Journalist Revitalized Washington Talk Shows

By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post
Saturday, June 14, 2008



Lights, Camera, Action
During his seventeen years in the moderator's chair, Russert has interviewed every major figure on the American political scene.

Tim Russert, the NBC commentator who revolutionized Sunday morning television and infused journalism with an unrelenting passion for politics, died of a heart attack yesterday.

Russert was recording a "Meet the Press" introduction in an NBC sound booth in Northwest Washington when he collapsed and was taken by ambulance, accompanied by his longtime producer Betsy Fischer, to Sibley Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead soon afterward. He was 58.

The news swept the capital like a shock wave, with colleagues, rivals, President Bush and those vying to succeed him remembering Russert as a superb practitioner of political analysis and an irrepressible son of blue-collar Buffalo who, quite simply, loved the game. His influence was such that an appearance on the top-rated "Meet the Press" could boost or sink a candidate, and when he declared after midnight on May 6 that Barack Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination, that was treated as a news event in itself.

Russert wore many hats -- onetime Democratic operative, Washington insider, NBC bureau chief, MSNBC commentator, sports fanatic, committed Roman Catholic, biographer of his father, known as "Big Russ" -- but his greatest legacy was his sustained style of interrogation. Grounded in prodigious research, Russert would press his guests on past statements and contradictions, often for a full hour, spawning legions of imitators.

Friends were stunned by the news. "I just loved him," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation." "When I scooped old Tim, I felt like I'd hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league."

"He was made for Washington because he lived and breathed politics," said Judy Woodruff, a former NBC correspondent now with PBS. But more than that, she said, he was remarkably empathetic. "When our son was sick about 10 years ago, he was right there, calling, coming over, bringing him back gifts from trips."

Russert's internist, Michael A. Newman, told MSNBC that an autopsy showed the journalist had an enlarged heart and that cholesterol plaque ruptured an artery, causing coronary thrombosis. He said Russert had been diagnosed earlier with coronary artery disease, but that it was controlled with medication and exercise and Russert had performed well on a stress test in late April.

The thread of Russert's career is laced through recent political history. His whiteboard from Election Night 2000 -- on which, early in the evening, he scribbled "Florida, Florida, Florida" -- became an iconic symbol of the disputed tally. Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Vice President Cheney chose to appear on "Meet the Press." In late 2006, Sen. Barack Obama used the Russert program to say he was considering a White House run.

Russert moved his father, a former sanitation worker, to a nursing facility last week and had escaped for a brief vacation in Italy with his wife, Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, and their son, Luke, before returning to Washington Thursday. Luke Russert, who is a sports commentator on XM Satellite Radio, had just graduated from college.

Former anchor Tom Brokaw gave MSNBC viewers the news at 3:40 p.m. "He worked to the point of exhaustion so many weeks," Brokaw said, adding: "This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice."

Within minutes, all the cable networks were airing nonstop remembrances of Russert, as if a head of state had died, and the tributes came pouring in. Bush called him "an institution," a "tough and hardworking newsman" who "was as gregarious off the set as he was prepared on it."

Obama told reporters he considered Russert "not only a journalist but a friend. There wasn't a better interviewer on television, a more thoughtful analyst about politics. . . . I am grief-stricken with loss." Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, called Russert "the preeminent political journalist of his generation."

"He was a junkie," said Washington Post writer Sally Quinn, a close friend. "He would say, 'People find stories about the budget boring -- that's crazy.' And then he would talk about the behind-the-scenes fights, the cast of characters, and it was interesting."

NBC News President Steve Capus called Russert's death "a loss for the entire nation. Everyone at NBC News is in shock and absolutely devastated," he said in a statement.

Praise also poured in as rival network anchors issued remarks. CBS's Katie Couric, calling Russert "a big teddy bear of a guy" but "a pit bull of an interviewer," said he gave her a big break when she was a local reporter for Washington's WRC-TV. Russert told her that "he admired my work, particularly my coverage of Marion Barry, who was then the mayor of D.C. He liked my 'scrappiness' and asked if I was interested in becoming the deputy Pentagon correspondent." She did.

"No one could see Tim in a room and not smile," said ABC's Diane Sawyer. "He brought so much joy and curiosity and sheer vitality to all our lives."

Jeff Gralnick, an NBC producer, recalled going head to head with Russert one election night when Gralnick was at ABC: "He was brutal to compete against because he was always one step ahead of you. We looked up at the monitor and said, 'The S.O.B. did it to us again.' " Russert delighted in asking a politician who decried the budget deficit which programs he would cut, or an opponent of foreign aid whether he would cut off aid to Israel.



Lunch at the White House
Russert was among a group of television journalists invited to meet with President Bush before his 2008 State of the Union speech.

In a 2004 interview, Russert said he would try to preempt a guest's talking points by incorporating them into his question, "and you take away at least the first time they say it. . . . You instinctively want to lean across the table and choke 'em and say, 'Stop! We've heard it!' "

Former Clinton White House aide Paul Begala recalled on CNN how Russert once "pounded" him during a 1998 interview, but days later sent a note saying, "Brother Paul, we both did our jobs."

Russert's position as a power player was confirmed by his role in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former top aide. Libby testified that he had learned the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame from Russert, but the newsman, on the witness stand for two days, said they had never discussed it. The jury believed him and convicted Libby.

Russert, a graduate of John Carroll University, put himself through Ohio's Cleveland-Marshall College of Law by booking a Bruce Springsteen concert and winning big in a Buffalo pinochle game. He quickly gravitated to New York politics, becoming chief of staff for then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan at age 29. His penchant for exhaustive research paid off when he slipped to two reporters information that Moynihan's 1982 opponent, former congressman Bruce Caputo, had claimed a military record in Vietnam when he had been a civilian Pentagon employee, forcing Caputo to withdraw from the race.

By the time Russert was working for then-Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1984, the New Yorker carried a possibly apocryphal quote from presidential candidate Gary Hart -- "Get me a Russert!" -- that fueled the operative's legend.

The following year he changed careers, becoming an assistant to the NBC News president, and soon booked Pope John Paul II for an interview on "Today." Russert took over the Washington bureau in 1988, and became a "Today" commentator almost by accident, when NBC executives, amused by his political banter during daily conference calls, decided to put him on the air.

"Meet the Press" was languishing in the ratings when Russert took it over in 1991, and he first gained national attention by stumping David Duke, a Louisiana gubernatorial candidate, with a question about the state's three biggest employers. Russert later expanded the program to an hour, grabbed the ratings lead a decade ago and never relinquished it.

Russert won an Emmy in 2005 for his role in the coverage of Ronald Reagan's funeral, and this year Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Russert became so valuable to NBC -- "Meet the Press" is said to have annual profits of $50 million -- that executives signed him to an extraordinary 11-year contract that was to expire in 2012. Industry insiders estimate he was earning more than $5 million a year.

Despite his eventual wealth, Russert never seemed to forget the summers he spent emptying pails of spoiled food into a garbage truck. His patter was filled with average-Joe references and constant references to his beloved the Buffalo Bills. Russert, a Washington Wizards season-ticket holder, viewed himself as a translator who made politics accessible to the average voter.

