speed rail; they're for planning studies or upgrading train service on existing track.
But as NPR's Greg Allen reports, the federal money will help create some true high-speed rail systems, and the first to be completed will be in Florida.
GREG ALLEN: President Obama previewed the announcement on the high-speed rail last night in his State of the Union address. But he flew to Tampa today and made the announcement again for a reason: Tampa is where the country's first new high-speed rail line will originate.
The $8 billion in grants is part of the stimulus package passed by Congress last year, much of which is being used to rebuild roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
In Tampa, the president said it's important to also begin preparing infrastructure for the future.
President BARACK OBAMA: We want to start looking deep into the 21st century.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
President OBAMA: And we want to say to ourselves there is no reason why other countries can build high-speed rail lines and we can't.
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. OBAMA: And that's what's about to happen right here in Tampa. We are going to start building a new high-speed rail line...
ALLEN: In all, 31 states are getting some of the high-speed rail money. That includes projects in Washington state, Wisconsin and North Carolina. The biggest projects are in California, Illinois and Florida.
In Florida, the Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line has been in the planning stages for years. Permitting is already mostly done, and rights of way have been acquired. Trains will run at speeds up to 168 miles per hour. The line will run 88 miles, a trip that's an hour and a half now by car and by train will be less than an hour.
With the federal money, one and a quarter billion dollars, it's expected to be completed by 2014. In Tampa, Vice President Joe Biden said high-speed rail will ease traffic congestion and be good for the environment.
Vice President JOE BIDEN: Most important, we're creating jobs, good jobs, construction jobs, manufacturing jobs, and we're going to be creating them right now.
(Soundbite of applause)
ALLEN: For rail advocates in Florida, today's announcement is the culmination of literally decades of work. Ed Turanchik is a former state legislator who now heads a Florida high-speed rail group, Connect Us.
Mr.�ED TURANCHIK (President, Connect Us): Ultimately, Tampa to Orlando to Miami will serve 13 million Floridians or 67 percent of our population, five international airports that have 100 million passengers a year, four cruise ship terminals with 10 million passengers and 65 million tourists. This system is going to be a very, very strong performer.
ALLEN: Aside from Florida and California, though, most of the federal money is going not to high-speed rail but to improve service and speeds on conventional rail lines. There's a billion dollars, for example, to improve service between Chicago and St.�Louis, reducing the current five-and-a-half hour trip to four hours.
Mark Roiter(ph) says this is exactly what he was worried would happen. Roiter is a former journalist who wrote a report for the liberal Progressive Policy Institute about how best to bring high-speed rail to America.
While $8 billion is a lot of money, Roiter says splitting it up among 13 rail corridors spreads it too thin and dilutes its economic impact. Grants made in New England and Ohio, he says, will make trains more reliable but not necessarily any faster.
Mr.�MARK ROITER (Progressive Policy Institute): That is probably a good use of public money to improve conventional train service, but its high-speed rail and it doesnt jumpstart the economy.
ALLEN: Vice President Biden said today the $8 billion is just the first installment in spending on high-speed rail. The administration, he says, is committed to funding $5 billion in additional rail projects over the next five years.
But while in the U.S. high-speed rail is just leaving the station, in Europe and Asia, other countries are racing ahead. (Unintelligible) that China is well underway with an ambitious high-speed railing network that will link all of the countrys major cities and 80 percent of its population.
Last year, while the U.S. was setting aside $8 billion, China spent between $200 and $300 billion on high-speed rail.
Greg Allen, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
President Obama delivered his first State of the Union address here last night and its winning praise from some independent voters.
Before the speech, independents had been drifting away from the president, pushing his approval rating to a new low. His focus on job creation and calls for bipartisanship last night may have given Mr. Obama a second chance with independents.
But as NPR's Scott Horsley reports: words are one thing, results another.
SCOTT HORSLEY: Ron Kesterson says he didnt vote for Barack Obama, but the retired engineer from South Carolina was willing to give the new president a chance. Kesterson's approval of Mr. Obama was on shaky ground by the time he took part in an NPR political poll last week. But the Republican says Mr. Obama's standing improved somewhat with last night's address to the nation.
Mr. RON KESTERSON: I thought it was a good speech. I wouldnt say it was a great one. I think he realized and vocalized the issue that people have with the economy as being number the one priority.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama devoted much of his hour-plus speech to the economy, outlining a number of proposals designed to encourage job growth. He didnt abandon other parts of his agenda, though, and that pleased Jack Rossin, a Democratic marketing consultant from Massachusetts.
Mr. JACK ROSSIN (Democratic Marketing Consultant): I thought he took the argument to the Congress a little more forcefully than he has done in past.
HORSLEY: Rossin has been frustrated by the inability of Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work together.
Mr. ROSSIN: Both sides are playing the obstructionist game. Theyve got to find a way to all come together and work stuff out, instead of trying to obstruct each other. So I was particularly glad that he addressed that.
HORSLEY: Now that Democrats have lost their supermajority in the Senate, Mr. Obama says he wants to bring Republicans off the sidelines. He repeated his desire to change the way Washington works.
But Republican political analyst Dan Schnur says thats less persuasive now, than it was when Mr. Obama was on the campaign trail.
Mr. DAN SCHNUR (Director, Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, USC; Republican Political Analyst): It's always difficult to run as an outsider when you're president of the United States. And Obama's goal last night was less to pretend that he wasnt president, and rather to remind voters what he'd set out to do and what they obstacles were to making that change happen.
HORSLEY: Schnur, who directs the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, says he doesnt think Mr. Obama has shifted to the center of the political spectrum, the way Bill Clinton did after losing Democratic majorities in Congress. But he does sense a reordering of priorities, with health care falling to a distant second.
Mr. SCHNUR: It didnt seem like his heart was in it. The message that came out of the health care passages last night was I tried hard, I messed up, Im willing to try again. But if youve got something better, let me know. Thats not exactly a stirring call to arms.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama also gave new way to deficit reduction in his speech last night. Deficit hawk, Diane Lim Rogers, who writes the blog EconomistMom.com, gives the president some credit for his partial spending freeze proposal. But she complains he's not doing enough to prepare people for the spending cuts and tax hikes that will eventually be needed.
Dr. DIANE LIM ROGERS (Economist, EconomistMom.com): I think that President Obama finds this issue a very difficult conversation to have with the American people. Until he gets over that and makes it his mission to level with the American people about it, he's not going to make any headway with the politicians.
HORSLEY: Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg thinks the president's speech helped him with skeptical swing voters. In focus groups after the speech, those voters expressed stronger approval for Mr. Obama's goals and his leadership, though Greenberg says they're still not sure if the president can actually deliver.
Mr. STAN GREENBERG (Democratic Pollster): The big question is, you know, will he succeed? I mean they're hoping for him. They're rooting for him. But the big question is can he succeed?
HORSLEY: And thats a question that will take more than a speech to answer.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Now for our annual day-after-the-State-of-the-Union tradition: truth-squading the president's address, as well as the Republican response.
And we have Bill Adair to help us do that. He's editor of the nonpartisan fact-checking Web site, PolitiFact.com. Thanks for coming in, Bill.
Mr. BILL ADAIR (Editor, PolitiFact.com): Thanks for having me.
BRAND: Well, let's start with the president. And, of course, he talked a lot about the economy in his speech. Here's what he said he has done about relieving the tax burden.
President BARACK OBAMA: We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses.
(Soundbite of applause)
President OBAMA: We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for eight million Americans paying for college.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
BRAND: And was it true? Ninety-five percent sounds like a lot.
MR. ADAIR: It was true. That was the one true rating we gave the president last night of the seven ratings we did. He's correct. When you look at an independent assessment of the tax cuts that were included in the Economic Stimulus Bill that was passed last February, indeed, they did reach about 95 percent of working families. So he gets a true on the Truth-O-Meter for that one.
BRAND: All right, the president also talked about changing the way Washington works and closing what he called the credibility gap with the American people.
President OBAMA: That's why we've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.
BRAND: Has he actually done it?
Mr. ADAIR: No. The first part of that was the part that we fact-checked, that he has excluded lobbyists from policymaking positions. And we gave that a false on the Truth-O-Meter. He did establish a policy that was supposed to stop the revolving door for former lobbyists working in the administration. But it had some loopholes, and there are at least four former lobbyists that we could identify who are in policymaking positions, including one who has policy in her title. So he gets a false on the Truth-O-Meter for that one.
BRAND: Hmm, he has these waivers, right?
Mr. ADAIR: Yeah, it's waivers and also recusals. The waivers in particular really seem to undermine the blanket statement he said about prohibiting this revolving door.
BRAND: Okay, today inside Washington, I understand that a lot of people are talking about this moment from last night.
President OBAMA: Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests...
(Soundbite of applause)
President OBAMA: ...including foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections.
BRAND: And then the camera cuts to audience and to Justice Samuel Alito, and you could see his reaction. He was shaking his head no, and saying something like thats not true. Did he have reason to?
Mr. ADAIR: He did. We gave the president a barely true for that statement. He has been very critical of that Supreme Court opinion from last week. But in this case, he's overreaching. The Court did not open the door to unlimited spending by foreign corporations the way he said. Thats one worry thats some people have, but the Court specifically said it was not addressing that issue. So we rated that one barely true on the Truth-O-Meter.
BRAND: Let's turn to the Republican response. In a new twist, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell spoke not in a small empty room but to a full Virginia House of Delegates; it's kind of mimicking the setting of president's speech. He spoke a great deal about the role of the federal government. He quoted Jefferson and he said that federal spending is out of control.
Governor BOB MCDONNELL (Republican, Virginia): The amount of debt is on pace to double in five years and triple in 10. The federal debt is now over $100,000 per household.
BRAND: Is that true?
Mr. ADAIR: Well, we gave that one a half true on our Truth-O-Meter. That one is a little bit complicated and there seems to be some bookkeeping gymnastics, to reach that conclusion. There are a couple of different ways you can slice it that in some cases dont seem accurate in the way we crunch the numbers. So we rated that one half true on our Truth-O-Meter.
BRAND: Bill, at the outset of this interview, you said you only gave the president only one full truth.
Mr. ADAIR: Yeah. We checked seven different claims by the president. And, indeed, he only got one true, two mostly true, two half true, one barely true, and one false. For Obama supporters, I guess if there's any silver lining in all that, it's that he didnt earn our lowest rating: pants on fire.
BRAND: Okay. Thanks, Bill.
Mr. ADAIR: All right. Thank you, Madeleine.
BRAND: That's Bill Adair. He's the editor of the nonpartisan fact-checking Web site PolitiFact.com, where he fact-checked the president's State of the Union speech.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And in California, Im Madeleine Brand.
The writer who gave a name and a voice to teen angst has died. J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye died yesterday of natural causes at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. He was 91 years old. The story of Holden Caulfield caught on with an anxious world in the throes of the Cold War and it never let go. While the Book-of-the-Month Club made Catcher in the Rye one of its featured selections, it was also one of the 20th centurys most banned books.
NPRs Neda Ulaby has an appreciation of an author who in some ways never grew up.
NEDA ULABY: You wont hear J.D. Salinger in the story. NPR was unable to find a single recording of his voice. Salinger retreated to a New Hampshire farmhouse in 1953, a few years after he published The Catcher in the Rye. And there he stayed, scowling at photographers who dared snap his picture.
Salinger agreed to a rare interview with a newspaper reporter in 1980. It helped that she sent her picture. Betty Eppes discussed that meeting on NPR in 1997.
(Soundbite of past interview)
Ms. BETTY EPPES (Newspaper Reporter): He said, I refuse to publish. He said there is a marvelous peace in not publishing. He said, there's a stillness. And he said, when you publish, the world thinks you owe them something. He said, if you dont publish, they dont know what youre doing, and he said, you can keep it for yourself.
ULABY: Rumors have Salinger stashing reams of unpublished fiction in a vault. His last published work was a New Yorker story in 1965. Writer Joyce Maynard moved in with Salinger in 1972 when she was an 18-year-old Yale dropout and he was 53. In a reading from her memoir, Maynard recalled Salingers obsessions with diet and alternative medicine.
Ms. JOYCE MAYNARD (Writer): Speaking of the food most people eat, Jerry uses the word poison. He says Vedantic literature tells us the natural life span of a man is 120 years. He plans to live that long.
ULABY: Salinger came from a Jewish-Scots-Irish New York family that imported meat. In the 1930s, he worked briefly as a cruise ship entertainer. Then came World War II. Andrew Delbanco is director of American Studies at Columbia University.
Professor ANDREW DELBANCO (Director, American Studies, Columbia University): He was a writer who was formed by the 1940s, by his experience, I suspect, in the war. He participated in D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge. And theres a sense, at least to my ear, in not only Catcher in the Rye but in some of his best stories, that this catastrophe lies in the background of everything he feels and writes.
ULABY: For Esme - With Love and Squalor is about an American soldiers conversation with a 13-year-old English girl.
Unidentified Man #1: I told her that Id never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it. She nodded.
Unidentified Woman: Make it extremely squalid and moving.
Unidentified Man #1: She suggested.
Unidentified Woman: Are you at all acquainted with squalor?
Prof. DELBANCO: For Esme - With Love and Squalor is really one of the most beautiful stories in the American language. He really captures this exquisitely painful sense of lost beauty, lost hope.
Unidentified Man #1: We shook hands.
Unidentified Woman: Isnt it a pity that we didnt meet under less extenuating circumstances?
Unidentified Man #1: I said it was. I said it certainly was.
Unidentified Woman: Goodbye.
Unidentified Man #1: Esme said.
Unidentified Woman: I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.
ULABY: The shell-shocked young men in Salingers stories seemed somehow frozen, says Andrew Delbanco. And they wanted children they admire to be frozen, too.
Prof. DELBANCO: He wants these children to remain children. He celebrates their beauty and their innocence in a way actually that to our sensibility today might be a little bit unnerving in fact.
ULABY: A Perfect Day for Bananafish is one of those unnerving stories. Its about a troubled honeymooner who plays with a little girl in the ocean before killing himself. That character is one of seven sensitive siblings who appear in a number of Salinger stories, including Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Franny and Zooey. Stories about the Glass family had already established Salinger as a minor literary star by the time he published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951.
Unidentified Man #2: All of a sudden, this girl came up to me and said, Holden Caulfield. Her name was Lillian Simmons. My brother D.B. used to go around with her for a while. She had very big knockers.
ULABY: A prep school student Holdens age did this reading for NPR.
Unidentified Man #2: How marvelous to see you, old Lillian said. Strictly a phony.
ULABY: The Catcher in the Rye was an instant success. But Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco says it wasnt until the counterculture movement that Holden Caulfield took his place as a classic American anti-hero.
Prof. DELBANCO: Holdens indignation at the world, his sense that it is so filled with people of this sort really struck a nerve particularly in the early and mid 60s. Everybody carries around with them an impulse to say no to the world. The dissident impulse is very strong and powerful in American culture and literature.
ULABY: Delbanco traces that impulse from Americas first immigrants, to Emerson and Thoreau to the Beat writers who were Salingers contemporaries. He says Salinger empathized with young people as outsiders, and he romanticized their straightforward, non-phony impulses. And in J.D. Salingers fiction, innocence was a treasure to be protected.
Unidentified Man #2: I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobodys around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And Im standing on the edge of this some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean, if theyre running and they dont look where theyre going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. Thats all Id do all day. Id just be the catcher in the rye and all.
ULABY: The Catcher in the Rye inspired censors, assassins and innumerable ordinary readers who found in Salingers hopeful yet disillusioned heroes an uncompromising kindred spirit.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
A lot of those ordinary readers first came across The Catcher in the Rye in English class when they were teenagers. Angst-ridden, insecure, sometimes angry teenagers to whom Holden Caulfield simply made sense.
Allan L'Etoile is a high school English teacher at Gonzaga College High School here in Washington, D.C. Welcome...
Mr. ALLAN L'Etoile (English Teacher, Gonzaga College High School): Thank you.
SIEGEL: ...to the program. Youve taught The Catcher in the Rye for how long?
Mr. L'Etoile: Twenty-three years.
SIEGEL: And how do you first introduce the book to your students?
Mr. L'Etoile: Well, its changed actually over the years, whether the kids are more or less conformist. They tend to be a bit more conformist nowadays is my take at the school where I teach. And I sort of introduce it to them nowadays as pretty much a story of a boy growing up, trying to find his way in the world, as do a lot of boys in literature, that the first thing they have to do is give up a fantasy usually - in this case, being a catcher in the rye.
SIEGEL: I remember - I guess this is as true of the Salinger "Nine Stories" as of "Catcher in the Rye," but from my adolescence, it was the kind of book kids read and wanted to become writers after that, after they'd read it. It was just it was such an experience. Have you ever noticed that having that effect on any of your students?
Mr. L'Etoile: There is a fair amount of that, yes. Yeah, its very inspiring. Kids tend to hold on to it. They dont this is a book they dont sell.
SIEGEL: Thats Allan L'Etoile. He's a high school English teacher. As for aspiring writers, Salinger can present some complications.
Mr. SHALOM AUSLANDER (Writer): You know, we read "Catcher" in high school and I read it again later on. And its one of those books that the voice gets in your head so much, at least, for me, that it wasnt particularly helpful for my own writing because you just start writing like that voice.
SIEGEL: That's Shalom Auslander, a writer whose work has been described as angry and sardonic.
For writer Rick Moody, the voice of Holden Caulfield was more of an inspiration.
Mr. RICK MOODY (Writer): It had a sort of huge walloping impact on me as a reader, that voice, that character, his sort of mild melancholy, his desperation for attachment, his commitment to the truth, they were all revelatory for me as a teenager.
SIEGEL: For the writer Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker magazine, Holdens voice stands out beyond just about anything else in American literature.
Mr. ADAM GOPNIK (Writer, The New Yorker): With (unintelligible) voice, its one of the two great youthful voices in all of American literature. I guess you could throw Nick Carraways voice in there as well from The Great Gatsby as a kind of a - as a post-graduate; Nick has gotten out of college. And its a voice thats made up of a certain kind a set of mannerisms that have become part of American speech and all - Holden always says, he's (unintelligible) as hell. He was charming as hell. She was cute as hell.
Its a funny voice, as I said. Its a humorous voice, a comic voice, full of wonderful observation of everything from the way that the skating skirt twitches on the butt as he says of his less than perfect girlfriend Sally to the way he observes or reads all of his little sisters homework in her notebooks.
SIEGEL: Beyond the language of Salinger, Adam Gopnik says the character, Buddy, channels some of the authors deepest thoughts on writing.
Mr. GOPNIK: He says somewhere that the real end of a writer is not to write a masterpiece, its not to perfectly portray his time, its to write with all his of stars out. To write the one thing that that writer can do that expresses everything that that writer believes.
There are lots of good writers. There are lots of hugely skilled writers. Theres lots of us who write about many subjects with curiosity and diligence. But there are very few writers in century who find or forge the key that enables them to unlock the hearts of their readers and of their fellow people. And Salinger did that. He did it repeatedly. And whether he was silent for 40 years or miserably grumpy for half a century, I dont care. He did that. And he alone did that. He wrote with all his stars out and the world shines brighter for him.
SIEGEL: The Catcher in the Rye leaves you wondering at the end. Is Holden Caulfield still stuck in a rebellious angry place or is there a crack, a slight one in his bitter armor. Heres an excerpt from the ending read by the 16-year-old son of one of our colleagues here at NPR.
Unidentified Man: Thats all Im going to tell about I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school Im supposed to go to next fall after Im out of here, but I dont feel like it. I really dont. That stuff doesnt interest me too much right now. A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here keeps asking me if Im going to apply myself when I get back to school next September. Its such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what youre going to do until you do it? The answer is you dont. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear its a stupid question.
SIEGEL: Holden Caulfield and J.D. Salinger conclude The Catcher in the Rye with this line: Dont ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. J.D. Salinger didnt tell us much, but he will be missed. As for Salingers final journey, writer Shalom Auslander was a bit concerned.
Mr. AUSLANDER: I hope hes being left alone. I hope God is leaving him alone, but I doubt it. That guy is probably a bit of a nag, probably chasing Salinger around for autographs.
SIEGEL: J.D. Salinger died yesterday at age 91 at the home New Hampshire, where he secluded himself for half a century.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In response to the State of the Union, we always hear from congressmen and commentators. We thought wed also check in with a couple of ordinary Americans weve met on recent assignments to hear what they made of President Obamas speech.
Just last week I was in Chillicothe, Ohio where I met with, among other people, Robert Call, a lead technician at the Kenworth Truck Plant there. Rob Call, what did you make of the speech?
Mr. ROBERT CALL (Lead Technician, Kenworth Truck Plant): I think the president came out with his gloves off last night. I mean, he told the American people what they needed to hear as far as the economy, as far as jobs, what his plan is. It sounds like he has a plan in action. But, you know, its just lip service. Theres a lot of people that are angry and have a lot of cynicism toward Washington right now.
SIEGEL: Yourself included?
Mr. CALL: Myself included, you know. I mean, youre going to give results, you know, and this year will be telling.
SIEGEL: When we spoke last week, you told me that you wanted people in Washington to recognize how vital blue collar workers are to this country. Did you get that sense?
Mr. CALL: I did. I think that President Obama was directing his message toward the middle class people, you know. Hey, Im listening, you know. Im going to do what I can to create jobs, get jobs back in this country, try to revitalize the economy with jobs, you know. And then get the confidence of the people back up to where it used to be in this country, you know, and the leaders.
But the leaders in Washington need to set aside and work together versus groaning about what lobbyists or what special interest group are, you know, that are coming in and trying to change things and water things down. They need to have more concern about the voters who put them in the positions that theyre in.
