The Blog

Kimberly Marteau Emerson: San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris Talks To Kimberly Marteau About Her New Book Smart On Crime

2009-11-24T21:07:05Z

Q: You dedicated Smart on Crime to your mother, Shyamala G. Harris, calling her "the toughest, smartest and most loving person I have ever known." She died this year. Tell me about your relationship and why she inspired you.

My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero. She was a woman who gave herself to my sister and me unconditionally, and was the most inspiring and courageous person in my life. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, where she met my father. My mother was also the consummate professional, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher and teacher whose work took her to universities all around the world. Despite her 5-foot stature, she had a commanding presence and a sharp wit, a keen sense of humor and endless depth of knowledge.

Q: What does it mean to be "smart on crime?" Are we not being smart now? Why and how does your book address this idea?

This book is predicated on one main premise, which is that all Americans have the right to live in safe communities. Having spent nearly two decades as a courtroom prosecutor, I know that it simply is not enough to just talk tough about crime. I want us to be what I call "smart on crime." That means in order to make our communities safer, we have to take a strategic approach to changing the status quo -- because our current system is failing all of us.
In the book, I first address some of the myths and outdated approaches that I believe are failing. In the second half of the book, I outline the ways in which I believe we can chart a new course for tackling these long-standing problems. My hope is that this book helps to elevate the discussion of how we as a state and nation approach the criminal justice system. I believe it is absolutely possible for us to create a future with safer streets, lower re-offense rates, and a better-educated workforce.

Q: In the book, you talk about how important it is to look at the criminal justice system through economic eyes. In a time of extremely limited public resources, how do we justify allocating those resources to anything other than investigating crimes and prosecuting criminals, especially violent crimes?

Getting smart on crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes. It does mean using the time and resources we now spend on offenders more productively to reduce their odds of re-offending. Remember, for decades we have spent billions of dollars on ineffective solutions that have not improved public safety. I believe that especially in these tough economic times, it is critical that we evaluate the cost of action versus the cost of inaction. I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison. But as I discuss in the book, we must take a smarter approach when it comes to combating nonviolent crime. And it is also essential that when we look at investing in innovative ways to fight crime before it occurs, we must weigh the short-term costs of action versus the long-term costs of inaction.

Q: Can you please explain the "crime pyramid" and what it reveals about the weaknesses in crime prevention? Why are our harsh sentences not deterring some kinds of crimes?

I have found that the "crime pyramid" is an effective way to visualize the totality of crimes committed in our society, and an effective way to communicate about how we can best fight crime -- because as you know "crime" is not monolithic. Visualizing this pyramid, at the top are the very worst crimes: murder, rape, violent assaults, crimes that so rightly command our attention. While these crimes are so horrific and threatening, they form the very top of the pyramid because they constitute the minority of crimes. Did you know that only one fourth of all offenders sentenced to prison are violent offenders?

One of the main reasons we haven't been able to effectively prevent nonviolent crime is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid. For several decades, the passage of tough laws and long sentences has created an illusion in the public's mind that public safety is best served when we treat all offenders pretty much the same way: arrest, convict, imprison, parole, and hope they learn their lesson. But the numbers paint the true story, which is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming more hardened criminals during their imprisonment.

Q: In Smart on Crime, you take aim at several myths about crime, including that the only thing the criminal justice system and education have in common is that they both need reform. Why do you believe that fighting truancy might be the most significant step we can take in crime prevention?

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime. As San Francisco District Attorney, I have seen firsthand what too frequently happens to habitually and chronically truant school kids: young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe. A recent report from UC Santa Barbara concluded that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime, crimes that cost the state of California $1.1 billion every year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes, and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.

The warning bells keep on ringing. In California, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts. I believe that this is one of those critical issues where we can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.

Q: You are very proud of "Back on Track," a re-entry program that you started out of the San Francisco DA's office in 2005. How does it fit into your Smart on Crime ideas?

The old approach to fighting crime is well-known. Police and prosecutors are deluged with low-level drug cases, and the public spends billions on prisons to house these offenders. And, every year, prisons release hundreds of thousands of these offenders back into our communities. They have no plan, no skills, nowhere to go, and they pick up right where they left off. Within three years of release, 70 percent of California prisoners will re-offend and return to prison.

That is why in 2005, I created an initiative called Back On Track. Back on Track is a reentry program designed for nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. These are young people who are mostly in their early 20's, have no prior criminal records and were caught for low-level drug offenses. None of their cases involves gangs, guns, or weapons.

We give them a choice: they can go through a tough, year-long program that will require them to get educated, stay employed, be responsible parents, drug test, and transition to a crime-free life, or they can go to jail. Those who choose Back On Track plead guilty to their crime, and their sentence is deferred while they appear before a judge every two weeks for about a year. They must obtain a high-school-equivalency diploma and hold down a steady job. Fathers need to remain in good standing on their child-support payments, and everyone has to take parenting classes. For people who hit all of these milestones, the felony charge is going to be cleared from their records.

The results speak for the wisdom of investing in reentry programs. For this population, the recidivism (or re-offense rate) is typically 50 percent or higher. Four years into this initiative, recidivism has been less than 10 percent among Back On Track participants. And the program costs only $5,000 per person, compared to over $35,000 a year for county jail. That saves our city roughly $1 million per year in jail costs alone. When you add in the total expense of criminal prosecutions to taxpayers, including court costs, public defenders, state prison, and probation, the savings are closer to $2 million. And we cannot even begin to quantify the value of these individuals' future productivity, taxes and child support payments, or the brightened prospects for their families.

That is why both Governor Schwarzenegger and the US Department of Justice have recognized Back on Track as a model for both our state and nation.

Dan Mirvish: Not Just Palin Porn In Eisenstadt Book

2009-11-24T20:08:10Z

Now that Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue is out, it's worth taking a look at the book that Ken Silverstein at Harper's says is "essential reading for all political junkies": I Am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man's (wildly inappropriate) Adventures with the Last Republicans, by none other than fake pundit (or "fundit") Martin Eisenstadt - the man best known as the former McCain adviser who took credit for spreading the rumor that Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent.

Those who have followed Eisenstadt's misguided career may know that he is in fact the creation of two award-winning filmmakers: myself and my creative partner Eitan Gorlin. For the uninitiated, let's just say that Eisenstadt - a Sr. Fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom & Democracy - continues to dispute that claim.

The book itself is largely about the McCain/Palin campaign, and in it, Eisenstadt claims not only to have leaked the Africa comment to FoxNews' Carl Cameron, but also admits to being the one who bought Palin's $150,000 wardrobe for the RNC Convention. After buying the clothes at Neiman Marcus, Eisenstadt interrupts Palin in the middle of her getting a spray-on tan which leads him to comment:

As Sarah lay ﬂat on a portable tanning table, her towel dropped to the sides. Her back was as white as the Alaska tundra, with the top of her buttocks rising like the foothills of Mount McKinley. A very attractive woman began to spray on a smooth golden mist. "Cindy told me to get rid of my Eskimo tan before going on TV tonight. John's funny about the melanomas, so they ﬂew in Tracy here to spray me up good."

Like many passages in the book, this little GILF fantasy is actually based on a couple of real life facts. Yes, Sarah Palin greeted campaign staffers in a towel at the convention. And yes, the FEC reports indicate that a spray-on tan expert was flown in from LA just for the convention. We're told by our editor that this is called "contemporary historical fiction" - we're told by others that it is just annoying. You be the judge. (And to help you sort out fact from fiction, the clue is if it's footnoted, it's probably true.)

