Donald Trump Says He May Keep Parts of Obama Health Care Act

Abstract: Just days after a national campaign in which he vowed repeatedly to repeal President Obama’s signature health care law, Donald J. Trump is sending signals that his approach to health care is a work in progress. Mr. Trump even indicated that he would like to keep two of the most popular benefits of the Affordable Care Act, one that forces insurers to cover people with pre-existing health conditions and another that allows parents to cover children under their plan into their mid-20s. He told The Wall Street Journal that he was reconsidering his stance after meeting with Mr. Obama on Thursday. The comments added to a sense of whiplash about the law and its future. More than 100,000 Americans rushed to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, the biggest turnout yet during this year’s sign-up period, underscoring that millions of people now depend on the law for coverage. Beyond Mr. Trump’s comments, new plans laid out on his presidential transition website this week deviate from what he had proposed during the campaign , and he added ideas that appeared to more closely align with the mainstream Republican agenda. The new plans drop all mention of reining in high drug prices, which Mr. Trump had advocated for months, and add new language about modernizing Medicare, a potential nod to congressional efforts to give people vouchers toward buying private health insurance. “Health care is shaping up as a priority for the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which closely tracks health policy. “But we still have very little detail about what that really means.” The health care industry, which invested hundreds of millions of dollars in preparing for business under the Affordable Care Act, is disoriented about what to do next — and scrambling for ways to avoid a financial shock. A repeal of the act would mean the loss of millions of customers for insurance companies and uninsured people turning to hospital emergency rooms for basic care. Mr. Trump, in an interview to be broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” said the guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions was “one of the strongest assets” of the law. He also said he would try to preserve the measure allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26. “We’re going to do it simultaneously — it’ll be just fine,” he said, saying that people would not lose coverage when the law was repealed. Policy experts say that the part of the law that Mr. Trump is rethinking, that prevents insurers from refusing to cover people with costly medical conditions, only works financially for insurers if there are plenty of healthy people also buying insurance. If only sick people enroll, premiums would soar. To get healthy people covered, the existing law includes generous subsidies to help more people to afford a policy and taxes people who don’t buy insurance. New Hampshire Residents: Did You Sign up for Insurance Through the Affordable Care Act? The Times would like to hear from Americans who are signing up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Industry executives say their first priority is to persuade Mr. Trump and the new Congress to replace the law with some way for people to continue getting coverage. The problem is that, until now, top executives from the biggest insurers have not heard from Mr. Trump or his close advisers about his plans. In fact, the industry as a whole made no contingency plans for a Trump victory and does not yet appear to have developed a strategy. In the last few days, executives have huddled hurriedly with their boards and advisers to discuss how to react. In mapping out various election result possibilities, “this wasn’t on the sheet,” said Mark Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna. “We had no idea how to approach it.” The consequences are urgent. About 22 million Americans would be without insurance if the law were repealed. The state marketplaces, where about 10 million of those people buy insurance, would no longer exist. The millions of others who were newly eligible for Medicaid would also lose coverage. “I’m concerned about the fear factor of what is going on,” said Bernard J. Tyson, the chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, the system based in California that includes hospitals, doctors and an insurance plan. He said the company was already getting calls from people worried about whether they would still be able to get coverage. Both federal officials and insurance executives say people should not hesitate to sign up during the current open enrollment period. Terri Marsh, 61, in Goose Creek, S.C., did not hesitate to sign up again for a Blue Cross plan as soon as she could. “Insurance is something you have to have,” she said. Before the marketplace plans were available, she had been without coverage for five years, despite having a serious inflammatory disease. “Because I have a pre-existing disease that is off the wall for them, I could not get insurance,” she said. Without getting the coverage through the law, she said, “I could possibly be dead.” Yet Republicans have seized on some areas where the law is struggling and in the government-run insurance marketplaces in particular. This month, for example, Republicans highlighted the sharp rise in the average price of an insurance plan on the marketplace — 25 percent — as proof that the law was fatally flawed. Mr. Bertolini warned that rates could go even higher next year. Without a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, Republicans will probably be unable to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act. But they can eliminate several consequential provisions through a special budgetary process called reconciliation. Last year, the Senate passed a reconciliation bill that undid large portions of the health bill. The House passed it. President Obama vetoed it. The bill would have eliminated the expansion of Medicaid coverage for Americans near or below the poverty line. It would have eliminated subsidies to help middle-income Americans buy their own insurance on new marketplaces. It would have eliminated tax penalties for the uninsured, meant to urge everyone to obtain health insurance. And it would have eliminated a number of taxes created by the law to help fund those programs. (It was written to kick in after two years, meaning the programs would not disappear immediately.) Image A repeal of the Affordable Care Act would mean more uninsured people going to hospital emergency rooms for basic care. Credit Adam Glanzman for The New York Times Many parts of the law cannot be repealed through reconciliation. Among them are reforms to the Medicare program, a provision that requires insurers to cover young adults on their parents’ policies, and requirements that health insurers sell policies to anyone regardless of their health history. Those parts of the law are very likely to remain law. Crucial aspects of the bill can be undone in a number of other ways, too. The administration could simply halt efforts to sign people up for the state marketplace plans. Or Congress could eliminate the federal subsidies that help millions of people afford a plan. Either one of those moves would most likely cause far fewer people to sign up for insurance, leading to instability or collapse of the insurance marketplaces. “There are a lot of different triggers that can be pulled,” said Benjamin Isgur, the leader of the PwC Health Research Institute. For the insurers and hospitals, the challenge is to persuade President-elect Trump that an alternative to the online marketplaces is necessary. Insurers will feel the loss of customers both in the individual market and under state Medicaid programs. While most are well diversified into other areas of insurance, the Affordable Care Act was seen as a way to forestall the steady erosion in employer-based insurance. The companies spent years and millions investing in being able to sell new policies through the state marketplaces, operating under an entirely new model. Hospitals, however, are likely to be the biggest losers. Under the law, they agreed to get less money from the government, essentially in exchange for having to cover fewer uninsured people. “If repeal happens, are there voices in the industry loud enough to replace it?” said Sam Glick, a partner at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm. Executives insist that the proposals that have been discussed before, including by Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House and a Republican, laid out how to replace the coverage and would allow people to transition to different options. The Trump administration and Congress “are not going to pull out the rug from people,” said Dr. J. Mario Molina, the chief executive of Molina Healthcare, a for-profit insurer. He predicted that the earliest the law could be repealed was 2018, and that it would be replaced with something like a modified version of Medicaid, the government insurance for poor people. “The debate is not around the what, but around the how,” he said. Because Mr. Trump has been short on detailing exactly what he plans to do, though, many in the industry argue they cannot prepare a strategy in advance. He has said broadly that he wants to repeal the law, for example, and give states more control over Medicaid programs. He has talked about being able to sell insurance across state lines and has recently discussed a return to the state programs that existed to help cover people with serious medical conditions. “This is Day 1 of figuring out what all of this means,” Mr. Glick of Oliver Wyman said Wednesday.

Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
Health Insurance
Donald Trump
Barack Obama
Legislation


