April 15, 2007
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Corbis Archives,War Czar, Philadelphia Homicides,Today’s Blogs, Today’s Papers
- Today’s Papers, Today’s Blogs, Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist Checklist: Scraggly-Haired White Boy
What Washington is talking about this week.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Friday, April 13, 2007, at 4:43A.M. E.T.Don’t Hate the Players
Who’s Your Biological Daddy?
Media. Scraggly-haired white-boy radio host Don Imus is fired amid outrage that he referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Imus apologizes profusely, making sure to mention that some of his best friends are nappy-headed hos. Defenders point out that Imus’ remarks are nothing compared with what many gangsta rappers say all the time. But even Snoop Dogg calls for his ouster, pointing out the difference between Imus insulting college students and his own references to “hos that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things.” In other media news, the Onion comes to D.C.; Zeitgeist surrenders.
Celebrities. After two months of popcorn-munching drama, a DNA test concludes that Anna Nicole Smith’s baby-daddy is floppy-haired photojournalist Larry Birkhead. “I told you so,” Birkhead tells reporters, implying that this could have been over a lot sooner if everyone had just listened. The baby wonders if they can run the test once more just to be sure. Towheaded former Playboy model Willa Ford will play Smith in the forthcoming biopic Anna Nicole—perhaps the most physically schizophrenic role since Robert DeNiro’s turn in Raging Bull. Now They Can Throw a Real Party
Crime. The North Carolina attorney general drops all charges against three former Duke lacrosse players accused of gang-raping a stripper. They may now return to their normal lives, if you can call crippling notoriety and lifetime Googlability normal. But as this case closes, another opens: Silver-maned District Attorney Mike Nifong, condemned by the AG as a “rogue” prosecutor, is already the subject of a bar-association investigation and may also face charges for withholding exculpatory evidence. If convicted, he could be sentenced to mauling by Duke fans. Pac It Up
Sports. The NFL suspends dreadlocked Titans cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones and Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry for their off-field conduct. Jones, who faces charges related to a shooting in a Vegas strip club, insists he’s simply taking a break to spend some quality time with his lawyer. Redheaded NFL commissioner Roger Goodell chides them for “damaging the reputation of players throughout the league” and tarnishing the otherwise wholesome reputation of the NFL. Take Off Your Helmet and Stay a While
Iraq. The Defense Department announces a surprise minisurge: Active-duty soldiers will have their tours extended from a year to 15 months. Elsewhere, a suicide bomb rips through the cafeteria of Iraq’s parliament building, killing eight and wounding many more. It’s the worst attack yet on the Green Zone, but balding Sen. John McCain says it is not part of the “larger picture.” Muqtada Sadr, meanwhile, encourages Shiite militias and Iraqi security forces to stop fighting one another—a touching call for solidarity amid so much sectarianism. Now they can focus on blowing up Americans. Banker? I Barely Know Her!
Business. Greasy-haired World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz apologizes for giving plum jobs to a bank employee who happens to be his romantic partner. Since taking over in 2005, Wolfowitz has made fighting corruption a major plank of his tenure, possibly as a distraction technique. The bank’s board promises to act quickly in deciding Wolfowitz’s fate. War “Czar” Least Popular Job Since Human Shield
White House. Three generals turn down the job of war “czar”—a new post that, if created, would oversee military and civilian affairs in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lack of interest indicates a strong reluctance to get mixed up in a troubled war effort. Perhaps the administration would have better luck if it called the position, say, Imperial Chieftain, or Grand Vizier of Sand and Sea. Computer Failure Probably Just Actual Failure
Law. The war over the fired U.S. attorneys gets hotter than Johnny Cash’s house: Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, suspended in his sensory deprivation chamber in preparation for next week’s hearings, gets served with a subpoena requesting another batch of classified documents. The White House also announces that e-mails dealing with the firings of U.S. attorneys, including many from Karl Rove, have been “lost.” Dome-tastic Sen. Patrick Leahy compares the mix-up to the Nixon tapes’ missing 18 minutes. Seems more like the digital equivalent of “My dog ate my homework.” You know it’s bad when even Newt Gingrich thinks you should resign. So It Goes
Death. Curly-haired Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84—a fact he would probably find hilarious, or depressing, or both. Vonnegut’s formative experience as a writer was the 1945 bombing of Dresden, which he called “a work of art.” Legions of MFA students pour out Pabst Blue Ribbons in his memory. Eloquence, Experience, Lymphoma
2008. Potential Republican candidate Fred Thompson reveals he has cancer—a seeming prerequisite for public life these days. Buzz also builds around Newt Gingrich, who defies all expectations at a debate with swoosh-haired Sen. John Kerry and advocates corporate tax incentives to combat global warming. Audience members half-expect “Gingrich” to tear off his mask and reveal himself as Al Gore. Meanwhile, as Sen. John McCain reasserts his commitment to this “necessary and just” war in Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama calls for a “surge in honesty.” Obama 2008: Where the “O” is for “Oh, snap.” Christopher Beam is a Slate editorial assistant.Today’s Blogs
And Quiet Flows the Don
By Michael Weiss
Posted Friday, April 13, 2007, at 1:44 P.M. E.T.And quiet flows the Don: After a weeklong media blitz and a spate of complaints from figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, CBS fired Don Imus from his radio show on Thursday for his reference to Rutgers women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hos.” No one online seems to have had much affection for the shock jock, yet chatter focuses on how shambolic it was to have “race-baiters” and “hypocrites” inter a man who said nothing worse than what one might find in hip-hop lyrics.