Russert wrote two best-selling books, "Big Russ & Me" and "Wisdom of Our Fathers," which brought fame to his working-class dad and enshrined Russert's reputation as a man of modest western New York roots.

At times he could be a lightning rod. Russert moderated a 2000 Senate debate between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio, and drew criticism for pressing the then-first lady about her trustworthiness after she had blamed charges about her husband's infidelity on their political opponents.

While leading officials and politicians in both parties praised Russert as a fair-minded inquisitor, some liberal critics complained that despite his political heritage, Russert reserved his toughest questions for Democrats.

Russert always gleaned the latest political intelligence for his role as a pundit, but he could be flat wrong on occasion. Asked about presidential candidate Howard Dean on "Today" on Jan. 6, 2004, Russert said: "Right now something would have to interfere with Howard Dean's movement towards the nomination. He clearly is on his way to it unless something untoward happens." Dean's White House campaign collapsed weeks later.

On Election Night 2006, NBC gave Russert an electronic version of the whiteboard he had made famous six years earlier, but he became frustrated at its complexity and decided to stick with pen and paper.

CNBC's John Harwood said yesterday that he and the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib taped an appearance yesterday morning on Russert's MSNBC talk show. As they left about 10:30, Harwood said, "Jerry observed that he didn't think Tim felt well."

As his shaken colleagues -- Brian Williams, David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell, Keith Olbermann -- remembered Russert during hours of continuous coverage on MSNBC yesterday, it was a reminder of how ubiquitous he had become during the primaries, appearing on camera from early morning until late at night. "Nobody enjoyed covering 2008 more than Tim," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who works with NBC. "How many times did I hear him say, 'It doesn't get any better than this.' "

Staff writers Lois Romano and Patricia Sullivan contributed to this report.

Russert Took Media Bias Seriously

By BERNARD GOLDBERG
The Wall Street Journal
June 18, 2008



On Set
Betsy Fischer, Executive Producer of Meet the Press, talks to Russert before a taping of the show at the NBC Studios April 1, 2007 in Washington, DC.

There have been millions of words written and spoken in the past few days about Tim Russert -- words about how Tim knew his beat better than almost anyone in Washington, about how hard work was in his blue-collar DNA, and about what a decent guy he was. All true.

But days later another reality has finally sunk in: that while his colleagues loved and admired Tim, I'm not at all sure they really understood him, not the part that made him so important in American journalism, anyway.

Knowing politics as well as he did was part of it, for sure. But a lot of people in Washington know politics. Asking probing questions was part of it, too. But again, Tim didn't have a patent on tough questions. And it wasn't just that (unlike too many others) he was fair to both sides. No, what made Tim Russert different, and better, I think was his willingness to listen to -- and take seriously -- criticism about his own profession. He was willing, for example, to keep an open mind about a hot-button issue like media bias -- an issue that so many of his colleagues dismiss as the delusions of right-wing media haters. (Trust me on this one, I worked at CBS News for 28 years and know Dan Rather personally.)

In 2001, my first book, "Bias," came out. It was an insider's look at bias in the media. Not one network news correspondent would have anything to do with me. I couldn't get on any of their morning news shows to talk about the book (which was a national best seller), or their evening shows or their weekend shows or even their middle-of-the-night news shows. No one in network television wanted to discuss the issue, no matter how many Middle Americans thought it was important.

Russert was the lone exception.

He had me on his CNBC interview show, and we talked about bias for a full hour. He had me on his show two other times. About five years ago, we turned the tables and I interviewed him for a book I was writing on the arrogance that I believe pervades too much of American journalism.

Tim was a big proponent of diversity, but he wanted to go further than the usual stuff. "I am for having women in the newsroom and minorities in the newsroom -- I'm all for it. It opens up our eyes and gives us different perspectives. But just as well, let's have people with military experience; let's have people from all walks of life, people from the top-echelon schools but also people from junior colleges and the so-called middling schools -- that's the pageantry of America . . . You need cultural diversity, you need ideological diversity. You need it."

Tim understood that without that kind of diversity, journalism would be in trouble. He knew it wasn't good for journalism or America if almost all the people reporting the news lived and worked in the same bubble.

"There's a potential cultural bias. And I think it's very real and very important to recognize and to deal with," he told me. "Because of backgrounds and training you come to issues with a preconceived notion or a preordained view on subjects like abortion, gun control, campaign finance. I think many journalists growing up in the '60s and the '70s have to be very careful about attitudes toward government, attitudes toward the military, attitudes toward authority. It doesn't mean there's a rightness or a wrongness. It means you have to constantly check yourself."

"Why the closed-mindedness when the subject comes around to media bias?" I asked him.

"That, to me, is totally contrary to who we're supposed to be as journalists. . . . If someone suggested there was an anti-black bias, an anti-gay bias, an anti-American bias, we'd sit up and say, 'Let's talk about this, let's tackle it.' Well, if there's a liberal bias or a cultural bias we have to sit up and tackle it and discuss it. We have got to be open to these things."

His many friends in journalism -- the ones who spend their lives inside that comfortable, elitist bubble -- would do well to take those words to heart. Facing up to their biases and making a conscious effort to get rid of what Tim called "preferred positions" on important social issues (for abortion and against guns, for example) would be a lasting tribute to Tim.

We ended our conversation that day with an exchange about the criticism he took from some on the political left for wearing a red, white and blue ribbon on his lapel when he interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney on Sept. 16, 2001. He told me a good friend of his died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and that the friend's family had asked if he would wear the ribbon, "and I never thought for a second about it."

"I want a debate about national security and who defines national security," he said. "I understand all that. But in the end, you have to make judgments, and on that day I made a judgment that five days after the most horrific event of my lifetime and of my journalistic career, that for me to say to the country I too am part of this, I too have experienced this gut-wrenching pain and agony, and I too have enormous remorse and sympathy, with not only the people who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the field in Pennsylvania, but all of us -- we're in this together. This isn't covering Democrats and Republicans or the Bills versus the Redskins; this is us. The Taliban doesn't believe in the First Amendment."

"But what about those who say journalists shouldn't wear red, white and blue ribbons, that by doing that somehow you're taking the government's side in some debate or another," I asked him.

"It is imperative," he told me, "that we never suggest that there's a moral equivalency between the United States of America and the terrorists. Period. I'll believe that until the day I die."

Which was way too soon.

Mr. Goldberg, a correspondent at CBS News from 1972 to 2000, is the author of "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" (Regnery, 2001) and, most recently, "Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right" (HarperCollins, 2007).

The Russert Difference

Meet honesty in the press.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com
June 18, 2008 12:00 AM

Only with Tim Russert’s sudden death at the age of 58 has his true stature as a landmark journalist become as widely recognized as it has long deserved to be.

To ask who will replace him as host of Meet the Press is to confront the reality that there is no one comparable on the horizon. Those of us who have followed Meet the Press since the long ago days of Lawrence Spivak know that Russert was the best of some very good hosts.

