Obama’s Challenge

The campaign speaks to “Radicalism.”

By Stanley Kurtz
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 23, 2008, 7:00 a.m.

Today, in a piece (see article below) in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools,” I offer a report on my research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation once headed by Barack Obama. As I explained in “Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?” the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago first agreed to grant, then abruptly denied me, access to the files of this foundation. Subsequently, the Daley Library again reversed their decision and made the CAC files available.


Bill Ayers (1968)

As I note in today’s Journal piece, I’ve conveyed the gist of my Annenberg findings to the Obama campaign and offered them a chance to respond. In reply, the Obama campaign has sent me an extended “on the record” statement about Obama’s role at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and about the nature of his relationship with Bill Ayers. I present that statement in its entirety here:

The Annenberg Challenge records only serve to establish clearly that while Barack Obama and Ayers had occasional contact during Obama’s 6 years of service on the bipartisan board, they did not work closely together to exchange and develop policy ideas. In fact, as these records show, Ayers attended a total 6 meetings of the Board during the 6 years of Obama’s Board service. And, as these same records also demonstrate, the advisory committee that Ayers co-chaired played no operational role whatsoever once the Challenge hired its Executive Director at the end of its first year.

Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board. Barack Obama was encouraged to run for Chair by Deborah Leff, with whom he served on another board, recommended by Pat Graham, and elected by the bipartisan founding board members: Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White.

Barack Obama months ago confirmed that he had contact with Ayers during the course of his foundation work, and he pointed out that “We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education”. Senator Obama also said earlier this year that Ayers was “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis”, a fact that is not in any way contradicted by their contact through the Annenberg Challenge which ended 12 years ago, or by any of the Challenge records.

The suggestion that Ayers somehow dominated the policy or direction of the bipartisan Challenge Board, imprinting it with radical views, is absurd. The Annenberg Challenge was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Republican Governor Jim Edgar, who wrote to Walter Annenberg to encourage the creation of the Challenge, joined Mayor Daley to announce the formation of the Challenge and his administration continued to work closely on education reform with the Board. John McCain has praised an initiative funded by the Challenge. The Challenge’s work is still carried on today through to the bipartisan Chicago Public Education Fund, which coordinates closely Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley to improve teacher performance and has included such board members as Illinois Republican Party Chair Andrew McKenna.

The Challenge was established to allocate grants targeted to improve student performance and promote teacher training and leadership development in the Chicago Public Schools. One objective of the Challenge was to improve education for the bottom quartile of students attending Chicago Public Schools — whose reading, math, and basic skills scores improved markedly during the years in which the Challenge invested in city schools. Due to the work of the Challenge and the Fund, the number of board certified teachers in Chicago Public Schools has increased by the hundreds.

As is well known, by the time Barack Obama met him, Ayers was a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and he has held the title of ‘distinguished scholar’ the University of South Carolina for many years — Ayers held both positions at universities while Republican Governors served on their Boards of Trustees. The detestable acts that Ayers committed decades before occurred when Senator Obama was 8 years old and the Senator has condemned them in no uncertain terms.

While I’ve addressed this statement in the “Radicalism” piece, I’ll extend my response here.

Let’s first review CAC’s initial setup. In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to “delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.” All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.


Former radical activist Bernardine Dohrn and her companion William Ayers leave court in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1981. Dohrn received a $1,500 fine and three years probation for her role in the ‘Days of Rage’ disturbance in Chicago in 1969. Photo: AP

During this initial year of 1995, Ayers also sat as an ex officio member of the board. The Obama campaign is trying to minimize his cooperation with Ayers by counting the number of board meetings where both sat together. That will not do. For one thing, as long as we’re counting occasions on which Obama and Ayers were together, the Obama campaign omits Obama’s appearances before the Collaborative, when it was co-chaired by Ayers. In 1995, Obama and Ayers also sat together on the board’s Governance Committee, with at least one independently scheduled meeting, and who knows how many others. Ayers and Obama were also part of a group of four instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern CAC. Surely that endeavor would have involved significant interaction between them. Then there’s the question of unrecorded meetings of both the board and the Collaborative. For example, the archives contain an intriguing note indicating that, although a CAC board meeting took place on July 25, 1995, “No minutes were recorded.” Were Ayers and Obama both present at that meeting? More important, what took place there?

The partnership between Ayers and Obama is about much more than the number of occasions on which the two were recorded together in the same room. As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies. And especially in CAC’s first year, Ayers was largely in charge of the process. One of CAC’s own evaluations notes that during 1995, CAC was a “Founder-Led Foundation.” That is, Ayers was not merely an ex officio board member that year, but as the key founder and guiding spirit of CAC, he was effectively running the show.

This is consistent with what I found in the documents, which, for example, show Ayers not only speaking for the Collaborative before the board, but speaking in place of absent board members when they couldn’t be present to make a report. In general, in 1995, Ayers seems to be deeply involved in the work of every important body and committee at CAC. Of the three CAC founders, Ayers, Anne Hallett, an urban school advocate, and Warren Chapman, a state school reformer, only two, Ayers and Hallett, were Collaborative co-chairs and ex officio members of the board. And in a letter, Hallett describes herself as “joined at the hip” with Ayers. Clearly Ayers was the senior partner of the pair, given his prominence as an author, and as a national spokesman for educators consciously committed to politicizing their classrooms. Ayers is not only an activist, but a sort of father-figure to radical educators, authoring not only books of his own, but editing collections of like-minded authors, and putting together coalitions of educators, as he did at CAC. Hallett and Ayers may have co-chaired the Collaborative and together been ex-officio on the board, but this was largely Ayers’s show.

So when CAC’s own evaluators call 1995 the period of the “Founder-Led Foundation,” they are essentially saying that, in 1995, Ayers was the most powerful individual at CAC. The Obama campaign treats that suggestion as “absurd,” yet it is effectively made by CAC’s own evaluators. This needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama campaign’s minimization of the Ayers-Obama connection that year. Ayers’s outsized role at CAC also needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama camp’s claim that Deborah Leff and Patricia Graham first suggested Obama’s name as board chair. Given the degree of Ayers’s power at this early stage, it’s hard to believe that the ultimate decision on Obama’s elevation to the board was not made by Ayers himself. After all, Ayers and his immediate ally, Michael Klonsky, would end up seeking major financial support from CAC for their own “Small Schools” network. Ayers could not have been indifferent to the choice of board chair, since his own funding, and that of his many allies, would depend on it.

