The Force of Populism in Politics

The Wisdom of Crowds
When populist rage leads to smart policy.
By Michael Hirsh and Daniel Gross NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010
John Dingell is one of the few people in Washington who remembers the last time so much populist anger gripped the country. It was early 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. The Michigan congressman, now 83, was a wide-eyed kid listening to his father—also a congressman—speak at the family dinner table about losing his entire net worth of $7,500. "Americans all hated the damn bankers, they hated Wall Street," Dingell tells NEWSWEEK. "We had more communists in this country than there were in the Soviet Union because" of rage against the so-called banksters. No one knew this better than the incoming president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The story is told that a supporter warned FDR that if he failed now, with the nation in chaos, he'd be known as "our worst president," and Roosevelt supposedly replied: "If I fail, I'll be your last president." FDR exhorted his New Dealers, "Above all, try something!" While it took time to get going, the hodgepodge of recovery programs he came up with—some successful, others not—managed to appease most of the populist outrage.
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Barack Obama isn't saddled with the same degree of economic disaster as Franklin Roosevelt; the nation suffers 10 percent unemployment, which is bad, but it's not 25 percent. Yet the 44th president may face a political problem almost as sticky. Obama, like FDR, must appease populist anger rising from both left and right. Obama's giant stimulus, his health-care plan, and his continuation of the Bush administration's various bailout programs have ignited a prairie-fire backlash from the right (fueled in part by cynical Beltway Republicans). They call themselves tea partiers. The left's outrage is less organized (it's the left, after all), but reflects a visceral sense that the president has coddled Wall Street and given short shrift to Main Street. "The Democratic base is out of patience here," says a senior labor leader. "We're at a breaking point." There's something deeper at work beyond politics. We've witnessed an epic failure of the establishment—political, financial, business, even cultural.
All of which adds up to a very unhappy moment for Obama. The president and the Ivy Leaguers he has surrounded himself with are not natural populists. Since its appearance on the scene in the late 19th century, the language of populism has been one of opposition and incitement, clashes and fights—the Eastern bankers vs. the Midwestern farmers, rich white urban elites vs. poorer rural whites. That's not the language Obama traffics in. When the cerebral Obama inveighs against "fat-cat bankers," the phrase doesn't trip off his tongue. He's a community organizer, not a rabble-rouser. And he must know that populism, generally speaking, has been the refuge for losers in the American political process. No populist candidate has even come close to the presidency, though Teddy Roosevelt hit the 27 percent mark with his Bull Moose run in 1912 (he'd already been president, after all) and Ross Perot amassed an impressive 19 percent in 1992. William Jennings Bryan, the original Populist candidate, was the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but received fewer votes in each successive campaign.
Above all, populist uprisings usually careen out of control, driven by mindless anger. To some extent that's what is happening now. By the time of his confirmation vote last week, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke had been blamed for everything from Alan Greenspan's deregulatory policies to the flawed oversight of Wall Street, even though most of the worst-hit financial institutions were outside the Fed's supervisory reach. Yes, Bernanke made mistakes—serious ones—in the run-up to the financial crisis. But he also arguably did more than anyone to pull the global economy back from the brink of a Great Depression. Bernanke survived, but his populist penance was to suffer the largest "no" vote ever in the history of the Fed chairmanship, 70 to 30, with damage to the Fed's reputation that could be permanent.
Even so, smart presidents don't confront the populists head-on, they defang them by giving them some of what they want. After FDR launched the New Deal—and John Dingell's father helped to write the Glass-Steagall law separating commercial from investment banking—the nation slowly recovered and Roosevelt's personal popularity soared. Populist rabble-rousers like Huey Long on the left and Charles Coughlin on the right lost their resonance (or, in Long's case, were assassinated).