Media critic Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine thinks the standards for a “macaca moment” ought to be re-evaluated in the age of cable news and YouTube. Nevertheless, he writes: “I would have fired Don Imus years ago. Because he’s boring. And if he should have been fired as a racist, that, also, should have occurred years ago. Howard Stern has been exposing his racism for more than a decade (odd, by the way, that few if any news reports went to Stern for this perspective). I’m no fan of Imus. I panned him in TV Guide years ago. I won’t miss him now that he’s gone. I think what he said was as stupid as it was offensive — that is, colossally on both counts.”
At the New Criterion‘s Armavirumque, conservative editor Roger Kimball says he never took to Imus but sympathizes with the auto-da-fé officiated by hypocrites: “I don’t have much time for vulgarians like Don Imus. But I am ready to give him if not three then at least two cheers. His brand of irreverence is not everyone’s cup of tea. But the idea that he should be pilloried and hounded out of his job because Sharpton and Jackson managed to whip up a frenzied, racially-inspired campaign against him is nothing less than disgusting.”
Oregonian Rob Kremer thinks the timing is all wrong: “[I]t is really interesting that this story broke concurrently with the Duke lacrosse players getting their charges dropped. Weren’t Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson fanning those flames as well? Have they apologized to the lacrosse players? I mean, who was harmed more, the Rutgers basketball team or the Duke lacrosse players? It’s not even close.”
Largely, though, bloggers focus on the apparent double standard that allows rappers to get away with the same language that got Imus canned. Richard at Politics Plus Stuff argues that it’s a “red herring that Rap artists us the same terms all the time without penalty. … Sure it is disgusting when Rap artists ‘use those words,’ but they are using them generally. They are not actually calling real live very talented people those names in front of everyone. Which is not to defend the Rap artists’ use of the terms. They also deserve to be taken down for such incivilities. But they don’t walk right up to a woman and call her a ‘ho’ to her face on national radio and TV just to entertain an audience!”
Few share that sentiment. Writes Travis at the incongruent-affect: “Don Imus is an idiot. There’s no doubt about it. … But the utter hypocrisy of individuals like Snoop Dogg who cry foul at individuals who use this sort of language and then sell records that freely use those terms is staggering.”
And righty Michelle Malkin, who devoted her latest column to the pervasive misogyny in rap, compiles a selection of the latest chart-topping lyrics and adds: “Al Sharpton, I am sure, is ready to call a press conference with the National Organization for Women to jointly protest this garbage and protest the radio stations and big pimpin’ music companies behind it. Or perhaps the New Civility Squad is not convinced yet that the Billboard chart toppers I’ve highlighted are representative?”
At My Errant Mind, Sean Wilson, a former U.S. Army infantryman, has no love for Imus either, but points out a different hypocrisy: “I hear young women calling each other bitches and such cute variants as ‘biatch’ or ‘beotch’ all the time. They proclaim it proudly on their MySpace profiles, on their t-shirts, and call each other by those words when talking on their cell phones. I am assuming these young women who were the target of the comments by Imus never use ho or bitch or any other such language? Not ever? And they get offended when they hear it in movies, right? And they would speak out if someone else had been targeted? Forgive me if am skeptical.”
Conservative black blogger LaShawn Barber decries the double standard and comes down hard on the black community: “If black Americans in 2007 are this delicate and overreact to the slightest insults with this much unrighteous indignation, it’s pretty safe to say black people are not made the way they used to be, of stronger stuff, able to withstand truly demeaning and criminal treatment at the hands of true oppressors. It’s sad to know that the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of people who faced actual oppression are so much weaker, much less discerning, and much more undignified.”
New York magazine’s The Daily Intelligencer has a handy roundup of bigoted slurs uttered by public figures.
Read more about the end of Imus. In Slate, Stephen Metcalf explains why he listened to Imus, and Timothy Noah chronicles Imus’ other offensive remarks.