This brings us to the ethical concerns that led to a restructuring of the relationship between the CAC board and the Collaborative after 1995. The Obama camp points to this shift as if it quiets questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship. In fact, the post-1995 restructuring of CAC more urgently raises such questions. Precisely because Collaborative members like Ayers were themselves up for CAC grants, stronger barriers had to be created between the board and the Collaborative. So after 1995, Ayers appears to have lost his ex officio status on the board, and the Collaborative lost its theretofore prominent role in advising the board on grant applications.

I found little explicit discussion, in either board or Collaborative minutes, about the need for this major structural change. Could the unrecorded July 25, 1995, board meeting have addressed the issue? That meeting would have taken place just as the responses to the initial “Request for Proposals” were coming in. At that point, it would have been evident that many Collaborative members were seeking money from CAC itself. This was at the high point of Collaborative’s power, before CAC had an executive director in place. Perhaps discussion of the “self-dealing” issue, and the need to make structural changes, began at that meeting. The specific question of what happened at the unrecorded July 25, 1995 meeting is only speculation, of course. But we do know, from internal and external evaluations of CAC, that ethical concerns did in fact lead to a formal demotion of the Collaborative’s power after 1995.

While the appearance of self-dealing receded after CAC’s first year, the reality may still have been in place. Evaluators, both internal and external, have criticized CAC for over-committing its funds in 1995, and also for doing far too little to demand accountability from grant recipients, very much including the initial batch. Many of the initial grantees continued to receive funds for years. Evaluators consistently note the lack of flexibility in grants, and complain that the huge 1995 commitments, with relatively few changes in follow-on years, significantly undercut CAC’s impact and effectiveness.

So although Ayers may have lost his formal position on the board after 1995, and while the Collaborative he co-chaired may have surrendered its formal influence over the grant-making process, grant decisions Ayers put in place when he was effectively running CAC were respected for years by the board. And according to internal and external evaluations, this appears to have been greatly to the detriment of CAC. Why, then, did the board, chaired by Obama, adhere so assiduously to the funding decisions and strategies put in place by Ayers in 1995, even after CAC’s formal structure changed?

I’ll have more to say about that issue down the road, but you can read the key evaluations for yourself. (See Dorothy Shipps et al.,"The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” here; Alexander Russo, “From Frontline Leader to Rearguard Action: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge,” here; and Mark A. Smylie et al., “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for the Future, Part ,1 here and especially Part 2, here.)


Bernardine Dohrn (1969)

The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.

The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.

The Obama campaign notes that during the CAC years, achievement test scores improved markedly in the Chicago public schools. That’s true, but deeply misleading. The real source of improvement was the leadership of accountability-oriented Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, who began to reform CPS in 1995, the year of CAC’s founding. Vallas established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That’s what pushed up Chicago test scores. CAC’s own final evaluation carefully compared students at schools with Annenberg projects and schools without. According to CAC’s own report: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” It also indicates that Annenberg failed, not because it’s altogether impossible to improve urban schools, but because CAC’s heavily politicized community-organizer partners weren’t any good at doing so.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

OPINION

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

By STANLEY KURTZ
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
September 23, 2008

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.


Bill Ayers (AP).

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions.
Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board.
The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Illegal Immigration And The Mortgage Mess

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
September 23, 2008

The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers. As panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue the financial industry, they've fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers and minority home ownership mau-mauers (can't call 'em greedy, that would be racist) for blame.

But there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies ffueled the mortgage crisis.
It's no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave—Loudoun County, Va., California's Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters—also happen to be some of the nation's largest illegal alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Regional reports across the country have decried the subprime meltdown's impact on illegal immigrant "victims." A July report showed that in seven of the 10 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics represented at least one-third of the population; in two of those areas—Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif.—Hispanics comprised half the population. The amnesty-promoting National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund have received millions in federal funds to "counsel" their constituents on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10-million earmark for itself in one of the housing bills past this spring.

For the last five years, I've reported on the rapidly expanding illegal alien home loan racket. The top banks clamoring for their handouts as their profits plummet, led by Wachovia and Bank of America, launched aggressive campaigns to woo illegal alien homebuyers. The quasi-governmental Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority jumped in to guarantee home loans to illegal immigrants. The Washington Post noted, almost as an afterthought, in a 2005 report:

"Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing major ethnic or racial group, have been courted aggressively by real estate agents, mortgage brokers and programs for first-time buyers that offer help with closing costs. Ads proclaim: "Sin verificacion de ingresos! Sin verificacion de documento!"—which loosely translates as, 'Income tax forms are not required, nor are immigration papers.'" [More Hispanics Gain Foothold in Housing Market, By D'Vera Cohn, June 13, 2005]

In addition, fraudsters have engaged in massive house-flipping rings using illegal aliens as straw buyers. Among many examples cited by the FBI: a conspiracy in Las Vegas involving a former Nevada First Residential Mortgage Company branch manager who directed loan officers and processors in the origination of 233 fraudulent Federal Housing Authority loans valued at over $25 million. The defrauders manufactured and submitted false employment and income documentation for borrowers; most were illegal immigrants from Mexico. To date, the FBI reported, "Fifty-eight loans with a total value of $6.2 million have gone into default, with a loss to the Housing and Urban Development Department of over $1.9 million."

It's the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to lax Bush administration-approved policies allowing illegal aliens to use "matricula consular cards" and taxpayer identification numbers to open bank accounts, more forms of mortgage fraud have burgeoned. Moneylenders still have no access to a verification system to check Social Security numbers before approving loans.

In an interview about rampant illegal alien home loan fraud, a spokeswoman for the U.S. General Accounting Office told me five years ago:

"[C]onsidering the size of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and other large cities throughout the United States known to be inundated with illegal aliens, I don't think the federal government is willing to expose this problem for financial reasons as well as for fear of political repercussions."

The chickens are coming home to roost. And law-abiding, responsible taxpayers are going to pay for it.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

Taxpayers’ Trillion

How much will be left after Washington takes its cut?

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 24, 2008, 0:00 a.m.


Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion.

Many people have trouble even forming some notion of what such numbers as billion and trillion mean. One way to get some idea of the magnitude of a trillion is to ask: How long ago was a trillion seconds?

A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read and write. Neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Chinese dynasties had yet come into existence. None of the founders of the world’s great religions today had yet been born.

That’s what a trillion means. Put a dollar sign in front of it and that’s what the current bailout may cost.

