National Archives Releases More Clinton-Era Documents

Abstract: The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed documents from the Clinton White House on Friday, with topics including Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ill-fated attempt as first lady to overhaul the health care system. Previous disclosures often shed new light on elements of the Clinton presidency, including the administration’s scrambles after the Republicans won control of the House in 1994 and after the Monica Lewinsky scandal began to envelop the White House in 1998. The latest disclosures are posted on the website of the William J. Clinton Library. A First Lady Plots Her Own Political Path In the fall of 1999, Mrs. Clinton’s staff faced a unique challenge: Figuring out how a sitting first lady could explore a run for the United States Senate. Should Mrs. Clinton’s exploratory campaign committee or taxpayers pay for her trips to New York? What if she meets with United Nations officials and attends a fund-raiser? The conclusion: The government would pay travel costs of Secret Service agents, the White House photographer, doctors and personal aides when Mrs. Clinton traveled to New York; the campaign would pay for travel of any aides related to her run for Senate. The math over how to split these costs was broken down in excruciating detail in these memos. A trip to Binghamton, N.Y., and New York City included “43 percent official; 22 percent exploratory committee; 36 percent political,” read one memo from the first lady’s office . The memos highlight the untraditional tenure of Mrs. Clinton, whose political ambition and policy involvement often overshadowed the traditional role of a first lady. Clinton Documents The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed documents from the Clinton White House on Friday. Here are some of them, referred to in our article. Mrs. Clinton’s role in overseeing the secretive Health Care Task Force prompted a lawsuit over whether the first lady was a private citizen or a public official. (A United States Court of Appeals declared the first lady to be a government official exempt from some disclosure requirements.) The attempt at a health care overhaul represented a trial by fire for Mrs. Clinton, who was accused of overseeing a secretive and dysfunctional task force led by an aide, Ira Magaziner. In a memo dated April 1995, Mr. Magaziner explains in detail his efforts to persuade the news media to report more positively on the failed task force, including a list of names of Clinton aides whom he believed to be sources on articles critical of the president and first lady’s efforts at a health care overhaul. “I seethe inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials have been to you and the president and how hurtful they have been to me in their private discussions with the press,” Mr. Magaziner wrote to Mrs. Clinton. — Amy Chozick After a Suicide, a Cryptic Note From the President One of the most intriguing documents released on Friday is an otherwise blank sheet of paper with a cryptic note in President Clinton’s familiar left-hand scrawl. The paper is dated June 14, 1994. “H.R.C.,” it says, using the initials for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “What did we ever decide to do on this?” And then it is signed, “B.C.” Whatever “this” was is not mentioned. The paper was in a file marked “Vince Foster,” referring to the longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton who came from Arkansas to serve as White House deputy counsel but then committed suicide. The day before the date marked on the document, both Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were interviewed by Robert Fiske, the independent counsel then looking into Mr. Foster’s death. — Peter Baker Managing a Sex Scandal On March 26, 1996, a young White House aide sent an email message up the chain of command. “This is an official request to hang the picture of President Clinton signing the telecomm bill in our office,” the aide wrote. It was signed, “Thank you. Monica Lewinsky.” A month later, the young Ms. Lewinsky would be banished from the White House, dispatched to the nether regions of the administration by presidential advisers trying to protect the president. “Our direction is to make sure she has a job in an agency,” Patsy Thomasson, the deputy White House personnel director, wrote in a message . “We are working toward that end.” The ultimately tragicomic White House tenure of Ms. Lewinsky echoes through some of the documents released on Friday. In hundreds of pages related to the scandal that would, to her everlasting chagrin, forever bear her name, Ms. Lewinsky is largely an off-screen character discussed endlessly by all the other players, with her own voice coming through in just that single banal, one-sentence request. Also missing from the file are the voices of two other protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. But the papers pull back the curtain a bit on the frenzied efforts by the people around them to deal with the burgeoning political furor touched off by the president’s sexual liaison with Ms. Lewinsky that would lead to his impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate. According to the papers , Mr. Clinton received a letter from Keith Olbermann, who had left sportscasting to become a political broadcaster, apologizing for “whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage” and promising to leave the news business and head “back to my previous career in sports as quickly as possible.” A note drafted for Mr. Clinton to send in reply had the president saying, “I’m grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.” White House aides debated whether to forgive others they deemed complicit in fanning the flames. Mickey Ibarra, a White House aide, wrote about speaking with Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland after he criticized Mr. Clinton. “I delivered our message (it does not help any of us to pile on),” Mr. Ibarra wrote . When the radio host Tom Joyner made comments on his show that irritated Clinton aides, one sent a message saying they should remember that the next time he asked for an interview. Another countered that Mr. Joyner was mostly on the president’s side and besides they would need him in the future. “Politics baby!!!!!” the aide wrote . Sidney Blumenthal, a White House adviser close to Mrs. Clinton, wrote a series of messages aimed at undercutting key players in the episode. He referred to “the plotters” who were promoting the scandal and called the journalist Michael Isikoff, then of Newsweek, a “coconspirator.” He suggested that Linda Tripp, who taped Ms. Lewinsky talking about her relationship with the president and then turned over the recordings to the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, may have falsified talking points she said Ms. Lewinsky had given her. If so, Mr. Blumenthal wrote , “Tripp would be a liar, a worthless witness and open to prosecution herself for lying to F.B.I. investigators.” As for Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who helped Ms. Tripp bring the original accusations to Mr. Isikoff at Newsweek, Mr. Blumenthal sent a message to the reporter David Corn questioning her integrity. In the message , Mr. Blumenthal wrote that Ms. Goldberg had been sued by the author Kitty Kelley “for stealing a lot of money from her” and suggested Mr. Corn call Ms. Kelley. “Do you want Kitty’s phone number?” he asked. “I think she’d talk on background.” Also evident in the files is a certain resignation by Clinton aides mystified by the whole episode. Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton strategist, wrote to a White House aide in 1999 looking for help in coming up with lines for an event to be presided over by the NBC journalist Tim Russert. Mr. Begala wanted to be prepared for what he presumed would be the line of questioning. “Russert asked me 13 times in one interview what the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky was,” Mr. Begala wrote , trying out a line. “Hell, I don’t even know what his relationship with Al Gore is.” — Peter Baker Damage Control Over Whitewater Deal More than 1,000 pages of the documents released on Friday concern the Whitewater investigation in the mid-1990s of an Arkansas real estate deal involving the first couple. Among the legal opinions, talking points and chronologies in the documents are many memos focused on how to portray the Clintons in the most favorable light. • An unsigned memo for the president from March 1994, titled “Key Points on Whitewater for Press Conference,” said, “You and Hillary have done nothing wrong. This whole affair involves an unsuccessful investment in a minor real estate deal nearly 16 years ago. Defend H.R.C. Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public service work. A person whose life and career have exemplified highest ethical standards and integrity. • In another memo written that same month, a political adviser, Paul Begala, urged the Clintons to do a joint interview on primetime television. “They must be relaxed, open and forthcoming. Any sense of bitterness, anger or righteous indignation will not work,” he wrote. “A word about interaction: Mandy observes that in many joint interviews, the president defers to the first lady. This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on this issue.” • A January 1995 memo suggests that a “Whitewater Team” be formed, the purpose of which would be to “develop and implement a coherent offensive and defensive White House strategy for responding to inquiries directed at the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton.” The proposed team was to include more than a dozen people, including lawyers, press assistants and a researcher. “The team’s central focus will be issues that involve direct challenges to the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton,” the memo said. — Kitty Bennett Last-Minute Pleas for Clemency In his final days in office, President Bill Clinton and his staff were being lobbied by a host of friends arguing for pardons or other executive clemency, including one of his former lawyers, a former president and a future adviser to the current president. But none of the documents released on Friday warned him of the firestorm that would erupt with his last-minute acts of clemency. The most controversial of the pardons eventually issued went to the financier Marc Rich, and the documents include a letter from Dec. 19, 2000, about Mr. Rich that was sent to a Clinton aide, Bruce Lindsey, by a former White House counsel, Jack Quinn. In the letter, Mr. Quinn cited a conversation with Mr. Lindsey while in Belfast about the pardon request for Mr. Rich, his client. “You expressed a concern that they are fugitives; and I told you they are not,” Mr. Quinn wrote , referring to Mr. Rich and Pincus Green, his partner. Mr. Quinn went on to explain that Mr. Rich and Mr. Green were living in Switzerland when they were indicted in 1983. So rather than fleeing the indictments they simply “chose not to return to the U.S. for a trial.” “Their failure to return to New York was not a crime, and no one has ever accused them of a crime for failing to come to the U.S. for a trial,” Mr. Quinn wrote. The letter came just a few days after Mr. Quinn sent a handwritten note to Mr. Lindsey. “I am told that Barak also raised the Marc Rich matter with the president, as has at least one other person who was told that you and I should discuss it,” Mr. Quinn wrote in that note, referring to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli prime minister. In another plea, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, weighed in on behalf of two inmates on death row, Juan Raul Garza and David Paul Hammer, arguing that Mr. Clinton should spare them because of problems with the application of capital punishment in America. “Renewing federal executions under these circumstances would undermine your lifelong commitment to equal justice at home,” they wrote . And Harold Hongju Koh, then the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor who would go on to become President Obama’s top State Department legal adviser for a time, also wrote the White House about Mr. Garza, who was then scheduled to be the first federal inmate executed in nearly 40 years. Mr. Koh advocated a moratorium on federal executions because of evidence of racial disparity in the justice system. “One of President Clinton’s greatest legacies will be his commitment to racial justice and equality,” Mr. Koh wrote. A moratorium “would reaffirm that legacy.” In the end, Mr. Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich and Mr. Green. He postponed Mr. Garza’s execution, but the convict was put to death in June 2001 after President George W. Bush refused to grant clemency. Mr. Hammer’s execution was postponed and his death sentence was later overturned by a judge because the prosecution had withheld statements that might have helped him. He was resentenced to life in prison, a sentence reaffirmed this summer. — Peter Baker Was Bill Clinton a Trekkie? The revelation of presidential affair with a young aide would be a public relations nightmare for any White House, but some aides kept a sense of humor about it in their correspondence . Mr. Clinton was preparing for a news conference in 1999 a week before an interview Ms. Lewinsky gave to Barbara Walters was set to air. Anticipating that reporters would ask the president whether he planned to watch the interview, James Kennedy, a White House spokesman, passed along a suggested response to his colleague, Amy Weiss. Mr. Kennedy wrote that Mr. Clinton should say, “I have already expressed my regret for what she and others have had to go through because of things I have said and done. I wish her well in whatever she does.” But that was not Mr. Kennedy’s original idea. He first thought about letting Mr. Clinton say bluntly that he would not be watching television that day. Frustrated that a lawyer struck that line from the proposed response, Mr. Kennedy suggested that Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary, offer an intergalactic response. “Perhaps Joe, if asked, can say he usually watches ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ at that hour,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. Here’s the interview Mr. Clinton might have missed while he was possibly watching the prequel to the original “Star Trek” series: — Alan Rappeport Hollywood Strikes Back Mr. Clinton found some of his strongest financial support among Hollywood moguls who were not too happy when the White House introduced a Summit on Violence in the Media in the wake of the 1999 high school shooting in Columbine, Colo. In one memo, a senior adviser, Minyon Moore, writes that Andy Spahn, an adviser to several megadonors in the entertainment industry, had expressed concern about the summit meeting. “He indicated that if this was another attempt by the White House and Congress to attack the entertainment industry and not to talk specifically about guns, that this would greatly affect” a fund-raiser scheduled with Mr. Clinton in Los Angeles, Ms. Moore wrote. In another memo, a White House aide informs Mr. Clinton’s office that David Geffen, the producer and prominent Democratic donor, wanted his foundation mentioned at the summit meeting. “Andy Spahn from his office will try to roll us on this,” the aide wrote. “How do you want me to handle their pressure?” — Amy Chozick

Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Marc Rich
Archive
President of the United States
Amnesties Commutations and Pardons


Orlando Aftermath: Red Flags, Yet Legally Able to Buy a Gun

Abstract: The gunman in a shooting rampage at a Florida nightclub, identified as Omar Mateen, would seem, in retrospect, to have been the kind of person who should not have been able to buy a gun. His former wife described Mr. Mateen as mentally unstable and abusive. A co-worker at the security company where he worked recalled him talking “about killing people all the time.” And the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated him for possible ties to terrorism. Yet, just as was the case with a long line of other mass shootings, nothing prevented the Orlando gunman from legally buying the weapons he used. The explanation, as confounding as it may be for those who favor tougher gun restrictions, has its roots in a civic value that crosses the political divide: the right to due process. The pattern is, by now, numbingly familiar. Jared Loughner , who in 2011 shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head and killed six others in Tucson, had exhibited alarming signs of mental illness, yet legally bought the Glock handgun used in the shooting just a few weeks earlier. A month before Aaron Alexis killed a dozen people in 2013 at the Washington Navy Yard, the police in Rhode Island visited him after he called them to complain that he was hearing voices and that people were following him and harassing him with a microwave machine. Nevertheless, shortly after, he was able to legally buy the shotgun he used in the shooting. Video Edward Henson — the owner of St. Lucie Shooting Center, where Omar Mateen bought two weapons — said he did not know the Orlando shooter personally. The phenomenon occurs again and again on a more humdrum, daily basis, involving far less spectacular shootings. In 2010, in Oklahoma, Barbara Diane Dye was shot and killed by her husband in a bank parking lot. Two weeks earlier, she had filed an emergency order of protection against him, explaining that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her and that she feared he would turn violent when he received divorce papers. As they waited for a court hearing needed for a full protection order, Ms. Dye and her family begged the local police to take away his guns. The issue with these cases and countless others is the way federal gun prohibitions have been drawn up, seeking to balance what the Supreme Court decreed in 2008 was a constitutional right to bear arms against the potential threat to public safety. Most of the federal criteria that bar people from buying or possessing guns under federal law require some sort of legal adjudication: a felony conviction, for instance; an involuntary commitment to a mental institution, a process that typically requires a judge’s decree; a full protection order that includes the opportunity for a hearing. It is a relatively high bar, given the range of behaviors that might set off alarms about someone having a gun. While Mr. Mateen might have exhibited worrisome red flags, his behavior had never risen to the level that involved a full-fledged court process, or some other official proceeding, that would have blocked him. How They Got Their Guns A vast majority of guns used in 19 recent mass shootings were bought legally and with a federal background check. The same applies to Mr. Loughner and Mr. Alexis, as clearly mentally unstable as they both were in retrospect. In Ms. Dye’s case in Oklahoma, her husband had not yet been given the opportunity to contest the allegations against him in a court hearing on the order of protection, which could have led to his being barred him from having guns. The issue of due process, in fact, is at the heart of why gun rights advocates have resisted so strenuously a proposal to bar people on federal terrorism watch lists, or who have otherwise been suspected by the authorities of ties to terrorist groups, from buying guns. (Mr. Mateen was on a watch list from 2013 to mid-2014, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said, but not earlier this month when he bought the guns used in the shooting.) People on the watch lists, which can include tens of thousands of names, have no opportunity to contest their inclusion in a court of law, gun rights proponents point out. And taking away a constitutionally protected right, they argue, should carry a much greater legal bar. The measure was defeated six months ago by Republicans in Congress, but Senate Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein of California and Bill Nelson of Florida, said on Monday that they would renew their push for a vote on the legislation. “I hope every member of the House and Senate had time for quiet reflection yesterday to ask what we could have done to prevent this tragedy,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said on Monday. “I’m so sorry. I’m heartsick, I’m basically sick by our inaction. It’s shameful the United States Senate has done nothing — nothing — to stop these mass shootings.” Just one Republican, Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, voted in favor of the proposal in December, but Democrats said that they believed that Republicans would come under new pressure. Image Omar Mateen It is a sign of where the gun debate is in this country at the moment that even the Manchin-Toomey gun bill of 2013, the most ambitious proposal for tightening federal gun laws in recent years, would have been powerless to block Mr. Mateen’s purchase of a gun. That is because the measure, proposed after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., was focused on expanding existing federal background checks on guns to a greater array of gun transactions, particularly those made through “private sales” at gun shows or online. Only in a handful states — New York and California are among those that stand out — have lawmakers sought to tighten the legal threshold to include red flags that extend substantially beyond the federal criteria. New York passed a law in 2013 after Newtown that compelled mental health professionals to report any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others,” a process that could lead to the person being prohibited from buying and possessing firearms. But, by late 2014, the list had swelled to some 34,500 names , raising concerns even among some mental health professionals that some in the database were not truly dangerous. California, for its part, introduced this year something lawmakers called a “gun violence restraining order,” in which family members or law enforcement officials can petition a judge on an emergency basis to order people to surrender their firearms, pending a full hearing, because the individuals pose a danger to themselves or others. The weapons could then later be returned, if a person successfully contests the removal in court. Gun control proponents, seeking to expand the restraining orders to other states, hope the hearing process for the orders give them a convincing way to counter the due process arguments from opponents. An alliance of gun control supporters are now trying to secure enough signatures to get a similar firearm restraining order on the ballot in November in Washington State. Ultimately, it is a question that promises to resurface, given the protracted nature of the gun debate in the United States: Where should the line be drawn?

Orlando Shooting
Gun Control
Mental Health
Omar Mateen
Orlando shooter
Guns


Consumer Credit Grew in November

Abstract: Consumers increased their borrowing in November, as higher credit card spending offset slower growth in auto and student loans , a report from the Federal Reserve showed on Friday. Separately, wholesale businesses trimmed their stockpiles for a second straight month in November. Consumer borrowing rose $14 billion in November to a new high of $3.53 trillion. Economists believe that the latest strong job gains in the labor market will raise consumer confidence and persuade households to finance purchases by taking on more debt. For November, the category that covers credit cards increased $5.7 billion. That came after a much smaller $65 million gain in October. The category that covers auto loans and student loans rose by $8.3 billion. That was the smallest monthly gain for this category in more than three years, since an increase in February 2012. The overall monthly gain of $14 billion was slightly below the October gain of $15.6 billion. It was the smallest overall gain since an increase of $10.8 billion last January. A separate report from the Commerce Department said that wholesale inventories fell 0.3 percent in November, after a similar drop in October. Their sales dropped 1 percent, their biggest setback since January. Economists are hoping that continued strong job gains will help consumer spending, and that businesses will respond by restocking their shelves in coming months. They believe that slower inventory growth in the October-December period held back economic growth in the fourth quarter. An estimate from economists at JPMorgan Chase said that weaker inventory rebuilding would cut growth by about 0.3 percentage point in the fourth quarter of 2015. They are projecting that the economy grew at a moderate 2 percent rate in the fourth quarter.