SIEGEL: At this point, it looks like the presidents health care bill, the Senates health care bill literally is down for the count and may never get off the canvas. Does that make you worried or youre one of those who feels better that that bill is not flying right now?
Mr. CALL: I feel better because I really dont know what all is in the bill. My current health care, I feel, is a good health care. Ive had - both my kids have been in and out of hospital over the past several years and my health care has covered quite a bit. Now, what scares me is the unknown. So, you know, Im more at ease if it dont pass, then what it would if it pass.
SIEGEL: What you have because what you have works and therefore...
Mr. CALL: Yes, it does.
SIEGEL: why change? Why change?
Mr. CALL: No. And my philosophy is if its not broken on my end, dont try to fix it for me.
SIEGEL: Rob Call, thank you very much for talking with us about...
SIEGEL: Youre welcome.
SIEGEL: ...the State of the Union. Robert Call, who is a lead technician at the Kenworth Truck Assembly Plant in Chillicothe, Ohio.
Brian Jolles is an insurance broker in Ellicott City, Maryland. Thats in Howard County where through much of last year, weve gone to hear what people make of the health care initiative. Brian Jolles, what do you think of the State of the Union?
Mr. BRIAN JOLLES (President, Jolles Insurance): You know what, I thought the president did an excellent job overall. I think he definitely accomplished his primary goals of refocusing on getting people back to work and gaining back trust.
SIEGEL: Now, weve been talking about health care over the past year and you were really against idea of a public option at one point. Are you more satisfied thinking that there might not be any big health care bill and that there might be the health care bill thats in the Congress?
Mr. JOLLES: Im more satisfied that there likely wont be the exact bill thats in the Congress currently, that is going to be something different. I never want anyone to think that any American doesnt want health care reform. We all do and so do I. I just think it will take a different shape.
SIEGEL: What about the tone of President Obama and what some have described as a kind of feistiness or taking the gloves off?
Mr. JOLLES: You know, I saw really a little bit of both. I mean, I definitely saw him, you know, turn around and be a little bit humble about the idea of putting something so large as fixing health care reform on his agenda and settling in a year. But at the same time, I think I would have liked to have heard him, you know, be a little bit more explanatory to the American people about making this process of the Democrats, Republicans and make this an American plan, not a Democratic plan.
SIEGEL: Your insurance agency is a small business. There was a lot of talk about small business in that State of the Union speech. As a businessman, did you feel that the president was addressing some of your concerns?
Mr. JOLLES: Absolutely. And I look at my own operation here. Weve got eight employees and it was very heartening to see him focused on small businesses and to know that hes going to introduce tax credits and incentives to, you know, for small business and I think its great.
SIEGEL: Well, Brian, its been good to talk once again. Thanks.
Mr. JOLLES: Okay, thank you so much.
SIEGEL: Thats Brian Jolles, who is the president of Jolles Insurance in Ellicott City, Maryland, giving us his reaction to the State of the Union address. We heard earlier from Rob Call of Chillicothe, Ohio.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Its ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Tomorrow on MORNING EDITION we'll have more on the London conference. We'll have an interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): It is for me just the beginning and how it goes will be a little bit like jazz. I mean, we're not sure. I can't lay it out completely. We know that, you know, we're not going to be making peace with people who are still trying to kill us and kill Afghans and send suicide bombers and do the, you know, horrific, barbaric acts that they do to kill and intimidate people.
But there are a lot of members of the Taliban who want out.
BRAND: The full interview with Secretary Clinton tomorrow on MORNING EDITION.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
In a Wichita court today, Scott Roeder admitted killing doctor and abortion provider George Tiller. Roeder testified that he believes abortion is murder and that he wanted to stop Tiller.
At question now is whether jurors will be allowed to consider a sentence of voluntary manslaughter for Roeder instead of first-degree murder.
NPR's Kathy Lohr was in the courtroom and she has this report.
KATHY LOHR: Roeder began his testimony saying he did not deny any evidence the prosecution has put on: the facts related to the shooting of Tiller.
Defense attorney Mark Rudy asked Roeder a series questions about whether he bought the .22-caliber handgun used in the shooting, whether he spent the night at a Wichita hotel, and finally whether he shot Tiller at his church on May 31. Roeder answered yes to each question.
Mr.�MARK RUDY (Attorney): Again, is it fair to say, with very, very limited exceptions, you don't dispute or disagree with any of the evidence presented from the state through their witnesses and exhibits?
Mr.�SCOTT ROEDER: I do not.
LOHR: Roeder testified that he became a Christian in 1992 and began learning more about abortion. He says he believes abortion is murder and that he began protesting outside clinics, including Tiller's in Wichita.
His defense attorneys painted a picture of Roeder as a man increasingly upset about abortion and asked him to explain what he knew about it. Roeder began a list of four or five types of abortion but was abruptly stopped by objections from the prosecution.
Mr.�ROEDER: Partial-birth abortion, forceps, where they go in and tear the baby limit from limb.
Unidentified Woman: Objection, your honor.
The Honorable WARREN WILBERT: And the jury is admonished to disregard that answer. Mr.�Roeder, I'm going to tell you right now you cannot discuss specifics of medical procedures.
Mr.�ROEDER: Okay.
The Hon. WILBERT: That's outside the scope of what's relevant material, and you certainly don't have the medical background to testify to those.
LOHR: In the courtroom, Roeder appeared calm and measured in his responses, much of time answering yes and no.
Prosecutors continue to object, saying Roeder's testimony was outside the scope of the trial and that the judge had already ruled Roeder would not be able to present this kind of evidence.
Earlier today, the judge ruled against allowing testimony from former Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline. Kline brought charges against Tiller for allegedly violating the state law regarding late abortions, but the case was dismissed by the Sedgwick County district attorney, the same woman who is prosecuting this case. Judge Warren Wilbert said allowing Kline to testify would be inappropriate.
The Hon. WILBERT: It's exactly what this court seeks to avoid, which I said I would not allow, and that I would not allow this courtroom to turn into a forum or referendum or a debate on abortion.
LOHR: Roeder pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges. His defense attorneys say he was counting on state officials and laws to stop Tiller. And when that didn't happen, they say Roeder became frustrated and took matters into his own hands.
The defense is trying to make a case for voluntary manslaughter. In Kansas, that's defined as the honest but unreasonable belief that circumstances existed which justified deadly force. That would carry a much lighter sentence than premeditated murder.
The judge has continually said he has not yet decided whether he will give the jury an instruction that would allow for a voluntary manslaughter conviction. More is required to prove manslaughter, including that there was imminent danger and that the actions of the person who was killed were illegal. In this case, prosecutors say performing abortions in Kansas is legal, and they say there was no imminent danger to Roeder. Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Wichita.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel in Washington. Professor, author and political activist Howard Zinn died yesterday. Considered the people's historian, Zinn's book, "A People's History of the United States," was unabashedly leftist. It celebrated the historical contribution of feminists, workers and people of color when other books did not. It also sold a million copies. NPR's Allison Keyes has this remembrance.
ALLISON KEYES: Reviewers of Howard Zinn's work often used the word radical to describe his view of history. One critic called him a model of the academic as activist, but Zinn's close friend, retired MIT professor Noam Chomsky, says Zinn changed the conscience of a generation.
Mr.�NOAM CHOMSKY (Former Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology): He studied what he called the countless small actions of unknown people that lead to the great moments that enter the historical record. That's a shift in perspective and understanding which is quite profound and quite significant.
KEYES: Howard Zinn told NPR in 2003 he felt there were important things missing from history books, and America's young people were getting an inadequate education. Zinn said those who accused him of rewriting history to reflect a liberal agenda were absolutely right because history had previously been written from the point of view of the powerful.
Mr.�HOWARD ZINN (Author, "A People's History of the United States"): And yes, I want to change that history so that people can get an idea of what ordinary people have suffered and what ordinary people have done to change their lives.
KEYES: Zinn was born in New York in 1922 into a Jewish immigrant family. After a teenage violent brush with police during a communist rally, Zinn joined the Army during World War II. He later wrote that his combat experience has crystallized his anti-war activism.
By the mid-1950s, Zinn was chair of the history department at Atlanta's historically black Spellman College. It is there that he met civil rights activist and NAACP chairman Julian Bond.
Mr.�JULIAN BOND (Chairman, NAACP): In addition to an enormous loss for the country and for the profession of history, we've lost a great, great friend.
KEYES: Bond says he worked with Zinn at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as the sit-in movement began. Bond says not only did Zinn chronicle the contributions of working people and women, he made it acceptable and mandatory for other historians to do the same.
Mr.�BOND: Someone like Rosa Parks gets her say in his history. It's not just Martin Luther King saying, hey, let's boycott these buses. It's Rosa Parks providing the spark for it. And you just go along through the course of American history, it's these forgotten people who did so much at a time when no one else seemed to step up.
Mr.�DAVID HOROWITZ (Author): There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect.
KEYES: Conservative pundit and author David Horowitz is among critics who fiercely disagree with Zinn's politics. Horowitz calls "A People's History of the United States" a travesty.
Mr.�HOROWITZ: Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.
KEYES: But Zinn's supporters say the former Boston University professor has a powerful legacy, and Zinn himself told the online think tank bigthink.com in 2008:
Mr.�ZINN: I want to be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power they didn't have before.
KEYES: Howard Zinn died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 87 years old. Allison Keyes, NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
The granddaddy of independent film festivals, Sundance, ends this weekend in Park City, Utah. Nearly 200 films have screened there in the past week. Awards will be announced on Saturday.
Lisa Kennedy is the film critic for The Denver Post, and she joins us now with her review of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Welcome.
Ms.�LISA KENNEDY (Film Critic, The Denver Post): Thank you for having me.
BRAND: Lisa, I understand you saw a lot of films, maybe 20 films in all, and can you tell us which ones you liked the best, which ones really stuck in your mind, and let's start with the fiction films?
Ms.�KENNEDY: Yeah, absolutely. One of the films I really loved, and it's probably my favorite, was called "Winter's Bone" by Debra Granik, and it's set in the Ozarks. It's this kind of mythical film about a young woman who has to go looking for her father who is due in court and seems to looks like he's going to skip bond.
He cooks meth, and it looks like he's going to skip bond, and if he does, then she loses the house, and this is the actress in this is Jennifer Lawrence, a young, up-and-coming actress who's really quite good, and she knocks it out of the park, but what's really extraordinary about "Winter's Bone" is how beautifully directed it is, how assured the direction is. It's just one of the most it's got mood, it takes us places that we haven't been. I don't think it exploits that culture of, you know, poor life in the Ozarks.
And that was one of my favorites. Another favorite was a film called "Blue Valentine," which is really quite different. It's a romantic drama featuring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in really good roles, kind of mixing their courtship and the sort of dissolution of their looking like it's going to be the dissolution of their marriage, and that's another really fine film.
BRAND: Ryan Gosling, I don't really associate with a light romantic comedy.
Ms.�KENNEDY: Well, it's not a comedy.
BRAND: Okay.
Ms.�KENNEDY: Though there are some light moments, it's actually more of a romantic drama, and yes, he's a serious actor but so good and so heartfelt. It's a really lovely role for him.
BRAND: What about documentaries?
Ms.�KENNEDY: Well, documentaries are almost - you know, are notoriously strong at Sundance, and I saw a couple that I thought were especially interesting. One opened - was an opening-night film. They had three this year, which is sort of unusual, but one of them was called "Restrepo" by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, and Sebastian Junger, as you know, is the journalist who wrote "A Perfect Storm."
He and Hetherington stayed with an Army platoon in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan for a year, and it's - you know, I think a lot of us have seen embedded documentaries about the war in Iraq and often Afghanistan, but this still struck me as very different and struck a lot of us, I think, as very different because all the other documentaries tend to sort of, like, bounce out of that. We're only with this platoon. We're only with these guys.
BRAND: All right, that's "Restrepo," a film made by Sebastian Junger. Any other documentaries that you liked?
Ms.�KENNEDY: The other film that I really loved was Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman," which is about the sort of disaster of our public education system. And I think one of the amazing things about this film is that he followed five children who wind up in five various lotteries for charter schools. And by the time you get to the lottery, if you aren't a parent, you feel like a parent, and if you are a parent, you feel like these are your children.
And it is so unnerving watching any of these children wait to find out whether they're going to be saved from their failing schools and afforded an opportunity for a great school, and I think it's such a great articulation of the unfairness of where our public education system is right now. It's a really good film.
BRAND: And Lisa, if you could just sum up the mood there at Sundance, because we've talked a lot on this program and elsewhere about how the major studios have dropped a lot of their independent divisions and that there isn't a lot of support out there these days for independent film, what's the mood there now?
Ms.�KENNEDY: I don't think that there was a mournful I think that people you know, young filmmakers are still making films. There were really interesting films there. Redford, Cooper, John Cooper, the director, were all interested in this notion of stories. So I don't think there was a lot of mourning.
And I saw a lot of the people who had been at those indie arms of studios still doing the work and excited about the films. So I think it may be just one of those, you know, you sort of reboot yourself in some ways and maybe try to figure out new ways of distribution, new ways of, like, getting stories out at a different you know, and everybody, the word that I detest but I'm going to use because I do think it's the word that sort of maybe describes a mood in some way is the sort of desire to monetize independent films still without having to, like, sort of think that the studios are going to come back in and save them.
BRAND: Lisa Kennedy is a film critic for The Denver Post, and she's been talking to us about the Sundance Film Festival, which concludes this Saturday. Thank you very much.
Ms.�KENNEDY: You're welcome. Thank you.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The Israeli movie "Ajami" begins with a murder.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AJAMI")
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLES)
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS)
SIEGEL: It's not in Gaza or in the West Bank and it's not a Jew killing an Arab or vice versa. It's a crime in a neighborhood where that's not uncommon.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AJAMI")
(SOUNDBITE OF SCREAMING)
SIEGEL: "Ajami" is the name of the neighborhood. It's in Jaffa, the old town next to the modern Tel Aviv.
YARON SHANI: It's like a very small neighborhood with so many people and cultures and religions. You have the Muslims and the Christians and Jews. You have criminals next to lawyers.
SIEGEL: That's Yaron Shani, one of the two men who wrote, directed and edited "Ajami" together. It's a remarkable collaboration. Shani is a Jew. His partner, Scandar Copti, is a Palestinian Israeli and Arab Christian who is from Ajami, and they worked on this film for eight years.
SHANI: It's like we were married, you know, for eight years because we spent, like, 12, 14 hours a day together. We felt like we're two soldiers fighting against everybody.
SIEGEL: The result of that collaboration is a brew of subplots unlike any other Israeli film. It's about an invisible minority: Israeli Arabs. There's more Arabic than Hebrew spoken. And the way that Shani and Copti made it was unusual: an amateur cast with scenes written and shot in sequence, and at every step, even decision about writing and editing was agreed to by the two of them.
SCANDAR COPTI: So sometimes we spent, like, three days arguing about a small scene, if it should go to this direction or to the other direction. But I think that this is the thing that made this film so wide, you know. It's not only one point of view of one person. It's two persons discussing things artistically, politically, in order to come to this result.
SIEGEL: There's a conflict. There's a dispute between a Palestinian family in Ajami and a Bedouin family that, I guess, wanted protection money from their clan, and the dispute eventually goes to a traditional Palestinian judge.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AJAMI")
(SOUNDBITE OF ARGUING)
COPTI: So this is something that is still common all over the Middle East and especially in Israel. It's an alternative juridical system the Arabs have, not all of them, mostly in the south. And what we did actually, we did a real court. We brought three real people who knows what they do. All the rest of the people you see in the scene, we told them that it's - we are a documentary team, and we came to document, sort of, how like this.
SIEGEL: So you mean, so a lot of the people who are witnessing this - what amounts to an informal civil trial of a dispute - most of them think it's a real civil dispute.
COPTI: Yes. Most of the people who are sitting there, they are reacting with real emotions because they came with one of the sides. They are defending their uncle or the people who are close to them. Of course, our actors, Omar and Abu-Lias, they didn't know nothing. They didn't know where it will go to.
SIEGEL: When you speak of the actors, you know, the actors who are playing the parts of Omar and Abu-Lias, these also are people who are new to the whole business of acting in a movie, yes?
COPTI: Well, actually, the film has more than 150 characters. And not only Omar and Abu-Lias, all the characters in this film are portrayed by people who come from exactly the same background like the characters, but because they identify so much with the subject, with the characters, and because they went through a whole year of exercises and role-playing, we only had to put them in a real situation, and the minute it happened, they forgot that it was a film, and they developed real feelings.
SIEGEL: What was it like making a film that is mostly in Arabic, to be shown as an Israeli film and to be shown to Israeli audiences?
SHANI: Well, I can say that in the commercial aspect, all the TV channels didn't want to have anything to do with us because they thought that the script was too complicated, and they thought that the Israeli audience will not go to see a film in Arabic. The public funds are much more open, and they gave us a little bit of money to start with.
SIEGEL: The public funds being, you mean, being the government.
SHANI: The Israel Film Fund, and we had 40 percent of the budget from them, and the rest, actually, we got from Germany. So the film is a co-production between Israel and Germany.
COPTI: But this project was so hard from the first place because nobody believed in us. Nobody wanted to do it. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it because everybody told us, come on, you're crazy. You want to make a movie with more than 100 non-actors without giving them text, with two cameras and shooting it chronologically. Are you nuts? Go away.
SHANI: But the thing is that when we released the film in Israel, well, first of all, it won the most important academy awards in Israel. And then when it was released in Israel, it became a hit. People were writing about it spontaneously. You could hear about people discussing it in their own homes. And I think that it's also the first Israeli feature film that brought Arab audiences into the cinemas. So it was really amazing for us as filmmakers to experience that.
SIEGEL: For the two of you, what was the - apart from the craft of making a film, what was it that you learned from your involvement in "Ajami" and the neighborhood, or what was it that you learned about Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel that you didn't know before?
COPTI: You know, we learned a lot. For me, it was a great opportunity to detach myself from all this crazy place and have the opportunity to watch it from the outside.
SIEGEL: You mean the place that you had actually grown up in.
COPTI: Yes, Ajami.
SIEGEL: And Yaron Shani, what was the learning experience for you?
SHANI: Well, for me, it's something that we will need a whole hour for me to explain what I've been through in this project, but I can say that in the process, I learned Arabic, I got to know hundreds of people that I would never get to meet. And of course I found myself a very unique, artistic expression. And I became much more aware to what it is to be a human being, you know, what is the value of human lives and how I should respect that as a filmmaker.
SIEGEL: Do the two of you have another multi-year project that you're now going to embark on that you can emerge from when you're both 50 or so and talk to us about?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHANI: Well, yes, but it's going to be when we are 60, not 50. Yeah, it will take a little bit more time.
SIEGEL: Well, Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti, thank you both very much for talking with us.
SHANI: Thank you.
COPTI: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: And their movie, "Ajami," has made the first cut for an Academy Award. It's one of the nine foreign films that will be winnowed down to five in the competition for Best Foreign Language Film.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
NPR: voted on by a clique of aging industry insiders. But as NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports, winning one still means plenty to the musicians in the audience.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO: Sunday night, everyone in the Staples Center in Los Angeles will be waiting for these five words:
Unidentified Male: And the Grammy goes to...
DEL BARCO: Excitement usually follows. Winners sometimes kiss their Grammy statues. They thank God or their parents. In the case of many hip-hop artists, winning one or more gives them license to boast.
LUDACRIS: Are y'all telling me all I had to do was cut my hair to win a Best Rap Album? Is that what y'all are telling me, huh?
DEL BARCO: When rapper Ludacris accepted his first Grammy in 2007, he not only tried to settle an old beef, he thanked everyone who helped him reach the top and some who dissed him.
LUDACRIS: Special shout-out to Oprah and special shout-out to Bill O'Reilly. I love you.
DEL BARCO: Los Angeles musicians Ulises Bella and Asdru Sierra say they were sitting way in the back of the audience in 2002 when the band's name, Ozomatli, was pronounced incorrectly by presenter Emilio Estefan.
ULISES BELLA: We jumped up like we had just won the Publishers Clearing House or something.
Mr. ASDRU SIERRA (Musician) Yeah, it was like...
BELLA: I can't believe it, I can't believe it.
SIERRA: My life's gonna change. My life's gonna change. I can buy all the stuff I want now. Yeah, but Grammys doesn't come with a check.
BELLA: Yeah, sure doesn't.
DEL BARCO: Sierra and Bella say winning their first Grammy confirmed to them they were on to something with their blend of hip-hop, salsa, cumbia and other world beats.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EMBRACE DE CHAOS")
OZOMATLI: (Singing) Am I a patriot? Of what? Of chaos. Every day I watch young studs play blocks. Where? In front of buildings, dealing what they gotta. Currency and game exchange. What else?
DEL BARCO: Before the Grammys, Sierra and Bella say record companies and radio stations didn't quite know how to market the multilingual, multicultural band.
BELLA: To have that kind of validation from people in the industry just felt really good, you know? At the same time, I think part of me was kind of, if we lost, have that kind of punk rock attitude, like, eh, whatever. But in the end, I think the Grammys have opened a lot of doors for us.
DEL BARCO: The Ozomatli guys got more airplay and bigger record deals and began touring around the world as cultural ambassadors for the U.S. State Department. Winning a Grammy can sometimes mean a boost in sales. Ann Donahue is senior editor of Billboard magazine, which bases its charts on sales.
ANN DONAHUE: Last year, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss won Album of the Year for "Raising Sand," and they saw a 715 percent increase in their amount of sales. And that album had done pretty good previously to that. So it's just the exposure that they got in the TV show, and it really paid off.