Michael Weiss, a writer in New York, is co-founder and managing editor of Snarksmith.com.Today’s Papers
Nuclear Reactors
By Jesse Stanchak
Posted Sunday, April 15, 2007, at 6:39 A.M. E.T.The New York Times leads with how Iran’s nuclear ambition is prompting nations across the region to look into developing their own nuclear technology. The Washington Post leads with an update of yesterday’s top story: The U.S. military now confirms that Marines fired on civilians during an incident in Afghanistan last month, killing or injuring more than 40 people. The Los Angeles Times goes with reports that Iraqi Sunnis have set up a parallel intelligence agency within the Iraqi government to counter the predominately Shiite official agency, which is entirely funded by the CIA.
The NYT paints the nuclear ambitions of virtually every Middle Eastern nation as the byproduct of fears that a nuclear Iran would dominate the region. All the nations concerned say they only want nuclear technology for generating electricity (despite the region’s vast oil reserves), and the paper treats this claim with healthy skepticism, assuming that at least some of the states in question would want to pursue nuclear weapons. The article’s most startling cl.. Most Arab nations would prefer a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities to Iran having nuclear weapons. In a related story, the NYT says North Korea failed to meet deadlines for shutting down its nuclear facilities, leaving the U.S. with relatively few options for bringing the nation in line with the commitments it made in February.
The hook of the WP‘s Afghanistan story is that the U.S. Army is, to an extent, confirming what Afghanistan’s human rights council had concluded: that American troops acted excessively in responding to a suicide bomber. The NYT runs a more narrative version of the story, which may be a better read but doesn’t tell the reader anything that the WP didn’t report yesterday.
The LAT‘s piece on parallel Iraqi intelligence agencies focuses as much on political maneuvering as it does on ideology, since this shadow intelligence bureau was born as much out of personal rivalries as political realities. Sadly the tale of spy versus spy doesn’t have a clear hero, as both organizations appear culpable of a range of illegal activities.
The WP off-leads with reports of lending companies’ improper use of government-held student loan data, prompting the Department of Education to mull shutting down the government database until better controls can be implemented. The database, which contains vast stores of personal information from 60 million borrowers, may have been used to fuel direct mailing campaigns and other marketing efforts. The information is meant to be used by schools and lenders to issue loans and collect repayments. The paper says that Education officials were aware that data mining went on, but recent inquiries showed it spiraling out of control. What’s troubling is the underlying assumption that a certain amount of data mining is tolerable, even inevitable—an idea the story never really gets around to questioning. The NYT runs a related story above the fold, reporting that private lenders have steadily boxed direct federal student loans out of the market place by offering schools sweetheart deals.
In a sort of reverse “Nixon’s secret plan to end the war” scenario, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., tells the NYT point blank that he has no “Plan B” for Iraq, should President Bush’s “surge” strategy fail. McCain tells the paper that if it became clear the surge was not working, then he would try to think of another idea, but at present “I cannot give you a good alternative because if I had a good alternative, maybe we could consider it now.”
Much has been made of Illinois Democrat Sen. Barack Obama’s success at raising funds from small first-time donors. But according to the WP, Obama has been no slouch in courting the big money, either, even after swearing off money from federal lobbyists, a pledge he’s kept so far, if only in the most technical sense.
The WP tries to reconstruct a day of violence possibly perpetrated by private security guards in Iraq, in order to examine the loose legal strictures such hired guns are under.
The conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan may be taking on a new shape, says the NYT, as Arab and non-Arab tribes, often portrayed as nemeses, may be allying to either fight the Sudanese government or negotiate some kind of settlement.
One of the major downsides of campaign fund-raising growing so quickly is that candidates can’t always question who their supporters are, says the LAT as it profiles a Pakistani man who had done fund-raising for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and a host of other Democrats, only to wind up on the run from the FBI.
The WP airs criticisms of million-selling author and educational consultant Ruby Payne’s controversial views on how schools can best educate low-income students. The stir is over Payne’s often sweeping characterizations of children from a certain economic strata: for example, the idea that they’re more motivated by a need to please their teacher than by a desire to achieve high grades. Critics say Payne’s ideas paint the poor as a single, homogenous group, and argue that many of her assertions are unverifiable.
The WP‘s Opinion page gives Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales a chance to address criticisms stemming from the firing of U.S. attorneys last year. Gonzales repeatedly writes that he made no “improper” decisions during a review of all 93 U.S. attorneys, a process that eventually led to eight of them being replaced. Buried deep in the rhetoric lies an announcement: Gonzales writes that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility will review the firings.
The LAT reports Chicago will be the U.S. bid city for the 2016 Olympics, derailing Los Angeles’ hopes of hosting the games for a third time. Chicago now has to face down international competition from cities like Tokyo and Madrid.
For Starters, the Movie Sucked . . .
The LAT runs a series of investigative pieces on how and why the 2005 film Sahara bombed—the film is currently $105 million dollars in the hole, despite having so many promising elements: best-selling source material, a well respected crew, and bankable stars.