What made Tim Russert special was not some trademark catchword or contrived persona. What you saw was what you got — a down-to-earth guy who came on the air having thoroughly researched the subject and having a keen insight into politics and politicians.

He didn’t flaunt his knowledge. He was one of the few very smart people who seemed to feel no need to impress others that he was smart. But, if you knew the subject that he was talking about, you realized that he had really done his homework.

There was something else that set Tim Russert apart from many other journalists, whether print journalists or broadcast journalists: His agenda was bringing out the facts.

He didn’t let the politicians he interviewed get away with slippery statements and inconsistent positions. But it was not “gotcha” journalism. It was not trying to filter or slant information to promote some political or ideological agenda.

No doubt Tim Russert had his own opinions. He had, after all, been on the staff of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and on the staff of former New York governor Mario Cuomo.

But, whatever Tim Russert’s political opinions were then or later, that was not what his program was about. He was there to serve the audience by bringing out the facts about the political world, a world where spin is the usually name of the game.

Often critics who complain about media bias argue as if what is needed is to be “fair” to “both sides.” But what is far more important is to be honest with the audience — who are seeking information and understanding about the real world, not about the ideology or the agenda of the journalist.

This is not to denigrate opinion journalists, who have a valuable role to play, just as reporters like Tim Russert do. But, with both opinion journalists and reporters, the question is whether you play it straight with the audience, instead of filtering out inconvenient facts in order to manipulate the audience in favor of some agenda.

In short, the issue is honesty rather than “fairness.” The question is whether journalists put their cards on the table. Russert put his cards on the table — and they were high cards.

A small personal note: A few months ago, an old friend said that he would like to get a videotape of my interview on Meet the Press back in 1981. I dug up an old videotape in my garage but, after several summers in a hot garage, it was not in very good shape.

As a long shot, I decided to write to Meet the Press, to see if they would sell me another copy of the interview, if it was still available.

This interview took place back in the days when Bill Monroe was the program’s moderator. But, since the only name I knew of at Meet the Press was Tim Russert, I addressed a note to him, figuring that one of his secretaries might get back to me with the information.

Instead, I received a DVD of that interview and a brief, handwritten note from Tim Russert, with a transcript of the interview thrown in.

How people treat those who cannot do them any good or any harm reveals a lot about their character. For me, Tim Russert scored high in that department as well.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Today's Tune: Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (1957)

(Click on title to play video)

Livin' in a Frosty Paradise?

ANWR is not as pristine as it's cracked up to be.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 13, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon ... I believe this area should be kept pristine.”

Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.

One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport.

Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport?

Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.


Caribou in Artic National Wildlife Refuge

In summer, the coastal plain is mostly mosquito-plagued tundra and bogs. (The leathernecks at Prudhoe Bay joke that “life begins at 40” — because at 40 degrees, clouds of mosquitoes and other pests take flight from the ocean of puddles). In the winter, it reaches 70 degrees below zero (not counting wind chill, which brings it to 120 below) and is in round-the-clock darkness.

A few years back, Jimmy Carter wrote of proposed drilling in ANWR in the New York Times: “The roar alone — of road-building, trucks, drilling and generators — would pollute the wild music of the Arctic and be as out of place there as it would be in the heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.”

The roads are made from ice, hence constructed in winter, doing no permanent damage to the environment. As for the discordant notes such activity would introduce to the Arctic symphony, I don’t know whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it, but I suspect that the “wild music” of the Arctic in winter is only euphonious to those — like Carter — who are not actually there to hear it.

Even in summer, people who actually live on the north coast of Alaska, like the residents of Kaktovik (just three miles north of the coastal plain where drilling might take place) overwhelmingly think good jobs in their backyard is music to their ears.

Meanwhile, is the “music” of the Grand Canyon really so pristine? Babies crying, kids chasing lizards, campers laughing, donkeys braying, cars honking: Why does this not trouble the consciences of Carter and McCain?

Perhaps it’s because the analogy between ANWR and the Grand Canyon is spurious on its face. “Pristine,” after all, is not synonymous with beautiful (there are ugly virgins), and “well-trafficked” is not the same as ugly (millions of people have seen the Sistine Chapel).

Indeed, before the age of environmental Romanticism had captured elite opinion in this country, such analogies didn’t pass the laugh test. Both the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards enthusiastically supported drilling in ANWR in the late 1980s. The Post noted that the area “is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on surrounding life. ...” To say such things today is to unforgivably pollute the inane music of groupthink. And that’s something even the “maverick” McCain will not do.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.


— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Sitting on an Ocean of Energy, Doing Nothing

By Daniel Henninger
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/home-page


Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: "Brazil is not a serious country." How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?

One thing Brazil and the U.S. have in common is the price of oil: It is priced in dollars, and everyone in the world now knows what the price is. Another commonality is that each country has vast oil reserves in waters off their coastlines.

Here we may draw a line in the waves between the serious and the unserious.

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill - in 1969.

We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of - the caribou.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key to ANWR's oil 13 years ago.

Our waters may hold 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas. As in Brazil, these are surely conservative estimates.

While Brazilians proudly embrace Petrobras, yelling "We're Going to Be No. 1," the U.S.'s Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, promises to impose an "excess profits tax" on American oil producers.

We live in a world in which Russia's Vladimir Putin and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a "climate-change" bill. This they did fresh off their subsidized (and bipartisan) ethanol fiasco.

One may assume that Mr. Putin and the Chinese have noticed the policy obsessions of our political class. While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn't they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Forget that. We'll do it ourselves.

Putin intimidates Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states and Poland with oil and gas cutoffs, while Chávez uses petrodollars to bankroll Colombian terrorists. Cuba plans to exploit its Caribbean oil fields within a long tee shot of the Florida Keys with help from India, Spain, Venezuela, Canada, Norway, Malaysia, even Vietnam. But America won't drill. Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said just last month he's afraid of an oil spill. Katrina wrecked the oil rigs in the Gulf with no significant damage from leaking oil.

Some portion of the current $4-per-gallon gasoline may be attributable to the Federal Reserve's inflationary monetary policy or even speculators. But we can wave goodbye to the $1.25/gallon gasoline that in 1990 allowed a President Bush to airily lock away the nation's oil and gas jewels. This isn't your father's world of energy. New world powers are coming online fast, and they need energy. We need to get back in the game.

The goal shouldn't be "energy independence," a ridiculous notion in an economically integrated world. It's about admitting the need to strike a balance between the energy and security realities of the here-and-now and the potentialities of the future. Some of our best and brightest want to pursue alternative energy technologies, and they should be encouraged to do so, inside market disciplines. But let's at least stop pretending the rest of the world is going to play along with our environmentalist moralisms.

The Democrats' climate-change bill collapsed last week under the weight of brutal cost realities. It was a wake-up call. This is the year Americans joined the real world of energy costs. Now someone needs to explain to them why we - and we alone - are sitting on an ocean of energy but won't drill for it.

You'd think the "national security" nominee, John McCain, would get this. He's clueless - a don't-drill zombie. We may mark this down as the year the U.S. tired of being a serious country.