DEL BARCO: In some cases, a Grammy can provide a career boost for an artist looking to make a comeback. Bob Santelli, who runs the new Grammy Museum, points to Bonnie Raitt. By 1990, she had been dropped by her label and was reportedly battling drug and alcohol abuse.
BOB SANTELLI: At that particular point, she was at the crossroads of her career, and Capitol Records had decided to take a chance on it.
DEL BARCO: Capitol released Raitt's album, "Nick of Time," and it went on to sweep the 1990 Grammys. She won four, including Album of the Year.
SANTELLI: Those Grammys resurrected her career. All of a sudden, everybody loved Bonnie Raitt all over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BONNIE RAITT: (Singing) I fall in love (unintelligible).
DEL BARCO: Even performing at the Grammys can help a musician. In 1999, Ricky Martin was famous in Latin America but almost unknown to gringos up north. That changed when Martin got on stage to shake his hips and sing during that year's ceremony.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CUP OF LIFE")
RICKY MARTIN: (Singing) Do you really want it? Yeah. Do you really want it? Yeah.
DEL BARCO: To a lesser extent, recognition by the Grammys has also helped the dozens of musicians honored each year during the pre-telecast Grammy ceremony. Slack key guitarist and producer Daniel Ho is a four-time Grammy winner in the Hawaiian music category.
DANIEL HO: It's brought Hawaiian music to maybe a world stage. I mean, people know about it now, and the recognition certainly changed a lot of things career-wise. We're doing higher level projects, bigger artists, maybe charging a little more money for a gig.
DEL BARCO: Even within a music scene, a Grammy can provide a kick in the pants. Zydeco musician Terrance Simien thanks the Grammy Foundation for helping his colleagues in New Orleans recover after Hurricane Katrina. Beyond that, Simien says his Grammy win inspired other musicians to keep the musical tradition alive.
TERRANCE SIMIEN: It really energized a lot of young musicians to continue to do what they're doing, you know, continue to follow in the tradition of all the great musicians that came before them.
DEL BARCO: You might think that the novelty would wear off, but there still seems to be a thrill to winning, even for ex-Beatle Ringo Starr.
RINGO STARR: What's great about it, it's always open for next year. We're all in the game again. To get a Grammy is really cool. I love getting Grammys.
DEL BARCO: Ringo Starr is scheduled to be one of the presenters in this year's Grammy Awards ceremony to be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
In Baghdad this week, several devastating bombings left more than 60 people dead. Those bombings also raised questions about the effectiveness of the many checkpoints that blanket the city.
As NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports, bombers have been able to travel with near impunity, even to some of Baghdad's most secure neighborhoods.
LOURDES GARCIA: The bombings have left Baghdad jittery. Most of the streets are empty except for the cars pooled around Baghdad's hundreds of checkpoints.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLES)
GARCIA: At this one in the neighborhood of Karradah, a policeman holds a handheld bomb detector. He marches past a waiting car, looking for a tiny antenna to swivel, the supposed sign that there are explosives in the vehicle.
Abu Moussa is a member of the Iraqi army. He swears by the machines.
ABU MOUSSA: (Through Translator) The device does work, and I can show you that. Go put one single bullet in any of those cars, and the device would detect it.
GARCIA: But the wand-like machine has recently come under scrutiny in the U.K. where the ADE 651, as it's known, is made. British authorities have banned its export and detained the head of the company that makes the device for fraud.
Iraq's government says it will launch an investigation into how well the device works. It also says that the wand is not the only defense it uses against bombers. But on a recent trip across town, NPR passed through a dozen checkpoints in different parts of the city that were exclusively relying on the device. Soldiers working the checkpoints said it is the only detection method they are trained to use.
Hussein Qassim is a 32-year-old taxi driver. He says people are worried that elections slated for March 7th will prompt more attacks.
HUSSEIN QASSIM: (Through Translator) I expect more violence in the run-up to the elections. All the people are scared. They are afraid to go out.
GARCIA: And he says he doesn't believe the checkpoints can prevent bombers from getting through.
QASSIM: (Through Translator) The security men are doing their job properly, but it is the devices that are bad quality. They are useless and only cause traffic jams.
GARCIA: Some U.S. military officials have charged that the machines are little better than divining rods. The head of U.S. forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, says the U.S. military is trying to train Iraqis to use other methods.
RAY ODIERNO: It is very sophisticated how they hide these explosives. You cannot judge it by the naked eye. It takes a certain amount of expertise to determine if there's, you know, explosives in the vehicle.
GARCIA: For the first time, in attacks this week on a string of hotels, insurgents used small arms fire to disable the checkpoints. That allowed the car bombers to get closer to their targets, says General Odierno.
ODIERNO: Although we had had some intel that said they were going to try to conduct some of these attacks under the cover of small arms fire, it's the first time we'd actually seen it.
GARCIA: How effective the checkpoints here are will go some way to determining how quickly U.S. troops can withdraw from Iraq. The U.S. military says the bombings are just a spike in what has been a period of relatively low violence. That's scant comfort to the people affected by the blasts.
ALI NAZAR: Broke. All this is broken.
GARCIA: On one of the streets where the attacks took place, Ali Nazar, a furniture salesman, shows his cracked storefront window. He says it's unacceptable to still be faced with this level of violence here.
NAZAR: The Americans couldn't stop talking about that Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane - talking about something which did not happen. But here, there are attacks every day, but they say it's not a big deal. Is Iraqi blood so cheap?
GARCIA: Haji Ahmad Hafudh is also a furniture trader. He blames Iraq's government for buying the bomb detection devices in the first place.
HAJI AHMAD HAFUDH: (Through Translator) They know it doesn't work. They bought something on the cheap. I've traveled with weapons on me through checkpoints and have never been stopped.
GARCIA: He says Iraqi government leaders have no one to blame but themselves for the security lapses. He won't vote for them, he says, in the upcoming elections.
AHMAD HAFUDH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: We do not believe in the people in power now, he says. I'm talking as a person from the streets, he says. I do not feel proud of such government because it is a failure.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Baghdad.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
In the new movie "The Edge of Darkness," Mel Gibson plays a Boston police detective investigating his daughter's murder. Critic Bob Mondello says one thing in particular about "The Edge of Darkness" and a few other new films eerily like it drove him to the edge of distraction.
BOB MONDELLO, Host:
Daughters, daughters everywhere, and now I need a drink. Because they're not just daughters, they're dead daughters come back as ghosts to help their fathers. And that's not the sort of trick that can pop up in three movies in a single month and not be annoying.
I mean, there are other reasons to be annoyed with "The Edge of Darkness," Mel Gibson's in it, for one thing, but when Daddy's little girl trying to get out of harm's way...
Bojana Novakovic (Actor): (As Emma Craven) Hi, Dad. I'm going to come home for a few days.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EDGE OF DARKNESS")
MONDELLO: ...instead gets killed on his doorstep and then starts talking to him from beyond the grave...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EDGE OF DARKNESS")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONDELLO: ...well, at that point, all I can think is: Didn't I just see this? What about little Susie in "The Lovely Bones"?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LOVELY BONES")
SAOIRSE RONAN: (As Susie Salmon) My murderers still haunted me.
MONDELLO: She swooped back from the afterlife to try to contact her father.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LOVELY BONES")
Unidentified Male (Actor): (As character) Susie would never go off with a stranger.
RONAN: (As Susie) My father had the pieces, but he couldn't make them fit.
MONDELLO: And she already had ghostly company at the multiplex in "Creation," where little Annie Darwin popped up spectrally in her father's Victorian study to help him with his book "On the Origin of Species."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CREATION")
MARTHA WEST: (As Annie Darwin) What are you so scared up? It's only a theory.
PAUL BETTANY: (As Charles Darwin) Apart from anything else, it would break your mother's heart.
MONDELLO: Ah, yes, mothers, mostly sidelined in these adult ghost stories for reasons that would probably fascinate Freud. In "Creation," much against mom's wishes, Dad spirits Annie away for useless medical treatment. In "The Lovely Bones," Mom runs away and lets Dad face their daughter's death alone. And in "Edge of Darkness," well, it's a Mel Gibson movie and has no use for moms.
So in each case, Daddy's little girl stays Daddy's little girl, which is what, wish fulfillment, daughters who don't grow up and move away, who are forever young and forever needing their fathers, if only to catch their killers?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)
SIEGEL: (As character) I wish you have someone.
Unidentified Man (Actor): (As character) You're my girl.
MONDELLO: Ghosts in fiction have been assisting folks left behind for a while, of course. Shakespeare brought Hamlet's deceased dad back from the grave to identify his killer. Patrick Swayze came back in the movie "Ghost" to save Demi Moore.
But this ghost-daughter thing feels different, as if Hollywood's dream factory is stuck in nightmare mode but still wants to offer uplift. Do fathers feel vulnerable right now, with news broadcasts trumpeting terrorist threats and economic downturns? Sure, they do. What parent doesn't worry about being able to protect, to provide for?
So after scaring dads half to death, what bone does Hollywood throw them? The kids will come back to haunt them. Daughters, daughters everywhere. And I could still use that drink. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
The most positive news on the economy to date. Those words today from the White House describing a better than expected burst of growth late last year. Economists agree that the news was indeed good.
But as NPR's John Ydstie reports, they disagree on whether the economy is truly out of the woods.
JOHN YDSTIE: The 5.7 percent growth rate for October, November and December significantly exceeded most economists' expectations. John Sylvia who's the chief economist for Wells Fargo says it adds to his belief in the recovery.
JOHN SYLVIA: I'm far more confident now, having seen this number that we will have sustained growth. There's no W here in this economic period, no double depreciation.
YDSTIE: What boosted Sylvia's outlook were some other numbers further down in the GDP report. For instance, consumers spending grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, and business investment and equipment and software also grew nicely. Sylvia says that suggests confidence is returning, which is necessary to create a self-sustaining recovery.
But Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com is skeptical.
MARK ZANDI: I don't think the coast is clear. For that to occur, we need to see businesses start hiring again. I anticipate that this spring. But until that occurs, I don't think we can conclude that we're home free here.
YDSTIE: Zandi says the consumer spending number was good news, but points out that most of the 5.7 percent growth rate at the end of last year was due to businesses readjusting their inventory levels, ordering more from producers to re-stock their warehouses than they did at the depths of the recession. He argues that to make sure the recovery continues, there needs to be more government stimulus.
ZANDI: The risks are still high that we could backtrack into recession. The foreclosure crisis, the lack of credit, these are all very serious threats and most notable is the lack of hiring, at least so far. So, that's why I think it's very important for policymakers to remain aggressive.
YDSTIE: Zandi believes that if the job creation proposals President Obama unveil during his State of the Union speech were quickly enacted, it could boost growth. He thinks it could increase from 2.5 percent this year to over 3 percent, enough to start bringing down the unemployment rate from 10 percent where it is today.
But Wells Fargo's John Sylvia says more stimulus is not needed and not a good idea.
SYLVIA: It's hard to justify adding permanent workers with these temporary programs. Lot of businesses are going to look at this and say how can I hire a somebody today if you're going to take away this temporary program in a year or two.
YDSTIE: Undeterred by arguments like that, President Obama was pushing his jobs proposals today and he had a tough audience, the Republican congressional retreat in Baltimore, where he outlined a new job tax credit for small businesses.
BARACK OBAMA: And here's how it would work. Employers would get a tax credit of up to $5,000 for every employee they add in 2010. They'd get a tax break for increases in wages as well.
YDSTIE: In addition, the president is proposing that $30 billion of the rescue loans that banks are repaying be made available to small community banks so they can make loans to small businesses. The Congress will get these and other job creation proposals officially when the president sends his budget to Capitol Hill on Monday.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And as we've heard President Obama went before House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore today, he fielded their questions and he told them that one obstacle to bipartisan cooperation on issues like health care and energy is overheated partisan rhetoric.
BARACK OBAMA: You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.
And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It's not just on your side, by the way. It's on our side as well. This is part of what's happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.
SIEGEL: Well, joining us now in a bipartisan spirit are our regular political observers columnist E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of the New York Times, welcome back.
DIONNE: Thank you.
DAVID BROOKS: Great to be here.
SIEGEL: E. J. first, has the president said or done anything this week that might actually reverse the downward trend of the Democratic poll numbers or increase the chance of bipartisan cooperation?
DIONNE: Well, I did think it was amusing today that he said we demonize each other and then in the middle, at one point that meeting, he praised Congressmen Paul Ryan, a Republican, and then quickly added I didn't mean it because he didn't want to encourage a Republican primary against him because Republicans would think he got endorsed by the guy saying all that crazy stuff.
I think that the - if you look back at the last year, politically, the Republicans won the two big definitional arguments of 2009 on the stimulus and on the health care bill. Were the Republicans obstructionists? Yes. Did they offer new ideas? No, but they did win the message wars.
So, and I think Obama began this week to start taking some ground back. And he's really putting the Republicans finally under some pressure. But they have a lot of work to do.
Nancy Pelosi met with a bunch of us columnists and somebody asked her if Democrats are in trouble getting their message across, and she said it's like a marriage: If a husband thinks he's communicating and his wife doesn't think he's communicating, he's not communicating.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DIONNE: Good advice to the Democrats and Obama.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, you have a column today in which you long for something between bipartisanship and a pox on both your houses. Do you see any prospect of Barack Obama becoming what you call an updated, saner Ross Perot?
BROOKS: Typical incoherence on my part.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: No, I mean a lot of this debate about the State Union would he moved to the center? And the axis was center left. Well, to me, the axis really should be inside-outside. We're in a moment of unprecedented distrust of Washington. And that is where the country is. And I thought - and the question is does anybody in Washington reflect that distrust and do they have a solution to the genuine problem which is the Washington broken?
We've tried to reform Social Security, immigration, health care, energy, all those things are failures or likely failures. And so I thought the president took some steps to showing I will change Washington, I am not a typical Washington insider.
He adopted some policies, which are kind of independent friendly, freeze on spending, nuclear power, offshore drilling, that's non-orthodox stuff. Nonetheless, I don't think he went nearly far enough. The country is just in a rage about Washington, and he is behind that, as are the Republicans, but at least they can say we're against Washington. He has to try to say Washington is terrible, trust us to run more of the country and that's a contradiction.
DIONNE: I agree with David on this, the need for him to distance himself from Washington. At the end of that speech, you wondered does Barack Obama live in Washington anymore because he really was trying to identify with that anger.
And I think part of his strategy here is to make an argument that, wait a minute, these Republicans who have been giving me all this grief and the statement that led to this segment, these guys are at least as responsible for the mess we have here. So, he's trying to push back against them, which is something he really hadn't done very much of in 2009.
BROOKS: But they could at least say Washington is broken, let's go get all the power out of Washington. That's a reasonably simple message. To me, the core moral corruption is the deficits. You've got to tackle the deficits in a very hardcore way. And that means Republican saying we need tax increases, Democrats saying we need spending increase, we're not even close to that.
SIEGEL: The White House went into the State of the Union address very averse to labeling it a new beginning or a restart of the Obama presidency, at least publicly very averse. Is in fact the Obama presidency in need of a new beginning or a new start?
DIONNE: You know, it's a question of substance versus politics. Substantively, I think Obama wasn't being too soft on himself when he gave himself a solid B+ for the first year. I think that he did stem the economic collapse. He set a fairly reasonable framework on foreign policy. But I think, politically, you cannot call it a successful year when your party is in such bad shape. When the Republicans win a Senate seat, they hate it when you raise that in the White House, but it's true.
And I think the speech itself suggested that whatever they're saying, they knew they needed a new political course. They just don't want us to think there's new Barack Obama. And I think, as a person, he's still fairly consistent. But they did need a new political course.
BROOKS: I like the consistency. I wish he would have said, listen, I made some mistakes. He sort of said it, but he didn't really illuminate them because they did make some big ones. They misread the nature of the election. They thought it was a sort of new deal era. People wanted a big activist government, which they don't. They spent nine months on a central initiative which now has an 80 percent chance of failure.
SIEGEL: Health care.
BROOKS: Health care. And these are just huge mistakes. And so, one likes to see someone in midair admit doubt, politicians never do it, I guess I understand. But I would like to have seen a little more sense. I'm listening to you, let's re-establish trust.
DIONNE: Health care was about to be passed until the Massachusetts result, it should be said. And secondly, I don't think the opposition to Obama is rooted in ideology. I think if unemployment were at 4 percent instead of 10 percent, people would say whatever he did looks really good.
BROOKS: That's exactly where we differ.
SIEGEL: In the brief time that remains, just like to note the passing of perhaps the most influential and least media-exposed writer of modern times, J.D. Salinger we lost. An important person to you guys?
DIONNE: I loved the short stories, especially "Raise High The Roof Beam Carpenters." And my colleague Henry Allen had a lovely line in the paper today. Salinger was once considered subversive in his wry, quite tweety way, the sort of guy who stands in a corner for the whole party and then goes home with the most beautiful girl there.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: You know, though, he froze himself an amber - I read a great book recently, a great novel named "King Dork" by an author name Frank Portman. It was about a kid who barraged by having to read Holden Caulfield every single damn year.
SIEGEL: David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, thanks to both of you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
For lovers of independent film, it's been a big week for two reasons. First, the Sundance Film Festival, but also yesterday brought the end of an era. The New York and L.A. offices of Miramax Films closed their doors.
The company was founded in 1979 by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and named for their parents Miriam and Max. The Weinsteins and Miramax turned out a string of low-budget hits before joining Disney in 1993, where they made many of their best and best-known movies. Here's a quick refresher.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE ENGLISH PATIENT")
RALPH FIENNES: (as Count Laszlo de Almasy) Let me tell you about winds.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE")
LAURA SAN GIACOMO: (as Cynthia Patrice Bishop) Why do these tapes all have women's names on them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "GOOD WILL HUNTING")
MATT DAMON: (as Will Hunting) Do you like apples? Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE CIDER HOUSE RULES")
MICHAEL CAINE: (as Dr. Wilbur Larch) Goodnight, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "SWINGERS")
VINCE VAUGHN: (as Trent) Baby, look at me, look at me. You're money, and you know what else? You're a big winner tonight.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "GARDEN STATE")
NATALIE PORTMAN: (as Sam) You got to hear this one song, it will change your life I swear.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "CHICAGO")
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL THAT JAZZ")
CATHERINE ZETA: (as Velma Kelly) All that jazz...
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "PULP FICTION")
SAMUEL L: (as Jules Winnfield) And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THERE WILL BE BLOOD")
DANIEL DAY: (as Daniel Plainview) I drink your milkshake.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "CLERKS")
JASON MEWES: (as Jay) Pack o'wraps, my brother man, time to kick back, drink some beers and smoke some weed.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "TRAINSPOTTING")
EWAN MCGREGOR: (as Renton) Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already.
BRAND: That was "Trainspotting," "The English Patient", "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "Good Will Hunting," "The Cider House Rules," "Swingers," "Garden State," "Chicago," "Pulp Fiction," "There Will Be blood," and "Clerks." Miramax, it turns out, is not completely dead. Disney says over the next two years, it still plans to release at least half a dozen films under the Miramax name.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
It's been seven weeks since Tiger Woods told the world he was taking an indefinite break from golf. He made that announcement on his Web site as news about his extramarital affairs went from bad to worse.
On the golf course, his leave really began yesterday when what has traditionally been Tiger's first tournament of the season teed off without him.
Joining is now as he does most Fridays is sportswriter Stefan Fatsis. Hi, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Madeleine.
BRAND: So, it's really only now that we're seeing what sort of impact Tiger Woods' absence will have on golf.
FATSIS: Yeah, in this round anyway. Remember a year ago he missed the beginning of the season because was recovering from knee surgery, and then it was clear that there is a Tiger effect - lower TV ratings, lower course attendants, jitteriness among sponsors, and now it's going to be tally the lost revenue one more time. This is going to be an interesting few weeks.
Reporters, TV networks, golf sponsors, manufacturers are all going to try to calculate exactly how much Tiger matters and whether the sordid nature of what's happened to Tiger Woods will make him more or less of a marquee attraction for the sport when he does come back.
BRAND: So, you think he will come back, eventually.
FATSIS: I think everybody thinks he's going to come back eventually. It's just a question of when.
BRAND: Okay. So, tell us more about this tournament that started yesterday without him.
FATSIS: Yeah, it's Torrey Pines Course in San Diego, and Woods has owned this tournament. He's won it six times since he first played it in 1998. Ticket sales this year are down 15 to 20 percent compared to 2008, the last time Tiger played it because he missed it last year with that knee injury. This is also the first big TV tournament of the year because it falls on the off weekend for the National Football League before the Super Bowl.
Last year, without Tiger, the rating for the final round was half of what it was in 2008. And at Torrey Pines this year, Tiger is dominating the conversation. Players are being asked about his absence.
Phil Mickelson, the number two player on the golf tour, said the game of golf needs him back. And then he said he wouldn't talk anymore about Tiger. Another player, Rocco Mediate, apparently surveyed the sparse crowds during practice on Monday and said to his caddy, a little different here.
BRAND: So, how does golf deal with this, I guess, elephant in the room? Its best player not only absent, but absent because of a tabloid scandal.
FATSIS: You know, I think it just has to pretend that's not why he's absent in some ways, you know, don't deny it but don't bring it up. And then you move on. Phil Mickelson right now is kind of the anti-Tiger. He's older than Tiger at 39. He's the number two player on the tour. He has very high favorable, most people like him. He's coming off of a personally trying year, his wife and mother were diagnosed with breast case last year.
So, you promote Phil Mickelson, the golf channel is running promos for the next few tournaments says five weeks of Phil. And then when Tiger does come back, you handle it very carefully - no fawning, no praise, no audible sighs of relief.