But I Am Martin Eisenstadt is much more than just a fake campaign tell-all. It also reaches back to 35 years of (mostly) Republican malfeasance as Eisenstadt was literally raised by the kingmakers of GOP politics - from John Ehrlichman to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove. Marty even admits that while he spied on his mother pleasuring Nixon aide Ehrlichman in the Oval Office, he may have accidentally leaned against a certain tape recorder button for 18 ½ minutes of oedipal shame. As for his own sexual awakening, Marty boasts of losing his own virginity to none other than Fawn Hall at the height of Iran-Contra.

And the third element of the book is what we call an existential cyber mystery. During the course of the election campaign, Marty is forced to confront increasingly troubling internet rumors that he doesn't exist. In the age of Google, this is the ultimate damage that one's enemies can inflict, and Eisenstadt has no shortage of enemies - both real and imagined. In fact, this internet mystery closely mirrors the real rumors and innuendos that consistently threatened to pull the plug on our Eisenstadt ruse. Like in the book, we too, were vexed by a certain Brazilian golf blogger, which ultimately led to profiles in the New York Times, Associated Press, and newspapers across the globe.

But unlike poor Marty - whose career lay in ruins by the end of 2008 - we were doing much better. The Times story led to a book deal with Farrar, Straus, Giroux - the (once) prestigious publishing house that claims 21 Nobel and an equal number of Pulitzer winners in their fold. Rumor has it, that with the publication of our book, some of those awards will be revoked. To ward off speculation of their involvement, they've even created a new imprint - "Faber & Faber" - to deflect criticism of their poor taste in authors.

I Am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man's (wildly inappropriate) Adventures with the Last Republicans is enjoying great reviews and is available now in bookstores across the US and Canada and on Amazon. Eisenstadt, Mirvish and Gorlin are currently on a book tour now, and will be having their West Coast launch party on Dec. 3 at Book Soup.

Matthew Pearl: Are You Dickensian?

2009-11-24T16:32:11Z

The world around us has become more Dickensian lately. At least that's how it seems by the way the word circulates.

Put it into a Google news search, and you'll see a sampling. Here's what I got when I did:

Dickensian waif

Dickensian melodrama

Dickensian boarding school

Dickensian evening

Dickensian Christmases

Dickensian schemes

Dickensian arm-loss (!)

Dickensian nightmare (of American health care)

You might even be Dickensian without having realized it.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us the word came into use in the 1880s and defines it as: "of or pertaining to Charles Dickens or his style."

Recently it could also have been defined as "of or pertaining to The Wire or Bernie Madoff," both of which were pasted to the word for the last few years.

I wonder who uses the word more, Americans or the British. I'd guess Americans. The word may be the equivalent of an English accent, which we Americans tend to think raises IQ points, a tendency that in turn makes the British question our IQs. Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised "costumed Dickensian characters." Seriously.

Alongside "Dickensian," the OED lists "Dickensy" as one of the original words used for the same meaning, but now in disuse. That word would probably be less tempting to use so often because it doesn't make you sound as smart. "Yes, I agree this movie is very Dickensy."

When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian. Banishing your wife from the family estate while beginning a romance with an eighteen-year-old actress also counts as Dickensian.

Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word Dickensian could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications. It's probably most often used for social issues, as in some of the Googled examples. Yet we don't tend to read Dickens's pure social novels that much anymore, such as Hard Times, at least not voluntarily.

Dickens's final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, The Last Dickens. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary, and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.

He died while the novel was still being serialized and it remains incomplete, so we don't know how it would have ended. Thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been written speculating on the ending, with different camps heatedly arguing over it. After years of making a study of his final novel, I can state one thing with certainty about how it would have ended: it would have been really really Dickensian.

Make a point of using the word Dickensian in a sentence today. See how people respond, and whether they take its meaning for granted. Report back results below!

Jason Pinter: New York City on the Brink: The Truth Behind "The Darkness"

2009-11-24T16:05:15Z

Fact: the NYPD was forced to cancel its January, 2010 Police Class due to budget cuts.
Fact: The NYPD anticipates that there will over 3,000 fewer cops on the streets in 2010 due to these same cuts.
Fact: Mayor Bloomberg expects to cut $1.75 billion in spending over the next two years, including 1.5% cuts in education services and 2% cuts in uniformed forces.
Fact: According to the state department of labor, New York City has shed over 125,000 jobs since August 2008.

With unemployment skyrocketing, the city facing a $5 billion gap, with fewer cops on the streets and more people needing to do whatever it takes to survive, New York City is a powder keg.

This is the premise behind my new thriller, "The Darkness". As a lifelong New Yorker, I've seen this city undergo cataclysmic changes over the last year. Thousands upon thousands of people have lost their jobs, many of them friends. People who led the lifestyles of Kings and Queens are now barely making ends meet. Those who were millionaires are now forced to survive on severance packages. In my latest thriller, I wanted to ask the ultimate 'What If?' question: What if you lost everything, yet could trade your soul to live the life you've grown accustomed to?

You make half a million dollars a year. You own a multi-million dollar apartment with beautiful views overlooking Central Park. You drive a Lexus, summer in the Hamptons. You are not even thirty years old. You can have everything you want, whenever you want, at the very moment you ask for it. The world is at your fingertips.

And then, in an instant, it is all gone. Everything. You lose your job. You lose your income. Suddenly you cannot afford that beautiful apartment. Creditors are leaving messages on your iPhone. Your model girlfriend dumps you because you cannot keep up with her 'tastes'. You were once a Master of the Universe, but now the universe is knocking on your door, waiting to collect its debt.

How far would you go to keep it all?

In "The Darkness", the newest book in my bestselling, critically acclaimed Henry Parker series, Henry will find out just how far some people will go...

Henry is a young, idealistic journalist. While investigating a seemingly random murder, a man whose body is found with its bones crushed nearly to dust and floating in the East River, he discovers out that the dead man is connected to a Keyser Soze-esque drug kingpin known only as The Fury. This drug lord has lain dormant for nearly twenty years, but has suddenly resurfaced. And it's no coincidence that this shadowy figure has chosen this moment to wreak havoc on the city. With the city in turmoil, the stage is set to unleash the biggest crime wave New York has seen in a quarter century. This plan goes back decades. It stretches from the highest of Manhattan penthouses, to the deadliest drug cartels of South America.

The spark has been lit, and if Henry and his friends don't uncover just what this druglord's plan is, this brimming powder keg is bound to explode...

Order "The Darkness" from:
Amazon
Amazon Kindle
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble e-reader
Books-A-Million
Borders
Indiebound

Download the free ebook exclusive prologue - "The Hunters":

Amazon Kindle
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Jesse Kornbluth: Writing With Twyla Tharp: I Collaborated With A Genius -- And Survived

2009-11-24T15:29:19Z

The first time I took the elevator to Twyla Tharp's penthouse was a grey, chilly morning in early April. We sat in her minimalist office that overlooked a terrace that overlooked Central Park, but when you're in a room with Twyla Tharp, it's hard to notice anything else.

To say she can be intimidating is to understate.

Her features are sharp, her hair is no-nonsense white, her glasses are oversized and round. Somewhere below her neck is a small, taut body, and a white shirt and loose jeans, but none of that matters. Only her gaze does, and it was focused on this newcomer with curiosity and skepticism.

I thought: I am not worthy.

I'm surely not the first to think that. Tharp revolutionized dance with her insistence that classical ballet and modern movement need not be antagonists, and over a 40-year career, she's explored that breakthrough idea in a dizzying catalogue of greatest hits. She's choreographed movies. She's had a Broadway hit. She was anointed with a MacArthur Fellowship, the one that certifies you as a "genius." And she's written two books. One is an autobiography, Push Comes to Shove. The other, The Creative Habit; Learn It and Use It for Life, is a surprise -- a wise guide for the general reader about harnessing your personal creativity.