Will that money be spent wisely? It is theoretically possible. But don’t bet the rent money on it, or you could end up among the homeless.

Whenever there is a lot of the taxpayers’ money around, politicians are going to find ways to spend it that will increase their chances of getting re-elected by giving goodies to voters.

The longer it takes Congress to pass the bailout bill, the more of those goodies are going to find their way into the legislation. Speed is important, not just to protect the financial markets but to protect the taxpayers from having more of their hard-earned money squandered by politicians.

Regardless of what Barack Obama or John McCain may say they are going to do as president, after a trillion dollars has been taken off the top there is going to be a lot less left in the federal treasury for them to do anything with.

Already Senator Christopher Dodd is talking about extending the bailout from the financial firms to homeowners facing mortgage foreclosures— as if the point of all this is to play Santa Claus.

The huge federal debts that we already have are the ghosts of Christmas past. Financial institutions are not being bailed out as a favor to them or their stockholders. In fact, stockholders have come out worse off after some bailouts.

The real point is to avoid a major contraction of credit that could cause major downturns in output and employment, ruining millions of people, far beyond the financial institutions involved. If it was just a question of the financial institutions themselves, they could be left to sink or swim. But it is not.

We do not need a replay of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the failure of thousands of banks meant a drastic reduction of credit — and therefore a drastic reduction of the demand needed to keep production going and millions of people employed.

But bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos. It makes political sense only to people like Senator Dodd, who are among the reasons for the financial mess in the first place.

People usually stop making ill-advised decisions when they are forced to face the consequences of those decisions, not when politicians come to their rescue and make the taxpayers pay for decisions that the taxpayers had nothing to do with.

The Wall Street Journal, which has for years been sounding the alarm about the riskiness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, recently cited Senator Christopher Dodd along with Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Barney Frank among those on Capitol Hill who have been “shilling” for these financial institutions, downplaying the risks and opposing attempts to restrict their free-wheeling role in the mortgage market.

As recently as July of this year, Senator Dodd declared Fannie Mae and Freddie “fundamentally strong” and said there is no need for “panicking” about them. But now that the chickens have come home to roost, Senator Dodd wants to be sure to get some goodies from the rescue legislation to pass out to people likely to vote for him.

Don’t make any bets on how this situation is going to turn out — except that we can predict that politicians will blame the “greed” of other people. You can bet the rent money on that.

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

Our Federal Economy

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Wednesday, September 24, 2008; Page A23


Members of Congress are being exhorted to stampede, like lemmings in reverse, away from a postulated cliff. But some of the economic geographers who say they know that the cliff is there, and that the economy will plunge over it if Congress stops to think before empowering the secretary of the Treasury to control the flow of capital through the veins of American capitalism, are some of those experts who said in March that prophylactic federal intervention in the matter of Bear Stearns was necessary to contain the crisis.

Everything that has been done for the past six months has been done to cope with what previous actions were supposed to prevent. A perhaps pertinent axiom: There is no education in the second kick of a mule.

The essence of this crisis is lack of knowledge, including the inability to know who owes what to whom, and where risk resides. In such a moment, government's speed should not vary inversely with its information. With government's prestige, measured by approval ratings of the president and Congress, at a historic low, government is taking on unprecedented responsibilities. Henry Paulson, a.k.a. the Fourth Branch of Government, is intelligent and indefatigable and has as much pertinent experience as could be hoped for. But no one has ever had much experience that is pertinent to the tasks that would be assigned to him by the three-page legislation that would give him almost complete discretion over at least $700 billion.

Before Congress codifies this, it should consult Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." But since the federal government was transformed into a regulatory state in the 20th century, Congress has routinely delegated essentially legislative powers to the executive branch and independent agencies. This is one reason conservatives regret the growth of government: It entails supplanting the rule of law -- laws written by elected representatives -- by the rule of rules written in the executive branch.

Rep. Barney Frank, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, says: "No one in a democracy, unelected, should have $800 billion to spend as he sees fit. . . . That's not the way to run a democracy." Frank is properly punctilious about a fundamental principle of American governance -- legislative control of public funds. But a fundamental principle of American political economy is that no elected person should exercise virtually unfettered discretion with such sums of taxpayers' money.

In 1922, Lenin, attacked from the left because he was allowing some small-scale private enterprise and agriculture, promised that the state would control the Soviet economy's "commanding heights." In 1945, Britain's Labor Party explained its nationalization policies by saying that socialism should include government "control of the commanding heights of the economy."

In 1945 Britain, this meant the stuff of industrialism -- iron, steel, coal, railroads, etc. In 1945, Aneurin Bevan, a leading Labor politician, said: "Britain is an island bedded on coal and surrounded by fish; only an organizing genius could produce a coal shortage and a fish shortage simultaneously." Socialism soon produced that.

Today, the commanding heights of America's economy are financial services, and regarding them, the line between the public and private sectors is being blurred to indistinctness. What is the American equivalent of coal and fish? We might find out.

An enormous range of complex judgments will have to be made about who will decide -- and by what criteria -- to whom money will be directed, and how to value and price the financial instruments, and the assets behind them, that the government might soon own. But these micro problems, although quite huge, pale next to the macro problem, which is:

This crisis has arrived during the ninth month of a vast demographic deluge -- the retirement of 78 million baby boomers. As the population ages, the welfare state -- primarily, a transfer-payments pump providing pensions and medical care for the elderly -- requires more rapid economic growth to generate increasing revenue. To the extent that today's crisis results in large amounts of capital being allocated by considerations other than those of economic efficiency, the nation will be consigned to less-than-optimal economic growth.

The next administration, but especially an Obama administration, will chafe under severely narrowed economic restrictions. But subsequent generations will pay the radiating costs of the rising role of the state in allocating financial resources.

georgewill@washpost.com

The Jihad Prevention Act

By Kathy Shaidle
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Wednesday, September 24, 2008

International reaction was almost uniformly negative last week when news broke that Britain had officially granted Muslim Sharia courts permission to rule on everything from divorce to domestic violence. After all, in its strictest form, Sharia law requires the stoning of women accused of adultery, and the execution of converts from Islam, among other draconian punishments for offences that aren’t even considered crimes in the West. In the U.K. and abroad, pundits and politicians denounced Britain’s capitulation, but only one elected official responded with a daring proposal aimed at preventing Sharia law from gaining such a foothold in America.

