Latest News

Ending The Last Meal Tradition On Texas Death Row: A "Diversionary Issue"?

2011-09-23T22:49:00Z

On Thursday, prison officials in Texas decided to end the practice of allowing condemned inmates to choose their last meal.

The day before, Texas had executed Lawrence Russell Brewer, one of the men who chained James Byrd Jr. to a pick-up truck and dragged him to his death in 1998. But the state first reportedly granted Brewer the following request: two chicken-fried steaks, one pound of barbecued meat, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover's pizza, three fajitas, an omelet, a bowl of okra, one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, some peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts and three root beers.According to various reports, Brewer did not eat any of it.

The same day, in Georgia, another condemned man, Troy Davis, was offered the chance to request a last meal. He asked to have the same meal as the other inmates - a cheeseburger, slaw, baked beans, potatoes and cookies.

In a letter posted on the website of the NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the organization, wrote that it was not the first time Davis had refused a last meal:

The last time Troy faced execution, in 2008, the warden brought in what was to be his last meal. But Troy refused to eat. Looking the prison staff in their eyes, he explained this meal would not be his last. He was vindicated when he received a last minute stay. Guards still remember this as a haunting moment, one rooted in Troy's deep faith.

The decision to end the tradition in Texas was made after State Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, called and wrote to the head of the state prison agency. He said that if they didn't abolish the practice, he would take the matter to the State Legislature.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Whitmire said he had been concerned about the practice for several years. Addressing it had been on his "to-do list," he said. He said he'd moved the item to the top of his list after reading about Brewer's request and what he considered a "manipulation of the system."

He said he was indignant that "a convicted capital murderer who committed one of the most hideous crimes imaginable would be allowed to order not one item, but numerous items and then not eat" and that Brewer should be "made a celebrity two hours before he was executed."

"I think the inmate ought to be fed the same meal as the general population, probably lunch," Whitmire added. After that, he said, the prison should "continue to carry out the most serious matter that the state of Texas deals with."

Anne Emanuel, a Georgia lawyer who worked as a legal analyst on the Amnesty International team that fought for Davis' exoneration, said she was moved by Davis' request to have the same meal as the other inmates. As for Whitmire's decision to end the practice in Texas, she said, "Clearly it's a small issue. I kind of think it's a diversionary issue."

The Texas death row process has been under intense scrutiny. In 2009, a Chicago Tribune investigation into the state's 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who had been convicted of murder for the deaths of his three young daughters by arson. The report noted that of nine fire scientists who reviewed the case against Willingham, all concluded that "the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore."

Later that year, the Texas Fire Commission was about to reexamine the evidence in the Willingham case when Gov. Rick Perry reappointed three members of the board. When board members and observers criticized the decision, Perry wrote it off as "business as usual." Despite the shake-up, the commission concluded in 2010 that the original case investigators had used "flawed science" in making their determination.

Whitmire expressed outrage at Emanuel's suggestion that he may have been trying to divert attention from what she called "the real issues surrounding the implementation of the death penalty."

"I'm not here to dicsuss or debate the death penalty," he said. "That didn't enter into my decision."

He reiterated that his goal had been to ensure that people like Brewer were not given "special treatment" and said he didn't see why someone in his position would want to distract people from criticisms of death penalty cases.

"I don't prosecute 'em, I don't rule on 'em," he said. "They are what are."

Thailand's New Rice Policy Could Lead To International Food Price Crisis, Analysts Warn

2011-09-20T16:39:00Z

A program sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is warning of a possible spike in international rice prices, a development that the program's analysts say could have grave implications for countries where access to food is already limited. The analysts are reluctant to make specific predictions about how high the price could rise, but they say they worry that the increase could be significant.

In Somalia, where the cost of food is already high, the effects of even a modest increase could considerably worsen the severe famine that has been ravaging the country for months. Analysts listed Somalia, Djibouti, Haiti and countries in West Africa and, to a lesser extent, Central America as places that stand to be seriously affected by such an increase. To varying degrees, all of these countries depend on imports of rice to make up for limited local harvests of grain.

The report was issued by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS NET, a USAID-funded program that gathers information about food prices, the climate and other factors in food supply and analyzes the potential impact on what famine researchers refer to as "food-insecure" regions. Analysts for the program first became concerned about the possibility of a food crisis last summer, when the prices of maize and wheat started to go up.

In July, the international price of rice began to rise as well, intensifying their concerns. They traced the origins of the increase to Thailand, where the government recently announced a plan to buy rice from the country's farmers at above-market prices -- a scheme that at least one government member described as a strategy aimed at winning votes. The government enacted the policy earlier this month and says it will begin the buying stage in October.

Thailand occupies a key position in the complex web of dependencies that make up the global food economy. It supplies 30 percent of the world's rice exports, more than any other country. The dependence on Thai rice is particularly heavy in West Africa, where most countries consume more rice than they produce.

The rest of Africa would likely be less vulnerable to the effects of a spike, with the exceptions of Djibouti and Somalia. Somalia imports most of its rice from Pakistan, yet a price spike stemming from Thailand could lead to similar price increases in exports from other countries. And though the poor in Somalia consume more wheat and sorghum than rice, a bump in rice prices could prompt traders of those grains to raise their prices, too.

John Scicchitano, the program manager for FEWS NET, noted that the increasing interdependence of the world's economies has led to a sharpened awareness among famine experts that a policy intended to help the poor in one country could hurt the poor in another. "We understand increasingly that with globalization and the international food trade, global food prices impact the poor in important ways," he said.

The possibility of a steep increase of special concern given the food-price crisis of 2008, which led to rioting in countries throughout the developing world, from Haiti to Yemen to India. For food security experts, that moment marked a turning point in how to assess the risks that arise from international commodity markets.

"Before, international prices had been quite stable for a number of years and what was more important was local fluctuations in prices," said Scicchitano. "The more local markets were integrated with international markets, the more there'd be a stabilizing effect on prices. Now it's the opposite effect. In this case, for rice, the more local markets rely on international markets, the more volatile they are."

Fabien Tondel, a markets and trade adviser for FEWS NET, said the relative stability of rice prices over the past few years has allowed people in poor countries to shoulder increases in other commodity prices, helping prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis. The price of the standard variety of maize exported from the Gulf region of the United States was 89 percent higher in August than a year ago, and the price of wheat exports from that region increased by 45 percent over the same period.

