May 29, 2007

• Sharks,Judi Giuliani,Anthony Pellicano,Iraq War,The DNA 200 ,Darwin Correspondence, Writers,Today’s

  Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Today’s Papers Going Small By Daniel Politi Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2007, at 5:58 A.M. E.T. The Washington Post leads, and the New York Times fronts, word that President Bush will announce a new set of sanctions against Sudan’s government for its failure to stop the violence that has been plaguing the country’s Darfur region. The measures include sanctions that target government-controlled businesses as well as two senior government officials and a rebel leader. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how U.S. military leaders are looking for ways to “redefine success” now that they’re starting to realize the political goals that were linked to the “surge” in Iraq will not be met. Instead of focusing on the broad national goals, military leaders are expected to start pointing to small, local successes as a sign of progress. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with, and the WP off-leads, the talks between the Iranian and U.S. ambassadors in Baghdad, where the two officials traded accusations of who was responsible for fomenting the violence in Iraq. As expected, there were no real breakthroughs, although both sides characterized the meeting as positive and left open the possibility for more talks in the future. The NYT leads with the effort by a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers to increase funding for the coal industry, even as congressional leaders are set to introduce legislation to decrease greenhouse gases. The coal industry has been lobbying heavily and insists coal-to-liquid fuels could be a source of clean energy, although opponents counter that much of the technology is still unproven. The paper says the fight illustrates the “tension, which many lawmakers gloss over, between slowing global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil.” USA Today leads with an analysis showing that if the federal government were to use the same accounting standards as corporations it would have recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year instead of the official $248 billion deficit. The discrepancy is because the federal government does not follow modern accounting rules that require expenses to be recorded immediately, even if they will be paid for in the future, such as Social Security. As part of the administration’s effort to apply pressure on Sudan, Bush will task Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with getting the United Nations to approve a new arms embargo and to prohibit the government from conducting military flights in Darfur. Bush was apparently ready to announce the new sanctions last month but decided to hold off when the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked for more time to continue pursuing a diplomatic solution. But the NYT reports that Bush is “extremely frustrated” with the situation and decided he shouldn’t wait any longer. The WP notes that the announcement is likely to anger U.N. diplomats who have recently said they have been making progress with negotiations. Of the three broad political goals outlined by U.S. officials when they were touting the increase of troops in Iraq, only the new law to distribute the country’s oil revenue might be completed by September, and even that is a long shot. Knowing full well they can’t tell Congress that there’s been no progress, military leaders are beginning to shift focus away from the central government, saying the initial goals were too ambitious to begin with. Instead, military advisers hope to point to strategies at the local level that are producing results, including agreements with tribal leaders, to emphasize that the situation is improving, albeit slowly. The main new idea that seemed to come out of the meeting in Baghdad was a proposal put forward by the Iranian ambassador to create a “trilateral mechanism” to discuss ways to reduce the violence in Iraq. The commission would be composed of officials from Iraq, Iran, and the United States. The U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, said he would forward the proposal, along with Iraq’s offer to hold more talks in the coming weeks, to Washington. As had been previously agreed, the only topic was Iraq and so there was no mention of Iran’s nuclear program or its recent detentions of U.S.-Iranian citizens. In other Iraq news, a suicide bomber killed 24 people near a historic Sunni mosque in Baghdad. The Post says there are concerns the attack could lead to retaliations similar to what took place when the Shiite shrine in Samarra was bombed. But the LAT says the site of the explosion appeared to have been chosen at random. Meanwhile, the NYT fronts a look at how Iraqi prostitutes have become an increasingly common sight in Syria as the number of refugees continues to grow. The WP fronts the story of Allison Stokke, an 18-year-old pole vaulter who suddenly discovered she had become an Internet sensation. All of the unwanted attention didn’t start with naked pictures or an embarrassing video, but rather from a seemingly innocuous photograph of the attractive teenager that was posted by a popular sports blog earlier this month. Suddenly her popularity began to spread like wildfire all over the Internet. Stokke first tried to ignore it and then wanted to bring it under control, but she soon realized she was powerless to stop it. “Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning,” Stokke said. Better late … A correction from today’s NYT: “A caption on June 8, 1944 … misspelled the given name of the first officer seated at the left side of the table. He was Col. Girard B. Troland of New London, Conn.—not Gerand. The error was called to the attention of the editors by his grandson yesterday.” Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

  You don’t have to hate your first job By Laura VanderkamTue May 29, 6:47 AM ET Dustin Ashley Tester, 34, just got back from a week-long trip aboard a catamaran off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. She spent every day surfing and soaking up the sun. But this wasn’t a vacation. Tester has loved surfing since she picked up the sport two decades ago. So, shortly after graduating from Prescott College in Arizona, she founded a Hawaii-based surf camp and travel company called Maui Surfer Girls. Like many entrepreneurs, she struggled through rough patches. But these days, she spends her time leading tours or camps in gorgeous locations and helping women build their self-esteem as they conquer the waves. She also spends a lot of time pinching herself. “Every day out there on the boat I was thinking, ‘I’m getting paid right now!’ ” she says. Pretty lucky, right? If you’re one of the 1.5 million young people graduating from college this spring, you might be fantasizing about a dream job like Tester’s. Finding one, though, seems harder than standing up on a surf board. Career fairs feature booths advertising companies no one grew up dreaming about. Friends in the workforce whine about their hours. Well-meaning family members wax nostalgic about “paying their dues” at first jobs where they manned the office coffee pot. It’s enough to send you scurrying to grad school to postpone the whole process. But here’s a secret: You do not have to hate your first job. In fact, you can fall in love with it – if you do what Tester did. Rather than obsess about the font on her résumé, she asked herself two little questions: What do I love so much I’d do it for free, and how can I get someone to pay me to do that? Find the answers to these questions, young graduate. And you will never “work” again. Follow childhood wishes This year’s entry-level job market is even hotter than the overall economy. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that recruiters plan to hire 17.4% more grads from the 2007 class than the ’06 class. Just because you’re likely to get a job, though, doesn’t mean you’re going to like it. A recent Conference Board survey found that fewer than 39% of workers younger than 25 are even “satisfied” with their jobs, the lowest level in the survey’s 20-year history. A 2005 poll from Maritz, a research firm, found that only 10% of Americans strongly agreed that they look forward to going to work every day. A January CareerBuilder.com survey found that 84% of workers aren’t in their “dream jobs.” Fair enough. We all like to complain. But CareerBuilder.com dug a little deeper and asked people to think about what their dream jobs would look like. They found out, as Vice President Richard Castellini noted in the poll’s news release, that these jobs were “surprisingly reminiscent of childhood wishes for many workers.” I don’t find this surprising at all. For most of us, when we were little, there was something we loved so much we spent hours focused on it. Tester surfed. I scribbled stories in my school notebooks. Maybe for you joy came from something like “building sand castles.” This is the answer to the first question: “What do you love so much you’d do it for free?” Unfortunately, as we grow up, we see these affections as impractical. We don’t think there’s an answer to the question: “How do I get someone to pay me to do that?” People who experience career bliss, though, never lose faith on question No. 2. Fortunately for them, it turns out that this modern, wired economy has room for all sorts of livelihoods. I’ve been discovering this with writing. I moved to New York a year after college because I had grown up dreaming about being a writer in the big city. I figured I’d always need a day job to support myself. But while I hunted for that day job, I started writing for anyone whose checks cleared – websites, non-profits, newspapers, magazines, companies. Slowly, I got more assignments. Then I got better assignments. Articles turned into books. Eventually, I realized I was making a living doing what I had loved as a kid. I started writing about careers and found people – from cupcake bakers to music video producers – who had figured out the same secret to job happiness. Indeed, I once interviewed a man who did get paid to build sand castles. Greg Glenn, founder of a company called Sandscapes, grew up on the beach. He soon realized that people flocked to view his elaborate sand creations. He also realized that event planners might pay for his ability to draw crowds to fairs and malls with sand sculptures. He started Sandscapes to do just that. Which risk to take? Yes, many of these people with dream jobs are self-employed. That’s not surprising; even the best employer in the world wouldn’t know exactly what kind of job is perfect for you. It can be scary to strike out on your own. But taking a conventional job involves risks, too – namely, that you’d be one of the 90% of people who don’t strongly look forward to going to work every day. “That’s a huge part of your life that you’re not happy,” Tester says. “People would be so much happier if they enjoyed what they did.” It’s easy to settle for a mediocre job. But when you’re young and can survive on optimism, there’s no reason to settle. You owe it to yourself as a graduation present to ask these two little questions. Find answers, and you’ll soon learn that it’s easy to love your life if you make a living doing what you love. Laura Vanderkam, author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, is a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. Copyright © 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

  Saturday, May 26, 2007 Wild parties under the sun draw crowds Las Vegas pools seize the day Wild parties under the sun draw crowds despite the $375 rum. And ladies, do you really need those tops? By Kimi Yoshino Times Staff Writer May 26, 2007 LAS VEGAS — On a Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, at the hottest pool party in town, the Hard Rock Hotel’s Jack LaFleur is the man to know. The promotions director stands at the velvet rope, deciding who will shake their booties in the sun — and who won’t. “Only girls, send ‘em up!” LaFleur barks as a stream of 20-something, bikini-clad women hop the line, leaving a couple of hundred frustrated men in their wake. “No more guys. It’s out of control.” This is Rehab, Las Vegas’ best-known, biggest and craziest pool party. In the 21 Sundays it will operate this year, hotel executives estimate that Rehab will rake in about $6 million — nearly $35,000 every hour it’s open. As many as 3,000 tanned, toned and oil-slicked bodies find their way into Rehab each week, where they play swim-up blackjack, gulp down $17 cocktails served in 30-ounce plastic jugs and make out under waterfalls, on lounge chairs and, well, just about anywhere. Since it began in 2004, Rehab has transformed Vegas’ once-sleepy daytime scene into a “Girls Gone Wild” tableau of debauchery. Today, almost every major casino resort has nightclub operators managing its 21-and-over pools. They hire DJs to spin music and demand hefty cover charges. Rates vary by the weekend; on the cheapest days women pay $20, men $30. Several resorts have separate “Euro-style,” or top-optional, pools, with half-naked women cavorting in the water. This summer, both the Mirage and Venetian — heavyweights in the nightclub arena — have unveiled re-imagined pools. “It’s done a remarkable thing to the nightlife landscape,” LaFleur said. “Day life? It’s hard to even categorize it…. It’s finding those ways to generate revenue. For a town that’s been known exclusively for nightlife, this was extremely daring and off the charts.” The gamble is paying off. By 8:30 a.m., a ghastly hour by Vegas standards, people are already lining up outside Rehab, even though the pool doesn’t open until 11. “It’s almost like a ‘Star Wars’ premiere,” LaFleur said. “They sit down. They hold that spot in front.” Others, like Lisa Tully, a nursing manager from North Carolina, show up a bit later — and flash a little flesh to guarantee access. “As soon as we pulled the cover-ups off, they said, ‘Bam. Come up here,’ ” said the 38-year-old, who sported a pierced belly button and a black bikini dotted with rhinestones. The truly flush fork over $1,200 for a season pass — even if they plan to visit only a couple of times. Although LaFleur declined to say how he managed the gender ratio at Rehab, women were clearly in the majority. Ripped men with six-pack abs and check-out-my-pecs tattoos trolled the meat market in board shorts. Busty women, some obviously surgically enhanced, strutted around in high heels. Tully and her friend Deana Yeomans, 36, recounted the sad tale of one of their male friends, who called three times to try to rent a cabana at Rehab. “How many girls?” the operator asked. None, he answered. “They said, ‘Ha!’ ” Yeomans said. “They wouldn’t even take the reservation.” Fifty extra greenbacks, plus cover charge, did the trick for Shawn Conti, 27, a Tampa, Fla., real estate developer in town for a conference. “I would have spent more,” Conti said. “It’s well worth the money. I’d rather do this than go out” at night. He figured he’d drink all day, enjoy a nice dinner, go to his hotel and pass out. Then, after a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up refreshed for his meetings the next day. “What’s not to like?” said Garrett Williams, 25, a real estate broker. “At a nightclub, it’s dark and you can’t talk to anybody. Here, it’s light out and everyone is half naked. The number of girls wearing thongs out there is ridiculous.” When it first opened, organizers envisioned Rehab as a place to relax on Sundays after a hard weekend of partying. “That lasted about a week,” said the Hard Rock Hotel’s marketing guru, Phil Shalala. “People were actually beginning to stay in on Saturday night just so they could go to Rehab during the day.” Once inside, people are racking up huge tabs. In addition to the $17 cocktails, Rehab serves alcohol by the bottle. Bacardi rum that retails for about $15 costs $375; for a bottle of Jagermeister — typically about $20 — it’s $400. The big spenders can drop $1,195 for a bottle of Cristal champagne, which normally runs about $300. Roving photographers snap pictures like paparazzi and post them online. “These people have money in their pocket,” Shalala said. “The overall lifestyle that they live is work hard, play harder.” The scene has become so successful so fast that Hard Rock is planning on doubling the size of the pool area — already 4.7 acres — in the next couple of years. It will also add an upscale, more relaxed setting by 2009. At the Venetian, the new Tao Beach Club — an extension of the successful Asian-themed nightclub — opened in May with a party hosted by hip-hop artist Jay-Z. The pool is open daily but offers “Sunset Sundays” starting about the time Rehab winds down. The Palms’ pool promotes “Ditch Fridays.” Others, like the Venus Pool Club at Caesars Palace or Bare at the Mirage, are trying to be different. Venus is decidedly upscale, offering frozen grapes and frozen towels and charging $650 for a daily cabana rental. “This is just filling a void Vegas lacked in the daytime department,” said Alex Acuna of Light Group, which operates the new “Euro-style” Bare. Bare is the smallest pool-party venue in town, marking perhaps the first time that being small in Vegas is something to brag about. “It’s not a spring-breaky, 2,000-people pool party,” Acuna said. “It’s 250 people, intimate. Great music, great food, great drinks, great service.” Unlike Rehab, which serves nachos and chicken fingers, Bare peddles mojitos by the pitcher, lobster tacos with grilled mangoes and shrimp lettuce cups. And although nobody’s doing cannonballs into the pool, a battle cry to “release the twins” results in a round of free shots for ladies who go topless. A trio of women who said they worked as cocktail waitresses at the Penthouse Club in New Orleans complied with the request. “We hate tan lines,” said Rachel Oefelein, 22, baring her chest, pierced nipples and all. Her friend Erica Wise, 24, said they had been surprised by the pool experience: “I thought it would be a bunch of old creepy men staring, but it’s a bunch of people our age having fun.” The friends lounged on a daybed compliments of friend Steve O’Brien, 47, a computer consultant from Pennsylvania, who footed the bill for the $350 bed and spent “well over” the $300 drink minimum. A crew of attendants flitted about, pouring a $350 bottle of Grey Goose vodka from the group’s private fridge and changing towels. The staff was so attentive that they bought extra sunscreen from the hotel gift shop and delivered fatter straws for MaLou Maxey, 31, when she told them that she “deeply hates little straws.” “This has far exceeded any expectations I had of the place,” O’Brien said, adding that he wasn’t “all that concerned” about the rising bill as he sipped his mojito ($50 a pitcher). At Rehab, LaFleur is bracing for back-to-back parties over the holiday weekend. On Memorial Day, Rehab is renamed Relax at the Pool. “It’s going to be frightening,” LaFleur said. “Last year, there were 1,500 people that didn’t even get close to me to get in.” kimi.yoshino@latimes.com

  Today’s Papers Cut and Run By Ben Whitford Posted Saturday, May 26, 2007, at 5:15 A.M. E.T. The New York Times leads on White House plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq by 50 percent next year in a bid to shift the debate away from a specific exit deadline and towards a broader discussion of America’s role in the region. The Washington Post leads, and the LA Times off-leads, on claims that during the buildup to war the White House ignored repeated warnings from intelligence agencies about the risks involved. The Wall Street Journal heads its worldwide newsbox, the NYT and the LAT tease, and the WP stuffs news that Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr is back in Iraq. The LAT leads on claims that Iran’s efforts to gain nuclear weapons have led up to a dozen other Middle Eastern countries to seek nuclear technology. The White House is developing “concepts” for drastically reducing troop levels in Iraq once the surge strategy has run its course, according to senior administration officials. The proposals, apparently developed with the backing of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but without the involvement of US military commanders, would see troop numbers fall to 100,000 by the time of the 2008 election, with a new focus on training Iraqi forces and fighting Al Qaeda. “The current level of forces aren’t sustainable in Iraq, they aren’t sustainable in the region, and they will be increasingly unsustainable here at home,” said one official involved in the discussions. America’s top ground commander in Iraq warned that any US pullback would have to be conducted slowly and carefully. The Democrat-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday reported that in early 2003 US intelligence agencies warned that invading Iraq would risk sparking sectarian violence, aiding Al Qaeda’s operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing Iran’s regional influence. Analysts also told the White House that military action “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups”. The Senate committee’s chairman said the warnings “were widely distributed at the highest levels of government, and it’s clear that the administration didn’t plan for any of them.” Meanwhile Moktada al-Sadr, the populist Shiite cleric who heads the Mahdi Army, is back in Iraq after a lengthy stay in Iran; speaking at a mosque in Kufa, he demanded the speedy withdrawal of US troops and called for unity between Shiite and Sunni factions. The deaths of seven more US soldiers were announced Friday, bringing the total for May to nearly 100. Israel continued to pound Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip yesterday, launching airstrikes on at least eight locations. The NYT teases the story, noting that one of the attacks struck close to the home of the Palestinian prime minister. At least 38 Palestinians have been killed since the operation began nine days ago. Both the NYT and the WP front reports on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ties to Vinod Gupta, a CEO whose shareholders say he used company money to “ingratiate himself” with the pair. Gupta paid Bill Clinton more than two million dollars in consulting fees, and spent $900,000 to fly the former president and his wife around the world; the case illustrates how successfully the former president leveraged his elite donors once he left the White House – and the extent to which Hillary has been able to tap into the same network. Meanwhile the LAT picks over two new Hillary Clinton biographies, but finds little that’s likely to impact on her chances in 2008. All the papers ponder the implications of the war spending measure, which Bush finally signed yesterday, for the 2008 presidential candidates. The NYT and the LAT report on GOP attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom voted against the spending measure. The WSJ accuses Hillary Clinton of political opportunism. The WP fronts news that the new immigration bill currently under debate would do away with the “genius visas” that give talented aliens a fast-track route to US citizenship. The new regulations would send top academics, artists and sports stars through the same process as everyone else; a Nobel prize would count for less than a two-year degree. There’s more trouble brewing for Alberto Gonzales; the WP and the LAT both report that the Justice Department weighed political allegiances in appointing more than two dozen new immigration judges, many of whom had little previous experience of immigration law. The practice potentially violates civil service laws, and apparently pre-dates the tenure of former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling. The WP and the NYT report that Bush negotiators snubbed German calls for deep long-term cuts in levels of greenhouse gases ahead of next month’s G8 meeting, citing the US’s “fundamental opposition” to the German position. After a former Tour de France winner admitted doping yesterday, the NYT reports on the peloton of pro racers who have confessed using performance-enhancing drugs in recent weeks. The WP reports that the prosecutor who won the conviction of “Scooter” Libby in the CIA leak case wants him to be sentenced to more than three years behind bars. The NYT notes that Libby’s attorneys hope to persuade Bush to grant a pardon. With Americans turning away from sticky sodas in favor of quirkier non-carbonated drinks, both the WSJ and the NYT eye Coke’s $4.1bn purchase of Glacéau, the manufacturer of VitaminWater. “Growth in the beverage industry isn’t going to come from tiny bubbles,” said one analyst. The NYT profiles Iran’s departing UN ambassador, who despite being forbidden to travel more than 25 miles from Columbus Circle rose to become one of Tehran’s most influential advocates in the United States. Ben Whitford is a freelance journalist based in Princeton, NJ.

  Friday, May 25, 2007 Bush and Impeachment Why Bush hasn’t been impeached Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. By Gary Kamiya May. 22, 2007 | The Bush presidency is a lot of things. It’s a secretive cabal, a cavalcade of incompetence, a blood-stained Church Militant, a bad rerun of “The Godfather” in which scary men in suits pay ominous visits to hospital rooms. But seen from the point of view of the American people, what it increasingly resembles is a bad marriage. America finds itself married to a guy who has turned out to be a complete dud. Divorce — which in our nonparliamentary system means impeachment — is the logical solution. But even though Bush cheated on us, lied, besmirched our family’s name and spent all our money, we the people, not to mention our elected representatives and the media, seem content to stick it out to the bitter end. There is a strange disconnect in the way Americans think about George W. Bush. He is extraordinarily unpopular. His approval ratings, which have been abysmal for about 18 months, have now sunk to their lowest ever, making him the most unpopular president in a generation. His 28 percent approval rating in a May 5 Newsweek poll ties that of Jimmy Carter in 1979 after the failed Iran rescue mission. Bush’s unpopularity has emboldened congressional Democrats, who now have no qualms about attacking him directly and flatly asserting that his Iraq war is lost. Some of them have also been willing to invoke the I-word — joining a large number of Americans. Several polls taken in the last two years have shown that large numbers of Americans support impeachment. An Angus Reid poll taken in May 2007 found that a remarkable 39 percent of Americans favored the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. An earlier poll, framed in a more hypothetical way, found that 50 percent of Americans supported impeaching Bush if he lied about the war — which most of that 50 percent presumably now believe he did. Vermont has gone on record in calling for his impeachment, and a number of cities, including Detroit and San Francisco, have passed impeachment resolutions. Reps. John Murtha and John Conyers and a few other politicians have floated the idea. And there is a significant grassroots movement to impeach Bush, spearheaded by organizations like After Downing Street. Even some Republicans, outraged by Bush’s failure to uphold right-wing positions (his immigration policy, in particular), have begun muttering about impeachment. Bush’s unpopularity is mostly a result of Iraq, which most Americans now believe was a colossal mistake and a war we cannot win. But his problems go far beyond Iraq. His administration has been dogged by one massive scandal after the other, from the Katrina debacle, to Bush’s approval of illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of “signing statements” to disobey laws he disagrees with, to the outrageous Gonzales and U.S. attorneys affair. In response to these outrages, a growing literature of pro-impeachment books, from “The Case for Impeachment” by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky to “The Impeachment of George W. Bush” by Elizabeth Holtzman to “U.S. v. Bush” by Elizabeth de la Vega, argue not only that Bush’s misdeeds are clearly impeachable, but also that a failure to impeach a rogue president bent on amassing unprecedented power will threaten our most cherished traditions. As Lindorff and Olshansky conclude, “If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now, it may be only a piece of paper by the end of President Bush’s second term. Then it will be time to be afraid.” Yet the public’s dislike of Bush has not translated into any real move to get rid of him. The impeach-Bush movement has not really taken off yet, and barring some unforeseen dramatic development, it seems unlikely that it will. Even if there were a mass popular movement to impeach Bush, it’s far from clear that Congress, which alone has the power to initiate impeachment proceedings, would do anything. The Democratic congressional majority has been at best lukewarm to the idea. In any case, their constituents have not demanded it forcefully or in such numbers that politicians feel they must respond. Democrats, and for that matter Americans of all political persuasions, seem content to watch Bush slowly bleed to death. Why? Why was Clinton, who was never as unpopular as Bush, impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for the far more serious offense of lying about war? The main reason is obvious: The Democrats think it’s bad politics. Bush is dying politically and taking the GOP down with him, and impeachment is risky. It could, so the cautious Beltway wisdom has it, provoke a backlash, especially while the war is still going on. Why should the Democrats gamble on hitting the political jackpot when they’re likely to walk away from the table big winners anyway? These realpolitik considerations might be sufficient by themselves to prevent Congress from impeaching Bush. Impeachment is a strange phenomenon — a murky combination of the legal, the political and the emotional. The Constitution offers no explicit guidance on what constitutes an impeachable offense, stating only that a president can be impeached and, if convicted, removed from office for treason, bribery “or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” As a result, politicians contemplating impeachment take their cues from a number of disparate factors — not just a president’s misdeeds, but a cost-benefit analysis. And Congress tends to follow the cost-benefit analysis. If you’re going to kill the king, you have to make sure you succeed — and there’s just enough doubt in Democrats’ minds to keep their swords sheathed. But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that. The truth is that Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn’t mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we’re too confused — not least by our own complicity — to work up the cold, final anger we’d need to go through impeachment. We haven’t