It was a book that brought us together. Her new one, The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, would be published by Simon & Schuster in November. She'd written enough for several volumes, and would, in time, surely have been able to carve a book out of it. But she was also embarking on a new show -- "Come Fly With Me," a night of dance built around Frank Sinatra songs -- and her time was tight. If the book was to be published on schedule, someone was needed to help her get to the book's finish line.

I have done this work before, with mixed results. In 1986, I collaborated with Roger Enrico, then the CEO of Pepsi Cola. He worked as hard as I did, all the while running a giant company; all these years later, we still get royalties. Less happy was my experience with Kelsey Grammer. I was hired to write his memoir just six weeks before an inflexible deadline; Grammer gave me little time or guidance, and I succeeded only in turning a total disaster into a mere failure.

If I was skittish about signing on to a new collaboration, I had an additional reason -- Twyla Tharp has a reputation as an artist who finds even perfection inadequate; it was easier to picture her as an autocrat than as a collaborator. But I didn't sense that at our first meeting. She grilled me about Balzac, Tolstoy and Proust; I parried to the best of my ability, painfully aware she'd practically memorized every word they'd written. After a half hour of literary tennis, I suspect we were both pleasantly surprised, she that I had read a book or three, me that that her work ethic seemed fairly reasonable.

One thing I should know, she said: She got up early, worked all day, went to bed early. She expected appointments -- ours included -- to begin a few minutes before the appointed hour: "If you're not early, you're late." I said I understood.

And so we began.

There was one table in her office -- a venerable Shaker piece that was sufficiently rare that I quickly learned to put a coaster under my water glass. This work surface was bracketed by two chairs and industrial shelving stacked with a video editing system, stereo equipment and books. Up a few steps was a large empty room: a dance studio and rehearsal space. When she didn't go to the gym -- at 69, she can still bench more weight than I can -- she danced here. It was one of the supreme perks of our time together that she sometimes showed me how the thing was done.

From time to time, I'd look outside and imagine us finishing the book in July, reading the manuscript and sipping iced tea in air-conditioned comfort as the park shimmied in the summer heat. Some days it seemed that time would never come -- Twyla Tharp could be fierce.

Not that she was ever in a grim mood. It was always, "Good morning, Miss Tharp" and "Hello, my sweet" with us -- formal manners delivered with irony and topspin. The thing was, Twyla Tharp is a one-off. She lives in the now, and she does it with a ferocity I've never encountered. I'd bring up some moment from her childhood that stunned or shocked me; she never had an emotional reaction. Stuff happens. It makes you who you are. Move on. Dazzled by her equanimity, I would.

And so we did plowed through her collaborations with Billy Joel, Jerome Robbins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Richard Avedon, Milos Forman, Norma Kamali and Frank Sinatra. This required considerable discipline, because this book, even more than its predecessor, is for general readers -- the stories are about dance, but as she often said, "Work is work." And to drive the point home, we dotted the pages with stories of great collaborators: Steve Martin, the Wright Brothers, Marie and Paul Curie. Even the baseball slugger Kirk Gibson makes an appearance.

Who wrote what? She wrote everything. No one has ever worked harder; anything I sent to her would come back marked, edited, revised, improved. Nothing I did could have made her dramatically better; my contribution was to buff and suggest, propose and try, and, on the rare occasion, shoot the moon. Throughout, she could not have been more supportive and appreciative. As her dancers know, a "very nice" from Twyla Tharp is a bit more meaningful than it is from almost anyone else.

There was only one disappointment. The final month of work on the book involved many meetings at her apartment. Only in the July heat did I learn that I wouldn't be sipping iced tea in the air-conditioned office --- because her office opens on to her dance studio, it isn't air-conditioned. Cold air may be good for writers, but it's bad for dancers.

So, with the terrace door open and the hot air blowing through, I swooned. And I sweated. My eyes smarted; the pages of the manuscript were marked with blotches. I can't remember a more physically demanding work environment. Or a more rewarding one -- I worked with a genius, and survived, and now, magically, there's a book.

[Cross-posted from HeadButler.com]

Charles Madigan: Obama's Election: Destiny Called

2009-11-24T00:14:11Z

It sounds pretty arrogant--"I'm going to find a new way to write about politics" -- but that was my objective with Destiny Calling: How the People Elected Barack Obama. My sense was that the old hierarchy -- newsroom elites deciding what was important, reporters following orders and each day filing dozens of very similar stories from the campaign trail -- was melting away.

I was out of the game, one of a small army of veterans who either chose to leave the Chicago Tribune or were invited to leave to cut costs. But I wasn't done with politics yet, particularly in light of Obama's campaign, its epicenter in Illinois, and an awareness that a new kind of history was being written. Media may have been in collapse, but I wasn't. I needed to find a better (and frankly, cheaper) way to do it.

I concluded that what was most important was the condition of the nation after eight years of George W. Bush. What a disaster the man created! -- from Hurricane Katrina (the natural catastrophe he couldn't handle), to a pair of badly managed wars, to ethical behavior that recalled 19th Century politics, to a shattering economy with all its consequences still to play out. It seemed clear to me that the story of this campaign would not be told in an airplane flying over the nation. I wanted to find the people who reflected the problems I identified.

That took me to Mississippi to talk with a Katrina victim; to North Carolina to watch a campaign play out through the eyes of a political veteran; to Maryland, where a valiant retired army colonel told me about the price of war and why he would vote for the first person who promised to bring the troops home; and lots of other places to talk about the fissures of the economy.

There is nothing traditional about the book I wrote. It is defined by special people who reflect on the state of the nation. One of the most interesting pieces, to me, played out in Evanston, Illinois, where I spent some time with a woman I have known for years, Birch Burghardt. She did a big favor for me: she watched the Republican convention on television and set down her thoughts for me. Here is how I told her story in Destiny Calling.

Giving people are hard to find. Some people just send money. Some people send their concerns or their wishes for the best. Some people send their prayers. Birch Burghardt does all of that, but she also sends herself, which makes her unusual in the firmament of givers. Whether it's supporting after-school programs for disadvantaged children or tackling that biggest of all challenges, teaching in the Chicago Public Schools, somehow she has been there. There are people like this all over the North Shore of Chicago, folks who could sit comfortably back, send a check now and then, and feel just fine about it. But they don't. The place fairly buzzes with do-gooders, many of whom actually do good instead of just talking about it.

Burghardt lives in a couple of places, one of them Evanston and one of them an island off Seattle where she and her husband Galen have constructed a dream house for themselves and their children. A strong singer and lover of folk music, she is frequently seen in the company of her daughter, a tall blond like herself with blue eyes and the gift of a strong alto. It is a very musical family.

I asked her to watch the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul and tell me what she thought of the performances. I believed she would be particularly astute at this assignment because, first of all, she is fair-minded, and second, she is very smart, with a master's degree in economics from Georgetown and a doctorate in education from Northwestern.

She has an interesting background. Burghardt was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She went to public schools in Farmington then shifted to private schools. She spent her childhood in such a Republican family that she would be sent to school wearing a little gold elephant pin that said GOP on it, or "I Like Ike" buttons. All of that changed in the 1970s and 1980s, when her family abandoned the GOP and became activist Democrats in the wake of the Nixon administration and Watergate. They were inspired by Jimmy Carter.

Burghardt wants the next president to be careful about balance on the Supreme Court. She hopes he will not be so partisan when it comes to filling high court vacancies. She wants serious action on the environment -- not that she believes the nation can turn back the clock, but it has to make a commitment "to reduce our negative impact on the environment." Having taught school in Chicago, she knows "the immensity of the challenges faced by the schools," so federal funding efforts are important.