BRAND: So, how are sponsorships for these tournament's faring now that Tiger's out?
FATSIS: Well, this has been a problem pre-Tiger. Golf is relied on the financial services, on the automobile industries as major sponsors for years. And those two industries obviously have been hit extremely hard because of the recession. On top of that, smaller companies that sponsored some of these weekly events but weren't as noticeable nationally also have backed out for financial reasons from golf tournaments.
Take Torrey Pines, for example. This tournament had been sponsored for years by Buick, which was a major player in golf for decades. The automaker dropped all of its golf sponsorships after its parent General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection in the auto bailout last summer.
BRAND: And did Torrey Pines find a replacement?
FATSIS: You know, it did find an 11th hour replacement sponsor last week, Farmers Insurance. The company signed a one-year deal with one option year. For how much, we don't know. And given the economy and now Tiger, you know, the PGA has done pretty well to retain sponsors and has even signed some new sponsors. It added four new title sponsors so far this year.
PGA Tour will still have 46 events this season. Last week, it even announced a new event in Sea Island, Georgia in October, which will be sponsored by an accounting and consulting firm. And that does show that golf's demographic will always have some appeal to companies. And that's the message that PGA officials are drumming publicly. Golf has value with or without Tiger Woods.
BRAND: Stefan, thank you.
FATSIS: Thanks, Madeleine.
BRAND: That's sportswriter Stefan Fatsis. He joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Satirist David Slavin knows where the PGA tournaments will turn now that existing sponsorships were drying up.
DAVID SLAVIN: Attention American workers, we humbly but firmly ask you to put aside your labors for two hours this Sunday afternoon as the most excellent nation of China presents the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China Pro-Am Golf Tournament only on NBC.
Get ready for a serious, but enjoyable links action featuring many world famous golfers as well as celebrity appearances by Vice President Xi Jinping, Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei, Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu and Randy Quaid. Also, we strongly suggest that you not leave your television sets during interesting commercial breaks so that you may improve your mind as you learn more about our exceptional co-sponsors - PetroChina, Bank of China, China Telecom, and Prilosec OTC. The Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China Pro-Am Golf Tournament. Watch or be watched.
SIEGEL: Satire from David Slavin with Stephen Park.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
We have an update now in a story from Monday's program. Our co-host Melissa Block reported from Lake Placid, New York on a World Cup ski cross race. That's where four skiers at a time race down a twisty course full of bumps and jumps.
Ski cross is making its Olympic debut in Vancouver next month. It's both thrilling and dangerous. And as Melissa reported, a French skier at that world cup race had a terrible accident. Florent Astier careened off the course. He was medevaced out and doctors feared he might be paralyzed.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Well today, Melissa has learned that the 23-year-old skier is, in fact, paralyzed from the chest and shoulder area down after suffering a C5 vertebra fracture and several spinal cord injury.
Doctors treating Mr. Astier at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont, say it's too early to project his long-term outcome. Mr. Astier's family is with him at the hospital.
Joe Fitzgerald, the race director for the International Ski Federation, FIS, says this is the most serious accident they've ever had in seven years of ski cross world cup races. He added, it is very unfortunate, we're all very sad for him.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRAND: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
P: The $549 registration fee, for one, on top of the fact that it's being treated as a for-profit event at all.
And there's more bad news: Two prominent congressional conservatives who had been scheduled to speak have cancelled.
NPR's Don Gonyea reports.
DON GONYEA: The T-E-A in Tea Party stands for the rhetorical question: Taxed enough already? A year ago it was no more than that but it's grown quickly, drawing conservatives who oppose big government to huge rallies and countless smaller protests like this one that greeted President Obama in Tampa yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CROWD)
Unidentified Man: Obama is a maniacal idiot.
GONYEA: This Tea Party member, Tom Burns of Jupiter, Florida, was dressed as Darth Vader, though he doesn't exactly sound like him.
TOM BURNS: May the force be with the people. That's basically what I'm saying.
GONYEA: Harnessing that force is what next week's convention is all about, says Mark Skoda, a Memphis-based activist who helped organize the event.
MARK SKODA: Part of what I believe is that rallies and excitement and signs without execution are, frankly, visceral and wonderfully entertaining, but they do not change the actions at the state and government level. And this is all about changing those actions.
GONYEA: The main figure behind the event, Nashville attorney Judson Phillips, has been the target of stinging critiques from Tea Party activists, complaining about a $549 registration fee and the alternative $349 ticket price for those who come only to the Palin speech. Then there's Palin's speaking fee reported to be as much as $100,000, a figure the organizers won't confirm.
Perhaps the biggest complaint: It is not a non-profit event. Phillips is accused of trying to cash in and capitalize on the movement. Skoda says not so.
SKODA: Frankly, this convention right now is about break-even, maybe a few bucks ahead.
GONYEA: Meanwhile, Eric Erickson of RedState.com, a leading conservative blog, posted an item calling the entire convention, quote, "scammy." And his was not the only blog to condemn the event. Mark Meckler co-founded the national TeaPartyPatriots.org. He has described the event as a user/patient of a grassroots movement.
MARK MECKLER: We're all suffering in the current economic environment. And a lot of our folks felt it was appropriate, if they had that kind of money to spend, to stay home in their local areas as opposed to taking all that money out of local elections and going and spending it in Nashville on a fancy hotel and a convention.
GONYEA: But plenty of groups are still backing the Tea Party Convention. Teri Christoph is with SmartGirlPolitics.com, a site for conservative women.
TERI CHRISTOPH: It's the activists, the grassroots activists. To me, having - the reason that we're involved is not because Sarah Palin is involved.
GONYEA: As for the differences among conservatives the convention has ignited, Christoph says this.
CHRISTOPH: I feel like this group is getting picked on because there are some sour grapes. And believe me, there are sour grapes in many Tea Party groups. It's just the nature of something like that trying to get a movement together.
GONYEA: Yesterday came word that Republican Congresswomen Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn - both heroes of the movement - backed out. Neither was to get a speaker's fee, but each said the for-profit nature of the convention raised questions about compliance with congressional ethics rules.
Mark Skoda says all this controversy was unexpected.
SKODA: I think, however, it goes to the key point about, you know, grassroots movements tends sometimes to be unwieldy. These are not professionals. We are not professional corporate organizers.
GONYEA: Some in the Tea Party Movement want to change the Republican Party. Others want to form a third party. That's a dream that's eluded many populist activists across the political spectrum for generations, and the Tea Party is just beginning to grapple with the challenge.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
A story now about a country that seems to violate the laws of the economic universe. It has one of the lowest poverty rates in the world, low unemployment, a steadily growing economy and almost no corruption. That country is Denmark.
Our Planet Money correspondent David Kestenbaum recently visited to find out if things are really as perfect as they seem.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: By one survey, the Danish people are the happiest in the world. And on this day, even though it's pitch dark - it's 4:00 in the afternoon and it's raining - people are out on their bicycles and remarkably chipper.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CHIME)
KESTENBAUM: I took a walk with economist Ole Petersen at the Copenhagen Business School. He pointed out one strange thing: The government buildings, built centuries ago, they're gigantic.
OLE PETERSEN: All the buildings in downtown Copenhagen and the Royal Castle, the Parliament Building, the ministries are oversized.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KESTENBAUM: The buildings are too big here.
PETERSEN: Yeah, they were built for an empire and now they exist in one of the smallest states in the world.
KESTENBAUM: It turns out the government today has no problem filling those buildings. If you're one of those people who think the U.S. has big government, well, there is big government and then there is Denmark. The Danish government looks after everyone, provides free high-quality education, free high-quality health care. Of course, it's not really free. Denmark has some of the highest taxes in the world; just getting a cup of coffee costs more.
ILYA NORDRUM: Okay, that's coffee latte?
Unidentified Man: Cino.
NORDRUM: Cappuccino, okay.
KESTENBAUM: How much is that?
NORDRUM: Thirty-three.
KESTENBAUM: And how much is tax?
NORDRUM: How much is what?
KESTENBAUM: Tax.
NORDRUM: Tax, 25 percent.
KESTENBAUM: That's pretty high.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORDRUM: It's excellent. Actually, I'm Swedish. They have it much better in Denmark because they have higher taxes.
KESTENBAUM: That tax-loving woman was Ilya Nordrum. And that tax, it's nothing. Buy a car, you'll pay 200 percent tax. That's right. Instead of paying, say, $20,000 you'd have to pay $60,000.
A headline from a Danish newspaper last year read, Denmark Keeps World Tax Title, for the highest taxes in the world. Income tax is high even for the middle class. And yet, a lot of people are okay with it.
Seena Bauolason(ph) is a student.
SEENA BAUOLASON: I think it is terrific.
KESTENBAUM: You think paying taxes is terrific?
BAUOLASON: I do actually think it is terrific. And I...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAUOLASON: ... I get a little bit angry because constantly in Denmark, there's this talk that we have to lower the taxes, lower the taxes, lower the taxes.
KESTENBAUM: Danes do get things for their taxes. If you lose your job, you can collect unemployment insurance for up to four years.
When I sat down with the economist Ole Petersen, he told me there is a downside.
PETERSEN: Some people will take the opportunity to stay unemployed because they're paid to stay unemployed.
KESTENBAUM: That means a slightly slower growing economy.
PETERSEN: Yeah, there's a kind of slack in the system.
KESTENBAUM: Denmark has an interesting kind of hybrid economy. It has this huge welfare state, but it has also fiercely embraced a lot of free market ideas. The unemployment benefits are generous, but it's also very easy to fire people. That makes the economy nimble. Employers can get rid of workers when they don't need them and hire them back quickly when they do. Petersen says losing your job here is just not that big a deal.
Now, all countries face choices like this: How do you want to set up your economy? Those decisions shape how you live and your psychology. In Denmark, for instance, there aren't severe class distinctions because the poor get helped, the rich get taxed, so everyone gets squashed into a big, fat middle class.
One economist told me: Look, we don't have any geniuses and we don't have the best pro athletes - they leave because of the high taxes - but overall we're doing well.
That doing well thing though, it worries Per Gullestrup. He runs a medium-sized shipping company, the Clipper Group.
PER GULLESTRUP: A big difference between Denmark and the States is, for example, if you go to a football match - any sports activity - you know, whether you win or lose, it's not so important. You participate. You didn't win, but you participated, where in America, second place doesn't figure.
And we don't have that killer instinct. And I feel that that's dangerous because we have this attitude, you know, we're doing fine, we've done well so far, but that doesn't mean you're always going to do well.
KESTENBAUM: Ole Petersen, the economist, likes a lot of things about his country's economy. But he says one danger with big government, big welfare programs is that they don't shrink. They get bigger and bigger and bigger.
PETERSEN: And the threat, of course, or the challenge, of course, is that the welfare state could become so big that the economy could collapse because it's so big.
KESTENBAUM: Do you worry about that?
PETERSEN: Absolutely.
KESTENBAUM: That's the thing about economies that look like miracles - they don't always last. Denmark could stumble but so could the United States.
David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
It is an annual tradition. The mayors of the two cities going head-to-head in the Super Bowl make a friendly bet. The loser has to provide the winner with a favorite local delicacy. Well, this year, the stakes got a little higher. That's because the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have gotten into the wagering. The prize is a three-month loan of one of the greatest treasures from the museum in the losing city, and joining me now are IMA director Maxwell Anderson and NOMA director John Bullard. Welcome to both of you.
MAXWELL ANDERSON: Thank you.
JOHN BULLARD: Thank you.
SIEGEL: And Max, when it came to putting up some painting for loan to New Orleans should the Colts lose, what did you pick?
ANDERSON: Knowing that the Colts wouldn't lose, it was a fairly straightforward choice, and that was a painting by Ingrid Calame "Tracing Tire Tracks on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway," which is actually a great work in our contemporary collection.
BULLARD: And I thought, gee, if we're going to really make a bet, let's bet maybe something that it would hurt if it was gone off our walls for three months.
SIEGEL: And you chose?
BULLARD: I suggested a Renoir painting, which is currently in a big show in Paris.
ANDERSON: I also thought maybe what we needed to do is respond with an object of virtue, and that was a cup made for the 1855 World Exposition in Paris that won the great grand medal.
SIEGEL: All right. So when was this cup...
BULLARD: And the chalice was beautiful but a little over the top, heavily elaborated, almost on the verge of being a tchotchke.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BULLARD: And we got plenty of that stuff in our basement, so I didn't need another one from Indianapolis.
SIEGEL: He's calling your stuff tchotchkes now.
ANDERSON: Well, the Renoir seemed to me kind of sentimental, and I used a French epithet. So we moved on from there.
SIEGEL: Well, it eventually came down to two very interesting paintings. Max Anderson, why don't you tell us what you're willing to send off to New Orleans for three months?
ANDERSON: We have the largest collection of JMW Turner, the great British artist, and so we chose his foremost work in our collection, which is a painting of the "Plague in Egypt" painted around 1800 when he was 24, when he was the same age as Austin Collie, one of our great Colts players.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ANDERSON: So it seemed to me very appropriate to have a young 24-year-old assaulting the competition of the Super Bowl.
SIEGEL: And John Bullard in New Orleans, how did you match that one?
BULLARD: Well, that Turner is a fabulous picture. So to find something that perhaps would compliment it, we have a large landscape painting by the great French artist Claude Lorrain, who was the father of landscape painting, and his work was an inspiration for Turner.
So I thought the two of them would look great together in New Orleans.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You're that confident. In New Orleans.
BULLARD: And we don't have a Turner. So we'd love to have "The Fifth Plague" in New Orleans.
SIEGEL: So this is a trash talk between museum directors is what we're hearing.
BULLARD: Yeah, we don't get to trash each other very much. We're usually quite collegial and, you know, football mania has taken over, particularly in New Orleans, which hasn't been in a Super Bowl in 40 years of its franchise, so our turn.
ANDERSON: Well, we'd love to help, John, but the turns have to come at the end of the game.
SIEGEL: Well, I know this is illogical, but good luck to both of you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BULLARD: May the best team win.
ANDERSON: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: That's John Bullard of the New Orleans Museum of Art and Maxwell Anderson of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, talking about the wager they've made on the Super Bowl.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand in California.
An extraordinary display of political fencing today as President Obama spoke to a gathering of House Republicans. The GOP is holding its annual retreat in Baltimore and invited the president to speak. What followed was an incredibly nuanced kabuki dance with each side trying to gain the political advantage.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook was there and she filed this report.
P: You know what they say: keep your friends close, but visit the Republican caucus every few months.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ANDREA SEABROOK: Obama's speech started out as a treatise to the gathered Republicans to help him make Washington act less Washington-like.
P: But I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SEABROOK: He also spanked Republicans for not voting for the stimulus package that most economists say helped the economy recover. And he said the differences between the two parties are not nearly as gaping as politics make them seem.
P: But we've gotten caught up in the political game in a way that's just not healthy. It's dividing our country in ways that are preventing us from meeting the challenge of the 21st century. I'm hopeful that the conversation we have today can help reverse that. So, thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SEABROOK: Now, at these events, the media is usually kicked out of the room after the main speech, but late last night, according to GOP retreat organizers, President Obama called and asked that the press be allowed to stay in the room for the extended Q&A with Republican congressmen, and they said yes. That gave Republicans their turn to make points, starting with conference chairman Mike Pence.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Mr. President. Now, last year your administration and your party in Congress told us that we'd have to borrow more than $700 billion to pay for a so-called stimulus bill that we were told had to be passed or unemployment would go to eight percent. Well, unemployment is 10 percent now, as you well know, Mr. President.
SEABROOK: This began a series of questions that seemed more intent on making a point than making an inquiry. Republicans deftly packed their questions with policy statements and political jabs. And President Obama, just as deftly, focused on dismantling the Republicans' premises.
P: Let's talk about just the jobs environment generally.
SEABROOK: The dance went on for a good 45 minutes. Energy policy, health care, taxes, jobs, everyone smiling, everyone sparring. The exercise only became overt a couple times. For example, when Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling asked this marathon question.
SIEGEL: Mr. President, a year ago, I had an opportunity to speak to you about the national debt. The Republicans...proposed a budget that ensured that government did not grow beyond the historical standard of 20 percent. The national debt has increased 30 percent. Now, Mr. President, I know you believe...Mr. President, you're due to submit a new budget. And my question is...
P: Jim, I know there's a question in there somewhere because you're making a whole bunch of assertions, half of which I disagree with. And I'm having to sit here listening to them. At some point, I know you're going to let me answer.
SIEGEL: Well, that...like your old budget, triple the national debt and continued to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy. That's the question, Mr. President.
P: All right, Jim, with all due respect, I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running - running a campaign.
SEABROOK: And it probably didn't help the cause of bipartisanship that the president kept referring to Jeb Hensarling as Jim. Afterwards, the president mingled with lawmakers' families while the Republican leaders and their staff immediately began trying to figure out who had benefited from this. Some were annoyed that Mr. Obama had dodged their questions; others seemed to have a kind of grudging respect for his skill at dissection. No one seemed to think this one extraordinary scrimmage would change things in Washington, but at least for once the real game was on full display.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Baltimore.
: Require corporations to get approval of their political spending from their shareholders. Representative Capuano joins us from Boston, and tell us, how will this work?
MIKE CAPUANO: Quite simply, the shareholders, it's their money and I think that anybody who is spending money should ask those people who own that money what their opinion is. If the shareholders choose to be involved in political action, that's fine. Apparently the court has said that is legal and that's okay with me. That's all I want. I wouldn't want somebody reaching into my pocket and taking my money to be used for something I didn't want.
: Your bill, though, would require the shareholders to approve of, is it every expenditure of $10,000 or more?
CAPUANO: Yeah. But they could do it once a year. I mean, that's a proposal. I'm open to other proposals, maybe just once a year, maybe the numbers could be different, but the concept is what's important, is to have the shareholders be the ones who make the determination. If they want to use it for political purposes, that's fine by me.
: Is this bill that you've drafted one of those bills that's really an extremely effective press release to make a good point or do you have a shot, really, at getting this thing through the House?
CAPUANO: No way to tell. I hope it's not a press release. That's not the intent. I mean, there are a lot of discussions going on, as you pointed out at the top, that are on other things to do, and I may participate and supporting some of them or not. This one just struck me as something that there's no need to wait for it. It doesn't take on the Supreme Court decisions directly, doesn't require a constitutional amendment. And all it does is simply say something that most people have said from day one: You should have a say on how your money is spent.
: Have you given any thought to whether GM or Citi could advertise right now and take out a political ad?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: I'm intrigued by that thought.
CAPUANO: My guess is they could probably take out an ad right now and say we hate this idea or we love this idea.
: Speaking on behalf of our shareholders, the government of the United States of America.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CAPUANO: Oh, and plus, for me, there are another aspect, which I am also working on, but - it's transparency. I think that voters are actually intelligent enough to know that if they know the source of a commentary, that they can put that in context. And for - as a politician at the end of every ad, I have to say, and I approve this message, there's a reason for that. And that reason is so that people will know that Mike Capuano has approved the saying of whatever it is I just said. And I would argue the same thing should be done with political speech for others as well.
But I also think it's the transparency that's a problem. It's when you get Citizens for Good Governance say Mike Capuano is a great guy or Citizens for Good Governance say Mike Capuano is a terrible guy, call him and tell him he's no good. I would argue that the average voter would be best served to simply know who's really saying that. And if it's truly is Citizens for Good Governance, fine. But we all know that it's probably, you know, corporation X or business person X. And, again, not that they're not entitled to say it, but I think it's a little bit of false advertising to pretend something that you're not.
: So, you'd like to see political ads of that sort look a little bit more like the pharmaceutical ads with the side effects.
CAPUANO: Yes, absolutely.
: That the groups that have given to the group that's advertising against you would be listed, like, along with nausea and headaches.
CAPUANO: Right, very good analogy.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: And brittle bones and all of that.
CAPUANO: I think that would be fine. Again, I think voters are not as stupid as some people think they are. And I think they're preferably capable of cutting through, you know, the agendas that we all have, as long as they know where that agenda is coming from. So, if it's the XYZ corporation, well, if they're big polluters, then I personally wouldn't mind them taking ads on against me, you know. We're a big polluting company, and we hate Mike Capuano.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CAPUANO: Well, thank you very much.
: Well, Congressman Capuano, thanks a lot for talking with us about your proposal.
CAPUANO: Thank you.
: Mike Capuano, Democratic Representative from Massachusetts.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
Here in California, the city of Oakland has just gotten another big-box store. But it's unlike any you've seen before. This one is a superstore specializing in medical marijuana. It has everything a customer could want, from a physician to make the pot legal to all the gear a person needs to grow their own.
NPR's Richard Gonzales gives us a tour.
RICHARD GONZALES: In California, all you need is a doctor's letter to buy a small amount of medical marijuana. But if you want to grow your own, then you might become a customer of iGrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GONZALES: It's a 15,000-square-foot warehouse located near the Oakland Airport, and it's designed as a one-stop shop for everything you'll need for indoor hydroponic cultivation of marijuana, medical or otherwise - everything but the plant itself.
BRAND: iGROW is - I like to call it the medicinal marijuana superstore.
GONZALES: Justin Jorgensen is general manager of iGROW.
BRAND: You'll find everything from soil to any of the various grow mediums, so there's coca leaf, there's hydroton, there's a lot of different mediums. You can find trays to hold water or to hold your actual different plants.
GONZALES: Not to mention, all the systems you'll need to grow weed indoors. That's where iGROW's onsite experts can help. They're called the Grow Squad, a name inspired by another big-box retailer, says Jorgensen.
BRAND: The Geek Squad at Best Buy - we have the Grow Squad. People that are professionals consult with you and answer any questions you have pertaining to growing.