Fox Planning National Sports Network It Hopes Can Challenge ESPN

Abstract: For Rupert Murdoch, creating a national cable sports network in the United States to compete with ESPN has been his white whale — a tantalizing television opportunity but one of the few fields that his media empire has not conquered. But two decades after shaking up the sports broadcasting world for the first time by acquiring N.F.L. rights, Murdoch has plans to challenge ESPN head on and claim some of the lucrative revenue that the sports media giant has had largely to itself for more than three decades. On Tuesday, Fox will announce its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network, in August. The channel will carry Nascar races, Major League Baseball games, college basketball and football, soccer and U.F.C. fights. It will also broadcast studio shows, including one that is to be hosted by Regis Philbin, a celebrated Notre Dame fan. Murdoch’s effort is a long shot to topple ESPN, or at least take a huge bite out of it. ESPN brings in more than $6 billion annually from its industry-high subscriber fees. It owns the rights to televise Major League Baseball; the N.F.L.; the N.B.A.; Nascar; tennis; myriad collegiate conferences; the Bowl Championship Series and its new playoffs; and a raft of other sports. Both ESPN and ESPN2 have 98.5 million subscribers. It is a true empire, with eight domestic cable channels; the ESPN3 broadband network; the Web sites ESPN.com and Grantland.com; a radio network; digital properties like ESPNw, which focuses on women’s sports; a magazine; the WatchESPN app, which enables viewing of ESPN on computers, smartphones and tablets; and ownership of the Global X Games, college basketball tournaments and seven bowl games. Fox Sports 1 will join a market that is far more crowded than it was when Murdoch first contemplated squaring off against ESPN. Not only will Fox face the dominance of ESPN, but NBC and CBS have their own sports channels, which are struggling for viewers and identities. The Big Ten and Pacific-12 conferences have created their own networks, and the Southeastern Conference is planning one. And in the past decade, M.L.B., the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. have started their own channels. Still, Fox and its parent, News Corporation, have a companywide faith in sports as a DVR-proof way to attract viewers — especially young men — and a belief that their new sports channel will differentiate itself from the competition, as the Fox News channel has demonstrated in its successful challenge to CNN and then MSNBC. To ensure that Fox Sports 1 has some of the style and attitude that Fox Sports has had since it began in the mid-1990s, Murdoch and Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, brought back one of their favorite executives, David Hill, for its creation and launch. Hill, the former head of the Fox Sports Media Group, left the division last year for another job within News Corporation. “We think sports is a huge arena that has room in it to build a really attractive businesses,” Carey told analysts on an earnings call last month. He said that the company recognizes the escalating costs of sports rights but “in a world of increasing fragmentation, we think sports continues to be a more and more important and unique part of that overall landscape.” The channel’s success might not have to come as a result of beating ESPN at its game. David Bank, managing director of global media and Internet research at RBC Capital Markets, said that Fox Sports 1 would be a success “from Day 1” and could, in future years, bid against ESPN for N.B.A. rights and any cable package of N.F.L. games that might come to market. “Do I expect them to be ESPN? No,” he said. “Mega-success will be hard to determine for five years.” But, he said, “Rupert and Chase have had a pretty decent run at building long-term value.” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Nomura Securities, wrote in a recent report that Fox Sports 1 would be a “good start” for News Corporation but was “unlikely to make a material dent to ESPN’s business for the investable time horizon.” Image News Corporation’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, will use existing contracts to stock his new sports network with games. Credit Josh Reynolds/Associated Press Published 11/07/2012 One way to measure Fox Sports 1’s future success will be how many subscribers it gets and the subscriber fees it can accumulate. Fox has spent months working to convert Speed , a motorsports-centric network with 81 million subscribers, to Fox Sports 1. A companion service, Fox Sports 2, will replace another niche channel, Fuel. Fox is seeking substantially more for Fox Sports 1 than the 31-cent monthly subscriber fee that Speed gets, according to the media research firm SNL Kagan. Bank estimated that Fox Sports 1 will probably charge cable, satellite and telephone companies 75 cents to $1 a subscriber. “At $1 a sub, it’s a massive home run,” he said. By comparison, ESPN charges $5.15 a month and additional fees for its other channels. “We view Fox as a formidable competitor,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s president. “They’ve got the resources of News Corp., and the willingness that Fox has shown in the past to take big bets and to create a difference.” He added: “We like our hand. We just have to play it well.” Fox is certainly asset-rich. It plans to use existing long-term deals to fill Fox Sports 1 with M.L.B. games, including some from the league division series, beginning in 2014; Nascar Sprint Cup and truck races; U.F.C. matches; future World Cup soccer matches; and Big 12 and Pac-12 football and basketball games, as well as those from a basketball conference that is being formed by the seven Catholic universities that are leaving the Big East. The new network is also expected to buy some Big East games from ESPN. Fox also has 22 regional sports networks to plumb for talent and some of its baseball programming. Two of those regional channels, each in Los Angeles, recently lost the rights to carry the Lakers and the Dodgers — each to networks created by Time Warner Cable. But last November, News Corporation made a major foray into the New York sports market by paying about $2 billion for a 49 percent stake in the YES Network, the profitable channel of the Yankees, with an option to buy up to 80 percent in three years. Still, the possibility of starting a national sports network constitutes unfinished business at Fox. In the late 1990s, Fox tied a package of M.L.B. games and a news operation with Keith Olbermann as the star anchor on its regional sports channels. It failed. Recalling that time, a former Fox executive said, “It was Chase’s vision that we’d use the regional sports networks to transition into a national sports network.” Then, in 2004, Murdoch tried to create a national channel in partnership with the N.F.L. and cable operators. At the time, Murdoch said, “We want to consider the capacity of pay television subscribers to pay for two ESPNs.” But that effort never got off the ground, and he has waited nine years to make his next move. Sports will become even more integral by this summer, when News Corporation splits into two publicly traded companies. The company’s newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will join a publishing-based company that will retain the name News Corporation. The 20th Century Fox studio, Fox Broadcasting, Fox Sports, the cable channels FX and Fox News and the regional sports networks will form the Fox Group. News Corporation has recently grown its sports business in the United States and abroad, making live sports programming central to the Fox Group, executives have said. In the past year, News Corporation paid $335 million to complete its acquisition of Singapore-based ESPN Star Sports, previously a joint venture with the Walt Disney Company, and $757.6 million to broadcast Indian Premier League cricket through March 2018 on its Star TV channel. “Across the whole sports portfolio, it’s about making choices about where you want to invest and where to prioritize,” James Murdoch, the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, said on the earnings call last month.

TV
Rupert Murdoch
Fox Sports
ESPN
News media,journalism
Fox Broadcasting
Fox News Channel


Tough Park for Hitters? Mets Don't Think So

Abstract: WASHINGTON, April 13 - It took only three pitches for Liván Hernández to retire the first two Mets hitters Thursday afternoon. By the time Hernández trudged off the mound, 21 tedious pitches later, the Mets had socked three long home runs, setting off an offensive outburst not often seen in a stadium widely considered a pitcher's haven. In pummeling the Washington Nationals, 13-4, to cap a three-game sweep at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, the Mets (7-1) pounded 16 hits. They continued to assert themselves as an anomaly for a franchise that has generally relied on dominant pitching, not a ferocious offense, to be successful. This season's edition features three bona fide cleanup hitters -- Carlos Delgado, David Wright and Cliff Floyd -- who went a combined 7 for 9 with 6 runs batted in against Hernández. There is a speedy and improving leadoff hitter, José Reyes, who stole his third base of the season and scored twice. And if his resurgence persists, Carlos Beltran, whose first-inning, bases-empty home run set the tone, could be one of the more versatile and dangerous No. 3 hitters in the National League. As a team, the Mets are batting .320, which is tops in the league. They are not just getting many hits, but are getting timely hits. On Thursday, the Mets drove in 11 of their 13 runs with two outs. "You want to beat us, you have to pitch to like seven, eight guys," said Delgado, who went 3 for 5 with a home run and also scored three times. "That's nice for us. It doesn't happen too often, but it's nice when you have this." Floyd said of the Mets' start, "Ain't nothing about this phony." The Mets had as many hits through the first four innings Thursday (eight) as the Nationals had combined in the first two games of the series. Hernández was chased rom the game after the Mets knocked him around for eight runs (seven earned) in six innings. Joey Eischen, a left-hander, replaced him and fared no better. The Mets sent 10 batters to the plate in the seventh inning, with the big hits coming from Chris Woodward and, of all people, the reliever Darren Oliver. Each slapped a two-out, two-run single. Oliver pitched two scoreless innings, striking out four, in relief of Victor Zambrano, whose season debut resembled several other outings during his Mets career. Zambrano allowed three runs on six hits in five innings, and he issued four walks and struck out three. He said he had recovered from the strained hamstring that he sustained March 31 in a spring training game and from the flulike symptoms that have bothered him the past few weeks. But, he added, he started losing his stamina in the fourth inning, when the Nationals scored twice to cut the Mets' lead to 6-2. "First time out, can't expect him to be on top of his game," Mets Manager Willie Randolph said. The Mets have the best record in baseball, and they are starting to take on the indefatigable confidence and the subtle swagger of their manager. They have embraced Randolph's consent to wear neat goatees. "I feel like I have my identity back," Delgado said, jokingly. The team is looking forward to facing more competitive teams -- Milwaukee and Atlanta -- at Shea Stadium over the next week, and then leaving for an 11-day trip to San Diego, San Francisco and Atlanta. "That's where you really get into how you're going to play," Randolph said. It is still too early, however, to start calculating magic numbers (150 to win the N.L. East) or reserving playoff seats. The Mets have played two teams so far. One, the Florida Marlins, has the lowest payroll in baseball and usually starts six rookies in the field. The other, the Nationals, grumbles about its stadium's cavernous dimensions and has a pitching staff that, as proven Thursday, can serve up pitches that make those complaints meaningless. Hernández was the latest culprit. He allowed four home runs Thursday, and they were all well over the fence. The first, from Beltran in the first inning, was certainly the longest. Right fielder Jose Guillen remained motionless as the ball banked off the facade of Section 464 (which could have easily been how many feet it traveled) in right-center field, then jogged over, picked it up and threw it into the upper deck. Since beginning the season 0 for 9, Beltran has gone 8 for 18 with 3 home runs, boosting his on-base percentage to .432. He is seeing better pitches with Delgado batting behind him. Delgado followed Beltran's home run with a sharp single to right. It was the third consecutive time that Delgado has had a hit after a hit by Beltran. Wright, who is blossoming into one of the league's top players, ripped a two-run shot to deep left, and Floyd, who entered his at-bat 4 for 22, unleashed a rocket to right-center field to give the Mets a 4-0 lead. "I felt like the biggest idiot in the world," Floyd said. "You go out there and you swing so easy and nice and compact. And then, you know, you get good results. Whereas the first week, every swing I took was swinging out of my butt. Every swing was trying to hit the ball out of the stadium." Floyd's misdirected approach, like the first three pitches Thursday, could have given Hernández the wrong idea about this year's Mets.