Jesse Stanchak is an assistant documents editor at Congressional Quarterly. He covers elections in Oregon and Idaho for CQpolitics.com.- Nascar Faces a Less Certain Future
Steve Helber/Associated PressRevenue for International Speedway Corporation fell 19 percent because of lower attendance and concessions sales
As Growth Hits a Wall, Nascar Faces a Less Certain Future
On the cusp of the 2007 season, Brian France, chairman and chief executive of Nascar, stood before reporters at Daytona International Speedway and declared that the sport was continuing its remarkable rise.
France, the 44-year-old grandson of Bill France Sr., who founded Nascar 59 years ago, said on that February day that he expected television ratings to increase after a drop-off last year in more than 80 percent of the races featuring top drivers. He predicted that Nascar would rediscover the momentum that had transformed stock-car racing from a niche market in the Southeast to one of the most-watched sports in the United States.
But six races into the current season, Nascar is at a crossroads, suffering from an identity crisis at the same time that television viewership has not recovered. Ratings are down about 14 percent compared with last season, said officials from International Speedway Corporation, which owns 12 of the 22 tracks where Nascar runs top races.
The company announced last week that first-quarter revenue was down 19 percent because of lower attendance and concessions sales. In the past four months, International Speedway withdrew proposals for racetracks in Staten Island and in Washington State because of political opposition. John Saunders, the chief operating officer of International Speedway, in which the France family holds 63 percent of the voting stock, acknowledged that Nascar’s growth had leveled off.
“All sports have growth spurts and reach plateaus at various times,” he said last Tuesday in a conference call. “Nascar is not unique. What is unique is that this is Nascar’s first time.”
H. A. Wheeler, longtime race promoter and president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway in North Carolina, said that Nascar is in transition as it struggles to straddle two worlds.
“Are we moonshiners, country music, banjos and Route 66?” said Wheeler, who is known as Humpy. “Or are we merlot and Rodeo Drive? We just have to settle down and say: ‘Is this what we want? Exactly who are we?’ “
The task of defining the business falls to the France family, which has had a tight grip on Nascar for three generations.
While hundreds of people work for them, the Frances — who declined interview requests for this article — are responsible for Nascar and its direction. They own Nascar, control most of the racetracks and collect the profits. They make the crucial decisions, choosing to relocate established races to nontraditional markets like Los Angeles and introducing a radical new Car of Tomorrow, designed to increase safety, decrease costs and improve competition.
Bill France Sr., a tough, tall moose of a man, founded Nascar in 1948. His son Bill Jr. ran it like a dictatorship for 31 years before handing it to his son, Brian, in 2003. Bill Jr.’s daughter, Lesa France Kennedy, became president of International Speedway.
Jim France, Bill Jr.’s brother, is vice chairman of Nascar and chief executive of International Speedway. The family has been tremendously successful. Forbes estimated that Jim and Bill France Jr. are each worth $1.5 billion, gained primarily from Nascar.
The Frances remain one of the most powerful families in professional sports. Unlike in baseball, whose unions and owners often check the power of the commissioner, the family does what it wants because Nascar drivers are independent contractors. The Frances’ word is rarely challenged, say drivers, teams and other prominent figures in auto racing. Both times drivers tried to form a union, in the 1960s and ’70s, their efforts were quashed by the Frances.
“Sometimes we overlook what could be considered a monopoly,” said Kyle Petty, a third-generation Nascar driver. “We overlook what could be considered price-fixing with the purses and stuff like that. We overlook it because, in the end, we make a good living and they make a good living.”
Even Jack Roush, a feisty, often cantankerous owner of five top Nascar cars, knows he must bow to the Frances. “If you want to be a part of their circus,” Roush said, “you have to play by their rules.”
That means, though, that the Frances receive the credit when Nascar succeeds, as it has at a rapid pace in the past decade, and that they will be blamed if it sputters.
Unforeseen Speed Bumps
Although television ratings could have declined for many reasons, including an increase in channels and viewers’ choices, the Frances hit speed bumps while trying to expand, with Kennedy, 45, leading the effort. A racetrack proposal for the Denver area is encountering early opposition, and plans for New York and Washington are dead, for now. “Their missteps were early and often,” said Councilman James S. Oddo, a Staten Island Republican. He added that International Speedway’s first mistake might have been buying the land before gauging the probability of a racetrack’s approval.
At the first meeting with Staten Island officials, Oddo said, International Speedway’s slide show presented only two alternatives for about 450 acres of unused industrial land. “It was like they were saying, If we don’t get a shiny brand-new stadium, then you get diesel fuel-belching tractor trailers that will clog your roads,” Oddo said. “If they intended to intimidate us, it backfired.”
New investors are still attracted to Nascar. John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, teamed with Roush this season.
In an e-mail message, Henry said he had researched Nascar for three years before deciding to take a calculated risk to join the sport. He said too much emphasis was put on “year over year” television ratings, for Nascar and other sports.