Then she pops up with an issue that sounds classically conservative to me: "balance the budget." But she adds that she would support tax increases to do that, which sounds Democratic again. She does not like the fact that the Chinese hold so much of America's debt.

Put it all together and you end up with a voter who looks a lot like many independent voters across the country -- concerned about social issues like education and improving living conditions around the world, a little conservative on budget questions, and an advocate for public schools. It's healthy that her positions are not predictable, because most people don't fit handily into the boxes created for them. There are gun-owning liberals, for example, and conservatives who deeply oppose the death penalty. There are libertarians who feel pot smoking is just fine, and Democrats who support strong enforcement action on all drugs.

Simple categories are just not broad enough for people like Burghardt. Because of her background as an economist, she has an inherent distrust of big government and what it can do. At the same time she liked the description "compassionate conservative" when it appeared in Republican circles in 2000 because it sent the message that you could be conservative and also care about the well-being of your fellow man. "It really made me think that people do care," she said. "They want there to be goodness. They want there to be kindness. They want there to be relationship and caring. They want to help people who need help, but they are still conservative." She hastened to point out that she believed President Bush was disingenuous and never voted for him.

By the time of the Republican convention, with its faux start because of Hurricane Gustav, she had been following both sides of the contest closely and was eager to see what the Republicans had to say. My sense was that even though I thought of her as liberal, she could be swayed by a good argument to do an about-face. Her comments on the convention indicated that was likely true, up to a point -- the point being the arrival of Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

"I thought that at the beginning, McCain and Fred Thompson were incredibly eloquent. And they said what was most important. The most compelling thing about McCain, I think, is that he has, in the past, been really open and really productive, often working across the aisle. He has that experience of being a prisoner of war and being very loyal to the United States. I think that's compelling. Whether it's important or not, I don't know. When I watched those speeches, I thought, 'Huh, maybe I'd vote for McCain. Too bad I don't agree with him on some points.'"

"When Sarah Palin gave her speech, I hated it. She was so sarcastic. I thought she was playing herself up as a great person, really spunky and neat, right? But not really a person of substance so much as a person of punch and power. And then this nastiness that came out, I was very sad ... Then [Rudy] Giulani's speech -- same thing. I thought he was unpleasant ... I mean, when he smiles it looks strange. So anyway, I thought, 'Okay, good. I don't have to vote for McCain.'"

As the convention progressed, Burghardt thought it was clear that the Republicans were still working on the party base, very late in the game. All the speeches seemed aimed at convincing the party faithful they had nominated the right candidate, even though his conservative credentials were hardly sterling. And the more she found out about Palin, the more concerned she became that the Alaska governor was unprincipled.

Palin's problem with the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" got Burghardt's attention. The Alaska governor claimed she had canceled the project, a pet project of Alaska senator Ted Stevens, but that happened only after she first supported the construction project, then nixed it and used the money for other highway construction.

"There's that," she said. "I mean, the New York Times has biases, but they probably don't report falsehoods. Then there's the trooper story, which just makes me think, 'I want a slime ball like that as president?' Inexperienced and a slime ball. An emotional slime ball. Oh God!"

McCain put the deal breaker on the table for Burghardt when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Burghardt is not a vulgar woman, so when a "bitch" slips out, she gets a little pink and apologizes. It's a fetching gesture, but not a good sign for the McCain-Palin ticket.

In making her decision, true to form Burghardt didn't just send money or offer lip service. She gave herself to the Obama campaign.

Alex Higgins: The Maya Really Did Warn Us About Our Future (Unintentionally)

2009-11-23T22:45:25Z

Roland Emmerich's enjoyably silly CG destruction-fetish flick '2012', featuring more ruined cities and panicked statesmen than any of his previous offerings, takes its cue from the cranky claim that the Maya calendar predicted the apocalypse, and we're now due. The premise is that the astronomers of the doomed medieval Central American civilization figured out that an alignment of the planets in the solar system on December 21st 2012 would somehow cause the sun to emit excessive radiation that would mess up Earth's core, in turn tearing up the ground we're standing on.

If I take time from your life now to point out that the Maya did not make such a claim, and that solar-system-wide planetary alignment would not so much as disturb your cable reception, I can only hope you will forgive me for insulting your intelligence so egregiously.

But as with many such fanciful claims, there is a real, actually interesting, story lurking in the background, brought to us by history and science. And it tells us something about our own possible future.

The Maya live on in Central America today, the term covering different communities in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salavador and western Honduras. Sadly, they are often grossly ill-treated peoples, long oppressed by ruling elites of European origin. But the great Maya civilisation that built some of the world's most impressive pyramids in highly populated cities and wrote in beautiful hieroglyphics from the 3rd to the 9th centuries AD disappeared long before the merciless Spanish conquest. Where millions once lived, Spanish armies would struggle to find enough food to steal from sparsely populated hamlets.

The ruins of their abandoned cities, given over to nature so soon after the height of their development have long presented an intriguing, romantic mystery since they were rediscovered by outsiders, John Stephens of the US and Frederick Catherwood from England in 1839. There are a number of competing theories of the principal cause -- from civil war to disease and foreign invasion to overuse of the soil. But another explanation that incorporates and expands on these, popularised by Jared Diamond in his book 'Collapse', is leading over the others -- and it's bad news.

Central America was never an easy place for a highly developed civilization to emerge, with its long dry season and unpredictable rains. The Maya required ingenuity and intense labor to keep the soil fertile, catch water in reservoirs and dig the canals and irrigation ditches that made the best use of it. The corn that made up much of their diet could not meet the nutritional needs of a marching army of an empire, but the Maya established flourishing city-state kingdoms that competed with each other for military and cultural pre-eminence. Surviving documents and monuments tout the achievements of self-obsessed kings and nobles, boasting of their conquests and the gory punishments meted out against the vanquished.

But 90 million miles away, their glories were undone. A pulse in solar activity with an average cycle of 1,500 years triggered climate change on Earth. Its impact was varied and seems to have primarily affected the North Atlantic region, unlike the artificial global warming we are experiencing today where temperatures rise steadily in every continent and ocean. But the lesser, natural, mediaeval warming was not without far-reaching consequences for people. Maya reservoirs could hold enough water to last 18 months without rain - but after the 8th century, this would not be enough. Evidence from sediment layers and pollen point to a history of drought, and in particular, three successive droughts between 800 and 950 AD, maybe decades long each.

Low-lying northern cities could access water from underground sources, but the southern cities, high up in the mountains depended on their reserves. Piecing together precisely what happened is not easy - but from 800 AD to 950 AD, the rule of the kings came to an end (perhaps at the hands of angry subjects), the calendar stopped and the Maya population fell between 90 and 99%.

The mega-drought theory for the Maya demise is not accepted by all archaeologists though it has been gaining ground. But while other causes have been suggested - such as the overuse of soil and warfare, the horrible possibility is that these were further consequences of regional climate change, the acts of increasingly desperate people. As Diamond suggests, "Like most leaders in human history, the Maya kings and noble did not heed long-term problems..." Faced with the greatest challenge to their rule, they recommitted to self-destructive habits of over-consumption, built greater monuments to themselves and killed each other over their dying land to the end. It is a warning to us.

The very existence of natural climate change is often brought up by global warming deniers as a feeble counter to the rock-solid science demonstrating man-made global warming, as though no climatologist had ever thought of it before. Even more curiously, they illustrate the history of natural climate change with cutesy anecdotes about wine-growing in a warmer northern England and ice fairs in London during colder times. The point being: climate change is natural ... and it's nothing to worry about! But the actual history of natural climate change is often of civilization-breaking havoc. And the medieval warming in the north Atlantic was weak stuff compared to the global warming our greenhouse gases are preparing for us, but was devastating nonetheless. Like the Maya, we face destructive forces that could be well beyond our capacity to adapt to. Their empty cities are a warning to us.