NEW YORK METS
WASHINGTON NATIONALS
BASEBALL


Underground Fire Disrupts Midtown Manhattan

Abstract: A buildup of carbon monoxide under a Midtown street caused an underground fire and a manhole explosion Tuesday afternoon, prompting the evacuation of four buildings near Times Square, the authorities said. The explosion occurred at 4:30 p.m. outside of 226 West 52nd Street, the Novotel Hotel . No one was injured, but the hotel and three other buildings were evacuated and part of Broadway was shut down for hours. The Fire Department said the explosion, just down the street from the Roseland Ballroom and around the corner from the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, was caused by feeder cables under the street catching fire and creating a buildup of smoke and carbon monoxide. Four hours after the explosion, the scene was still chaotic. Traffic was blocked off and crowds of hotel guests and passers-by flooded Broadway, which was closed between 51st and 52nd Streets. Jean-Francois Sanchez, visiting New York for the first time with his wife, could not get into the Novotel, where they were to stay. Mr. Sanchez said they took a cab from the airport and were dropped off at 48th Street and told to walk the remaining four blocks with their luggage. A hotel worker then told them to get some food and return in a couple of hours. When they returned at 8:30 p.m., the street was still closed, and Con Ed employees were furiously working on the manhole. A Red Cross employee said the hotel was hiring a bus to shuttle guests to other hotels across the city. “It’s amazing,” Mr. Sanchez said. “It’s my first time in New York, and this happens.”


Hong Kong Voting for Legislature Is Heavy

Abstract: HONG KONG — Pro-democracy candidates won strong voter support in legislative elections held here over the weekend but failed to capture some key seats because pro-Beijing political parties with greater financial resources proved more skillful in navigating Hong Kong’s complex electoral system. Pro-democracy groups appeared on Monday to have narrowly retained at least one-third of the seats in the new legislature, the proportion they need to block fundamental changes in the territory’s laws. Voters thronged to polling stations across Hong Kong on Sunday, a day after the local government backed down from a plan to introduce mandatory pro-Beijing patriotic education in the territory’s schools. Pro-democracy candidates won some votes at the expense of pro-Beijing candidates and independents, who had tried to emphasize economic issues. Discussions of international competitiveness or the minimum wage were swamped in the last days of the campaign by the acrimonious education issue and the difficult questions of national identity that it raised for Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. But Hong Kong has a complex system of multiple-seat geographic constituencies, in which voters choose slates of candidates. A “closed list” system of counting votes makes it relatively easy for the first person listed on each slate to be elected, but very hard for second and subsequent candidates on each slate to gain seats. The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong used this arrangement to its advantage, running multiple slates in election districts across Hong Kong and using its formidable logistical network to guide tens of thousands of supporters to vote for one or another of its slates. As a result, the party won a series of seats for its top-of-the-slate candidates despite a weak overall vote count. In an interview after votes had been counted for half of the seats in the legislature, Tam Yiu-chung, the party’s chairman, denied suggestions by democracy advocates that his party had been heavily subsidized by Beijing. Mr. Tam also denied accusations that his party had taken elderly people to the polls on Sunday and had unfairly offered them various incentives to vote for the party’s candidates. Mr. Tam said that his party had relied on local fund-raising and that “the elderly people support D.A.B. because they want stability.” The poorly financed Civic Party, lacking a grass-roots network to guide its supporters, ran a single slate in each constituency and tried to persuade as many voters as possible to vote for it. The party’s best known politician, Audrey Eu, and its rising star, Tanya Chan, listed themselves second on slates in the New Territories West constituency and Hong Kong Island, respectively. Both ended up losing their seats. Their slates were the biggest vote-getters by wide margins, gaining more than 70,000 votes in each case, compared with fewer than 45,000 votes for the next-best slate. But they still did not garner enough votes for either woman to be elected. Ms. Chan said in an interview after her defeat that the party could not have done anything differently. “It’s quite difficult for us to estimate the supporters,” she said. “You can see that the infrastructure built by the pro-establishment camp worked professionally.” The Democratic Party, whittled down for years by defections to more radical political groupings, had the opposite problem from the Civic Party. It did try to run separate slates, but lacked the resources to coordinate voting by its supporters. The result was that several slates lost entirely, and the party ended up with a handful of seats despite a fairly strong vote count. Albert Ho, the party chairman, announced that he would submit his resignation at a meeting of the party’s central committee on Monday evening, following a party tradition that the leader resign after an election setback. Democracy advocates did win three of the five new “superseats” in the legislature, for which nearly all adults in the territory could vote. While the new seats have no extra voting power in the 70-seat legislature, the breadth of the voting for them could give extra influence to these members. Mr. Ho was among the three winners, but said that he would still resign because his party lost at least three other seats. “This election was a defeat for our party,” he said. In an interview, Mr. Ho said that Hong Kong businesspeople with operations on the mainland had told him of intense pressure from Beijing to give money to pro-Beijing parties in Hong Kong. Democracy advocates needed 24 seats to block major legislative initiatives. They won 27, but three of them were captured by members of the radical People Power party, which has refused to cooperate with other pro-democracy parties. On economic policy issues like raising the minimum wage, pro-business candidates won 21 seats, and pro-labor candidates won 22 seats, while centrists won the rest. Michael DeGolyer, a longtime pollster and political analyst at Hong Kong Baptist University, said that the party alignments among the centrists also made them likely to tilt toward populism, and he predicted that Leung Chun-ying, the new chief executive who took office on July 1, would move in this direction as well. “The business community is not going to be happy,” Mr. DeGolyer said. Only 40 of the legislature’s seats are elected by the general public; the other 30 are chosen by industries like banking and by professions like the law and Chinese medicine. These functional constituencies, as they are known, are mostly dominated by people who have connections to mainland China , many of whom have investments there; they tend to choose pro-Beijing lawmakers. The Hong Kong government retreated early Saturday evening from its previous insistence that “moral and national education” become mandatory in the territory’s schools by 2015. Instead, the government said, each school would be allowed to decide whether to offer the subject. The initial insistence that the program be mandatory touched off a 10-day sit-in at the local government’s headquarters by students wearing black T-shirts. By Friday night, the crowd at the sit-in numbered 120,000, the organizers said, and on Saturday night, 100,000; the police’s estimates were about one-third of those totals. Scholarism, the student group that led the protests, decided Saturday night to end the sit-in. By Sunday evening, students had packed up most of their gear, although 20 tents remained at the protest site. Heidi Ma, a spokeswoman for Scholarism who was helping to coordinate the cleanup, said that those tents would also be removed, but she added that the group could yet hold further protests because many members were dissatisfied that the education program had not been withdrawn completely. While the education plan antagonized many parents and students, it may have also prompted some voters to support candidates who seek a stronger local government and a closer relationship with the national government in Beijing. Walking the family dog, Edmond Chiu, a 53-year-old doctor, went to vote on Sunday evening and said afterward that he worried that Hong Kong was becoming too politicized. “I want to vote in such a way as to prevent Hong Kong from becoming ungovernable,” he said, while declining to say which candidates he supported. “People are going to extremes. Parents are teaching their kids not to negotiate, not to compromise, not to reason.” Regina Ip, a former secretary of security who mounted an unsuccessful effort in 2003 to introduce stringent internal security legislation, led her nascent political group, the pro-Beijing New People’s Party, to win a seat in each of two geographic constituencies in the new legislature, a strong showing for a small organization. Flanked by supporters in dark pinstriped suits, she said that she planned to expand her party. By making it easier for small parties and independents to win at least one seat, Hong Kong’s electoral system has fragmented the territory’s political parties and limited the influence of the legislature. Over the years, that has helped the territory’s chief executives and their ministers to dominate the political process. But in the last 10 days before the voting began on Sunday, the education dispute seemed at least temporarily to curb the fissiparous trend in Hong Kong politics. Political parties with clear positions on relations with mainland China fared better, at the expense of independents who tried to emphasize the economy. Christine Fong, an independent who campaigned on economic issues but also opposed the government’s education plan, attributed her defeat to the public’s intense focus on the territory’s relationship with Beijing in the final days of the campaign, “rather than on livelihood.”

Elections
Voting and Voters
Leung Chun-ying
Hong Kong
Politics and Government
China
Betterment LLC