done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy — not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it. At first glance it seems odd that Bush’s fraudulent case for war has saved him. War is the most serious action a nation can undertake, and lying to Congress and the American people about the need for war is arguably the most serious offense a public official can commit, short of treason. But the unique gravity of war surrounds it with a kind of patriotic force field. There is an ancient human deference to The Strong Man Who Will Defend Us, an atavistic surrender to authority that goes back through Milosevic, to Henry V, to Beowulf and the ring givers, and ultimately to Cro-Magnon tribesmen huddled around the campfire at the feet of the biggest, strongest warrior. Even when it is unequivocally shown that a leader lied about war, as is the case with Bush, he or she is still protected by this aura. Going to war is the best thing a rogue president can do. It’s like taking refuge in a church: No one can come and get you there. There’s a reason Bush kept repeating, “I’m a war president. I’m a war president.” It worked, literally, like a charm. And many of the American people shared Bush’s views. A large percentage of the American people, and their elected representatives, accepted Bush’s unlimited authority to do whatever he wanted in the name of “national security.” And they reaffirmed this acceptance when, long after his fraudulent case for war had been exposed as such, they reelected him. Lindorff and Olshansky quote former Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker, who justifies his opposition to impeachment by saying, “Bush obviously lied to the country and the Congress about the war, but we have a system of elections in this country. Everyone knew about the lying before the 2004 elections, and they didn’t do anything about it … Bush got elected. The horse is out of the barn now.” To be sure, the war card works better under some circumstances than others. It is arguable that if there had been no 9/11, Bush’s fraudulent case for war really would have resulted in his impeachment — though this is far from certain. But 9/11 did happen, and as a result, large numbers of Americans did not just give Bush carte blanche but actively wanted him to attack someone. They were driven not by policy concerns but by primordial retribution, reflexive and self-righteous rage. And it wasn’t just the masses who were calling for the United States to reach out and smash someone. Pundits like Henry Kissinger and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also called for America to attack the Arab world. Kissinger, according to Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial,” said that “we need to humiliate them”; Friedman said we needed to “go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.” As Friedman’s statement indicates, who..leaving “who” for tone–> we smashed was basically unimportant. Friedman and Kissinger argued that attacking the Arab world would serve as a deterrent, but that was a detail. For many Americans, who Bush attacked or the reasons he gave, didn’t matter — what mattered was that we were fighting back. To this day, the primitive feeling that in response to 9/11 we had to hit hard at “the enemy,” whoever that might be, is a sacred cow. America’s deference to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach is profound: It’s the gut belief that still drives Bush supporters and leads them to regard war critics as contemptible appeasers. This is why Bush endlessly repeats his mantra “We’re staying on the attack.” The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush had lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway — revenge was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a misplaced revenge than none at all. For those who did not completely succumb to the desire for primitive vengeance but were convinced by Bush’s fraudulent arguments about the threat posed by Saddam, the situation is more ambiguous. Now that his arguments have been exposed and the war has become a disaster, they feel let down, even betrayed — but not enough to motivate them to call for Bush’s impeachment. This is because they cannot exorcise the still-mainstream view that Bush’s lies were justifiable and even noble, Straussian untruths told in support of what Bush believed to be a good cause. According to this line of thinking, since Bush and his neocon brain trust really believed that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous tyrant, the lies they told in whipping up support for war were, while reprehensible, somewhat forgivable. In Elizabeth de la Vega’s book on impeachment, framed as a fictitious indictment of Bush for conspiring to defraud the United States, she argues that from a legal standpoint it doesn’t matter that Bush may have believed his lies were in the service of a higher good — he’s still guilty of fraud. In a brilliant stroke, de la Vega compares the Bush administration’s lies to those told by Enron executives — who were, of course, rightfully convicted. The problem is that the American people are not judging Bush by the standards of law. The Bush years have further weakened America’s once-proud status as a nation of laws, not of men. The law, for Bush, is like language for Humpty Dumpty: it means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. This attitude has become disturbingly widespread — which may explain why Bush’s illegal wiretapping, his approval of torture, and his administration’s partisan purge of U.S. district attorneys have not resulted in wider outrage. This society-wide diminution of respect for law has helped Bush immeasurably. It is not just the law that America has turned away from, but what the law stands for — accountability, memory, history and logic itself. That anonymous senior Bush advisor who spoke with surreal condescension of “the reality-based community” may have summed up our cultural moment more acutely than anyone else in years. A society without memory, driven by ephemeral emotions, which demands no consistency from its leaders but only gusty patriotism, is a society that is not about to engage in the painful self-examination that impeachment would mean. A corollary to the decline of logic is our acceptance of the universality of spin. It no longer seems odd to us that a president should lie to get what he wants. In this regard, Bush, the most sanctimonious of presidents, must be seen as having degraded traditional American values more than the most relativist, Nietzsche-spouting postmodernist. All of these factors — the sacrosanct status of war, the public’s complicity in an irrational demonstration of raw power, the loss of respect for law, logic and memory, the bland acceptance of spin and lies, the public unconcern about the fraudulence of Bush’s actions — have created a situation in which it is widely accepted that Bush’s lies about Iraq were not impeachable or even that scandalous, but merely a matter of policy. Just as conservatives lamely charged that the Scooter Libby case represented the “criminalization of politics,” so the conventional wisdom holds that distorting evidence to justify a war may be slightly reprehensible, but is not worth making much of a fuss about, and is certainly not impeachable. The establishment media, which has tended to treat impeachment talk as if it were the unseemly rantings of half-crazed hordes, has clearly bought this paradigm. In this view, those who want to impeach Bush, or who are simply vehemently critical of him, are partisan extremists outside the mainstream of American discourse. This decorous approach has begun to weaken. A recent U.S. News and World Report cover read, “Bush’s last stand: He’s plagued by a hostile Congress, sinking polls, and an unending war. Is he resolute or delusional?” When centrist newsweeklies begin using words drawn from psychiatric manuals, it may be time for Karl Rove to get worried. But it takes time to turn the Titanic. The years of deference to the War Leader cannot be overcome that quickly. For all these reasons, impeachment, however justified or salutary it would be — and I believe it would be both justified and salutary — remains a long shot. Bush will probably escape the fate of Andrew Johnson and the disgrace of Richard Nixon. But he’s not home free yet. The culture of spin is also the culture of spectacle, and a sudden, theatrical event — a lurid accusation made by a former official, a colorful revelation of a very specific and memorable Bush lie — could start the scandal machine going full speed. Even the war card cannot be played indefinitely. If Bush were to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and the full dimensions of America’s defeat were to become apparent, all of his war-president potency would backfire and he would be in much greater danger of being impeached. Congress and the media both gain courage as the polls sink, and if Bush’s numbers continue to hit historic lows, they will turn on him with increasing savagery. If everything happens just so, the downfall of the House of Bush could be shocking in its swiftness. – By Gary Kamiya

  Today’s Blogs Justice Is Blonde By Christopher Beam Posted Thursday, May 24, 2007, at 6 P.M. E.T. Bloggers analyze Monica Goodling’s testimony and express relief that Jordin Sparks won American Idol. They also can’t wait to try out a new iPod-themed sex toy. Justice is blonde: Former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling testified before the House judiciary committee Wednesday, saying she had “crossed the line” by taking political leanings into account when making hiring decisions. Bloggers mostly agree that’s an understatement. Christy Hardin Smith at liberal Firedoglake doesn’t buy what she calls Goodling’s “if I broke the law, I didn’t mean to” routine: “[H]ow can someone who worked in a building full of experienced prosecutors possibly think that is remotely credible? My ignorance of the law made me politicize the hiring of multiple career justice employees? Puh-leese.” Philosophy professor Hilzoy at politically moderate Obsidian Wings thinks Goodling came off as smart and capable, but still “has not said anything to clear up the central question: who put the US Attorneys on the firing list, and why? What she has said just confirms the sense that there was nothing that remotely resembled a good decision-making process.” At the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal, Kevin Drum marvels at the still-deepening mystery: “Goodling is now the latest high-ranking DOJ official to say that, really, she has no idea why those U.S. Attorneys were fired last year, or who made the choices. The list appeared, somehow, but apparently not from any human hand. It’s a miracle!” During her testimony, Goodling recalled an “uncomfortable” conversation with Gonzales, in which the attorney general may have improperly tried to coordinate their stories. Paul Mirengoff at conservative Power Line isn’t convinced that the AG was trying to influence Goodling: “[P]erhaps Gonzales was trying comfort Goodling by indicating that he didn’t think she had done anything wrong. Alternatively, perhaps Gonzales was trying to make sure his recollection of the process was correct. In any case, Goodling didn’t think he was trying to influence how she would testify.” Liberal Don Q. Blogger at Vaguely Logical is pretty sure Gonzales was tampering: “Or else why would he turn a meeting with her into a session where he describes HIS recollection of the Great US Attorney Massacre in some detail and then asks how she remembers it?” “Maru the Crank Pot” at WTF Is It Now? admires Goodling’s ability to play the naif: She’s “very good at pretending she has no idea what the hell everyone is so angry about. It’s the old “punch someone in the back of the head and look around the room dumbly and say ‘who? me?’” trick.” At group law blog Balkinization, Marty Lederman parses Goodling’s statement that she was “not aware, however, of anyone within the Department ever suggesting the replacement of these attorneys in order to interfere with a particular case … for political advantage.” Lederman calls the last three words “suspicious”: “One might conclude that Goodling would only add that phrase if she were aware of people (even in the Department) suggesting the removal of the attorneys in order to interfere with a particular case — but if she did not presonally know whether the interference was designed ‘for political advantage.’ “ At the New Republic‘s The Plank, Michael Crowley serves up a new rendition of a classic tune, “I Crossed the Line”: “I kept a close watch on this staff of mine/I kept my eyes wide open all the time/I kept the Dems out for their sorry minds/It was a crime, I crossed the line.” Read more about Goodling’s testimony. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick writes that Goodling came across “more honest than Gonzales” and calls the Democrats “overmatched.” Jordin rules: Teenager Jordin Sparks beat out Blake Lewis to become the youngest American Idol winner Wednesday. Bloggers are nearly unanimous in their lack of surprise. “I’ve had Jordin pegged for many weeks as a possible winner,” writes Reed Dunn at Watching American Idol, “though I thought it was going to be Melinda Doolittle from the moment I saw her. When it came down to Jordin and Blake, though, it seemed like a no-brainer.” Entertainment blog BuzzSugar is happy: “Normally, I’d be worried about someone so young taking on all the pressures of winning ‘Idol’ … but she’s grown up with fame, and she seems grounded enough to handle all the attention that’s going to come her way now.” “Cell Geek” at The Cell Freak thinks the final song was an unfair choice: “Blake Lewis actually started out strong on ‘This Is My Now’ but once the chorus kicked in you could see he was embarrassed to be singing this and rightly so. No one would expect Eminem to tackle Barbra Streisand, why did they make Blake sing this?” Idolator‘s Brian Raftery, liveblogging the finale, shares his feelings about the “craptastic” finishing song. Lisa Timmons at A Socialite’s Life predicts Blake will be just fine: “[T]hese days, losing on American Idol doesn’t seem to have hurt the career of anyone who’s managed to stick it out long enough to be get some irons in the fire.” Read more about the American Idol finale. Watch Jordin Sparks’ show-winning performance. Slate‘s Jody Rosen and Katherine Meizel discuss the finale. Good vibrations: Apple sent a cease and desist letter to Ann Summers, a British sex shop chain, after the store began offering an “iGasm“—a product that hooks up to your iPod and vibrates along with the music. Apple complains that the iGasm ads, which show a curvy silhouette with a white cord running into her undies, violate their intellectual-property rights. Bloggers examine what’s rubbing Apple the wrong way. Brooklyn-based Free Williamsburg doesn’t understand Apple’s beef: “Seems to us, a product like this could actually HELP Apple sales, but as usual the company is absurdly cagey about their branding.” Ann Summers boss Jacqueline Gold responded cheekily to Apple’s threats: “Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put a smile back on their faces!” Hadji at Ernie Schenk Calls This Advertising? reflects: “[C]ome to think of it, I talked with some pretty high level execs from Apple the other day and they did seem, well, happy.” Meanwhile, Patrick at PhillyBurbs asks a pressing question: “[I]s it compatible with my eight-track player?” Read more about the iGasm. Christopher Beam is a Slate editorial assistant.