Debt
Consumer behaviour
Personal finance
US Economy
Commerce Department
Federal Reserve
Economy


After 3 Road Victories, Rangers Falter at Home

Abstract: This was a Rangers letdown that Coach Tom Renney could see coming from a distance: a date against the worst team in the Western Conference, just as his team returned home after winning three road games that injected new life into its puzzling season. But the Rangers could not ward off the letdown. The Los Angeles Kings scored two goals before the Rangers could take two shots. The Rangers did fight back, dominating the offensive chances in the second and third periods, but the Kings staved them off for a 4-2 victory Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. This game was exactly one year after forward Sean Avery was traded by the Kings to the Rangers. Avery scored a goal, but he also had two penalties and committed a turnover that led to the Kings’ third goal. The loss ended a three-game winning streak for the Rangers (27-23-6) against the Kings (22-30-3), who have won only 10 games on the road this season. “After three road games we won, I thought we should jump on them and get a lead, and it was the other way around,” Rangers forward Jaromir Jagr said. “We recovered, but those chances, I don’t know why, we couldn’t score. I had a lot of chances. A lot of chances.” The Rangers outshot the Kings, 41-31. Jagr had seven shots, but neither he nor the rest of the Rangers could overcome their dreadful start. For the first 16 minutes, the Kings outhustled the Rangers to the puck and had them backpedaling. By the time the Kings took a 2-0 lead — on goals by the light-scoring forwards Scott Thornton and Brian Boyle — the Rangers had managed only one shot. “The first period they came out hard, kept it simple,” Rangers defenseman Michal Rozsival said. “They dumped it in and forechecked hard, and we had trouble getting out of our own zone. They played well. We have to give them credit. They are a young, talented team. Basically we got outworked, especially the first half of the game.” Boyle’s goal, which came after Rangers defenseman Jason Strudwick overskated the puck behind the net to give the Kings an easy pass out front, came 13 minutes 8 seconds into the first period. By that point, the Kings were outshooting the Rangers, 14-1. Renney called a timeout to rail at his team, and the Rangers responded. They started to push the play into the Kings’ end and scored at 17:50 of the first. Center Chris Drury jumped on a rebound, sending it past Kings goalie Jason LaBarbera, a former Ranger. The Rangers seemed to grab some momentum in the second period, outplaying the Kings for most of it. But the Kings used another turnover, this one by Avery, to take a 3-1 lead at 9:18 on a goal by Alexander Frolov. The Rangers had 24 shots in the second period, but managed only one goal — a measure of retribution by Avery at 17:26. The Kings squelched any momentum by scoring their fourth goal 1:21 into the third. Frolov outbattled Rangers defenseman Fedor Tyutin for the puck behind the Rangers’ net and passed in front to Anze Kopitar for an open shot. “I don’t think L.A. is a bad team,” said Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, who made 27 saves. “They’re a talented team. But we were not ready in the first period. Everybody can see that. We bounced back and played much better, but we beat ourselves tonight. We pretty much gave them three goals.” The Rangers’ loss also continued their streak of futility against Western Conference teams, dropping to 0-6-2 against them this season. And they play the Stanley Cup champion Anaheim Ducks on Thursday. “It’s in our hands,” Renney said. “Just look at the standings. These are very big games for us.” SLAP SHOTS Rangers center Blair Betts left Tuesday’s game in the first period with an injury to his left knee. ... Rangers forward Brendan Shanahan missed his second straight game as he recovered from various nagging injuries. ... Forward Ryan Hollweg sat out this game because of an automatic one-game suspension from the N.H.L. for receiving his second major penalty of the season on Sunday.

New York Rangers
Hockey Ice
Los Angeles Kings


Local Governments Turn to Fees to Fill Budget Gaps

Abstract: After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident. “I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Ms. Kimel, 67, an office manager at a furniture store. “I always thought this sort of thing was covered by my taxes .” It used to be. But last July, Winter Haven became one of a few dozen cities in the country to start charging “accident response fees.” The idea is to shift the expense of tending to and cleaning up crashes directly to at-fault drivers. Either they, or their insurers, are expected to pay. Such cash-per-crash ordinances tend to infuriate motorists, and they often generate bad press, but a lot of cities are finding them hard to resist. With the economy flailing and budgets strained, state and local governments are being creative about ways to raise money. And the go-to idea is to invent a fee — or simply raise one. Ohio ’s governor has proposed a budget with more than 150 new or increased fees, including a fivefold increase in the cost to renew a livestock license, as well as larger sums to register a car, order a birth certificate or dump trash in a landfill. Other fees take aim at landlords, cigarette sellers and hospitals , to name a few. Wisconsin ’s governor, James E. Doyle, has proposed a charge on slaughterhouses that would be levied on the basis of each animal slaughtered. He also wants to more than triple the application charge for an elk-hunting license to $10, an idea that has raised eyebrows because the elk population in the state is currently too small to allow an actual hunting season. Washington ’s mayor, Adrian M. Fenty , has proposed a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 a month, to be added to electric bills, that would cover the cost of operating and maintaining the city’s streetlights. New York City recently expanded its anti-idling law to include anyone parked near a school who leaves the engine running for more than a minute. Doing that will cost you $100. “The most dangerous places on Staten Island are the schools at drop-off and dismissal time, when parents are parked three deep in the road,” says James S. Oddo , a City Council member from Staten Island who voted for the measure. “There is a mentality here that Johnny can’t walk 100 feet, he has to be dropped off right at the front of the school — and frankly that’s why Johnny is as pudgy as he is.” Nothing, it seems, is off the table. In Pima County, Ariz., the County Board of Supervisors increased an assortment of fees, including the cost of AIDS testing. Florida has proposed raising medical visit co-payments for inmates in state prisons. Parking fees at the Honolulu Zoo could rise by 500 percent if a proposal there goes through. Politicians tend to regard fees as more palatable than taxes, and more focused too. If a state needs to finance an infrastructure to oversee fishing , why shouldn’t fishermen foot the bill? But groups like the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in Washington worry that governments are now using fees to shore up budget shortfalls rather than cover specific costs incurred by specific users. “When it comes to paying for bananas, you’ve got the market as a mechanism to make sure you’re paying a fair price,” says Josh Barro, a staff economist at the Tax Foundation. “But when it comes to getting your driver’s license renewed, the government has a monopoly, and you have no idea what it costs the state or what it’s doing with the money.” In some cases, towns say they are merely enforcing rules that have long been on the books. For the first time in years, for instance, officials at Londonderry, N.H., have mailed notices to dog owners reminding them to renew their annual dog licenses, which cost $6.50 apiece, or face a $25 fine. Town leaders think the get-tough approach could raise an additional $20,000, but Meg Seymour, the town clerk, is dreading local reaction. When the town last sent out fine notices, in 2002, the calls to her office were vicious. “Let’s just say that we’re the ones who take the venting,” she said. “You have no idea.” If past patterns hold, the new wave of fees is just getting started. Gary Wagner, a professor of economics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was one author of a study of moving-vehicle and parking tickets in North Carolina , covering a 14-year period. He found a strong correlation between a dip in government revenue and a rise in ticket-writing by the police. “But there’s a lag time,” Mr. Wagner said. “Typically, it’s about a year after the revenues drop that the police start writing more tickets.” If you date the start of the downturn to last September, the ticket-writing is just getting under way. And New Yorkers can expect more days like the one in mid-March, when the police wrote 9,016 driving-while-phoning tickets within 24 hours, roughly 20 times the usual number. The “accident response fee” idea could spread, too. A company in Dayton, Ohio, called the Cost Recovery Corporation specializes in setting up collection systems for municipalities that bill for police and fire responses. (The company keeps 10 percent of billings.) Inquiries have tripled in the last year, says the company’s president, Regina Moore. “What we’re hearing from towns is, ‘The taxpayers are all over us; they don’t want to surrender more tax money,’ ” she said. “And response fees are basically a form of restitution, like paying for a stay in jail.” Insurance companies loathe the idea, because inevitably customers assume that a crash fee is covered by their policies. (It isn’t, in most cases.) And unlike the pay-to-stay approach to jails, crash fees rarely play well in the media. The mayor of Duluth, Minn., backed off a crash fee proposal shortly after Jay Leno joked about the city, by name, in a “Tonight Show” monologue last year. In Winter Haven, the accident response fee seemed to leaders to be a reasonable way to help finance the police and fire departments, but so far only 20 percent of the $32,000 that has been billed to at-fault drivers has been collected. “We chose not to contract out the collection part of this, and frankly, because of staff cuts, we don’t have enough people to handle all the paperwork,” says Joy Townsend, the city’s communications officer. “We’re now evaluating how cost-effective this program is.” Ms. Kimel, the S.U.V. driver in Florida, will not make the numbers look any better. She has no idea whether the city will come after her for that $316 bill, but she doesn’t care. “I’m not paying,” she said, “because it isn’t fair.”