After Frustration, Winslow Embraces Fresh Start With Jets

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — When tight end Kellen Winslow sought and received his release from the New England Patriots last September, ending his stint with the team after only nine days, it was as amicable a parting as there can be in the N.F.L. Winslow said he explained to Patriots Coach Bill Belichick the extensive amount of work he had to do after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in a motorcycle accident in 2005. He said that he was willing to spend hours in the trainer’s room and do the various exercises prescribed in order to play, but that he did not want to watch from the sideline. At the time, Rob Gronkowski was healthy, and Aaron Hernandez was expected back soon from an injury to join him as a second tight end to ease the pressure on wide receiver Wes Welker. Winslow’s lone appearance involved four snaps and one reception for 12 yards, and he was discouraged. “Right team, wrong time,” Winslow said. Belichick understood. When Belichick announced the release Sept. 27, Winslow posted on Twitter, “I’m lookin forward to my next opportunity in the NFL and continuing to play the game I love.” To Winslow’s dismay, another opportunity never came last season. But after signing a one-year deal with the rival Jets after a three-day tryout in June, Winslow returned to New England on Thursday night. He described the anguish of watching virtually all of last season go by as “very hard.” “Besides my motorcycle accident, it was the toughest part of my career,” he said. “And it was unnecessary.” Winslow, in his 10th season, is still bitter about the way Seattle dealt with him before his arrival in New England. The Seahawks acquired him from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on May 21, 2012; they released him Sept. 1 amid reports that he refused to renegotiate his contract. With the season about to begin and rosters set, Winslow was unable to find a team that seemed like a good fit. “That’s just the way they do things over there, I guess,” Winslow said. “But I’m back, and it’s good to be back.” He was drafted sixth over all in 2004 by the Cleveland Browns, amid expectations that he might surpass the accomplishments of his father, Kellen Winslow Sr., who reached the Hall of Fame at the same position. Winslow, 30, looks to be a great fit for the Jets. Their new general manager, John Idzik, who previously worked for Seattle, wanted to strengthen the tight end position after losing Dustin Keller as a free agent to the Miami Dolphins. On Sunday, Winslow played a key role in a season-opening 18-17 victory at home against Tampa Bay by leading the Jets with seven receptions for 79 yards. He caught the only touchdown pass from Geno Smith, the rookie quarterback the Jets hope to build around, on a 7-yard toss that drew them to within 14-12 before halftime. Smith, still learning to decipher the multiple looks defenses are giving him, is finding Winslow when he is in doubt. “Kellen is great, not only from a leadership standpoint, which is something I think he brings to the table every single week, but a physical standpoint,” Smith said. “He’s one of those tight ends who constantly get open.” Smith added: “He can be a safety valve for me. He communicates well. He’s extremely smart. He knows defenses. He’s just a wily vet.” Heading into Thursday’s game, Winslow had made 440 catches for 4,877 yards and 24 touchdowns since 2006. The only tight ends to rank ahead of him in receptions and yards since then were Jason Witten of the Dallas Cowboys (626 catches, 6,934 yards), Tony Gonzalez of the Atlanta Falcons (597, 6,494 yards) and Antonio Gates of the San Diego Chargers (448, 5,867 yards). “When it’s clutch time, and it’s time to make a play, that’s what I live for,” Winslow said. Given the circumstances surrounding the Jets’ receiving corps, Winslow figured to again be prominent in the game plan Thursday. Santonio Holmes, a wide receiver expected to be Smith’s primary target, was recovering from a Lisfranc injury to his left foot. Tampa Bay held him to one catch for 13 yards. Jeremy Kerley, who led the Jets in receptions (56) and receiving yards (739) last season, sustained a concussion in the opener and was out of the lineup Thursday. Winslow was limited in practice Tuesday as the Jets completed their harried preparations for New England. Coach Rex Ryan indicated that careful handling was a sign of things to come. “We’ll lean on our trainers as far as the amount of physical work that he does,” Ryan said. “Now, I will say this: Mental preparation and all that, he’s dialed in.”

Kellen Winslow
Jets
Patriots
Seahawks
Football


Rangers Calmly Disagree With Two Diving Penalties

Abstract: Any small advantage, gained or lost, can deeply affect a series as close as the first-round playoff matchup between the Rangers and the Flyers, which continues Tuesday with Game 3 in Philadelphia. And the Flyers have kept giving the Rangers a man advantage. The Rangers had six power plays in a 4-1 victory in Game 1, and another six in the Flyers’ 4-2 victory in Game 2. The Rangers would have had eight power plays in Game 2, had the referees not called offsetting diving penalties on Mats Zuccarello and Derek Dorsett. After practice Monday, Rangers Coach Alain Vigneault found a way to object that would not draw a fine. “Let me ask you, did you see the replays?” he said when asked whether the officials had explained the calls to him. “I’ll let you make the judgment on if Zuccarello’s was an embellishment. It doesn’t matter what I think.” The first call came at 8 minutes 40 seconds of the second period, with the score tied at 2-2. Flyers defenseman Andrew MacDonald tripped Zuccarello in front of the Philadelphia net, away from the play. Zuccarello’s legs became tangled, and as he fell, his left arm came up in a way that could have been an exaggeration — or, just as plausibly, an effort to keep his balance. The referees called MacDonald for interference and Zuccarello for diving. The second came about three minutes later, just after the Flyers had taken a 3-2 lead. A split second after a whistle in the Philadelphia zone, the Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds crosschecked Dorsett in the back, sending him headfirst into the end boards. Both players were sent to the penalty box. Had one of those diving penalties not been called, the Rangers would have had another power play at a critical juncture. The Rangers are 3 for 12 on power plays in the series. “I didn’t think I was diving, but the refs make mistakes like we make mistakes,” Zuccarello said. “I thought it was a bad call. I think everyone who watches me knows I don’t dive. That’s what I thought when I got the call — I would never dive. But it’s forgotten now.” Dorsett also disagreed with the call against him. “I can’t see him coming, and I’m in a vulnerable position — I don’t think I embellished,” he said. “If I’m going to dive, am I going to dive face-first into the boards?” The N.H.L. first instructed referees to penalize diving players before the 1992-93 season; the penalty came under the umbrella of unsportsmanlike conduct. Starting in 1998-99, referees were instructed to enforce the rule more closely, with the penalty listed as “diving.” The Rangers’ staff uncovered one other game since the start of the 1998-99 season in which a team was called for diving more than once: Game 6 of the first-round series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Washington Capitals on April 26, 2010, when the Canadiens’ Maxim Lapierre was penalized twice and his teammate Brian Gionta was called once. Zuccarello said the Rangers coaches had not emphasized a need to avoid embellishment penalties in Game 3. “We’re not a diving team, so it’s nothing to talk about,” he said. SLAP SHOTS The Flyers announced Monday that goalie Steve Mason would remain out of the lineup for Game 3, and that Ray EmerY, who stopped 31 of 33 shots in Game 2, would get his third straight start. Mason, the Flyers’ No. 1 goalie, has been sidelined with a suspected concussion since a collision forced him to leave Philadelphia’s next-to-last regular-season game.

Ice hockey
Referee
Rangers
Flyers
Derek Dorsett
Mats Zuccarello
Playoffs


Daniel K. Tarullo, a Star at the Fed

Abstract: WASHINGTON — As finishing touches are put on the most comprehensive rewriting of financial rules since the Depression, a 57-year-old former law professor is emerging as one of the most influential financial regulators in the United States. For all the criticism of the Federal Reserve for failing to anticipate and prevent the financial crisis , the central bank and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, are emerging with vast new responsibilities to safeguard the financial system. Alongside Mr. Bernanke is Daniel K. Tarullo, who was President Obama’s first appointment to the central bank’s board of governors, and who believes that re-engineering the regulatory system could soften the blow of a future crisis. “I would characterize my aspiration as follows,” Mr. Tarullo says in his characteristically professorial tones. “That the regulatory and supervisory reforms we undertake will significantly reduce the incidence and severity of financial crises.” That is hardly a modest aim. Then again, the legislation on Capitol Hill envisions the Fed as a kind of supercop for the financial system, a backstop against the kind of extreme risk-taking that produced the financial crisis that reached a peak in 2008. “We need to do more than adjust our regulatory system,” Mr. Tarullo said in an interview at the Fed’s headquarters. “We really need to redesign the system, but in doing so, to draw on regulatory tools that have developed over the years.” Mr. Tarullo, who blends an expertise in economic regulation with a passion for Faulkner and Eliot, took office eight days after Mr. Obama did, as the economy was reeling from the aftershocks of the crisis. He quickly won the confidence of Mr. Bernanke. He helped oversee stress tests of the 19 largest bank holding companies, which helped them to raise capital and regain investor confidence. And then he set out to tighten the way the Fed’s 2,800 bank regulators and supervisors around the country oversee 5,800 financial institutions, large and small. The effects of Mr. Tarullo’s influence are rippling through the Fed and the banking industry. Within the 12 Fed districts, there is a greater awareness of scrutiny from Washington. Mr. Tarullo is overseeing a review of bonuses and pay practices at 28 banks that is expected to be released shortly. And he has put in place two new regulatory approaches: reviews that look at risk-taking across banks, not just individual institutions; and quantitative surveillance, which marshals the Fed’s statistical powers to “identify developing strains and imbalances” across the financial sector. The new faith in regulation, which is shared by the Obama administration, has its skeptics, even within the Fed. On Thursday evening, Richard W. Fisher, the outspoken president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, warned that regulation could do only so much. “The industry is unfortunately evolving toward larger and larger bank size with financial resources concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” he said, adding, “We must cap their size or break them up — in one way or another shrink them relative to the size of the industry.” But for now, the Fed and the Obama administration are siding with Mr. Tarullo’s approach, which sees breaking up banks only as a last resort. Last year, after the Fed’s director of supervision and regulation, Roger T. Cole, retired, Mr. Tarullo replaced him with a longtime Fed economist, Patrick M. Parkinson, who had been helping the Treasury Department devise the regulatory overhaul the administration would present to Congress. The blueprint was the basis for the legislation approved by the House and Senate, which is about to be merged by a conference committee. Mr. Tarullo is also crucial in talks over the updating of the international rules that set out the minimum levels of capital large banks must hold. How those requirements, known as the Basel standards, are determined and enforced, will have a big effect on global financial stability. It all amounts to a greater role for regulators, whose failings were apparent in the last crisis. “Understandably, there is some hesitancy to leave too much to the discretion of regulators, because regulators did not do a great job before the crisis,” Mr. Tarullo said. “But that consideration is balanced to some degree by a concern that if you specify rules or outcomes based solely on current circumstances, then three or five years from now, they may not be effective.” Mr. Tarullo said that a “macroprudential perspective on financial regulation ” — that is, a view of the financial system as a whole, not just a narrow focus on individual banks — requires “broad expertise in economic and financial markets.” He added, “There is no other agency in the United States government that has that breadth of relevant experience.” So for Mr. Tarullo, coming to the Fed after serving as an adviser to the Obama campaign was “an easy decision,” he said. “I felt then, and nothing in the intervening 16 months has changed by mind, that difficult as the task is, the Fed was by a substantial margin the institution best positioned to effectively supervise the integration of capital markets and traditional financial intermediation,” Mr. Tarullo said. Mr. Tarullo is likely to see his role enhanced even further, given that the Fed’s vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, a 40-year Fed veteran, is retiring later this month. In addition, the Senate version of the regulatory legislation would create a second vice chairman’s position at the Fed, to focus on regulation. Mr. Tarullo would “be a standout choice for that,” said Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Born in Boston, the eldest of three children of a salesman and a homemaker, Mr. Tarullo studied English at Georgetown and received a master’s in the subject at Duke. During law school at the University of Michigan, he says he became deeply interested in economic and regulatory issues. From 1981 to 1987, Mr. Tarullo taught law at Harvard; in an influential 1987 article he argued that workers displaced by trade should be entitled to financial compensation and help seeking or training for new work. It was a time of ideological tumult, and Mr. Tarullo was denied tenure — a rarity for an assistant professor. He returned to Washington and was chief employment counsel to the Senate labor committee, led by Edward M. Kennedy. He later served in economic roles at the State Department and at the White House in the Clinton administration before teaching law at Georgetown (which gave him tenure). “Effective, conscientious and enthusiastic,” said Daniel H. Zelikow, who as a Treasury official worked with Mr. Tarullo and is now executive vice president at the Inter-American Development Bank. “He’s a classic good-government guy.” Tall, with white hair and an angular face, Mr. Tarullo shares with Mr. Bernanke a scholarly demeanor that comes from years of teaching. He recently finished rereading Hawthorne’s novels. His wife, Louisa, does research in early childhood psychology; they have two grown children. On a shelf in his office is the funeral program for Mr. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who died last August after 46 years in the Senate. “He taught me — all of us — that you can and should fight hard for your policy views, but that those commitments should never stop you from trying to work with those who disagree with you,” Mr. Tarullo said. Among some Democrats there is frustration over the decision not to break up giant banks. “I am intellectually open to the proposition that the only way to achieve the optimal balance between financial stability and the efficient intermediation of capital flows might be to break up some of the largest institutions,” Mr. Tarullo said. “But given the uncertainties, I would probably be inclined to begin with other measures, such as more stringent capital and liquidity requirements for the largest, most complex firms.” And while Mr. Tarullo favors letting the government “stop mergers among financial firms that would increase systemic risk,” just as the government can halt monopolistic mergers, he holds the view that regulatory improvements cannot wait. The government needs to seize the “momentum for reform, which eventually will attenuate because people’s attention turns to other things,” he said.