GONZALES: IGrow isn't the first hydroponic store in Oakland, but it's probably the largest in California. And its grand opening yesterday came as a campaign to legalize marijuana for recreational use took another step forward. Proponents announced that they have collected 700,000 signatures, more than enough to get on the November ballot. Richard Lee(ph) is a medical marijuana dispensary owner in Oakland who is bankrolling the effort.
BRAND: This is - historic first step toward ending cannabis prohibition. I've always believed that cannabis should be taxed and regulated and that our current laws aren't working.
GONZALES: The petitions still have to be certified, but if the measure gets on the ballot and passes, anyone over the age of 21 could possess an ounce of marijuana and grow their own inside a 25-square-foot area. Cities and counties could also regulate and tax marijuana. Back at the iGrow warehouse, local elected leaders made it clear they already have an eye on potential revenues from marijuana in any form. Rebecca Kaplan is a member of the Oakland City Council.
BRAND: And so anytime we have a local business opening, growing, thriving, we want to be proud of that. We want to celebrate that. We want to uplift that. And we know that our city can grow this way. And we will have revenue that will fund the parks and the libraries and the services that people need.
GONZALES: There are still many California cities grappling with how to regulate their medical marijuana dispensaries, but the opening of the iGrow superstore suggests that cannabis is taking another step out of the shadows, at a time when polls indicate that California voters may be ready to legalize weed for any adult, regardless of how they plan to use it.
Richard Gonzales, NPR News, Oakland.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand.
And I'm in denial. We all are here in California. We know a big earthquake is coming sometime. But we pretend otherwise, even with Haiti in the news every day. Recently, though, I was confronted with reality when I visited seismological lab at Caltech and looked over Anthony Guarino's shoulder. He was staring at a computer screen that monitors earthquakes in Southern California.
ANTHONY GUARINO: For the week, we've had 777. Generally, we have about 30 a day, but today we've had a lot more. And this week has been a lot more active.
BRAND: Thirty a day, that's, what, about one an hour? Fortunately, most were too small to even be felt, but they're a sobering reminder that the earth beneath us is very active. The notorious San Andreas Fault is not that active, but it is the biggest and most dangerous in the United States. It runs the length of the state.
Across the street from Caltech, in a yellow clapboard house, is the regional office of the U.S. Geological Survey. It's where I meet geophysicist Doug Given, who's not exactly reassuring about the big one.
DOUG GIVEN: We know that a big earthquake on the San Andreas is inevitable. We know that it has produced many, many large earthquakes. We don't know when that next earthquake is going to happen, but we do know that it is going to happen.
BRAND: And when it does happen, Given says, there will be two to three minutes of violent shaking. It would be nice to know exactly when the big one is going to hit, but Doug Given says earthquake forecasting is not possible now and it may never be.
So he's working on developing an early warning system, which could potentially save lives. If scientists are able to detect that an earthquake has started far from a city, they'd have time to send out a warning.
GIVEN: Earthquake waves move pretty fast. And the most destructive waves move at about two miles per second. Sounds really fast, but we can transmit information at the speed of light, which is essentially instantaneous.
BRAND: Think of it like the delay between seeing lightening and then hearing the thunder. There are 300 seismic sensors located throughout Southern California that measure ground motion. They're in cities, forests and out in the desert. And now about half of the sensors are being upgraded with Federal stimulus dollars. The new equipment can send out seismic information five seconds faster. That's a lot of time for Doug Given.
GIVEN: So, if you can detect that an earthquake has began very rapidly at the place where it begins, the epicenter, then it's possible to send warning out ahead of the waves. The farther away you are, the more warning you get.
BRAND: He imagines a scenario in which the San Andreas Fault begins to rupture at its southern most end, south of Palm Springs, and violent seismic waves head toward Los Angeles.
GIVEN: We can detect that an earthquake is very large within about 10 seconds of the beginning of the earthquake, possibly less. Given the distance of my hypothetical earthquake to Los Angeles, that would allow well over a minute of warning to the downtown L.A. area.
BRAND: A minute? But that's a long time.
GIVEN: It is.
BRAND: But what to do in that minute? That's the other piece of the early- warning puzzle. Doug Given sees two groups that could use this information. The first would include gas companies, electric utilities, airports.
GIVEN: We're talking to railroad companies as an example. The type of response that they would adopt would be to slow down or stop trains. In Northern California, BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, is already on board and interested in early warning.
BRAND: And the other group is us: The public. But informing the public could lead to problems.
GIVEN: This is a very infrequent type of event. Let's imagine that we're talking about public warning such that there would be, say, a light or an alarm in an office building, say, if the people aren't educated, and they don't know what it means and they don't know what to do about it, then the early warning is wasted.
BRAND: You spend your precious few seconds wondering: What is that alarm? So is there a better way? Doug Given imagines one day maybe cell phone companies could text message everyone in a threatened area all at once. So they have the science, and they're working on the notification tools for an early warning system, so, what's the holdup?
GIVEN: Mostly funding.
BRAND: How much would it cost?
GIVEN: We're thinking somewhere between $50 to $100 million for a construction of a system and probably something on the order of $5 million a year to operate it.
BRAND: And that's just for the West Coast. That's part of the problem. Doug Gives says many in Washington see earthquakes as a regional threat and therefore something the states should fund. California with its budget woes is in no position to start spending on earthquake early warning systems.
(SOUNDBITE OF OFFICE)
BRAND: So, how realistic is this?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BRAND: And how likely will it be that we'll see an early warning system anytime soon?
GIVEN: It depends on pretty much the willingness of probably the federal government to fund it. Most of the early warning systems that are currently operational were built as a result of some devastating earthquake that created a national will.
BRAND: The Kobe earthquake in Japan, the Mexico City earthquake.
GIVEN: And we haven't had an earthquake like that in the United States. You know, if we have a big earthquake that kills a thousand people in California, you can bet they'll be right there with the money right afterwards. It sure would be nice if they were there with the money before.
BRAND: In the meantime, Doug Given says, we should all have preparedness kits in our homes and cars: food, water, cash and sneakers. As his colleague told me, you're not going to want to drive after the big one hits. I think I'll return to my state of denial now.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Time now for your letters. And first, reaction to our remembrance yesterday of Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States." Zinn was unapologetically leftist. And in his obituary we had this from conservative writer David Horowitz.
DAVID HOROWITZ: Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So, he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.
SIEGEL: Well, those remarks sent this avalanche of adjectives tumbling into our inbox: inelegant, inappropriate, tacky, rude, shocking, shameful and low class.
HOROWITZ: You invited Pat Robertson to eulogize Roberts at length with no counterpoint. At the time, I thought that NPR was sacrificing a balanced view in favor of the respectful policy to speak no ill of the dead. If so, that is a special privilege accorded to the far right.
SIEGEL: Scott Mathis(ph) of Austin, Texas was equally appalled. He writes this: This segment was as ill-conceived as asking Mr. Potter to eulogize George Bailey. Or asking Ann Coulter to eulogize Noam Chomsky or asking James Carville to eulogize Ronald Reagan.
Well, we got a very different kind of response to our remembrance of J.D. Salinger, namely stories of the first time listeners read "The Catcher In The Rye."
: For Molly Hans(ph) of Shiremanstown, Pennsylvania, that was in 1964. She writes: Someone brought a copy to school and passed it around. At age 11 or 12, that was the best way to become one with Holden Caulfield, to hide the book behind your speller and hope you don't get caught by the nuns when you laughed out loud. We are all in our 50s and still talking about it - just what every writer hopes for.
SIEGEL: Thanks for all of your emails and keep them coming. Go to npr.org and click on Contact Us.
: Iraq. He was appearing before a panel investigating why the British government decided to join the 2003 Iraq invasion.
As NPR's Rob Gifford reports, if anyone was expecting contrition or repentance from Blair, they didn't get it.
ROB GIFFORD: It wasn't a trial, but many outside today's inquiry thought that it should be.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
: Tony Blair to the Hague. Tony Blair to the Hague. Tony Blair...
GIFFORD: Tony Blair to the Hague, they chanted, to face the International Criminal Court. Blair, the consummate politician who seemed so attuned to public opinion when he swept to power in 1997, has become vilified by many for ignoring that same popular opinion and taking the country into a very unpopular war in 2003.
Twenty-nine-year-old Martin Abrams(ph) marched against the war at the time, and he was back today.
MARTIN ABRAMS: He's essentially a war criminal. He led us into a war full of lies. He's caused the deaths of 179 British troops and countless more Iraqis.
GIFFORD: Inside, Blair launched a robust defense of his decisions before the five-member panel, saying he would make the same decisions all over again. He spent a lot of the morning talking about 9/11, how it changed everything, he said, and especially the risk that a leader like Saddam Hussein, with a track record of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, might link up with an organization like al-Qaida.
TONY BLAIR: Well, this isn't about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception, it's a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam's history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he caused, given 10 years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk?
GIFFORD: Blair admitted that his government failed to anticipate some of the problems of the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, in two areas especially.
BLAIR: One was, as I say, the absence of the properly functioning civil (unintelligible) infrastructure. And, of course, the second thing, which is the single most important element of this whole business of what happened afterward, people did not think that al-Qaida and Iran would play the role that they did.
GIFFORD: He said there isn't a day that goes by when he doesn't think about the massive responsibility that he bears. But, in the end, he was briefly heckled when asked if he had any regrets.
BLAIR: No regrets. Responsibility, but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein.
Unidentified Man #1: Come on.
BLAIR: I think he was...
Man #1: (unintelligible)
Unidentified Man #2: Be quiet, please.
GIFFORD: As he left the forum, Tony Blair was booed by some in the public gallery who shouted: You're a liar and a murderer. Valerie O'Neal(ph) watched the testimony. Her son Chris was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007.
VALERIE O: Give that man an Oscar because his performance in there, it should be on the red carpet. He's blaming everybody but himself. He will not take any of the blame himself.
GIFFORD: Blair was not without his supporters, though. Denis MacShane, who was in the prime minister's cabinet in 2003, pointed out that the decision to go to war was approved by the British Parliament.
DENIS MACSHANE: There were hundreds of people in parliament who voted. I was Europe minister. There wasn't a single European leader or intelligence service at the time who doubted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We know better now, but are we making a judgment today in 2010?
GIFFORD: The inquiry has no legal power to indict Blair or anyone else, but Rosemary Hollis of City University in London, who's just published book called "Britain and the Middle East in the 9/11 Era," says the process has still been worthwhile.
ROSEMARY HOLLIS: I think from the point of view of the British public, it's quite important that this inquiry has taken place and that the former prime minister be seen to be put on the spot. There is a great sense of unfinished business, a great sense that he hasn't been held accountable. And even if he's not taken to court and charged with an illegal act, there will have at least have been a sense that he's had to explain himself.
GIFFORD: And he may have to do so again if the panel decides they need to hear more. Blair's successor Gordon Brown is said to face the inquiry in the coming months.
Rob Gifford, NPR News, London.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
Thirty-seven minutes, that's how long it took a Kansas jury to find Scott Roeder guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated assault. In May, Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, while Tiller was at church.
NPR's Kathy Lohr has been in Wichita for the trial, and she sent us this report.
KATHY LOHR: Roeder testified he believed abortion was murder and said he needed to stop it by killing Tiller, one of the few doctors who provided abortions later in pregnancy. Roeder did not deny any of the facts surrounding the May 31st shooting. The defense wanted the jury to consider a voluntary manslaughter charge, which carries a much lighter sentence than murder, but the judge ruled against that. Kim Parker is one of the prosecutors.
BRAND: Hopefully it sends a clear message that this type of conduct is clearly not justified under the law. There is no place for this. There are no medals to be given for those who violate the rules.
LOHR: Roeder's defense attorney, Mark Rudy, was clearly dejected after the verdict. He said Roeder made so many admissions that there was no hope without the voluntary manslaughter defense.
BRAND: The jury was not presented with any options, obviously. It was he's either guilty of first-degree murder or they'd have to let him go. And, obviously, we knew that they weren't going to let him go. And we were not allowed to argue lessers. We weren't allowed to argue other things that had been ruled out. So, you know, we were left with not much to argue, frankly.
LOHR: Some anti-abortion activists who attended the trial, including David Leach from Iowa and Michael Bray from Ohio, both signed a justifiable homicide petition, arguing Roeder should be able to use that defense. Randall Terry, who started Operation Rescue, was also in court. And he said he didn't think justice was served, that the jury didn't get to consider Roeder's motive: to prevent abortion.
BRAND: And it showed to me that they never got a chance to get inside of Scott Roeder's head. The babies who died at Tiller's hand, they deserved their day in court and it should've been this trial, and it wasn't.
LOHR: But for abortion rights groups, the guilty verdict is a big victory. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri says Roeder's conviction sends a clear message that domestic terrorists will be held accountable in Kansas and elsewhere. Kathy Spillar is with the Feminist Majority Foundation.
BRAND: The evidence is overwhelming. I don't see how the jury could've arrived at any other decision. And I appreciate that, you know, ordinary citizens can sit through this kind of a trial and come to a conclusion of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, in fact, beyond any doubt.
LOHR: Spillar says abortion rights groups want the Justice Department to file federal charges against Roeder for Tiller's murder. And they're asking federal officials to further investigate anti-abortion extremists, including those who spent time with Roeder.
In a statement, the family of George Tiller said they hope he will be remembered for his service to women and for the help he provided to those who needed it.
Roeder's first-degree murder conviction carries a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Sentencing is set for March 9th.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Wichita.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
If you believe 9/11 was an inside job, or that Neil Armstrong's moon walk actually took place on a Hollywood set, or that a bunch of Jewish elders gathered in Europe at the end of the 19th century to plot the takeover of the world, well, this next story's for you. Because if you do, David Aaronovitch, a columnist for the Times of London, thinks you're, at best, deluded and, at worst, dangerous.
He spent six years looking into the details behind some of the best-known conspiracy theories and he set out to debunk all of them. The result is a book called "Voodoo Histories." And David Aaronovitch says he got the idea while working on a BBC program in Tunisia.
Mr. DAVID AARONOVITCH (Author, "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History"): I had a very, very good young producer/director with me, a guy in his early 30s, very sensible. And we were having to drive down from Tunis to an amphitheater. And on the drive, he just turned around to me and said, I've prepared nothing really. You know the moon landings? And I said, yes, I'd seen them as a kid on television. He said, well, you didn't.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. AARONOVITCH: I said, what do you mean I didn't? He said, well, didn't happen.
And he then told me the thing, which everybody gets told, you know, about the photographs that don't make any sense, and the stars that aren't there, and the flag flapping in the nonexistent breeze, and so on - all of which was conclusive evidence, he said, that this moon landing hadn't taken place.
RAZ: And this was an otherwise reasonable guy. I mean, he wasn't sort of a wacko. He wasn't out there.
Mr. AARONOVITCH: Absolutely not a wacko at all. And the notion that a large number of people who believe in conspiracy theories are just wackos, I think, just simply doesn't fit. I mean, really what this book is about is why perfectly intelligent people can believe perfectly ridiculous things.
RAZ: Let me ask you about the famous document known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." This is supposedly is of a meeting of Jewish bankers and other powerful figures in Europe at the end of the 19th century. They're planning to take over the world. People believe this then. And in many parts of the world, people still do, right?
Mr. AARONOVITCH: Absolutely. I mean, we now kind of would regard such a theory, I think most of us, as being utterly ludicrous. But in 1920, my own newspaper, the Times of London - I mean, and what more prestigious paper could you get? At least it wasn't till I worked for it - had an editorial, which said look at this pamphlet. It raises these incredibly disturbing questions and then said about the First World War, have we fallen out of the pasture escape to pasture moniker? In other words, it was the prospect of a German victory - only to find ourselves in a Pax Judaica.
Now, it's about a year later that the Times redeems itself a bit because its correspondent in Constantinople that discovers that the original book for the Protocols is, in fact, a French book from the 1860s. And this has just been lifted, key passages taken out, the words Jews - you know, we Jews and this is what we're going to do - put in and then circulated around Europe in the period after the First World War. And we know the consequences that that lead to in terms of it being so widely believed, particularly in Germany.
And as you quite correctly say, the Protocols are still now widely cited in the Middle East.
RAZ: And you describe how in some of your travels in the Middle East, you see it all over the place in bookstores and book shops, and it's just sort of regarded as a normal historical document.
Mr. AARONOVITCH: Totally normal, and it has had a parallel with 9/11 theory. If you were to travel in Pakistan, for instance, you will find that the significant proportion of the educated Pakistanis, including the military class, believe fundamentally that George Bush brought down the Twin Towers; that it was an inside job.
And that makes dealing with, let's say, the Pakistani Taliban quite difficult for them because they actually fundamentally don't believe the premise upon which the battle against terror was waged. And quite often, what they will cite in these circumstances in support of their theories - journalists, academics and others - are theories that have been come up within America, in Europe and so on, and they cite them as authority.
RAZ: And I want to ask you about that, because the former Malaysian leader, Mahathir Mohamad, recently said this publicly that 9/11 was carried out by Zionist elements and so on. There are many people in this country, in the United States, who believe that 9/11 was an inside job. How did you go about debunking those claims?
Mr. AARONOVITCH: Mahathir Mohamad incidentally also said that one of the key signs that it could be done was the making of the movie "Avatar," if you remember.
RAZ: Hmm.
Mr. AARONOVITCH: In other words, if you're clever enough to make the movie "Avatar," then you were clever enough to do 9/11.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. AARONOVITCH: And he also effectively said something really kind of rather insulting, which he said the Arabs in a sense weren't well-organized enough to do something like that.
The thing about dealing with conspiracy theories is you can't just assume right from the beginning that any conspiracy theory is automatically wrong because it seems to violate common sense. I mean, you're absolutely right. You have to go back to first principles and say, what is the evidence for this?
RAZ: David Aaronovitch, I'm wondering if the belief in conspiracies today have real world consequences. I mean, why should we take them seriously?
Mr. AARONOVITCH: I talk about quite a lot of conspiracy theories in the book and some of them are actually not that damaging. It's really not so terrible if people look at the front of "The Da Vinci Code" where Dan Brown tells you that the Priory of the Sion is real, which of course it isn't. It was invented in 1956.
Nobody's going to die as a result of that. Although I gather it has been fairly irritating for people in some French cathedrals and so on as a consequence of tourists coming up and asking them about it.
But when you get something like the 9/11 story, the protocols, or its latter version, which is that the Zionists or a kind of super version of the Jewish lobby is continuously operating. These things actually do have real world consequences. I mean, it allows the people who are - who may have bear some responsibility for some of these events to evade that responsibility by suggesting that it's conspiracy.
Look, for instance, of the way in which the Iranian government deployed the notion that it was the British and the Americans behind their demonstrations. Now, this just in the last couple of weeks, they have begun executing people who were involved in the demonstrations in Tehran. And one of the elements that allows them to do that is this if you like this conspiracy theory element.
RAZ: Before I let you go, I have a question for you. Aren't are you part of the conspiracy, you know, given that you work for the establishment media?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. AARONOVITCH: I've had this said to me on a number of occasions. Like after a discussion in London about the book, this guy came up to me afterwards, one of the 9/11 truth people. He looked me in the eyes and he said, why are you doing this?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. AARONOVITCH: I had to say, look, you know, I've done the work on this. This is what I think to be true. But of course, it's exactly what a lot of people in the conspiracy movements are going to say is he's just one of them. I mean, look at his name.
RAZ: David Aaronovitch is a journalist and author. His new book is called "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History."
David Aaronovitch, thank you so much.
Mr. AARONOVITCH: Thank you.
RAZ: And you can find more conspiracy theories and David Aaronovitch's list of the characteristics that help them spread. That's in our Web site, npr.org.
(Soundbite of song, "Horchata")
Mr. EZRA KOENIG (Bandleader, Vampire Weekend): (Singing) In December, drinking horchata, I look psychotic in a balaclava.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is music from Vampire Weekend. The track is called "Horchata," and it's from their new record.
Just four years ago, the members of this band were still students at Columbia University. And since then, their whimsical lyrics and afro-pop sound have inspired sharply divided reactions.
Some critics see Vampire Weekend as the most exciting American indie band in years. And others argue that these four seemingly privileged Ivy Leaguers are engaging in the worst type of cultural appropriation. But despite that, the band's new record just entered the Billboard charts at number one.
(Soundbite of song, "Horchata")
RAZ: Vampire Weekend's latest record is called "Contra." And lead singer Ezra Koenig is in our New York studios.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. KOENIG: Thank you.
RAZ: I know you're probably going to wince here, but I have to ask you about this song "White Sky."
(Soundbite of song, "White Sky")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) An ancient business, a modern piece of glasswork, down on the corner that you walk each day in passing...
RAZ: And there's just this - there's a gem of a song with this wonderful falsetto howl right in the middle. And I was reading comments on a Web site about this song.
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah.
RAZ: Okay. And someone wrote: This song sounds like the lost track of Paul Simon's "Rhythm of the Saints." Now, I know I've read that you don't like the comparisons but I'm wondering why. I mean, what's wrong with the comparison?
Mr. KOENIG: Well, we don't dislike the comparisons. I mean, you know, of course we have nothing but respect for Paul Simon. I guess we felt like when the first record came out, we just were inundated with these comparisons and constantly getting asked about Paul Simon and "Graceland."
And as much as it's an amazing album and, I think, a very important album, it started to feel extremely reductive to have to only talk about African music through the lens of Paul Simon's "Graceland."
But that said, the idea that somebody would think of this track as having some sort of connection to "Rhythm of the Saints" is thrilling.
(Soundbite of song, "White Sky")
RAZ: You grew up in New Jersey. How did you sort of first start to get into African music?