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

Adiós, Guantánamo

By JAMES TARANTO
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2008



Detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court had done today," Justice Antonin Scalia writes at the end of his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, extended rights under the U.S. constitution to enemy combatants who have never set foot on U.S. soil.

It's worth noting that the nation has lived to regret things the court has done in earlier wars. In Schenck v. U.S. (1919), the court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party leader for distributing an anticonscription flier during World War I--material that would unquestionably be protected by the First Amendment under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). In Korematsu v. U.S. (1944), the court held that the government had the authority to ban Japanese-Americans from certain areas of California, simply on the ground that their ethnic heritage rendered their loyalty suspect. Korematsu has never been overturned, but there is no doubt that it would be in the vanishingly unlikely event that the question ever came up again.

This war was different. Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, we began hearing dire warnings about threats to civil liberties. Five members of the high court seem to have internalized these warnings. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his majority opinion today, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." Kennedy and his colleagues seemed determined to err on the side of an expansive interpretation of constitutional rights.

And err they did. As Justice Scalia writes:

[Today's decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.

In establishing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, President Bush relied on a Supreme Court precedent of more than a half century's standing, Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), which held that nonresident alien enemy combatants had no right to habeas corpus. As Scalia explains:

Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners [to Guantanamo], but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

This points to a key limitation in today's ruling. The majority distinguished Guantanamo from the facility at issue in Eisentrager--a U.S.-administered prison in occupied Germany--on the ground that although the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is technically on Cuban territory, America exercises "complete jurisdiction and control" over it. Thus, detainees have constitutional rights pursuant to today's ruling only if they are held at Guantanamo.

What does Boumediene mean in practice? Almost all Guantanamo detainees already have lawyers and have petitioned for habeas corpus. Those cases will go forward in the Washington, D.C., federal trial court. The judges there will have to settle on a standard of proof, and to rule on such tricky questions as how much classified material the government is obliged to provide to terrorists and their lawyers. Since the military's existing procedures are already overly lenient--Scalia lists several cases of released detainees showing up on the battlefield--it seems unlikely that many detainees will end up winning release.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have said they want to close down Guantanamo, and this ruling makes that outcome more likely. There is little advantage to the U.S. in sending enemy combatants to a facility where they will immediately be able to lawyer up, and indeed, Guantanamo has admitted few new detainees in the past several years. A notable exception occurred in 2006, when President Bush transferred Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and a dozen or so other "high value" detainees there--a dramatic action that helped galvanize Congress to pass the Detainee Treatment Act This turns out to have been a mistake. KSM & Co. now have "constitutional rights." Had they been kept where they were, wherever that was, this would not be the case.

It's possible that Scalia is wrong when he predicts more Americans will die as a result of this ruling. It may be that al Qaeda is a weak enough enemy that America can vanquish it even with the Supreme Court tying one hand behind our back. Anyway, keeping future detainees away from Guantanamo should prevent them from coming within the reach of the justices' pettifogging.

Perhaps decades from now we will learn that detainees ended up being abused in some far-off place because the government closed Guantanamo in response to judicial meddling. Even those who support what the court did today may live to regret it.

Fair-Weather Civil Libertarians

The New York Times's initial coverage of the Boumediene decision is written by David Stout, not Linda Greenhouse, so it's fairly muted. But it still depicts the ruling in the predictable way: "a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security . . . a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration." Greenhouse has accepted an early-retirement buyout from the Times, but she did write as recently as Tuesday, so we assume she's still working and will cover the decision in her characteristically over-the-top fashion in tomorrow's paper.

But the Times is not always so enthusiastic about civil liberties. Today it published an article by Adam Liptak on the prosecution of Mark Steyn before a Canadian "human rights" tribunal. Steyn is charged with employing words to hurt the feelings of Muslims--i.e., with exercising what we Americans call the right to free speech. But instead of sounding the alarm about the Canadian assault on civil liberties, Liptak emphasizes how different America is from the rest of the world. His tone is not approving:

"In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one's legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment," Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called "The Exceptional First Amendment."

"But in the United States," Professor Schauer continued, "all such speech remains constitutionally protected."

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France. . . .

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

"It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, "when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack."

Professor Waldron was reviewing "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment" by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

Liptak is unfair to Lewis, who in his book (see page 167) makes clear that he seeks only to lower the threshold for "imminent violence," not to create other categories of unprotected speech:

I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience some of whose members are ready to act on the urging. That is imminence enough.

What the Steyn case illustrates, however, is how the foes of Western civilization seek to use hate-speech laws to silence criticism of radical Islam. The First Amendment renders America largely immune from this tactic. In this case, civil liberties and national security are in complete accord. How telling that in this case the Times's usual ardor for the former is so dampened.

Today's Tune: Fire Inc. - Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young

(Click on title to play video)

Ingraham, Pence Join to Demand Broadcaster Freedom

by Ericka Andersen
http://www.humanevents.com
Posted: 06/12/2008

Laura Ingraham

Conservative talk radio -- one of the most potent forces in US politics -- could be neutered by a return of the “Fairness Doctrine” unless Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) is able to get 28 more signatures on his “discharge petition” to force a House floor vote.

The so-called “Fairness Doctrine” -- initiated in the 1930s under Franklin Roossevelt -- enabled the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the content of radio and later television programming. In its heyday, it proved effective in keeping nearly all conservative opinion off the air.

Part of former President Ronald Reagan’s legacy included ridding America of the Fairness Doctrine. When the measure was shelved in the 80’s, free speech went live and conservatives were no longer shut out of mass broadcast media. Radio truly became a free market.

The “Fairness Doctrine” could be revived by liberal appointments to the Federal Communications Commission, certain to happen if Barack Obama is elected this November. (It has been upheld by the Supreme Court, though it could be susceptible to further challenges.)

At a press conference yesterday, Pence urged members of Congress to sign a discharge petition that will bring the Broadcaster Freedom Act to a vote on the House floor.

When members of the 110th Democratic Congress picked up the Fairness Doctrine as their issue last year, Pence devised The Broadcaster Freedom Act to oppose this potential censorship.

The BFA would prevent the FCC from implementing regulations and prohibitions on broadcasters, and would ensure that no future President could reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.

As it stands, the measure has been shelved because Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to schedule a vote. She and the rest of the Congressional Dems would rather let time run out in the term in hopes that a Democrat president -- assuming Barack Obama --would veto it and appoint liberals to the FCC.

Pence called for members to sign the discharge petition, which will force a vote, before July 4, in order to “declare support for freedom.”

If 218 members sign the petition members can demand a vote. Pence said he is confident the Act will pass because “freedom always wins on the House of the floor of the people.”

2004 "Communists for Kerry" rally

Almost every Republican signed onto the BFA when it was introduced but not one Democrat budged. Republicans Timothy V. Johnson (Ill.), Ralph Regula (Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (W.V.) have yet to sign the petition.

Renowned conservative radio host Laura Ingraham said she will stand against the FD as the BFA is “imperiled” by these Democrat Congressmen and Senators.