The outlook for rice is still "relatively good," Tondel said. According to the International Grains Council, global production of the grain has been high, and over the next year there should be enough rice to satisfy the demands of importing countries.

Yet political events like the government program in Thailand could disrupt the normal functioning of the markets in those countries, causing demand to outstrip supply. "If merchants anticipate the supply to go down or prices to go up, they will likely hold onto their stocks to sell later at higher prices," Tondel explained.

Tondel was careful to avoid sounding alarmist. Even if the price of rice does go up dramatically, the results wouldn't necessarily be dire, he said. Other rice-producing countries could compensate for the shortfall in Thai exports, and the increased competition could persuade the Thai government to rescind its policy.

Still, when it comes to warning the world of the potential for a crisis, food-security experts aren't about to take any chances. "We saw what happened in 2008," said Tondel. "We want to make sure that it doesn't happen again."

WATCH: Arab Spring In New York? Maybe One Day

2011-09-18T18:53:00Z

NEW YORK -- On Saturday afternoon, nearly a thousand people gathered by the bull statue in Manhattan's financial district, marched up Broadway, and poured into the plaza at Broadway and Liberty Street, holding up signs and shouting slogans like, "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out." They were protesting what could perhaps be summed up as the corporate takeover of everything. By 9:30 p.m. or so, their numbers had dwindled, but of the hundred or so people who remained, many were there for the long haul, having come prepared with sleeping bags and mats and plenty of loose tobacco.

The call for 20,000 people to "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months" was originally put out in July by the magazine Adbusters. Over the past few weeks, protesters had met in Tompkins Square Park to make plans. They set up a website: occupywallst.org. They talked and tweeted of a Tahrir Square moment for America.

Well, it wasn't that. It wasn't Athens or Madrid or London either. It wasn't even the San Gennaro street fair, which at that moment was separating hundreds of tourists from their dollars a mile or so away in Little Italy. Still, if the turnout didn't quite meet everyone's hopes, it didn't defeat them either. "This is great!" one young woman proclaimed defiantly, standing on a granite bench and shouting into a megaphone. "It's the first step!"

What would have to happen for people to amass in the streets of New York as they amassed in the Middle East or in Greece and Spain? How angry would you have to get before you packed a toothbrush and a blanket and took to the streets?

Sam Payne, a 15-year-old from Boston, said he was "unhappy with laws that grant corporations personhood and favor the corporations over the well-being of people." His father, John, was marching alongside him, a bedroll strapped to his back. "I'm here as his chaperone," John said, "not that I don't agree with everything they're saying."

Libor Von Schonau, 33, a native of the Czech Republic, said he just came back from Athens, where he spent the summer organizing protests in Syntagma Square. He said he was unhappy with what's happening "not just in the U.S. but globally."

"There's too many issues, from health care to war, to the way the U.S. is meddling in other countries -- what they do in Egypt, what they do in Palestine," he said.

Jake, an 18-year-old from New Jersey who would reveal only his first name, said, "I don’t think anyone is happy anymore." He was wearing one of those grinning masks favored by people who identify themselves as members of Anonymous, which is either a protest movement or an Internet subculture or something else, depending on whom you ask. One website claiming the mantle of Anonymous had thrown its weight behind the protest, and Jake had heeded its call. "The banks should have no involvement in government," he said.

His friend, Matt Parica, had a World War I-style gas mask hanging around his neck. "Corporations have more rights than people," he said.

Jake's mask was getting hot so he took it off.

"My family -- we had a small business. A cafe shop," said Jake. "And then around the time of 9/11, Starbucks started popping up everywhere and we got shut out of business."

He went on: "My sister just took out a student loan to go to college, and she told me she's going to be paying it off until her kids go to college."

He wasn't grinning.

"I see people wasting their lives working jobs they hate," Jake said. "I'm tired of it."

(Correction: An earlier version of the story said that a few hundred people attended the protest. According to The Nation and The Intnational Business Times, about a thousand people attended.)

A video of the protest from Eric Brown. See appearances from Jimmy "The Rent Is Too Damn High" McMillan and Anonymous:

Maikel Nabil Sanad, On Hunger Strike in Egypt, Is Dying, Says Family

2011-09-15T13:22:44Z

Back in March, when the ouster of Hosni Mubarak was still fresh, the Egyptian government arrested a 25-year-old blogger named Maikel Nabil Sanad and sentenced him to three years in prison. Under Mubarak's rule, the incarceration of dissident bloggers was not uncommon, but Maikel's trial was the first of this kind in the post-Mubarak era, and many saw it as a sign of things to come. Human Rights Watch deemed it "the worst strike against free expression in Egypt" in more than three years, and several U.S. lawmakers pressured the head of the Egyptian military to release him. A spokesperson for the State Department said America was "deeply concerned."

Those expressions of concern went unheeded, however, and now Nabil's family and friends say Nabil is dying. He has been on a hunger strike for three weeks, and a few days ago he announced that he'd begun refusing medicine and water as well. Yesterday he wrote a letter to the public in which he said he was "unable to leave bed" due to the "great pain and loss of vision" that he experiences whenever he stands up.

Nabil was arrested for the crime of libel: He'd written an article on his blog in which he criticized the military's role in the revolution. Although protesters in Tahrir Square famously cried out that they supported the military, Nabil argued that the military was in fact an enemy to the protestors, and described several cases in which he claimed that soldiers had physically and sexually abused them.

"The revolution has so far managed to get rid of the dictator," he wrote, "but not the dictatorship."

In April, the authorities brought him before a military tribunal, where he was tried and sentenced without his lawyers present. His lawyers say that when they showed up at the courthouse that morning, they were told that their trial had been postponed until the next day.

Nabil had taken a stand against the military before. Last fall, he refused to report for compulsory military duty and was arrested by military intelligence, but he was allowed to go free two days later. They then discharged him from military service, declaring that he was unfit to serve.

And then on February 4, 2011, he was arrested while participating in a demonstration in Tahrir Square. He claimed that the soldiers who took him into custody blindfolded him, beat him and sexually harassed him. This alleged incident formed the basis of the report for which he was later arrested and found guilty.