In recent weeks Obama has tried to mollify both populist camps. To satisfy the left, he announced a $100 billion fee on large banks, a new jobs program, infrastructure investments, and middle-class tax cuts. He also abruptly embraced a proposal from one his most prominent progressive critics, former Federal Reserve chairman and sometime adviser Paul Volcker, to ban banks from risky trading. Appealing to the right—and, increasingly, a piqued center that includes deficit-hawk Dems like Evan Bayh—Obama has announced a three-year spending freeze for discretionary programs that don't include defense and national security, Medicare, or Social Security. Above all, hoping to appeal to both sides, Obama has become far more strident in speaking against Wall Street.
But Obama is going to need a lot more than his usual rhetorical flourishes in the months ahead. There's a perception, largely accurate, that one set of rules applies to one group of people—generally wealthy and well connected—and another set of rules applies to the rest. And worse, that the many are subsidizing the few, cleaning up the messes they made. In too many areas, there are zero-sum games, in which the private interests of those who have access to the levers of power are arrayed against the interests of the large mass of American citizens. Generally speaking, the people have come out losers: insurance companies against policyholders, borrowers against lenders, and, most recently and explosively, taxpayers against the banks. Regardless of how much of the bailout money comes back, there's no way to spin it other than as a transfer of wealth from public taxpayers to the shareholders, bondholders, and managers of large, poorly run financial institutions.
The bottom line: there can be such a thing as smart populism, too—and if there ever were a time for it, it's now. (As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently said: "Just because [ideas] seem populist doesn't mean they're not the right thing to do.") Accordingly, here's a NEWSWEEK guide to smart populism in the Age of Obama. If implemented correctly, these proposals would not only help to bring us out of recession, they could also begin to fix the deeper problems in the economy. And they might go a long way toward mollifying both left and right (though the right is likely to stay unhappy no matter what is done with the Dems in power). The general principles: replace policies that pander to corporations with ones that help people, give companies incentives to be better citizens, finance government operations more equitably, and stop the pernicious practice of socializing losses and privatizing gains.
Slash Wall Street compensation, systemically and permanently, and provide carrots and sticks to make the financial industry behave more responsibly. If Washington can create new laws to regulate Wall Street's trading practices, there's no reason our legislators can't do the same thing with compensation. One smart proposal has been offered by FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair, a Republican; she would tie insurance premiums charged to the banks to how risky their business models are. Another proposal would tie any compensation to long-term performance and add "clawback" provisions—rescinding pay and bonuses—if trades go bad. Yes, Wall Street CEOs will surely whine that without giant pay-and-bonus packages, they'll lose their best talent. But guess what: that would also be good for the economy. In recent years those enormous pay packages have lured America's best and brightest students to the Street, and away from more productive endeavors. Math whizzes became "quants," inventing products like CDOs that added almost no real economic growth and nearly sank the global economy. If Wall Street compensation is reduced enough, maybe then our best brains will go into real engineering, or bioengineering, or medicine. Or making better iPads.
Cram down mortgages. Everyone in Washington is worried about the "moral hazard" of forgiving home-owner debt on bad mortgages—it will make borrowers lazy and careless in the future, critics say. (The tea-party movement was launched by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli's rant about this.) Funny, nobody makes the same argument when giant investment firms walk away from billion-dollar mortgages on apartment complexes and office buildings. Economists agree that one of the biggest dead weights on the economy is the vast number of mortgagees whose homes are underwater, amounting to at least a quarter of the nation's 45 million mortgages, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. Yet the Obama administration's ultracautious program for inducing lenders to give easier terms, called the Home Affordable Modification Program, simply isn't enough. Every time there's a renegotiation of terms, the banks earn another fee—and the rate of new defaults after a year under the program is as high as 75 percent.
It's time to reconsider some intelligent proposals that the financial industry hates but is now wealthy enough again to endure: writing down principal on the mortgages, and for those who are seriously underwater, letting bankruptcy judges "cram down" or reduce the amount of mortgage owed. This would give indigent mortgage holders the right to work through debts over several years under Chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code. It's analogous to what happens to troubled corporations when they declare Chapter 11: a judge oversees a deal between them and their creditors, and they often emerge with a clean slate. One such proposal by Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was defeated last year.