“This is nothing more than an attempt to have government regulate one of the most effective forms of political discussion today,” said Ingraham, who ended her comments with a pledge: “out of my cold, dead hands.”

Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, joined Pence at the conference to recommend a new website -- hypocrisycaucus.com -- so voters can see “which politicians wake up every morning and lie to them on this issue.”

House Republican Leader John Boehner encouraged constituents to contact their member of Congress and hold them accountable for their part in the BFA. Boehner called the stalling of the Act in the House “bizarre” and said there was nothing “fair” about the Fairness Doctrine.

Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center, called the FD a “real threat to free speech” and lambasted the four decades when the broadcast wing of America was “chilled and silenced” until it was lifted in 1985.

“With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, conservatives found a home in broadcast,” Bozell said. “The leftist ideas have no market there.”

Craig Parshall, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters, took the stage as well, noting a recent trip to the Netherlands that he thought might preview America’s future.

Parshall said that politically incorrect statements in the Netherlands are reported to the government and imposing the Fairness Doctrine here would only be a “thinly disguised form of tyranny.”

Republicans need the support of every member, including some moderate Democrats willing to take a stand.

“We want to challenge the House Democrats to take a stand for freedom and be a signer,” said Pence, who urged everyone to “cherish the dynamic forum that is American talk radio.”


Ms. Andersen is a news producer and reporter for HUMAN EVENTS. She previously interned for The Washington Examiner newspaper. She has appeared on MSNBC live and been a guest on the Lars Larson radio show and the Jim Bohannon radio show. She wrote for the Indiana Daily Student, Indiana University's daily newspaper. E-mail her at eandersen@eaglepub.com.

Hummer’s Done

The Nation's Pulse

By Eric Peters
The American Spectator
Published 6/12/2008 12:07:48 AM



The Hummer is history.

GM is desperately looking for a place to unload the brand that, literally, almost no one wants anymore. Even the littlest Hummer -- the H3 -- has become a hard sell in an era of $4 per gallon regular unleaded.

Total Hummer sales (all models) have fallen to a dismal 10 percent or so of what they were at the height of the cheap gas bubble -- 75,939 units circa 2005-2006 -- and GM probably feels like a farm dog with a dead chicken tied around its neck right about now.

The scent of death was in the air as long ago as 2006, when GM dropped the hugest Hummer, the military-based H1 that Arnold used to parade around in. That year, only 376 were sold -- a canary in the coal mine if ever there was one.

GM should have taken the hint -- and folded the entire Hummer line right then. Instead, it tossed a V-8 into the formerly in-line five-cylinder powered H3 -- apparently figuring that just what the market wanted was even worse gas mileage.

Sales of the littlest Hummer have predictably tanked.

Ditto the second-largest Hummer, the Chevy Suburban-based H2. GM has managed to get rid of only about 3,000 of them so far this year -- $100 fill-ups and 15 mpg have become about as appealing as a saggy 60-something Arnold in a speedo.

Three years ago, GM might have shaken some loose change out of Hummer. Too late for that now. There will be layoffs and plant closings -- and tax write-offs.

HUMMER OWNERS themselves (the few, the proud, the profligate) will be left to rumble around in their outre modern-day equivalents of chocolate brown metallic, landau-roofed '68 Sedan de Villes circa 1975: ungainly relics of a time still within living memory but fading fast.

You'd see one of the old dreadnoughts every now and again, turn to look, and marvel at the spectacle. Did people really drive those things?

For GM, the Hummer's demise is more serious. Because it's not just Hummers that are going away but in all likelihood, just about every vehicle that's like them. And with that goes GM's -- and Detroit's -- profitability.

The whole business is built on big SUVs and pick-ups. GM hasn't made money on small cars in years. Maybe a few hundred bucks per at the retail level. Inside the biz, such cars were referred to with great contempt as "loss leaders" -- and built for the sole reason of making GM's overall fuel economy track record look a little bit better than it would have otherwise.

No, the money was in big SUVs -- which had profit margins (at peak) of several thousand dollars per vehicle. There was more cash to be made selling one GMC Yukon Denali than half a dozen Chevy Cobalts. Who could resist such a mountain of cash?

Not GM (and not Ford, either). That's why Detroit spent the '90s cranking out as many big SUVs as possible -- and thinking up new models that would be even more colossal, and profitable, while relegating small car development to some distant, hopefully never-to-arrive manana.

THUS IT HAS COME to pass that GM, Ford, and Chrysler all find themselves several days late -- and as a result, many dollars short. All three have reported double-digit downturns lately.

GM is throttling back its total truck/SUV production capacity by more than 700,000 vehicles annually -- which is huge. But then, so is the $38.7 billion GM lost last year. The automaker hasn't made a net profit since 2004.

And it's bound to get worse the higher gas prices go -- because all three lack top-tier small cars and are still playing catch-up on the hybrid and electric vehicle front.

GM, for example, has a plug-in electric car (the Volt) on the way. But it won't get here for another two years. And reports are that GM will want $40,000 a copy, too.

Two. Years.

Meanwhile, arch-nemesis Toyota has been selling its Prius hybrid for ten years now. It has a fleet of highly successful small cars -- and is literally swimming in black ink. Industry watchers believe Toyota has enough cash lying around to buy the corpse of GM and pick its bones clean.

Sic gloria transit mundi.


- Eric Peters is an automotive columnist and author of Automotive Atrocities (MBI).

Hollywood Heroes and Villains

Eminentoes

By George Neumayr
The American Spectator
Published 6/12/2008 12:08:28 AM



Actor Clint Eastwood arrives at a screening, celebrating the DVD box set release of the "Dirty Harry" film franchise, as he walks past a poster promoting the DVD in Los Angeles May 29, 2008. Eastwood starred as Inspector Harry Callahan in five films featuring his character starting with the 1971 film "Dirty Harry.
" REUTERS/Fred Prouser (UNITED STATES)

Soviet propagandists used technology to take the politically inexpedient out of photos. Hollywood propagandists now demand that the politically favored be put into them.

Clint Eastwood, not adopting the proper mindset of political correctness, failed to picture blacks in his recent World War II movies playing a prominent role at Iwo Jima, for which he has been rebuked by fellow director Spike Lee.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said to the press last month at a Cannes film festival press conference. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist."

Eastwood then compounded his sin by assuming that historical accuracy is an acceptable defense. "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," Eastwood said. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they'd say, 'This guy's lost his mind.'"

Lee countered Eastwood's alleged racism with a dollop of ageism. "He sounds like an angry old man out there," said the angry middle-aged director.



France's 1960s screen icon Brigitte Bardot, seen here in 2007, received a 15,000-euro (23,000 dollar) fine on Tuesday for inciting hatred against Muslims.
(AFP/File/Eric Feferberg)

MEANWHILE, ANOTHER insufficiently enlightened aging and angry Hollywood star found herself in a French court for racial hate speech. On Tuesday, Brigitte Bardot was convicted of a charge of provoking discrimination, fined $23,325 and told to pay $1,555 in damages to an anti-racism group.