The major difference between the Maya in the 8th century and us now is that they had little ability to understand what was happening to them and even less to do anything about it. Our civilization, by contrast, knows what is happening and even at this late date has the ability to prevent catastrophe. What is in question is our willingness to act on what we know and demand the transformation the necessary transformation in the way we produce and use energy. Which is what you can do on December 12th, the day of the international climate conference in Copenhagen. It's not the day world ends, but it could be the day our governments didn't try to save it.

Jeanne Devon ("AKMuckraker"): Attorney of Palin Critic Speaks Out

2009-11-23T22:34:47Z

By Donald Craig Mitchell
Contributing writer to The Mudflats

Last July in Fairbanks, with Todd smiling at her side and Piper sitting in her lap, Sarah Palin watched Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell take the oath to fill out her term in office as Governor of Alaska. Then she vanished. For the past four months the Forty-Ninth State has seen neither hide nor hair of the woman. No speeches at chambers of commerce luncheons. No sightings on the street. No Sarah cheering on the sideline at Wasilla Warriors girls basketball games. No Sarah sitting in the pew on Sunday worshiping at the ChangePoint and Anchorage Baptist Temple evangelical mega churches. She's been gone. Disappeared.

It now turns out that while Alaskans were hunkering down for winter Sarah was in San Diego working for a woman named Lynn Vincent, the ghostwriter HarperCollins hired to cobble together Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah's first person account of her it-only-would-happen-in-America rise from small town mayor to small state governor to Republican Vice Presidential candidate to popular culture icon.

Since Tuesday when Going Rogue was released nationwide copies of the book have been flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Boise and Grand Rapids and not flying off the shelves in San Francisco and Seattle.

Since I already have enough to read, I had intended to give Going Rogue a pass until I had time this weekend to motor over to the Anchorage Barnes & Noble and give Ms. Vincent's word-smithing a skim. But on Monday I learned that I'm in the book. Not surprisingly, that piqued my interest. And then yesterday a friend lent me a copy.

I've now read it. Here's the review.

I usually begin reading a book that purports to be nonfiction by reading the index. But Going Rogue doesn't have one. So I started with the acknowledgments section at the back of the book. In the first paragraph Sarah explains to her readers: "I'm very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I'm thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl. That practice allowed an orderly compilation over the past weeks and let me summarily wrap up at least some of my life so far."

Sarah then thanks thirty-seven people (all but four only by his or her first name so that none of the rest of us have a clue who they are) before she thanks Lynn Vincent "for her indispensable help in getting the words on paper."

If all that is read quickly, it leaves the veneer impression that Sarah wrote her book. But if read carefully that's not what it says. "Help in getting the words on paper?" Too coy by half.

Decide for yourself when you do your own skim at your own local Barnes & Noble. But start to finish Going Rogue reads to me like Sarah sitting on the sofa in Lynn Vincent's condo in San Diego, school girl diaries in her lap, talking hour after hour in her you-betcha patois into a computerized tape recorder like the ones court reporters use to record depositions. Then each afternoon when Sarah went off on her jog, Ms. Vincent would begin her real workday sitting at her computer editing and cut and pasting that day's transcript of Sarah's ramblings into a narrative.

I can't prove that. But someone should ask Sarah if that's how she "wrote" Going Rogue. Lynn Vincent would be a more reliable source. But, no surprise, her contract with HarperCollins contains a non-disclosure provision. Adam Bellow, Sarah's editor at HarperCollins, also would know. But he for sure is not telling. At least until he has too much red wine during dinner at Elaine's some night and lets the secret slip.

The book itself is a prosaic hagiography divided into three parts. Part one is Sarah's autobiography from her birth in Sandpoint, Idaho, to her selection by John McCain as his running mate. Part two is Sarah's story of her life on the road during the 2008 presidential campaign. Part three is a sanguinolent settling of accounts for the torment to which she was subjected in Alaska after the election - a torment so awful that it brought the operation of the entire executive branch of the government of the State of Alaska to a gridlocked halt and left Sarah no choice but to abandon her governorship in order to earn $5 million in four months talking into Lynn Vincent's tape recorder.

If that three-part narrative has a unifying theme, the theme is that everything - and I mean everything - that has ever gone wrong for Sarah Palin was someone else's fault.

Sarah's lackluster performance during her interview with Frank Murkowski when she somehow made the short-list of candidates to succeed Frank in the U.S. Senate? That was Frank and his Attorney General, my friend Gregg Renkes's, fault. The Troopergate scandal? Walt Monegan and the Democratic members of the Alaska Senate pulled that mean-spirited prank on a blameless Sarah. The nationally televised interview with Katie Couric that branded Sarah Palin as an ignorant and uneducated laughingstock? Katie sandbagged her. The fabulously disastrous Thanksgiving television interview when Governor Palin pardoned a turkey while in the background unpardoned turkeys were having their heads shoved down a funnel and their throats slit? Sandbagged again. That time by a local TV news cameraman.

Don't take my word for it. Thumb through Going Rogue on your own. Page after page after page. It's always someone else's fault.

When discussing George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon is reported to have said that George was a nice guy. "But his wife. That woman knows how to hate." Since Dick meant that as a compliment, he would be impressed with Sarah's penchant for settling scores. Because scattered throughout its content Going Rogue contains an enemies list as long as the list the nation's Thirty-Seventh President and his henchmen compiled during the run-up to Watergate.

Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah's predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah's lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah's predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank's Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain's campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman, Walt Monegan (Sarah's Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah's ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama's chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama's chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar's Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin's liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).

That's not the complete list. There's no index and I'm tired of typing.

Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.

Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin's most articulate and factually well-informed critics.

It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah's ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin's misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature's investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah's tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.

In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as "a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father's local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd's cousin's wedding."

Andree McLeod is where I come in.

I am an attorney by trade and an historian of modest reputation by avocation. In 1987 I briefly convinced an Alaska Superior Court that it was a violation of the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions for the State of Alaska to have a campaign finance system that allows individuals who are not eligible to vote for a candidate to influence the candidate's election by making campaign contributions. In 1998 I came within one vote of convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold the constitutionality of an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would have mandated a similar result. Over the years since, I have frequently represented individuals for a reduced fee or no fee in cases in which I think the public policy benefits merit my effort.

For that reason, I was not surprised in September 2008 when a friend called to ask if I would have a cup of coffee with a woman named Andree McLeod. By that date, I had been active in Alaska's (small state) political life for thirty years. But my answer to that query was, "Who's Andree McLeod?" But I went for coffee and discovered that Andree McLeod is a quite amazing woman.

Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin's, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.

When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan - i.e., Alaska Republican Party - political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being "captured" by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story.

After researching the Alaska Public Records Act I concluded that, for reasons not worth detailing here, the private back-channel email system that Sarah had created was a violation of the Alaska Public Records Act. As a consequence, representing Andree McLeod, on October 1, 2008 I filed a lawsuit against Governor Palin in the Alaska Superior Court, the purpose of which is to obtain an order prohibiting state officials from using private email accounts to conduct state business.

The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.

That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.

What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?

Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.

After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here's what Lynn and Sarah say:

We always suspected that someone was funding and directing
Andree's efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still
begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she
hadn't worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough
time or money to turn harassment of the governor's office into a
full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints
became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why:
prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.

I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)

But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled "Donald Craig Mitchell." And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.

Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.

