¡Basta Ya! ¡No Mas!

May the Lord have mercy on the soul of George Walker Bush. I challenge anyone to read—without weeping—these last letters home from some of the 75 Texans who have died in Iraq. W is a butcher and all of them—W and the war criminals in his administration—deserve to burn in Hell. Anyone who can read through all of these letters without weeping has a cold, stone heart. And the flag-covered caskets keep arriving in Dover while W is on vacation and running about the country on his fool's errand. If this is (fair & balanced) sedition, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
In Their Own Words
Read passages from letters written by Texas soldiers who died in Iraq.

For the feature article "Letters Home," we photographed correspondence written by Texans who died in Iraq. Because we could not include all the letters we received from soldiers' families in the pages of the magazine, the text of some additional letters appears below. We have not corrected spelling or grammar; instead, the letters appear exactly as they were written.

As of July 2004, 75 Texans had died in Iraq.

First Lieutenant Doyle Hufstedler III, 25, Abilene

To his wife, Leslie, who was expecting their first child. Hufstedler was killed on March 31, 2004, when an improvised explosive device hit his armored personnel carrier in Habbaniyah. Leslie gave birth to their daughter, Grace, in May.

27 Nov 2003

Love Bug,

. . . I received a few letters last night and was so thriled to here it went well. Hopefully I will be able to call on 1 Dec and find out how that appoptment went. Keep sending the tapes! They do make me sad but I still want to listen to them. I think its realy cool you are going to be able to viedo tape the next ultrasound! So, do we find out the sex on the 1st or after that? I just cant wait to find out I've been thinking alot about name and I realy do like my name for a boy but I understand you don't I did however like you suggestion of Matthew David But I kind of worry about what Matt would think! This just poped in to my head this morning but thought for a gril, Chesson Ashely, Im not sure I like it though. It just kinda poped in to my head like I said. . . .

. . . Hay while I am thinking about it there are some things I would like you to send me if its not to much trouble. Some of it my be difficult to do and if it is don't even bother. I need a coffe cup, thermos, pack of cigarette lighters, and 4 package of 1st Leutnet Pin on Rank (black). Ill need the rank for when I get promoted in a few months. That will be nice it a realy big raise on top of the raise we will get in January. Hopefully we will still be able to save some money after the little one comes.

You will have to let me know how the Aggie TV game goes even though I think I already know the outcome. Is it in College Staion or Austin? I guess its not realy that important. I just kinda want to know. Well I am going to drop this in the mail and see if any showed up for me today! I dout it though most everyone has the day off for the holiday. I love you so much and miss you teribilly. I can't wait I get home! I love you baby!

Love,

Me

29 Nov 2003

Love Bug,

I so much enjoyed geting to talk to you on Thanksgiving espicialy for so long. I hope I said I love you enough! I didn't think we would actully be able to talk for forty mineuts as most of our phone conversations are so matter of fact. I guess with more time to talk we didn't have to worry about matter of fact things. I miss you so much and can't wait till I get home and can hold you in my arms. I love you baby.

I'll tell you what I am supper excited waiting to get my packages you sent, espicialy the one with the Christmas tree. I am going to put it up as soon as I get it just like you always want to put it up the day after Thanks Giving. Just think next Christmass we will have a little one to buy presents for. How nice will that be! I tell you what I just cant wait to see what you got me, espicial since Harrold went with you to get it. I absolutely can't think of what it might be. Guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Our mission went well yesterday and we even found some more weapons! We found 3 RPG-7 launchers, 8 RPG rounds, and 181 mm mourtor round. Today we are back out at the ASP which has become extremly boreing most of the time. Its kinda nice however because every one leaves you alone for the most part.

I think tomorrow I will give myself a hair cut and take a hot shower if they have water. Hopefully we will have mail tomorrow. Also as we have not received any in about 3 days on account of the holiday. As always baby I love you and miss you, and I'll meet you in my dreams!

Love,

Me

. . . I am just so excited about Grace coming and can't wait to hold here and you in my arms and take walks in the evening, except know with a stroller. I can't wait to take you for ice cream and just go for drives. Just think I'll be home soon and we will be doing all of those things. I love you so much baby and will call and write very soon.

!I love you!

Love,

Me

9 Dec 2003

Love Bug,

. . . Carrying on I got several letters from you yester day from the 13th and 19th of November. In one of them you talked about stayin in Charrlotte to have the baby! I thing that is a good idea, espicialy since you like the doctor so much, and besides that means our baby won't be a geographical yank. . . .

. . . I am so excited about being a father, its going to be so much fun! And yes we can try to eat lunch every day when I get home. That would be awesom.

Love,

Me



Master Sergeant Kelly Hornbeck, 36, Fort Worth

To his parents, Jeff and Camille. Hornbeck served in the Army's Special Forces. He died on January 18, 2004, of wounds that were sustained two days earlier, when an improvised explosive device hit his vehicle south of Samarra.

10-10-03

Mom + Dad,

. . . My team is performing great. I could not be happier with them. I hope and pray that things continue to go as smoothley as they have and we'll all be home safely, and soon. I love you both.

Kelly



Second Lieutenant Jonathan Rozier, 25, Katy

To his wife, Jessica. Their son Justin, who Rozier briefly mentions, was seven months old at the time this was written. Rozier was killed on July 19, 2003, when his unit was fired upon by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire in Baghdad.

9 Jun 03

Hey Hottie,

. . . I can't wait to get home. When I'm not busy & I sit down, I start to think of home. I imagine what those first few minutes when I get off the plane will be like. I think about seeing you there with Justin. Seeing you smile and possibly cry as I walk up. Grabbing you and hugging you for a long time, tightly. Giving you kisses & wiping away your tears. It makes me happy to imagine that. I think about the first day, week, visiting family. Being able to sleep with you again, sharing a warm bed on a cold night, whispering to each other in the dark. Holding & kissing you . . .

I miss it all. I want to hold your hand in the grocery store. I want to put my arm around when we watch a movie. I want to have you come up & kiss me just because & I'll do the same. To hear you say "I Love you." I love you too.

I know I didn't do all of that all the time before I left. Now that I've had to do without for so long I know that I was wrong. You are my most precious treasure & I didn't keep you right. I'm so sorry. When I get back I want to start all over again. Start from scratch & get it right this time. I want to Honeymoon for the rest of our lives. Always to be amazed by each other. To always love & always want each other. I'll kiss you right when I get home, you'll see. Until then, close your eyes & think of me. I'm saying I love you & if you listen you can hear me. If you get sad, I'll be there, holding you, wiping away your tears.

I love you

Jonathan



Lance Corporal Aaron Austin, 21, Sunray

To his fiancee, Tiffany Frank. Austin proposed to Frank a month earlier, over the phone from Iraq. He was killed on April 26, 2004, when he and his fellow Marines came under heavy enemy fire in Fallujah.

Thursday, April 15, 2004 4:45 PM

to whom it may concern,

my relationship with jesus christ is close he has helped me through alot and is definitaly helping me through the situation i am faced with now. i beleive in his angels of protection and beleive all things work out for the good for those who beleive in his name. i know i slip alot but beleive in the blood he shed for our sins. i hope to make a positive effect spiritually on those who surround me. . . .

Aaron Austin



Sergeant Henry Ybarra III, 32, Austin

To his father, Henry II. Lilian, who Ybarra mentions having spoken to the night before, was his wife and the mother of his three children. Ybarra was killed on September 11, 2003, in Balad, north of Baghdad, when the tire he was changing on a ten-ton cargo truck exploded.

27 Feb 03

Hey Dad,

How is it going? Me good. I got to talk to Lilian last night. My birthday went ok. I work nights here so I am off during the day. How is the weather there? Here it is breezy at times. We have had about 4 sand storms since I have been here. The area I am at is called Camp Udari. It is 15 miles from the Iraq border. We are ready to push forward into Iraq. We are just waiting for the word. I am ready to go and get it over with. I don't see the war lasting very long. We have the best attack helicopters around. Not just the best but alot. The 101st Airbase division from Ft. Campbell will be moving into the area anyday now. I also hear 1st cav from Hood will be joining us here. I have no fears. I know God will protect me. The day of my birthday we had to put our protective mask on. The camp picked up a false chemical preserve. What a way to wake up on your 32nd birthday. Dad if you can see the equipment here in Kuwait that we have you would feel sorry for Iraq. We have just about everything you can think of. Well Dad just wanted to say a quick hello and let you know I am ok. Write you soon.

Love your son,

HY

Copyright © 2004 The Texas Monthly Magazine

This Is My Lawsuit, This Is Your Lawsuit

The Brothers Spiridellis have a legal problem. Woody Guthrie— that great capitalist in the sky—sold his song and the current copyright owners have threatened Gregg and Evan Spiridellis with a copyright infringement lawsuit. Somehow, I think Woody Guthrie—the original Okie from Muskogee—would have enjoyed the parody. If this is (fair & balanced) theft of intellectual property, so be it.

[x CNN/MONEY]
A Jibjab Showdown
Bush-Kerry parody draws the ire of the music publisher that owns the Guthrie song.
by
Allen Wastler

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - With something as fun as a cartoon Bush and Kerry hurling musical epithets at one another, you knew lawyers would have to get involved.

And, unfortunately for JibJab.com, they have.

You know the Jibjab thing I'm talking about, right? The flash animation movie swirling around the Internet with President George Bush and Senator John Kerry singing to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land."

Bush: "You're a liberal sissy!"

Kerry: "You're a right wing nut job!"

Both: "This land will surely vote for me!"