  Today’s Papers And the Money Keeps Rolling In By Daniel Politi Posted Friday, May 25, 2007, at 5:34 A.M. E.T. The Washington Post leads, the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, and everyone else fronts news that, after months of back-and-forth, Congress sent President Bush a war-spending bill without any timelines for the withdrawal of combat troops. Bush vowed to sign the bill, which funds operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until the end of September and includes a series of benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet to continue receiving reconstruction money. The Los Angeles Times leads with President Bush announcing that he supports the Iraq Study Group’s plans to make U.S. troops focus more on support and training, but only after they succeed in improving the security situation in Baghdad. “Bush’s remarks were the clearest yet on his vision for the long-term U.S. role in Iraq,” says the LAT. The New York Times leads with a poll that shows most Americans support the main provisions in the new immigration reform bill currently under debate in the Senate. By comfortable majority margins, most Americans believe illegal immigrants should be given a chance to stay in the country and are also behind the idea of allowing temporary foreign workers to come into the country. USA Today leads with word that high gas prices are not going to stop a record number of Americans from getting in their cars this Memorial Day weekend. “We are not seeing any indication that motorists have abandoned their holiday weekend travel plans,” a spokesman for AAA tells the paper. According to an oil analyst, cars are expected to use up to 190 million gallons of gasoline more this holiday than on a regular three-day spring weekend, which amounts to a whopping 1.2 billion gallons of gas. September is now the key month for the next debate over war funding, when lawmakers will hear from U.S. commanders on whether the increase in troops has had the desired effect. But as a demonstration that lawmakers will be keeping a close eye on the situation, the bill says President Bush must give a status report on the Iraqi government’s progress in meeting the benchmarks by July 15. Almost all Republican lawmakers voted for the bill, but many Democrats were angry about the lack of a withdrawal plan and reflected that sentiment through their votes. In the House, a majority of Democrats rejected the war-funding portion of the bill, which passed 280-142. The separate bill that included $17 billion in domestic spending, as well as an increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, had overwhelming bipartisan support, and passed 348-73. Both bills were joined in the Senate, where it was approved 80-14. Everyone notes Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama voted against the package. The new NYT/CBS poll also reveals 51 percent of Americans favor the provision in the immigration bill that would prioritize education and skills over family ties for those who want to settle in the United States. A majority of those polled (61 percent) think illegal immigration is a very serious problem, and most said employers who hire illegal immigrants should be penalized. Although 82 percent believe the government should do more to secure the borders, only 15 percent said that building fences is the way to go. The House had a busy voting day yesterday, and both the NYT and WP front news that, after much wrangling and diluting, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed new ethics legislation 396-22. Among the key provisions is one that would force lobbyists to disclose the amount of contributions they bundle from different sources, and the reports would be posted online. But as the NYT notes, “lobbyists are not the only bundlers,” so the provision won’t affect many others who use the fund-raising tactic. The NYT fronts, and the WP goes inside with, word that cleric Muqtada Sadr is back in Iraq after spending four months in Iran. Everyone agrees Sadr’s return is significant, but no one is really sure what it means or what he has in mind for the future. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, tells the Post he thinks Sadr is back to try to “consolidate his power base.” There has been lots of talk recently that the rise in sectarian violence is a reflection of divisions within Sadr’s militia. So far, Sadr has remained quiet, but officials believe he’ll deliver a sermon as early as today. The LAT fronts, and USAT goes inside with, a prominent group of international scientists warning that exposure to even low doses of some commonly used chemicals while a fetus is developing, or during a child’s first few years, could cause a variety of serious health problems. Since use of these chemicals is so widespread, “there needs to be renewed efforts to prevent harm. Such prevention should not await detailed evidence on individual hazards,” the scientists wrote. Yesterday, the WSJ said former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was the lead candidate to become the new head of the World Bank. Today, the Post reports President Bush is not likely to choose a former senator because administration officials want someone who has experience running a large organization. The WP hears that the two top contenders are former U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick and Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt, two men the WSJ also mentioned yesterday. The Post‘s Dana Milbank mentions how, keeping up with current trends, the president brought up al-Qaida over and over again during yesterday’s news conference. He mentioned al-Qaida a total of 19 times, and, at one point, even focused on how the terrorist group is a threat to everyone, even the children of some of the reporters who were present. “They are a threat to your children David,” Bush said to NBC’s David Gregory. “It’s a danger to your children, Jim,” Bush told the NYT‘s Jim Rutenberg. “This last warning was perplexing,” writes Milbank, “because Rutenberg has no children, only a brown chow chow named Little Bear.” Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

  Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Writers Take Out Their Knives Thuss Farrell   May 20, 2007 Ideas & Trends Writers Take Out Their Knives By MOTOKO RICH FOR all those who believe that “Moby Dick” would be great except for the parts about the whale, the British publisher Orion Books will publish this month a set of pared-down classics, cutting about 40 percent of what it calls “padding” from works like “Anna Karenina,” “David Copperfield” and yes, “Moby Dick.” It’s a well-trodden path, from Reader’s Digest to CliffsNotes to “Shrink Lit,” and has sparked the inevitable tsk-tsk-ing in literary circles. But surely, there are some books that could use some trimming. We asked seven authors, all of whom know a thing or two about the judicious use of words, what books they would put on the chopping block. Their answers, not entirely serious, roamed from classics to modern literature, and even some works that might not qualify for either term. Not surprisingly, Norman Mailer took on an old target, Tom Wolfe, with whom he famously tangled after the publication of “A Man in Full,” Mr. Wolfe’s 742-page doorstop of a book about the Atlanta real estate and social scene. Mr. Mailer included other contemporary giants like Toni Morrison and John Irving. Then again, Mr. Mailer also suggested that some of his own work could use another go-round with an editor; Neal Pollack and Joyce Carol Oates offered themselves up, as well. Length in and of itself was not a criterion for cutting: Ann Patchett suggested George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” which in the edition Ms. Patchett wrote an introduction for runs only 128 pages. And Ms. Patchett is a passionate advocate for “Moby Dick” — including all the stuff about the whale. Christopher Buckley, author of “Thank You for Smoking” and “Boomsday” Might I dare to suggest that L. Ron Hubbard’s book “Mission Earth,” which clocks in at 1.2 million words, might just be a teensy bit more accessible if it were say, just a million words? The pre-eminent examples of books that could probably do with a slightly better body mass index would be the works of Ayn Rand. They, nonetheless, stay resplendently in print, but having tried to read “Atlas Shrugged” about four times and “The Fountainhead” about, maybe, twice, these would be definite candidates for the literary liposuction machine and would probably be just as good — or just as bad. Ann Patchett, author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth & Beauty” Writers shouldn’t necessarily just pick on the long books. There are plenty of short books that are too long as well. I wrote an introduction to a new edition of “Animal Farm,” and I hadn’t read it since I was 12 and it was awful. Then I reread “1984″ and it was beyond awful. Definitely cut that one down. Suffering is often good for us in literature. I just read “The Wings of the Dove,” and it has about 400 of the most excruciatingly boring pages and then 150 pages that are transcendent beyond imagination. When I was saying this to people, they said, “Couldn’t you just skip the first 400 pages?” But it’s the suffering that makes reading transcendent. It’s like cutting out Good Friday and going straight to Easter. Easter doesn’t have the resonance without Good Friday. Sometimes we have to suffer. But then I’m Catholic. Stephen King, author of “The Shining” and “Lisey’s Story” Certainly the Bible could use cutting; think of all those begats, not to mention minor-league prophets such as Habbakuk (there isn’t even a car dealership named after him). What about “Ulysses”? All that tiresome stream of consciousness could go. And there is “Gone With the Wind,” which I would shorten to this: “Civil War?” said Scarlett. “Fiddle-de-dee!” But Atlanta burned! Rhett left! “I will think about it tomorrow,” said Scarlett, “for tomorrow is another day.” That’s so good you could probably fit “Dombey and Son” in the same edition. Or shorten “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” to a National Enquirer headline: UNFORTUNATE GIRL SLEEPS THROUGH RAPE, IS LATER HUNG. Neal Pollack, author of “Alternadad” and “The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature” I would cut say 80 percent of “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks and turn it into the greeting card that it was meant to be. Given that I’m a basketball fan, and given the recent controversy, I would cut the NBA rulebook by about 40 percent because some of these rules have got to go. I think I shouldn’t have added the extra 60 pages to “The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature” paperback edition. Let’s cut 40 percent of “The Satanic Verses,” not necessarily the stuff about Muhammad, but just because I thought it was too long. Norman Mailer, author of “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Castle in the Forest” Mr. Mailer sent in a list without commentary, which he requested be printed in full. Ernest Hemingway: “For Whom the Bell Tolls” John Dos Passos: “U.S.A.” William Faulkner: “Absalom, Absalom!” John Steinbeck: “The Grapes of Wrath” Thomas Wolfe: “Look Homeward, Angel,” “Of Time and the River,” “The Web and the Rock,” “You Can’t Go Home Again” James Jones: “Some Came Running” Norman Mailer: “Harlot’s Ghost,” “Ancient Evenings,” “The Executioner’s Song” Tom Wolfe: “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “A Man in Full” Toni Morrison: “Beloved” John Irving: “The World According to Garp” Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Black Girl/White Girl” I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go. And let’s say Jane Austen: too many descriptions of furniture and balls and ballroom gowns. I’m sure I could think of many other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own. Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections” Mr. Franzen said he can’t think of any great work that he would like to see slashed, but tinkered with some book titles, should they be chopped. “The Pretty Good Gatsby” “Alyosha Karamazov” “The Adventure of Augie March” “Paler Fire” “Lite in August” “Shortmarch” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Darwin Correspondence Cambridge University Library OBSERVANT In this previously unknown letter to a clergyman friend in 1860, Darwin initiated a correspondence about deaf cats with blue eyes. May 20, 2007 Word for Word My Dear Fellow Species By MARY JO MURPHY THE Origin of Species” is almost 150 — a fit survivor of the science canon even if not everyone has seen fit to jump from the Ark to the Beagle on the matter of evolution (three Republican presidential candidates, for example). But Darwin himself was slow to come to his ideas, and slower still to disclose them to a skeptical public. Last week, the Darwin Correspondence Project, based at Cambridge University, put about 5,000 letters to and from Darwin, some of them previously unpublished, online at darwinproject.ac.uk, with thousands more to follow. The searchable database lets anyone track the painstaking development of his research and thinking — on all kinds of topics, personal and professional, and with a huge array of correspondents. MARY JO MURPHY • The first surviving letter shows Darwin as a 12-year-old boy, acting like one, as he complains to a friend about his sister’s interrogations on his hygiene in 1822: Just as I was going, she said she must ask me not a very decent question, that was whether I wash all over every morning — no — then she said it was quite disgustin — then she asked me if I did every other morning, and I said no — then she said how often I did, and I said once a week, then she said of cour you wash your feet every day, and I said no, then she begun saying how very disgusting and went on that way a good while. …so then I went and told erasmus, and he bust out in laughing and said I had better tell he to come and wash them her self, besides that she said she did not like sitting by me or Erasmus for we smelt of not washing all over, there we sat arguing away for a good while. Darwin’s father wanted him to be a doctor but the son apparently didn’t like blood. His squeamishness shows — as does his compassion and meticulous concern for the practicalities — when he solicits an Angora rabbit from William Tegetmeier, a poultry expert, in 1856: Could you get the Porter to stick her, for I do not want her alive, & she would get knocked about & half-starved in our cross country Roads. I find that it ruins the skull to kill a rabbit in the ordinary way by a blow, & I shd. think it would be difficult to break the neck below the atlas. — I really do not wish or expect you to do so disagreeable task as to stick the poor beast, but I daresay the same Porter whom you employ to carry her … would do it. At Cambridge, when he was meant to be studying for the clergy (redirected after medicine didn’t work out), he was more into competitive beetle collecting. To his cousin, in the jaunty prose of the college man, in 1829: I have caught Mr. Harbour letting Babington have the first pick of the beettles; accordingly we have made our final adieus, my part in the affecting scene consisted in telling him he was a d——d rascal, & signifying I should kick him down the stairs if ever he appeared in my rooms again: it seemed altogether mightily to surprise the young gentleman. It was at the end of a letter to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin’s closest friend, that, building slowly, he dropped his bombshell of a notion in 1844, 15 years before “Origin”: I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who wd not say a very foolish one.