Tarullo Daniel K
Federal Reserve System
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Law and Legislation
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Credit and Debt
Banks and Banking
Wall Street (NYC)


Finding a Public Use for AT&T's Parthenon

Abstract: Old Pennsylvania Station was "vast enough to hold the sound of time," Thomas Wolfe said. The lobby of the old AT&T headquarters at 195 Broadway was easily vast enough to hold the sounds of the 20th century. What will happen to it in the 21st? "This is going to become some kind of public space," said David W. Levinson, the chairman of L&L Holding Company, which bought 195 Broadway last year for $270 million from Peter S. Kalikow, a real estate developer who is chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "Whether a museum or retail, we don't know how it's going to evolve. But it's so important to bring this space back to the public." City officials consider the lobby so important that they hope to make it a landmark. It would be the first interior landmark designated in Lower Manhattan in seven years. Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said the agency was having "very fruitful discussions" with Mr. Levinson and his architect, Michael Gabellini. A crucial point, he said, is configuring the lobby for the greatest public access. Only three of the 14 existing interior landmark spaces downtown are now open to casual visitors. [A scorecard of the most and least accessible landmarks, Page B5.] No. 195 was the headquarters of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company when it ruled electronic communication through the nationwide Bell System and linked the world by copper, cable and satellite; by telephone, radio and television. ("Commercial use in doubt," said a headline in The New York Times about Bell Laboratories' first demonstration of a television transmission, from Washington to New York, in 1927.) Nothing else would have suited this company but to draw from the greatest monuments of history: massive marble Doric columns modeled on those of the Parthenon, arrayed in forestlike rows recalling the hypostyle halls of Egyptian temples. Welles Bosworth, the architect of the 29-story building on Broadway, between Fulton and Dey Streets, which was constructed in stages from 1912 through 1923, said, "The spirit is that of a highly organized and fundamental public institution." Monopoly, more like it. In "The Biggest Company on Earth" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981), Sonny Kleinfield wrote that the lobby had "a palpable feeling of great size and great hush, of great sums of money being made and great sums being spent." Though AT&T left 23 years ago, the lobby lost no grandeur. It even kept such remnants of the telephone company as a muscular bronze figure by Chester Beach symbolizing "Service to the Nation in Peace and War," under a relief map of the United States commemorating the first transcontinental phone line of 1915. "This building is a museum," Mr. Levinson said. Admiringly. Striding quickly over floors polished to an icy sheen, he pointed out acorn-topped door hinges, locks ringed by ornamental wreaths, a seven-foot-tall marble mailbox and cherubs frolicking above the elevator doors. The hypostyle hall, which forms an L shape along Broadway and Fulton Street, has about 15,000 square feet of space and ceilings 40 feet high. By 2010, it will occupy the highly visible middle ground between the new Fulton Street Transit Center and the new World Trade Center PATH terminal and transportation hub. "We will be the link at street level and below grade," Mr. Levinson said. A pedestrian concourse under Dey Street will connect to 195 Broadway. The Dey Street end of the lobby, which was the building's original entrance, will continue to serve the office tower above, whose tenants include the Thomson Corporation, an electronic information company; Morgan Stanley; and the Holland & Knight law firm. The top three floors are vacant. So is the step pyramid at the summit. This was where "Golden Boy," a gilded nude male figure by Evelyn Beatrice Longman -- lightning bolts in one hand, a cable strand in the other -- stood until 1980. In the 1980's, the statue occupied the lobby of AT&T's headquarters on Madison Avenue, between 55th and 56th Streets, as AT&T divested itself of local telephone companies, including Southwestern Bell, which later became SBC Communications. (SBC acquired its former parent company last year and renamed itself AT&T.) The statue moved next to Basking Ridge, N.J., then to AT&T's network operations center in Bedminster, N.J., where it remains today. Mr. Levinson said he would like "Golden Boy" to come home, but an AT&T spokesman said there were no plans to move it anywhere. For once.