The bit is hilarious. Unless you are The Richmond Organization, a music publisher that owns the copyright to Guthrie's tune through its Ludlow Music unit.

"This puts a completely different spin on the song," said Kathryn Ostien, director of copyright licensing for the publisher. "The damage to the song is huge."

TRO believes that the Jibjab creation threatens to corrupt Guthrie's classic -- an icon of Americana -- by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie's unifying message. The publisher wants Jibjab to stop distribution of the flash movie.

Of course the creators behind Jibjab don't agree.

"We consider it a case of political satire and parody and therefore entitled to the fair use exemption of the copyright act," said Jibjab attorney Ken Hertz.

So far there isn't a lot of money involved. The brothers who made the movie, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, have been distributing it pretty much for free (a paid-download option was available, but abandoned as most folks went for the free-on-the-Internet route). But the two are getting a lot of media attention as more news organizations and talk shows feature the flash bit (I think CNN was first, by the way, when we featured it on "In The Money" in early July).

"We're just trying to catch our breath," said Gregg Spiridellis, before sending me on to his lawyer.

Right now lawyers for both sides are just hurling threatening letters at one another. If the dispute ends up in court, it'll be interesting.

TRO: "You've hurt our music!"

Jibjab: "You've got no humor!"

Both: "This judge will surely side with me!"

Allen Wastler is managing editor for CNN/Money and a commentator on CNNfn.

Copyright © 2004 CNN/MONEY

Hell, Don't Give Me Science, Give Me That Old-Time Religion!

In the early 21st century, the yahoos are in full cry. The earth is flat. Life begins with the first flirtatious glance, not even conception. Science is replete with lies. The President of the United States of America claims that he gets his advice from the Almighty. (Internet rumor has W on drugs because he seems unbalanced to staffers. W invokes the Lord in one breath and drops an f-bomb epithet in the next. The Prozac Nation has its commander-in-chief.) The Attorney General of the United States would be happy to mount a fundamentalist Inquisition. If this is (fair & balanced) ignorance, so be it.

[x Scientific American]
Questions That Plague Physics: A Conversation with Lawrence M. Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss speaks about unfinished business

Chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, Lawrence M. Krauss is famed in the research community for his prescient suggestion that a still mysterious entity called dark energy might be the key to understanding the beginnings of the universe. He is also an outspoken social critic and in February was among 60 prominent scientists who signed a letter entitled "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking," complaining of the Bush administration's misuse of science. The public, though, might know him best as an op-ed writer and author of books with mass appeal. His 1995 work, The Physics of Star Trek, became a best-seller, translated into 15 languages. He is now finishing his seventh popular title, Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, which he describes as "an exploration of our long-standing literary, artistic and scientific love affair with the idea that there are hidden universes out there." Krauss recently discussed his many scientific and social passions with writer Claudia Dreifus.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: What are the top questions bedeviling physicists today?

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Three that I find fascinating are: What is the nature of dark energy? How can we reconcile black hole evaporation with quantum mechanics? And, finally, do extra dimensions exist? They are all connected. And they are all going to require some new insights into quantum gravity. But someone is going to have to come up with a totally new and remarkable idea. And it's hard to predict when that is going to happen. In 1904 you couldn't have predicted that Albert Einstein would come up with a remarkable idea in 1905. I think the resolution to these problems is likely to be theoretical and not experimental. This is because direct experimental signatures that might point us in the right theoretical directions in these areas probably lie beyond the realm of current experiments. I'd also bet that the solution to these problems is not going to resemble anything being done now, including string theory.

SA: Is string theory the physics equivalent of The God That Failed, as some people used to say about communist ideology?

LK: Not exactly. But I do think its time may be past. String theory and the other modish physical theory, loop quantum gravity, both stem from one basic idea: that there's a mathematical problem with general relativity.The idea is that when you try to examine physical phenomena on ever smaller scales, gravity acts worse and worse. Eventually, you get infinities. And almost all research to find a quantum theory of gravity is trying to understand these infinities. What string theory and what loop quantum gravity do is go around this by not going smaller than a certain distance scale, because if you do, things will behave differently. Both these theories are based on the idea that you can't go down to zero in a point particle, and that's one way to get rid of mathematical infinities. The main difference, I think, between the two theories is that string is intellectually and mathematically far richer. String theory hasn't accomplished a lot in terms of solving physical problems, but it's produced a lot of interesting mathematical discoveries. That's why it fascinates. Loop quantum gravity hasn't even done that, at least in my mind.

"We live in a society where it's considered okay for intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate."

SA: Are you saying that string theory hasn't really gotten us anywhere?

LK: Neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity has told us much about the key unsolved physical problems--most important, why does the universe have dark energy? That's the biggest question right now. One thing that has come out of string theory is the idea of plural universes or extra dimensions, and that's because string theory is based on extra dimensions. The only consistent string theory originally had 26 dimensions, and then it got lowered to 10. But the universe we live in is four-dimensional [three spatial plus time]. A lot of talk went into explaining how all these extra dimensions were invisible. Recently some people have been trying to turn that defect into a virtue by suggesting that the extra dimensions might actually be detectable.

SA: You've just finished writing a book about parallel universes. Do you think they're real?

LK: Let me answer you this way: it's an exciting area, and it's wonderful for graduate students. One of my former Ph.D. students is largely responsible for the recent surge of interest in this idea. But I think these extra dimensions smell wrong. What we are learning from elementary particle physics about the unification of all the forces in nature tends to point in a direction that is not the direction these large parallel universe models suggest. As beautiful and as sexy as they are, if I had to bet, I'd bet that these large extradimensional ideas are probably not right. We'll see.

SA: How did you come to write The Physics of Star Trek?

LK: Actually, it began as a joke, probably sometime in 1993. I had just finished Fear of Physics for Basic Books. I was chatting with my editor about what I might do for them next. Somewhere in the conversation, she mentioned something about her daughter's being a Trekker. "How about The Physics of Star Trek?" she laughed. That night I started thinking about the transporter, a Star Trek device that disassembled your atoms, moved them almost instantaneously to somewhere else and reassembled them in that place. What might it take to build one? That led to my making a list of all these neat Star Trek phenomena that one could use to hook people into thinking about physics. If people loved this imaginary stuff, I thought, why couldn't they love real science, which is a thousand times more amazing? I was blunt about Trek things that wouldn't work. But I also pointed readers toward more fascinating possibilities in the real universe. Real science comes up with ideas that no fiction writer would have the temerity to suggest. Think about cosmic antigravity, something I work on at my day job: no one understands why empty space should have energy. It's the weirdest idea in the world!

"I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religious classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science."

SA: Why?

LK: If you asked a child how much energy there is in empty space, he'd say "none," because that's the sensible answer. But what we've learned is that's not true: if you take everything away, there's still something there. What's worse is: if you put a little amount of energy into empty space, then everything we know about the laws of physics says you should be able to put a tremendous amount of energy into it. Once you open the dam and allow empty space to have energy, you ask how much it should naturally have. Our current understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics says that empty space should have about 120 orders of magnitude more energy than the amount we measure it to have. That is 1 with 120 zeroes after it! How to reduce the amount it has by such a huge magnitude, without making it precisely zero, is a complete mystery. Among physicists, this is considered the worst fine-tuning problem in physics. When we solve this problem, we're going to have to explain why the number that we measure is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than we would expect it to be. No one has an idea how to do that. And that's why it's the most exciting thing in physics. Because weird makes things exciting.

SA: You are one of the few top physicists who is also known as a public intellectual. In the middle of the past century, that kind of activity by scientists was much more common. Albert Einstein, in fact, was an international celebrity, whose private views of everything from nuclear disarmament to Zionism were solicited by the press. Why do you think you're such a rare bird that way now?

LK: I can't speak for others. Besides my own research, I see part of my mission as trying to close the disconnect between science and the rest of the culture. We live in a society where it's considered okay for intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate. Now, it wasn't always that way. At the beginning of the 20th century, you could not be considered an intellectual unless you could discuss the key scientific issues of the day. Today you can pick up an important intellectual magazine and find a write-up of a science book with a reviewer unashamedly saying, "This was fascinating. I didn't understand it." If they were reviewing a work by John Kenneth Galbraith, they wouldn't flaunt their ignorance of economics.

SA: How did science illiteracy become socially acceptable?

LK: We all know how badly science is taught in many schools. So many middle school and even some high school teachers have no background in science. When my daughter was in the second grade and I went to her school, I was stunned by how her teacher seemed incredibly uncomfortable with having to teach even the simplest scientific concepts. I think this is common. And there is the reality that science has grown increasingly esoteric, making it more difficult for laypeople to grasp. The truth is--and I'm hardly the first to say this--after World War II, American scientists became an isolated elite. The secrets that allowed them to change the world also allowed them to shirk responsibility for citizenship. Scientists became a class above society, rather than a part of it. And so for the longest time, certainly until the 1970s, many American scientists just didn't believe that reaching the public was important. Those were good times, with lots of money coming in. The wake-up call came in 1993, when Congress killed the Superconducting Super Collider. That was a real signal physicists were doing something wrong. We hadn't convinced the public--or even all of our colleagues--that it was worth billions to build this thing. And since then, it has become clear: to get money for what we do, we're going to have to explain it to the public. My predilection is to try to connect the interesting ideas in science to the rest of people's lives.

SA: The big public issue you've been identified with is fighting against creationist teachings in the schools. For the past couple years, you've spent your time traveling, debating creationists on proposed curriculum changes for Ohio's high schools. Was that fun?