Brennan Book, Many Years in Making

Abstract: WASHINGTON In 1986, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal made an unprecedented secret deal with Justice William J. Brennan Jr. , who had by then served on the Supreme Court for 30 years and was its leading liberal voice. “I basically would sneak up to his chambers at 7 o’clock in the morning and interview him and go through papers,” the reporter, Stephen Wermiel, said last week. Over the next four years, Mr. Wermiel conducted 60 hours of interviews. “I had access to everything,” he said. “I don’t think an outsider has probably ever been allowed to sit by himself with nobody watching him in a justice’s chambers and have access to anything that was there.” Mr. Wermiel told no one but his family and The Journal’s Washington bureau chief. Under the terms of the deal, though, the paper had to forgo what could have been spectacular scoops. In 1987, for instance, the court heard a $10 billion dispute between Texaco Inc. and the Pennzoil Company. “I could have told you three months before it came out how that was going to come out,” said Mr. Wermiel, who now teaches constitutional law at American University Washington College of Law. In the interviews, Justice Brennan was candid to a fault. He expressed disappointment in Justice Thurgood Marshall, who joined the court after a historic career as a civil rights lawyer. “What the hell happened when he came on the court, I’m not sure,” Justice Brennan said in 1988, “but he doesn’t seem to have the same interest.” He asked Mr. Wermiel to use “great discretion” in addressing the subject, saying it could be “horribly misunderstood.” In discussing his own contributions, Justice Brennan said, “I am not going to be modest” and again asked Mr. Wermiel to be tactful. “Steve, you’ll have to tone it down,” the justice said. As it turned out, for the following quarter-century Mr. Wermiel did more than tone it down. The idea behind their arrangement had been that Mr. Wermiel would produce a biography of Justice Brennan after he retired. That happened in 1990. But the years passed and no book appeared. Justice Brennan died in 1997. One of the justice’s sons, William J. Brennan III, complained publicly about Mr. Wermiel’s pace not long before he himself died in 2004. “He is the official Boswell,” the younger Mr. Brennan told Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. “It would be nice if he would avail himself of the opportunity. My father had hoped that he would see the biography at least in draft form before he died.” Mr. Wermiel said the task had overwhelmed him. “I don’t mind saying it was part writer’s block and part other obligations,” he said. In 2006, Mr. Wermiel recruited Seth Stern, a reporter at Congressional Quarterly and a graduate of Harvard Law School, to rescue the project. The book, written mostly by Mr. Stern and credited to both men, was finally published Monday. It is called “Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.” Justice Brennan’s daughter, Nancy Brennan, sounded pleased that the biography’s long gestation was over. She said her father had placed his trust in Mr. Wermiel based on the recommendation of Abner J. Mikva, then a federal judge in Washington. (Mr. Mikva is the Zelig of the American legal scene. He was also a mentor to Justice Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court’s newest member, and an early adviser to President Obama.) “I am so happy that we have a comprehensive biography that’s a starting place,” Ms. Brennan said. “It’s a great platform for future historians.” The book is brisk, accessible, fair-minded and studded with surprises. Among them, Mr. Stern said, was how often Justice Brennan’s votes in cases like Roe v. Wade , which established a constitutional right to abortion, were in tension with his personal views. “He has discomfort with women in his workplace,” Mr. Stern said, “yet he’s a champion of women’s rights in his decisions. He’s uncomfortable about abortion, but his privacy decisions make Roe possible. The press infuriates him at a personal level, and yet he’s a champion of the press.” Mr. Wermiel said the book should serve as a corrective to the view that Justice Brennan’s considerable personal charm was the key to his success in forging majorities with members of the court like Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who moved to the left over his 24 years on the court. “The magic of Brennan wasn’t throwing his arms around Blackmun and flattering him into becoming a liberal,” Mr. Wermiel said. “The magic of Brennan was stating his position in a kind of receptive way over a really long period of time and being willing to work. Not that there wasn’t flattery and some cajolery and so on, but it’s not alchemy.” The two authors were a study in contrasts as they traded anecdotes and observations over coffee last week. Mr. Stern, who is 34 and was finishing fifth grade when Mr. Wermiel started reporting, had just returned from a honeymoon and seemed bursting with energy. He dedicated the book to his new wife. Mr. Wermiel is 60, and his body language conveyed relief and delight that the book was done. He, too, dedicated the book to his wife, and to his daughter. Then Mr. Wermiel added this: “To Justice Brennan, Abner Mikva and Seth Stern, who made this book possible.”

Supreme Court
Brennan William J Jr
Stern Seth


Seeking More Bookings, Airlines Limit Sites That Show Their Fares

Abstract: When Josh Marion had to book a last-minute business trip to New York, he knew the plane ticket wouldn’t be cheap. A loyal Delta flier, he went to TripAdvisor, which lists flights from many airlines, to compare Delta’s price against those of its rivals. He hit a wall. “The fare wasn’t even there,” he said. Indeed, Delta pulled that information from TripAdvisor last year. It did the same for a number of European online travel agencies this year, saying that they did not have permission to use its data. This is just what Delta would like to see more of, experts say. Airlines are increasingly pushing and prodding travelers to book flights through their own websites, where they can sell more services like in-flight entertainment and add-ons like hotel reservations. They also bypass paying a commission to websites that book plane tickets. For consumers, this means that the hunt for the lowest fare has become more difficult as the number of places where they can comparison-shop has dropped. In many cases, they just give up. Already, travelers typically use three or four sites when shopping for a flight, according to Phocuswright, a travel market research firm. “The number goes up for your more price-sensitive travelers,” said Douglas Quinby, vice president for research. “Consumers are going to go to the price-comparison sites and thinking they’re comparing prices, but they’re not,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at Yale, who conducted a study for the Travel Technology Association, a trade group representing air travel sites, asserting that the airlines hurt competition when they cut independent distributors out of the loop. Experts say airlines’ evolving distribution strategy is another outgrowth of a consolidated airline industry, where customers now face additional charges for just about everything except using the bathroom. Last week, Lufthansa took an even more extreme step when it announced that starting in September it would charge passengers roughly $18 for the option of booking plane tickets through third-party sites. To avoid the fee, passengers must book the ticket through Lufthansa-owned channels. The company said Lufthansa was just ensuring that customers pay for only the services they want. “More customized services will better reflect customers’ preferences,” said Juergen Siebenrock, a Lufthansa vice president. As recently as a few years ago, that would have been hard to imagine. Only one prominent carrier, Southwest Airlines, has booked tickets predominantly through its own site. But that could change if other carriers see an appeal to Lufthansa’s strategy. “Having a greater degree of freedom in their sales activities, to the benefit of their customers, is probably something every airline advocates,” Mr. Siebenrock said. Analysts say this push is fraying a certain sort of compact that arose with the Internet age: Fare information was widely disseminated, available for comparison, but travelers would make the arrangements themselves. Image A Delta plane landing at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Delta Air Lines has pulled fare information from TripAdvisor and a number of European online travel agencies, saying that they did not have permission to use its data. Credit Stuart Isett for The New York Times “They’re just making a very calculated decision,” Mr. Quinby said of the airlines. “I think the reason why they haven’t yet pulled out of the major O.T.A.s” — online travel agencies — “is because of the market power.” Expedia’s purchase of Travelocity and Orbitz this year, he added, was “a hedge against the growing power of airlines.” The airlines say that they still offer travelers plenty of ways to shop, and that their fare and schedule information is still available on the big online agency and comparison sites like Expedia and Kayak. Delta, for one, is unapologetic. “Delta reserves the right to determine who it does business with and where and how its content is displayed,” a company spokesman said in an email, adding that the carrier continued to work with a limited number of online partners. Both sides in this tug of war have a case to make. “The airlines absolutely want fliers as much as possible to come to their own website,” Mr. Quinby said There are two financial advantages: Airlines want to be able to offer their own fare packages, bundles and add-ons like extra legroom and in-flight entertainment. “The more that the airlines can get the fliers to book on their own sites, the more opportunity the airlines have to engage with those travelers,” Mr. Quinby said. In the industry, that is called the upsell. “Where a significant portion of Delta’s profits come from is ancillaries after you buy the basic transportation,” said Max Rayner, a partner at Hudson Crossing, a travel industry consulting company. “That’s one big reason for Delta to be hellbent on denying access.” Last quarter, for example, Delta’s extra revenue from everything from baggage fees to merchandising rose 27 percent — an extra $50 million. Airlines also want to avoid paying fees of around $5 to $12 a ticket when fliers make third-party bookings. Lufthansa said that its new fee was being levied only on booking channels where the carrier’s own costs have gone up. The third-party players, for their part, want to present a transparent website that lets travelers make an apples-to-apples comparison on flights. At some websites, airlines are a loss leader. The sites make money by earning commissions from hotel bookings, but the flights help lure the customer in the first place. “The travel search funnel often begins with a traveler saying, ‘Can I get there?’ ” Mr. Rayner said. If it’s too difficult for travelers to figure that out, they will relent and go directly to their preferred airline’s website, said Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of TripAdvisor Flights. “Imagine a world where you have to download six or seven apps just to book a flight,” he said. “It’s already hard enough.” Some experts say a bigger problem in the airline industry is the dwindling competition that consolidation has wrought. “There’s clearly a competition problem in the airline industry,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s business school. “The fundamental problem is that airlines don’t have enough competition among airlines and enough flights and enough incentive to expand their capacity.” For Mr. Marion, the hassle of searching for the lowest fare ultimately proved too much. “I ended up booking it through Delta’s website,” he said. “I did pretty much exactly what Delta wanted me to do.”