“The ratings generated by Nascar are terrific in relation to other sports,” Henry wrote. “It is a very, very strong sport that is very well run and well positioned for the future.”
Nascar’s television viewership is second best nationally to that of the National Football League. An army of about 100 Fortune 500 companies is involved in Nascar, but its corporate sponsorship revenue is growing at a slower rate than in the past, according to an April report by the brokerage firm A. G. Edwards.
It is too early to gauge the success of Nascar’s recent bold moves. The Frances began a playoff system in 2004, and have since fine-tuned it. They allowed the first foreign carmaker, Toyota of Japan, to compete in the top-tier Nextel Cup series this year.
They are also trying to court a new base of fans with international personalities and races. Juan Pablo Montoya, a former Formula One driver from Colombia, made his Nextel Cup debut this season. The second-tier Busch series has scheduled races in Mexico City and Montreal.
No recent move by the Frances has been more significant than the introduction of the standardized Car of Tomorrow, which is supposed to enliven races by making it easier to pass. It made its debut last month at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, receiving criticism from drivers. Wheeler, of Lowe’s Motor Speedway, said the Car of Tomorrow would produce close racing, which would produce rivalries and drama that could bring the fans back. “With this car, I can see that sparks will fly once again,” he said.
Bill France Jr., 74, loves that kind of racing. He is obsessed with parity among Nascar’s teams and keeping the competition close, said Lee White, senior vice president and general manager of Toyota Racing Development. France feared that Toyota would dominate Nascar, White said. But when France granted permission, saying Toyota could win its fair share but only by an inch, White said, “It was like receiving the blessing from the pope.”
Although he used to attend nearly all the races, France has faded from the forefront. He remains vice chairman of Nascar and chairman of International Speedway but is frail and ailing after a cancer diagnosis in 1999.
“The Frances aren’t at the racetrack like they used to be because they have other people handling the competition side,” the longtime driver Ken Schrader said. “Now Brian is looking for new sponsors for the series or finding bigger places to race. He has a bigger job.”
The migration to bigger markets took Nascar east of Los Angeles, to California Speedway in Fontana, where its top division made its debut in 1997. That track gained a second race in 2003, at the expense of a Labor Day mainstay at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, where the Southern 500 had been run since 1950.
Empty Seats
California Speedway does not sell out for either Nextel Cup race. Attendance figures are not released, but there have been patches of empty seats as Nascar struggles to win over Southern California, including the Latino market.
Perhaps even more important to the state of Nascar, though, is that an examination of television ratings in specific markets suggests it may not be gaining as many fans in new and bigger areas as it has lost from its Southeast base. In fact, Nascar may be losing fans in both places.
From 2004 through last season, ratings for races broadcast on Fox in the top five markets dropped in all but New York, where the ratings were stagnant. In Los Angeles, they fell by 22.2 percent, in Chicago by 12.5 percent and in Philadelphia by nearly 28 percent. At the same time, Fox ratings in some traditionally strong markets also fell. Atlanta was down by 18.2 percent; Greensboro, N.C., by 8 percent; and Greenville, S.C., 1.5 percent.
The ratings for broadcasts of the Daytona 500 since 2004 have fallen as well, about 40 percent in Los Angeles, 28 percent in Chicago and about 11 percent in the New York, according to Nielsen Media Research.
“I know that some core fans have had some displeasure with the rules and regulations, the Car of Tomorrow, and some new fans might not like those things either,” said Robin Pemberton, Nascar’s competition director. “When you’re in the middle of something so successful, and the expectations are up, it’s hard to meet everybody’s expectations.
“You just take the criticisms, move on and hope the fans understand that things can’t stay the same forever.”
Perhaps nothing has changed more than the television contracts, and the money at stake. Nascar is in the first year of an eight-year contract with Fox, ABC/ESPN, TNT and Speed valued at about $4.5 billion, or $560 million a year. Its previous contract was worth $400 million a year.
Kyle Petty cited NBC’s decision not to renew its television contract with Nascar as a warning flag. “That’s a big, big story that someone walked away,” he said. “That’s a huge blip on the radar.”
NBC, which incurred losses on Nascar, had exclusive rights to renegotiate a new contract but decided to spend $600 million a year on the N.F.L. From 2001 to 2006, ratings for races broadcast on NBC fell by 38 percent in the Los Angeles area.
For now, though, Petty said, the ratings and even the lower attendance have not caused a crisis because the race itself has become secondary to the marketing opportunities surrounding it.
“It’s not about the tickets or the TV ratings,” Petty said. “It’s all about how many Cokes we could sell in that market.”
- Epidemic of Gun Violence in Philadelphia
Philadelphia Struggles to Quell an Epidemic of Gun Violence
PHILADELPHIA, April 14 — In a hospital emergency room, a young man winces as doctors try to determine how badly he has been injured.