— I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which cd bear any way on what are species. — I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts — At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals” … but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his — though the means of change are wholly so — I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. It was also to Hooker that he turned after one of the savage reviews of “Origin,” in 1859: I cannot help it, I must thank you for your affectionate & most kind note. My head will be turned. By Jove I must try, & get a bit modest. I was a little chagrined by review. I hope it was not Woodward. As advocate he might think himself justified in giving argument only one side. But the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base. He would on no account burn me; but he will get the wood ready & tell the black beasts how to catch me. The American botanist Asa Gray was a lifelong correspondent. The two shared scientific observations, but also discussed the Civil War. Darwin was passionately antislavery, as in this 1861 letter: I cannot believe that the South would ever have fellow-feeling enough with the North to allow of government in common. Could the North endure a Southern President? The whole affair is a great misfortune in the progress of the World; but I shd not regret it so much, if I could persuade myself that Slavery would be annihilated. … I sometimes wish the contest to grow so desperate that the north would be led to declare freedom as a diversion against the Enemy. … But Heaven knows why I trouble you with my speculations; I ought to stick to Orchids. Not that orchids always satisfied. To the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell in 1861: But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.— I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am. Gray supported Darwin on evolution but believed also in a guiding design. Darwin would have none of it, and suggested in an 1861 letter that his own large nose, of which he was not fond, was something no designer could have created: Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I shd. believe in design. — If I could be convinced thoroughily that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I shd. be convinced. — If man was made of brass or iron & no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I shd perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing. — I have lately been corresponding with Lyell, who, I think, adopts your idea of the stream of variation having been led or designed. I have asked him (& he says he will herafter reflect & answer me) whether he believes that the shape of my nose was designed. If he does, I have nothing more to say.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  The DNA 200 AP Photo/Mike Derer FREE Byron Halsey after new DNA evidence led a judge to throw out his murder convictions last week. May 20, 2007 The Nation The DNA 200 By CHRIS CONWAY DAVID VASQUEZ was a janitor of borderline intelligence when he confessed to the 1984 rape and murder of a young woman in Arlington, Va. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison and spent 5 years there, before DNA evidence from a series of similar rapes and murders committed after he was jailed convinced the police that Mr. Vasquez was innocent. Mr. Vasquez was pardoned in January 1989, becoming the first inmate to be exonerated by the then-nascent science of DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project, a legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan that pioneered its use. Late last month, the number of inmates formally cleared on the strength of DNA evidence reached 200, a moment that led to the first in-depth analysis of those cases by the project. The first 200 who were cleared, shown below, served an average of 12 years in prison. They ranged in age from 14 to 56 at the time of their convictions. Eighty-eight percent were convicted of sexual assault; 28 percent of murder. Fourteen were on death row. Several more have been all but cleared but await official exoneration — like Byron Halsey, above, who spent 19 years in a New Jersey prison for the sexual assault and murder of two children. Last week, a judge threw out the convictions citing new DNA evidence that pointed to another man as the killer. Mr. Halsey was released on bail. Prosecutors are expected to say soon if they will seek a new trial or drop the charges. In the 18 years since the Vasquez case, DNA testing has revolutionized forensic science and upended long-held notions about the reliability of evidence used routinely to convict people of crimes, including confessions. In the 200 cases, often more than one factor led to the initial convictions, the analysis showed. Three-quarters were marked by inaccurate eyewitness identification, and in two-thirds, there were mistakes or other problems with the forensic science. Fifteen percent featured testimony by informants at odds with the later evidence. There were confessions or admissions in about 25 percent of the cases. In about 4 percent, the people had pleaded guilty. As these cases have captured the public’s attention, various states and law enforcement agencies have made reforms, including improving the standards for eyewitness identifications, recording interrogations and upgrading their forensic labs and staffs. Several states have appointed commissions to re-examine cases in which inmates were exonerated by DNA. Some states are reconsidering their death penalty statutes. DNA testing has also helped law enforcement officers exclude suspects from further scrutiny. And, in turn, it has helped the police and prosecutors convict an untold number of people of crimes, stamping those outcomes with an equal sense of scientific finality.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Missing American Soldiers By RAVI NESSMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER ..> ..> raqi motorists drive their cars in central Baghdad, Iraq, as smoke is seen, background, in the al-Sinak district, Wednesday, May 23, 2007. Unknown gunmen opened fire on commercial shops in a drive-by incident in the al-Sinak district, injuring 3 bystanders. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban) View related video BAGHDAD — Iraqi police found the body of A man who was wearing what appeared to be a U.S. military uniform and had a tattoo on his left hand floating in the Euphrates River south of Baghdad on Wednesday morning. One Iraqi official said the body was that of an American soldier. The man had been shot in the head and chest, Babil police Capt. Muthana Khalid said. He said Iraqi police turned the body over the U.S. forces. The discovery of the body in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad in Babil Province, came as U.S. troops and Iraqi forces continued their massive search for the three soldiers abducted May 12 in an ambush on their patrol near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The U.S. military said in an e-mail that it was looking into the report, but could not confirm it. The report of the body found was confirmed by a senior Iraqi army officer in the Babil area. He told The Associated Press that the body found in the river was that of an American soldier. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. In an interview with the Army Times newspaper last week, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he believed at least two of the missing soldiers were alive. “As of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive,” he said in the interview, which was posted on the newspaper’s Web site on Saturday. “At one point in time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again we just don’t know.”

  In the Heat of Battle: Iraq War Joao Silva for The New York Times OBSCURED Basic information like how many civilians have died can be impossible to pin down in Iraq. At left, the aftermath of a suicide bombing.   May 20, 2007 The World In the Heat of Battle and Politics, Hard Facts Melt By JAMES GLANZ BEWARE the benchmarks of Iraq. As Congress and the American public begin to ask for tangible and quantitative measures of whether the troop increase in Iraq is creating improvement or presiding over failure, it would be wise to remember the kind of place where the United States is dispatching — metaphorically, at least — its statisticians. Iraq is the place where there are still wildly conflicting estimates of something as fundamental as how many civilians have died as a result of the war. It is a place where some government officials will swear that there are 348,000 wonderfully trained, motivated and equipped Iraqis in the security forces and other officials will tell you that most of those troops and police either have questionable loyalties, lack equipment or simply do not always report for duty. The precision is very important: 348,000, according to Wednesday’s update from the Pentagon. Or, perhaps, hundreds of thousands less. And the disagreements do not go away even when various groups agree on basic facts — say, that the United States has now spent $8.9 billion of its own and Iraq’s money on rebuilding the electricity and oil sectors, according to the latest figures from the Government Accountability Office. In those same numbers, oversight agencies see a rebuilding program that has fallen short of virtually all of its performance goals and had little impact on Iraqis’ lives, while organizations that are heavily involved in the program, like the United States Army Corps of Engineers, see a huge success that has not received due credit. “Nationwide, and since the time of sovereignty in 2004, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed over 3,000 of the original 3,786 projects in the Iraq Reconstruction Program,” according to a recent news release from the corps. How can a single country look so kaleidoscopically different depending on the point of view? Part of the answer is clearly that competing political entities strain with all their might to see a reality that fits their convictions — and that includes official entities that are determined to show progress, said Justin Logan, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. “You can always show progress,” he said. “Somewhere in Iraq, something is better than it was three months ago, and you can go and get somebody to write that story.” That method survives after four years in Iraq, Mr. Logan said, through “a mixture of wishful thinking and selective disclosure.” Mr. Logan’s analysis finds support among some of the oversight officials who have looked most closely at the reality of Iraq. Take, for example, those 348,000 Iraqis in the military and police forces. Joseph A. Christoff, director of the international affairs and trade team at the Government Accountability Office, who has made repeated trips to Iraq to carry out his research, said that the figure enormously overstates the actual readiness of the forces. “Half of them don’t show up for work each day,” he said. “They have divided loyalties — many of the people are loyal to Shia militias. And they are dependent on the United States for their movement, their equipment, their ammunition and their life support.” There is a related problem, he said, when the United States attempts to show that it has made progress against what it sees as the main foe in Iraq, Al Qaeda, by killing or capturing the organization’s leaders or disrupting its operations. In fact, he pointed out, it has long been known that the violence in Iraq stems not from one source but from a mishmash of conflicts, including purely criminal gangs working with both Shiite and Sunni armed groups, which in turn battle each other and fight among themselves. “And all of them have the general goal of getting us out of there,” Mr. Christoff said. Several other factors have recently made it even tougher to obtain solid information about what is actually happening on the streets of Baghdad, a notoriously opaque environment even before the fog of war set in. First, as the often desperate security situation has damaged the normal functioning of parts of the government, information that used to flow quickly through chains of command at the Interior and Defense Ministries is no longer as readily available. And most Iraq analysts have concluded that the rise of sectarian powers in Iraq has weakened the office of the prime minister, which had previously functioned as a sort of information clearinghouse during crises. A second problem is that by necessity Iraqi government officials are surrounded by thicker and thicker blankets of security where they operate, within the strange menagerie of the Green Zone. That prevents them from making their own observations of life in the rest of Baghdad, said Laith Kubba, who was the spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari until Mr. Jaafari left office in early 2006. “The gap has gone too wide,” Mr. Kubba said. “Many of those people have insulated themselves from what’s out on the streets.” Another difficulty for the United States is the remarkable weakness American officials seem to have for people who say what Americans want to believe about whatever country they happen to be in. The effect has been obvious at least since “The Quiet American” by Graham Greene, set in 1950s Vietnam, and Iraq has been fertile ground for this particular brand of bad information. Yet even for Iraqis with no motivation to shade the facts, exactly what effect the recent American troop buildup has had on the streets remains unclear. Mishkat al-Moumin, a former Iraqi environment minister in close touch with family in Baghdad, says the buildup has already increased security and allowed people to lead slightly more normal lives in some neighborhoods. But Louay Bahry, a former Iraqi academic, says that his contacts are telling him that the so-called surge has been a failure and has not improved security. Both Ms. Moumin and Mr. Bahry are now affiliated with the Middle East Institute, a research organization in Washington. Still, even Mr. Bahry says that there are tenuous indications that all is not lost. “In certain areas of Baghdad,” he said, “real estate has revived itself. People are buying and selling houses. People would not do this if there were not some good signs for the future.”   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work George Wilhelm/Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press Anthony Pellicano May 21, 2007 In Court Files, Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and ALLISON HOPE WEINER LOS ANGELES, May 20 — Just hours after a raft of articles suggesting the impending collapse of his business hit the papers on April 11, 2002, Michael S. Ovitz did what Hollywood moguls had done for a generation: He called Anthony Pellicano. “I need to see you,” Mr. Ovitz said, asking for a private meeting at an out-of-the-way spot. “This is the single most complex situation imaginable.” They all went to Mr. Pellicano when their situations seemed too complex, or the stakes too high, to leave anything to chance: executives and actors, studio bosses and their jilted spouses, the hottest and the has-been. In nearly 20 years in Los Angeles, he had made himself into the rightful owner of that breathless title, “Detective to the Stars,” the one man who would, and seemingly could, do anything to clean up any mess. So when federal agents raided Mr. Pellicano’s office in November 2002, his case became a local obsession: who would be fingered next, people wondered anxiously, as investigators gathered evidence and listened to Mr. Pellicano’s wiretap tapes. Perhaps the case has not lived up to its advance billing as the biggest Hollywood scandal in decades. More than a dozen people have been arrested, including a movie director, the head of a Century City law firm and a cast of minor characters. Mr. Pellicano himself sits in jail, awaiting trial on charges that his vaunted detective prowess actually boiled down to an almost addict-like reliance on illegal wiretaps. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of wiretapping and conspiracy. Only one actual wiretap has been produced by prosecutors, and defense lawyers dispute its authenticity. Still, the evidence so far — 150,000 pages of documents and hundreds of recordings Mr. Pellicano made of his own phone calls, many of which include discussions of wiretapping — is a rich sourcebook of show-business manners, mores and argot, a vicarious tour through the dysfunctional heart of Hollywood. The case file, much of which was obtained by The New York Times, illustrates the economics of information in the place that values it most — a community devoted to the manufacture, control and perpetuation of image. And it explains why Mr. Pellicano, who trafficked in all manner of potentially damaging data, was so eagerly hired and his unmasking so direly feared. The marketplace was filled with potential buyers, from the top of the town to the bottom of the D-list, in the movies, television, music, even the art and sports worlds. Stars might have had the most to lose if secrets were exposed. But entertainment executives — for whom job security is notoriously fleeting, and reputations as evanescent as last weekend’s box office — had ample reason to think others were plotting against them, or at least rooting for them to fail. Back in the golden days of Hollywood, the studios had in-house detectives to erase the indiscretions of their bosses and stars. In the era of outsourcing, Mr. Pellicano set himself up as a fixer for hire, on a $25,000 nonrefundable retainer, creating a character to suit whatever his clients imagined him to be: old-time shamus or shady ex-spy, geeky technophile or mobbed-up muscle. His constant allusions to being “connected,” to his roots in Al Capone’s old stomping ground of Cicero, Ill., nurtured what, for some customers, was a captivating aura of violence. From his suite on Sunset Boulevard, he maneuvered his way into the confidences of the powerful and fabulous, peddling information as ammunition or as protection from the unintended consequences of their lives. A Penchant for Celebrities He started out in Chicago in the 1960s tracking deadbeat customers for the Spiegel catalog, then hung out a shingle as a private investigator. From the beginning, he made celebrity clients his calling card. When the remains of Elizabeth Taylor‘s husband, the producer Mike Todd, disappeared from a Chicago cemetery in 1978, Mr. Pellicano led the police, and news cameras, right to them. He also acquired a mastery of audio technology, and was constantly quoted in Watergate-era articles about detecting wiretaps and electronic bugs. When a tape said to be of the exiled shah of Iran surfaced, The Times hired Mr. Pellicano, “one of the country’s top voice analysis” experts, to authenticate it. For a private eye selling himself to celebrities, however, Chicago was not as target-rich as Los Angeles. Mr. Pellicano moved west to help John Z. DeLorean, the carmaker and playboy, fight cocaine charges, and the acquittal instantly established him in town. As his business exploded, so did the range of services he offered. It was an open secret that the menu included wiretapping. Eavesdropping was nothing new in Hollywood. As early as the 1950s, a small industry of security companies was kept busy sweeping for bugs in the homes and offices of studio executives and cheating husbands. But by the mid-1990s, Mr. Pellicano had revolutionized the practice, inventing a virtually undetectable wiretapping technique. His wiretaps were installed not inside a target location but outside, in phone company junction boxes, and connected over telephone lines either directly to his office or to a laptop in a nearby apartment that recorded every call. Eventually, he devised a way to operate many wiretaps at once. By the late 1990s, to hear him tell it in conversations with clients, he was tapping phones all over town. (His lawyers did not respond to messages requesting comment.) Mr. Pellicano’s association with Bert Fields, a litigator known for his confrontational style, gave him entree to a client list studded with stars like Tom Cruise and executives like Mr. Ovitz and the talent manager Brad Grey. “I don’t care how you get information,” David Moriarty, a lawyer helping Mr. Fields defend Mr. Grey, told Mr. Pellicano in one recorded conversation. “You’re my kind of man,” the private eye shot back. (Asked for comment, Mr. Moriarty’s lawyer said that the quotation had been taken out of context, and that prosecutors had cleared his client of any wrongdoing.) In fact, two cases involving Mr. Grey produced roughly three-quarters of the documents in the Pellicano file. When the comedian Garry Shandling went up against Mr. Grey, his longtime manager, in 1998, Mr. Fields took Mr. Grey’s case, and before long, the detective was running what prosecutors say were illegal checks on witnesses like Mr. Shandling’s accountant, personal assistant and girlfriend. Two years later, Vincent Zenga, an upstart screenwriter-producer known as Bo, sued Mr. Grey over credit and profits from the hit horror spoof “Scary Movie.” During a deposition, Mr. Grey squirmed in the witness chair as Mr. Zenga’s lawyer depicted him as an unethical exploiter of other people’s work. After two grueling days, one of Mr. Grey’s lawyers e-mailed a colleague with a simple message: “Brad wants to hire Anthony Pellicano to investigate Zenga.” The lawyer added a request, to “see if we asked Zenga for his cellphone no. during his depo.” Mr. Pellicano was quickly on the case, wiretapping Mr. Zenga. What Mr. Pellicano heard was helpful not only in defeating Mr. Zenga in court; it could also be used to stymie his career. When Mr. Pellicano mentioned that Mr. Zenga was doing deals with the Imagine and Miramax film companies, one of Mr. Grey’s lawyers responded, “We ought to be able to put a stop to that.” In a statement on Friday, Mr. Grey said he believed that everyone on the legal team at Mr. Fields’s law firm, including Mr. Pellicano, “was acting properly, and I knew nothing of the improper activities now alleged against him.” Mr. Fields’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Michael S. Ovitz saw threats coming from every direction. In his prime, as head of Creative Artists Agency, he had been considered “the most powerful man in Hollywood.” By April 2002, his new talent and production company was falling apart even as he tried to sell it; his old protégés at Creative Artists were picking off his clients one by one; and he believed that his enemies were using the news media to broadcast and speed his undoing. On the day he mysteriously asked Mr. Pellicano for a 30-minute meeting — one mentioned nowhere in Mr. Ovitz’s detailed appointment calendars for 2002 — another round of articles had reported the defection of the comedian and actor Robin Williams back to Creative Artists. Mr. Ovitz later told the F.B.I. that he asked Mr. Pellicano to learn what would be printed about him in the coming months and to uncover embarrassing information about his enemies that he could use against them, documents show. Mr. Ovitz’s lawyer declined to comment for this article. John McTiernan, the director of blockbusters like “Die Hard” and “The Hunt for Red October,” hired Mr. Pellicano to wiretap his producer. In the summer of 2000, filming an ill-fated remake of the 1970s cult film “Rollerball,” Mr. McTiernan became convinced that the producer, Charles Roven, was undermining him with the movie’s financiers and executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “I sort of would like to know what he’s saying to the studio, and if there is any place where he’s clearly saying one thing to the studio and saying something else to others,” Mr. McTiernan said in a conversation recorded by Mr. Pellicano. But the detective offered only generalities. “Jesus Christ,” he said, describing his first round of eavesdropping. “I mean, scheming. Wriggling. Lying. Hypocrisy. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” When Mr. Pellicano complained that the sheer volume of calls meant that finding the most valuable information would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack, Mr. McTiernan asked if his computer could listen for the juiciest stuff, specific words or names. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s in the movies,” Mr. Pellicano said. Balking at the expense, Mr. McTiernan told Mr. Pellicano to take down the wiretaps. But he asked Mr. Pellicano to save the tapes — just in case. Mr. McTiernan, who declined to comment for this article, became the first movie-industry casualty of the federal investigation, when he pleaded guilty last year to falsely telling an F.B.I. agent that he had no knowledge of any wiretapping by Mr. Pellicano and had never discussed it with him. The Perfect Hollywood Persona Hollywood is sustained by its own peculiar system of mutual advantage. There are the boldface names, their lives often complicated by overlapping personal and professional conflicts, who believe that one call to the right person (and a lot of money) can solve any problem. And then there are the service providers — the agents, lawyers, publicists, assistants and countless others — who stroke the egos of the people paying the bills and get to have their own egos stroked according to their proximity to celebrity. Mr. Pellicano’s consigliere persona, reinforced by the Italian opera on his telephone system, was a perfect fit. The singer and actress Courtney Love called in 2001. She was fighting to get out of her record contract, fighting the surviving Nirvana musicians over control of the estate of her late husband, Kurt Cobain, and supporting her producer and boyfriend, James Barber, in a child-custody fight. She also feared that a disgruntled former assistant who had hacked into her e-mail account might publish her correspondence with friends like Drew Barrymore, Russell Crowe and even her psychic. Ms. Love complained to Mr. Pellicano that previous private eyes had turned out to be overpriced frauds, wimps or geeks. She wanted someone who could do it all, she told him, who would use whatever tools it took to get results — from refinement to “baseball bats.” “And I need them all under one roof,” she said. “Listen, Courtney, if you come to me, that’s the end of that,” Mr. Pellicano said. “My clients are my family, and that’s it.” Ms. Love indicated her approval. “There is no other way around it,” he said. “I’m very heavy-handed, honey.” “I need heavy-handed, baby,” Ms. Love said. “I like talking to an Italian.” “Sicilian, honey,” he corrected. “Well, that’s even better.” The tapes do not tell what Mr. Pellicano ultimately did for Ms. Love, who declined to comment for this article. But for stars who lived and died on image, perhaps his most valuable service was making sure a private problem did not metastasize into a public spectacle. In one conversation in 2001, the comedian and actor Chris Rock showed how attuned he was to the levels of outrage evoked by different types of scandal. A Stirring of Ambitions Mr. Rock feared that his rising stardom was being threatened by an accusation that an adulterous one-night tryst two and a half years earlier had not been consensual. “I’m better off getting caught with needles in my arm, I really am,” he fretted. “Needles with pictures: ‘Here’s Chris Rock shooting heroin.’ Much better blow to the career.” “I’m not going to let it happen,” Mr. Pellicano assured him. “Just stick with me, baby. I’ll take care of it.” Mr. Pellicano read from the woman’s police report, saying he was not supposed to have gotten a copy, and then confided that the police were not taking her seriously. (No charges were brought. Mr. Rock declined to comment for this article.) He also offered some unsolicited career advice, asking about Mr. Rock’s latest movie, a romantic comedy called “Down to Earth,” and cautioning him not to “get too fluffy” in choosing parts. “Look what happened to Richard Pryor,” he said. Inevitably, Mr. Pellicano’s life stirred his own Hollywood ambitions. In 1993, he collaborated with the director Michael Mann and the writer Cynthia Cidré on a screenplay about a private eye who squashes tabloid stories, wiretaps his prey and charges a $25,000 nonrefundable retainer. (“We’re living in a society where the rich and famous think they can pay for and get away with anything,” one character observes.) That project stalled, but in early 2002, Mr. Pellicano put together a pitch for a TV series he described as a “Sopranos” for Los Angeles. He sold it to Brad Grey’s company, producer of “The Sopranos,” which took it to HBO. Worried that the network would rob him of credit and money, Mr. Pellicano received a mollifying call from Mr. Grey. “They said that they will not give me executive producer credit,” Mr. Pellicano complained. “Well, I will take care of that. What’s the next thing?” Mr. Grey asked. “I have to have story credit,” Mr. Pellicano said. After all, he said, he had written much of the pilot script. When Mr. Grey promised to remedy the situation — and assured him that a $15,000-per-episode fee was respectable in the TV market — Mr. Pellicano regained his usual bravado. “You’re my friend,” he told Mr. Grey. “If you said, ‘Anthony, I get $10 million, you get $10,000,’ that’s it.” He added: “You are my friend forever. And if you called me up and said, ‘Anthony, we’re passing,’ I’d say, ‘O.K., Brad, what else is going on?’ “ Still, a moment later, Mr. Pellicano could not resist complaining again about his fee. “When I did the consulting for the script for Fox with Michael Mann, I got $250,000,” he said. But that was for a film, Mr. Grey said, adding, “That’s a better business.” Mr. Pellicano never got his series. It was rejected by HBO sometime in 2002. Mr. Grey himself left TV for the movie business in February 2005, when he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures. Last week, in his statement, he said: “When you talked with Anthony Pellicano, you immediately saw he was a colorful character, which made his HBO series a great idea then. Ironically, it may be an even better idea today.” Indeed, Mr. Mann never gave up on making a film about a Hollywood detective, and this month he announced a new script, set on the old MGM lot in the 1930s. Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star, Variety reported, as “the kind of detective studios once relied on to clean up the scandals” of their stars. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  The Thunderbolt Six years ago, she was the other woman. Today, she’s the ostentatiously adoring wife of the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Judi Giuliani’s run for First Lady. By Lloyd Grove CPI) If everything works out, it may be the last great political deal brokered in a smoke-filled room. On a balmy June night in 1999, Judith Nathan was having a drink at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East 63rd Street. Her companion was Dr. Burt Meyers, an infectious-disease specialist at Mount Sinai hospital and one of the many physicians she had befriended as a hospital sales rep for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Nathan, then 44, was at ease amid the upmarket manliness, a woman of the world among many middle-aged men of the world, including, that night, the mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. Club Mac, with its wooden Indians, leather sofas, and “state-of-the-art ventilation system,” had become a well-known late-night haunt for the mayor. Perhaps it was also something of an escape: He was still living at Gracie Mansion with his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover. Here, he could kick back with a tumbler of Glenlivet and relax with City Hall aides and political associates. Sometimes a woman would approach him, interrupting his cigar-smoking to express her admiration, maybe get an autograph. Perhaps flirt mildly. So it wasn’t surprising when Nathan, a pretty woman with rich brown hair, came over and said hello. This story of how they met had to be pieced together from accounts by Giuliani intimates because the couple refuses to talk about it. Even during their gauzy TV interview this past March with Barbara Walters—who was a guest at their wedding in 2003—which was a custom-made moment to safely peddle this type of personal anecdotage, Judith demurred. “That’s one thing I would kind of like to keep private,” she said, allowing only that “it was by accident.” A few days after their fateful meeting, the mayor had an aide retrieve Judith’s business card from his desk drawer at City Hall, then he phoned and asked her out. They took in a movie at Loews Kips Bay, The General’s Daughter, which is about a cover-up at West Point. At dinner afterward, at Peter Luger Steakhouse, they were chaperoned by a couple of City Hall staffers. Later, on the occasion of their marriage, Giuliani would tell the Times‘ “Vows” columnist that “our attraction was instantaneous. There was something mystical about the feeling.” He evoked an appropriately operatic moment from one of his favorite novels, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, when Michael Corleone spotted his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. “It was,” Rudy said, “the thunderbolt.” When she met the mayor at Club Macanudo, Judith Nathan couldn’t have imagined the complexity of the relationship she was getting into. At that point, the considerable successes of Rudy’s mayoralty were in the past and his future was uncertain. He may have looked like a catch, but he certainly did not look like a potential president. There was talk of a Senate run. Now, in a Cinderella-like reversal, Judith Giuliani, with her husband’s help, is auditioning for a vast and contradictory role: romantic partner of America’s Mayor, wholesome third wife, definer of gender roles, and emblem of respectable femininity for an entire nation. So far, her attempts to play this impossible part have been riveting, if sometimes comic. Rudy Giuliani has always been the most insular of politicians, operating within his personal tribe, at odds with most everyone outside. The prime value is extreme loyalty, and for those in possession of that quality (think Bernard Kerik), much else is forgiven. Like George W. Bush, he and his team create their own reality and wait for the world to follow. Judith Giuliani is the latest to join this coterie, and by far the most important. He’s given her influence into all facets of his professional life. He has often referred to Judith as his “closest adviser.” In a 2003 TV interview, Rudy claimed that Judith is “an expert we rely on” at Giuliani Partners. “She gives us a lot of advice and a lot of help in areas where she’s got a lot of expertise—biological and chemical,” Rudy said as Judith watched him and nodded vigorously. “And since we do security work, that’s an area of great concern—you know, another anthrax attack, a smallpox attack, chemical agents. She knows all of that.” Famously, he told Barbara Walters that Judith would be able to sit in on cabinet meetings, acting at the time as if this were a perfectly ordinary responsibility for a president to give his wife. At other times, their presentation has been lovey-dovey to the point of queasiness. Their displays of affection got so gooey during the taping of the Walters interview that the ABC News doyenne is said to have joked, “Enough already!” They held hands and cooed; he called her “baby” and she called him “sweetheart” as they kissed on the lips. At one point, after he absolved her of responsibility for his divorce from Hanover and his alienation from their two children (“She’s done everything she can. She loves all the children”), Judith, who was serenely feminine in a sea-green sweater, with another, lavender sweater tied casually around her neck over it, French preppy style, reached out to caress his cheek. When Walters asked her if she was “bothered” by her affair with the married mayor, Judith responded, blandly, “It was a rocky road, absolutely. But when you have a partnership that is based on mutual respect and communication, the two of you know what’s going on.” Americans have an unresolved relationship with their idea of what a First Lady should be. It doesn’t usually involve thunder and lightning. Political consultants know what’s easiest to sell: Harriet Nelson, which is to say more or less Laura Bush. More-assertive types, be it the Svengali socialite in couture (early Nancy Reagan), the defiantly unkittenish liberal crusader (early Hillary Clinton), or the aloof and foreign-seeming heiress (Teresa Heinz-Kerry), are more off-putting because it’s difficult to identify with them. Judith Giuliani’s biggest drawback—her three marriages—reminds voters of Rudy’s own three and the associated tawdry drama. The first, to his second cousin, was annulled after fourteen years. His second, to Hanover, ended with Rudy’s televised May 2000 announcement that he intended to separate from her; Hanover’s shocked, tearful, also-televised response blamed Rudy’s “relationship with one staff member,” i.e., his communications director Cristyne Lategano. That was before much was known about Judith. By the summer of 2001, Judith’s face, along with Donna’s and Rudy’s, was plastered on the cover of People magazine with the tawdry headline INSIDE NEW YORK’S NASTIEST SPLIT … THE MAYOR, THE WIFE, THE MISTRESS. Six years later, the rollout of Judith-as-wife, as potential First Lady, is still tainted by the smoke of that thunderous extramarital night at Club Mac. Her magazine appearances have tended to be like the one in the March Harper’s Bazaar, where she talked about “making him happy, making a happy home” and posed lip-to-lip on Rudy’s lap. “I’ve always liked strong, macho men,” she told the magazine. “Rudy’s a very, very romantic guy; we love watching Sleepless in Seattle. Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?” But amid their efforts at cozy public normalcy, suddenly Rudy’s son, Andrew, told a Times reporter that “there’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife.” Theirs is a very New York love story, complicated and, frankly, mature. It’s hard to say how it’ll play in the red states. In early 2000, as Rudy’s Senate race was getting under way, Judith Nathan was a mysterious but constant presence in the campaign entourage. Rudy didn’t bother to clarify her role internally, and the few people in the know kept their own counsel. One campaign staffer at first assumed Judith was “some sort of adviser or consultant.” Others believed she was a member of his security detail. Finally, by the time Rudy withdrew from the race in May, most folks had figured it out. The couple was quickly beset by crises: his prostate cancer and then 9/11. Under Judith’s guidance, he considered various treatment options and decided against surgically removing the prostate—the method that produces the most reliable outcome—in favor of implanting radioactive seeds. Called brachytherapy, it’s a less common procedure that has its advantages: The risk of long-term erectile dysfunction is lower. “He didn’t want the knife down there at all,” says an intimate who was privy to Rudy’s worries. Meanwhile, Rudy’s divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, acting on his image-battered client’s instructions, announced that Rudy’s radiation treatments had for the past year left him impotent, making sex with his girlfriend impossible. “Part of the reason Rudy loves her so much is that she loved him, and batted her eyes at him, even when his very virility was questioned, when his sexual vitality was knocked out,” says the former Giuliani associate. And Giuliani was unquestionably in love. A few years ago, at a wedding attended by prominent lawyers and judges, Rudy and Judith were sitting at a table where the other guests were having a spirited legal and political discussion. “Rudy was deferring to her the entire evening,” says a fellow guest. “They were talking about the war in Iraq, and she was opining. They were talking about the Second Circuit, and she had an opinion about that too. People didn’t know what to say. And Rudy, if anything, was drawing her out. ‘What do you think about that, baby?’ She likes to talk.” A former associate of Giuliani’s from the days when he was a mob-busting federal prosecutor says, “Loyalty does mean everything to him. He absolutely adores her. He doesn’t need the expensive Brioni suits she has him wear, or the fancy food she has him eat. He was a cheeseburger-and-martini guy. But Rudy defers to her.” Almost immediately after they came out as a couple, Judith accompanied the mayor everywhere, even marching alongside him in city parades. Paparazzi staked out her apartment building and her condo in Noyack. Donna Hanover obtained a court order barring Judith from Gracie Mansion. She quit Bristol-Myers Squibb in March 2001 and, with the connections supplied by her powerful consort, joined a philanthropic consulting firm, Changing Our World Inc., as a managing director. Before they were married, he indulged her desire to dine regularly at Le Cirque even though the heavy cuisine tended to make him queasy. “It was almost required daily, going to Le Cirque for dinner, and Rudy used to throw up afterward, because the food was so rich,” says a witness. “But she wanted to go, because it was the place to be seen, and the treatment by Sirio [Maccioni, the owner] was incredible.” As you descend from the hilltops on Route 309 into the former Judi Ann Stish’s hometown, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, it sparkles like shards of glass in the sunlight. Then—closer in, on the edge of town—the vision loses its luster amid the detritus of a long-abandoned coal-mining economy. You pass a barnlike structure sporting a sign that misspells adult shope, then gigantic Quonset huts, then strip malls, then churches. Since the mines shut down after World War II, Hazleton has struggled mightily. In 2002, U.S. News & World Report labeled Hazleton “a town in need of a tomorrow.” Aside from Judi, the city’s most famous native is Jack Palance. Judi’s second cousin, retired Hazleton Area schools superintendent Geraldine Stish Shepperson, says the family patriarch—whose surname was Americanized from Sticia—emigrated from Italy to toil in the mines with Irish and Slovak settlers in the early 1900s. “They were all poor working people.” Judi’s grandfather Frank Stish, a milkman, was paralyzed in an on-the-job accident, Shepperson says, and Judith’s 81-year-old father, Donald, is a retired circulation manager for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Judi’s mother, Joan, is Polish-American, and these Stishes—including Judi’s older brother, Donnie, and younger sister, Cyndy—attended St. Stanislaus Catholic Church, down the street from their modest two-family house on Carson Street in the Nannygoat Hill neighborhood. These days, Donald and Joan Stish spend part of the year in a Palm Beach condo purchased by Rudy and Judith. “She was beautiful and had long, reddish hair,” remembers current Hazleton High School English teacher Mike Saleeba, who was a year behind Judi back in the early seventies. “I remember her face—she had a fantastic complexion. I wouldn’t have dared to ask her out.” Still, “she would go out of her way to say hello to you. She wasn’t one of the snobs.” Saleeba compares Hazleton’s atmosphere in those days to the sitcom Happy Days. Saturday nights were spent dancing to live bands at the local YMCA. Afterward, the kids headed for the Knotty Pine—”the Pines,” they called it—a popular diner where they pulled up in their cars, flashed their headlights, and the waitresses served barbecue sandwiches curbside. Judi’s Hazleton High classmate Mike DeCosmo often dropped her home after a night of fun. “She was one of those people who never had a bad word about anybody, always upbeat, always friendly,” says DeCosmo, today an accountant. Judi was known as a diligent student and an attractive girl who busied herself with extracurricular activities such as the Future Nurses Association, the tennis and ski clubs, the literary society, and the Diggers Club, a volunteer service organization that “brightened the days of many handicapped and retarded children in Hazleton’s schools,” according to Janus, the high-school yearbook. In a blue-collar place like Hazleton, nursing was one of the few professions that were seen as appropriate for young women. “There was teaching, and there was nursing. That’s all that was offered to us, really,” says the school librarian, Theresa Krajcirik. It also got Judith out. She met medical-supplies salesman Jeffrey Scott Ross and, after two years of nursing school up the road in Bethlehem, married him at the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas. Then they moved to North Carolina. Their marriage lasted less than five years. By the time of their uncontested Florida divorce on November 14, 1979, husband No. 2 was already in the wings. She married Bruce Nathan five days later. They had met in Charlotte, where Bruce had moved after selling the Long Island–based office-furniture business founded by his grandfather. For the 24-year-old Judi, who had spent much of the previous five years on the road, demonstrating and selling surgical equipment, Nathan was a catch. Over the course of their increasingly rocky marriage, they lived in Atlanta and Manhattan (while acquiring a Hamptons summer place) and the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. She left him and moved to New York in March 1992 with their 7-year-old daughter, Whitney. Not surprisingly, Bruce Nathan’s friends remember Judi less than fondly. “She was a real opportunist, a real Becky Sharp character,” says a Nathan-family friend who shared Thanksgiving dinners with Bruce and Judi. “She was kind of cute, and Bruce was quite handsome—a rich trust-fund kid from Long Island. She was less sophisticated in those days. I think she really desired to be sort of the Junior League type. She basically struck me as having an inflated, self-important view of herself.” AP) The voluminous divorce papers filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court paint a more complicated picture. In public court documents, Bruce said he and Judi adopted Whitney in March 1985, when they lived in Atlanta, after trying for five years to have a child on their own. In 1987, they moved to New York, renting a series of apartments on the Upper East Side. The formerly Catholic Judi became an active member of the socially prominent Brick Presbyterian Church. The Nathans enrolled Whitney at the elite Madison Avenue Presbyterian Day School and, later on, Spence. In other court documents, there is mention of a Porsche, a Cadillac, antique furniture, paintings, pricey rugs, a place in Southampton, and, according to Judi, Bruce’s “trust fund valued at $800,000 to one million dollars.” She added, “My husband has had a long history of credit loans to support his lavish lifestyle.” As with all bad marriages, there seems to have been enough blame to go around. In one of the many affidavits filed and cross-filed by the warring Nathans, Judi accused Bruce of “a violent temper,” “numerous physical assaults and manhandling of me,” including “screaming vile epithets, cursing,” and “punching me in the side of my head” in March 1992. After that alleged attack—which Bruce has denied—Judith retreated with her daughter to a neighbor’s and called the cops. “I feared for my safety and that of my daughter,” she claimed in her affidavit, adding, “I immediately fled California.” She went first to Hazleton and stayed temporarily with her parents, then moved in with friends in Manhattan and took a part-time job in a dentist’s office before eventually finding full-time work at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bruce, in his own court filings, claimed that Judi had kidnapped their child and branded her an “unfit mother” and a “social climber” whose “‘main goal’ in life was being involved with whatever was ‘the in thing’ at the moment. Whether it was belonging to ‘the right church’ by converting from Catholicism to Presbyterian; playing bridge with the ‘right people’ … enrolling Whitney at the ‘right schools’ in order to further my wife’s social aspirations; wearing designer clothes and jewelry; and vacationing at the fashionable Hamptons.” And while “I maintained my Jewish heritage,” Bruce alleged that “my wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within Whitney’s earshot.” When he couldn’t afford something, she referred to him as “Jew boy” and other slurs. Mike McKeon, Judith’s campaign press secretary, dismisses the “ridiculous” fifteen-year-old allegation. “Anti-Semites don’t marry Jews.” Meanwhile, she went on with her life, having various romances. One is said to have been with a French diplomatic staffer. For four years, she and Whitney and clinical psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on East 55th Street. Years later, after Rudy made Judith the third Mrs. Giuliani and launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Zacharioudakis rhapsodized to the Daily News about his former lover’s “passion,” “sensual” nature, and “Italian eroticism.” Around the same time, Judith went back to court over custody arrangements for 16-year-old Whitney. She’d fled her mother’s Upper East Side apartment to move in with her father, safely out of the limelight. Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. For one thing, Rudy’s political career was resuscitated. During his illness, Giuliani had become increasingly dependent on her, a relationship that continued into his professional life. “She had to approve his schedule, which had already been finalized weeks before,” says an insider. “People eventually knew not to lock anything in until she’d looked at it.” In his best-selling 2002 autobiography, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that his future wife had been an effective mayoral adviser after 9/11 because she “had been a nurse for many years, and afterward a pharmaceutical executive; she had managed a team of people and had many organizational skills. Further, she had wide-ranging scientific knowledge and research expertise.” He added that he “put her to work helping me organize the hospitals” to treat the injured from ground zero. His campaign Website, meanwhile, notes, “In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mrs. Giuliani coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.” But concerning Judith’s participation in the city’s response to 9/11, public-health and security consultant Jerry Hauer takes exception to the Giuliani campaign’s assertions. Hauer—a nationally known bioterrorism expert who was Rudy’s first director of the newly created Office of Emergency Management—minced no words about the claim that the mayor’s then-girlfriend “coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.” “That is simply a lie,” Hauer tells me. “But Rudy’s not shy about rewriting history when it suits him.” Hauer had a bitter falling-out with Giuliani after Hauer endorsed Democrat Mark Green’s mayoral candidacy in 2001. “You’re done,” Rudy told him ominously after he and former police commissioner Bill Bratton staged a press conference endorsing Green. Rex USA) “I had left city government before 9/11, and Rudy called me back to help out,” Hauer says. “He asked me to relocate the Family Assistance Center from the Armory on Lexington Avenue, which was too small, to Pier 94. We put it together in two and a half days. At that point, he had already announced his separation from Donna and he wanted to get Judith involved somehow. Most people didn’t really care. We had a job to do. Where she had opinions, she offered them, and where they were valuable, we listened. The fact that she was the mayor’s girlfriend didn’t carry a lot of weight with most of the folks working there.” Afterward, Rudy installed her on the board of the Twin Towers Fund. The Giuliani-Nathan nuptials were a star-studded extravaganza at which the bride wore a bejeweled Vera Wang gown and a diamond tiara, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officiated, and the 400 guests included Wang, Walters, Beverly Sills, Yogi Berra, Joe Torre, Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, Mort Zuckerman and Henry Kissinger, even Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas. Judith elevated her profile in the charity world by touting various good causes in her column in Gotham magazine. She lent her name to the all-girls Mother Cabrini High School and the McCarton School for autistic children. In 2003, Judith posed in a cranberry bejeweled Carolina Herrera gown for the cover of the society glossy Avenue. She sported a huge Chopard brooch and Jimmy Choo shoes while reclining languidly in her so-called Moroccan sitting room. From the magazine’s excitable perspective, the Giulianis had “created their own Chartwell,” the name of Sir Winston Churchill’s country house, on the Upper East Side. The article confidently predicted that Judith “could be the most stylish First Lady since another Upper East Sider, Jacqueline Kennedy.” “You have a successful marriage when you have each other as a priority,” she told the magazine. “I travel with Rudy. He respects me and involved me in all aspects of his life. We get involved in speechwriting. We make decisions together about which places we are going to go. It’s a busy life and we live it together.” They have adjoining offices at Giuliani Partners at 5 Times Square, where she has installed Pilates machines, the better to keep her husband fit. Today, she doesn’t like to leave his side, her arm possessively around his waist at social gatherings such as a buffet dinner last July at Ronald Perelman’s East Hampton estate, where I saw the two of them navigating the A-list crowd joined at the hip. Manhattan hostesses have long known that if they invite the Giulianis to dinner, they must be prepared to breach protocol by seating them not only at the same table but next to each other, and Rudy’s standard lecture contract explicitly requires that his wife be placed beside him in case his appearance involves sitting through a meal. It’s no surprise to veteran Rudy watchers that in recent weeks, senior presidential-campaign operatives have apparently been grumbling about what they consider Judith’s meddling in matters outside her areas of competence. “She’s, uh, feisty, as they say,” a high-level supporter told Newsday. “The staff people go a little nuts.” The story of Manny Papir is a cautionary tale for anyone who doubts that Judith Giuliani is a force to be reckoned with. Papir, Rudy’s longtime personal aide, learned the hard way during a trip to Europe when Rudy, taking a 9/11 victory lap in early 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and then was honored with the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden. Among Rudy’s inner circle, Judith was fast becoming known for her demanding requirements. Even loyalist Sunny Mindel was overheard joking that whenever they arranged a chartered jet for their principal and his companion, “we need two seats for Judith—one for her and one for her Gucci bag.” (“I have no recollection of saying that,” Mindel says.) When Judith asked to stay two nights in Baden-Baden instead of the previously planned one—throwing the intricate schedule into disarray—Papir, who was advancing Rudy’s triumphal tour, made the mistake of betraying his impatience. Running into other members of the entourage in the lobby, he muttered, “Let me guess—you’re waiting for Princess, too.” When the quip was reported back to Rudy and Judith, Papir—who declined to comment—was out of a $200,000-a-year job. McKeon dismisses the complaints, arguing that Judith is not trying to be a political strategist. “It comes from people who are not on the inside of the campaign. Maybe that’s why they’re grumbling,” he says. “Judith is nothing but an asset, and, as the campaign continues, she’s going to be a larger and larger asset.” Her early work on the stump has been marred by occasional gaffes, but he calls her “an experienced public speaker” and says there are no plans to get her a speechwriter. “Her primary role is as a support system for Rudy in a personal way and as a character witness for him in a public way. She knows him as a man, as a husband, and as a good person, and that’s what she’ll be talking about. She’ll be one of our key surrogates.” Judith Giuliani was introduced to the public by the tabloids. But that experience did not fully prepare her for the current one. Friends describe a woman who is hurt and baffled—”freaked out,” says one—by the barrage of coverage of her first marriage and the fact that long ago, her job had her demonstrating surgical-stapling procedures on live dogs. Candice Stark, who’s known Judith for twenty years, believes that she’s a target of opportunity. “I read these things in the newspaper trying to trash her, trying to make her seem like something that she’s not, and I think it’s just people looking for anything they can to take Rudy down,” she theorizes. “Everything about his life is so well known they can’t dig much further, so they’re going after her instead. So much of politics is cruel. You’ve got to be strong.” A confidant of Judith’s from the Hamptons, where the Giulianis paid $3 million for a 6,000-square-foot shingled house in Water Mill, complete with swimming pool, wine cellar, and cigar room, argues that she’s been unfairly caricatured. “This is a woman, a single mother, who has struggled most of her life, and she married somebody not because he was famous or because she thought he would be the president but because she was in love with him,” the friend says. “Now she’s very worried that something she will do or say will hurt his opportunity. She loses sleep over it. Reading in the newspapers that she’s a liability has been very, very hard for her.” The friend added, “I think Rudy’s the one that’s sabotaging her. He’s out of control. There’s too much hand-holding and kissing on the lips, behaving like a couple of 18-year-olds in their first love affair. She doesn’t have the political smarts, and I don’t think she expected any of this.” (Like many people interviewed for this article, this friend asked for anonymity. “No good deed goes unpunished,” explained Howard Koeppel, declining to share his impressions of the mayor’s then-girlfriend, who was a frequent visitor after Rudy moved out of Gracie Mansion to bunk with Koeppel and his domestic partner, Mark Hsiao.) Republican fund-raiser and Manhattan hostess Georgette Mosbacher—the ex-wife of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher, who was Commerce secretary under the first President Bush—is a new member of Judith’s social circle, along with Walters and Beverly Sills. All three were Judith’s guests in December at an intimate ladies’ lunch at the Giulianis’ East 66th Street co-op off Madison Avenue. “It’s a tough role—I’ve been there,” says the flame-haired Mosbacher. “For me, it was horrible, devastating. You don’t want to hurt your husband, and everything you do reflects on him. You become hypersensitive and you try to be what you think the press wants you to be so they won’t come after you. But you learn pretty quick—at least I did—that you can’t win that way. In the end, you gotta be yourself.” Judith, who had been Rudy’s constant companion during early campaign swings in New Hampshire, has more recently stayed behind and lowered her profile—and Rudy has urged reporters to cut her some slack, pointing out that “I am a candidate. She’s a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction.” When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because “she’s up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore.” The locution “our daughter” was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna’s surname and reportedly didn’t bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. (“In the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline,” says a Republican strategist. “He can’t be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain’t gonna cut it.”) As for the brickbats Judith has been absorbing of late, “I tell her it’s just like when I was mayor and every day people want to disagree with your policies and criticize you,” he said. “Over time, you get used to it.” Wren Abbott contributed research to this article.

  Shark Reproduces Without Sex No Need for Dad: Female Shark Reproduces Without Sex by Agence France-Presse • Posted May 23, 2007 12:15 PM BELFAST (AFP)—A female hammerhead shark that gave birth without sex has put the bite into conventional wisdom about reproduction among large vertebrates, according to research published Wednesday. The shark’s offspring has no paternal DNA, bemused experts from Northern Ireland and the United States report. The discovery is the first known case of asexual reproduction in sharks but it also raises concerns about the genetic health of dwindling shark populations, they say. The investigation was launched after an unexpected birth in an aquarium at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska in December 2001. The baby’s arrival baffled staff, as none of the three possible mother hammerheads in the tank had been exposed to any male hammerhead for the past three years, after they had been caught as babies off Florida. The research was carried out by scientists from Queen’s University Belfast, the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and the Henry Doorly Zoo. The head of the Queen’s research team and the study’s co-author, Paulo Prodohl, from the School of Biological Sciences, described the findings as “really surprising.” “As far as anyone knew, all sharks reproduced only sexually by a male and female mating, requiring the embryo to get DNA from both parents for full development, just like in mammals.” Co-author Mahmood Shivji, who led the Guy Harvey Research Institute team, said the research may have solved a mystery about other species of shark having babies in captivity despite not having contact with males. “It now appears that at least some female sharks can switch from a sexual to a non-sexual mode of reproduction in the absence of males,” said Shivji. But what appears to be a boon for the world’s threatened sharks also has a downside. “Unfortunately, this occurrence is not benign, because it results in reduced genetic diversity in the offspring since there is no new genetic variation introduced from the paternal side,” Shivji said. Females of only very few vertebrate species can give birth to fully formed young without requiring their eggs to be first fertilised by a male’s sperm. This reproductive ability is known as parthenogenesis–but it is a rare event and until now only seen in some species of birds, reptiles and amphibians, never in major vertebrates such as sharks. Mammals are now the only major vertebrate group where this form of reproduction has not been seen, said Prodohl. The study appears in Biology Letters, a journal published by Britain’s Royal Society

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