LK: It was the least fun of anything I've ever done. Convincing people of the excitement of science is fun; trying to stave off attacks on science feels like the most incredible waste of time, even if necessary. I got drafted after several creationists were appointed to the Standards Committee of the Ohio State Board of Education. They were proposing new standards to create false controversy around evolution by introducing an ad hoc idea called intelligent design into high school science classes. For nearly a year, I found myself in the middle of what was almost the equivalent of a political campaign. When it was over, we won and we lost. We won because we had kept intelligent design out of science classes. We lost because in the spirit of "fairness," the board added a sentence to the standards saying, "Students should learn how scientists are continuing to critically examine evolutionary theory." I strongly opposed this. I wanted them to say that scientists are continuing to critically examine everything. As I feared, this sentence opened the door for the creationists' claiming that there is controversy about the accuracy of evolutionary theory. And it's come back to haunt us. Just the other week, I had to put everything I was doing aside because the creationists were back at their old games again in Ohio. One of the model lessons that came out was an intelligent-design diatribe. Basically, they snuck the whole thing in again, through the back door. This becomes so tiresome that you just want to say, "Forget about it, go on." But then you realize that this is exactly what Phillip Johnson, this lawyer who first proposed the intelligent-design strategy, proposed when he said something like, "We'll just keep going and going and going till we outlast the evolutionists."

SA: Do scientists trap themselves when they try to be "fair" and "give equal time" in their debates with the anti-Darwinists?

LK: Yes. Because science isn't fair. It's testable. In science, we prove things by empirical methods, and we toss out things that have been disproved as wrong. Period. This is how we make progress. I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-million grant, which is the second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio, institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which it isn't. [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that the foundation "has decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments."]

SA: Why do you find this grant so particularly disturbing that you single it out here?

LK: Because we're living in a time when so many scientific questions are transformed into public relations campaigns--with truth going out the window in favor of sound bites and manufactured controversies. This is dangerous to science and society, because what we learn from observation and testing can't be subject to negotiation or spin, as so much in politics is. The creationists cut at the very credibility of science when they cast doubt on our methods. When they do that, they make it easier to distort scientific findings in controversial policy areas. We can see that happening right now with issues like stem cells, abortion, global warming and missile defense. When the testing of the proposed missile defense system showed it didn't work, the Pentagon's answer, more or less, went, "No more tests before we build it."

SA: Between your popular writing and your political work, when do you do science?

LK: In the quiet hours of the night, in between those things. I do it then--or when I have the opportunity to sit down with students and postdocs. It's amazing to me, when we do that, how much we can accomplish. I rely on that a lot lately.
There can be months when I'm working on other things, and I get very, very depressed. Talking about science is important, and it may be the most important thing that I do. But if I'm not actually doing science, I feel like a fraud. On the other hand, if I don't do the public stuff, I also feel like a fraud.

SA: Why a fraud?

LK: Because science is not done in a vacuum. It is done in a social context, and the results of science have important implications for society, even if it is simply providing a general understanding of how we humans fit into the cosmos.
Thus, simply producing new knowledge, without making any attempt to help disseminate it and explain it, is not enough. I think one cannot expect every scientist to spend time on the effort to explain science. But in a society in which the science is of vital importance and also in which many forces are trying to distort the results of science, it is crucial that some of us speak out.

Claudia Dreifus has been a magazine journalist and political interviewer for almost all of her adult life. For ten years she was "LI Interviewer," producing two 3,000-word interviews a month for Newsday's Sunday Magazine. After Newsday, she went to Playboy, where she refined her skills interviewing such luminaries as Gabriel García-Márquez, William Safire, and then Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. For several years a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Dreifus currently, in addition to being a contributing writer for the "Science Times" section of The New York Times, she is a contributing editor to the world’s largest magazine, AARP – The Magazine, and a contributor to Scientific American, SEED, and MS. Magazine. Claudia Dreifus is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School for Social Research. She lives in New York City.

© 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

It's Iraq, Dummy!

Have you wondered WHY the United States hasn't been hit by al Qaeda since 9/11/2001? It's Iraq, Dummy! We are being hit hard and often in that miserable bit of hell on earth. In fact, to paraphrase the late Bernard Fall, our forces are caught in hell in a hot and dusty place. In the meantime, W prattles on about bringing democracy to Iraq. Hell, we cannot bring law and order (in Texas, it's lawn order) to Iraq, let alone find Osama bin Laden. Nor can we find Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the alleged mastermind of the Iraqi insurgency—in Fallujah (or anywhere else). Our war on terrorism more closely resembles a Keystone Kops farce. In the meantime, good young people are falling in that hellish, hot, and dusty place. It is time to tell W: ¡Basta Ya! !No mas! If this is (fair & balanced) outrage and despair, so be it.

[x AFP]
Iraq now an Al-Qaeda battleground, British report says

LONDON (AFP) - The US-led coalition's failure to restore security has turned Iraq (news - web sites) into a battleground for the likes of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, a British parliamentary committee said.

In a major report on the war on terrorism, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee said the lack of law and order had created a "vacuum" for criminals and militias, with "appalling consequences" for the Iraqi people.

It added that Iraq's own police and armed forces are still "a long way from being able to maintain security," and warned that ongoing violence could mar elections planned for early next year.

"We conclude that the violence in Iraq stems from a number of sources, including members of the former regime, local Islamists, criminal gangs and Al-Qaeda," the committee said.

"Iraq has become a 'battleground' for Al-Qaeda, with appalling consequences for the Iraqi people," it added.

"However, we also conclude that the coalition's failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq created a vacuum into which criminal elements and militias have stepped," it said.

It blamed an "insufficient number of troops" for contributing to the breakdown in security, adding that it was "disappointing" that some countries -- which it did not name -- had not committed forces to Iraq.

"It is therefore of the utmost importance that current problems are resolved in favour of the forces of order and that those who seek to impede Iraq's transition to a free and democratic state are defeated."

The 181-page report was published by the 13-member cross-party committee a month and a day after the June 28 handover of sovereignty to a interim Iraqi administration in Baghdad.

It also came just a day after a suicide bombing outside a police station and a wave of attacks around the Iraq left more than 120 dead.

Titled "Foreign Policy Aspects of the War Against Terrorism," the report was likely to give fresh ammunition to critics of Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s decision to join the US invasion of Iraq in March last year.

"No one can pretend that everything in the country is going well," Donald Anderson, a member of Blair's governing Labour party who chairs the foreign affairs committee, told reporters.

Asked whether the Iraq war had increased the threat of terrorism, Anderson replied: "Clearly there are elements of Al-Qaeda that are there that were not there before."

Echoing the current view of Blair's government, the report said Al-Qaeda remains "a very serious threat" both to Britain and its interests.

Blair is on holiday outside Britain this week, but he has been hoping that Iraq will fade from the public spotlight as his governing Labour party gears up for a general election likely to be held next year.

On the way forward in Iraq, the foreign affairs committee's report said it was "highly desirable that elections proceed on schedule" to foster confidence in Iraq's move towards democracy.

"However, we are concerned about the impact that the security situation could have on the validity of the election process," it said.

It asked British government to explain what plans it has, both with Iraq and with the United Nations, to beef up security for the polls, due to take place before the end of January.

"We further recommend that the government encourage states that remain reluctant to commit troops to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq to send forces to assist with the elections."

Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.

I Can't Phish Or Cut Bait

Uh, oh. I scored 40% (4 correct out of 10) at the Testing Your Phishing IQ site. Back in early 2000, I fell for a phishing fraud involving my Internet Service Provider at the time. I received an e-mail message with the logo and the look of e-mail from that ISP. Under the pretext of updating my records, I filled the boxes with my Social Security Number, mailing address, telephone number, and my credit card (VISA) information—number and expiration date. Duh! The hoax made the Amarillo fishwrap with the report that only one ISP customer had fallen for the request and spilled his cyberguts to the phisherman. Obviously, the sole rube in Amarillo was me. If this is (fair & balanced) humiliation, so be it.

[x PC Magazine]
Can You Sniff Out Fraud?
By Neil J. Rubenking

Phishing scams are on the rise. These fraudulent e-mail messages trick recipients into giving out sensitive information by imitating legitimate sites–PayPal, eBay, banks, or credit card companies. When you click a link to "verify" or "confirm" sensitive data like your bank-account numbers, the page looks legitimate. The browser may even display the secure-site lock icon. But your data goes to a crook, not to the bank. The scammer only needs a handful of dupes to make it profitable. By the time any investigation can take place, he's long gone.

You wouldn't be taken in by such a scam… or would you? Antispam vendor MailFrontier thinks you would. MailFrontier's desktop and enterprise products filter phishing scams separately from other spam, placing them in their own fraud-mail folder. The user can mark a message in this folder as legitimate, thereby moving it back to the inbox. MailFrontier experts observed that nearly ten percent of the mail unequivocally identified as suspicious was being rescued by users!

MailFrontier commissioned an independent survey in which 1,000 adults around the country were presented with screenshots of five e-mail messages and asked to identify them as legitimate or fraudulent. Two of them were actually frauds, including a well-known PayPal scam. On average, 28% of the responses incorrectly identified fraudulent e-mail as legitimate, or vice versa.

So, how would you have fared in the survey? You can find out at www.mailfrontier.com. When you click on the Test your Phishing IQ link, you'll get a chance to analyze ten actual e-mail messages and distinguish the legitimate from the fraudulent. Unlike the earlier survey, which used static screen shots, this test lets you scroll through the messages, hover the mouse over links, and do almost anything but follow the links. When you've made your decisions, submit them and find out which were correct.