That that politician was Rep. Tom Tancredo won’t surprise observers of American politics. The Colorado congressman has long been an outspoken critic of the unofficial “open-borders” policy that encourages millions of undocumented immigrants – including would-be terrorists – to enter the U.S. each year. During his short-lived presidential campaign in 2007, Tancredo repeatedly raised the immigration issue during televised debates. He also aired a provocative television ad in which he promised to “stop all visas to nations that sponsor terrorism and [to] arrest and deport any alien who preaches violence and hatred.”

The ad earned Tancredo scorn on the Left and also on some parts of the Right. Undaunted, he has now proposed a “Jihad Prevention Act” that “would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law [and] make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.” In his official announcement on September 18, Tancredo observed: “This is a case where truth is truly stranger than fiction. Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration.”

“When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims,” he explained, “you are also importing their radical ideology – an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy – such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty. The best way to safeguard America against the importation of the destructive effects of this poisonous ideology is to prevent its purveyors from coming here in the first place.”

Tancredo hopes his bill will spur public debate, and “send a clear message that the only law we recognize here in America is the U.S. Constitution and the laws passed by our democratically elected representatives…If you aren’t comfortable with that concept, you aren’t welcome in the United States.”

So far, reaction to the “Jihad Prevention Act” has been muted on both sides, possibly because the media is providing wall-to-wall election coverage. Nonetheless, some prominent supporters have emerged. Having advocated similar measures in the past, the group Muslims Against Sharia praised Tancredo’s initiative. So did scholar Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad. Bostom hailed Tancredo’s “sane approach,” adding, “Thank goodness for Congressman Tancredo’s courage and clarity on this pressing matter!”

Tancredo also has an ally in columnist and author Diana West. In books like The Death of the Grown Up and in her syndicated columns, West has chronicled what she considers the decline of Western civilization, brought on by everything from a perpetually adolescent popular culture to radical Islam. “What I like about this proposed legislation,” West said in an email interview, “is its clear, direct focus on Islamic law (Sharia).” Focusing on Sharia, West believes, is the “only way to grapple successfully with the repressive overlay of Islam on a society--understanding it as a function of law, and not religion.” She points out that Tancredo’s “bill allows us to see clearly through to the heart of the matter: the danger that unchecked Islamic immigration will bring about a constituency for Islamic law, leading to disastrous changes to our legal system.”

To be sure, West does have some reservations about the bill. “I'm not sure how he proposes to determine which Muslim immigrants advocate Islamic law and which do not,” she said. “I would prefer to see a general restriction on Islamic immigration to prevent the build-up of a demographic that wills Sharia. Moreover, West notes that this session of Congress is nearly over.
Even if Tancredo’s bill were “brought to a vote this week, I sadly doubt it will be passed.” Still another problem is that there is scant enthusiasm in Congress for passing such a bill. With the notable exception of Rep. Sue Myrick, a Republican from North Carolina, the political class has failed even to address the conflicts between Islamic law and Western values – let alone to draft legislation to thwart the spread of Sharia in the U.S.

Europe may soon prove a model in this regard – the unhappy case of Britain notwithstanding. This December, Israel’s Dr. Arieh Eldad, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, will host the Facing Jihad Summit in Jerusalem. The summit seeks to bring together “European lawmakers who are united in their shared belief that Islam today poses a serious threat to Western civilization.” The idea is to create an alliance of politicians who can workshop legislation to prevent creeping Islamization, which they can then bring back to their home countries and create a voting block in the EU parliament. The attending parliamentarians will be joined by experts on radical Islam such as Daniel Pipes and Bat Ye’or, but bigotry will not be tolerated: Eldad emphasizes that the summit will bar “neo-Nazis and racist parties” like the British National Party. “Seven countries will be represented so far,” Eldad told FrontPage.

And what of America? Eldad thought it likely that at least a few Capitol Hill politicians would attend the jihad summit. If so, Tom Tancredo might be an ideal delegate.

- A blogger since 2000, Kathy Shaidle runs FiveFeetOfFury.com. Her new e-book Acoustic Ladyland has been called a "must read" by Mark Steyn.

Dynasty's slow demise bottoms out with Yankees' September swan song

By Mike Lupica
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Wednesday, September 24th 2008, 4:00 AM

To the end, Derek Jeter wouldn't give in. Even the other night, before what even he had to know was the last game at this Yankee Stadium, Jeter would only give valedictories about the place and about the Yankees, not the season.

"We haven't been eliminated from anything yet," Jeter said, in the first season of his life that does not make it out of the month of September.


The last at-bat at the Stadium for the Bomber captain.

Credits: Laham/Getty
Published: 09/22/2008 12:54:56

Tuesday night Jeter and the Yankees were eliminated from the postseason for the first time in a full season of baseball since 1993. They would have made the playoffs in '94 under Buck Showalter, and probably would have won the World Series that year. Then they won that wild card in 1995, put themselves back in October for the first time in 14 years, put Don Mattingly into baseball's October for the first and only time in his Yankee career.

Then along came Joe Torre, the one who must not be mentioned at Yankee Stadium, for the last Yankee dynasty, four World Series in five years and nearly five in six years until the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 in Phoenix, on a November Sunday night in 2001. And even when the Yankees couldn't get out of the first round for Torre, against the Angels and Tigers and Indians the last three years, the Yankees, the constant $200 million Yankees, with an economic advantage over the rest of the field that no team in sports has, were at least making the tournament, in what was an extraordinary run of regular-season excellence.

Until Tuesday night.

Until Jonathan Papelbon was closing out the Indians at Fenway Park, gassing Jhonny Peralta with fastballs and then coming after Victor Martinez and getting him to pop to short, make the out that put the Red Sox, defending champions of the sport, into the playoffs and eliminated the Yankees. It had to happen eventually and now it has, because this Yankee team, even wounded, did not measure up in so many ways.

"Obviously," Joe Girardi said on television, "this is not the way we wanted the season to end up."

Then Girardi said, "We're playing our best baseball right now. Unfortunately, it's a little bit late."

They played their best baseball when they had no chance of catching Boston, played their best baseball on a last home stand at the Stadium that was as much like a curtain call as anything that happened during the ceremonies of last Sunday night. The Red Sox - the genie Torre's Yankees let out of the bottle over four October nights four years ago, that comeback from 0-3 down in the American League Championship Series that changed baseball history at the Stadium and at Fenway - started playing their best baseball on Aug. 1, after they got rid of Manny Ramirez, who had turned into a bum, and turned themselves back into a real team, one with real character.