Nabil is not the only civilian to have undergone a military trial since the revolution. An article from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting places the total number at 12,000, and says that suspects have been typically tried in three or four days and have been given sentences of between a few months to several years.

Earlier this year, Asmaa Mahfouz, a prominent Egyptian activist, wrote the following Tweet (translated from Arabic): "If the judiciary does not get us our rights, don't be upset if armed groups carry out a series of assassinations as there is neither law nor justice."

She was brought before the military prosecutor last month and charged with insulting the military. The case became a flashpoint in the growing movement to end the military trials, with presidential candidates and political groups criticizing the decision. The military council eventually ordered that the charges be dropped.

But Nabil is different from Mahfouz. He isn't a star, for one thing. "Maikel isn't a prominent public figure," his father told the press during a recent demonstration in support of his son. "Maikel is a normal person and that is why they imprisoned him. Others who had a lot of public support and had similar charges were released. But Maikel is one of the general public and he doesn't have anyone to defend him."

There's also the fact that Nabil supports Israel. He says he objected to military conscription in the first place because he refused to "point a gun at an Israeli youth who is defending his country's right to exist," and a section of his website is in Hebrew.

Several organizations are again calling for his release. A statement from Reporters Without Borders observed that Nabil "could very soon die" and warned that he could become "the symbol of a repressive and unjust post-Mubarak Egypt."

In response, a military official was quoted as saying that what Nabil wrote on his blog was "a clear transgression of all boundaries of insult and libel."

In April, shortly after Nabil's arrest, a friend of Nabil's and fellow blogger wrote an email to The Huffington Post in which he said that Nabil's sentencing proved "every word Nabil has ever said about our regime."

"The military council wants to annihilate anyone who questions what it does," wrote the blogger, who calls himself Kefaya Punk. "That reminds me of how the Catholic church treated its opponents in the medieval ages."

In an email yesterday, the blogger mostly stuck to the facts around Nabil's health -- the little he'd managed to gather. "About an hour ago, his brother called me on the phone to update me with the visit," he wrote. "He learned that Maikel was very fatigued."

Maikel Nabil Sanad, On Hunger Strike in Egypt, Is Dying, Says Family

2011-09-15T13:22:44Z

"The revolution has so far managed to get rid of the dictator," he wrote, "but not the dictatorship."

In response, a military official was quoted as saying that what Nabil wrote on his blog was "a clear transgression of all boundaries of insult and libel."

The Challenge Of Chronicling Life After 9/11

2011-09-09T13:52:38Z

Of all the documentaries about Sept. 11, none is more intimate than "Rebirth," a new film that draws its drama not from the cataclysmic nature of the attacks themselves but from lives of five people who lost loved ones or were injured. The film, which airs Sunday on Showtime, combines time-lapse photography of the Freedom Tower slowly taking form on Ground Zero with interviews of the subjects conducted each year from 2002 to 2009. As the characters wrestle with grief, their lives take surprising and dramatic turns, and the effect is a powerful, riveting film that transcends the specifics of 9/11 and considers the universal question of how people deal with loss. The director, Jim Whitaker, talked to The Huffington Post about his experience making it.

Let's begin with the basics. How did the film come about?

JW: I came to New York city a month after Sept. 11 to a friend's wedding, and what was distinct for me about the wedding was that it was very joyful -- obviously, because it was a wedding -- but there were a number of his friends in the corner who were crying. My friend worked on Wall Street.

I woke up the next day and said to my wife that I wanted to go to Ground Zero. I looked at the debris and it was only a month later so there was very much a feeling of dread and anxiety. I happened to see a person walking around the site and there was a look of determination on her face and I thought, "One day this will all be gone and it will be different." And it gave me a little hope. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to create an experience for an audience of having them go from a sense of dread and anxiety to hope in a very short time? That's where I came up with the idea to set up cameras, and to do a time-lapse of the site, essentially.

And then, I was there a lot and feeling the emotional and human emotional weight of being there and I just had the thought, "Why not capture that in the same manner as I was doing with the cameras?" Find people who were affected by the day, interview them every year once a year, in a sort of human time-lapse, if you will, and see how they evolved from grief to wherever they went.

The film had a lot of surprises for me. I was surprised by Tanya's transformation, for example. You include a heartbreaking clip from a home video showing her with her fiancé, referring to him as her soul mate. I hope I'm not giving too much a way when I say that, by the end of the film, she's met someone new, and they now have two children. Were you surprised by how the participants evolved?

JW: Yes, on a certain level, yes, and the second year by most accounts was the more difficult year, so in a sense I saw where they were headed, but part of it was a lot of the change that was happening. The change was happening in a year-by-year basis in a somewhat incremental way. In the film it kind of happens quickly, but for example with Tanya, I could see that by her third year she had gone from a place of, "I could never imagine falling in love" to "I could explore dating." So in a certain extent I could imagine that if you're exploring dating, in a few years you could met the right person.

The stories that you tell are very dramatic, and I'm wondering if there was any sense on the part of the participants of the effect those stories might have on an audience.

JW: There wasn't. One of the things that I had said to them in the beginning was that I would be interviewing them but I wouldn't be showing them anything of the film until I had completed the film, because I didn't want their seeing themselves in the process of it to affect the process of interviewing them through a period of time. So we never had a conversation about, "Hey, wasn't that interesting what happened before and here we are now?" It was always, "Well, here we are again for another year." My mother had passed away six months before Sept. 11, so I came into that first day with an openness about grief and loss, and so in the process of interviewing them I was so curious about how it worked, so we came in with an attitude of curious questioning more than anything else. Of course, my experience was very different from what they had gone through, but I was very curious about how they experience played out and how they were dealing with it on a year-by-year basis.

Do you think you could sum up what you learned from them?

JW: I think Tanya in the film, and actually recently, has summed it up in a very interesting way, and it's sort of the same idea, and it's you do grieve, you always grieve, there's always something there in that feeling of having lost someone. But as she says in the film, it doesn't mean you can't have joy. And recently what she actually said was it's not so much that you let go, but that when new experiences come into your life you have to think of it as an adding-on. You never quite let go, but you add on. I think there's some wisdom in what she said about that.