Social-engineering exploits like phishing may eventually be the biggest threat to online security. Even if antispam, antivirus, and antispyware programs evolve to be 100% accurate in identifying threats, the uninformed user can still stumble around them.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

W: The Radical; Kerry: The Conservative?

Given W's problems with language and syntax, why should it be surprising that he does not understand what his beloved label—conservative—really means. Leave it to the gadfly blogger, Andrew Sullivan, to call W to task for misrepresenting himself on the hustings. Actions speak louder than words. Sullivan has convinced me: W is the radical. If this is (fair & balanced) political philosophy, so be it.

[x AndrewSullivan.com]
The Conservative Party: Kerry's Democrats
by
Andrew Sullivan

If, broadly speaking, you're a conservative, whom should you be rooting for in the American elections?

I'm not being entirely facetious here. The conservative "movement" in the U.S. is still firmly behind president George W. Bush's re-election. He uses conservative rhetoric - taking the war to the enemy, upholding conservative social values, respecting religious faith, protecting the family, and so on. He is widely regarded as one of the most conservative presidents in recent history - rivaling Reagan, eclipsing his own father in right wing bona fides. And yet if you decouple the notion of being a conservative from being a Republican, no one can doubt that the Bush administration has been pursuing some highly unconservative policies.

Start with the war. Almost overnight after 9/11, president Bush went from being a semi-isolationist, realist foreign policy president to a transformational one. He junked decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of a steady oil supply, and forged a new policy of radical democratization of the Middle East. He invaded two countries - one in the grip of a theocratic dictatorship, the other brutalized by a Stalinist kleptocracy - and is in the process of trying to convert them into modern democracies. Nothing this radical has been attempted in U.S. foreign policy for a very long time. And nothing so liberal. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of "nation-building" as liberal claptrap. Now it's the centerpiece of his own administration. The fact that anti-American lefties despise the attempt to democratize foreign countries should not diguise the fact that Bush is, in this respect, indisputably a foreign policy liberal. He has shown none of his father's caution, little of Brent Scowcroft's realpolitik, and a rhetorical ambition not seen since Reagan and Kennedy.

At home, Bush has been just as radical. He has essentially junked two decades of conservative attempts to restrain government and pushed federal spending to record levels. He has poured money into agricultural subsidies; he famously put tariffs on foreign steel; he has expanded the biggest entitlement healthcare program; and dramatically increased the role of the central government in the matter of education. Apart from modest attempts to privatize some government functions, he has failed to reform a single government program to make it cheaper or more efficient. He has turned federal surpluses into huge deficits, and has dismissed the idea that this will have any damaging consequences. He has little interest in the bedrock conservative belief in leaving as much decision-making to the states as possible, endorsing a federal constitutional amendment that would prevent individual states from enacting gay marriage, and using federal powers to prevent other states from allowing medical cannabis. He has little or no concern for the separation of church and state, funneling public money to religious charities; and has appointed some of the most radical jurists to the federal bench. Whatever else these policies might be called, they have very little to do with traditional conservative themes of federalism, small government, the free market, the separation of church and state, and a strong, independent judiciary. Just try finding a coherent theme in Bush Republicanism. It is, in fact, one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an "ism".

There has also been, it's safe to say, a remarkable recklessness in Bush's approach to governance. Was it really necessary to insist that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in the war on terror? When Osama bin Laden was isolated in the Afghan-Pakistani border, was it wise to deputize the campaign to capture him to Afghan warlords? When so many people warned that the hardest task in Iraq would be what happened after the fall of Baghdad, was it sensible to junk all the carefully-written government reports for reconstruction and go in on the fly? Was it wise to brag in the days after the first military victory in Iraq that it was "Mission Accomplished"? When the Iraqi insurgency was gaining traction, was it sensible to apply the methods in Guantanamo Bay to the hundreds of petty criminals and innocents hauled into Abu Ghraib? At almost every juncture, where prudence might have been called for, Bush opted for winging it. Whatever else his methodology is, it can scarcely be called conservative.

So where is conservatism to be found?

Maybe you should cast a glance at Boston, where next week, the Democrats will anoint one John Forbes Kerry, a Northeastern patrician who is fast becoming the Eastern establishment's favorite son. Yes, Kerry's record on spending, defense and social policy has been liberal. But that is not the theme of his campaign so far. Kerry is as rhetorically dedicated to seeing through nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan as Bush is. But where Bush has scrapped America's longstanding military doctrine of only attacking when attacked, Kerry prefers the old, strictly defensive doctrine. Where Bush has clearly placed American national interest above any international concern, Kerry insists that the old alliances - even with old Europe - need to be strengthened and reaffirmed. Kerry insists that he is a fiscal conservative, aiming to reduce the deficit by tax increases. He has argued that stability in some parts of the world should take precedence over democracy or human rights. He opposes amending the Constitution and supports legal abortion, the status quo Bush wants to reverse. He has spent decades in the Senate, quietly building an undistinguished and constantly nuanced record. He is a war veteran, who plays up his record of public service every chance he gets. He's a church-going Catholic who finds discussion of religious faith unseemly in public. In the primaries, he was the safe, establishment bore compared to the radical pyrotechnics of Howard Dean and the populist charm of John Edwards.

His basic message to Americans is: let's return to normalcy. The radicalism of the past four years needs tempering. We need to consolidate the nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, before any new adventures against, say, Iran. We need to return to the old diplomatic obeisance to the United Nations. We should stop referring to a "war" on terror, and return to pre-9/11 notions of terrorism as a discrete phenomenon best dealt with by police work in coordination with our democratic allies. At home, we need to restrain the unruly theocratic impulses now unleashed by the Republicans. We must balance the budget again. We need to redress some of the social and economic inequality that has so intensified these past few years. Kerry's biggest proposal - and one sure to be modified considerably by the Congress - is an incremental increase in the number of people with health insurance. It's far more modest than that proposed by Bill and Hillary Clinton a decade ago.

Does that make Kerry right and Bush wrong? On the most fundamental matter, i.e. the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realize that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. But much of the hard work has now been done. No one seriously believes that Bush will start another war in the next four years. And in some ways, Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation-building than Bush.

Domestically, moreover, Bush has done a huge amount to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government; and he has been almost criminally reckless in his hubris in the conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing Iraqi WMDs; and he and America will be hard put to regain the moral highground in world affairs after Abu Ghraib. The argument Kerry must make is that he can continue the substance of the war, but without Bush's polarizing recklessness. And at home, he must reassure Americans that he is the centrist candidate - controlled neither by the foaming Michael Moore left nor the vitreolic religious right. Put all that together, and I may not find myself the only conservative moving slowly and reluctantly toward the notion that Kerry may be the right man - and the conservative choice - for a difficult and perilous time.

Andrew Sullivan is an Anglo-American journalist and intellectual, known both for his heterodox personal-political identity (HIV-positive, sexually gay, politically Tory/conservative, religiously Catholic) as well as for his pioneering efforts in the field of weblog journalism (AndrewSullivan.com).

copyright © 2004 Andrew Sullivan

Speechifying

All of the oratory at the political conventions prompted a look at the list of Top 100 speeches of the 20th century. The leaders with 6 speeches each in the list are Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald W. Reagan. My favorite aphorist—Harry S Truman—gained a single mention. I wonder how many mentions W will receive in the list of the Top 100 speeches of the 21st century? If this is (fair & balanced) aphonia, so be it.

Top 100 American speeches of the 20th century

Compiled by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A & M University, this list reflects the opinions of 137 leading scholars of American public address. 



Rank 	Title 	                     Speaker 	                              Date 	             Place

1 	"I Have a Dream" - Martin Luther King, Jr. - 08/28/63 - Washington, DC

2 	Inaugural Address - John F. Kennedy - 01/20/61 - Washington, DC

3 	First Inaugural Address - Franklin D. Roosevelt - 03/04/33 - Washington, DC

4 	War Message ("A Date which Will Live in Infamy") - Franklin D. Roosevelt -12/08/41 - Washington, DC

5 	Keynote Speech to the Democratic National Convention - Barbara Jordan 	07/12/76 	New York, NY

6 	"My Side of the Story" ("Checkers") - Richard M. Nixon - 09/23/52 - Los Angeles, CA

7 	"The Ballot or the Bullet" - Malcolm X - 04/03/64 - Cleveland, OH

8 	Address to the Nation on the Challenger Disaster - Ronald Reagan - 01/28/86 - Washington, DC

9 	Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association -	John F. Kennedy - 09/12/60 - Houston, TX

10 	Address to Congress on the Voting Rights Act ("We Shall Overcome") - Lyndon B. Johnson - 03/15/65 - Washington, DC

11 	Keynote Speech to the Democratic National Convention ("A Tale of Two Cities") -	Mario Cuomo - 07/17/84 - San Francisco, CA

12 	Speech at the Democratic National Convention ("The Rainbow Coalition") - Jesse Jackson - 07/17/84 - San Francisco, CA

13 	Statement on the Articles of Impeachment - Barbara Jordan - 07/25/74 - Washington, DC

14 	Farewell Address to Congress ("Old Soldiers Never Die") - Douglas MacArthur - 04/19/51 - Washington, DC

15 	"I've Been to the Mountaintop" - Martin Luther King, Jr. - 04/03/68 - Memphis, TN

16 	"The Man with the Muckrake" - Theodore Roosevelt - 04/16/06 - Washington, DC

17 	Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. - Robert F. Kennedy - 04/04/68 - Indianapolis, IN

18 	Farewell Address - Dwight D. Eisenhower - 01/17/61 - Washington, DC

19 	War Message ("The World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy") - Woodrow Wilson - 04/02/17 -	Washington, DC

20 	Farewell Address at the U.S. Military Academy ("Duty, Honor, Country") - Douglas MacArthur - 05/12/62 -	West Point, NY

21 	Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam ("The Great Silent Majority") - Richard M. Nixon - 11/02/69 - Washington, DC

22 	"Ich bin ein Berliner" - John F. Kennedy - 06/26/63 - West Berlin, Germany

23 	Plea for Mercy at the Trial of Leopold and Loeb - Clarence Darrow - 08/22-23 and 25/24 - Chicago, IL

24 	"Acres of Diamonds" - Russell Conwell - 1900-1925 - Delivered at many spots across the U.S.