The Yankees played when it was too late, got clutch hits when it was too late. They wanted to fight when the other guys were out of the room. When they needed to show character in August, when everything was still in play, not just the wild card but first place in the AL East, they had nothing.

I kept thinking they would make a run, even without Jorge Posada and Chien-Ming Wang, even after the wonder child, Joba Chamberlain, got hurt. I kept thinking that if they were good enough to win eight in a row the way they did after the All-Star Break they were good enough - and tough enough - to go right after the Rays and the Red Sox. Only they weren't.

Another Yankee team to go in with the first-round losers of the last three years. When they got hit at the end of July and the beginning of August, they went down and stayed down until they started winning games when it was too late.

And there is plenty of blame to go around here.

I understand all the reasons Brian Cashman had for not wanting to trade prospects, and spend another small pitching fortune, on Johan Santana. But the Yankees are six games behind the Red Sox today in the standings, with five to play. For all we have talked about the runners left in scoring position, you think Santana couldn't have been six games like that all by himself?

Girardi, for all the injuries, absolutely did not do what Torre always did, which is find a way to hold his team together for 162 and get a veteran team like that across the finish line. You can say this again, and all winter:
If Torre had had exactly the kind of season Girardi did, even with all the injuries, Hank Steinbrenner would not only have fired him, he would have wanted to call back the next day and do it again.

Alex Rodriguez, for all his gaudy numbers, did not have a good season, did not ever carry the team, was a bigger stick for the tabloids than he was for Girardi. Jeter's numbers were soft. Jason Giambi is hanging numbers now and playing for a new Yankee contract, but he left an army of big runs on the bases when the Yankees still had a chance.

Robinson Cano played an entire season looking as if his head were up in the clouds. Or somewhere. The Yankees say they don't want to move him.
Think about something: Just think about how everything looks in the AL East if the Yankees had Dustin Pedroia playing second for them this season instead of Cano.

"We get a chance to do what we did last year," Pedroia said in Boston Tuesday night.

The Yankees? Last year all they did was lose in the first round again. This year they're not even good enough to do that.

Multimedia

Audio Slideshow
Yankee Stadium Goodbye
Final game at Yankee Stadium, September 21, 2008

Audio Slideshow
Final Roll Call
Bald Vinny leads the last roll call in the Yankee Stadium bleachers.

Photo Gallery
Moments to remember
Look back at some of the memorable moments and Daily News back pages from the House That Ruth Built.

Photo Gallery
The curtain closes
See all the snapshots from Yankee Stadium's final hurrah - a 7-3 Bombers win over the Baltimore Orioles.

Yankees Live Chat
Now that the Yankees have turned off the lights at the Stadium and hit the road, beat writer Mark Feinsand is ready for his final in-season chat.Wednesday at Noon.

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Empathizing with Atheists

The need for a new kind of pluralism.

By Michael Novak
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 23, 2008, 7:00 a.m.

After all the activity on NRO’s “The Corner” following my September 17 conversation with Heather Mac Donald about atheism and theism, a raft of e-mails came my way, about one-third of them from self-described atheists.

These sturdy atheists taught me some things of which I had been insufficiently aware. One said he hated being told by Christians, sometimes standing uninvited at his own door, that his atheism was inadequate, even inferior. Another found the smugness and condescension of believers “insufferable,” and told me I should not have used that word of atheists until I had experienced the “insufferable” Christian version myself.

As it happens, just this morning two kind-looking ladies came to my door, and after wishing me a beautiful day, asked to leave with me a copy of The Watchtower (accepting which would probably place me on a “revisit” list). Several times in the past our home has had similar visits, not always as pleasant as today’s. I tried to be as polite and firm as I could, and give the ladies a smiling “God bless you” as I sent them away.

I can see how this would be annoying to an atheist. It sometimes bothers me. On the other hand, these were two nice women earnestly doing something difficult, in order to show their own inner fire to obey the imperative: “Go and teach all nations.”

These recent e-mails further made me think how difficult it must be to live in a country which is over 80-percent Christian in population, and annoyingly Christian in public life, with a faith sometimes unavoidable even inside one’s own front door.

All of us have met Christians who are in fact smug, condescending, insufferably certain that their own brand of the faith is superior to ours. Not a few tell Catholics that our faith is a corruption that will doom us to hell. We Catholics have also met some of our own faith so narrow-minded that they view us with barely controlled contempt. Some are narrow-minded in a traditionalist way, others in a “progressive” way. Point is, there are internal divisions, too.

But few of us belong to a minority as small as the small sect of atheists.

My informants also try to show me how “insufferable” are references to atheists as a small “sect.” They do not feel theirs is a sect. They think theirs is the “reality-based community.” Several take pains to insist that atheism is not an “opinion,” but a fact. They do not “question” it, they say, because it is just a solid fact. Not a fantasy, like Christian faith or Bugs Bunny.

It appears that they get their idea of what a “fact” is from the following sequence: They observe data discernible to the five senses, and then formulate an insight that unifies these observations in an intelligible way, and then, third, verify the insight against further evidence from the senses. They come to “facts” — real, solid, existential things, not fantasies — through this “verification principle.”

But philosophers have shown that this “verification principle” is not itself empirically verifiable. It needs to be argued for, not merely asserted. Each operation in the process — observe, gain insight, verify — is subject to many meanings, and understood in different ways by different philosophies. My atheist correspondents too easily pass over the epistemological and metaphysical difficulties in their choice of method (or at least in their descriptions of that method).

For instance, proving a negative has long been thought to be, if not impossible, at least unreliable. Necessarily, then, atheism is a belief, not a fact. It may be a belief with (as atheists think) a very high degree of probability, even though we theists judge it to have a low degree of probability. By contrast, agnosticism seems to be a more tenable commitment than atheism. Problem is, in action one must act as if God does not exist (etsi deus non daretur), or as if He does. In action one must make a commitment that one cannot quite make on purely intellectual grounds. It is by our deeds that we show what we most deeply believe.

One implication of this finding, interestingly enough, is that there are many who call themselves believers, whose actions show that their heart is committed elsewhere. Their deeds are out of line with their words. Similarly, there seem to be persons calling themselves atheists whose actions seem more in line with Jewish and Christian (and natural law) norms than their words do. For such reasons, wisdom seems to suggest that final judgment on any one of us is beyond our poor capacities. It is best left to an undeceivable Judge, to Whom our hearts and consciences and intentions are transparent.