While I probably once was, I haven't been a "prominent" attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly "liberal." To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my 'Governor Girl Reports' were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings "detailed an ethics attack strategy."

But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).

It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah's Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah's campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.

It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.

Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, "facts" in Sarah's book?

It's fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.

If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity's sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.

For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that "the one skeleton I'd kept hidden in my closet" (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.

Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, "cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd's business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla."

Once perfected, Pinocchio serum also would be useful to find out whether Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell really supports health care reform and, before the United States sends more troops there, whether Hamid Karsai really is committed to rooting out corruption in Afghanistan. But before a Pinocchio serum can be widely used, the FDA would need to conduct a clinical trial. Shooting up Sarah while she's still on her book tour would be a good first test of the potion's efficacy.

Eileen Gittins: Crowdsourcing Content and Demand: Andrew Sullivan's "View From Your Window" Book

2009-11-23T22:15:43Z

Earlier this summer, Leigh Haber, (longtime book editor and Blurb consultant) surfaced a wonderful book opportunity with Andrew Sullivan and his The Daily Dish blog, published by The Atlantic. For three years, Sullivan had been inviting his blog community to upload pictures of the view from their windows. He wanted to compile a selection of these images into a book that captures the breadth and width of the web... without words.

Although images are quickly becoming the lingua franca of the virtual 21st century, they also ground us in "real" space. They give form to our spectral selves. However, while images make things real, tangibility makes them matter.

At Blurb, we hear this all the time. We take more pictures than ever before, but we see fewer and fewer of them as they are digitally lock-boxed away in some suspended pixel animation state. When the content we view is just a mouse click away from deletion, the act of choosing what to memorialize in physical, touch-it, feel-it, smell-it form takes on new meaning. We are saying, "These things matter."

Sullivan's book also says, "You matter to each other." Compiling these digital images into a physical book, a book of great beauty, was sublimely contrarian. Offline becomes the new online. Here is an excerpt from Sullivan's initial call for submissions blog:

One of the strange things about having a blog, especially a one-man outfit like this one, is that, over time, you get to find out more about me, but not much about each other. Yes, you get to read some of the smartest emails on the web, but you don't get to know who your fellow-readers are, where they live, what they do, what they see as they look out their window each morning. I get a little sense of it from the roughly 500 emails I get a day. But it's still opaque.

Hence this idea, which may be nuts or it may be inspired. We'll find out. This week, get out your digital cameras, and take a picture of the view from your window. It can be your living room window, bathroom window, car-window or office view. If you're serving in the military, or traveling, it can just be the view from where you are standing or sitting. Email it to me, put "View From My Window" in the contents line, and I'll post as diverse and as interesting an array of reader photos as I can all week. ... So show me - and every other reader - your world. Don't pretty it up; just show it as it is - a glimpse through the looking glass of a blog, at the world its readers live in.

As you can see from the above, the original idea was to capture images over a week's time, but the View From Your Window became so popular, Sullivan found it had a life of its own. The community had voted, and they wanted to know who else was out there.

The next challenge was selecting and sequencing the images into the book; the natural answer became to let the community decide what made it onto the front and back cover, while enabling The Daily Dish staff to determine the book content itself. Time and place became the other construct for the book design; it starts out at dawn with palm trees and a barbed wire fence in Los Angeles and ends at dusk with a photo of a snow -covered McDonalds parking lot in Cheektowaga, New York.

The next question became how to produce, print and fulfill orders for the book. Not surprisingly, Sullivan selected the more nimble print on demand model that Blurb offers vs. a legacy book publisher. Why? Complete creative control, time to market measured in days and weeks, and -- perhaps most importantly -- who knew what the market for this book looked like?

Sullivan's book is 95% user generated content, but why not crowdsource demand as well? Could Sullivan de-risk an order for an offset run by having folks pledge their orders ahead of the actual printing? Color offset runs can deliver considerably lower costs than print on demand, but typically start at 1,000 copies and require the publisher -- in this case the author -- write a check up front. Alternatively, print on demand offers just that -- each book is printed on demand, as a unit of one, and thus there are no economies of scale, so the cost per book is higher -- but then again, no one has to write a big check.

So the question for Sullivan was, could he crowdsource demand via his blog not only to assess market size, but also to offer his readers a reduced price if they placed advance orders.
Here's an excerpt from his post on the topic:

We hope to save you at least $10 a book by crowd-sourcing the advance printing.

No old-media publishing house would give you those options. The combination of a blog and print-on-demand publishing can. And if this model works, it could help launch a whole new wave of books created with user-generated content and priced with crowd-sourcing efficiencies. We hope the Dish will help pioneer this, and help do to the book publishing industry what blogs have helped do to MSM establishment journalism. A four-color 200 page book is an ambitious place to start, but, as always at the Dish, our attitude is: why the hell not?

The result: within 5 days Sullivan had enough pledges to place an offset order and offer his customers the reduced price. He's now talking about books number two and three.

Dan Glickman: "The Blind Side's" 20-20 Vision

2009-11-23T21:37:44Z

Movies often are about escape and adventure. We root for the underdogs and cheer their success. Sometimes heroes beat the odds with dazzling superpowers. But many of the great cinematic stories come from a uniquely American well, where real life trumps even the best fiction and inspires us to strive toward our better selves.

The headlines today are rightly focused on the box office success of New Moon, but buried in the news is another remarkable story -- the quiet outperformance of a film called The Blind Side. Based on the Michael Lewis book, it tells the true story of Michael Oher, a young African American man who while homeless on the streets of Memphis in high school was taken in by an affluent white family and went on to become a first round draft pick for the Baltimore Ravens.

I defy anyone to see this movie and not be profoundly moved and inspired. Sandra Bullock is sweet charity incarnate as adoptive mom Leigh Anne Tuohy. And, newcomer Quinton Aaron holds his own as a young Oher, whom his newfound family likens to the gentle hero of the classic children's book "Ferdinand the Bull" (news, I'm sure, to many a defensive player on the receiving end of Oher's swiftness and strength).

The movie does a deft job with difficult circumstances. A mother who is alive but absent. A father who passes away but was never really known. The overwhelming 'slip through the cracks' fate of teens in similar situations. The depictions of homelessness are especially poignant, with the young Oher picking up sacks of left-behind popcorn after a high-school game and seeking shelter in a 24-hour laundromat, underscoring the sheer hopelessness of his circumstances.

Yet the movie soars by resisting the temptation toward self-congratulation. Quite the contrary, it passionately insists that, as much as Oher gained from the kindness of others, he returned it 10-fold in the richly fulfilling relationship he forged with his new family.

Asked why his wife insisted he pull the car over to the side of the road that fateful winter night, Sean Tuohy explained simply: "Because he needed some clothes. That's all it really was. Then he needed a place to sleep. The depths of need never stopped. And she got so far into it, she couldn't get out of it. And she fell in love with him."

As country singer (and promising actor) Tim McGraw, who plays the Tuohy patriarch, put it -- if it weren't a true story, "then you wouldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe it." The family that stopped on a cold winter night. The teacher who took an interest. The high school football coach who intervened on Oher's behalf. What makes each of these characters so powerful is that they are portrayals of real people who stepped into the void and changed the course of this young man's life.

It's a story we as a nation need right now. A recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that nearly 50 million Americans are struggling to get enough to eat amid today's record unemployment. That's the largest number since the USDA began counting, and it includes 1 in 4 kids. Our nation has its share today of Michael Ohers. The question before us all is do we have our share of Tuohys?

Repeated throughout the movie -- from Oher to his new and increasingly extended family and back again -- is a simple, reassuring mantra, "I've got your back." In a time of such need and want, it's an important and uplifting motto for us all to embrace. The Blind Side leaves you with an infectious desire to not turn a blind eye, but rather to do something that matters in your own community -- to find our own way to pull over to the side of the road and make a difference for our fellow man, yes, but also for ourselves.