25 	Televised Speech on Behalf of Barry Goldwater ("A Time for Choosing") - Ronald Reagan - 10/27/64 - Los Angeles, CA

26 	"Every Man a King" - Huey Pierce Long - 02/23/34 - Washington, DC

27 	"The Fundamental Principle of a Republic" - Anna Howard Shaw - 06/21/15 - Ogdensburg, NY

28 	"The Arsenal of Democracy" - Franklin D. Roosevelt - 12/29/40 - Washington, DC

29 	Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals ("The Evil Empire") - Ronald Reagan - 03/08/83 - Orlando, FL

30 	First Inaugural Address - Ronald Reagan - 01/20/81 - Washington, DC

31 	First Fireside Chat ("The Banking Crisis") - Franklin D. Roosevelt - 03/12/33 - Washington, DC

32 	Address to Congress on Greece and Turkey ("The Truman Doctrine") - Harry S Truman - 03/12/47 - Washington, DC

33 	Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature - William Faulkner - 12/10/50 - Stockholm, Sweden

34 	Statement to the Court - Eugene V. Debs - 09/14/18 - Cleveland, OH

35 	Address to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women ("Women's Rights Are Humans Rights") - Hillary Rodham Clinton - 09/05/95 - Beijing, China

36 	"Atoms for Peace" - Dwight D. Eisenhower - 12/08/53 - New York, NY

37 	American University Speech - John F. Kennedy - 06/10/63 - Washington, DC

38 	Keynote Speech to the Democratic National Convention - Ann Richards - 07/18/88 - Atlanta, GA

39 	Address to the Nation Resigning the Presidency - Richard M. Nixon - 08/08/74 - Washington, DC

40 	"The Fourteen Points" -	Woodrow Wilson - 01/08/18 - Washington, DC

41 	"Declaration of Conscience" - Margaret Chase Smith - 06/01/50 - Washington, DC

42 	"The Four Freedoms" - Franklin D. Roosevelt - 01/06/41 - Washington, DC

43 	Speech at Riverside Church ("A Time to Break Silence") - Martin Luther King, Jr. - 04/04/67 - New York, NY

44 	"What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States" - Mary Church Terrell - 10/10/06 - Washington, DC

45 	Speech Accepting the Democratic Presidential Nomination ("Against Imperialism") - William Jennings Bryan - 08/08/00 - Indianapolis, IN

46 	"A Moral Necessity for Birth Control" -	Margaret Sanger - 1921-1922 - Delivered several times for the American Birth Control League

47 	Commencement Speech at Wellesley College ("Choices and Change") - Barbara Bush - 06/01/90 - Wellesley, MA

48 	Address to the Nation on Civil Rights ("A Moral Issue") - John F. Kennedy - 06/11/63 - Washington, DC

49 	Address to the Nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis - John F. Kennedy - 10/22/62 - Washington, DC

50 	"Television News Coverage" - Spiro Agnew - 11/13/69 - Des Moines, IA

51 	Speech to the Democratic National Convention ("Common Ground and Common Sense") - Jesse Jackson - 07/20/68 - Atlanta, GA

52 	Speech to the Republican National Convention ("A Whisper of AIDS" ) - Mary Fisher - 08/19/92 - Houston, TX

53 	"The Great Society" - Lyndon B. Johnson - 05/22/64 - Ann Arbor, MI

54 	"The Marshall Plan" - George C. Marshall - 06/05/47 - Cambridge, MA

55 	"Truth and Tolerance in America" - Edward M. Kennedy - 10/03/83 - Lynchburg, VA

56 	Speech Accepting the Democratic Presidential Nomination ("Let's Talk Sense to American People") - Adlai Stevenson - 07/26/52 - Chicago, IL

57 	"The Struggle for Human Rights" - Eleanor Roosevelt - 09/28/48 - Paris, France

58 	Speech Accepting the Democratic Vice-Presidential Nomination - Geraldine Ferraro - 07/19/84 - San Francisco, CA

59 	"Free Speech in Wartime" - Robert M. La Follette - 10/06/17 - Washington, DC

60 	Address at the U.S. Ranger Monument on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day - Ronald Reagan - 06/04/84 - Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, France

61 	"Religious Belief and Public Morality" - Mario Cuomo - 09/13/84 - Notre Dame, IN

62 	Televised Statement to the People of Massachusetts ("Chappaquiddick") - Edward M. Kennedy - 07/25/69 - Boston, MA

63 	"Labor and the Nation" ("The Rights of Labor") - John L. Lewis - 09/03/37 - Washington, DC

64 	Speech Accepting the Republican Presidential Nomination ("Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice")  -	Barry Goldwater - 07/16/64 - San Francisco, CA

65 	"Black Power" -	Stokely Carmichael - 10/66 - Berkeley, CA

66 	Speech at the Democratic National Convention ("The Sunshine of Human Rights") - Hubert H. Humphrey - 07/14/48 - Philadelphia, PA

67 	Address to the Jury - Emma Goldman - 07/09/17 - New York, NY

68 	"The Crisis" - Carrie Chapman Catt - 09/07/16 - Atlantic City, NJ

69 	"Television and the Public Interest" ("A Vast Wasteland") - Newton W. Minow - 05/09/61 - Washington, DC

70 	Eulogy to Robert Kennedy - Edward M. Kennedy - 06/08/68 - New York, NY

71 	Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee - Anita Hill - 10/11/91 - Washington, DC

72 	Final Address in Support of the League of Nations - Woodrow Wilson - 09/25/19 - Pueblo, CO

73 	Farewell to Baseball - Lou Gehrig - 07/04/39 - New York, NY

74 	Address to the Nation on the Cambodian Incursion - Richard M. Nixon - 04/30/70 - Washington, DC

75 	"Address to the United States Congress" - Carrie Chapman Catt - 11/17 - Washington, DC

76 	Speech at the Democratic National Convention ("The Dream Shall Never Die") - Edward M. Kennedy - 08/12/80 - New York, NY

77 	Address to the Nation on Vietnam and the Decision Not to Seek Re-Election - Lyndon B. Johnson - 03/31/68 - Washington, DC

78 	Speech to the Commonwealth Club - Franklin D. Roosevelt - 09/23/32 - San Francisco, CA

79 	First Inaugural Address - Woodrow Wilson - 09/04/13 - Washington, DC

80 	"An End to History" - Mario Savio - 12/02/64 - Berkeley, CA

81 	Speech at the Democratic National Convention ("AIDS: A Personal Story") - Elizabeth Glaser - 07/14/92 - New York, NY

82 	"The Issue" - Eugene V. Debs - 05/23/08 - Girard, KS

83 	The Children's Era - Margaret Sanger - 03/25 - New York, NY

84 	"A Left-Handed Commencement Address" - Ursula Le Guin - 05/22/83 - Oakland, CA

85 	"Now We Can Begin" - Crystal Eastman - 09-10/20 - New York, NY

86 	Radio Broadcast of March 7, 1935 ("Share Our Wealth") -	Huey Pierce Long - 03/07/35 - Washington, DC

87 	Address on Taking the Oath of Office ("Our Long National Nightmare Is Over") - Gerald Ford - 08/09/74 - Washington, DC

88 	Speech on Ending His Fast - Cesar Chavez - 03/10/68 - Delano, CA

89 	Statement at the Smith Act Trial - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - 02/02/53 - New York, NY

90 	Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals ("A Crisis of Confidence") - Jimmy Carter - 07/15/79 - Washington, DC

91 	"Message to the Grassroots" - Malcolm X - 11/10/63 - Detroit, MI

92 	Speech at the Prayer Service for Victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing - Bill Clinton - 04/23/95 - Oklahoma City, OK

93 	"For the Equal Rights Amendment" - Shirley Chisholm - 08/10/70 - Washington, DC

94 	Address at the Brandenburg Gate - Ronald Reagan - 06/12/87 - West Berlin, Germany

95 	"The Perils of Indifference" - Elie Wiesel - 04/12/99 - Washington, DC

96 	Address to the Nation on Pardoning Richard M. Nixon - Gerald Ford - 09/08/74 - Washington, DC

97 	"For the League of Nations" - Woodrow Wilson - 09/16/19 - Des Moines, IA

98 	Address to Congress after Assuming the Presidency ("Let Us Continue") -	Lyndon B. Johnson - 11/27/63 - Washington, DC

99 	Defense of Fred Fisher at the Army-McCarthy Hearings ("Have You No Sense of Decency?") - Joseph Welch - 	06/09/54 - Washington, DC

100 	"Adoption of the Declaration of Human Rights" - Eleanor Roosevelt - 12/09/48 - Paris, France

Copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Road Sign: Austin Metroplex

Roadwork Next 400 Years 

Copyright © 2004 The New Yorker Magazine

A Mascara Call

In another life, I spent nearly 20 years blowing a whistle and wearing a striped shirt. I officiated (at least, that what I called it) high school basketball with a few college game in the mix. Of course, the harshest critics of a referee are coaches. I remember one coach screaming at me that I had missed a call (in his team's favor, of course). Then, when I blew my whistle and made a call that went against the other team, that coach screamed: "That's a mascara call!" In other words, I was attempting to make up to the first coach with a compensatory call. At least, the goofball didn't call me Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden. If this is (fair & balanced) cosmetology, so be it.