How Immigrants Helped Give Perry His 'Texas Miracle'

2011-09-02T22:40:03Z

For much of his tenure as governor of Texas, Rick Perry's record on immigration made him a darling of Latino Republicans. He supported a law that let the children of undocumented immigrants pay discounted rates at Texas universities, and shunned the aggressive approach that has made Arizona the nucleus of the anti-immigration movement, saying he didn't think it would be right for Texas.

In recent months, though, he's alienated many of those supporters by making the sorts of decisions a politician might make if he were, say, courting the right-wing, anti-immigration slice of the electorate in an attempt to win a Republican presidential primary. In June, he backed the state's controversial "sanctuaries cities" bill, which, like Arizona's SB 1070 law, was intended to ramp up enforcement against undocumented immigrants. And earlier this month, he met with Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff responsible for deporting 26,000 undocumented immigrants between 2007 and 2010 -- about a quarter of the total deported nationally during that period.

Of course, Perry is hardly breaking ground by veering to the right on immigration during a Republican primary campaign. What makes his situation unusual is the role that immigrants, and, more broadly, Mexico, have played in his ascent.

By now, there's hardly anyone in the country who hasn't heard of the feat widely known as the "Texas Miracle." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas has added more than 700,000 jobs during Perry's decade in office, seven times as many as any other state.

But while Perry, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, and his supporters tend to attribute this growth to the governor's conservative economic policies, there are many economists who feel that credit should be distributed among a wide range of factors, including immigration and the state's close relationship with Mexico.

"Mexicans come over to shop on this side," explained Pia M. Orrenius, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "and now even more so because the service industry and the leisure and hospitality industries in Mexico have been decimated by the violence. The Mexicans would rather shop and eat out here in the U.S. than do so in their own cities."

It's no accident, Orrenius said, that the leisure and hospitality industries in Texas have added thousands of jobs since the recession -- think of all those restaurants and malls catering to day-trippers from Juarez and Matamoros. And it's not just cross-border commerce that's been driving the economy. Even though immigration from Mexico has slowed in recent years as Texas has lost jobs in the construction sector, it continues to play an important role in Texas' growth, she said.

"On average you'll see that states with high economic growth you have high rates of labor force growth," Orrenius said, "and we get about half our labor force growth from inmigration" -- migration from other states -- "and immigration."

Although migrants from other U.S. states represent a growing segment of Texas' population of newcomers, about 40 percent of new arrivals still come from other countries, according to U.S. census data from the past three years. "If you have high rates of job growth that outstrip your own population growth, then states have to supplement that," Orrenius said.

Don Baylor Jr., an analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priority in Austin, gave a one-word answer when asked to explain the "Texas Miracle."

"People," he said.

As the economy has grown, he said, so has Texas' population, and he noted that the two types of growth fuel each other, with job opportunities attracting migrants and the resulting population boom leading to an increased demand for goods and services. "Obviously we share the largest border with Mexico," he said, "and that’s certainly a piece of it."

Baylor pointed out that one of the sectors that has added the most jobs in the last few years is education and health. "Quite simply," he said, "we’re talking about everything from private health care positions at hospitals to nursing home care to developmentally disabled care to childcare." As the general population increases, so does the demand for those services, and Latino immigrants are often called upon to fill such jobs, Baylor said. According to a 2009 report from the Pew Hispanic Center, 10 percent of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2008 had jobs that fell under a broad category that includes education and health services. By comparison, only 4 percent had jobs in the category that includes agriculture.

One common retort to Perry's boasts about Texas' job market is that most of the new jobs in the state pay low wages. But some economists say that many of those jobs are filled by immigrants, and that even a low-wage job could represent the first rung on the ladder of economic advancement for an immigrant from Mexico.

Jeanne Batalova, an analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, said it was reasonable to conclude from from the organization's analysis of U.S. census data that immigrants have indeed fueled job growth in the "low-skilled sector." She noted that the number of immigrants in the Texas workforce grew by 5 percent between 2007 and 2009 -- and that those immigrants were disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs -- while the rest of the workforce actually stagnated. For every 100 workers who did not have a high school degree, 60 were immigrants, she said.

For Texans, the state's dependence on Mexico is no secret. "Every Texan knows, I think, that Mexico has been a source of growth for the state and a source of strength for the economy," Orrenius said.

As the most powerful Texan in the state, Perry could perhaps take credit for that, especially considering that he was once seen as a leader who cultivated close relationships with Latinos. But for now, Perry's support of anti-immigration legislation may suggest that he and his advisers feel there is more to be gained by appealing to people who view immigration as a danger, not as an asset.

WATCH RELATED:

Steve Jobs' Journey To Become CEO Of Tech-Giant Apple

2011-08-25T23:45:13Z

If you're going to try to sum up the career of the man who brought computers to the multitudes, you might as well start by talking about the ads. There was the 1984 Mac debut (If you can point, you can use a Macintosh), the 1981 "revolutionaries" series (Ben Franklin designing a kite on his Apple II) and the 1977 Apple II "Simplicity Brochure," which laid out the philosophy that would guide the company on its journey to something like world domination: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Probably no image encapsulates him better, though, than this 1977 tableau of domesticity: a blandly handsome man sitting at a kitchen table, the keys of an Apple II beneath his fingers; a blondish lady in a flannel shirt peering back at him from across the room while chopping a salad.

"Normal people doing normal people things," said Steve Wozniak, the engineer who will always be known as a co-founder of a company that last employed him on a full-time basis in 1987. "Steve did all the little ads when we were kids, and we would take them around to trade shows. A dentist might see a brochure and say I'm gonna get one of these things called a computer. A teacher might want one. Not just the geeks from the geek clubs. His role from day one was bringing the computer to the normal people."

Steve -- the other Steve, the most famous Steve in the world, perhaps -- is of course Steve Jobs, who announced his resignation as the CEO of Apple on Wednesday. Jobs may not in fact be God, but few industrialists have ever commanded such a large and worshipful following, and over the last 24 hours, several other deities of Silicon Valley have added their fittingly respectful tributes to the global chorus of praise.

"I think his brilliance has been well-documented, but what gets forgotten is the bravery with which he's confronted his illness," Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, told Reuters.

"He uniquely combined an artist's touch and an engineer's vision to build an extraordinary company," Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said.

And then there's Vic Gundotra, another Google executive, who offered this anecdote about returning a missed call from Jobs (it was posted on his Google-plus page, of course):

"Hey Steve - this is Vic", I said. "I'm sorry I didn't answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn't pick up".