His name is Karim Williams, he is 27, and he is this city’s latest shooting victim. He says he was hit around 12:30 a.m. by a shot fired while he was walking from his girlfriend’s car into a bar.
Mr. Williams was fortunate. The bullet went through his leg without hitting bone or major blood vessels, and after a shot of morphine and a few hours’ observation, he will be discharged from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania back into the West Philadelphia night.
In some ways, Mr. Williams is a typical patient at the trauma unit: young, mildly intoxicated and apparently with no idea why he was shot. What makes his case less common, doctors here say, is that he is neither seriously injured nor dead, since Philadelphia is in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence that has left the police struggling to preserve public safety and government officials renewing efforts to tighten the state’s gun control laws.
Last year, there were 406 homicides in Philadelphia, most of them by gunshot, the highest number in nine years, according to the Police Department. From 2004 to 2006, the number of homicides in the city rose 22 percent, more than twice as much as the aggregate increase recorded by 56 cities surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national law enforcement group.
This year, the pace of the killings has worsened; as of Friday the death toll stood at 110, or 16 percent higher than at the same time last year. By comparison, in New York City, with six times the population, there were 102 homicides from Jan. 1 to April 8, a drop of almost 24.4 percent from the same period a year ago. The rise in violence is evident at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, whose trauma unit treated 479 gunshot victims last year, a 15 percent increase over 2005. Some 18 percent of the attacks were fatal, and 16 percent of the victims will suffer permanent disabilities, like paralysis from head or spinal injuries, amputations, or long-term damage to internal organs.
Gun violence is becoming so common in some parts of the city that many people are no longer shocked by it, said Dr. Bill Schwab, chief of trauma and surgical critical care at the hospital.
“Are people becoming numb to violence? The answer is yes,” Dr. Schwab said. “It’s very common for them to be sitting on their porch and to hear gunshots in the night.”
What sets Philadelphia apart from other cities, say the police, politicians and academic experts, is the combination of high poverty — with 25 percent of the population living below the poverty line, the city has the highest rate among the 10 biggest cities, according to census data — a youth culture that increasingly settles minor disputes through violence and the easy availability of guns.
Pennsylvania’s cities are forbidden by state law from making their own gun laws, and so must conform to the political will of a largely rural state that, according to the National Rifle Association, has around a quarter of a million gun owners.
With about 85 percent of Philadelphia’s homicides involving guns, gun control advocates are urging state lawmakers to limit handgun purchases to one per person per month. The goal is to choke off supply to so-called straw purchasers, who buy multiple guns on behalf of those who cannot legally acquire the guns themselves because they have criminal records.
Supporters — including Gov. Edward G. Rendell and Philadelphia’s police chief, Sylvester Johnson — say it would not curtail the right of gun owners to bear arms but would significantly reduce the number of illegal guns on the street.
But many state lawmakers oppose the plan, which was introduced in February as part of a package of gun control measures, as an attempt to curb the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “It’s a constitutional infringement,” said State Representative Bryan Cutler, a Republican from Lancaster County, at a recent seminar at Temple University Hospital here on the effects of gun violence.
A similar measure was defeated in the Legislature last October, the day after a Lancaster County gunman carrying a mostly legal arsenal shot 10 Amish schoolgirls in their classroom, killing five of them.
For Karim Williams, the explanation for Philadelphia’s carnage is a lack of jobs.
“You’ve got to have jobs for the people that need them,” he said from his gurney. “You have to keep people occupied. Without jobs, all you can do is resort to violence.”
Mr. Williams said he recently became a licensed electrician and was looking for work after a past in which he served jail time for crimes including car theft and drug dealing.
While Mr. Williams hopes to escape the violence of his West Philadelphia neighborhood, it is too late for Richard Johnson. He was killed in a South Philadelphia convenience store in July 2005 when he was 17.
His mother, Catherine Young, said Richard — who had won a full academic scholarship to a local university — and his cousin were shot by a 16-year-old boy who claimed they were blocking the doorway in the store, and came back a short time later with a gun.
“It’s so easy for them to have a gun,” Ms. Young said. “Nobody should own a gun except the police.”
Dan Barry’s column, “This Land,” will resume next week.
- Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan
3 Generals Spurn the Position of War ‘Czar’
Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, AfghanistanBy Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 11, 2007; A01The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.
At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration’s difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.
“The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said retired Marine Gen. John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ ” he said.
The White House has not publicly disclosed its interest in creating the position, hoping to find someone President Bush can anoint and announce for the post all at once. Officials said they are still considering options for how to reorganize the White House’s management of the two conflicts. If they cannot find a person suited for the sort of specially empowered office they envision, they said, they may have to retain the current structure.
The administration’s interest in the idea stems from long-standing concern over the coordination of civilian and military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by different parts of the U.S. government. The Defense and State departments have long struggled over their roles and responsibilities in Iraq, with the White House often forced to referee.