[x City Journal]
The Czarinas of Beauty
Stefan Kanfer

     We do everything alike. . . .

     We walk alike

     We talk alike

     And what is more we hate each other very much. . . .

     How I wish I had a gun,

     A little gun.

     It would be fun

     To shoot the other two and be only one!



    “Triplets,” from The Bandwagon, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz

The founders of the beauty business were three self-styled czarinas who built their castles in New York City. Here, each professed to be very different from (and, of course, far superior to) her rivals. Actually, they bore such an extraordinary resemblance to one another that they might have emerged from a modern gothic novel, concocted by a singularly imaginative author.

The late Estée Lauder, who died this April at 97, was a short, hyper-ambitious, social-climbing saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “Beauty is the will to be beautiful.”

Helena Rubinstein, who passed on in 1965 at 94, was a short, hyper-ambitious, social-climbing saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

Elizabeth Arden, who died in 1966 at 85, was a short, hyper-ambitious saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “Nothing that costs only a dollar is worth having.”

Arden’s greatest invention was herself. Born Florence Nightingale Graham in a rural Canadian village in 1881, she helped support her four siblings and widowed father by peddling household supplies to local farmers. In 1907, she emigrated to New York and got herself a job at a Fifth Avenue beauty salon, catering to wealthy clients.

Joining forces with an equally determined woman, Graham opened a salon on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, near Sherry’s and Delmonico’s restaurants, and not far from Bergdorf Goodman’s fashionable clothing emporium. Facials came at $2 per, with the bonus of “six treatments for $10.00.” Though the salon turned an impressive profit, the partnership lasted less than a year—Florence wasn’t cut out to share earnings with anyone. Once on her own, the first thing she did was change her moniker: Elizabeth sounded queenly, and Arden was the romantic forest in which Shakespearean lovers gamboled. The second thing she did was paint the door of her Fifth Avenue salon red. The color remains to this day.

Arden married Tommy Jenkins Lewis in 1915. He spent the next four years in Europe as an army officer in World War I. When he returned, he became part of Arden’s burgeoning company but had rather less success as a husband. His usefulness ended in the 1920s, when “Miss Arden,” as all employees were to address her, made her big move. She began to advertise her products with a WASP elegance, promising that the step-by-step process—cleanse, tone, and moisturize—was an entryway to wealth and a productive marriage, and a moat to keep age and time at bay.

Arden enjoyed a virtual monopoly on high-end cosmetics until the epochal day when she found an interloper treading on her turf. In War Paint, the diverting double biography of Arden and her closest rival, author Lindy Woodhead describes the clash of titans. “Elizabeth Arden was like the Queen of America. Then suddenly here comes Helena Rubinstein from Europe, making a big noise and—absolutely indisputable fact—Arden was good at promotion, but Rubinstein was even better.” She proved better still at markup. It hardly mattered that some of her cosmetics cost but pennies to make; it was the promise of glamour that put them across. Indeed, when Rubinstein launched a product called Ultra Feminine Face Cream, it bombed. Asked why it wasn’t moving off the shelves, she replied gloomily, “Not expensive enough.” She would not repeat the mistake.

Helena—the Madame, as employees were to call her—had started her long rise in Australia. She arrived there from Kraków with no money and less English. She did, however, possess a fine complexion, and this was the foundation of her fortune.

The young émigré began by packaging and peddling lanolin—sheep oil—disguising the odor with extracts of lavender, pine bark, and water lilies. That mixture was a hit around Melbourne, giving her the impetus to open a salon in 1903. Two years later, she moved to Western Europe, determined to dominate the continent. Settling in Paris, she sold her merchandise to the haute monde, and cultivated people who could do her some good. Helena became famous for lavish dinner parties, where she let loose some memorable statements. At one fete, a drunken French ambassador turned on Edith Sitwell and her brother Sacheverell: “Vos ancêstres ont brûlée Jeanne d’Arc!” For all her business intelligence, the hostess spoke almost no French. “What did he say?” she asked a guest. “He said, ‘Your ancestors burned Joan of Arc.’ ” Replied Rubinstein, “Well, somebody had to do it.” On another occasion, Marcel Proust, who had heard of the Madame’s connections, tried to consult her about the makeup that a duchess might wear. She blew him off. “He smelt of mothballs,” was her defense. “How was I to know he was going to be famous?”

The Madame first married Edward Titus, a sometime journalist and publisher, who turned out to be quite useful for writing publicity releases and for fathering her two sons. But after the Rubinstein cosmetic line caught on, she would no longer tolerate his once-overlooked infidelities. He was summarily let go, unmissed when the Madame relocated to New York to take on Arden in the glamour wars.

During that war, she flummoxed some savvy Wall Street speculators who thought to get the better of her. In 1928, she sold her American business to Lehman Brothers at a profit of $7.3 million, in the days when you could keep it. Came the Depression, she took the company off their hands, repurchasing the nearly worthless stock for a little over $1 million. She then rode the shares into the stratosphere, opening various beauty salons and outlets in Boston, Newark, Newport, Atlantic City, Chicago, San Francisco, Palm Beach, Miami, Southampton, and Detroit. She also acquired a second husband in 1938. Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, 23 years her junior, claimed to be a Russian prince. Whether he was or not, he became the raison d’être for the Madame’s men’s line of Gourielli aftershave balm and talc. Some called the marriage a marketing ploy.

All the while, Rubinstein and Arden kept up a public feud—an echo of the mock battle that Jack Benny and Fred Allen waged in their wildly popular radio comedies. Thanks to her marriage, Helena passed herself off as royalty, a move that galled the ultra-snobbish Arden. Elizabeth got some measure of revenge when Clare Boothe Luce’s malicious and witty The Women opened on Broadway and then became a hit movie in 1939. The opening scene takes place in a high-end beauty salon, clearly based on Arden’s flagship locale at 673 Fifth Avenue; the beautiful vixens in the film reminded insiders of Arden’s soignée clientele—and this despite the Madame’s new spa only a few blocks north at 715 Fifth Avenue, boasting a restaurant, a gymnasium, and rugs by Joan Miró. Nevertheless, Luce bypassed it in her drama, well aware that the best dish of the day was served behind Arden’s now-famous red door.

The battle of the cosmetic divas was good for business, but the ladies truly did loathe each other. Hardly a month went by when they didn’t engage in a duel by checkbook. If Rubinstein commissioned Salvador Dalí to design a compact, Arden would order a mural from Georgia O’Keeffe for one of her fitness studios. If the Madame acquired a new Picasso, Arden would buy a few more thoroughbreds for her Kentucky stable, demanding that handlers wash the stalls with her best-selling fragrance, Blue Grass. The steeds themselves benefited from daily massages with her skin-care sensation, Eight Hour Cream, though with what result the Racing Form does not say.

As the years went on, the battles intensified. Arden stole Rubinstein’s sales director; Rubinstein hired Arden’s ex. Reconciliation between these two egos became unthinkable.

As for Estée Lauder, she too was her own best invention. “Mine is hardly a rags-to-riches story,” she claimed. But that is precisely what it was. The daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens in 1907, though she liked to boast of a childhood surrounded by servants and allowed rumors to circulate that she was from an old Catholic family. Her father Abraham was the proprietor, in turn, of an agricultural supply shop, a cemetery, and a hardware store. Working in the hardware store, Esther learned how to wrap goods attractively; from her uncle John, she gained some insights about the science of cosmetics by watching him cook up face creams and toothache drops on the kitchen stove. Particularly fascinated by one of his skin lotions, she dubbed it “Super-Rich All-Purpose Crème” and helped him sell it to neighbors.

She reinvented herself in 1925 as Estella Mentzer, and again in 1930, when she married Joseph Lauder, himself the son of Austrian immigrants. Nine years and one son later, the marriage failed. Estée (by that time) had learned a lot about self-promotion by watching Arden and Rubinstein from afar. She concluded that the speediest way to rise in her chosen field was to marry a millionaire. Alas, the interested ones weren’t available, and the available ones weren’t interested. After a long, discouraging period, she asked a friend, “What am I knocking myself out for with guys? Joe’s a nice man.” And so in 1942, three years after the split, the couple remarried and had another son.

For 15 years the business remained small. There were Estée, her sons, a daughter-in-law, and a receptionist-secretary. “When people asked for the order department,” her son Leonard recently recalled, “my wife put them on hold, came back with a disguised voice and said, ‘This is the order department.’ ” He added, “Success perceived becomes simply success.”

True enough. Yet Lauder rose less on smoke than on mirrors. More attractive than her rivals—Arden possessed a pleasant but undistinguished face, while Rubinstein in her later years resembled a terrapin—Estée made her work a personal business. She dropped in at beauty parlors, showing off her perfect complexion, hawking her products away from the standard retail outlets, as if intended only for the privileged few. She was always glad to show potential clients how to apply cream and powders, and did free-of-charge makeovers for anyone with the patience to hear her spiel. These were ingenious tactics that created an atmosphere of intimacy—and produced an ultimate irony. The stuff she carried from salon to salon attracted the attention of retail stores, which soon wanted in on the Estée Lauder line. Bergdorf Goodman was her first big catch; other major emporia followed.