Mr. KOENIG: Well, I think we all grew up with, you know, parents who came of age in the '60s, people with pretty diverse record collections. My dad had King Sunny Ade and Fela records and, you know, in addition to all sorts of music from around the world. So, I never felt that any one type of music was, like, the music of our households.
So, when this band started, for various reasons, we'd become very disinterested in what we found to be the, you know, kind of cliched ways of playing guitar and playing drums. And...
RAZ: I mean, when you were in college, like the biggest band at the time out of New York were The Strokes.
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah, and I totally love The Strokes. And the bands that I don't like though are the kind of second and third Xeroxed...
RAZ: Generations. Mm-hmm.
Mr. KOENIG: ...generations of The Strokes.
We naturally were trying to think about different ways that we could approach the idea of being a rock band and approach the drum set and the electric guitar. And for us it's all totally natural because it was music we'd essentially turned up listening to anyway.
(Soundbite of song, "Cousins")
RAZ: The song "Cousins," and this is kind of manic, skittering collision of guitars and drums. And I supposed it's a sound sort of closer to the way that you guys are sometimes described, which is as a punk band.
(Soundbite of song, "Cousins")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) Dad was a risk taker, his was a shoe maker, you greatest hits 2006, little list maker. Caught in the melody, you wait in the car, oh you were born with ten fingers and you're gonna use them all.
RAZ: I want to ask you about the lyrics here. Dad was...
Mr. KOENIG: Sure.
RAZ: ...a risk taker, his was a shoe maker. You greatest hits 2006, little list maker. What...
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah.
RAZ: What's this song about?
Mr. KOENIG: I think ultimately this song is about conflict and about how easy it is to define yourself in opposition to others and, you know, think like everybody else is a, you know, some privileged arty whatever. And me, I'm the real deal.
RAZ: Is it sort of a personal thing here that you're trying to address. I mean, your band, obviously, has been referred to as a preppy band, a bunch of privileged kids, you know, trying to be punkers. But obviously the real story behind that is not true. Is this kind of a way to address some of those assumptions?
Mr. KOENIG: Sure. I mean, also it's difficult because going to Columbia and having a propensity for boat shoes, we naturally set ourselves up to have lots of critics look at us, you know, as these, like, little Lord Fauntleroys or, you know, these George W. Bushes. But it was always so clear to me that these people were attacking this kind of made-up version of us. They were making all sorts of assumptions about who we were based on where we went to school. And, I mean, you know, that always made me feel a little more at ease with that type of criticism.
RAZ: You guys spend time in California for this record. You were really in this sort of reading about the state, about California culture.
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah.
RAZ: What did you want to capture? I mean what did California culture means to you? And how did you want to put that on this record?
Mr. KOENIG: And I grew up in New Jersey, and my family is all from New York. Like my Dad grew in up the Bronx. He's never been into California, and you know, he has this kind of weird attitude towards it. You know, there is that kind of old school Annie Hall type of New York, anti-California bias.
But having spent so much time there, you know, since becoming a musician, I really started to kind of, I dont know if I'm in love with it, but become very fascinated by it. I was very excited by the idea that California actually did have some culture especially in an era when regional variation can seem like such a dying concept.
RAZ: Now, there's a song on the record called "California English." And I guess you put the vocals through this program called Auto-Tune.
(Soundbite of song, "California English")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) And if it's all a curse, and we're just getting worse, baby, please don't lose your faith in the good earth.
RAZ: Why did you decide to put your vocals through Auto-Tune?
Mr. KOENIG: The Auto Tune idea was totally Rostam. You know...
RAZ: You're friend to Rostam Batmanglij who's also in the band.
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah, right. He, especially on this album, was really into the idea of giving the vocals a distinct sound on every song. I was hesitant at first because I don't think Auto-Tune is considered particularly cool anymore. You know, it's already gotten to the point where every 12-year-old kid knows what Auto Tune is. But we really did feel like the way it worked on this song was distinct from the way it was being used in a lot of modern R&B.
RAZ: Where else on the album did you sort of work with voice manipulation?
Mr. KOENIG: Well, it's not always manipulation. I mean, on a song like "Taxi Cab," just the kind of mic we used and the way that it was miced, I'm singing extremely quietly for our band considering how on, you know, other songs I'm basically like barking as loud as I can.
RAZ: Let's hear a little bit of that song "Taxi Cab."
(Soundbite of song, "Taxi Cab")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) Unsentimental, driving around, sure of myself, sure of it now. You stand this close to me, like the future was supposed to be...
RAZ: Your voice is almost fragile here, Ezra. It's unlike anything you tried on your first record. What's the story behind this song?
Mr. KOENIG: This song kind of had an interesting genesis. There's this very old song that I'd had in a rap group before Vampire Weekend started that we never really knew what to do with. And one day in the studio, Rostam kind of took the idea from that previous song and started crafting it into this kind of dub-by quiet rhythm. Pretty soon after that we had this song.
RAZ: It's hard to imagine it as a rap song. And I - if I recall correctly that rap band you were in was like a comedy band, right?
Mr. KOENIG: Well, we never considered it comedy. I mean, it was a comedy rap band in the same way that Vampire Weekend is a comedy rock band. I mean, all the raps had been...
RAZ: I mean, the name of it was L'Homme Run, right?
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah, yeah, L'Homme Run. I mean, I - all of my favorite musicians -Elvis Costello or Q-Tip or De La Soul - always has had a sense of humor. So, I've always felt like in whatever music we make that we have to try to walk that line between not being overly serious but also not being a joke.
(Soundbite of song, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa")
RAZ: I want to go back to your first record for a moment and to hear a little bit from a song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa."
(Soundbite of song, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) This feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too. But this feel so unnatural, Peter Gabriel.
RAZ: I love this song. You name check Peter Gabriel here, and then Peter Gabriel recently recorded a cover of that song with the British band Hot Chip. And I want to hear some of that.
(Soundbite of song, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa")
Mr. PETER GABRIEL (Musician): (Singing) But it feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too. And it feels so unnatural to sing your own name.
RAZ: How surreal that must have been for you to hear Peter Gabriel singing your song about Peter Gabriel.
Mr. KOENIG: That's about as surreal as it gets. When we wrote all these songs, we were, you know, just college students. I mean, literally that song was written in my dorm room at Columbia. The use of his name in that song is more conceptual because, you know, when you're just a 22-year-old kid you think of Peter Gabriel's not a person. He's not somebody that you - you're going to shake hands with or talk to. He's a concept.
Obviously, since then I've got a slightly different perspective on it. But, yeah, that's probably the single craziest thing that's happened.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: That's Ezra Koenig. He fronts the band Vampire Weekend. Their new record is called "Contra."
Ezra Koenig, thank you so much and good luck.
Mr. KOENIG: Yeah, thank you.
(Soundbite of song, "Run")
Mr. KOENIG: (Singing) Every dollar counts, and every morning hurts...
RAZ: To hear full cuts from the new album, go to our Web site, nprmusic.org.
And that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Thanks for listening and have a good night.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
There is one word in politics that is seldom controversial. It's a word that has wide bipartisan appeal and the word, well, it's bipartisanship.
Unidentified Man: Bipartisanship is a means by which we obtain a good bill.
Representative ERIC CANTOR (Republican, Virginia): It is in our interests to work and to offer to be bipartisan, which we have.
Senator BYRON DORGAN (Democrat, North Dakota): There's no question that things need to be better, more bipartisanship.
RAZ: The voices of some members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. Now, nearly every politician professes to support the idea of bipartisanship, and virtually, all of them believe it's a good thing, including President Obama, who talked a lot about it in his State of the Union address this past week and in a meeting with House Republicans on Friday. He said bipartisanship is what the voters expect.
President BARACK OBAMA: I don't think they want more gridlock. I don't think they want more partisanship. I don't think they want more obstruction.
RAZ: And that's actually true according to polls. Voters say they want lawmakers to work together. But does it result in better policy?
We begin the hour with a look at the word, its history and whether the atmosphere in Washington is truly more partisanship today than it's been in the past. Now, one member of Congress who laments the way business is done in Washington these days is Ohio Senator George Voinovich. He's a Republican who's retiring this year. And we sat down with him to ask why he believes things have become so divided.
Senator GEORGE VOINOVICH (Republican, Ohio): With Harry Reid in charge and Mitch McConnell, I think many people on the Republican side feel that not cooperating may be a political advantage in terms of electing more members of the Senate, and Majority Leader Reid's part may be that not cooperating may be, you know, helpful to them because they have to reach out to their base.
RAZ: You actually criticized your party's leader, Mitch McConnell - Senator McConnell - for opposing President Obama's plan to form a bipartisanship panel to work on cutting entitlement spending. And I want to read a quote from a speech you gave on the floor of the Senate. You said, if the public perceives that the Republican Party is playing political games and whose main goal in life is to see how many more Republicans we can get in the Senate and the House, then I think it's going to backfire.
Do you think you're in a minority opinion on this nowadays?
Sen. VOINOVICH: Well, I suspect that maybe I am. I think frankly that how we behave between now and November is going to have a great deal to do with whether or not we're going to be successful and I think if the American people think that the Republican Party is the party of no and that we're unwilling, you know, to work with the president - and we had a chance to pass a bipartisanship commission and it was the best.
In fact, I think the president was convinced it was the best thing to get the job done. Now, that failed. And so, now, the president's talking about creating an executive order that would create a commission. And several of my friends in the Senate have said, you know, I'm not going to participate in that. It's just going to be a cover. And, you know, my attitude is this, is that before you take that position, listen to what the president has.
And if it makes sense, you know, you had a chance to create your own commission and you decided that you didn't want to do it, I think you ought to give the president the opportunity to come back and say, here's what I'd like to do. And if it looks like it's a legitimate effort on his part, we should participate in it. And if we don't, I think it makes us really look like we don't really care about that.
RAZ: Hmm. Do you believe that President Obama is a partisan leader, or do you think that he is earnest in his desire to work with the other party?
Sen. VOINOVICH: I think that he now realizes more than ever before he needs to be working with the Republicans. The problem that we've got is we've got a lot of people in the Republican conference who frankly just don't want to cooperate.
RAZ: Hmm.
Sen. VOINOVICH: And I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi has got the same thing with her people.
RAZ: Senator Voinovich, you have been criticized in the past by right-wing bloggers for being insufficiently conservative because of some of the independent, more independent positions you've taken, for example, with respect to the Iraq War. How do you think these kinds of critiques influence the political environment in general?
Sen. VOINOVICH: I took on President Bush back in 2003 with Olympia Snowe when they wanted to reduce taxes by...
RAZ: Yes.
Sen. VOINOVICH: ...almost $1 trillion.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Sen. VOINOVICH: And then the House got it at 757. And Olympia and I held the fort. The president came into Ohio after that and kind of was critical of me and then - what do you call it - this Growth - Club for Growth started running ads against me and so forth. But you know what? If you do what you think is right and you explain why it is that you're doing what you're doing, then basically I think people respect you.
Now, one other problem that we've got is the issue of this new wave of - what is it - MSNBC and Fox, and I don't know who else out there that, you know, they really try to insight people to get them to build their audience so that, you know, if you come out with a new idea, you better be careful that MSNBC or Fox News doesn't define what that issue is, because before you know it, that's the way people feel about it. So...
RAZ: And that has played into the intensified partisanship?
Sen. VOINOVICH: I do think so, because what's happening is, is I see some of my colleagues, you know, playing into that. I was just talking to one of the Democrats the other day about it and I said, you know, the Senate has really changed since I've come here in 1999. And he said, well, I've been here for over 30 years, and he said it certainly isn't the place that it was when I came here. There was a lot more camaraderie, senators spent more time in Washington.
Today, senators have two or three committees. They run around so busy raising money and the rest of it that we don't have a chance to spend that much time together to get to know each other.
RAZ: That's George Voinovich. He's a Republican senator from Ohio and he's retiring at the end of this year after two terms.
Senator Voinovich, thank you so much.
Sen. VOINOVICH: Thank you very much, Guy.
RAZ: Now, Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat, has become a kind of lightning rod for critics on the right. He's an unabashed, unapologetic partisan. And he believes there's very little incentive in trying to find common ground anymore.
Representative ALAN GRAYSON (Democrat, Florida): I think it's futile. It's like asking somebody on a date 26 times. The answer is no. It's just not going to happen. And I think that particularly in the past 14 months, the term bipartisanship has been exploited by the Republicans in order to put a veil over the fact they're simply not cooperating.
RAZ: But how could you actually get things done without bipartisan participation, particularly now that Democrats don't have 60 votes in the Senate?
Rep. GRAYSON: Well, I think that's an illusion. I don't understand why anybody thinks that government grinds to a halt simply because we don't have 60 votes in the Senate. The Congress has existed now for 222 years. Do you know how many of those years there's been a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate? Any idea?
RAZ: Fourteen years.
Rep. GRAYSON: That's exactly right, 14 out of 222. And somehow, for the remaining 208 years, the government managed to function.
RAZ: Do you think that it is all the Republicans fault? I mean, couldn't there be a legitimate case to be made that Democrats have also played a role in this partisan divide?
Rep. GRAYSON: No. The president has held out his hand again and again to the Republicans and they spat on it. You cannot force someone to be bipartisan. The Republicans aren't interested. That's the fact of the matter. And now, it's time to move on. We have to move on because there's no other way to solve our problems.
RAZ: I mean, you say that there's no other way to solve the problems, but I mean - but what if the result is gridlock? I mean, how do you expect the voters in the United States to accept that? And surely, they would blame the Democrats for that.
Rep. GRAYSON: What do you mean surely? Are you a Republican?
RAZ: Well, I mean, the Democrats are in control of Congress. If nothing gets done, who's going to be held accountable?
Rep. GRAYSON: Well, I think that people are smart enough to see that the fundamental reason why nothing gets done is that the Republicans vote against everything, whether it's in the House or the Senate. I don't understand why the voters would think it's the Democrats fault.
RAZ: Well, the argument that Republicans, of course, are making is that they didn't have any input; they weren't given a seat at the table.
Rep. GRAYSON: I mean, you know, those are just - that's a slogan. That's a meaningless cliche. The president said over and over again, tell me what it is that you think that we should do; and they have no plan. If there were an alternative, the president would be open to it. He said that over and over again, and so would I.
RAZ: Well, there certainly seems to be bipartisan agreement that the other side is causing the problems.
Rep. GRAYSON: Well, I can imagine another system. I think that all of us have lived through other times in America when we didn't have a stubborn minority, determined to destroy the opportunity of Americans to move ahead. There was a tradition for many years among Republicans of rationality, and now even that seems to be slipping away.
They've all become devotees of Glenn Beck. And, you know, if their view of how to move the country forward is to implement some form of Hannity insanity, then I think that the people eventually will understand that that's not viable.
RAZ: That's Alan Grayson. He's a Democratic congressman from Florida.
Congressman Grayson, thank you so much.
Rep. GRAYSON: Than you, too.
RAZ: Now it turns out the whole idea of appealing to bipartisanship isn't really rooted in American political tradition.
Dr. SAM HASELBY (Historian, Harvard University): It started in the early '70s.
RAZ: that's Harvard historian Sam Haselby.
Dr. HASELBY: It was conservative Southern Democrats under the Nixon administration who were pro-Vietnam War and anti-Civil Rights, and they were looking for a way to represent those positions which were very unpopular in their party - in the Democratic Party at the time. And they started talking a lot about bipartisanship.
RAZ: And Richard Nixon adopted the idea. In his 1972 State of the Union address, Nixon used the word four times when he called on Congress to pass his agenda.
President RICHARD NIXON: ...which should and must be the subject of bipartisan action by this Congress, in the interest of the country in 1972.
RAZ: Sam Haselby says some of the biggest changes in American history: Social Security, Medicare, changes to the tax code, these were all pushed through in a partisan way. And even earlier...
Dr. HASELBY: The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were highly partisan measures, entirely partisan measures. The Republican Party passed these pieces of legislation without a single Democratic vote.
RAZ: And those amendments, of course, codified and ended slavery, created federal citizenship, and expanded voting rights.
But now, with health care overhaul teetering on the brink, can any part of it be saved without some bipartisan support? Some Democrats say yes, and they point they point to an obscure procedure known as reconciliation. It's a parliamentary move that cuts off debate and ends the filibuster. But as we will find out, it's not so easy and there are plenty of restrictions.
That's story coming up when the program continues.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
And this week, the president hoped to hit the reset button.
President BARACK OBAMA: Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio; Minority Leader): There are issues and items that we do agree upon. But when they're lumped together in a 2,000-page bills, typically what we find is a lot of things that we disagree with.
RAZ: House minority leader John Boehner; and, earlier, President Obama.
James Fallows joins me here in the studio for a look at the week that was.
And, Jim, thanks for trudging through the snow here in Washington today.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly): My pleasure. It's nice and brisk outside.
RAZ: And on your blog this week, Jim, you write that normally, State of the Union addresses are more like corporate annual reports than normal speeches. But you also wrote that you think this one, this past week, will actually be studied by historians closely.
Mr. FALLOWS: Well, sort of. I think State of the Union addresses usually have two impacts: one is in real times made on the main guaranteed audience the president has over TV in the course of a year, so he makes his case.
The other is, they're studied in budgetary terms, because usually you go through and you have one sentence about each department of the government. I think this one, its main effect was its consistency with other big speeches Obama has given in sort of resetting his situation, recovering from political setbacks and saying here's the way he would like to redefine whether it's the deficit argument, the partisanship argument, the health care argument or so on.
RAZ: Now, Jim, no matter what anyone might think about President Obama, it was still pretty remarkable to watch him address those House Republicans in Baltimore yesterday. He was basically going into enemy territory. Now, he took questions for 90 minutes, and it was all televised. I can't remember another example of a president doing this.
Mr. FALLOWS: Nor can I. And I think the closet counterpart is something that was not only not televised but secret for a long time, which were the transcriptions of Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls which were released a few years ago. And you could hear the same sort of playing the great organ of working on people, with emotional appeals and logical appeals and all the rest.
And, Obama, of course, was doing this in live TV with a national audience in his enemy's camp. And I think that in retrospect, I think it will be good for the nation if there are gonna be many more of these. I will be surprised if the Republican Party accepts many more of these invitations, because I think on net it was a more impressive performance for the president in trying to present his personality and his arguments than it was for the other side.
RAZ: I mean, even though presumably some of the House members there will try and use their confrontations with the president in their re-election campaigns.
Mr. FALLOWS: That's certainly so. And I think we saw in this session, this remarkable session, the built-in advantage any incumbent president always has; that he was the center of every discussion. Now, these people were asking questions from the twilight or not really on camera, he could be there calm and confidently sort of giving his answers. So it is a plus that any president has, and it is particular form that favors President Obama.
RAZ: Jim, turning on to a completely different topic. Last night, China announced that it's suspending some military exchanges with the United States because of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
This issue seems to come up every year or so, and then it seems to just blow over and pass on. Is it different this time?
Mr. FALLOWS: I think it is different in some ways. It comes up every year or every couple of years because when the U.S. normalizes relations with mainland China and changed them with Taiwan 30-plus years ago, it committed itself to a kind of ongoing arms relationship with the Taiwanese, which is a constant irritant in mainland China. And so every time this happens, there's complaint from the government in Beijing, which is barely noticed by most of the populace in the U.S. but a big deal in China.
This time it may be more because so many other things are sort of breaking in the direction of U.S./China friction right now. The Google case, of course, is only becoming more sort of embattled in China. There's issues about currency levels and trade imbalances and, of course, the Copenhagen agreements where China and the U.S. were in disagreement.
RAZ: And the U.S. is now saying it will reduce its CO2 emissions by some 17 percent over the next decade, part of this Copenhagen Accord that was discussed last month at the U.N. Climate Change Conference.
China, of course, is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases. What's the sense? Will China sign on to this?
Mr. FALLOWS: I think in the long term, it is necessary for China to be involved in this sort of agreement, because otherwise there really isn't any hope of coping with it. In the short term, I think we'll know in basically two days whether or not China is willing to match this U.S. announcement with something of its own, because that was the period after the Copenhagen talks when all the major parties were supposed to say, okay, what are you doing next?
If they don't do that, it means another sort of long slogging round ahead.
RAZ: What are the Chinese objections?
Mr. FALLOWS: The Chinese objections are essentially that, you know, you Western powers, for 200 years you've had a free run on polluting world. And any way, you're still much richer than we are so why should we - just beginning to develop with all these peasants and poor people, why should we make these sacrifices now? That's their case.
RAZ: And, Jim, one more thing before I let you go.
(Soundbite of applause and cheering)
Pres. OBAMA: Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.
RAZ: Every year, Jim, I should mention, you post an annotated version of the State of the Union address. And this year, you did, as well. I was hoping you could explain what it is about that line we just heard that drives you up the wall.
Mr. FALLOWS: What drives me up the wall is that before the era of Ronald Reagan, who changed America in ways both better and worse, presidents, when they ended an address on any topic, they had to end it with an actual ending. They had to complete their thought. They had to say what they wanted people to do or change their behavior or whatever.
Abraham Lincoln did that. You can check it out. George Washington did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Everybody did it until Ronald Reagan who began the practice of ending all of his addresses with: And God Bless the United States of America.
That's a fine sentiment. I agree with that myself. But as a way to end a speech has become the equivalent of a flag pin...
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. FALLOWS: ...that is on your lapel. That is you have to do it otherwise you're somehow not American. So I fruitlessly and vainly lament its appearance every time it comes up.
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can read his annotated State of the Union at jamesfallow.theatlantic.com.
Jim, thanks so much, and God bless America.
Mr. FALLOWS: And God bless us, every one.