The highest-ranking White House official responsible exclusively for the wars is deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan, who reports to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and does not have power to issue orders to agencies. O’Sullivan plans to step down soon, giving the White House the opportunity to rethink how it organizes the war effort.
Unlike O’Sullivan, the new czar would report directly to Bush and to Hadley and would have the title of assistant to the president, just as Hadley and the other highest-ranking White House officials have, the sources said. The new czar would also have “tasking authority,” or the power to issue directions, over other agencies, they said.
To fill such a role, the White House is searching for someone with enough stature and confidence to deal directly with heavyweight administration figures such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Besides Sheehan, sources said, the White House or intermediaries have sounded out retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who also said they are not interested. Ralston declined to comment; Keane confirmed he declined the offer, adding: “It was discussed weeks ago.”
Kurt Campbell, a Clinton administration Pentagon official who heads the Center for a New American Security, said the difficulty in finding someone to take the job shows that Bush has exhausted his ability to sign up top people to help salvage a disastrous war. “Who’s sitting on the bench?” he asked. “Who is there to turn to? And who would want to take the job?”
All three generals who declined the job have been to varying degrees administration insiders. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, was one of the primary proponents of sending more troops to Iraq and presented Bush with his plan for a major force increase during an Oval Office meeting in December. The president adopted the concept in January, although he did not dispatch as many troops as Keane proposed.
Ralston, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was named by Rice last August to serve as her special envoy for countering the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a group designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Sheehan, a 35-year Marine, served on the Defense Policy Board advising the Pentagon early in the Bush administration and at one point was reportedly considered by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He now works as an executive at Bechtel Corp. developing oil projects in the Middle East.
In an interview yesterday, Sheehan said that Hadley contacted him and they discussed the job for two weeks but that he was dubious from the start. “I’ve never agreed on the basis of the war, and I’m still skeptical,” Sheehan said. “Not only did we not plan properly for the war, we grossly underestimated the effect of sanctions and Saddam Hussein on the Iraqi people.”
In the course of the discussions, Sheehan said, he called around to get a better feel for the administration landscape.
“There’s the residue of the Cheney view — ‘We’re going to win, al-Qaeda’s there’ — that justifies anything we did,” he said. “And then there’s the pragmatist view — how the hell do we get out of Dodge and survive? Unfortunately, the people with the former view are still in the positions of most influence.” Sheehan said he wrote a note March 27 declining interest.
Gordon Johndroe, a National Security Council spokesman, would not discuss contacts with candidates but confirmed that officials are considering a newly empowered czar.
“The White House is looking at a number of options on how to structure the Iraq and Afghanistan office in light of Meghan O’Sullivan’s departure and the completion of both the Iraq and Afghanistan strategic reviews,” he said. He added that “No decisions have been made” and “a list of candidates has not been narrowed down.”
The idea of someone overseeing the wars has been promoted to the White House by several outside advisers. “It would be definitely a good idea,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Hope they do it, and hope they do it soon. And I hope they pick the right guy. It’s a real problem that we don’t have a single individual back here who is really capable of coordinating the effort.”
Other variations are under consideration. House Democrats have put a provision in their version of a war spending bill that would designate a coordinator to oversee all assistance to Iraq. That person, who would report directly to the president, would require Senate confirmation; the White House said it opposes the proposal because Rice already has an aid coordinator.
Some administration critics said the ideas miss the point. “An individual can’t fix a failed policy,” said Carlos Pascual, former State Department coordinator of Iraq reconstruction, who is now a vice president at the Brookings Institution. “So the key thing is to figure out where the policy is wrong.”
- Photography Collection: Corbis
Lisa Kyle for The New York TimesCorbis, started by Bill Gates in 1989, owns millions of images, some of them kept underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania.
A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge
Correction Appended
In some sense, the iconic photograph of Rosa Parks recreating her quiet act of rebellion on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., belongs to every American. But as a practical matter, it belongs to Bill Gates.
Anyone wanting to use that image in a book or on a Web site must first license it from Corbis, a corporation founded and owned by Mr. Gates, who is better known for starting Microsoft. The photo is among the 11 million prints and negatives in the legendary Bettmann archive, which Corbis bought in 1995.
Since that first purchase, Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set up two dozen offices worldwide. Although Corbis says it brings in some $250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit.
Now the company is shuffling its top executives as it takes on new challenges, building up a business in rights management and plotting its response to the rise of low-cost online photo services that threaten to undermine its lucrative stock photo sales.
The company plans to announce Tuesday that Gary Shenk, the president, is being made chief executive as well. Mr. Shenk, 36, is an expert in rights licensing who has risen rapidly through the Corbis ranks since he was hired in 2003 from Universal Studios, where he started a small licensing unit.