This triumph led her to think bigger. To push the products, she invented gift-with-purchase promotions that brought even more customers into the tent. Then she turned to Europe. Overseas markets were notoriously tough for Americans to crack; to Estée, this was just another pebble in the shoe. She went to the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, for example, and found herself promptly snubbed by the perfume buyer. No matter; she spoke to a salesgirl and, while showing her the fragrance, somehow managed to spill some. The buyer inhaled the scent as he passed the counter and heard customers asking about it. Whether those customers were plants or real buyers, the “accident” had its desired effect. “We opened in France soon afterward,” Lauder’s memoir drily recalls.

Like the other two czarinas, Estée became a woman of enormous wealth, with houses in Manhattan and overseas. But unlike them, she passed her holdings on to the next generations. Rubinstein’s business changed hands two decades ago, and even her famous art collection went on the auction block. Although the scarlet door still decorates the Fifth Avenue locale of Elizabeth Arden, the company was sold in 1988. By contrast, the Estée Lauder Company remains a family affair. Estée’s son Ronald, once a New York gubernatorial candidate, stayed with the company until his retirement. His brother, Leonard, who would deliver the cosmetics by bicycle in the early days, is the company’s chairman, but will give way to his son William this summer.

Even in this time of Botox and collagen, implants and liposuction, the cosmetics industry still grossed some $60 billion last year and shows no signs of letting up. The siren appeal of a product off the shelves, a concoction that can diminish wrinkles, revive the skin, lighten the smile, and banish the years, remains as irresistible now as it did when Miss Arden, the Madame, and Estée Lauder first worked their magic. Such conditions will probably not change much in the new millennium, because humanity is unlikely to abandon its desire for self-improvement at minimum risk. In their heyday, the three ladies in question would hear many a put-down for selling superficial allure. After all, critics reminded their readers, beauty is only skin-deep. Playwright Jean Kerr spoke for cosmeticians around the world when she retorted, “I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?” That remains the deep-seated belief of most consumers, thanks to the efforts of those vanished pioneers, who still throw a long shadow across the city and the world, a trio with whims of iron and the talent for selling dreams in bottles and jars.

Stefan Kanfer is a contributing editor of City Journal and a former editor of Time. The most recent of his many books is Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball.

Copyright © 2004 The Manhattan Institute

Our Problematic Ally

Michael Moore's film—"Fahrenheit 9/11"—makes much of the connection between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. In fact, when Moore was filming across the street from the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, he and his crew were accosted by Secret Service agents. Why in hell is the United States Secret Service performing police tasks for the Saudi government? Gerald Posner wrote a very disturbing book—Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11—and he hasn't stopped raising my hackles. If this is (fair & balanced) disillusionment with the 9/11 Commission, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Scrutinizing the Saudi Connection
By GERALD POSNER

In establishing how the government failed to prevent the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the 9/11 Commission Report is excellent. Its grasp of some details, however, is less than reassuring - particularly details about Saudi Arabia, which it calls, in a gross understatement, "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism."

Perhaps even more startling is the report's conclusion that the panel has "found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually" helped to finance Al Qaeda. It does say that unnamed wealthy Saudi sympathizers, and leading Saudi charities, sent money to the terror group. But the report fails to mine any of the widely available reporting and research that establishes the degree to which many of the suspect charities cited by the United States are controlled directly by the Saudi government or some of its ministers.

The report makes no mention, for example, of an October 2002 study by the Council of Foreign Relations that draws opposite conclusions about the role of Saudi charities and how "Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem." The 9/11 panel also misses an opportunity to more fully explore an intelligence coup in 2002, when American agents in Bosnia retrieved computer files of the so-called Golden Chain, a group of Mr. bin Laden's early financial supporters.

Reported to be among the 20 names on this list were a former government minister in Saudi Arabia, three billionaire banking tycoons and several top industrialists. Yet the report neither confirms nor denies this. Nor does it address what, if anything, the Saudis did with the information, or whether the men were ever arrested by Saudi authorities.

These failures are ones of omission, but the questions are of vital significance. Less important, perhaps, but more well known is the story of how many prominent Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, were able to fly out of the United States within days of 9/11.

On Sept. 13, 2001, a private jet flew from Tampa, Fla., to Lexington, Ky., before leaving the country later that same day. On board were top Saudi businessmen and members of the royal family. The assertion is that they were afforded extraordinary treatment since they flew out after the most cursory F.B.I. checks and at a time when American airspace was still closed to private aviation.

For a long time, the White House, the Federal Aviation Administration and the F.B.I. denied that any such flights had taken place on the 13th, and the first day of travel was the 14th. Now the report of the 9/11 Commission finally admits the flight was on the 13th - but it fails to quell the controversy. Rather, the report says the flight only took off "after national airspace was open" and quotes the pilot saying there was "nothing unusual whatsoever" about that flight.

The report fails, however, to note that when the flights occurred, airspace was open only to a limited number of commercial - not private - planes. And it attributes incorrect positions maintained for months by the federal government, particularly the F.B.I., to a "misunderstanding" between federal and local law enforcement.

Moreover, the report makes no effort to determine whether the question of the special repatriation of high-ranking Saudis from the United States was discussed on the same day as the first flight in a private meeting - no aides permitted - between President Bush and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The ambassador has denied that the subject was discussed in his conversation with the president. But did the commission ask the president about it when it had the opportunity to question him? If so, there is no indication in the report.

The report makes no mention that one of the Saudis on the flight that left Kentucky for Saudi Arabia was Prince Ahmed bin Salman. Nephew to King Fahd, Prince Ahmed was later mentioned to American interrogators in March 2002 by none other than Abu Zubaydah, a top Qaeda official captured that same month. The connection, if any, between a top operative of Al Qaeda and a leading member of the royal family has remained unresolved despite Saudi denials. Prince Ahmed cannot be asked: he died in 2002, at the age of 43, from complications from stomach surgery in a Riyadh hospital.

Not only does the 9/11 report fail to resolve the matter of whether Mr. Zubaydah - who featured prominently in the now infamous Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001 - was telling the truth when he named Prince Ahmed and several other princes as his contacts, but they do not even mention the prince in the entire report. The report does have seven references to Mr. Zubaydah's interrogations, yet not a single one is from March, the month of his capture, and the time he made his startling and still unproven accusations about high-ranking Saudi royals.

Of course, none of these matters undermine the report's central conclusions about what went wrong inside the United States leading up to 9/11. And satisfying answers to questions about the relationship between the Saudis and Al Qaeda might not be available yet. But the commission could have at least asked them. By failing to address adequately how Saudi leaders helped Al Qaeda flourish, the commission has risked damaging its otherwise good work.

Gerald Posner, the author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, is writing a book about the Saudi royal family.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

50 Years Of Soul

The best of the Motown stable of performers were the four men known as the Four Tops. During the summer of 1965, I remember hearing "I Can't Help Myself" played over and over by some custodians where I also was working as a custodian. I had just earned an MA in history and the best job I could find was working a split shift as a custodian in the student union building at Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU). During my morning stint beginning at 4:00 AM, the other custodians played the jukebox (without depositing any coins) and the Four Tops singing their #1 hit filled the empty building. Whenever I hear that song, I go back in time. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Still Standing in the Shadows of Motown
By MICHELINE MAYNARD


Today's Four Tops: From left to right, Renaldo Benson, Theo Peoples, Ronnie McNair and Abdul Fakir at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. 

DETROIT, July 24 — Inside the tiny house where Motown Records began, Abdul Fakir is standing in famed Studio A, pointing out the worn spots on the floor where he and other members of the Four Tops stood when cutting their records.

He gestures to the sound booth, where the songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland sat, tweaking their arrangements. Motown's founder, Berry Gordy, stayed in his office upstairs in a house next door. But Mr. Gordy could hear the session through the walls. "If he came down, you had a hit," recalled Mr. Fakir, known as Duke.

On a day last month, a group of tourists descends the stairs. They fill the small studio, now part of the Motown Historical Museum, clamoring for autographs. Eulalio Brown of Port Huron, Mich., awaits his moment. Posing for a picture with Mr. Fakir, Mr. Brown, who claims a collection of Motown records "as big as Motown itself," is asked what set the Four Tops apart. "Longevity," he says, noting their five decades as recording artists.

Yet time has ravaged the Tops, too. Half the group no longer performs, including Levi Stubbs, whose gravelly voice was the signature of almost every song. Younger replacements have felt the sting of audiences who wanted nothing to change. Hits are scarce, too: the last was 15 years ago.

But while other groups of their era have broken up or been relegated to county fairs, the Tops still draw crowds to summer amphitheaters, where they crisply perform classics like "Standing in the Shadows of Love," as well as jazz tunes and fresh pop material.

And while the group is split on whether to continue if another original member can't go on, the Tops aren't packing up their sequined tuxedos just yet. On Wednesday, the group marks its 50th anniversary at a concert here that is being taped as their first television special.

Lifelong friends like Aretha Franklin and Mary Wilson, an original Supreme, will be on hand at the Detroit Opera House, honoring the group that was formed after its four original members, then high school students, met at a party in 1954.

Mr. Fakir, 68, will join Renaldo Benson, known as Obie, who is also 68, along with the two newest Tops, Ronnie McNair, 54, and Theo Peoples, 43. Mr. Peoples, formerly of the Temptations, will take on the parts sung by Mr. Stubbs, who stopped singing four years ago, felled by ill heath.

Now confined to a wheelchair, Mr. Stubbs, who declined to be interviewed, last appeared in public in April, at a benefit in Detroit.