OFFICE BUILDINGS AND COMMERCIAL PROPERTIES


For Alabama, One Title Down, One Ultimate Prize to Go

Abstract: ATLANTA — As the final seconds ticked off an instant classic, Alabama linebacker C. J. Mosley froze, uncertain if the game had ended, unsure if the celebration could commence. The fireworks helped convince him, as did the confetti that shot skyward and the bedlam that ensued. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Mosley said. “Complete? Incomplete? Clocked stopped? Still going? “Then it was over,” he said, as he paused and sighed. “Yes!” he added, and with a fist pump. A 32-28 triumph at the Georgia Dome earned the Crimson Tide a spot in the Bowl Championship Series title game in January, opposite Notre Dame, a dream matchup likely to shatter television records and drive more interest to the sport. First, though, Alabama needed to dispatch Georgia in the Southeastern Conference championship game, a de facto national semifinal with an atmosphere like a national title game. Georgia’s last drive started with 1 minute 8 seconds on the game clock. The final sequence unfolded before anyone could make sense of what took place. The officials overturned an Alabama interception after a review. The Bulldogs sped downfield, improbable as it seemed, the yardage gained in chunks, until they reached the 8-yard line. Those 8 yards stood between Georgia and the title game. Eight yards between Georgia and an epic upset. The Bulldogs did not spike the ball to stop the clock. They ran a play. The idea was for quarterback Aaron Murray to throw a fade toward the back of the end zone, but the ball was tipped and landed instead in the hands of fullback Chris Conley. He would have been better served to drop the ball but had only a split second to decide. Instead, he caught it and gained 3 meaningless yards. The clock ran out. So tense were those final seconds that afterward Alabama quarterback A J McCarron said he would “worry about this game” before he turned his attention to the Crimson Tide’s title game opponent, Notre Dame. And that was after Alabama won. In victory, Alabama secured one championship and moved closer to another, closer to its second consecutive national title and third in the past four seasons under Coach Nick Saban. A fan in the front row waved a sign back and forth. “Bring on the Irish,” it read. “You’ll need more than luck. ROLL TIDE.” For all of college football’s fancy passing, for all its spread offenses and Saturday shootouts, the two highest-ranked teams at season’s end — the Fighting Irish and the Crimson Tide — proved they could do something as simple as hand the ball off, push defenders backward, play great defense, throw occasionally and still win games. Sounds simple, at least. Looked simple, too, on Saturday. Behind by 21-10 in the third quarter, Alabama (12-1) sent its oversize running backs, Eddie Lacy and T. J. Yeldon, up the middle and dared the Bulldogs to stop them. Georgia (11-2) did not, could not, slow the onslaught. Alabama ran for one score, then another, to reclaim the lead in a game best summarized like a children’s book title: See Alabama Run. The Crimson Tide opened holes collectively large enough to drive a spaceship through. Alabama gained 350 rushing yards and averaged 6.9 yards a carry. Lacy accumulated 181 rushing yards and scored 2 touchdowns. Yeldon, in a secondary role, recorded 153 rushing yards and another score. This was UPS football, what-can-ground-do-for-you football. When Georgia reclaimed the lead early in the fourth quarter, Alabama ran to move the ball downfield, where it punted but pinned the Bulldogs near their end zone. When the Crimson Tide took the ball back, with 5:25 left, they ran again, even on one third-and-5. All that running set up the only Crimson Tide pass that really mattered, a rainbow that left McCarron’s hand and sailed downfield to the freshman Amari Cooper. Later, McCarron would say Cooper ran a go route when the play called for a post. No matter. McCarron saw the safety bite. “I just launched it,” he said. Touchdown, Tide. Alabama had somehow managed in the first two quarters to stumble and bumble its way ahead. McCarron, the second-most-efficient passer in the nation, looked nothing like the most valuable offensive player in last year’s national title game. He held onto the football as if someone had glued it to his hand. He looked, well, quite inefficient. He fumbled in the first quarter when linebacker Jarvis Jones shed two blockers and sacked him from behind. He telegraphed a second-quarter pass down near the end zone, which safety Sanders Commings saw coming and intercepted. Alabama converted a fake punt only to be whistled for delay of game. Saban sprinted onto the field, his face red, eyes narrowed, so incensed he lacked only steam coming out of his ears. Georgia converted its own fake punt at the start of the second quarter, a direct snap to Arthur Lynch, a tight end who took two steps forward and all but threw the football like a javelin to Commings, a safety of many talents, for a first down. Georgia scored, taking a 7-0 lead. For all the speed evident on the field, this game again highlighted what most distinguishes the SEC from other conferences. Speed, yes, but speed in big, athletic players. Big people beat up little people, as the football-minded like to say down south. So Alabama, behind and not playing all that well, handed the ball to Lacy, 6 feet and 220 pounds, a player who should be listed as running back-slash-semitrailer truck. On one late second-quarter play, Lacy pushed his way off tackle, into a crowd and up the right sideline, where, 41 yards later, his touchdown tied the score. If Georgia entered the game with at least a somewhat fair reputation for coming up small in the biggest moments, the Bulldogs did not shrink here. Instead, they turned to Todd Gurley, a burly freshman back in his own right. Gurley carried seven times on the first drive in the third quarter. He broke off an 18-yard scamper, but mostly he just plowed forward. His touchdown plunge, against the conference’s top-ranked defense, gave Georgia a 14-10 lead that it extended with a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown. That set up the run bonanza, the big-boy, old-school football, Alabama’s decidedly SEC approach. Notre Dame can play that brand of football, too, which should make for a throwback championship contest. As the final seconds ticked off an instant classic, though, the Crimson Tide refused to look too far forward. This is Alabama, after all. It had another championship victory to “worry” about.

Football (College)
University of Alabama
University of Georgia
Southeastern Conference
Bowl Championship Series


Ryan Lochte Beats Michael Phelps in 400-Meter Medley

Abstract: OMAHA — If Ryan Lochte was going to dethrone Superman, he had to become a Strongman. And so it was, heading into his showdown with Michael Phelps at this week’s United States Olympic trials, Lochte worked on his butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle, but also on his pony keg heave, his 400-pound chain drag, his 650-pound tire flip and his heavy bar lift. The time that Lochte put in out of the water to get better has paid golden dividends in it. The 400-meter individual medley on Monday night, which opened the eight-day meet, was a case in point. At the 2008 trials, Lochte was even with Phelps after 300 meters but was outkicked on the freestyle leg. This time it was Lochte who used a strong back half to pull out the victory. He reeled in Phelps, who led after the butterfly leg, and Tyler Clary, who was first after the backstroke, to win going away in 4 minutes 7.06 seconds. Phelps finished second in 4:07.89 to earn the other Olympic berth. Clary was third in 4:09.92. “The first race is always the hardest,” Lochte said. “I can take a deep breath now and relax and whatever happens, happens. I’m just going to go out and have fun now.” Four years ago, the 400 I.M. victory set the tone for Phelps’s week and, by extension, his Olympics. He qualified to race in eight events, then went 8 for 8 in Beijing to surpass Mark Spitz as the most decorated Olympian in a single Games. He struggled for the next two years with his motivation before finding his purpose in trying to hold off a fast-charging Lochte, who won five golds at last summer’s world championships. Lochte’s ascension provided a wake-up call for Phelps, who got another one on Monday when he was napping in his hotel room between finals and the hotel’s fire alarm went off. Phelps is the world-record holder in the 400 I.M. but until three months ago it appeared he would not try to defend his Olympic title in London. After posting a slower time in the preliminaries than both Lochte and Clary at the 2010 Pan Pacific Championships, Phelps shelved the event. He didn’t swim it on another big stage until resurfacing for Monday’s preliminaries. Was it the right decision to swim the event? “Yes,” said Phelps’s longtime coach, Bob Bowman, “because this is the catalyst for everything else. When this goes, everything else goes well.” Phelps and Lochte own five of the six all-time fastest swims in the event. Coming into the meet, Clary’s personal best, which he posted three years ago while wearing one of the since-banned buoyant suits, was three seconds slower than Phelps’s world record and nearly two seconds off Lochte’s personal best, a 4:06.08 that he clocked while pushing Phelps to a world record in the final at the 2008 trials. Clary was asked if he sometimes felt as if he came along at the wrong time. “I feel like I came along at the perfect time,” he said, adding: “I mean, the interesting thing about swimming, especially over the past four or five years, is that because of who Ryan is and because of who Michael is and because of what they’ve accomplished, there has never been this much exposure for swimming. There really hasn’t.” The proof was in NBC’s live, prime-time telecast of the finals this week. For 250 meters, it appeared that Clary might hijack the spotlight from the co-headliners. He took the lead on the backstroke leg and held it until Lochte overtook him on the breaststroke. If Clary had been born in any other country, he would be going to London as a medal contender. As it is, he’ll have to try to punch his ticket in his remaining events, the 200 freestyle (featuring Phelps and Lochte), the 200 butterfly (which includes Phelps) and/or the 200 backstroke (in which he’ll go up against Lochte). When Spitz was at his best, he had a cast of supporting men pushing him in his events, including Jerry Heidenreich, Don Schollander, Gary Hall Sr., Doug Russell, Ross Wales, Carl Robie, Ken Walsh and Steve Genter. Since 2005, Phelps has had Lochte, who finished 10 seconds behind Phelps in the 400 I.M. in his trials debut in 2004 and has been reeling him in since in the individual medleys, the 100 and 200 freestyles and the backstrokes. Their dual strengths is what makes their duels so compelling. They will probably go head to head this week in three more events: the 100 and 200 freestyles and the 200 individual medley. The way other events fall on the schedule — the 100 butterfly and 200 backstroke quickly come to mind — is the only thing keeping them from waging a decathlon-like battle of attrition. Because for all their versatility, Phelps and Lochte remain only human. Lochte was asked before the meet about his load capacity. How many events can he realistically cram into eight days, knowing he’ll have to race three times in most of them to qualify for the team? “In 2008, Michael Phelps set the limit, eight world records, eight gold medals,” Lochte said. “That’s amazing. But he’s human. He’s not a fish or anything like that. He’s just like all of us, and he trained really hard to get there. So I know it’s possible.” NOTES Dana Vollmer’s 2008 trials were no fun as she failed to qualify for the team despite being a favorite. On Monday, she put herself in perfect position to right that wrong by lowering her 100-meter butterfly American record by 0.05 second with a time of 56.42 in the semifinals. She will race for an Olympic berth Tuesday. ... Peter Vanderkaay and Conor Dwyer, who train with Ryan Lochte in Gainesville, Fla., finished 1-2 in the 400 freestyle. Another member of the Gainesville group, Elizabeth BeIsel, won the women’s 400 I.M. in 4:31.74, just missing Katie Hoff’s American record of 4:31.12. Caitlin Leverenz was second.