Steve laughed. He said, "Vic, unless the Caller ID said 'GOD', you should never pick up during services".

Jobs' story has been told many times by many tellers, and has several of the hallmarks of the classic mystical journey: the unusual circumstances of his birth, the days of monastic impecuniousness, the startling rise to power and acclaim, the departure from the fold, the triumphant return, the intimacy with death. Born in San Francisco in 1955, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up in the California milieu that Joan Didion would liken to Bethlehem. He grew his hair long, bummed meals from a Hare Krishna temple, and took Timothy Leary's advice literally, dropping out of Reed College after a semester. He journeyed to India in search of nirvana, hallucinated, and came back a bald-headed Buddhist.

The Buddha preached a message of simplicity, and Jobs carried that message to the kingdom of the geek. "He just wanted to get that technical stuff out of the way," Wozniak said. "Look at the Macintosh. All of a sudden, instead of typing a command, you just reach up with your pointer and drag it somewhere. You didn't have to learn a lot of stuff. You didn't have to have a big manual. He stuck to that philosophy in every product."

It was a monk's philosophy, maybe, but it earned him the riches of a Midas. The earliest Apple models were blockbusters, as they say. Yet the Macintosh, though profitable, didn't quite perform up to expectations, and soon Jobs was pushed out the door.

"They ran him out," said Jeff Gamet, the managing editor of The Mac Observer. "Jobs flew a pirate flag over the Mac development building. He had this kind of renegade idea about how the company needed to run and what they needed to be doing with the hardware, and the executives and board of directors was looking at the company as, well, 'We have shareholders and obligations to the shareholder and we have to look at the profit margins all the time.' They didn't think they should be spending as much money as they were."

Wozniak remembered his friend's departure slightly differently: "I felt it was a little disloyal to Apple. He still had the freedom to stay at Apple and work on products. But he wanted to do other things. He left because he felt that in his heart he was meant to build great computers."

Jobs attempted to do that by starting a new company, NeXT, in 1985. And although it may be the rare MacBook user who can recall the NeXT machines in any detail, that company proved to be the staging ground for many of Apple's later successes. It was at NeXT that Jobs developed the operating system that would evolve into Apple's OS X. According to Gamet, the accessibility and elegance of the system held great appeal for Apple, which had floundered in Jobs' absence.

"I think it's safe to say that Apple's position at the time was dire," Gamet said. "They were losing money, they had a very convoluted product line-up, and they were charging too much for the Macs that they were selling at the time, and they were also suffering from public image problems.

"Every week a new rumor was coming out about who was going to buy Apple. Sometimes it was Disney, sometimes it was an oil company, and of course the week I heard the rumor that Dunkin' Donuts was going to buy Apple -- which of course was a totally bogus rumor, but people really believed it -- I thought, yeah, this company's really in trouble."

Apple bought NeXT in 1997, Jobs took a consultant job with his old company and by the dawn of the next millennium, he was the permanent CEO. And it was at this point that the company embarked on the run of technological and commercial breakthroughs that yielded the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and which continues to this day.

Leander Kahney, the author of the blog cultofmac.com, recently ran off a list of some of those accomplishments before apparently running out of steam: "The iPod and the iPhone and the iPad the iTunes and the Mac stores, he popularized wireless networking, he popularized WiFi, USB flat-screen monitors...The list goes on and on."

For someone steeped in Buddhist teachings, Jobs' management style wasn't exactly placid. "Everybody’s got a Steve-Jobs-scream-to-my-face story," Kahney said. "Nose-to-nose, spittle coming out of his mouth." But that style may be one of the keys to the company's strength, he said. "He’s kind of weeded out people who can’t take that. A lot of the people he works with go toe to toe with him, and these are the people he wants."

In 2004, Jobs announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and in the years since, his illness has at times disrupted his work, necessitating a series of medical leaves.

So when he said he was stepping down Wednesday, people worried. "Deep inside I had a little bit of a scared reaction that maybe something was wrong," Wozniak said. Still, "everybody has to a reach a point where they need to retire or take an easier position in the company," he said. Yes: even Jobs.

There are worries, too, for the health of Apple -- for how it may fare three or four years from now, when Jobs' fingerprints have begun to fade. Trip Chowdry, a director at Global Equity Research, said he wasn’t betting on the company's long-term success.

"Success in the consumer space is not dictated by getting your product 80 percent right, 90 percent right, or 97 percent right," he said. "The success is defined by the last 2 percent of the product, and I don't think there's any other individual on the planet who has the kind of intuition Steve Jobs has to make sure they get the last 2 percent right. Apple stood out for one reason and one reason only: Steve Jobs."

So there it is. Steve Jobs and Apple have parted, and only time will tell how the company will do without him. In the meantime, his fans and worshippers can perhaps take some hope from an interview he gave to Rolling Stone in 1994, three years before he came back to Apple and raised it from the dead.

"Some people have compared you to Orson Welles," said the interviewer, "who at 25 did his best work, and it's all downhill from there."

"I'm very flattered by that, actually," Jobs replied.

"The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had – and that produced about 10 million children," Jobs added. "In a way it will never be over in your life."

Gaddafi And The Pursuit Of International Justice

2011-08-24T18:40:28Z

When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, announced on Monday morning that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi had been captured by rebel forces in Libya, it seemed as though there'd been a major breakthrough in the decades-long movement to establish an international system of justice.

Saif Gaddafi had been a target of the ICC since June 27, when the court issued arrest warrants for Saif and his father, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, as well as for his father's intelligence chief, Abduallah Senussi.

At the time, Moreno-Ocampo had said that the elder Gaddafi had had a personal hand in planning and carrying out "a policy of widespread and systematic attacks against civilians and demonstrators" and described Saif as the ruler's "de-facto prime minister."

Now the suspect was in his sites -- or so it seemed. Only hours after Moreno-Ocampo's announcement, journalists at a hotel in Tripoli were "woken during the night by a knock at the door and told to go downstairs," the Guardian reported.

There they found Col. Gaddafi's 39-year-old son sitting in an armored vehicle "with a mobile phone next to him and a smile playing around his lips."

Saif had a few choice words for Moreno-Ocampo and his supposed pursuit of justice: "Screw the ICC."