Airlines,airplanes
Travel,Tourism
Business travel
Price
TripAdvisor.com
Southwest Airlines
Deutsche Lufthansa
Delta Air Lines


Big Step Seen for Bronx Tower Tied to Early Hip-Hop

Abstract: Housing advocates, tenants and elected officials have declared a victory in the Bronx with the announcement of the sale of the mortgage on an apartment building that has been called the birthplace of hip-hop . The sale, which was financed with significant help from city agencies, was the first step toward bringing in new owners after what tenants called an era of neglect. The group trying to take over the building, Workforce Housing Advisors , pledged to address the many violations and improve maintenance at the building, which had been highlighted by elected officials and tenant advocates as an emblem of New York’s affordable housing crisis . The hulking brick tower at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue has been a haven for generations of working-class families. In the early 1970s, a young resident named Clive Campbell, otherwise known as D.J. Kool Herc, held much-celebrated parties in the community room — parties that played a crucial role in the early evolution of hip-hop. The building was sold in 2008 to a real estate group that included Mark Karasick, a prominent real estate investor, as part of a wave of deals in neighborhoods that had long been ignored. City officials initially tried to stop the sale , saying that the financing was not viable, but they were not successful. When the real estate bubble burst, the building’s conditions deteriorated, leaving tenants to battle rats, roaches and the threats of foreclosure. Mr. Karasick’s group tried to sell the building, affordable-housing advocates said, while housing officials sought to broker a deal of their own. Mr. Karasick’s lawyer did not return a call for comment last week. The city’s Housing Development Corporation supported WinnResidential, a real estate firm based in Boston, and Workforce Housing Advisors, Winn’s local partner, as they expressed interest in buying the Sedgwick Avenue building. Workforce Housing Advisors, a new company, is run by executives with years of experience in important roles in city housing agencies. If they complete the sale, the Sedgwick building would be the group’s first property. The city provided a $5.6 million loan to allow Winn and Workforce Housing to buy the building’s mortgage from Sovereign Bank for $6.2 million. The money came from a new $750 million city program to rescue distressed multifamily buildings from unsupportable debt by helping buyers deemed responsible by the city take over the troubled properties. “We’re serious about making sure that buildings don’t destabilize and then destabilize neighborhoods as well,” said Rafael E. Cestero, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. He said the city would pursue similar deals to ensure that affordable housing “doesn’t fall victim to people who are there only to make a quick buck.” Gloria Robinson, president of the Sedgwick tenants’ association, said the sale offered the prospect of much-needed relief. “It had gotten to a point where nothing was being done properly around the building,” Ms. Robinson said. “The garbage wasn’t being picked up, the floors weren’t being cleaned. It just got really, really bad. It’s like we’re starting fresh now.” D.J. Kool Herc called it “a great moment for 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.” “This is a historic site,” he said. “This is where hip-hop comes from. This is it.” Maintenance should improve quickly — the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, set aside $3 million in discretionary money to make improvements there. The new mortgage owners have filed for foreclosure, which would allow the building to be sold at a public auction, likely to be held next year. City officials said they expected Workforce Housing Advisors to prevail, though they could not guarantee that they would offer the highest bid. Representative José E. Serrano, one of the building’s early champions, noted there were still hurdles to clear, but said, “This is a strong victory because this is such a visible building.” The property sale will follow the model set by Omni New York, the real estate company led by the former Mets player Mo Vaughn. Last year, the city helped broker a deal for Omni to take over 14 buildings owned by the Ocelot Capital Group, an investment group that bought and then abandoned 25 Bronx buildings, which fell into disrepair. “We’re going to bring the building back to a place where someone would be happy to live with dignity,” said Kevin Gallagher, a director of Workforce Housing Advisors. Senator Charles E. Schumer called the building “the birthplace of predatory equity.” “This triumph stands as a message to others: beware,” he said. “It’s a message to those owners or lenders who want to buy these buildings at exorbitant rates with the only purpose of kicking the tenants out and raising the rents.”

1520 Sedgwick
Bronx (NYC)
Housing and Real Estate
Historic Buildings and Sites
Mortgages
Affordable Housing
Workplace Housing Advisors


Rose Leads Grand Slam in Bermuda

Abstract: The United States Open champion Justin Rose shot a four-under-par 67 for a two-shot lead over Jason Dufner in the PGA Grand Slam of Golf in Southampton, Bermuda. The 36-hole exhibition, which ends Wednesday, is for the four major champions of the year. The British Open champion Phil Mickelson chose not to play and was replaced by Padraig Harrington. Dufner, the P.G.A. Championship winner, had a 69. The Masters champion Adam Scott had a 70. Harrington, who won the PGA Grand Slam last year, shot 74.


The Vatican: Papal Rumors Denied

Abstract: The Vatican denied on Friday that the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to send a senior official to a new post in Latin America was linked to a secret report about leaked papal papers. Since the pope announced his resignation last week, Italian newspapers have been full of rumors about conspiracies, secret reports and lobbies in the Vatican that they say pushed the pope to abdicate. Some reports hinted that there were sinister motives behind the pope’s decision to promote Msgr. Ettore Balestrero, an Italian who holds a post roughly equivalent to deputy foreign minister, to be the Vatican’s new ambassador to Colombia. The Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the suggestion that the pope had made the appointment to get Monsignor Balestrero out of the Vatican was “absurd, totally without foundation.” The newspaper La Repubblica has run several stories speculating about the contents of a secret report prepared for the pope by a commission of three cardinals who investigated the theft of personal papal documents that were leaked to the media.

Pope
Catholic Church
Pope Benedict
Europe


Louisville Turns Back Cincinnati’s Late Run and Rules the Big East

Abstract: The last time that Louisville and Cincinnati met in a league tournament title game, the Cardinals beat the Bearcats in the Metro Conference final in 1981. The three-decade gap, the defunct conference and the far-flung location of the two teams in relation to Madison Square Garden provided a fitting parallel as the Big East peeked into its future Saturday night. Billing the game, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino proclaimed, “Conference USA has come to the Big Apple.” That notion will be even more true as stalwarts programs like Syracuse and Pittsburgh exit the Big East and ones like Houston and Central Florida enter. In a sports year in which a lack of regard for geography, rivalries and common sense among college leadership forced the Big East to overhaul its membership, Louisville’s 50-44 victory over Cincinnati for the Big East tournament title could best be viewed as a harbinger for change. The teams delivered a forgettable, buzz-less performance in the final of what’s widely regarded as college basketball’s most electric postseason tournament. In the first meeting in the Big East tournament final of a pair of teams that were not original Big East members, the most notable items may have been the unsightly uniforms or the bizarre feel in Madison Square Garden. While the game had been long sold out and the seats eventually filled in, the atmosphere lacked the partisanship created by more traditional and local Big East teams like Connecticut, St. John’s and Villanova. “My thing was it felt so different when the game ended,” the ESPN commentator Jay Bilas said. “It’s not going to be the same again.” He added about the league’s future, “It will be really good, but it won’t be as great.” With West Virginia gone after this season and Pitt and Syracuse expected to leave after the 2012-13 season, the Big East will lose more than hallmark programs. While the Big East will likely remain a top-echelon league with programs like Memphis and Temple, it will lose the geography and intimacy that defined the league of Dave Gavitt, John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca. The double round-robin conference schedule has long been gone, as the league bloated itself with teams in order to stay alive and satisfy the monetary pull of football. “The Big East right now is taking on a whole new thing,” Pitino said. “It’s disappointing we’re losing some teams. But on the other hand, I think you guys and ladies will be excited about Memphis and Temple. Everybody wants change today. You see Nebraska leaving and going to this league and this league. It’s bizarre how everybody just leaves.” The outcome of Saturday night’s game was barely ever in doubt, further making the odd atmosphere feel antiseptic. Cincinnati overcame a horrific start shooting and a 16-point deficit to inject a pinch of drama in the final few minutes. The Bearcats cut the Louisville lead to 4 points with 2 minutes 35 seconds remaining on a layup by Jaquon Parker. But Parker then prevented them from getting any closer as he barely grazed the rim on a long jumper and missed two free throws — one short, one long — with 30 seconds remaining to stymie any chance at a Bearcats comeback. The Louisville players certainly did not celebrate any differently than past Big East champions. Peyton Siva, who had 10 points and 5 assists and was named the tournament’s most outstanding player, delivered a poignant moment by going into the stands and hugging his father. Louisville players cut down the nets while music blared and players exchanged embraces. “For the University of Louisville , our kids deserved it,” Pitino said. Few know the pull of New York more than Pitino, who grew up on Long Island, coached the Knicks and still has a distinct local accent. After the game, Pitino said he was walking down the street this week when a construction worker yelled at him, “You should have never left the Knicks.” Pitino looked back and saw that the worker was 26 or 27 years old. He laughed and said, “You were in diapers.” It is that type of verve and passion that typifies New York and separates the Big East tournament. That is why the Big East can brag that its new 18-team membership will have more Final Fours and a larger television footprint, but those things cannot replace the history and tradition of a league forged together by familiarity. Alumni sat next to one another in office cubicles and shivered through the frigid winters together in the northeast corridor. Not a lot of Providence and Southern Methodist graduates sit next to one another in offices. The most captivating moment of the night might have come as Seton Hall’s Anna Negron sang a rousing edition of the national anthem. Pitino explained the sloppy game by saying that the teams know each other so well — Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin used to coach for him — that they cannot run a play without the other coaching staff pointing out where the play is headed. And it is precisely that type of familiarity that will be harder to find once the new 18-team league settles in. The Big East will essentially be two leagues, worlds apart, bonded by difficult travel and a postseason trip to New York. Bilas said to his broadcast partner Sean McDonough when the game ended: “This feels funny. This feels different.” A new era beckons for the Big East, and it just may have started Saturday night. “Maybe at the end it will be really good,” Bilas said. “But it will never be the same.”