She had written that the influx of Muslims was damaging French culture and not even the left-wing origin of her criticism -- as an animal-rights activist, she dislikes the Muslim feast of Aid el-Kebir which involves "slaughtering sheep," reports Associated Press -- could spare her from punishment for incorrect thinking and speaking.

Voltaire claimed he'd fight to the death for free speech. His intellectual children fine people for it.

But there is one aging star in which Hollywood and French society can take pride: Roman Polanski. With HBO's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired this week, his rehabilitation continues apace.

Hollywood finds it odd that people still hold his illegal sexual congress with a13-year-old against him. It is not like he engaged in hate speech.

The upshot of the documentary is that this honored figure in France -- he fled to Paris in 1977 -- was hounded out of America by an irresponsible press corps and judiciary. True, the judge in the case, Laurence Rittenband, was baldly unprofessional, making Judge Ito look almost circumspect.

But what's most striking about the affair, even in this documentary's pro-Polanski telling, was the 1970s-style indulgence of his conduct. For acts that today would land someone in jail for over 40 years, he got a little more than 40 days, during which time he was in protective custody and scribbling out notes for an upcoming movie.

In fact, Rittenband was prepared to give him a probation sentence until Polanski showed him up in the press by partying during a gap in the trial at an Oktoberfest event in Germany.



Polish-born French director Roman Polanski, center, arrives with French Culture Minister Christine Albanel, left, and French actress Valerie Lemercier for the award ceremony at the 61st International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on Sunday, May 25, 2008.
(AP Photo/Matt Sayles)

THE DOCUMENTARY HAS almost a whimsical quality to it, with dashes of moral equivalence sprinkled throughout.

Los Angeles, for all its famous transience, seems changeless in it: correspondents still on the air appear in the footage with longer sideburns, playing the same silly roles in a celebrity circus that would reassemble in the O.J. trial and innumerable others. Even the detective made famous by the O.J. trial, Phil Vannater, appears in the documentary, having served on the Polanski case.

It falls to Vannater to note stolidly to the sympathetic documentarians that Polanski did after all have sex with a 13-year-old (and was charged with five other serious offenses which were dropped). Perhaps it helped Polanski that he looked like he was 13 too.

The only real lesson gleaned from the documentary is that in Hollywood talent and charisma are the most powerful forms of protection and absolution, and that the only sins it treats as unforgivable (the footage of stars jumping to their feet at the Oscars to applaud Polanski in absentia when he won best director for The Pianist contrasts nicely with their sullen sitting during Elia Kazan's award) are ideological ones.


- George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.

Kobe not yet Jordan's heir

Kobe Bryant continued to add to his greatness in the Lakers' Game 3 win. But comparisons to Jordan remain far-fetched.

Posted on Wed, Jun. 11, 2008

By ARMANDO SALGUERO
The Miami Herald



LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 10: Kobe Bryant #24 of the Los Angeles Lakers matches up against Ray Allen #20 of the Boston Celtics in Game Three of the 2008 NBA Finals on June 10, 2008 at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE/Getty Images)


If he didn't start the debate, Kobe Bryant certainly joined in when he told a national TV audience he wants ``to be the best, simple and plain.''

Bryant added to his case for being considered the NBA's all-time greatest player by scoring nine points in the final seven minutes to lift the Lakers to a Game 3 victory over Boston in the NBA Finals.

The championship series renews Thursday and, no doubt, so shall Bryant's reach for the individual title he apparently covets as much as another championship.

And there is little argument Kobe Bryant deserves to be in the theoretical debate over who is the NBA's all-time greatest player. By the time he is finished, Bryant might indeed be right there with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell and Julius Erving and some others.

But that is as far as Bryant has gotten. He is merely in the conversation. He is not anywhere near being the subject of that conversation.

That would be Michael Jordan.

Still.



It has been only a decade since Jordan left the Chicago Bulls at the end of the team's second three-peat in eight years. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the people who cover the NBA today or fancy themselves experts on the sport are obsessed with identifying Air's heir.

That is why Vince Carter and Dwyane Wade and LeBron James ebb and flow in popularity. It seems when any is making a push for an NBA title, he must logically be the next Michael Jordan.

None is, of course. And neither is Kobe.

THE NEXT BIG THING

He is the next big thing -- again -- because his team is in the NBA Finals again.

Sure, you heard talk of Kobe taking Jordan's mantle when the Lakers won three consecutive titles earlier this decade, but that soon faded, didn't it?

When Shaquille O'Neal was dealt to the Heat, when the Lakers dropped out of contention and Bryant got busy pleading innocent to sexual assault charges or pleading to be traded, there wasn't a grand debate about him being better than Jordan.

But now Bryant is hot again because he is in living rooms all across America again. Suddenly we remember that he is a gifted player because he is leading a good team to the title's doorstep.

Suddenly we remember he once scored 81 points in a game, and we believe that anoints him the next Jordan.

But what about the things we seem to forget?

Those 81 points, though impressive, came against a 55-loss Toronto team with no All-Star on the roster. When Jordan scored 63 points against Boston, it came in the playoffs, against the eventual world champions, after which Bird compared Jordan to God.

It has become easy in today's shrinking-planet Internet age to lift up the now and dismiss yesterday. It has become easy to view things in a vacuum of current events, with little regard for history.

But let me jar your memory about Michael Jordan.

In December 1987, he scored 44 points against Houston and, while doing so, blocked shots by Hakeem Olajuwan and Ralph Sampson and finished the game with more blocks than the two 7-footers combined.

In May 1989, the Pistons were headed toward the NBA title, but Jordan didn't know that at the time. He guaranteed that the upstart Bulls would win Game 1 of their Eastern Conference playoff series against Detroit.

They did.

In the 1993 NBA Finals, Jordan scored at least 40 points in four consecutive games. The Bulls beat Phoenix.

MEMORABLE MOMENT

In only his fifth game back from an 18-month baseball hiatus, Jordan traveled to Madison Square Garden and scored 55 against the Knicks. With the game at stake, Jordan rose for a shot and instead passed to Bulls center Bill Wennington, who converted an open, game-winning layup.

''Michael is probably the only player in the world who can score 55 points and his biggest play of the game is a pass,'' Wennington said.



That was, by the way, Jordan floating toward the rim in the 1991 Finals against Los Angeles when two Lakers met him mid-flight. Jordan, tongue wagging, shifted the ball from his right hand to his left hand while the two defenders returned to Earth.

Still above the rim, Jordan laid the ball in, and the Bulls' championship dynasty was born.

The run ended in June 1998 when Jordan stole the ball and connected on a championship-winning jump shot against Utah. Jordan held the follow-through pose for a memorable, magical moment.

It was amazing then. It remains amazing today.

So no one should forget -- not even when we're watching Kobe Bryant or the next guy whose goal is to be the greatest player of all time.

New DVDs: Deneuve and Loren Still Haunt the Screen

Critic’s Choice

Sophia Loren (here with Robert Hossein) plays a Parisian laundress in “Madame Sans-Gêne,” directed by Christian-Jaque.