It's unclear what took place in the short time between Moreno-Ocampo's announcement and Saif's appearance. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the ICC, Fadi el-Abdallah, noted that the rebels had never officially confirmed Saif's detainment and said that their story was "a little ambiguous" to begin with.

Whatever the explanation, though, Saif's dismissal of the ICC illuminates a larger story -- the court's struggle to be taken seriously as it attempts to solidify a system of justice that transcends national boundaries.

The roots of that struggle go back to the late 19th century, when a Swiss jurist named Gustav Moynier proposed the establishment of a permanent court to penalize perpetrators of crimes in the Franco-Prussian War. Although he earned four Nobel Peace Prize nominations for his work, his proposal was never adopted, and over the next 100 years similar efforts were met with similar fates. (The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following World War II were exceptions.)

It took the atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia in the early 1900s to give the movement the momentum it needed. That momentum culminated in a conference in Rome in 1998, where 160 nations met to discuss the establishment of a permanent, international criminal court -- the ICC. After weeks of heated negotiations the treaty was put to a vote, and in 2002, the ICC was born.

Since then, the ICC's road to legitimacy has been far from smooth, and one of its biggest stumbling blocks has been the United States. Although former President Bill Clinton signed the ICC treaty at the end of his term, the Bush administration nullified his signature shortly after taking office. In a 2002 press statement, Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, warned that "by putting U.S. men and women in uniform at risk of politicized prosecutions, the ICC could well create a powerful disincentive for U.S. military engagement in the world."

In 2008, Moreno-Ocampo ran into another challenge when he asked the court to indict Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. The African Union refused to support the warrant and said that the states in its membership didn't have to arrest him. The AU adopted a similar stance this year when the ICC issued the warrants for the arrest of Gaddafi and other Libyan suspects. Jean Ping, the chairman of the AU, called the court "discriminatory," noting that it had only gone after crimes committed in Africa and arguing that it had turned a blind eye to the activities of Western powers in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The AU recommended that its member states not cooperate with the execution of the warrants.

One expert who has spent a lot of time thinking about these issues is Kamari Maxine Clarke, a professor of anthropology at Yale and the author of "Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa."

Clarke said that several African leaders, including Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria, had directly told her that they were "initially enthusiastic" about the ICC but that their enthusiasm had since dried up. She attributed their pessimism, in part, to a sense that Western powers are using the institution to deprive African countries of their autonomy.

"The countries that are now part of the global south have historical relations to Western nations, relations that are fraught with questions of colonial power and imperialism and formal agreements that may or may not have served the countries' long-term needs," she said.

Others argue that African countries have brought the glare of the ICC upon themselves. Richard Dicker, the director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch, pointed out that no fewer than 31 African states are party to the ICC treaty (Libya is not among them). Of the seven cases currently being investigated by the ICC, he said, four were referred to the court by the governments of the states where the alleged crimes took place.

The real problem, he suggested, was that more governments outside of Africa haven't followed Africa's example. "It may be obvious," he said, "but neither the United States, Russia, or the People's Republic of China is a party to the ICC treaty. The fact that leaders from smaller, weaker governments are more likely to find themselves facing an arrest warrant than the leaders of the most powerful governments is a reflection of the disparity in power and wealth that's so profound in the world."

Dicker pointed to several specific situations where, according to him, these powerful governments may have played a role in preventing the court from pursuing cases in countries they protect. "I'm thinking of the Chinese protecting the military junta in Burma, I'm thinking of the United States protecting those in Israel who may be responsible for war crimes in Gaza, and the Russians for example having protected Bashir Al-Assad up until now," he said.

Given the abstention of the U.S., Russia and China from the ICC treaty, some may suggest that it was hypocritical for them to use their positions on the Security Council to urge the ICC to investigate the Libya crisis. "It does speak to a double standard," Dicker said. "At the same time, simply because it's not possible to bring justice to victims everywhere, that's no excuse for denying justice to victims of egregious crimes where it is possible."

Clarke suggested looking at this problem from a different angle. Rather than limit one's analysis to scrutinizing why the U.S. and other world powers have refused to submit to the authority of the ICC, she said it was worth thinking about why those 31 African countries did not.

"The answer has to do with this new system of economic linkage," she said. "To sign and be party to international treaties in general is to demonstrate to the world that you have submitted to the rule of law and democracy and certain forms of justice, and to demonstrate this means your ratings go up in the world of economic loans."

"The U.S. in many ways stands outside of that," she added, "but for a country in Africa, among the poorest in the world, it's critical to demonstrate this alliance."

If the rebel forces in Libya succeed in capturing Gaddafi, Saif, or Senussi, they will have an opportunity to do just that. As of now, though, the National Transitional Council appears to be divided on the question of what to do with the suspects. "One side is calling for their eventual transfer and one side is calling for a national prosecution," said Stephen Lamony, an officer for the Coalition for the ICC, a nonprofit organization that works to promote the court's activities.

Under the ICC treaty, he explained, "states are given the jurisdiction to prosecute subjects on their territory if they can. If they cannot, that's when they are sent to the ICC, so the question is whether the new administration in Libya will have the capability to prosecute them." That decision will ultimately fall to the ICC, he said.

Dicker, the Human Rights Watch director, said he felt it was imperative that the NTC and its forces "make every effort to apprehend Muammar Gaddafi, treat him humanely in custody and make arrangements as quickly as possible to surrender him to the custody of the International Criminal Court."

He added that doing so will be "crucial in setting the tone for a post-Gaddafi Libya," in which "the rule of law for the most powerful, rather than vengeance, takes precedence."

Scientists Link Famine In Somalia To Global Warming

2011-08-19T16:00:00Z

As millions of people struggle to survive a famine in East Africa, it’s hard not to ask whether anyone saw this disaster coming. Chris Funk, one of the leading researchers of rainfall in the region, would answer yes.

As a climate scientist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Funk is part of a team of researchers who studies weather in East Africa, where the lack of rain this year has caused tens of thousands of people to die, most of them children.

He said he thinks of himself as a "drought detective," an analogy that captures the clue-gathering aspect of his work, if not the scale of the destruction he deals with. In more straightforward terms, he collects information about the climate from a variety of sources and uses it to try to identify the causes of droughts and make predictions about where and how droughts will strike in the future.