Basketball (College)
University of Louisville
University of Cincinnati
Big East Conference
Pitino Rick
Basketball
College Athletics


A Revamped Barcelona Has Its Sheen Back

Abstract: LONDON — After the first week of a complete schedule across Europe’s main leagues, the most heartwarming story is the old story. It is the return to completeness for Lionel Messi, who is not simply dancing with the ball as only he can but demonstrably enjoying the game again. He scored two goals in Barcelona’s easy 3-0 victory over Elche, a typical contribution, you might say, for Leo. Yet there were new dimensions Sunday night at the Camp Nou in Barcelona. One of those was a boy called Munir El Haddadi, who stepped into the senior team as if were born to do it. Munir had scored a goal with a shot from his own half of the field in junior soccer against Benfica last spring. On Sunday, the 18-year-old struck with that same left foot — a goal this time from just inside the opponent’s penalty area, but nevertheless a deft, almost casual flick off the outside of his shoe that it was, well, Messi-esque. Munir, who was born on the outskirts of Madrid, is of Moroccan heritage. He signed with the Barcelona academy, La Masia, when he was 15 and is a week away from turning 19. His goal on Sunday, which came after he struck the crossbar with another shot, made him the third-youngest player to score for Barcelona in La Liga, behind Bojan Krkic and Messi. Bojan, also a product of Barcelona’s academy, recently joined Stoke City in the English Premier league as he searches for a new start to his career at age 24. Barça is in its most comprehensive rebuilding phase in a decade. It has a new president and a new coach after Gerardo Martino was let go after last season. Martino had the job for only a year after replacing an ailing Tito Vilanova, who died last April of cancer at 45. All these traumas, plus court proceedings against the Messi and the Neymar families over money and taxes, compounded by the retirement of the club’s captain, Carles Puyol, and the slowing down of the aging assistant captain, Xavi Hernández. All those things — plus numerous injuries that hampered Messi — seemed to drain the zest out of the Camp Nou last season. And yes, the team finished without a trophy, an unacceptable second-place finish in the league behind Atlético Madrid. Worse, after FIFA ruled that the Barça academy illegally recruited foreign talents too young and threatened to shut down all transfers of senior players for 14 months, there were many inside and outside of Spain who mocked the Catalan club’s slogan, “Més que un club” — more than a club. Barcelona’s new president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, the board and the club’s sporting director, the former goalkeeper Andoni Zubizaretta, quickly embarked on rebuilding the team before the transfer ban could kick in. They would center their overhaul around Messi and Andrés Iniesta. To do that, they had no choice but to appeal the FIFA decision, a process that means it will finally be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. If the club loses the ruling, it will be shut out of the next few transfer windows, so Barcelona went on a grand buying and selling spree this summer as it tried to squeeze three transfer windows into one. “Messi stays, no matter what,” Bartomeu assured me back in April, when the playmaker, handicapped by injuries, looked a little dispirited by what was going on around him. “Whoever comes and goes,” Bartomeu had reasoned, “Messi is the identity of our club, our academy, our way of playing football. There is no price that could tempt us to sell him.” Even before it let its old coach go, Barça knew then who its new one would be: Luis Enrique, a contemporary of the former captain and coach Pep Guardiola. Both had come up through the coaching ranks with Barcelona’s youth team, and Enrique would be the man tasked with rebuilding the club to the same success it enjoyed under Guardiola from 2008 to 2012. Six senior players have arrived at a cost of nearly $240 million over the summer transfer window. Six other players, including Cesc Fàbregas, Alexis Sánchez and Bojan, have left at a combined cost of approximately half that. The difference between the outlay and recoupment was the $124 million or so it took to buy out Luis Suárez’s contract from Liverpool. How Liverpool spent all that money, and more, on virtually a full starting eleven shows just how much big money is recycled among Europe’s big teams. It will be a relief, for all of us, when the window shuts at midnight next Monday and we can get back to assessing performance and not finance. Sunday at the Camp Nou was an appetizer of that. Munir made the transition from the B team to the top team with the beautiful innocence of youth. He does not yet know fear or the burdens of expectation. He wears his hair like Neymar, but is more of an apprentice to Messi. Their first night together in the claret and blue shirts was reminiscent of when Ronaldinho — Old Smiley himself — ushered in the Messi era by setting up a goal for the then-17-year-old Argentine in the Catalan stadium. As Messi now nears the all-time record for goals in the Spanish league, there is another layer to the rebuilding of the team around him. What Barcelona was lacking was defense and midfield solidarity. Guardiola, when he was in charge, never saw it as a problem so long as the players worked the ball majestically and chased to win it back the very moment they lost possession. Enrique is looking for sterner stuff to blend with the artistry. The Croat Ivan Rakitic is now more of an enforcer, a gifted one, in midfield. Jérémy Mathieu and Thomas Vermaelen have arrived to add defense. But still, on the evidence of Sunday, passing and moving are the essence of the team. They are the hallmark made in La Masia, more than a club.

Soccer
Lionel Messi
Barcelona Soccer Team


Agent Was Secretly Investigated During Silk Road Trial

Abstract: The trial of Ross W. Ulbricht on charges he ran Silk Road, a website that allowed people to engage anonymously in drug dealing and other illicit activities, was widely watched in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Ulbricht was convicted in February and now faces a potential life sentence. But despite the high-profile nature of the case, an intriguing drama was playing out at the same time that the public did not see, newly unsealed court records show. It involved then-secret allegations of a rogue federal agent who was trying to enrich himself off the Silk Road scheme, information that Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers believed tainted the government’s case. On Dec. 15, weeks before the trial began, Judge Katherine B. Forrest held a closed hearing to discuss the delicate topic. The prosecutors, with the court’s approval, had told the defense lawyers that a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Carl Mark Force IV, was under investigation in San Francisco on suspicion that he stole money during the undercover inquiry into Silk Road. The defense wanted to use that information in Mr. Ulbricht’s trial, but the government objected on various grounds, including that Mr. Force was not aware of the full scope of the investigation into his activities, and that if he found out, he might flee, destroy evidence or seek to intimidate witnesses. “He does not know what the government or the grand jury is looking at,” Timothy T. Howard, a prosecutor, said at the hearing, a transcript shows. Judge Forrest ultimately barred the defense from using the information about Mr. Force. It was not until this Monday that the allegations became public , when the authorities announced that Mr. Force and a former Secret Service agent, Shaun W. Bridges, had been charged with money laundering and wire fraud in connection with the Silk Road investigation. Mr. Bridges’s lawyer has said his client maintains his innocence and will fight the charges; a lawyer for Mr. Force did not return a call seeking comment. But the court papers, unsealed by the judge, show a lengthy behind-the-scenes dispute over how the information about Mr. Force should be handled. On Nov. 21, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan wrote to the judge, asking for permission to tell the defense about the San Francisco investigation into Mr. Force and seeking an order prohibiting the defense from disclosing its existence. The letter contended Mr. Force had “played no role” in the Manhattan-based investigation of Mr. Ulbricht; rather, the agent had been part of a separate inquiry in Baltimore that resulted in the filing of charges there against Mr. Ulbricht. The prosecutors argued that the Force investigation was not “in any way exculpatory as to Ulbricht or otherwise material to his defense” — the kind of information the government would be required to turn over — but added that they were providing the information “in an abundance of caution.” On Dec. 1, Judge Forrest granted the government’s request, and Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers were told about the investigation. In early December, the defense responded with its own sealed arguments that the information about the Force investigation was both material and potentially exculpatory, and should be unsealed and admitted at trial. “We thought it was relevant and helpful to our defense, which was that other people had access to the Silk Road site and a motivation to frame Ross Ulbricht,” Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel, said on Wednesday. In court filings, the prosecutors, Mr. Howard and Serrin Turner, affirmed their opposition to disclosing the information to the jury, calling it “irrelevant and inflammatory,” and saying it tended to bolster Mr. Ulbricht’s guilt, not his innocence. They said that in the Manhattan case, the government “has not relied on and is not offering any evidence” from the Baltimore investigation. Mr. Dratel, at the Dec. 15 hearing, argued that without the information, “we’re going to be fighting this fight with hands tied behind our backs.” On Dec. 22, Judge Forrest issued a sealed decision agreeing with the prosecution that the information about Mr. Force was not exculpatory and citing the government’s claim that its disclosure “would result in significant prejudice to the integrity of the investigation.” Mr. Dratel said he would now seek a new trial for Mr. Ulbricht based on the information in the new charges. The United States attorney’s office had no comment.

Silk Road
Carl Mark Force IV
Ross William Ulbricht
Black market
DEA


Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math

Abstract: You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts. One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six? When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways. Yet a host of new studies suggests that the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education. One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning. “When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.” “What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.” This month in the journal Nature, Justin Halberda and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University and Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore described their study of 64 14-year-olds who were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more yellow dots or blue. ( Take a version of the test. ) Given the antiquity and ubiquity of the nonverbal number sense, the researchers were impressed by how widely it varied in acuity. There were kids with fine powers of discrimination, able to distinguish ratios on the order of 9 blue dots for every 10 yellows, Dr. Feigenson said. “Others performed at a level comparable to a 9-month-old,” barely able to tell if five yellows outgunned three blues. Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.” The researchers caution that they have no idea yet how the two number systems interact. Brain imaging studies have traced the approximate number sense to a specific neural structure called the intraparietal sulcus, which also helps assess features like an object’s magnitude and distance. Symbolic math, by contrast, operates along a more widely distributed circuitry, activating many of the prefrontal regions of the brain that we associate with being human. Somewhere, local and global must be hooked up to a party line. Other open questions include how malleable our inborn number sense may be, whether it can be improved with training, and whether those improvements would pay off in a greater appetite and aptitude for math. If children start training with the flashing dot game at age 4, will they be supernumerate by middle school? Dr. Halberda, who happens to be Dr. Feigenson’s spouse, relishes the work’s philosophical implications. “What’s interesting and surprising in our results is that the same system we spend years trying to acquire in school, and that we use to send a man to the moon, and that has inspired the likes of Plato, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has something in common with what a rat is doing when it’s out hunting for food,” he said. “I find that deeply moving.” Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind.