Dan Glickman is a former U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton Administration. He now serves as Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Daniel Ammann: How I Met the Biggest Devil

2009-11-23T20:36:47Z

Just before Christmas, two years ago, I waited at the Suvretta ski lift in St. Moritz, the world's oldest and most glamorous ski resort. It was one of the coldest mornings of the year, eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and my breath hanged before me in a cloud of mist. We had agreed to meet at eight thirty, and not a minute later an unimposing green Subaru Legacy, that has seen quite a few years, pulled up. The Biggest Devil climbed out and greeted me with a soft voice.

It was the exact term that Marc Rich, the most-wanted white-collar criminal in U.S. history until his highly controversial pardon by President Bill Clinton, used to describe himself. "I was painted as the biggest devil," Rich had said to me without the least bit of self-pity during one of our conversations. Then all of a sudden, so as to change the subject, he had challenged me: "Show me how good you ski."

So it came that a few days later I went skiing with the man, who is considered the most secretive, the most powerful and the most infamous oil trader. These three days in the Swiss Alps proved to be invaluable. Marc Rich, who had systematically avoided reporters and had given his last interview of significant length over twenty years ago, finally opened up and freely talked about his businesses and about his private life.

Being a business journalist in Switzerland, I had always been intrigued by Marc Rich. As a young Jewish boy in Belgium, he barely escaped certain death in the Holocaust. Penniless and unable to speak a word of English, he fled with his parents to the United States and made himself into the most successful -- and wealthiest -- commodities trader of his time: "The King of Oil," as one of his longtime business partners would later put it to me.

Rich then ran so afoul of the law that he landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list and absconded to Switzerland. The US Government chased him all over the world for "the largest tax evasion ever" (in the words of then-prosecutor Rudy Giuliani), for racketeering and for trading with the enemy Iran during the hostage crisis. The billionaire trader succeeded to evade the agents of the most powerful nation for almost twenty years before he got a presidential pardon.

What a life story, I thought. A story, all the more, which had not been written yet. So in 2000 I wrote my first letter to the office of Marc Rich + Company asking for an interview. My request was flatly denied. For years and years, I routinely sent faxes and e-mails, but the answers would always be the same: "No interviews."

This all changed in December 2006 when I wrote yet another letter and boldly explained that I was about to write a biography. In all truth, I did not expect a positive response. So I was surprised when Marc Rich finally agreed to a meeting. It came as an even greater surprise when he accepted my demands for total control over the contents of the book since I did not want to write an "authorized account" but also cover the things that he might not wish to read.

Researching and writing The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich became one of the most fascinating and most instructive experiences of my life. I talked to his family, friends and foes, from
ex-wife Denise Rich and the trader's first secretary, a Spanish Marquesa, to former prosecutor Morris "Sandy" Weinberg and US Marshal Ken Hill, who for fourteen years secretly sought to detain -- and even kidnap -- Rich. A former officer of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, provided insight into Rich's very special relationship to Israel and the crucial services he provided to the Jewish state. I interviewed dozens of traders from the five continents.

My many long conversations with Rich, more than 30 hours, were an important source of information. For the first time ever, he discussed his international business dealings -- even the most controversial ones. He openly and without remorse talked about Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, his most important supplier of oil, with whom he maintained a much more intensive business relationship than was previously known. He admitted that he did his "most important and most profitable" by breaking international embargoes and doing business with apartheid South Africa. He commented on his trades with Fidel Castro's Cuba and with Marxist Angola and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. He talked about Bill Clinton's pardon and revealed that he will never set foot in the United States again. And he explained why he thinks it is perfectly right to do business with corrupt, violent, and racist governments.

After our last interview I asked him why he ultimately spilled his secrets, after what seemed liked eternal secrecy. "Age and maturity," the Biggest Devil answered and gave me a sphinx-like smile.

Daniel Ammann is the author of The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich. St. Martin's Press.

William Petrocelli: Al's Poem

2009-11-23T20:19:19Z

Former Vice-President Al Gore had just finished speaking in San Rafael, California, on November 9, 2009, about his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. The 800 people in Domincan University's Angelico Hall - along with the over-flow crowd of 200 listening by TV monitor in an adjacent hall - were giving him a long and enthusiastic applause.

As he stepped backstage, I complimented him on the poem on pg. 28 of his book, which he had read at the end of his speech. He gave me a smile of thanks.

"When I submitted the manuscript to the publisher," Gore said, "my editor wanted to know who wrote it, because I hadn't attributed it to anyone."

"I told him, 'William Butler Yeats.'" Then Gore burst out laughing..

"When he acted like he might believe me, I had to tell him 'No, no, I wrote it!'"

In person, Al Gore is thoughtful, modest, and almost shy - totally different than the caricature his political opponents have painted. He looks trim and invigorated, which is surprising considering the weight that is probably riding on his shoulders. Gore right now has a role that is totally unique in American history. By immersing himself in the details of a global climate disaster that seems to be getting closer and closer, he has become, almost by default, the spokesman for everyone's grandchildren. Someday, he says, they might be asking, "How could you have let this happened?"

Al Gore could be spending time working on his golf game or be out giving pep-talks to motivational groups, but he decided instead to work hard to master the details of the climate-change crisis. He was one of the first major figures to sound the alarm about that impending disaster, and his message hit home in 2006 with the filming and publication of An Inconvenient Truth. After that film and book, Gore realized that he needed to immerse himself in the scientific details of the problem so that he could help guide the debate. He's done just that. Do you want to know the relative impact of CO2, methane, halocarbons, and nitrous oxide in creating global warming? Gore can give you the figures. Do you want to know how carbon sequestration works? Gore can lay out the details. Do you want to know how geothermal energy contributes to the problem but could also contribute to the solution? Gore can summarize what scientists are thinking.

It's an educational task that draws upon a lifetime of skills. Al Gore has to grab and keep the attention of many different audiences, explaining over and over again why the issue is so important - why we have to put short-term political concerns aside. All the while, he has to fight his way past an array of neo-Know-Nothings, babbling pundits, and right-wing opportunists. He knows he can't sink to their level - he can't indulge in the luxury of getting angry or fighting back on their terms, because the issue is too important. Part of the job he has taken upon himself is to be calm - to be right without being righteous.

Al Gore keeps reassuring nervous audiences that we have the tools to solve the crisis. Time is short, he says, but it hasn't run out yet. We haven't yet reached the point where our descendants are doomed to live on a grim and desiccated planet. Not yet.

And with all that, he had time to write a poem - one that Yeats might have been proud of.

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune's bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning's celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Nina Sankovitch: Great Women Writers Of 2009: Give Thanks

2009-11-23T20:01:52Z

Thanksgiving is here and I want to give thanks to five women writers who in 2009 excited, enlivened, and energized me through their great books. Maybe these books did not make the male-dominated Publisher's Weekly List of Top Ten Books of 2009 but they made my top ten list in a year in which to date I have reviewed 380 books on www.readallday.org.

These five writers worked magic for me. I sat down with each of their books and did not get up again until the last page was turned. These were the kind of books that left my mouth open in exhilaration, my heart pounding with satisfaction, and my fingers itchy to write about how great they were. My only regret was that there were not more pages in each book to consume and enjoy.

For me, great writing is defined by a writer being fearless, engaging, original, and sincere. All of these books were all of that, and more.

1) Ruins by Achy Obejas is a beautifully written, heart-wrenching novel about the dignity of one man in the face of harsh daily deprivations and the slow deterioration of his dreams. Set in Cuba in 1994, it tells the story of Usnavy, a man fated to live his life under the shadow of the United States and yet determined to live as a proud Cuban and to hold faith in the revolution that Che Guevara promised.

2) Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep is a charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog rescuing, ex-junkie mother. The novel presents the hilarious and heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling, and all other necessary acts of resistance.

3) How To Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall presents the stories of four very different and yet mysteriously intertwined characters. They have each suffered a devastating loss of some kind and they cope in different ways, and against currents of misunderstanding, loathing, fear, and wavering self-examination. The novel is utterly life affirming with its exploration of why and how we humans go on living despite the withering bouts of pain we must endure.

4) For Grace Received by Valeria Parrella is a collection of short stories about the grace that occurs when ordinary life meets extraordinary action. Her characters are from all walks of life in Naples. What they all share is the desire to break out of their conscripted box of duties and expectations and reach up into the universe of possibility, finding new delight in, or needed relief from, their daily existence.

5) The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a collection of short stories that celebrates the determination and endurance of women circumscribed by tradition or poverty or custom to move beyond their defined slots in life and find a new place and a new definition for themselves. By challenging long-held beliefs, these women are able to reveal new possibilities and undeniable truths, bridging the Nigeria they are rooted in and the new world (either literally or figuratively) that will set them free.

Jill Robinson: Poutine, With Apologies to Calvin Trillin

2009-11-23T19:31:00Z

I returned to America from 25 years in London around a year and a half ago, really excited at the possibility if a lot of us got involved we could elect an articulate President who had some serious and good principles and wrote his own books. Seemed to go well, and, in what now seems truly a miracle, we did elect this President.

However, just as the British have trouble clarifying their territories Australia and New Zealand, referring to them simply as "down under," so I have had trouble for many decades clarifying our "up over" territories Canada and Alaska. It certainly never occurred to me that anyone from these lands would consider the Presidency of our own actual States. (Or are these now the Reality States?) Never understood why John McCain selected his vice-presidential candidate from up over unless he believed, as many of us do, in his own immortality.

Then, yesterday I read the latest edition of the New Yorker to reach Los Angeles - the one with the Atomic Bomb Pumpkin Pie on the cover. Calvin Trillin, a man who, like the two other best funny American writers does not grin, has written a perfect study on what he says is Canada's National Food: the poutine, a mash of cheese curds, French fries and meat gravy. Like many excellent stories driven by character, you know this must be fiction and you don't Google "poutine" to be disillusioned, so well and carefully does Trillin make you understand how the national fondness for poutine explains Canada and our chilly attitude about the place.

What does this have to do with Sarah Palin? Trillin writes of Canada so knowledgeably, of the various local territories, the variations on the poutine, and, of course, he reflects on the National Animal, the Moose. So as I read, I realized I was confusing Canada with Alaska, and, why not, both being up over, chilly and not somewhere we have been. I mean we still feel Europe is just right there sort left of New York, and necessary to literary completion and dressing well.

In spite of the last election reassuring me that this up over personality was out of our serious new lives forever, I have been unable to avoid Sarah Palin over the past few days. So as I read Calvin Trillin treatise on the culinary vulgarities of the poutine (imagining that sometimes moose stock might make the gravy that is slupped), I decided that perhaps this person's persistent thrust into our media's cheese-curd consciousness is due to her hefty diet of poutine. I could see she has evolved from a moose DNA. Visualize antlers. Yes? Did she have moose parents -- and what is the plural of "moose"? Can you remember her parents? God knows we know more than we would wish of her daughter's former hunk. Is a hunk a curd? What, in fact, is a cheese curd? Trillin was careful to point out a real one as opposed to an invalid cheese curd as well as gravy that does not have the savory force of moose. Does the former V.P. candidate have savory force? Is this what drives the mobs of suburban Michigan outlanders from places even pilots miss during their computer games. Places with hoards of readers ganging up for orange wristbands saying, "I have read this book"? At least they want to read: the publishing industry is thrilled. There are readers UP OVER all eager to sit, up to their elbows in poutine, carefully protecting the orange plastic bangles they'll leave to their children, legacies of the literary, or is it political or is it celebrity thrill of their lives?

Can you catch celebrity; if you get close to it, maybe touch the book she touched. If we need shots to avoid swine flu, is the orange band a vaccine against moose flu? Hang onto the bracelet and in ten days you'll be coherent. You'll read a book by a person who wrote it. You'll be back to actual reality.

There is no other name on that book, and there's been concern. How could she do that to the writer? The writer, it's said, took off 20% off her royalties not to have her name on the book and has never, she told Rachel Maddow, even visited UP OVER, nor, even been at the same table with a poutine.

Esther Iverem: Precious and Painful

2009-11-23T18:25:23Z

In the films of Lee Daniels, horror is expressed through a claustrophobic Black pain that Hollywood finds absolutely compelling. In Precious, the fifth film that Daniels has either produced or directed, he returns to the formula that won him acclaim and won Halle Berry an Oscar for her role in Monster's Ball -- poor Black women are pathetic, sick and incapable of caring for themselves or their children.

Not so much buzz came to Daniels for his second, third and fourth films. The third, "Shadow Boxer," was also an odious tale of death and quasi-incest, and rated high on the gag-with-a-spoon meter but it involved a beyond middle-aged White woman played by Helen Mirren. So now, even after declaring to one reporter that he is no longer going to make movies for "Black people" (as if Monster's Ball was for us!), Daniels is certainly back to making movies with Black people sucked into an unforgiving black hole.

Precious, raped by her father, has borne two children that are also her siblings. She is illiterate. Her mother, played by comedian Mo'Nique, also abuses Precious sexually, physically and through an unhealthy relationship to food that has made Precious morbidly obese. But compared to the book, there is more emphasis on abuse heaped on Precious by her mother than by men, including her father.

Artists have the freedom to choose their narratives. But there is also a freedom of the viewer/consumer to react to not only the narrative but to the source of the narrative. We all have the freedom to interpret that a narrative, for example, on Black unemployment will be told by progressive activist Van Jones differently than it would be told be right-wing mouthpiece Armstrong Williams. Any Latino can react differently to a narrative on illegal immigration created by commentator Lou Dobbs versus one created by New York City journalist Elaine Rivera.

The film Precious is based on the 1997 first and only novel by Sapphire titled Push. Before Push, Sapphire was well-known around New York City for her poetry highlighting lesbian sexuality. The publication of the book, as well as the large advance Sapphire received for it, garnered its share of controversy within the bliterati. While Sapphire defended her work as a reflection of what she had seen while teaching reading and writing to young people in the city, others felt the book was an exercise in exploitation and hyperbole in the pursuit of recognition by the White literary world. Similar reaction greeted the 1982 publication of Alice Walker's incest- and abuse-centered The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. To a lesser extent, the same controversy swirled around 2003's The Known World, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tale about a Black family that owns slaves, by Edward P. Jones.

Push may not have won these big awards but with media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry signing on as executive producers, Precious has enjoyed dreamy promotion, some say hype. Mo'Nique's name is being mentioned for an Oscar nomination. Her performance is exceptional, as is the work done by Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibi in the lead role. But it is also sad that these two roles are among the very few available to Black actresses this year. (Black girl: be fat, sad or a joke.)

There are some rich moments in Precious, especially several scenes with Precious at a new high school for troubled girls and in interviews with her social worker, played with perfect Noo Yawk attitude by Mariah Carey. There is no denying that Daniels (not EVER to be confused with the journalist and lawyer Lee Daniels) can deliver a compelling, even mesmerizing, tale. Best of all, there is a hint that Precious can lift herself out of her hell and break up the Daniels theme of dead Black men -- and women -- walking.