Swimming
Lochte Ryan
Phelps Michael
Olympic Games (2012)


New Era Begins, and Yankees Hope It Starts Lasting Into October

Abstract: BOSTON — Derek Jeter took off his Yankees uniform for the final time on Sunday and with that the last player from the glory teams spanning the 1990s and 2000s is gone. The dynasty is finally over, and the record shows it. Even after beating the Boston Red Sox, 9-5, the 2014 Yankees finished with 84 victories, their lowest total in a nonstrike season since they went 76-86 in 1992, the year they drafted Jeter No. 6 over all. As Manager Joe Girardi noted, it is the end of an era that began in 1995, when the Yankees went to the playoffs after a 14-year drought. But the era the Yankees really want to see end is the one that began last year and continued this year, when they failed to reach the playoffs for a second consecutive year. The last time that happened was 1993. After all the good feelings and profits generated from Jeter’s farewell, all that is left is a team that disappointed its fans and itself. “I don’t think anyone was happy with the way the season went,” Mark Teixeira said. “I think that’s pretty much an understatement.” Now the Yankees can analyze what went wrong, but the answer is obvious: They had a woeful lack of offense, especially from established players. The Yankees scored 633 runs, 13th in the 15-team American League. Their team on-base plus slugging percentage was .687, 12 in the A.L. and 20th among the 30 major league teams. In the second half of the season, their on-base percentage was just .297, last in the A.L. and better than only the Diamondbacks, the Mets and the Reds. Several players had subpar seasons, including Jeter, who turned 40 and batted .256, 54 points below his career average. At least he was durable. One year after he played only 17 games because of a broken foot, he played in 145 games and had 581 at-bats. “It’s time to step back and let someone else do it,” Jeter said. That means another shortstop. It could be the backup Stephen Drew, who is a free agent, or maybe J. J. Hardy of the Orioles, who can also become a free agent. Girardi said he did not think Jeter’s replacement would have a particularly difficult time following in his footsteps. “It’s not going to be a huge deal,” Girardi said, “because Derek wasn’t pushed out or not re-signed. He retired.” The Yankees will also need to fill a few other positions, which could include third base and second base, depending on where they decide to play the versatile Martin Prado. But they will have many of the same players returning, including Brett Gardner, who had a career-high 17 home runs and .422 slugging percentage. “We’ve got to play better,” Gardner said. “I think we’ll be as good or better next than we were this year. When we went into spring training we felt we had a team capable of making the playoffs. But we didn’t play the way we were capable of playing.” Carlos Beltran dealt with a bone spur in his elbow much of the season and hit just 15 home runs and had 162 total bases in 109 games, with a .402 slugging percentage. Teixeira called his second half of the season “terrible.” He batted .179 with a .271 on-base percentage and .302 slugging mark after the All-Star break. He battled intermittent tendinitis in his surgically repaired right wrist, and said he would spend the off-season strengthening it. But General Manager Brian Cashman said that he could not be certain that Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, who is coming back from a one-year drug suspension, will be healthy and productive. “We just don’t know,” Cashman said. The Yankees must also make decisions on other impending free agents, like Chase Headley, Brandon McCarthy and Hiroki Kuroda, who may decide to retire, and David Robertson, who recorded 39 saves in his first year as a closer and can become a free agent. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Robertson said. “Let’s just see how things play out.” But pitching, particularly the bullpen, was not the Yankees’ problem, though several pitchers missed significant time to injuries. Dellin Betances has closer potential if Robertson leaves. He was a revelation, striking out 135 batters in 90 innings, a record for a Yankee reliever. Michael Pineda, who pitched Sunday, finally realized his potential, going 5-5 with a 1.89 earned run average. Masahiro Tanaka made two starts after injuring his elbow, and the Yankees hope that the problem is behind him and that he can pitch as well as he did at the start of the season. There was also some discussion about who would take over Jeter’s leadership role in the clubhouse, even if there is no captain. Francisco Cervelli, who signed in 2003, is now the most tenured Yankee. In Cervelli’s first major league spring training with the team in 2007, Jeter gave him a pair of spikes. “I hope he gives me another pair,” Cervelli said, smiling. “That was a long, long time ago. It was an honor to be with him for all this time. Not just me. It was an honor for all of us.” Now that all the honors and tributes are over, the Yankees want to start a new era — one in which they actually play in the postseason again.

Baseball
Derek Jeter
Joe Girardi
Yankees
Red Sox


Sam Champion Leaves ‘Good Morning America’ for Weather Channel

Abstract: The leading morning team in television is losing an important contributor with the announcement on Monday that Sam Champion would leave his post as the weather anchor for ABC’s “Good Morning America” to join the Weather Channel. The all-weather, all-the-time network said that Mr. Champion would be the anchor of an upgraded morning program to begin in 2014. The Weather Channel, which is partly owned by NBCUniversal, also announced that Mr. Champion would be the managing editor of the channel. Mr. Champion has been the weather anchor for “Good Morning America” since 2006. Before that he was the weather anchor for ABC’s flagship station in New York, WABC, for 18 years. With the new position, Mr. Champion will work alongside his morning TV rival, Al Roker of NBC’s “Today” show, who has his own early morning show on the Weather Channel, “Wake Up With Al.” Both Mr. Champion and his boss at ABC News, Ben Sherwood, described the decision to leave “G.M.A.” as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for a weather aficionado. Mr. Champion is not a meteorologist, but has been involved in coverage of numerous weather events at ABC in recent years, including the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy last year. ABC News won a Peabody Award for its coverage of that storm. Mr. Sherwood has already named Mr. Champion’s backup at “Good Morning America,” Ginger Zee, who is a meteorologist, as his replacement on the show.

Sam Champion
ABC News
Weather Channel
Good Morning America
TV
News media,journalism


Locking Horns Over Preservation and Property Rights in Queens

Abstract: In 1968, Roger and Frank White’s father received a letter from the City of New York. It informed him that the family’s 1865 whitewashed farmhouse in Douglaston, Queens, was being condemned to make way for the extension of 39th Avenue. After years in court, the city relented in the 1980s, but it was not until 2006 that the family was able to retake possession of the house. Barely a year later, as Roger White was preparing to restore the house, another surprise arrived in the mail, from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The house, along with 19 of its neighbors, was up for consideration as part of an expanded Douglaston Historic District. “For 30-odd years, the city wanted to tear down our house,” Mr. White said last week. “Now they want to turn it into a shrine. It’s unbelievable.” Like the Whites, the vast majority of homeowners in the area proposed for landmarks oversight are opposed to it, arguing for property rights over preservation. They have been fighting the city, local civic groups, and their friends and neighbors for eight years. “This is the crucible of Douglaston,” said Paul Graziano, a preservation consultant based in Queens who is leading the extension effort. It is also a crucible for the fierce debate over historic preservation, a debate as enduring as the buildings the city set out to protect with the passage of the landmarks law 50 years ago . That debate raises difficult questions: Should properties be protected at all costs, even from their owners? Does landmark status increase the value of a property, or decrease it? Does protecting the past impede the future, or propel it? On Thursday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission will hold a hearing, the first of four , to clear a backlog of 95 items that have been on the agency’s to-do list for up to four decades. Among them is the Douglaston extension, which in addition to 17 homes includes a Tudor-style apartment building, a church and an elementary school , most of which date from the 1850s to the 1910s. A final determination will be made next year on whether to declare these properties landmarks. While many in the existing Douglaston Historic District, as well as New Yorkers across the city, might view living in a landmark with pride, there are those who consider it onerous. Where some see history and beauty, they see bureaucracy, expense and limitations on what they can do with their properties. Image After the White family was forced out of their 1865 farmhouse, they bought the home next door. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times Mr. White bristles because he had every intention of restoring his farmhouse in a historically appropriate manner, just as he did with a nearby home his family bought after their eviction. “They all tell me, ‘Yeah, Rog, but what about when you’re dead?’ and I tell them, ‘Maybe you’ll die first and won’t have to worry about it,’” Mr. White said. The existing Douglaston Historic District came about in 1997, after years of lobbying. It encompasses more than 600 homes, from waterfront mansions to modest cottages , mostly in the prewar planned community of Douglaston Manor. A decade later, two houses along Douglaston Parkway that were not part of the district were sold to buyers who planned to expand or demolish them. Members of the Douglaston and Little Neck Historical Society sprang into action and pressed the landmarks commission to extend the district. Image Jean Huang in the backyard of her home in Douglaston. A 4,000-square-foot expansion on the original house resulted in complaints called into the city almost daily during construction. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times The two sides disagree over whether the historical society notified the property owners of their intentions. “We knocked on every single door and spoke to every single person,” said Kevin Wolfe, a local architect , Manor resident and a founder of the historical society. “Most of them seemed to support it, even if they want to remember things differently now.” Peg Breen, president of the Landmarks Conservancy, a citywide group, points to the success of the Manor, where homes regularly sell in the seven figures. “It’s not like people are leaving en masse because they are landmarked,” she said. Opponents of the Douglaston extension feel as if this is preservation by fiat. Image A pair of lion statues flanking the driveway of David and Jean Huang's home in Douglaston were vandalized twice. The city has received numerous complaints about the renovation of their home. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times “There used to be people I would talk to every day on the train platform; now they act like I’m a ghost,” said Steve Boutis, a Greek immigrant whose Cherry Street home of 39 years is in the expansion area. “Don’t they have enough ‘sense of place’ already in the Manor?” The outcry has kept the commission from acting, because the agency resists designating properties as landmarks without owner consent. “We need them to be our stewards,” Sarah Carroll, the commission’s executive director, said. Perhaps no one has struggled in this landmarks limbo as much as David and Jean Huang, whose 2007 purchase of a home on Douglaston Parkway inspired the preservationists’ campaign. The day after the Huangs closed on their $845,000 home, they got a call from a member of the historical society, inviting them to a barbecue. Everyone warmly greeted them — and implored them to preserve their modest farmhouse next door to the Whites’ home. Image Kevin Wolfe, an architect and a co-founder of the Douglaston and Little Neck Historical Society, at home in Douglaston last week. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times The Huangs agreed to keep the house and incorporate it into a 4,000-square-foot expansion tucked behind, yet still dwarfing, the original structure. They even adopted a number of suggestions made by the historical society, such as an elongated two-story addition rather than a boxy three-story one, and clapboard siding instead of brick. “I realized they had some good ideas, too,” Ms. Huang said. Yet once construction was underway, complaints were called in to the city almost daily, leading to numerous work stoppages and two dozen different violations. It took more than four years for the Huangs to complete the house. Once they were finished and moved in last winter, they encountered more problems. A pair of marble guardian lion statues flanking the driveway were spray-painted twice. After some people encouraged their dogs to relieve themselves on the property, Ms. Huang put out a sign saying, “Please do not pee on the plants.” Someone flipped it over and wrote in black marker that the dogs should direct their attention at the owners instead. The Huangs even needed tacit approval from the landmarks commission to get their changes approved by the city’s Buildings Department, because their property was on the commission’s radar. “They were very agreeable,” Mr. Huang said. It could be the last time he ever has to deal with the commission. Councilman Paul Vallone, a Democrat whose district includes Douglaston, has already said he will block the expansion of the historic district in light of residents’ opposition. The City Council has final say over land-use matters, and members almost always defer to the local representative. As a result, Ms. Carroll, the commission director, anticipates the agency might not expend resources approving something that will only be defeated. “I could have supported this before, maybe,” Mr. Huang said of the historic district. “But not now.”