Mathematics
Science and Technology
Animals


How to Make Your Holiday Air Travel More Bearable

Abstract: There’s not much that any traveler can do about the crowds and long lines at airports during the holiday season. But there are ways to cope. Stay current on flight and airport status. Track the flight status through the airline’s app, and monitor the airport’s Twitter feed. Sign up for TSA PreCheck. Frequent travelers are nearly unanimous in their recommendations of this program , which gives expedited passage through security to travelers who have undergone background screening. There’s still time to sign up before this holiday season if you move quickly: The agency says there is about a two-week wait for appointments, and turnaround is about a week more if your background check is clear. Fly on the least busy days and times. Thanksgiving and Christmas Day tend to have lighter traffic than other times during the holidays, said Patrick Surry, chief data scientist at Hopper , an air travel app. An analysis by Hopper of Thanksgiving week travel patterns finds that, as a general rule, traffic at airports in Western states peaks early in the morning, as travelers try to bridge the time zone difference. Hubs like Chicago and Atlanta also tend to have busy mornings, while big international jumping-off points on the East Coast have an evening “rush hour” as travelers begin overnight journeys. Choose your low-fare carrier carefully. A cheaper fare can come with drawbacks, said Gary Leff, co-founder of InsideFlyer.com . Low-fare carriers don’t have as much redundancy in their schedules or the same kind of partner networks as their mainstream counterparts, so a delay or a cancellation could mean being stranded for days rather than hours. Check prohibited carry-on items and wrapped gifts. The Transportation Security Administration says that some security bottlenecks around the holidays happen because infrequent travelers don’t know what they cannot carry onboard the plane with them. (See the agency’s rundown of prohibited items here .) If you bring holiday gifts in your carry-on luggage, don’t wrap them, in case T.S.A. agents want to see what’s inside. Beware the short layover. Missing a connection is bad enough, but with planes packed to capacity, finding a seat on a later flight can be a challenge, Mr. Leff warned. Also consider that while you may be able to sprint to your gate and make your connection, any bags you checked might not move as swiftly. That could leave you at your destination on time, but without your luggage.

Airlines,airplanes
Airport security
Airport
Travel,Tourism
Holidays


Lipsky’s Cooperation With Authorities Prompts Unease

Abstract: ALBANY — The halls of the New York State Capitol have for years provided a happy hunting ground for prosecutors and ethics investigators. Over the last six years, 27 elected officials in Albany have been indicted, convicted, censured, or otherwise accused of misconduct, according to a running tally maintained by the New York Public Interest Research Group. The allegations have been diverse; they include a senator attacking a photographer and an assemblyman having an affair with an intern. Now, it seems probable that the list will grow: Richard J. Lipsky, a well-known city and state lobbyist convicted of bribing former State Senator Carl Kruger , has been secretly cooperating with the federal authorities , suggesting that other elected officials could soon find themselves in trouble with the law. “I thought, ‘Who did Lipsky turn on?’ ” said State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat who has pushed to improve ethics rules in Albany. She added, “I bet many people in elected office and in the lobbying world said to themselves, ‘I wonder if it’s X.’ ” Mr. Lipsky was a regular presence in the Capitol and in City Hall in Manhattan, his Bluetooth device seemingly permanently attached to his ear. He built a reputation as a lobbyist for the underdog, waging public battles with large corporations like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and powerful developers. His clients in recent years have included the Red Apple Group , which operates the Gristedes supermarket chain, and the developer Forest City Ratner, and he gave tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to officials at the city and state levels. Around City Hall on Tuesday, there was no shortage of speculation among officials and lobbyists as to whom Mr. Lipsky might incriminate. Much of the talk focused on the officials who represent parts of the city like the South Bronx, Downtown Brooklyn and central Queens, where Mr. Lipsky was actively involved in land-use debates, particularly in efforts to derail development projects. Asked if he was bracing for another wave of allegations, City Councilman G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, a former state attorney general, laughed and said: “Would I be surprised? No.” He also welcomed any information that could be provided by Mr. Lipsky. “As long as he provides reliable information, it’s a very good thing,” Mr. Koppell said. “We’ve got to get rid of that kind of corruption in our politics.” In Albany, the list of scandals has been long. The Kruger case, as well as sexual harassment allegations against Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, have been among the most prominent, but a number of other lawmakers are also under investigation: Senator Shirley L. Huntley, a Queens Democrat, was indicted last month on charges of taking part in a scheme to steal taxpayer money meant for a nonprofit group she had founded, while Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, is being investigated for misusing taxpayer money. Both lost primaries this month. At the City Council, two members have run afoul of the law in recent years after city and federal investigations into the Council’s corruption-plagued and long-opaque process of doling out discretionary funds. One, Miguel Martinez, is serving a five-year prison term for absconding with $106,000, some of which was intended for nonprofit groups. Another, Larry B. Seabrook, was convicted in July of nine counts of fraud for orchestrating a corruption scheme to channel hundreds of thousands of dollars in city money to his relatives and friends. “A lot of members who started with me are no longer here because they are being housed elsewhere,” City Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn observed Tuesday. She would not be surprised, she said, if Mr. Lipsky tried to reveal “some sordid and/or illegal relationships,” given his extensive dealings with the City Council and the number of big projects the Council has debated. “A lot of people are bracing themselves for what tomorrow holds,” Ms. James said. “I just hope it’s not any of my colleagues.” In recent years there has been a steady stream of candidates running for office on a platform of removing the taint of corruption from politics in New York City and in Albany, including the governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat. But the list of allegations of wrongdoing has continued to grow. “There’s too much of an incestuous relationship between lobbyists, elected officials and donors,” said State Senator Tony Avella, a first-term Democrat from Queens who previously served on the City Council. Assessing the extent to which lawmakers had cleaned up Albany, Mr. Avella said, “We haven’t even made a dent.” None of the elected officials interviewed said they would be surprised to see colleagues charged. “Unfortunately,” said City Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn, “that’s the track record.”

Corruption (Institutional)
Lipsky Richard J
New York City
Bribery and Kickbacks
Kruger Carl
Politics and Government
New York State
State Legislatures
Lobbying and Lobbyists


Rebels in Eastern Ukraine Dream of Reviving Soviet Heyday

Abstract: In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, the Supreme Soviet, as its separatist legislature is known, is nationalizing coal mines and reviving collective farms. At parades, people wave hammer-and-sickle flags; school officials talk of revising the curriculum to celebrate the triumphs of the Soviet Union. There is now a secret police force called the M.G.B., reminiscent of the K.G.B. Some rebels call it, only half-jokingly, the N.K.V.D., the notorious Stalin-era secret police force. The unrecognized separatist mini-states in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, were rescued from a near-death experience last month, when a Russian military incursion routed the Ukrainian Army as it appeared close to completing a campaign to wipe the rebels out. A cease-fire that preserved the regions’ semiautonomous status was signed on Sept. 5. In the relative lull in fighting since, rebel leaders have busily set about building the sort of neo-Soviet states that have cropped up in other pro-Russian enclaves in the former Soviet Union: in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both on the border between Russia and Georgia, and in Transnistria. If a stalemate similar to these “frozen conflicts” were to last in eastern Ukraine, it could make eventual reintegration with the rest of the country difficult, if not impossible. “There is a lot of pompous celebration of the victory over fascism, a love for Soviet abbreviations, symbols and monuments,” said Vladimir Solovyov, a journalist with the Russian newspaper Kommersant, who was raised in Transnistria, which is sometimes called a sliver of the Soviet Union. Such Soviet nostalgia may seem farcical to Westerners, yet where it has been institutionalized in these pro-Russian enclaves, it has been well received by the citizenry. Image In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian political views were once on the fringe but are now common, residents put up a recruitment poster for a military force. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times “They accept the repression because they know nothing else,” said Mr. Solovyov, who moved away when he was 16. “People don’t want to talk politics because nobody wants to be fired and lose the small salary they receive. We had a lot of elections, but the same person always won.” While there may be a cartoonish hue to the anachronisms here and elsewhere in the former Soviet sphere where unreformed Communist institutions have popped up — in Belarus or Turkmenistan, for example — they mask the darkly serious human rights abuses that critics say are endemic in such systems. Dmytro O. Potekhin, a Ukrainian political activist, was held for 48 days in a detention center in Donetsk that was set up in an industrial-themed modern art center called Isolation. To clear space for the prison, fighters with the Donetsk People’s Republic smashed art in the gallery, including a large outdoor installation of mirrors that they found objectionable. The interior layout had not changed much from its days as a gallery, Mr. Potekhin said, other than the addition of a few buckets for use as toilets, a horrible stench and blood-chilling wails. “It was absolutely terrible,” he said in a recent interview. He said he was subjected to mock executions and questioned in a room with children’s art hanging on the walls. Rebels kept, by his estimation, hundreds of detainees in the locked gallery spaces, where the screams from nightly beatings echoed through the building. “It’s a combination of 1917 and 1937,” he said, referring to the Bolshevik Revolution and one of the darker years of Stalin’s reign. Military tribunals have ordered the incarceration of an estimated 1,000 people. “It’s a police state with no court system,” Mr. Potekhin said. “I was kept because there is no system of releasing people. There is a very advanced, very violent system of capturing people, but no system to release them.” The leadership of the Donetsk People’s Republic is drawn from Russian volunteers and local residents whose pro-Soviet political views were once on the fringe but are suddenly in demand. Image An alternate view of the destroyed memorial, near Snizhne, in eastern Ukraine. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times Through the lean years of market-oriented and pro-democratic overhauls, Boris O. Litvinov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet and a self-described “committed Communist,” made a living with odd jobs unrelated to his university degree in Marxist Leninism. He played bass guitar in a cafe, hawked goods as a salesman and taught at a community college until, improbably, his hour finally arrived. “Over the past 23 years Ukraine created a negative image of the Soviet Union,” Mr. Litvinov, 60, said in an interview. “The Soviet Union was not about famine and repression. The Soviet Union was mines, factories, victory in the Great Patriotic War and in space. It was science and education and confidence in the future.” Still, Mr. Litvinov, who said he consulted often with officials in Moscow, insisted the new republic would not repeat Soviet repression. As part of the so-called New Russia, he said the People’s Republic used as its template the laws of contemporary Russia, not the Soviet Union. The republic intends to integrate with Russia and the Eurasian Union, a Russian-backed trade group that includes Belarus and Kazakhstan, he said. Mr. Litvinov said that extrajudicial imprisonment here was a temporary wartime expedient, and that a court system would be up and running by December. After elections scheduled for Nov. 2, he said, the Supreme Soviet would be renamed the People’s Soviet. But Mr. Litvinov said some of the excesses, like referring to the security force as the N.K.V.D., were not to be taken seriously. “Some military men say, ‘I am from the N.K.V.D.,’ but it’s just bravado,” he said. Soviet revivalism is not the only underpinning of the uprising here. An icon in Mr. Litvinov’s office, a gift from a Russian politician, illustrates the religious and nationalist elements of the ideology behind New Russia. Still, the Soviet influence is clear. Fyodor D. Berezin, a deputy defense minister, who before the uprising was an author of science fiction novels, described the system of government the Donetsk People’s Republic as aiming to build as “military Communism.” The Isolation art space, where he once held talks as an author, is better used as a prison and garrison, he said, because the art there was “beautiful but senseless.” “Yes, we have a parliament and so on, but we will rule with military methods,” he said in an interview. “It’s a necessary situation. Democracy, that beautiful structure of society, is possible when resources are abundant. We don’t have that now. Winter is here.”