The other original Top, Lawrence Payton, died in 1997. Their absence makes the anniversary bittersweet. "It's like having one body with two limbs missing," Mr. Benson said over a lobster lunch last month in a downtown Detroit restaurant.


Original members, clockwise from top left, Renaldo Benson, Abdul Fakir, Lawrence Payton and Levi Stubbs. 

Not that the new members have had it easy. Mr. Peoples, the youngest Top, watched fans walk out of concerts when they discovered that he, not Mr. Stubbs, was singing lead. Not that he blamed them. "They're loyal fans of Levi's," Mr. Peoples said. "I can't take that as an insult."

The Tops frequently team up with Mr. Peoples's former group, the Temptations, with whom they first sang on Motown's 25th-anniversary special in 1983. Audiences sometimes confuse the two groups, given that they consist of identically dressed black men (five in the case of the Temptations) who sing in harmony and perform dance routines. But numbers tell the story: over the years there have been 21 Temptations, but only 6 Tops. And for the first 43 years, simply Mr. Fakir, Mr. Benson, Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Payton.

Mr. Fakir credits the quartet's closeness to the years they spent bouncing around the jazz club circuit. Leaving Detroit for New York, they shared a studio apartment and rotated three suits among them. (The Top with the most important appointment had first pick, Mr. Fakir said.)

The Tops toured with the jazz balladeer Billy Eckstine, who admonished them to forgo fancy dance steps until they had mastered their songs, as well as Count Basie and his orchestra. In 1963 they landed on the Jack Paar "Tonight" show, singing a jazz arrangement of "In the Still of the Night."

Watching in Detroit, Mr. Gordy instructed his staff to sign them up. By then the Tops were eager to trade the club scene for a label already known for generating hits, said Suzanne E. Smith, assistant professor at George Mason University and the author of "Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit."

But it took the Hollands and Mr. Dozier another year after that to concoct the Tops' first hit single, "Baby, I Need Your Lovin'," in 1964, and another year for the Tops to land their first No. 1 hit, "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)." Their second No. 1 hit, "Reach Out, I'll Be There," followed in 1966.

"We didn't know what bag to put them in," Mr. Dozier said by telephone from his home in Las Vegas. They concluded that Mr. Stubbs's plaintive voice should be most prominent, backed by the Tops' harmonies and layered with vocals by a female group, the Andantes.

Motown's choreographers and costume designers added to the presentation — "things they wouldn't have gotten" without joining Motown, Ms. Smith said.

Snappily dressed even offstage, the Tops liked to carouse in all corners of the globe. Mr. Dozier remembers 18-hour days that stretched until 3 a.m.

But relations with Motown grew strained by the early 70's, when Mr. Gordy took the label to Los Angeles. That was around the time Mr. Benson went in a decidedly un-Tops direction by writing the lyrics for "What's Goin' On," which Marvin Gaye recorded after revamping it with Al Cleveland. Gaye embraced the protest song over initial objections of Mr. Gordy, who doubted the tune would sell, Mr. Benson said.

Mr. Benson was inspired to write it after an afternoon in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He was stunned, he said, when police descended on a crowd of hippies, pummeling them for no apparent reason.

After leaving Motown, the Tops scored occasional hits through the 1970's and 1980's, the last being "Indestructible," which reached No. 35 on the pop charts in 1988. Mr. Stubbs meanwhile became known to a new generation as the voice of a man-eating plant in the film version of "Little Shop of Horrors."

While its Motown hits sell tickets, Mr. Fakir said the Tops were always cycling newer material through their act, saving their biggest songs, like "Reach Out" for a show-ending medley. By that point familiar lyrics like "I'll be there, to always see you through" are a game saver in the event of an off night.

"They could be sick, they could be on crutches," he explains, but once the audience hears those words, "Wham! You've got 'em."

The decline of Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Payton's death are cautionary tales to Mr. Fakir and Mr. Benson, who have talked about retiring the Tops should one of them falter.

"We're not worried about ourselves, but we want people to enjoy it," Mr. Fakir said. He went on, "When things start to diminish, it's time to go home."

That prospect alarms Mr. Peoples and Mr. McNair, who separately insisted they would be willing to carry on the Tops' tradition. "This is history," Mr. Peoples said. "I just can't see people not having the option of going to see the Four Tops anymore."

Mr. McNair added: "It's not about who's up there. It's about the music."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

The Spiridellis Brothers Get My Vote!

Neither candidate for president is interesting. One is stupid (W) and the other is boring (Kerry). However, the brothers Spiridellis are funny. Go to JibJab.com and see for yourself. If this is (fair & balanced) burlesque, so be it.

[x LATimes]
It's a whole new take on the talking heads
The political cartoon's fame soars on the Internet.
By Gayle Pollard-Terry


Boring & Stupid Can Be Funny 

Ever since the online launch of their wildly popular animated political parody at JibJab.com — one that's equally insulting to President Bush and his presumptive Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry — life hasn't been the same for the Spiridellis brothers, the site's creators.

Set to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," the two-minute cartoon lambastes "the right-wing nut job" (Bush) and the "liberal wiener" (Kerry) with amusing animation and slightly off-color lyrics. The site, www.jibjab.com, registered 5 million hits in the week after the short first appeared July 9 on the Internet.

Now brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis have stopped counting. Their site, produced in a warehouse on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica, has been intermittently crashing ever since because of the traffic. The national media has caught on; Gregg, 33, and Evan, 30, appeared this week on NBC's "Today" and "The Early Show" on CBS and have a date on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" on Monday. .

"We got a call from my sister-in-law in Holland that said they've been playing it on the air in Holland with Dutch subtitles," Evan says by phone from their office. They've also gotten requests from Australian and German television and hundreds of U.S. news outlets.

In the short, the candidates drawn with large heads and mouths like marionettes go at each other. Bush says Kerry has more waffles than a house of pancakes, a reference to alleged flip-flopping on the issues. Kerry finds it scary that the president can't pronounce "nuclear."

The brothers, the only permanent employees of their company, Jib Jab Media Inc., can't keep up with the demands of their latest creation. "We're getting requests from every agent, manager and lawyer in Hollywood to help us out," Gregg says.

On their projects, Evan is the animator. Gregg, who earned an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is the writer. It's not the first time they've poked fun at politics. During the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, they made a 90-second cartoon titled "Arnold for Governor" that was shown at this year's Sundance Film Festival. They also did an animated rap battle in 2000 between presidential candidates Bush and Al Gore.

The Web shorts aren't money makers, the brothers say. Instead, they're used "as a calling card for us as a creative team," Gregg says, to attract advertising business from corporate clients. They started their company in a garage in Brooklyn in 1998, just before the dot-com bust. They headed to Southern California 2 1/2 years ago.

Currently they are in production on an independent feature based on their bestselling children's book, "Are You Grumpy, Santa?" "The movie has a kind of a 'Shrek' tone," Evan says. "It's kind of an updated fairy tale."

The brothers are dazed by the response to JibJab. "A son wrote, 'This is the first time my dad and I have been able to approach politics without yelling at each other in our entire life,' " Gregg notes.

Copyright © 2004 Los Angeles Times

Dickie Ross, RIP

Dickie Ross was my best friend at Amarillo College. I knew him through my entire 32 years there and I cannot remember a cross word between us. He suffered a terrible stroke two years ago and battled back to return to work at the College. He would call me numerous times each week after his return to the College to "check up on me and to see how I was doing." In the week prior to the 4th of July this year, he suffered a terrible accidental fall and never regained consciousness. I will miss him. If this is (fair & balanced) sadness, so be it.



Richard J. "Dick" Ross: 1946-2004 


Richard J. "Dick" Ross, 57, of Amarillo died Thursday, July 22, 2004.

A memorial gathering will be at 10 a.m. Monday in Amarillo College Ordway Hall with Bernard Cohen officiating. Arrangements are by Schooler Funeral Home, 4100 S. Georgia St.

Mr. Ross was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Dec. 20, 1946, to Dr. William and Evelyn Ross and was raised in Denver. He married Judy Harrell on July 24, 1983. Mr. Ross earned his Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Colorado in Boulder and his Master of Arts from West Texas State University. He was a national certified counselor, a certified career counselor and a Texas licensed professional counselor and achieved the rank of professor. He was also a member of MENSA. Dick was employed at Amarillo College since 1971 in the Advising and Counseling Center.

He was a certified ski instructor and ski patrolman at Loveland Basin ski area. He developed and initiated one of the largest indoor ski ramps in the country and directed the Amarillo College ski program. Dick was very involved with the Student Activities Council of Amarillo College and various student and college organizations.

Dick was actively involved in the community of Amarillo through his activities with the American Diabetes Association, Tascosa High School Band and Orchestra program, community ski programs and the Porsche Club of America.

Dick loved his family, his work with students at Amarillo College and maintained a love for skiing, fast cars and life.

Survivors include his wife, Judy; two sons, Andrew Ross and Eric Ross, both of Amarillo; a brother, Dr. James Ross of Grand Junction, Colo.; his mother of Grand Junction; three nieces; and three nephews.

The family suggests memorials be to the Amarillo College Foundation, P.O. Box 447, Amarillo, TX 79178, the American Diabetes Association, Potter/Randall Chapter, P.O. Box 50433, Amarillo, TX 79159 or to ITA (Texas Tech Trombone Choir), Texas Tech University, School of Music, in care of Don Lucas, P.O. Box 42033, Lubbock, TX 79409.

Copyright © 2004 AMARILLO GLOBE-NEWS