Thus, what some atheists present as “fact” is actually a “belief,” a commitment to a certain way of viewing the world. Sometimes (not always) that way is a simple-minded materialism. They will accept as evidence only material things, as detected through the five senses. For them, beyond material things nothing else is real. However, this affirmation of theirs is not a statement subject to empirical test. It is a choice of one procedural rule rather than others.

Thus, some atheists seem to be evading the complexities behind their own narrow beliefs — and don’t want to think about them. They are more comfortable in a world of touch, sight, hearing, taste, scent. To stay solely in that world may be to understand themselves much too narrowly.

To many of us, for instance, it seems that acts of insight and judgment are far more vivid, valuable, and even pleasurable — we are exhilarated by the eros of inquiry — than are acts of our senses, delightful as these sometimes are. Do we not often arise from hours of reading, thinking, or writing, having been intensely captivated by insights and judgments, to find that our bodies are stiff and sore, perhaps too cold or too hot, hungry, thirsty? For many, insight, judging, and loving are penetrating human experiences more precious than the activities of the senses. Because of their preferability, the range of their activities, and their sublimity, these activities have often been thought of as a human being’s “spirited” acts, the acts of the human spirit.

Human beings seem to be best understood as either inspirited bodies or embodied spirits — a unity at the core of our being. Without the distinctive refinements of human brain cells and neurons, we lose our capacities for insight, judgment, love. But without exercising our capacities for insight, judgment, and love, our bodies fall far short of our human potential, often in a way so unworthy of ourselves that to others, we become objects of scorn: “You pig!”

That is why to make a mistake in understanding oneself is almost certain to lead to mistakes in coming to an understanding of God. A materialist will be looking where no evidence of God can possibly be found. His choice of method predetermines his failure.

Just as it helps believers to understand that atheists can be irritated by condescension from believers, it may help atheists to see that insisting that their own convictions are unquestionable “facts,” while those of others may be airily dismissed, undermines their claim to being fair-minded. If we are to have a dialogue based on mutual respect, we will all have to change our ways.

Meanwhile, the threat to our lives and liberties posed by a worldwide pseudo-religious totalitarian movement demands that all those who love liberty stop being divided against ourselves. True enough, we each have reasons for our own convictions, but we do well to respect the convictions of all others willing to fight alongside us against the common threat. In this great work, we will have to learn a new skill in civil conversation concerning matters of fundamental differences in philosophy and religion. These differences can no longer be ignored as if they did not exist, and were not of any serious importance. Manifestly, they are.

In previous generations, Americans have tacitly agreed that pluralism is best protected by remaining silent about profound differences in conviction. Today, pluralism needs a new set of protections: civil, reasoned conversation about much that divides us, so that fears of one another might be diminished, and enduring respect for one another come to flower.

— Michael Novak’s latest book is No One Sees God. His website is http://www.michaelnovak.net/.

Ricky Gervais: A 'Ghost' of a Chance

Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview

He created ''The Office'' and starred as the worst boss of all time. Now the British comedian is being promoted to Hollywood leading man in new comedy ''Ghost Town.'' But does he even want the job?

By Chris Nashawaty
http://www.ew.com/ew

Despite an Emmy and a pair of Golden Globes for The Office, breathless reviews for his HBO series Extras, and an inspired guest turn on The Simpsons where he tried to seduce Marge with an acoustic love song about ''Lady Di,'' Ricky Gervais isn't a celebrity in America yet. Not in the Brad Pitt sense of the word at least. So it's a little strange that he feels the need to check in to hotels here under a fake name.


RICKY GERVAIS ''Would I have rather done The Office than been in The Godfather? No doubt about it''
PHOTOGRAPH BY RODNEY SMITH

When Gervais — or, should we say, ''Paul Anderson'' — answers the door of his suite at the Four Seasons in New York, he doesn't look much like a celebrity, either. He looks like a traveling salesman who's just been shaken out of a nap. He's wearing a black T-shirt and baggy sweatpants. His face is covered in stubble. A half-finished bottle of red wine, presumably from the night before, sits atop the minibar.
When he's asked right off the bat who Paul Anderson is, Gervais takes a seat on the sofa and shifts around uncomfortably. He didn't know this was coming and he wants to explain, because he knows that if he doesn't, he'll come off like an arrogant jerk for using an alias. On the flip side, it means that he'll also have to come up with a new fake name to use in the future. A future when, perhaps, he will be famous enough in the States to need one.

After a few stammering moments, Gervais sighs. ''He's a guy I used to work with at a radio station in England. I just thought it was such a wonderfully generic name...Paul Anderson. It's got nothing to do with the director. I haven't seen There Will Be Blood, although I'm sure it's great.'' With that settled, Gervais asks for help hatching a new identity. When it's suggested that he go with something flashy, like Johnny Depp's infamous hotel pseudonym, ''Mr. Donkey Penis,'' Gervais mulls it over: ''It's a very brave man who calls a hotel and says 'I'd like to speak to Mr. Donkey Penis.' So I see how that would be effective. But let's see...maybe Scott Houston?...Brad Cockmore?...Bob Crunt?''

Gervais likes this last one. A lot. After repeating the name a few times, chewing over all of its funny textures, he lets loose a high-pitched girly squeal of a laugh. Even funnier, though, is the fact that there may soon be a lot of people calling to speak with ''Mr. Crunt.'' Because after revolutionizing TV comedy from the sleepy outpost of the BBC with his squirm-inducing, awkward-silence-filled anti-sitcom The Office (which Gervais co-created, co-wrote, and co-directed with Stephen Merchant, and starred in), the 47-year-old is now betting his short but unblemished track record that a self-described ''fat, middle-aged British comedian'' can become a leading man. And not just any leading man, but a leading man in the wheeziest and most cliché of Hollywood genres, the romantic comedy.

In his new film, Ghost Town — which was co-written and directed by Steven Spielberg's go-to screenwriter, David Koepp — Gervais plays Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist who, after briefly flatlining on the operating table during a routine colonoscopy, wakes up with the ability to see dead people. One of them, a former cheating husband (Greg Kinnear), won't stop haunting him until he agrees to woo the man's widowed wife (Téa Leoni) away from the self-righteous do-gooder she's planning to marry. Think of it as The Sixth Sleepless Sense in Seattle.