Real Estate
Housing
Douglaston Queens
Landmarks Preservation Commission
Historic preservation
Restoration and Renovation
NYC


Health Law Hearings Open in Supreme Court

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday appeared ready to clear away the last remaining obstacle to a historic ruling on President Obama ’s health care overhaul . At the opening of three days of arguments, the justices’ questions suggested that they were receptive to a point on which both supporters and opponents of the law agree: that the court should decide the case now rather than waiting until the law’s penalties for not having health insurance become due. On Tuesday, the court will turn to the central question in the case, the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that most Americans obtain insurance or pay a penalty. The courtroom on Monday was packed to capacity — some members of the public had waited in line since Friday — and the justices seemed energized, talking over each other more than usual. Outside, demonstrators came with signs, while Rick Santorum , a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, made an appearance in front of the courthouse to highlight his opposition to the law — Mr. Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment — and to note that another Republican candidate, Mitt Romney , had signed a state law with similar features when he was the governor of Massachusetts . The argument on Monday was a sort of appetizer to Tuesday’s main course, a 90-minute debate over whether the court has the authority to hear the case yet, given an 1867 law, the Anti-Injunction Act, that says taxpayers may not challenge taxes until they become due. The first penalties for violating the health care law’s individual mandate to obtain health insurance do not take effect until 2014, and they must be paid on federal tax returns in April 2015. “This case presents issues of great moment,” said Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. , “and the Anti-Injunction Act does not bar the court’s consideration of those issues.” The justices appeared to agree, and they seemed ready to proceed to the main question. A decision on the constitutionality of the health care law is thus likely by June, as the presidential campaign enters its final stages. It remains possible, though, that the Anti-Injunction Act will play a role in the case, if at least some of the justices are dissatisfied with the available options during their deliberations and are looking for a way to avoid a decision. The Anti-Injunction Act says that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person.” In other words, people who object to taxes must pay first and litigate later. That is so, said Justice Stephen G. Breyer , because “taxes are, for better or worse, the life’s blood of government.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond , Va., ruled last year that the 1867 law left courts for now powerless to decide the health care law’s constitutionality. The Obama administration had pressed this argument in trial courts but abandoned it on appeal, choosing instead to try to get a quick and clear decision from the courts. The challengers to the law have always said the law poses no obstacle to immediate review. In asking the Supreme Court to hear the case last year, the administration suggested that the justices appoint an outside lawyer to argue that the law bars the challenges. The justices asked Robert A. Long, a Washington lawyer in private practice, to do so, and he went first on Monday . “I would not argue that this statute is a perfect model of clarity,” Mr. Long said. But he said law was “jurisdictional,” meaning it forbids courts from hearing suits even if, as here, neither side objected. Mr. Long was followed by Mr. Verrilli, the solicitor general, arguing for the Obama administration, and Gregory G. Katsas, who represents the private parties challenging the law. Mr. Verrilli, whose style of argument is sober and deliberate, will return on Tuesday, arguing against two more colorful lawyers: Paul D. Clement , representing the 26 states challenging the law, and Michael A. Carvin, representing the private challengers. Mr. Verrilli walked a fine line on Monday. He told the court that the administration wanted a prompt ruling on the health care law and that the 1867 law should not stand in the way. At the same time, he asked the justices not to damage the federal government’s ability to rely on the 1867 law in other cases. There were other complications. Mr. Verrilli’s argument that the penalty is not a tax for purposes of the 1867 law was in potential tension with one he will make on Tuesday, that the mandate was authorized not only by Congress’s power under the commerce clause but also by its power to levy taxes. “Today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. “Tomorrow you are going to be back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax.” Mr. Verrilli said the name Congress gave to the payment required for violating the mandate in the health care law — calling it a penalty, not a tax — mattered for purposes of the 1867 law but was irrelevant in connection with the constitutional taxing power. The challengers to the law, represented by Mr. Katsas, agreed with Mr. Verrilli that the court might decide the case on the merits now. Mr. Katsas said the penalty for failing to obtain insurance was not the sort of tax the 1867 law concerned. Mr. Katsas also said that the challenge was in any event to the mandate, which applies to virtually every American, rather than to the penalty, which applies to a smaller group. Among people subject to the mandate but not the penalty, according to the challengers, are some poor people, members of some Indian tribes and those uninsured during gaps in coverage. “The purpose of this lawsuit is to challenge a federal requirement to buy health insurance,” Mr. Katsas said. “That requirement itself is not a tax. And for that reason alone, we think the Anti-Injunction Act doesn’t apply.” In a brief , the states challenging the health care law pressed a further argument. They say that the 1867 law does not apply to them, because states do not pay taxes, even if it applies to the private challengers. At the conclusion of Monday’s argument, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. thanked Mr. Long for his assistance to the court and added, superfluously, that “we will continue argument in this case tomorrow.”

Supreme Court
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
Health Insurance


McCain, Iraq War and the Threat of ‘Al Qaeda’

Abstract: As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “ Al Qaeda ” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there. “Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.” Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks. There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11 attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq. “The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. “This is much more fractionated than most people could imagine, with multiple, independent moving parts, and when you have that universe of networks, you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.” The entity Mr. McCain was referring to — Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq — did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The most recent National Intelligence Estimates consider it the most potent offshoot of Al Qaeda proper, the group led by Osama bin Laden that is now believed to be based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that, according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and direction from senior Qaeda leaders. In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. But some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.” Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence. The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.” In recent months, Mr. McCain has also been talking more about the threat posed by Iranian influence in Iraq, bringing him in line with American military officials, who in the wake of the Basra fighting seem increasingly convinced that Iranian support for Shiite groups now constitutes the primary security threat in Iraq. Mr. McCain acknowledged those concerns on Tuesday night in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC when he said that “we now see the Iranians beginning to reassert an age-old Persian ambition, as you know, to increase their influence, particularly in southern Iraq.” In talking about both threats, Mr. McCain tripped up last month on a visit to the Middle East, when he mistakenly said several times that the Iranians were training Qaeda operatives in Iran and sending them back to Iraq. Prompted by one of his traveling companions, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Mr. McCain corrected himself, saying that he had misspoken and had meant to say Iran was training “other extremists” in Iraq. And Mr. McCain went beyond what he usually says and what his foreign policy advisers believe during a back-and-forth with Mr. Obama at the end of February. It began when Mr. Obama said at a Democratic debate that while he intended to withdraw American forces from Iraq as rapidly as possible, he reserved the right to send troops back in “if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq.” Mr. McCain seized on the remark. “I have some news,” he said at a town-hall-style meeting in Tyler, Tex. “Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.” In general, Mr. Obama’s views track with those of many independent analysts. In a speech last August, he criticized President Bush by saying: “The president would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of Al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates Al Qaeda in Iraq — which didn’t exist before our invasion — and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wants to begin withdrawing troops, has spoken of leaving some troops behind to fight Al Qaeda, deal with Sunni insurgents, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly help the Iraqi military. She warned last year of the dangers if Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda.” Few, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, to take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal. The situation they fear and which Mr. McCain himself sometimes fleshes out is that an American withdrawal would be celebrated as a triumph by Al Qaeda and create instability that the group could then exploit to become more powerful. “Al Qaeda in Iraq would proclaim victory and increase its efforts to provoke sectarian tensions, pushing for a full-scale civil war that could descend into genocide and destabilize the Middle East,” Mr. McCain said this month. “Iraq would become a failed state. It could become a haven for terrorists to train and plan their operations.” Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said during a recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout, “you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge.” But such a withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north, leaving Al Qaeda “free to try to impose its will” and lead to increased sectarian violence that “would be very likely to draw neighbors into the conflict,” he said. While “it is absolutely incorrect to describe the Sunni insurgency in Iraq as driven by Al Qaeda, you can’t properly talk about Iraq without talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq” and its importance in the larger war against terror, said Reuel M. Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency who is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Bin Laden is a pretty good judge of the history of his own organization and its future, and he looks upon Iraq as the great battle, the make-or-break issue that will decide the fate of the ummah,” the global community of Islamic faithful. When Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior military commander in Iraq, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Mr. McCain sought an endorsement of his focus on Al Qaeda. But General Petraeus responded with an evaluation more nuanced than the argument Mr. McCain typically offers on the campaign trail. Al Qaeda “is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago,” he said. In response to another of Mr. McCain’s questions, General Petraeus replied, “The area of operation of Al Qaeda has been greatly reduced in terms of controlling areas that it controlled as little as a year a half ago.”

McCain John
Al Qaeda
Presidential Election of 2008
Iraq