Steve Davis, 49, the departing chief executive, will continue as a senior adviser after 10 years of running the company.
The move into rights clearance, which involves sorting out the questions of who owns what material and how much they should be paid for its use, is a departure from the original vision for the company.
Mr. Gates started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork — interspersing, say, Stanley Tretick’s shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under the desk in the Oval Office with photos of their own families at play.
That is not how things have worked out. But meanwhile Corbis has built up a formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an average of about $250 apiece.
Corbis also owns digital reproduction rights for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.
In all, Corbis represents or owns the rights to more than 100 million images, including some of the most famous photographs ever — Arthur Sasse’s photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate. And Corbis handles the licensing of millions of other images on behalf of thousands of photographers.
The archival photos bring in about half of Corbis’s sales, but the company also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis swinging golf clubs.
Over the past few years, Corbis has moved beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than doing their own expensive photo shoots.
Those customers are also buying from Corbis’s growing library of 30,000 short video clips — mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the beach.
What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image.
Although the microstock business still represents a small fraction of the $2 billion market for stock photos, analysts say it is possible that low micropayment prices could take business away from the higher-priced images Corbis relies on for the bulk of its revenues.
“Think about how visual the world is,” said Barbara Coffey, a senior research analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York who follows the stock photography market. “We have pictures on our cellphones. If I can get a reasonably clear picture and the rights are cleared and I pay $2 for it, then why would I pay Corbis $200?”
The rise of the microstock companies has been of particular concern to Corbis. For all its new lines of business, the company still gets some 88 percent of its revenues from image licenses, yet commands only about 11 percent of that market. Getty Images dominates the market with a 40 percent share.
Getty, which has grown quickly since its start in 1995 with the backing of its wealthy co-founder, Mark Getty, has a foothold in microstock thanks to iStockPhoto, which it bought last year for $50 million.
Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty.
In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model.
“More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty,” said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. “If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us.”
Corbis is also betting heavily on its Creative Resources division, which includes rights services and recorded 44 percent growth in revenue last year, to $30.1 million.
Mr. Shenk, who will take over from Mr. Davis at the end of June, is most likely the biggest reason for that growth. When Mr. Shenk left Universal for Corbis in 2003, he took five people and an impressive Rolodex with him. Now nearly 30 Corbis employees work in rights clearance, in offices in Los Angeles, New York, Europe and Asia.
Mr. Shenk, a Hollywood veteran who is an expert in what he calls “new ways to sell media,” said he believed Corbis was offering something unique in building a worldwide network of rights experts. The business of rights clearance, he said, is often a matter of knowing whom to call, and the idea is to make Corbis the first place that comes to mind when, say, an advertising agency is trying to clear the rights to use an image, video clip, or song.
Such was the case when the band U2 made its most recent video, for “Window in the Skies,” which braided together some 100 clips of old stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, synched to the new song’s music and lyrics. Corbis helped the band’s production company negotiate a thicket of publicity rights.
Roughly one-third of Corbis’s 1,100 employees are in downtown Seattle, in an old bank building well suited to the company’s hip self-image. The vast, open, two-story space has retained several enormous vaults that once held gold bars and now serve as photocopy and office supply rooms. Conference rooms are named after famous photographers, and copies of their work cover many of the walls.
The Corbis photographs themselves are not stored in Seattle, except digitally on the computers there. And those digital images constitute only a small fraction of Corbis’s holdings. Of the 50 million items in the Sygma collection, just 800,000 have been digitized.
The prints and negatives from Otto L. Bettmann’s archive, as well as those from a few smaller collections, are kept 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. In February, Corbis announced that it would be storing the Sygma collection in a preservation facility near Paris.
As ventures go, Corbis represents a small investment for Mr. Gates. He pays for large expenditures, and the company uses its revenues to cover smaller projects within the firm.
Mr. Gates’s involvement in the company is minimal. He spends only two to three hours each month meeting with Corbis management. Yet it is clear that he makes the big decisions. He has no interest, for example, in treating the undigitized portions of the image collections like one of his charities by, say, donating them to a public entity.
Despite the hands-off approach, Mr. Gates is apparently never far from the minds of Corbis employees. Mr. Shenk is in the process of relocating to Seattle from Los Angeles, and his sparsely decorated office in Seattle is evidence of the commuter life he has been leading. The only work of art in evidence one recent afternoon was on Mr. Shenk’s whiteboard, where a colleague had drawn the unmistakable likeness of Mr. Gates, peering out from behind his glasses.
“Keep up the good work, Shenk,” Mr. Gates says. “Or I’ll kill you.”
Correction: April 11, 2007
An article in Business Day yesterday about the photography licensing company Corbis misidentified the photographer who took a well-known photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under his father’s desk in the Oval Office. It was Stanley Tretick — not Cecil Stoughton, who also shot pictures in the Kennedy White House.