It's an unlikely career move for a guy who's made it a point of pride until now to write and star in his own projects. (Such as his hilarious podcasts, which are available at iTunes and audible.com.) But in a way, it's a miracle that Gervais has been able to keep Hollywood at arm's length this long. Ever since the first episode of The Office aired in the U.K. in 2001, film executives have been calling. And, for the most part, Gervais has politely turned them away. ''I remember I got a call from one of the studios during the first season of The Office, and they said, 'We'd love for you to be the lead in this film.' And I went, 'Well, who's going to see that?' It was just quiet on the other end of the line. They'd never heard someone say that. I told them, 'You want John Cusack for this.'''

Since then, Gervais says he's been offered dozens of parts in huge Hollywood movies — been given the chance to work with Johnny Depp and Tom Hanks — and passed each time. Instead, he's chosen to guest-star in an episode of the TV show Alias, because he's a fan of J.J. Abrams', and signed on for a bit part in Christopher Guest's 2006 comedy For Your Consideration, because he considers This Is Spinal Tap to be the alpha and omega of all things funny.
It's not that Gervais isn't grateful, it's just that deep down he knows he's not dependent on anyone else for a job. ''The only choice an actor has is yes or no,'' he says. ''I have more choices than that. I can write my own thing. Everything I do is bespoke, so it fits me. Would I have rather done The Office than been in The Godfather? No doubt about it. Would I have rather written and directed Extras than been in Gone With the Wind? No doubt about it. Would I rather do the podcasts that I do or be in the next blockbuster film as a hired hand? There's no doubt about it.''

EIGHT YEARS AGO, when Gervais' mother passed away, his sister and two older brothers met with their local minister, who was preparing her eulogy. He wanted to know some things about their beloved mum — her hobbies, her passions, the things that made her special. ''So he said to my brother, 'Tell me about your mum.' And my brother went, 'She was a keen racist.' Just like that. Straight face. And the vicar was like, 'I can't say that!' And he said, 'Okay, she also liked gardening.''' Gervais' brother then gave the minister a phony name so that when he listed her children in his remarks, Gervais and his siblings exploded with laughter.

Gervais grew up poor in Reading, 40 miles outside London. His father was a laborer who carried bricks on construction sites, and his mother was a homemaker. Both were hilarious. ''My dad was very dry,'' Gervais says. ''He'd say two words a day, but they'd be a clever put-down.'' As a child, Gervais didn't realize that his family was poor, or that his mother would buy Christmas presents for the kids and spend the rest of the year paying them off. He never thought about it because they were always cracking up. Years later, that ability to mine humor from the bleakest of circumstances informed every minute of The Office. Gervais had worked in a place like Wernham Hogg, he'd had a boss like David Brent, and he knew that sometimes the funniest thing in the world was the joke that misfired, or the humiliating faux pas.

''The Office worked because the themes are huge and everyone understands them,'' says Gervais. ''Boy meets girl, wasting your life, bad boss. Jesus, what's bigger than that? If you're not dying and you've got a house, what's the worst thing that happens to you every day? Embarrassment.''


REFLECTING ON HOLLYWOOD ''I don't care if I never do another film again,'' Ricky Gervais says. ''I can create my own material and I've got to remember that. As exciting as it is to be a film star, it means nothing to me''
PHOTOGRAPH BY RODNEY SMITH

In both The Office and Extras — and to a certain extent in Ghost Town — Gervais fine-tunes the awkward art of tossing off an offensive remark and digging himself deeper and deeper into the ditch as he tries to explain his way out. It can be excruciating to watch. You don't know whether to laugh or cringe. ''The British Office is one of the main things that made me do what I'm doing now,'' says Jonah Hill (Superbad), who just finished shooting next year's This Side of the Truth opposite Gervais and Jennifer Garner. (Gervais co-wrote and co-directed the comedy about a world where lying doesn't exist.) ''Ricky finds these uncomfortable moments and lets them breathe,'' Hill says.

Christopher Guest, who also appears in Truth, rarely grants interviews, but when asked to comment about Gervais, he got on the phone right away. Guest, whose films include Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, is Gervais' idol. And the sentiment seems to be mutual. ''Most comedies are made to get to a punchline and it's left at that. In The Office and Extras, there are also great moments of sadness and desperation. And for me, that's interesting.... I think The Office is the best TV I've ever seen, period.''

Gervais, who splits his time between England and New York City, where he just bought an apartment with his longtime girlfriend, Jane, is the first to admit that the show that launched his career has been ''ridiculously'' overpraised. And he's stunned that it's now a global franchise with versions in America, Chile, Russia, Canada, and France. There's even an unofficial version in Germany. ''The Germans are the only ones who didn't want to pay for the rights,'' says Gervais, ''which is strange, because it's not like the Germans to take things that aren't theirs.''

When Gervais talks, it's sometimes hard to tell whether he is joking. Gags fly out of his mouth so fast, and in such a deadpan, that sometimes you feel like you're not so much interviewing him as just trying to keep up. In a string of recent stand-up performances, two of which were taped for an HBO special that will air in November, Gervais aims that same withering, rapid-fire delivery at such sacred cows as Stephen Hawking (''Pretentious. Born in Oxford, talks with that American accent''), Nelson Mandela (''He hasn't re-offended. Shows you prison does work!''), and Anne Frank (''No sequel? Lazy''). Of course, this only works because he lands the sharpest punchlines on his own chin. Or chins. In his act, he describes how his life has changed since becoming successful, complaining that he's no longer referred to in the British press as just ''Ricky Gervais, comedian.'' Now he's ''Ricky Gervais, Tubby Comedian.'' Or ''Ricky Gervais, Rotund Comic.'' Or, simply, ''The Chubby Funster.''

With his first film as a Hollywood leading man now hitting theaters, Gervais suspects that he's about to become a target on this side of the Atlantic, too. And, initially at least, it doesn't seem to bother him. ''The reason I chose to do Ghost Town is because it was by far the best script I got,'' he says. ''It's good, it's moving, and I figured if I didn't do this one then I'll never do one. To me, it's perfect. I don't care what it does at the box office. I don't care what it scores in focus groups. I don't give a f---. It's exactly how we wanted it. And I'll like it in 20 years as much as I like it now.''

Gervais knows that he's had a charmed run so far, what with all those awards, and Office spin-offs in Russia, and testimonials from heroes like Christopher Guest. But deep down, he seems to understand that it won't last forever. That some will see his bid to be a Hollywood star as a sellout, or an ego trip. And that drives him crazy. ''Trust me, I get no joy out of seeing my fat face on the screen,'' he says, getting worked up. ''I'm not trying to be a film star. I don't care if I never do another film again. I can create my own material and I've got to remember that. As exciting as it is to be a film star, it means nothing to me. Do I say that because I have no ego, or the biggest ego in the world? I don't know and I don't care.''