GUY RAZ, host:
Reconciliation may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the relationship between Democrats and Republicans these days. But reconciliation, the congressional procedure, is very much on the minds of many Democrats. Having lost their filibuster-proof 60th vote in the Senate, some think reconciliation is the key to passing health care overhaul.
But what is reconciliation?
Sarah Binder is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And she's here to break it down for us.
Hi, Sarah.
Professor SARAH BINDER (Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings Institution): Hi, there.
RAZ: Let's start with the obvious question: Explain reconciliation.
Prof. BINDER: Okay. Reconciliation is one part of a much larger process by which Congress sets the budget for the federal government. When Congress passes a budget resolution at the beginning of the process, it sets targets: How much will we spend, how much will we take in? And when it sets those targets, if it turns out that Congress actually has to change the laws in order to meet those targets, you do that in reconciliation.
So let's say Congress says we want to spend less on Medicare. Well, the only way to do that is it pass a law that changes Medicare.
RAZ: And you don't need 60 votes in the Senate to do this. You just need a majority to get it passed.
Prof. BINDER: Well, the way the process was written in the 1970s is absolutely, they put a time limit on how much could be spent debating reconciliation. And almost by definition, that means you really can't filibuster it, you just need 51 votes.
RAZ: But originally, it was just meant to be a fine tuning mechanism to deal with issues of spending and taxation, right?
Prof. BINDER: Absolutely. Reconciliation wasn't anticipated to be a sort of vehicle for major policy change. It was anticipated to be this sort of cleanup mechanism.
RAZ: Hmm.
Prof. BINDER: But remember, it's also being created in 1974 when Congress is in the middle of a huge dispute, a constitutional dispute with President Nixon over spending. And in order to protect Congress' ability to legislate, they put the filibuster ban in there to make sure that its decisions go through quickly.
RAZ: So let's fast-forward now. How does this all relate to health care?
Prof. BINDER: Well, the possibility here is that reconciliation could be used because, of course, to change health care laws. We're talking about how taxes are raised to pay for health care. And we're talking about revenues to be saved by changing Medicare law. So the opportunity arises to use reconciliation to make those changes in laws affecting health care.
RAZ: Can they use reconciliation to push through the bill that the Senate has already agreed on?
Prof. BINDER: What's envisioned is a two-part process here. First, that the House would take up that Senate-passed bill and vote for it, approve it, and thus essentially get it ready for the president to sign. But then, at the same time, they would like the Senate - to go, going first - to pass a fix through reconciliation to take care of things like the Cadillac tax and other issues that they think are acceptable under reconciliation.
And then you'd have two bills ready for the president. He would sign the larger health care overhaul first and then sign the reconciliation fix into law.
RAZ: Has reconciliation ever been used to achieve major policy decisions?
Prof. BINDER: There have been 19 uses of reconciliation. And, in fact, major changes have occurred in them. We've seen welfare reform in the 1990s. We've seen tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. We've seen what we all call COBRA, right, changes that allow us to keep our health insurance when we leave a job. All those were done through reconciliation.
RAZ: So, do you think it's likely that Democrats will turn to reconciliation in the end to try and get health care passed?
Prof. BINDER: I think there a lot of steps and hurdles that have yet to be addressed here. Over the years, Congress, and the Senate in particular, have clamped down, or tried to clamp down, on the use of reconciliation for major policy changes, and they've done that through the creation of what's known as the Byrd rule, named for Senator Robert Byrd.
The Byrd rule says you can't put things into reconciliation if they don't affect spending revenues. And it's not quite clear that all of health care reform - say, banning insurance companies from imposing pre-existing condition limits - it's not clear that all of health care reform can actually fit under and be kosher under the reconciliation process.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Prof. BINDER: Why is that a problem to get rid of the Byrd rule? If someone says, whoop, you're violating the Byrd rule, it actually takes 60 votes to waive the Byrd rule. So it's not the great majoritarian solution that it's often made out to be, right? There are supermajority thresholds built into reconciliation.
RAZ: Sarah Binder is a congressional expert and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Sarah Binder, thanks so much for coming in.
Prof. BINDER: Thanks for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
Right now, thousands of people on YouTube are deciding what question they'd most like to ask President Obama. He'll answer a few of them Monday as part of a project called CitizenTube.
Now, so far, there have been questions about health care, the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A number of them want the president's views on UFOs and Scientology. But the most popular questions, by far, are about one thing.
Unidentified Man #1: Our country's failed prohibition on marijuana. When will you change these foolish and unjust laws so that the inevitable buyers of marijuana in the U.S. are contributing to a regulated system here at home and not terror along our border?
RAZ: This isn't the president's first YouTube Q&A. Here's how he handled the same topic last year.
President BARACK OBAMA: There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Pres. OBAMA: And I don't know what this says about the online audience.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: And he went on to conclude:
Pres. OBAMA: The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.
RAZ: Clay Johnson is the technology director at the Sunlight Foundation. He pushes for open government and integrating social media into politics.
Clay Johnson, welcome to the program.
Mr. CLAY JOHNSON (Technology Director, Sunlight Foundation): Hi there, Guy.
RAZ: Okay. So, can we infer that legalizing pot is the most important issue in America right now?
Mr. JOHNSON: Well, you know, if that was the case, then we probably have a lot of marijuana users going, dude, where's my polling place or something like that, because they certainly don't show up to vote.
RAZ: I got you. So before we could continue, I do want to play a few other questions that were submitted to President Obama.
Unidentified Man #2: How many turkey sandwiches can you eat in one day?
Unidentified Man #3: Would you support legislation for a national bedtime?
RAZ: Is this really an example of democratizing this process?
Mr. JOHNSON: Well, there's a couple of things you have to look at here. First off, you know, YouTube is the venue where people are asking these questions, which is the home of cat on a Roomba punching a pit bull in a sweater vest.
RAZ: I didn't see that one.
Mr. JOHNSON: Saying that this community is representative of American society at large is probably incorrect.
RAZ: So, what's the point of doing it on YouTube? Or why would the president say let's open YouTube up and I will take questions from anybody who wants to film themselves asking me a question?
Mr. JOHNSON: I think he gets to engage people directly in a one-on-one or a one-to-many kind of way outside of, you know, the news media so he can answer these questions directly to people that are asking him.
RAZ: But he could do that at a town hall meeting face-to-face.
Mr. JOHNSON: He could do that, but he can't do it to millions of people. You know, the number of people on YouTube far exceed the capacity of all of the stadiums in the United States of America combined. YouTube is probably the largest video site on the Internet...
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. JOHNSON: ...and the most appropriate venue for the president to go and answer these questions.
But it's important to remember that just because, you know, an organization or a group or a community is the most well-organized doesn't mean they're the most popular. So when you see, for instance, marijuana questions being the top question, it doesn't mean that they're the most popular amongst all of America. What it means is this is the most organized community...
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. JOHNSON: ...that's capable of getting their, you know, plus-one-ing their question.
RAZ: And when you plus-one-ing, that means you're voting for it.
Mr. JOHNSON: Yeah, you're up-voting it. What's really interesting is you can watch people organize to rig these questions, which isn't something that you can do, you know, with, say, lobbyists.
RAZ: And how can you see that?
Mr. JOHNSON: So you can go on like groups.google.com, right, and plug in CitizenTube, space, marijuana and you get a list of all of the mailing lists that Google indexes out there. And the discussions of people saying, hey, go plus one this question. And you can, in a really transparent way, watch people organize and see what's going on.
RAZ: Does this process actually distort the power of a small number of people, in a sense, kind of undermine the whole point of democratizing this whole thing?
Mr. JOHNSON: You get into a weird civics question here, right? Because does the fact that we have a House of Representatives rather than direct democracy where people are actually voting on bills also speak to that. You know, sometimes a popularity contest isn't the best answer.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. And we should mention that, I mean, these questions are filtered.
Mr. JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: Even if a question gets a lot of votes, it doesn't mean the president is going to answer it. So, what's the point of openly soliciting questions if the people behind this are going to select the questions anyway?
Mr. JOHNSON: Well, it's to get the really good ones. On one side of the spectrum, you have the president and his staff will make up both the questions and the answers that the president will answer. On the other side of the spectrum, you know, you let the people choose all of the questions that'll get asked and the president has to say, no, we're not going to legalize marijuana and, no, we don't have no evidence of UFOs and, yes, I have produced my birth certificate. Now, let's get to the real substantial questions that people have asked that maybe we didn't think of, right? It's called crowdsourcing.
RAZ: And did you video yourself or did you submit...
Mr. JOHNSON: No, I just submitted it in text. I have a face made for radio.
RAZ: Well, that's why we invited you here.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: That's Clay Johnson. He is the director of technology at the Sunlight Foundation.
Clay Johnson, thanks for coming in.
Mr. JOHNSON: Thank you very much, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, there is food available on the streets and in the markets of Port-au-Prince, but only to those who can afford it.
As NPR's David Schaper reports, that's led some aid groups to shift gears a bit and pay people for cleanup work so they can buy what they need to survive.
DAVID SCHAPER: I'm standing in an area called Rue Prolongee, just outside of Port-au-Prince. It's an area just devastated by the earthquake. The survivors here have set up a shantytown of sorts, where they've used sheets and blankets and boards and whatever they could find to create shelter.
The organization Oxfam has begun hiring some of these people, giving them brooms and shovels to help clean up the area. Not only does it make it more sanitary, but it also provides them with a little bit of income, when otherwise they have nothing.
Ms. LUNIDE FRANCILLON: (Foreign language spoken)
SCHAPER: Lunide Francillon is one of a handful of women sweeping up and shoveling trash and small pieces of debris into rusty wheelbarrows. She says she needs money badly. Francillon and her six children are left with next to nothing. With no job, she has no way to feed and clothe her family.
The situation for many like Francillon is increasingly desperate. Food aid comes inconsistently at best, and even when food is delivered, not everyone in camps like this is able to get something to eat. Francillon says she hopes to be paid for her work, but adds she would be doing this sweeping, cleaning and picking up anyway because it needs to be done. The encampment of improvised tents and shelters that is now home to close to 1,000 earthquake survivors in very tight quarters is becoming filthy and smelly.
Alex Yiannopoulos is emergency food security coordinator for the relief organization Oxfam. He says while the clean-up work sounds menial, it's quite important.
Mr. ALEX YIANNOPOULOS (Emergency Food Security Coordinator, Oxfam): There's a lot of waste products, rubbish, because people have nowhere to throw their rubbish; there's no one else taking that responsibility. It's basically to make sure the environment's clean to reduce disease risk.
SCHAPER: Proper waste disposal can help control rats, mice and insects, which often spread disease, and is critical to ensuring the long-term health and safety of earthquake survivors.
Yiannopoulos adds that paying the survivors to do this work puts money into their hands, empowering them to buy food when they want, rather than waiting for inconsistent deliveries, because he says there is food available at local outdoor markets; it's just that many people can't afford it, as food prices have soared since the quake.
Mr. YIANNOPOULOS: People are getting what we call minimum wage here, which is about three to $5. So that's enough to feed a family for the day and have a bit of money on the side.
SCHAPER: That small daily wage is also enough, Yiannopoulos says, to help kick-start a moribund local economy, as even before the earthquake, he says the unemployment rate in this neighborhood was around 80 percent.
Mr. YIANNOPOULOS: We're not only looking at the now and present. We're also looking at four years down the road and further. So these activities have to be linked into our longer-term effort. And we're trying to be very creative about making sure there's an overlap between our immediate response and our more longer-term programs.
SCHAPER: Yiannopoulos says the organization wants to make sure that people have jobs, incomes and a more sustainable future.
Mr. YIANNOPOULOS: People have more priority than food. You have to look at water, you have to look at shelter, and you have to look at the basic hygiene conditions and ensuring that people have a life that is - with dignity.
SCHAPER: Only 100 or so earthquake survivors were hired in this cash-for-work program initially, but Yiannopoulos says with the help of local partners, the program is adding more people every day. In the days and weeks ahead, he says Oxfam hopes to eventually support 5,000 workers in and around the Haitian capital, and other relief organizations are launching similar cash-for-work programs as well.
David Schaper, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
GUY RAZ, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Most of the big banks that receive TARP money, the money the government set aside to help rescue them from collapse, have now repaid that investment. But many taxpayers, the people who provided that cash, are still asking questions: Why is it so hard to get a loan? And why isn't my bank willing to refinance my mortgage? Or why are those same banks now handing out huge bonuses?
Well, Michael Parisi, a graphic artist in Santa Cruz, California, was asking himself those very same questions. He'd been trying to refinance his home loan with one of the big banks, but every time he managed to get on the phone with a real person, he says, he had to start from scratch.
Mr. MICHAEL PARISI (Graphic Artist): It's been this like, comedy of errors, essentially. You know, one person doesn't know how to communicate with another person, and I am just a number lost in this sea of numbers, and you know, I've gotten very, very frustrated. And I just decided that, you know, this is absolutely ridiculous, and I moved my accounts to a local credit union, a nonprofit credit union, Bay Federal here in Santa Cruz, and started a loan application with them - which, by the way, would be finished in three weeks.
That's the kind of efficiency that the local banks have that these large, corporate banks do not have. It's a locally owned business. So you feel like you're talking to people in your community. You don't feel like you're talking to someone who's sort of filtered through some corporate monstrosity that really does not have your best interests in mind. You're actually talking to people who care about you and your - and the community at large. It's pretty amazing.
RAZ: Michael Parisi was inspired to put his money in a local bank, in part, by a campaign called Move Your Money. It was started by liberal blogger Arianna Huffington, and she's encouraging people who hold accounts in one of the big banks to move that money to a smaller, community bank, a bank that wasn't involved in buying toxic, subprime mortgages or taking unnecessary risks.
And she even commissioned a short film that uses choice clips from the movie "It's A Wonderful Life" as a kind of metaphor, with George Bailey as the local banker standing up to the big, corporate interests.
(Soundbite of movie, "It's A Wonderful Life")
Mr. JAMES STEWART (Actor): (As George Bailey) This rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.
RAZ: We stopped into the Independence Federal Savings Bank here in Washington, D.C., the other day. There are just four branches of this bank, and the day we came in, a pleasant smell wafted through the lobby.
Mr. BOB ISARD (President, Independence Federal Savings Bank): On Friday afternoons, we have our popcorn machine running.
RAZ: That's bank president Bob Isard. He says he likes to get to know as many of his customers personally as he can.
Mr. ISARD: We are there when people walk in. When you called to speak to me today, you got me on the phone. I don't think you would get the president of one of the top 10 banks in the country, if you tried to.
RAZ: Isard worked for big banks in the past, but he says there's something different about being at a community institution.
Mr. ISARD: The local bank in that town cares because having a playhouse, a movie theater, entertainment, restaurants - all those things are the lifeblood of business for that community. And when you start draining all those things away, the bank dies, too.
RAZ: In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama pledged to give smaller banks, like Independence, $30 billion - money he hopes that could be used to extend more credit to small businesses.
Simon Johnson was once the chief economist at the IMF. He's now a professor at MIT, and he says that shifting money from big banks to small ones actually makes good economic sense.
Professor SIMON JOHNSON (Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology): The smaller community banks and credit unions, I would emphasize, often offer a better deal, a better deal, more fair treatment on credit cards, better terms on your checking account, for example. And a lot of people have not really thought about that.
The big banks, the mega banks in our economy - the Citigroups, Bank of America and so on - have done really bad things to all of us through their misbehavior, and through their continued political lobbying that's preventing sensible financial reform. So moving your money is good for the individual person, and it's good from the point of view of the financial system.
RAZ: But why punish the banks if they have almost all paid back what was essentially an investment by the federal government?
Prof. JOHNSON: Well, it's not about punishment, Guy. It's just about responsibility. It's about people looking forward and saying, you know, how comfortable am I with the largest six banks in this economy now having total assets - which, of course, come from their liabilities, which is the money they get from us - total assets over 60 percent of the size of our economy, 60 percent of GDP?
That's a big banking system that's more concentrated than in the past. The same six banks back in the 1990s were less than 20 percent of GDP, measured on a comparable basis. How comfortable is anyone listening with the fact that these banks are becoming bigger - they're obviously extremely arrogant, they've behaved in a reckless manner before, and now the president himself is telling us that they need to be reined in.
RAZ: Simon Johnson, you're an economist, and I'm wondering about the economics of this campaign. I mean, you know, yeah, sure, there's populist appeal. Many Americans are angry about the bank bailouts. But if we all put - or most of us put our money in community banks and let the big banks collapse, wouldn't we, the American consumer, feel those consequences?
Prof. JOHNSON: Well, the big banks are not going to collapse. They've been underwritten by the U.S. government, essentially, and that's actually part of our problem.
They are, you know, so-called too big to fail - meaning when they get themselves into trouble, they get massive bailouts. And what you want to do is really, move the balance of the financial system, move the money away from those banks in a somewhat gradual and responsible manner.
RAZ: How would the big banks know if customers were actually moving their money because of this campaign?
Prof. JOHNSON: Well, one thing is customers tell them. A lot of times, you have an exit interview, and you go in to close the account, and at least anecdotally, we know a lot of people are telling their banks exactly why they're moving. It's not clear the banks care at this point, but I think they will wake up to this sooner or later.
RAZ: That's Simon Johnson. He's an economist and author of the upcoming book "13 Bankers." It's about the American financial system.
Simon Johnson, thanks for joining us.
Prof. JOHNSON: Thanks very much.
RAZ: Now, before you go rushing out to open an account at your community bank or credit union, you might want to consider what Bert Ely has to say about all this. He's a banking consultant based out of Alexandria, Virginia, and he says there could be hidden costs to making that move.
Mr. BERT ELY (President, Ely & Company, Inc.): You know, first of all, they may be sacrificing convenience, service and price. But it's not that I oppose this. I just think the whole idea is ludicrous.
If people, for whatever reason, want to move their banking business from a large bank to a small bank, you know, that's their right. But this notion of punishing the big banks in this way, I think, is simply ludicrous.
First of all, it's not clear to me what benefit is gained from it. I don't think the big banks are going to suffer enormous losses of customers on this. In fact, they probably won't even notice it because there's a constant turnover of accounts in banks of all sizes.
RAZ: The president, in his State of the Union address, pledged $30 billion for smaller, community banks. How much of an impact will it have?
Mr. ELY: Well, this would be $30 billion of so-called TARP monies that would be invested in the small banks. And first of all, many of these small banks do not want to take that investment. I've ever since this program's been around have counseled banks not to take the money unless they absolutely need it.
RAZ: Why not?
Mr. ELY: Because of the strings attached to it. And a lot of bankers have found out that these strings are just not worth the price.
But the other thing that's important to keep in mind is that most small banks in this country are adequately capitalized. They have ample funds to lend. The challenge they find is finding good, credit-worthy borrowers. That's why I don't think this particular program is going to have any meaningful impact at all.
RAZ: If for the average consumer, doing this - moving their money from a big bank to a small bank - is just a psychological victory, what's wrong with it?
Mr. ELY: Well, you know, nothing. You know, there's nothing wrong for it. I mean, this is a free country. People ought to be able to bank wherever they want. I might add that I bank in a community bank that I'm perfectly happy to deal with.
I question, number one, how many people will do it; number two, to what extent we can even measure it; and third, I would question the wisdom of it if someone will end up not being as well-served by their bank as they are with a large bank.
If I could give an example on that: In many large, metropolitan areas, if a family is kind of scattered in terms of where they live is some distance from where they work and where kids go to school, they may actually be better served by one of the large banks that, for instance, has ATMs that these folks can access without charge in all the different places. A community bank, by necessity, is smaller. It doesn't serve a large geographical area.
RAZ: So let's take a hypothetical example. Say 50 percent of individual account holders move their money from the largest banks into the community banks. Would there be any kind of overall economic impact?
Mr. ELY: First of all, if they lost 50 percent of their individual, family customers, it would have a huge impact on those banks. What we would see would be a tremendous shift of business from larger banks to smaller banks. Quite frankly from the standpoint of the economy, there would be a lot of cost if there was a shift of that great a percentage.
RAZ: But how would that affect an individual consumer? I mean, you say there are costs that might be associated with it. What kind of costs?
Mr. ELY: Well, the costs would be to the - first of all, to the large banks as they downsize their operations. For smaller banks, there would be a lot of costs and investments required to upsize their operations, and those costs would ultimately get passed through to consumers.
RAZ: So in essence, what you're saying is that you would just have a reversal of the situation, where community banks would then become the big banks.
Mr. ELY: Well, they would certainly become bigger banks. And I think that one of the concerns that always comes up with a community bank - and that is it will get to be too big a bank and as it grows, lose its association with its community and, quite frankly, become very bureaucratic.
RAZ: Bert Ely is a banking consultant in Alexandria, Virginia. Bert Ely, thank you so much for coming in.
Mr. ELY: Thank you for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Ten Americans will appear in a Haitian courtroom tomorrow. They were arrested over the weekend and accused of trying to take almost three dozen children from the quake-stricken country across the border into the Dominican Republic.
NPR's Mandalit del Barco is with us from Port-au-Prince.
Mandalit, who are those Americans, and what did they allegedly do?
MANDALIT DEL BARCO: Well, you know, I was at the judicial police station in Port-au-Prince, where the Americans are being held. I was there today. And apparently, they came to Haiti from a charity based in Idaho called New Life Children's Refuge, and their mission was to try to rescue abandoned and traumatized children.
So they came here and picked up 33 kids from two months to 12 years old from an orphanage that had collapsed during the earthquake. They were headed in a bus into the Dominican Republic, where they wanted to take them to another orphanage, when the police stopped them.
Now, a spokeswoman from the Minister of Culture told me border police asked them to see identification papers for the children, but they didn't have them, and that's when they arrested them on charges of child trafficking.