This current drought, which is said to be the worst in East Africa in 60 years, is actually the second of two droughts to hit the region in the past year, one right after the other. Most years, the region receives rainfall in the fall and the spring, but this year, both rains failed, causing crops to wither and livestock to die. By July 20, when the UN declared a famine in parts of southern Somalia, tens of thousands of people were dead.

Funk, as well as others in his field, saw the potential for trouble in Somalia long before everyone else did. And he has come to the conclusion that back-to-back droughts that have devastated Somalia in the past year are likely part of a larger trend connected to global warming.

As bad as these droughts have been, Funk said droughts in the region are only going to get more frequent and more intense. As the time between them decreases, Funk said, so will the ability of the population to recover, creating what essentially amount to an accelerating cycle of drought and starvation.

There is some debate within the scientific community about whether the frequency of droughts in East Africa is increasing. What is not disputed is that the world -- and the Indian and Pacific Oceans specifically -- is getting warmer. Although some climatologists predict that East Africa will actually get wetter in the long run, they, too, point to climate change as a factor.

All in all, Funk's view is gaining acceptance both in scientific and political circles. Valerie Amos, the coordinator of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations, implied as much during a recent tour of the Somali Regional State when she effectively paraphrased Funk.

“Everything I've heard has said that we used to have drought every 10 years," she said, according to the Telegraph. "Then it became every five years and now it's every two years. And if you don't have the rains at the beginning of the year or towards the end of one year, then you are going to have a problem into the next year."

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, echoed this concern, The Huffington Post reported. "Absolutely the change in climate has contributed to this problem, without question," Shah said.

The other day, Funk explained how he identified climate change as a culprit for the humanitarian disaster in Somalia. Funk and his team of researchers came to their conclusions about East African weather patterns after studying the weather in the region for about a decade.

"We've noticed some pretty large declines in the spring rain," he said. "That might not have been that important if they were in New Hampshire, but because they were in these incredibly insecure areas of Ethiopia and Kenya and Somalia, we really wanted to find the cause of them."

After gathering and comparing data from recent drought years and normal years, Funk found that the Indian Ocean and western Pacific tended to be warmer and rainier than usual during dry years in East Africa. He also found that the winds blowing over the Indian Ocean were weaker than normal during those years, meaning there was less moisture travelling from the sea to the skies over the Horn of Africa.

So were the warming of the ocean and the weakening of the westward winds related? He and his team hypothesized that the energy created by the increased rainfall over the ocean travelled westward and settled over East Africa, making the land both hotter and drier and increasing the air pressure in the region, essentially blocking the westward winds that would have otherwise carried moisture to the continent. Funk said that statistical analysis and computer simulations supports this model.

The next month, Funk and his team completed a paper investigating what would happen if this long-term warming tendency, as Funk calls it, combined with a La Niña event -- a natural fluctuation in the sea-surface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean that occurs every few years.

"It looked to us that the combination of La Niña and this trend was really bad news for the Horn," he said.

The following month, Funk was at an annual weather meeting in Boulder, Colo., when the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, forecasted a moderate to strong La Niña for that fall.

Funk happened to be sitting next to Gideon Galu, a Kenyan meteorologist for the Famine Early Warning System Network, or FEWS Network, a coalition of government agencies and scientists (including Funk) that share information about famine predictions in order to best coordinate a response.

Galu had previously worked as a TV weatherman in Kenya, which, he said, was just like the equivalent job in America. "All the jokes on the weather people," he said.

Now he found himself at the forefront of an effort to forecast a weather disaster whose scope and impact few Americans would be able to comprehend. He and Funk began looking at data from past La Niña years, and eventually determined that that there was a 50 percent chance that two droughts would strike in a row -- one in the fall, and another in the spring.

This possibility of back-to-back droughts combined with a variety of other factors -- including the long-term warming trend that Funk and his colleagues had just identified, high food prices in the region and the lingering effects of the droughts that choked East Africa in 2007, 2008 and 2009 -- led them to realize that if back-to-back droughts occurred, it would be catastrophic.

Galu returned to Nairobi, where he worked with climate and food specialists in the FEWS Network to produce a report warning of the possibility of a food crisis.

John Sciccitano, the project manager at FEWS Network, said that initial reactions to the report were good. "The US made some significant allocations of food," he said. "And then, of course, throughout the year there were additional resources allocated."

The problem, he said, was that "the magnitude of the crisis just got so huge that it just outstripped the ability of the international community to respond."

Over the last six months, as the international community has struggled to mitigate the crisis, Funk and his colleagues have examined the role that the long-term warming trend might play in summer weather in East Africa and India. They've also been trying to help the region guard itself against future droughts by looking for ways to improve its overall agricultural production. "There are many areas in East Africa that always receive enough rain to grow crops," Funk said. "Improving yields in these areas could make the rest of the region more secure, even in dry years."

Of course, anyone hoping to resolve the problem of food crises in East African must contend with an elaborate web of interrelated problems, including social factors such as poverty, population growth and political instability, which there is no shortage of in Somalia.

"There may be plenty of grain on the shores of Lake Victoria, but you might not have the money to buy it," Funk said.

Despite all these local challenges, not to mention the warming of the oceans, Funk said he sees reason to be optimistic about the long-term prospects for East Africa. "There's been a lot of positive movement in the internal aid world over the last five or six years," he said. Governments and other organizations have been pouring money into the region, and just as importantly, they've been directing it toward attempts to make long-lasting, structural changes.

But with the global economy in peril, will they be able to continue to invest as they have in the past?

"I don't know," said Funk. "I just don't really know. There's kind of a psychology part of this, which is that when we see a picture of the starving child everybody's heart goes out and we try to respond. But the harder problem is, 'How do we attack the structural problems?' The situation is not getting any better in East Africa. And if we don't try to solve those long-term problems, I'm afraid this kind of thing is going to happen more frequently, not less."

Scientists Link Famine In Somalia To Global Warming

2011-08-19T16:00:00Z

"It looked to us that the combination of La Niña and this trend was really bad news for the Horn," he said.

The following month, Funk was at an annual weather meeting in Boulder, Colo., when the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, forecasted a moderate to strong La Niña for that fall.

Galu returned to Nairobi, where he worked with climate and food specialists in the FEWS Network to produce a report warning of the possibility of a food crisis.