Gervais leans back on the sofa and runs his hand through his hair, trying to regain his composure. You're left waiting for a sign that he's joking, a punchline to break the awkward silence. But it never comes.

FIVE SPLASHY PROJECTS THAT RICKY GERVAIS SAYS HE TURNED DOWN

Pirates of the Caribbean 2

Gervais passed on the chance to share the screen with Johnny Depp, saying, ''I didn't want to sit in a Winnebago for six months waiting to show up as a comedy pirate for two minutes.''

The Da Vinci Code

Ditto to costarring with Tom Hanks in this 2006 Ron Howard thriller. ''I'm going to pop up and people are going to go: That's the fat fellow from The Office! Who the f--- does he think he is?''

Star Trek

Abrams approached the comedian about his franchise reboot, due next summer: ''I was never a big fan, so I would've felt guilty taking the part just to be in a blockbuster. To what? Boost my profile?''

Arthur remake

''I said 'no' straight-away,'' Gervais says about an offer to star in a new version. ''Why would I mess with a perfect comedy? They know people don't watch films that have the wrong font — it's got an '80s font.''

Magnum P.I. movie

Gervais wouldn't say which role was offered, but we'll bet it rhymes with ''Figgins.'' ''I don't want to be the funny butler...because [roles like that] do no good. I just keep walking away.''

More with Ricky Gervais:

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Posted Sep 19, 2008

Published in issue #1013 Sep 19, 2008

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Jeter’s Actions True to Example Set by Ripken

By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of The Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 23, 2008

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 21: Derek Jeter #2 of the New York Yankees waves to fans after the last regular season game at Yankee Stadium on September 21, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City. The Yankees are playing their final season in the 85 year old ball park and plan on moving into the new Yankee Stadium across the street to start the 09 season. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

By early Monday morning, the famous DiMaggio sign from the tunnel leading to the Yankees’ dugout was missing. Derek Jeter, prime suspect, was not talking.

“Everybody wants to know,” he said with a crooked, sheepish smile when asked if Joe D’s famous expression of pinstriped devotion — “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee” — was the keepsake he claimed to have his eye on before the Yankee Stadium finale.

“In due time,” Jeter said.

He was finally back at his dressing stall after a long night’s demonstration of why he could have gotten away with carting out the infield if he could have figured out how to lift it from the ground.

When they handed him a microphone on the field late Sunday night and his teammates crowded ’round, his words of gratitude to the fans were heartfelt, delivered with a poised candidate’s deliberate cadence. He said he was nervous but he seemed as if he were born for the moment, and with an occasional dab of the eye, we could believe he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

“What I was thinking as Derek was speaking was that it was going to be one of those moments that will play over and over for the next 100 years, like Lou Gehrig,” General Manager Brian Cashman said, standing near home plate while all around him, grown Yankees multimillionaires bent over and scooped dirt into small plastic cups.

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 21: (L-R) Jorge Posada #20, Mariano Rivera #42, Derek Jeter #2, and Andy Pettitte #46 pose for a photograph after defeating the Baltimore Orioles of the New York Yankees during the last regular season game at Yankee Stadium on September 21, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

“I was thinking exactly that for him, how it doesn’t happen very often that an individual Yankee gets to address the entire Stadium on an occasion this special,” Cashman said. “And no doubt it had to be Derek.”

•

It had to be the player for whom the flashbulbs popped as they did for no other during each at-bat, all five hitless, in the 7-3 victory wrap of the Orioles. Jeter was still the people’s choice, as he has long been in the South Bronx, and will remain across the street next year.

He is the quiet captain, aloof even, some have argued, but everything he said Sunday night was pitched perfectly, and not just on the field. Before the game, he was asked what made Yankee Stadium so different. The lights, for one thing, he said. They always seemed brighter than elsewhere. He said he imagined actors feeling likewise playing Broadway.

“To be out there with him tonight as he spoke to the fans, as he let them know what the Stadium means to him, is something I’ll never forget,” the rookie outfielder Brett Gardner said. “You know, a lot of people say he’s a quiet captain. and maybe he is, but he’s a guy that leads by example, and that’s the kind of guy I want to follow.”

Jeter said the collective lap around the field “just kind of happened” but there was a moment when his arms were extended in the direction he wanted the Yankees to go. It was no one-man show: Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada remain beloved holdovers from the championship Joe Torre era, but the gesture was clearly a Jeter orchestration.

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 21: Derek Jeter #2 and Alex Rodriguez #13 of the New York Yankees talk against the Baltimore Orioles during the last regular season game at Yankee Stadium on September 21, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City.(Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

You could say that the Orioles owed it to the Yankees to play the inconspicuous role of the opponent in the staged production of self-celebration. On the night in Baltimore in September 1995 when Cal Ripken Jr. broke Gehrig’s record for the most consecutive games played, DiMaggio, of all people, graced the occasion with a rare ballpark visit. It may seem strange to younger fans after the home-run onslaught and subsequent steroid revelations, but a player merely running out to take his position at shortstop meant that much only 13 years ago.

“You could, after four and a half innings, watch him lap the field, grabbing hands all the way around, pulling America back into baseball,” I wrote of Ripken that night, sitting in the left field auxiliary press section.

In the season after a bitter work stoppage killed the World Series, Ripken reminded the country of the sport’s most appealing aspect, its men-at-work ethos. It always annoyed me to no end when people would say that McGwire and Sosa saved the game. The reality is that baseball came to a fork in the road, chose what it thought was a shortcut to riches and nearly wound up in ruin.

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The season after Ripken left Gehrig behind, Jeter became a Yankee Stadium fixture at shortstop and a reminder over the past 13 years that the game is best measured by little things more than the long ball. By timely base hits and body language and grace under pressure.

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 21: The scoreboard is seen during a pregame ceremony prior to the start of the last regular season game at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees on September 21, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City.(Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)


“Derek is a lot like Cal because he represents all that our society aspires to be and what our game should aspire to be,” Cashman said. “Like Cal, and like most Americans, he takes his job seriously. He goes to work every day, and he does it with pride for his franchise and his city.”

After all these years, punctuated recently by Jeter’s surpassing of Gehrig, too, as Yankee Stadium’s career hits leader before they turned out its bright lights, there is nothing quiet about a statement like that.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com