One of the women from the group, Laura Silsby, said they had the best intentions, and she talked to reporters last night.
Ms. LAURA SILSBY (New Life Children's Refuge): The entire team deeply fell in love with these kids that have lost their homes and their families. We were told by a number of people, including Dominican authorities, that we would be able to bring the children across. The mistake obviously we made is we did not understand that there was additional paperwork required.
DEL BARCO: Now, government officials here say they thought the church members may have been part of an illegal adoption scheme. In fact, there is such a fear that children will be sold illegally, that the prime minister is now required to personally authorize any children who are leaving the country.
RAZ: Mandalit, bring us up to date on the relief efforts there. Are there still problems with food distribution?
DEL BARCO: Well, up to now, food distribution, like a lot of things here, has been rather chaotic. But today, the relief groups tried a new approach. They handed out color-coded coupons so each family could get 55-pound bags of rice. And the idea was that the rice would be given to the most needy in 16 parts of the city, mostly to women to avoid trouble.
There are U.N. and U.S. military patrols out at these sites. But as it turns out, only nine of the sites opened today. Some of them were thought to be too dangerous, and word didn't get out to everybody in need. So when the food ran out - that is 160,000 bags - a lot of people were, apparently, upset. And our reporters say it did get a bit heated in some parts of the city.
Now, the goal is to feed two million people in the next two weeks, though some of them had other food sources. But there are still a lot of hungry people here in Port-au-Prince, Guy.
RAZ: That's NPR's Mandalit del Barco from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Mandalit, thanks so much.
DEL BARCO: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan produce hundreds of tons of trash every day. And much of that waste is disposed using open-air burn pits. They're massive holes where the garbage is dumped in and set on fire.
Now, there are about 80 of them still in operation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and these burn pits produce plumes of smoke that can be inhaled by troops living as far as a mile away.
Now, in the past few years, more and more service members who were exposed to that smoke have started to report respiratory ailments and other health problems. And it's serious enough that the Pentagon, which originally dismissed those ailments as unrelated, is now re-examining the issue.
Kelly Kennedy has been covering the story for Military Times, and she joins me in the studio now.
Welcome.
Ms. KELLY KENNEDY (Reporter, Military Times): Thank you.
RAZ: Tell us about these burn pits and actually specifically the one at Balad Airbase in central Iraq. What kinds of things were being burned there?
Ms. KENNEDY: The burn pit at Balad was about 10 acres wide. People said they saw things from batteries to unexploded ordinance to just the daily operations of the mess hall. There was tons of cooking oil and Styrofoam, plastic and, you know, the plastic utensils and that sort of thing. So...
RAZ: And actually, human limbs, body parts were being burned there.
Ms. KENNEDY: Right. Their medical incinerators would go out, and they would put amputated body parts from Iraqis or other civilians, not from the troops, in the burn pits.
RAZ: And I should mention this pit was actually closed in October and replaced with something else.
Ms. KENNEDY: With three incinerators.
RAZ: Is there less pollution as a result of using incinerators?
Ms. KENNEDY: There is. When they burn things at a higher temperature, it doesn't give off as many toxins. And then the incinerators cost millions and millions of dollars. So that's it's a cost issue for sure.
RAZ: When did people start coming forward?
Ms. KENNEDY: Well, I actually got some documents send by a whistleblower out of Iraq in the fall of 2008, and we wrote a story, saying, you know, we know in the United States, we don't use burn pits because they're bad for your health.
And as soon as we wrote that first story, we had 100 people come forward within the first week, to Disabled American Veterans and to Military Times, saying we're sick.
RAZ: What were they saying? What did they have?
Ms. KENNEDY: They were having respiratory problems. They were being diagnosed with allergy-like symptoms, but not necessarily allergies, asthma. They were having problems passing their PT tests. They couldn't take enough...
RAZ: This is the physical fitness test.
Ms. KENNEDY: Right, they're failing the run portion. And within probably a month, we had 400 people saying that they were sick. And now, the number is up to more than 500.
RAZ: Have you received any angry reaction or response from the military basically saying, you know, you are giving a voice to people who had prior conditions?
Ms. KENNEDY: I wouldn't say angry. I wouldn't say that I've heard over and over and over again that this group of people may have had pre-existing conditions. And the problem with that is if the military calls it a pre-existing condition, they don't have to pay for disability benefits.
But I mean, a lot of these guys are coming back with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which are things that they were screened for before they joined the military. So I'm not really sure how they could be pre-existing conditions.
RAZ: How many troops do you estimate were potentially exposed to this smoke at the Balad Airbase?
Ms. KENNEDY: Tens of thousands. There are 30,000 people there at any given time.
RAZ: Now, in recent weeks, the Pentagon has sort of acknowledged that this could potentially be a problem and has started to re-examine this issue. What specifically are they doing?
Ms. KENNEDY: They're talking about doing more air samples. They're talking about doing case studies with the troops, so bringing in the guys who say they're sick. I think in this case, you've got President Obama saying we're not going to let this become another Agent Orange. You've got Congress calling for measures to be taken. You've got General Shinseki at the VA saying we're going to take care of these guys. I think there's enough people paying attention and demanding help that it's going to be taken care of.
RAZ: Kelly Kennedy writes for the Military Times, and she's been reporting about the effects of burn pits on troops who've served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kelly Kennedy, thanks for joining us.
Ms. KENNEDY: Thank you for having me.
RAZ: We called the Pentagon for comment on this story, and a spokesman confirmed that a number of troops exposed to burn-pit smoke have reported, quote, "acute health effects like irritated eyes and respiratory problems."
The spokesman said the longer-term health impact is still unclear, and the military is conducting additional studies.
GUY RAZ, host:
To Nigeria now, where religious violence has erupted again between Christians and Muslims in the central city of Jos. Human rights monitors say several hundred people were killed in just a few days this month. That brings the death toll in that city to 2,500 over the past decade.
NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton visited Jos and sent this story.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON: Jos, the capital of Plateau State, lies at the heart of Nigeria, where the mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south meet in Africa's most populous nation. This cosmopolitan, yet volatile, city has come to represent both aspirations and conflicts in a mosaic of a country that is home to hundreds of ethnic groups, cultures and religions.
Mr. SHE JOSAMI(ph) (Human Rights Congress): What we have seen in Jos is indescribable. It is a tragedy.
QUIST-ARCTON: Four hundred-plus victims in four days of fighting and counting, say rights campaigners like She Josami. He heads Nigeria's northern-based Human Rights Congress, and was in Jos to document the latest outbreak of violence.
Mr. JOSAMI: It was a clash of Muslims and Christians. It was a killing field. It was madness. It was the breakdown of law and order.
QUIST-ARCTON: Josami's own in-laws were among the victims. He said his wife's mother, father and 18-year-old sister were smoked out of their home, trapped and burned alive.
Mr. JOSAMI: People came out en masse, confronting each other and killing each other using such primitive weapons like knives, cutlasses, axes, sickles, sticks, bows and arrows.
QUIST-ARCTON: Last week, reports emerged of scores of charred corpses being dumped in wells and sewage pits in a majority Muslim village on the outskirts of Jos.
While down below, scores of displaced people are milling around the compound, housing the central mosque in Jos. Here, upstairs, this classroom has been transformed into a temporary hospital ward. It's full of Muslim women and children who survived attacks with varying degrees of wound inflicted, the women say, by Christians.
Can you tell me your name first, please?
Ms. JAMILA GEBRUM(ph): Jamila Gebrum.
QUIST-ARCTON: Describe and explain what happened to you, please, Jamila.
Ms. GEBRUM: (Through translator) The people told them there would be no problem. And the pastor in the area was telling them that there were no problem, they should just stay calm. But when they were attacked, a 5 months old baby was killed in the process.
QUIST-ARCTON: Dr. Salisu Arafat(ph) is helping to treat the wounded.
Dr. SALISU ARAFAT: Weve had so many different kinds of patients, mainly with gunshot injuries. Most of the government hospitals in the areas, they are not accessible to us, the Muslims. So a lot of patients had nowhere to go.
QUIST-ARCTON: Across town, in a government hospital, Christian survivors describe their ordeals, they said, at the hands of Muslims. Lying on a mattress on the floor, Zacharia Dungumaroji(ph) writhed in pain as he turned to show us the entry point of a bullet through his stomach and out the back.
Mr. ZACHARIA DUNGUMAROJI: A woman saw me, and she pitied me. And she called people to come and help me. When you see my blood was rushing like a cow. So I was shouting Jesus, Jesus, God, come and help me. We stayed together with them, the Muslims, but when this thing happened, they turned their backs against us.
QUIST-ARCTON: The director of the League for Human Rights in Jos, Shamaki Gad Peter, blames Nigerian politicians for the recurring violence in the city. It's little more than a year since the last outbreak of fighting. Yet, Shamaki said, despite the creation of government-sponsored committees to investigate the problems after the November, 2008, clashes, the authorities have failed to address deep-seated grievances. These pit the original Jos residents, known as indigenes, against settlers who've lived in Nigeria's Plateau State capital for many, many years.
Mr. SHAMAKI GAD PETER (Jos Director, League for Human Rights): (Through translator) People say that look, I've invested so much in this land, you need to identify me as an indigene of this place. We have the issue of politics, the issue of poverty, the issue of land. And we have jobless youth in our society that when you give them a little money, and you instigate them, they are willing to do anything.
QUIST-ARCTON: The Nigerian government ordered troops into Jos to take over security and keep the fragile peace, but campaigners warn that once the military leaves town, unless the perpetrators of the violence are prosecuted and punished, there will be a repeat of the fighting: today, tomorrow or next year.
Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Jos, north-central Nigeria.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
When Alice Eve Cohen was 44, she rushed to the hospital for an emergency CAT scan. Her belly was swollen, and doctors thought it might be an abdominal tumor, a big one. The radiologist frowned at the images.
Ms. ALICE EVE COHEN (Author, "What I Thought I Knew"): (Reading) We did find something in you, Mrs. Cohen. You did? We found a baby. What? We found a baby. What? We found a baby in you. Congratulations, Mrs. Cohen.
RAZ: That's the playwright and actress Alice Eve Cohen, reading from her memoir, "What I Thought I knew." Until that moment, what she thought she knew was that she could never, ever get pregnant.
Alice Eve Cohen joins us from our New York bureau. Welcome to the program.
Ms. COHEN: Thanks, I'm delighted to be here.
RAZ: You were told you could never conceive a child. Why?
Ms. COHEN: Well, when I was 30 years old, I actually wanted to become pregnant, but my period had stopped, and I knew that I had been affected by being a DES daughter. My mother had taken diethylstilbestrol when she was pregnant with me.
RAZ: Which is a synthetic estrogen.
Ms. COHEN: Exactly. And as a result, I had a deformed uterus. And I - we went to a fertility specialist who said, well, first of all, you're never going to get pregnant on your own because your estrogen is so low. In fact, I'm going to put you on estrogen replacement therapy at this young age of 30. And secondly, you should never, ever attempt through fertility treatments to become pregnant because the outcome would be terrible. There's no way with your small, deformed uterus that you could possibly carry a baby to term. So it would be dangerous for you and the baby. So I recommend adoption. And I did, in fact, go that route - and adopted a daughter.
RAZ: So, Alice Eve Cohen, you suddenly find out you're six months' pregnant. You're 44 years old. On top of that, you had been taking hormones for your condition through the six months of the pregnancy so far, and the doctors were concerned that there might be some complications.
You're in the hospital, and you're looking at the sonogram, and what do you see?
Ms. COHEN: The doctor explained that based on what he saw on the sonogram, the baby was male. But we got a call a couple of days later from the doctor, who said, well, it appears that the baby is genetically female and anatomically male, which meant that he anticipated the baby would have ambiguous genitalia.
That, in turn, indicated that the baby might have something called chronic adrenal hyperplasia, which is a potentially fatal enzyme disorder. So I imagined a terrible outcome, a terrible scenario, and it was unimaginably painful and frightening.
RAZ: And you even considered abortion at a certain point.
Ms. COHEN: I did. The only option that was open to me at the time was a late-term abortion in Wichita, Kansas, with the late George Tiller.
RAZ: The doctor who was murdered.
Ms. COHEN: Yes. And in that terrifying time when I was feeling hopeless about my future and the baby's future and really could see no way out - in fact was feeling suicidal when I was trying to assimilate all of this information - being given that choice saved my life. And it enabled me to choose to have the baby.
RAZ: And I mean, you were worried. I mean, one of the side effects of the DES that your mother had taken when she was pregnant with you was that there was a pretty significant possibility that you would give birth early, very early.
Ms. COHEN: Yes, in fact, you know, way back at the age of 30, when the fertility doctor examined me, he said: You wouldn't be able to carry a baby past six months.
Well, I found out I was six months' pregnant, you know, liable to give birth any moment and therefore, was exceptionally careful not to - well, really not to move.
You know, I tried to stay as still as possible for the remaining three months to protect the pregnancy. And in fact, I did have a full-term birth.
RAZ: Alice Eve Cohen, you had minimal amount of health insurance when you were going through this process. What did you learn about the health-care industry in our country during that time?
Ms. COHEN: I found it well, in retrospect, I find it almost comical how many errors, how many omissions there were, how inadequate my health insurance was. At the time, it wasn't remotely comical.
My insurance company refused to cover any high-risk obstetric care because none of my odd series of problems fit into their customary categories. So I paid for every bit of obstetric care out of pocket, going into tremendous debt. And I think that the way I was shafted by my insurance company is probably very typical of how many Americans feel.
RAZ: Shortly after you turned 45, you actually gave birth. And I mean, all of these fears had been building up at that point: the gender ambiguity, the dying in childbirth, the child not surviving. What happened?
Ms. COHEN: Well, you know, the title of the book is "What I Thought I Knew," and at that moment in the book, I thought I knew that the baby would be born with genital ambiguity. And in fact, it seems that it was either a misreading of the sonogram, or it might have been a temporary genital enlargement because of the hormones that I was taking.
I didn't anticipate what really was happening, which was that my daughter was born with a growth disorder, and one leg was shorter than the other - which was, at that time, an undiagnosable mystery.
RAZ: And how is your daughter today?
Ms. COHEN: My daughter is fantastic. She just had her 10th birthday. She's super smart. She's got a fantastic sense of humor. And she is a wonderful fiction writer.
RAZ: And her condition has been - improved?
Ms. COHEN: She had a leg-lengthening surgery last year, which was just the most difficult, painful, long procedure. And I don't wish it on anyone, but it did lengthen her leg. And we've been giving a series of sighs of relief as she outgrows some of the earlier challenges.
RAZ: Has she read the book? I mean - and if she has, what does she make of your talk of abortion or even the fact that, eventually, you brought a wrongful life suit against the doctor who initially misdiagnosed you?
Ms. COHEN: I'm delighted you asked that question. It was something that my husband and I were very worried about before the book was published. You know, we don't generally believe in censorship, but we were ready to hide the book, send her away to sleep-away camp when the book came out and, you know, pretend nothing had happened.
But she's too smart for that. So the one condition we gave her was: You have to read it when mommy or daddy is in the room because we know you're going to have a lot of questions.
So she read the book, and she said: Good book, Mom. I really liked it. And I said, I'm so glad, but I have to say, Daddy and I were really worried that you'd be upset by the book. Did it upset you at all? And she said nope, because I knew exactly how everything was going to turn out.
RAZ: That's Alice Eve Cohen. She's a playwright and theater artist. The story of her unexpected pregnancy is called "What I Thought I Knew."
Alice Eve Cohen, thank you so much.
Ms. COHEN: Thank you.
(Soundbite of song, "Chabiba")
TINARIWEN (Music Group): (Singing in foreign language).
GUY RAZ, host:
We're hearing the music of the desert, actually the Sahara, and the sounds of Tinariwen, a band of nomads, former rebels turned rockers, who released a new record called "Imidiwan." It's one of the tracks Betto Arcos is spinning on his world music program "Global Village" on KPFK in Los Angeles.
And Betto is here once again to share some of the new music he's found. Betto, good to have you back.
Mr. BETTO ARCOS (Host, "Global Village"): Great to be with you, Guy.
RAZ: You brought several new pieces from African artists, mostly from Mali in the southern Sahara region. And I want to start by asking about this song we're hearing by Tinariwen. It's called "Chabiba."
Mr. ARCOS: This is a group of Tuareg musicians. They call themselves Kel Tamashek, specifically. That's their ethnic group. And they sing in Tamashek, that's their language. They're former nomads. They live around the borders of Libya, Algeria, Mali and Niger.
This is a song about their landing for their homeland, their family, their friends and the rebels who fought like them for their freedom.
(Soundbite of song, "Chabiba")
TINARIWEN: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: And I guess you should explain a little bit of the background of the rebellion.
Mr. ARCOS: They were fighting against the government of Mali because they felt oppressed. They felt they weren't able to travel from village to village and crossing the borders. And the Malian government wasn't exactly happy with this, but then there were peace accords. And after the rebellion, they decided it's time to give up their arms and continue with their music.
(Soundbite of song, "Chabiba")
TINARIWEN: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: The song is called "Chabiba" by the band Tinariwen.
Betto, we're staying in the region, and you bring a new piece from an artist who's just pretty well known here in the U.S., Ali Farka Toure.
(Soundbite of song, "Sabu Yerkoy")
Mr. ARCOS: I think a lot of people remember Ali Farka Toure from the work that he did with Ry Cooder...
RAZ: Ry Cooder, yeah.
Mr. ARCOS: ...back in the early '90s.
RAZ: "Talking Timbuktu," correct?
Mr. ARCOS: Correct, that beautiful album. Ali Farka Toure has had a long history of music in Mali, and this record is a kind of retrospective of some of the music that he started playing back in the early '60s, including this particular tune, which is kind of an anthem to the independence of Mali, which happened in 1960.
Interestingly, this song is not a traditional Malian song from the North, where he's from, from the village of Niafunke, in the area of Timbuktu, but it's actually a song influenced by Cuban music, and the Cuban aspect of it you hear very clearly in the melody line. There's even a reference, perhaps, to a Cuban tune. And not only that, they asked Cachaito Lopez, the great Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, the bassist who played with many musicians in Cuba, and also famous for the Buena Vista Social Club, to join in on bass.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: It's such a beautiful piece of music and so easy to listen to, you know? When was this recorded?
Mr. ARCOS: This was recorded about a year or so before Ali Farka Toure passed away.
RAZ: He died in 2006.
Mr. ARCOS: Yes.
RAZ: And it was just released now.
Mr. ARCOS: This is actually coming out in a couple weeks. So you are hearing a very special advance of this beautiful music.
RAZ: The track is called "Sabu Yerkoy." It's from the forthcoming record "Ali and Toumani" by the late Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate.
(Soundbite of song, "Ligdi")
RAZ: Betto, this next piece takes traditional music from Burkina Faso with a sort of a dance spin to it.
Mr. ARCOS: Yeah. You're probably going to say what a contrast to go through this electronica, and I'll be the first one to tell you, I'm not a fan of electronica. But when I heard this music, I said wait a minute, wait a minute, I love this stuff.
(Soundbite of song, "Ligdi")
BURKINA ELECTRIC (Music Group): (Singing in foreign language)
Mr. ARCOS: We have a composer-percussionist from New York, Lukas Ligeti, son of the great composer George Ligeti, working with an electronica artist from Dusseldorf, Germany. And they work in collaboration, okay? They're all co-composers of this music, working in collaboration with musicians from Burkina Faso. The guitarist is out of this world. I mean, this guy, oh, when I heard the solos that he had on this record, I said wow, where is he from? I want to meet him.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. ARCOS: Lukas Ligeti and the musicians, what they've done is they've actually spent time in villages, listening to music, absorbing the sounds, the ooze from the streets, from the markets, and learn how to play the rhythms of Burkina Faso. And they put on a show.
I mean, I haven't seen them yet, but I'm told that two of the other members are dancers. So they dance to this music. So they get the audience going. And it's supposed to be really an amazing show.
RAZ: Wow. The track is called "Ligdi." It's off the debut album by the band "Burkina Electric."
(Soundbite of song, "Mbube")
Ms. ANGELIQUE KIDJO (Singer): (Singing in foreign language).
RAZ: Finally, Betto, you've been talking about this last piece we're hearing for weeks now. It's called "Mbube" by Angelique Kidjo.
Mr. ARCOS: If you hear the background vocals of this song, you might be able to recognize a very, very famous song from South Africa that was recorded in the early '50s by none other than the great Pete Seeger. It's a song that he titled "Wimoweh."
(Soundbite of song, "Mbube")
Ms. KIDJO: (Singing in foreign language).
RAZ: Yeah, when I heard that, it just it blew me away. I mean, a completely different version of that song that we're used to hearing.
Mr. ARCOS: This song was initially recorded by Solomon Linda with a group that was called The Evening Birds in South Africa. The record made it to the U.S. through Decca Records. Alan Lomax got a copy of it, gave it to Pete Seeger. He recorded it, loved it. Then Miriam Makeba, the great South African singer who passed away a couple of years ago, also recorded it with Harry Belafonte Folk Singers and the Chad Mitchell Trio. And then, of course, I came to hear it, growing up in Mexico in the early '60s, with a version by The Tokens, which called it yes, you remember, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: The track is "Mbube." It's by Angelique Kidjo. And it's one of the songs Betto Arcos has been spinning on his radio show "Global Village" on KPFK in Los Angeles.
Betto, thanks so much for coming in and sharing some of your favorites with us.
Mr. ARCOS: Oh, I always love doing this. Thank you for having me.
(Soundbite of song, "Mbube")
Ms. KIDJO: (Singing in foreign language).
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Thanks for listening, and have a great week.