By DAVE KEHR

The New York Times
Published: June 10, 2008

These days, all it takes to be labeled a diva is to release a couple of pop albums in a row and exhibit some bad behavior in public. But at least two extraordinary examples of the genuine article continue to walk the earth: Sophia Loren, 73, and Catherine Deneuve, 64. This week Lionsgate Entertainment honors these two near-mythological figures of the European cinema with boxed sets of seldom-seen films.

Lionsgate.
Catherine Deneuve, as a glum anesthesiologist, and Patrick Dewaere in André Téchiné’s “Hotel America” (1981).

Although their careers overlap — Ms. Loren’s first film dates from 1950, Ms. Deneuve’s from 1957 — they represent two very different traditions. Both have regularly crossed the Alps, Ms. Loren to appear in French-language films and Ms. Deneuve in Italian ones, but they seem to belong to sovereign territories of their own, which barely have diplomatic relations.

Lorenland is a proletarian world of workers and peasants, defined by spontaneity and sensuality, a world of broad comedy and even broader melodrama. The petit principality of Deneuve is the Monaco of movies: a primarily urban environment of designer boutiques and chic restaurants, in which emotions are muffled and sex discreet (and frequently unhappy).
Where Ms. Loren is a pagan goddess, all bosom and hips, with almond eyes and pillowy lips, Ms. Deneuve is a perfectly proportioned Renaissance angel, thin-lipped, wide-eyed and enveloped in a nimbus of golden hair. Ms. Loren has the imposing physical presence of a monumental statue; Ms. Deneuve the exquisite, pocket-size beauty of a cameo brooch. Ms. Loren invites us to live more intensely in our world; Ms. Deneuve exists in another space entirely, one surrounded by velvet ropes, and she’s not sure she wants to share it at all.

Sophia Loren in Boccaccio '70 (1962). (credit: Brown Brothers)

Ms. Loren began as a bit player (she can be glimpsed as a slave girl in the MGM “Quo Vadis,” filmed in Rome in 1951), and it took her several years to assemble a star persona. Even as directors discovered her remarkable physical gifts, it took them a while to figure out what to do with them. The oldest film in the “Sophia” boxed set, Ettore Giannini’s kitschy Technicolor tribute to Neapolitan song, “Carosello Napoletano” (1954), takes Loren’s statuesque quality almost literally. As the most beautiful girl in 19th-century Naples, she poses rigidly for a photographer, an object to be contemplated. She is barely more animated in “Attila” (also 1954), a sword-and-sandals adventure directed by Pietro Francisci (whose 1958 “Hercules” would turn this most distinctive of Italian genres into an international phenomenon), in which she plays a scheming Roman aristocrat opposite Anthony Quinn as the well-known Hun.

Sophia Loren and Vittorio De Sica

Ms. Loren really came into her own in another 1954 film, Vittorio De Sica’s “Gold of Naples” (not part of the present collection, but said to be a coming Criterion release). In a single traveling shot, held an outrageously long time, De Sica simply records the astounding sight of an ungirdled Ms. Loren, playing a Neapolitan pizza-maker, as she walks the length of a crowded street, moving in ways that definitely do not bring marble to mind. Galatea had come to life, and Ms. Loren, with this one image, became a star.

The Lionsgate set flashes forward to 1962 and the French-Italian co-production “Madame Sans-Gêne,” a costume adventure that represents one of the last flowerings of the French “tradition of quality,” with direction by Christian-Jaque. Ms. Loren, spilling out of a low-cut peasant blouse that defies several laws of physics, is a Parisian laundress who befriends a tiny Corsican colonel during the French Revolution and rises to the nouveau aristocracy under the empire, without losing her bawdy forthrightness.
By this point Ms. Loren had already passed through Hollywood (most gloriously in George Cukor’s 1960 “Heller in Pink Tights”) and won an Oscar under De Sica’s direction (for the pompous “Two Women”), yet here she seems to be playing a caricature of Italy’s über-diva Anna Magnani. There is much hearty laughter with hands on hips — and not a whole lot else. The Lionsgate set builds to an anticlimax with De Sica’s tedious, saccharine “Sunflower” (1970), among the least engaging of the many films in which Ms. Loren appeared with Marcello Mastroianni.

The Deneuve collection begins with a genuine curiosity, Jean Aurel’s 1968 “Manon 70.” Based on the 1731 novel by Antoine François Prévost, as updated into a best-selling novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent, the popular (and pseudonymous) author of a long series of historical bodice-rippers, the film offers Ms. Deneuve as a sort of contemporary courtesan, dressed in Op-Pop Ungaro outfits accessorized by oversize sunglasses.

Manon pings capriciously among assorted wealthy lovers (one is played in deadly earnest by the gifted American comic actor Robert Webber) until she discovers her grand amour, a self-serious journalist (Sami Frey) who destroys his career in order to support her in the jet-setting style to which she has become accustomed. Very much a film of its unsettled time, “Manon 70” strenuously draws parallels between the libertines of the 18th century and the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, frequently to unconsciously comic effect.

The downside to being Catherine Deneuve is that no matter how she is cast, she invariably ends up playing the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, seldom an interesting role. Directors have tried to cope with this in different ways over the years. Most struggle unsuccessfully to deglamorize her: In “Le Choc,” a 1982 thriller included here, the director Robin Davis gets some kind of a prize for casting her as the proprietress of a provincial turkey farm (which does not prevent Alain Delon, as a hit man on the run, from falling madly in love with her); in “Le Sauvage,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s popular comedy from 1975 set on a tropical island, gives her a sunburn, takes away her couture and dumps her in the drink. (She is little more than a guest star in Alain Corneau’s “Fort Saganne,” a heavy 1984 military epic with Gérard Depardieu, which is also in the Lionsgate box.)

Among Ms. Deneuve’s more recent directors, André Téchiné seems to have found the best solutions to her excess of attractiveness. In the 1981 “Hotel America,” the first of five films they have made together (and by far the best in this collection), he shifts the burden of glamour from her to her male co-star, the wide-eyed, childlike Patrick Dewaere.

Ms. Deneuve is the glum, dowdy Hélène, an anesthesiologist no less, who has come to the resort town of Biarritz to get over the death of her fiancé. Mr. Dewaere is an irresistibly helpless local, a painfully sensitive dreamer who lives in a room in his mother’s small hotel. Although he makes the first advances, soon it is Ms. Deneuve who is pursuing him, rationalizing his emotional upheavals and capricious changes of mind (he’s Manon 81), while she functions as the center of stability. For once, she is not an object of desire but an individual afflicted by desires of her own. The reversal makes her human.

(Lionsgate, $39.98 each box set, not rated)

DO AS DEMS SAY, NOT AS THEY DINE

By Jonah Goldberg
New York Post
June 11, 2008


Feinstein: Reluctantly privatizing the Senate's food services.

Al Gore claims that "good enough for government work" once implied that such work met the highest standards of excellence. Maybe. But in the US Senate's kitchens, "good enough for government work" means any meal that doesn't require a stomach pump.