The problem, he said, was that "the magnitude of the crisis just got so huge that it just outstripped the ability of the international community to respond."

"There may be plenty of grain on the shores of Lake Victoria, but you might not have the money to buy it," Funk said.

But with the global economy in peril, will they be able to continue to invest as they have in the past?

Conservative Latina Activist Takes On The Tea Party

2011-08-16T14:05:00Z

When George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, a record for a Republican presidential candidate, DeeDee Garcia Blase took pride in knowing that she'd played a part. A fifth-generation Mexican American from Texas, Blase had volunteered for the Bush campaign in her adopted state of Kansas, handing out flyers, working shifts at a phone bank and offering up her coffee shop for meetings of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Like many former soldiers, she had found her way to the GOP through the military; she'd served in the Air Force under Bush's father in the 90s (as a dog handler on a bomb squad). She was also a "diehard" supporter of gun rights, and all in all, a "capitalist, small taxes, less government Ronald Reagan type of Republican" who wished more Latinos shared her views and who tried to spread the gospel in whatever small ways she could.

But in 2009, when Arizona adopted a stringent law that tightened the vise on undocumented immigrants, Blase, who lives in Arizona, felt that her views were no longer represented by the Republican establishment, at least in her state. In an effort to change the Republican Party "from within," she started her own organization, Somos Republicans, and within a few months had signed up 6,000 members, a number that perhaps carries more weight that one would expect.

True, there are individual Tea Party rallies that attract bigger crowds, but conservative Latinos may be in a unique position when it comes to determining who occupies the White House for the next term, or terms. Four of the country's most heavily Hispanic states -- Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida -- are pivots on which the next presidential election could turn.

In this context, 6,000 doesn't seem like such a small number after all. In fact, as Lionel Sosa, a former advisor to Ronald Reagan and a member of Somos Republicans, pointed out in a recent letter to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), 6,000 is the number by which Bush won the Latino vote in Florida in 2000.

For the past few months, members of Somos Republicans have been using whatever power this position grants them to kick dirt on the reputations of Republican candidates and officials who promote what Blase bluntly described as "bigotry and violence." By flooding newspapers and government offices with letters and emails, and by issuing statements on high-profile Republicans in an attempt to muster press, they hope to persuade Republican operatives to disown the far-right heroes of the Tea Party and steer the GOP down a more moderate path. High on their list of enemies are Mo Brooks, the Alabama congressman who said that he'd do anything to get rid of undocumented immigrants "short of shooting them," and Russell Pearce, the Arizona state senator who sponsored the state's tough SB 1070 law (and who now faces a recall election).

To bolster Somos' influence, Blase said she plans to release a scorecard grading every candidate for office around the country on a host of issues, including immigration. If she were to grade them now, she said, Michele Bachmann would receive the lowest score -- an F.

Rick Perry would earn a B, she said. He would have gotten an A, she added, had he not added a measure to an emergency session of the state senate earlier which would have essentially given police officers more authority to ask about the immigration status of detainees.

That measure "fired up Latinos in Texas," she said, and she didn't mean in a good way.

One of the "fired up" Texas Latinos is Lauro Garza, a retired police officer who has also worked as a U.S. Customs agent and a history teacher, and who sprinkles his conversations with spot-on impressions of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cheech Marin, among others. A few years ago he combined some of these talents to start a conservative talk show on the Internet.

"I used to say that my objective was 'to promote Latinos among Republicans and to promote Republicans among Latinos,'" Garza said, "and as I became more and more frustrated with the way things were going with the Republican party, as the tide of nativism rode in, I used to say 'to teach Republicans to have some damn respect for Latinos.'"

He wrote a blog, too, and after some of his postings came to Blase's attention, she signed him on to lead the Texas chapter of Somos Republicans. "We're trying to mitigate the damage to the Republican reputation," he said.

In his capacity as a Somos leader, Garza said he has had lunch with Rick Perry on two occasions.

"I was impressed," Garza said, adding that he doesn't usually feel that way about people. "I used to jump out of helicopters," he explained.

Perry struck him as confident, funny, "very conservative," and, crucially, sympathetic to Mexican Americans.

So when the governor, who announced his candidacy for president on Saturday, supported the Texas immigration bill, Garza said he was disappointed.

It was a "terrific mistake," Garza said. "He and his advisers have demonstrated really remarkable stupidity in the past. So I hope they will come to us at Somos Republicans for guidance."

That is the hope of Somos Republicans in general -- to guide the Republican Party as they attempt to maneuver through the minefield of immigration politics. Of course, there's no indication that they will achieve that kind of influence.

"It doesn't seem realistic right now," said Pilar Marrero, who writes about politics for the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion. "Politically, the party is going in the other direction. All the local initiatives that have been passed in the four years -- harsh anti-immigration laws ranging from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma to Arizona, all of these were led by Republicans. Some of the individual politicians who have been pushing these laws, they're very shrill, and they're very extreme and the mainstream of the Republican Party hasn't fought back. I respect Blase's passion about it and her attempt to get her party to listen, but I'm not sure it's having a lot of effect."

Blase does not necessarily disagree. Although she takes some credit for the movement to recall Russell Pearce, she says she's had to contend with growing skepticism among Latino Republicans concerning the feasibility of changing the party from the inside. Soon after starting Somos, she said, members of the organization began to question their party affiliation. "I said, 'Stick it out,'" she recalled.

But she found it harder and harder to follow her own advice, and in June, she finally left the party and registered as an independent. She said the turning point came when Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American junior senator from Florida, sponsored a federal immigration bill viewed by many as an attack on undocumented immigrants. Rubio may be popular with Cubans in Miami, said Blase, but "every Mexican American in the Southwest knows he's an enemy to the immigrant cause."

Rubio's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As a defector from the GOP, Blase started a new organization, one aimed expressly at attacking the Tea Party. She called it the National Tequila Party (she said she wanted a name that would appeal to young people).

According to Blase, the Tequila Party has so far registered 2,000 members, mostly Democrats or independents, and like Somos Republicans, it is preparing a scorecard, one that exclusively rates politicians on their immigration records. "Obviously we're not going to support any Tea Party politicians," she said.

In the meantime, said Blase, she will be looking to hire someone to replace her at Somos Republicans. She will consider applicants "who will not toe the party line."