Ukraine
Donetsk Ukraine
Luhansk
Politics
Soviet Union
Communism
Human Rights


At the Presidential Debate on Long Island, a Distinctive Accent Gets a Rare Voice

Abstract: New Yorkers are accustomed to being kicked to the political curb in presidential election years. The state will almost always vote Democratic, so it gets none of the tender love and care that the candidates lavish on its swing-state brethren. But then there was the debate Tuesday night at Hofstra University on Long Island, an event of uncommon and conspicuous New York-ness. Gone, if only for a moment, were those laconic Coloradans and ubiquitous Ohioans who dominate the political discourse every fourth autumn. At this debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney , the Republican nominee, there were voters named Greenberg and Ladka (or was it Latke?) and most of them spoke quickly — and through their sinus cavities — the way people are supposed to. “I’ve got to say, the questioners all looked and sounded like people who you’d see on the 6:47 out of Merillon Avenue,” said Stu Loeser , a former spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a native of Long Island (where, for those who do not know, Merillon Avenue is a station on the major railroad line). This, of course, was a local joke and one Mr. Loeser told — and retold — in various ways through his Twitter feed on Tuesday night. “Mistah President, Govahnah Romney, all due respect ...” he wrote, trying to capture that distinctly New Yawk accent. Nor was he alone in detecting a piquant flavor in the voices at the debate. Yahel Carmon, who works for the Obama campaign, wrote on Twitter : “I have bizarre mix of pride and shame about how heavy these Long Island accents are.” If the folk heroes of most campaigns are, to dip into cliché, stalwart heartlanders, like Joe the Plumber , it was unusual — and maybe even heartening — to discover that a homegrown hero had apparently been found in Jeremy Epstein, a student of exercise science (totally Long Island), who posed the debate’s first question. Mr. Epstein, 20, was interviewed on Wednesday by Chuck Todd of NBC News and asked to share “his thoughts on the experience.” He dutifully reported that he felt as though Mitt Romney had been “staring into” his “soul” and was personally touched that President Obama had told him that his future would be bright. It was also pleasing from a local point of view to see New Yorkers finally get some love, in classic pandering fashion, from the candidates. When talking about his education program, Mr. Obama did not bring up Harvard; he name-dropped Nassau Community College. Mr. Romney tried something similar by mentioning SUNY Albany, although it came out slightly mangled — but then again, who cares? There were some observers who saw religion at play in the debate, as well as geography. Tablet Magazine, which bills itself as a “daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas and culture,” published an article on Wednesday claiming the occasion was “one of the most Jewish” events in recent American political history. Why? “Four words: Town Hall. Long Island.” (The Jewish Daily Forward called it the most Jewish debate ever .) Still, not everyone thought that the debate was infused with a New York sensibility. Thomas R. Suozzi, a Democrat and a former Nassau County executive, was in the audience and remembered, in particular, when Mr. Romney crowded Mr. Obama on the stage. “If it had really been a New York event, there would have been a little more ‘get-outta-my-face’ talk,” Mr. Suozzi said.

Presidential Election of 2012
Debates (Political)
Long Island (NY)
Hofstra University
Obama Barack
Romney Mitt
New York State


Mets Set Season High for Runs

Abstract: CHICAGO — Perhaps it was just a cruel taunt from the fates, but on their most productive day in five years, the Mets finally conceded that their hopes of reaching the playoffs are over. Soon after the Mets demolished the Chicago Cubs, 18-5 , the team announced that Johan Santana would not make his next scheduled start because of what the pitching coach Dan Warthen said was “minute” pain in his left pectoral muscle. Minute also best describes the Mets’ chances of making the postseason , and withholding Santana from his next start was the tactical equivalent of hoisting a white flag up the pole. The Mets, including Santana, acknowledged that if they were still in a playoff race, he would have made his regularly scheduled start, Tuesday against the Nationals in Washington. “Of course,” Santana said. “Oh yeah, no question. I’m a competitor. If there is a different situation, then no question I would be pitching.” General Manager Omar Minaya agreed. “He could probably pitch, yeah,” Minaya said. “But we decided to take that away from him.” Those statements are as close as anyone on the Mets has come to publicly acknowledging what has appeared obvious for some time — that only a mathematician’s fantasy could produce a chain of events in which the Mets would make the playoffs this year. Even with Sunday’s lopsided victory, the Mets are 12 games behind the first-place Atlanta Braves in the National League East and 11 behind the Philadelphia Phillies in the wild-card standings , with only 25 to play. So there seems to be no reason to take the chance of using Santana when he is not 100 percent pain-free. Instead, the minor league right-hander Dillon Gee will be called up from Class AAA Buffalo to replace Santana, apparently against Santana’s will. “He’s one of those guys that fights you tooth and nail to get out there on the mound,” Manager Jerry Manuel said of Santana. “So we’re kind of taking it out of his hands, and saying, ‘Hey, we don’t think this the right time to push it.’ ” Santana strained his left pectoral muscle near where it attaches to the shoulder during his last start, Thursday in Atlanta , and was removed from the game after only 65 pitches. He played catch Saturday and said he felt fine, but during a light bullpen session Sunday, he could not tell the coaching staff that he was pain-free. But Santana has pitched with far worse pain. In 2008, for instance, he pitched with a torn meniscus in his knee during his last start of the season, with the Mets needing a victory to stave off elimination. “I know what pain feels like, believe me,” he said, “and this is not even close to what it was back then. But I understand they want to be very careful, and if that’s the right thing to do, then we’ll do it.” The day certainly had the feel of a team playing for nothing, at least based on the starting lineup, which featured six players who spent at least some of the year in the minors. On a day when the Mets reached season highs in runs and hits (21), David Wright, Jose Reyes and Jason Bay did not play. The last time the Mets scored 18 runs was Aug. 24, 2005, at Arizona, and they had not had 21 hits since April 29, 2000, when they had 23 at Colorado. The rookie shortstop Ruben Tejada had a career day with his first home run and five runs batted in, two on a bases-loaded bloop single off starter Ryan Dempster in the fifth inning. “Obviously, the hit that he got with the bases loaded and two outs against Dempster was the biggest hit of the day for us,” Manuel said, “because we had been horrible with the bases loaded.” Tejada came into the game batting .185 with only eight runs batted in over 56 games, thus adding more than 50 percent of his R.B.I. total in one remarkable day. Ike Davis went 4 for 6 with a two-run homer in the eighth inning, his second home run in two days, and knocked in three runs. Jon Niese (9-7), who earned the victory even though he allowed five runs, had two hits and two R.B.I. In the ninth, Chris Carter, who also spent some of the season in Class AAA Buffalo, singled with the bases loaded to drive in his former Bisons teammates Josh Thole and Nick Evans. In all, eight position players who had spent time in the minors had a hit or a run. That is typical in spring training and when a team is out of contention. INSIDE PITCH Jose Reyes took batting practice and said his sore oblique muscle was not completely healed. He may play Tuesday or Wednesday in Washington. ... In addition to Dillon Gee, who will start Tuesday, the Mets are planning to call up Raul Valdes, Sean Green and Jesus Feliciano.