The first time I was invited to the Senate for lunch, I was jazzed to sup in the corridors of power. But my meal seemed to have sat under a heat lamp since LBJ was running the place. I felt more like Robert Redford in the 1980 film "Brubaker," where the prison food often moves on its own.

As befits a government-run commissary, the Senate cafeteria has a decidedly Soviet attitude toward variety. It has averaged only two new menu items a year over the last decade. The food is so bad, every lunch hour Senate staffers rush to the House side of the Capitol like starving New Yorkers of the future storming the last Soylent Green vendor.

According to auditors, the chain of restaurants run by the Senate food service, including the snooty Senate Dining Room, has almost never been in the black. It's lost more than $18 million since 1993 and dropped about $2 million this year alone. If the food service doesn't get an emergency bridge loan of a quarter-million dollars, it won't be able to make payroll.

So how will the Senate fix the problem? Well, with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein taking the lead, the Democrats - that's right, the Democrats - have called a classic Republican play: Privatize it.

The House of Representatives made the switch in the 1980s, and its food service is now better. And profitable: The House has made $1.2 million in commissions since 2003. The Senate has taken 20 years to follow suit.

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization can't be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. "What about the workers?" they cried. Apparently, some Democrats feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, was forced to deal with reality. "It's cratering," The Washington Post quoted her as saying. "Candidly, I don't think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn't need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses."

Yes, yes, go on, Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Perhaps you might meditate on the District of Columbia's public school system, which spends roughly $14,000 a pupil in exchange for one of the worst educations in the country. Every year, one of the greatest mysteries in the nation's capital is whether textbooks have been delivered to the right kids, or even to the right schools. It can take until Christmas to get it all worked out. FedEx Corp., meanwhile, can tell you where any of its millions of packages are in more than 100 countries, right now. (Why not just FedEx the textbooks to the kids?)

Or you might ponder the hilarious example of New York's OTB. For most of the last 40 years, these state-run betting parlors have actually lost money. Apparently, the house always wins - except when the government is the bookie.

Look wherever you like, it's not as if there's a shortage of examples. And more are on the way.

Indeed, all augurs point to a tsunami of government ambition in the years ahead, particularly if Barack Obama wins in November. Obama promises a national health-insurance plan overseen by the kith and kin who serve the Senate its navy bean soup.

He believes that the failure of public schools - like DC's - is largely attributable to the under-funding of education. DC's schools already are among the best-funded and worst schools in the country. By all means, let's have more of the same!

Feinstein, to her credit, witnessed an abject failure of government right under her nose - on her plate, in fact - and did something about it. "It's clearly not the sort of thing that I ran for the Senate to do," she said, according to the Post. "But somebody has to do it."

Alas, the possibility that she or her colleagues will make a similar call about anything that doesn't affect them directly in less than another 20 years seems too much to hope for.

JonahsColumn@aol.com

Stern, NBA have big problem on their hands with Donaghy’s allegations

Posted on Tue, Jun. 10, 2008 10:15 PM

By JASON WHITLOCK
The Kansas City Star



The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant was in full Kobe form on Tuesday night, putting up a shot over the Celtics’ Paul Pierce in the second half. Bryant finished with 36 points. The Celtics lead the series 2-1.

LOS ANGELES | The system is broken, and David Stern’s belittling of disgraced and criminal former NBA ref Tim Donaghy won’t fix the officiating crisis undermining the credibility of all big-time sports.

The system is broken, and the one “media” organization — ESPN — that could provide significant pressure to enact dramatic change from sports leagues is in partner$hip with the leagues in question.

Stern and the NBA soldiered on Tuesday night, conducting game three of the Celtics-Lakers finals series at Staples Center as though Donaghy’s most recent media maneuver didn’t question the legitimacy of the proceeding.

Donaghy, who is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to betting on and manipulating games he worked, alleged in court filings that two referees in a 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff series favored the Lakers in game six to ensure extending the best-of-seven series to seven games.

The game was one of the most controversial in recent NBA history. The Lakers shot 27 free throws in the fourth quarter alone. Journalists covering the contest labeled it horribly one-sided officiating. Then-Kings coach Rick Adelman blasted the officiating.

Donaghy’s court document also alleged that top league officials instructed the refs to avoid calling technical fouls and fouling out big stars. Donaghy also claimed that the league manipulated games to increase ticket sales and ratings.

His charges couldn’t be more perfectly timed. Game two of the current series was marred by the huge free-throw disparity enjoyed by the Celtics. As predicted by longtime and casual NBA followers, the Lakers benefitted from favorable officiating Tuesday night in their 87-81 victory.

Kobe Bryant shot 18 free throws Tuesday, which is eight more than the entire Lakers team attempted in game two.

Game three was an awful mess. The Celtics shot 35 percent from the field. Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett combined to shoot eight of 35 from the field. The Lakers connected on just 43 percent from the field. Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol combined for 13 points on five-of-18 shooting. Both teams were terrible from the free-throw stripe. Four players broke double-figure scoring and only three players — Kobe Bryant, Ray Allen and Sasha Vujacic — played at a high level.

“It was not a beautiful ballgame,” Lakers coach Phil Jackson admitted. “Hopefully, both of us will play better basketball on Thursday night.”

Yeah, they need to, because Tuesday’s game is hardly worth discussing. Donaghy and his allegations were a much more relevant topic. They are not as easy to dismiss as Stern would lead you to believe.

“This is criminal activity that Tim Donaghy has admitted to, and this is sour grapes,” Stern said. “… Because a convicted felon said something about his colleagues in order to lower his time away, am I worried about that? I’m worried that someone is out there saying it, but you’re the one who will either deal with it or not as part of the media.”

Stern is worried about the media. Why?

ESPN, the worldwide leader, has no real interest in exhaustively examining Donaghy’s allegations. Not when there is a Barry Bonds or O.J. Mayo or Miguel Tejada to embarrass and expose.

Why hold a league’s billion-dollar feet to the fire and jeopardize a lucrative relationship when you can cherry-pick cheating and lying athletes to blame for sports’ ills?

As Stern said countless times, there was nothing really new about Donaghy’s allegations. His claim of unethical and manipulated officiating has been out there for some time. We in the media know that fans have a growing suspicion that games are consistently and intentionally being impacted by bad officiating.

At the very least, referees should be subject to questioning by the “free” press. The American system is predicated on checks and balances and watchdog organizations. Why are refs treated as a protected, fragile species?

A 25-year-old quarterback has to answer for his dumb decisions, but a 50-year-old ref gets escorted from the field and almost never has to answer for the mistakes he/she makes that dictate the outcome.

Sports have become too lucrative to operate under customs developed before there were billion-dollar TV contracts at stake. This problem isn’t limited to the NBA. I still remember Super Bowl XL and the one-sided officiating that sabotaged Seattle’s chances of beating the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Stern talked about “transparency” and how his league has nothing to hide. If that’s the case, then he should be the first commissioner to make his refs accessible to reporters after every game. I think we would be less likely to see another Tim Donaghy if refs knew they had to immediately answer for their suspicious actions.