Fix "too big to fail" once and for all. Obama was correct when he said in his State of the Union that everyone is united in their hatred of the bank bailout. The progressives have always mistrusted Big Finance, and conservatives are upset that the proper functioning of free markets has been undermined by behemoths that no longer have to play by free-market rules. There are actually some signs that both sides are beginning to unite around the "Volcker rule." Even Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute says that there's probably no other way but to keep traditional banks away from Wall Street wizardry. "If there's got to be a [federally] guaranteed sector, it at least should be boring," he says.
Crack down on market manipulation that is driving up the cost of basic commodities. Everyone's focused on mortgage debt. But one reason people can't pay it on time is the high cost of oil, gas, and food. To little notice, the actual physical supplies of commodities have not been determining market prices as much as the frenzy of buying and holding by customers of the big investment banks. A few simple rules curbing big-time commodity speculators by imposing "position limits" could help, but the Obama administration has not been backing up a few progressives on the Hill, like Sen. Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, who've been fighting for such rules.
Cut payroll taxes while adding a tax on speculation. Here's another area where left and right might be able to agree. Conservatives note that if government wants to discourage something, it should impose more taxes on that activity. If it wants to encourage something, it should reduce those taxes. Fine, we want more payrolls—jobs, in other words—and less Wall Street–style gambling. So resurrect the idea of a tax on financial trading, which was floated many years ago by Nobel Prize–winning economist James Tobin—no radical populist. This would both raise revenue and send a signal. Meanwhile Sens. Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, have proposed a plan to boost hiring by exempting any company that brings on a worker who has been unemployed for at least two months from the 6.2 percent of Social Security payroll tax for the rest of the year.
More broadly, come up with a more rational, more progressive set of national tax policies. The right won't like this one, but it's a key way to restore long-term health to the economy. The Bush-era tax cuts gave us all that long-term fiscal budgetary pain without any of the macroeconomic gain. They are slated to expire, and so they should. Returning much of the tax code to the state it was in the 1990s—higher estate taxes, higher taxes on capital gains and dividends, higher taxes on the highest income brackets—is a necessary and responsible move.
What's more, the tax code persists in treating certain income—mostly that made by really rich people—as more equal than other income. A loophole in the tax code allows private-equity- and hedge-fund managers to pay capital-gains rates (as low as 15 percent) on income they get for managing money for other people. This should be eliminated. Here's the ultimate irony: during the Bush era in the 2000s, the tax climate for investing was never more favorable, and it was the worst decade for stocks in recent memory.
This is hardly a cure-all for what ails America, but then most of the populists aren't asking for a panacea. They're asking for answers. Barack Obama is still in a position to supply them, and here he might take some encouragement from FDR. Historian Alan Brinkley points out there are "interesting similarities between the trajectory of Roosevelt's presidency and Obama's. Both began with tremendous popularity and hopes and expectations, and by end of the first year of both of their terms there was quite a lot disillusionment." FDR responded with what became known as his "second New Deal"—ramming through an astonishing flurry of legislation that included the creation of Social Security and the Securities and Ex-change Commission and the Wagner Act (giving labor the right to organize and bargain collectively). "Roosevelt went through very much the same kind of uprising of anger in 1934 as Obama is experiencing," says Brinkley, but ultimately FDR managed to "outflank" it. Obama's got a more recalcitrant Congress to deal with, Brinkley notes, but he still has three more years (at least) to recover from a crisis that's far less serious.
If the president can manage to get ahead of the populist sentiment, rather than merely chase it as he's currently doing, he will begin to fulfill the hopes and expectations he raised in his campaign, and which now seem so deflated.


Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/232856

Air Force playing games on PS3

U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s
by Mike Smith
yahoo_games_p893:http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/u-s-air-force-building-supercomputer-from-ps3s/1387199
Buzz up!

Image Courtesy of the USAF
No doubt the Air Force purchasing department gets some odd requests from time to time, but we'd love to have seen the grin on the face of the officer tasked with procuring some 1,700 Playstation 3s for a USAF facility in Rome, NY.
Before you complain about your tax dollars being spent on toys, the machines aren't for gaming. Instead, the facility -- an Air Force research lab -- will join them into a parallel-computing cluster that, when complete, will number well over 2,000 PS3s.
The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.
"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," the facility's computing director Mark Barnell told Stars and Stripes. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."
The cluster won't be as powerful as a regular supercomputing rig, but it will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly: it'll consume as much as 95% less electrical power and shut down unused machines when the cluster isn't running at full capacity.


(I just found this incredibly interesting, and terrifying. I am a tech phobe when it comes to computers imitating human behavior. Keep my calendar, yes. Interact socially with me, no. And now the Air Force is trying to delve into smarter computers. Grr.)

November 15, 2009

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists’

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” He said he got his statement from his staff and “did not know where they got the information from.”

Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to “revise and extend my remarks.” It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.

The e-mail messages and their attached documents indicate that the statements were based on information supplied by Genentech employees to one of its lobbyists, Matthew L. Berzok, a lawyer at Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok who is identified as the “author” of the documents. The statements were disseminated by lobbyists at a big law firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

In an e-mail message to fellow lobbyists on Nov. 5, two days before the House vote, Todd M. Weiss, senior managing director of Sonnenschein, said, “We are trying to secure as many House R’s and D’s to offer this/these statements for the record as humanly possible.”

He told the lobbyists to “conduct aggressive outreach to your contacts on the Hill to see if their bosses would offer the attached statements (or an edited version) for the record.”

In recent years, Genentech’s political action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign contributions to many House members, including some who filed statements in the Congressional Record. And company employees have been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers. But Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.”

Mr. Morris said Republicans and Democrats, concerned about the unemployment rate, were receptive to the company’s arguments about the need to keep research jobs in the United States.

The statements were not intended to change the bill, which was not open for much amendment during the debate. They were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines.

Democrats emphasized the bill’s potential to create jobs in health care, health information technology and clinical research on new drugs.

Republicans opposed the bill, but praised a provision that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech.

Lawmakers from both parties said it was important to conduct research on such “biosimilar” products in the United States. Several took a swipe at aggressive Indian competitors.

Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.”

In separate statements using language suggested by the lobbyists, Representatives Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, both Republicans, said: “One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country. Unfortunately, many of the largest companies that would seek to enter the biosimilar market have made their money by outsourcing their research to foreign countries like India.”

In remarks on the House floor, Representative Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, recalled that his family had faced eviction when his father was sick and could not make payments on their home. He said the House bill would save others from such hardship.

In a written addendum in the Congressional Record, Mr. Hare said the bill would also create high-paying jobs. Timothy Schlittner, a spokesman for Mr. Hare, said: “That part of his statement was drafted for us by Roche pharmaceutical company. It is something he agrees with.”

The boilerplate in the Congressional Record included some conversational touches, as if actually delivered on the House floor.

In the standard Democratic statement, Representative Robert A. Brady of Pennsylvania said: “Let me repeat that for some of my friends on the other side of the aisle. This bill will create high-paying, high-quality jobs in health care delivery, technology and research in the United States.”

Mr. Brady’s chief of staff, Stanley V. White, said he had received the draft statement from a lobbyist for Genentech’s parent company, Roche.

“We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record,” Mr. White said. “I asked him for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

Some differences were just a matter of style. Representative Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York, said, “I see this bill as an exciting opportunity to create the kind of jobs we so desperately need in this country, while at the same time improving the lives of all Americans.”

Representative Donald M. Payne, Democrat of New Jersey, used the same words, but said the bill would improve the lives of “ALL Americans.”

Mr. Payne and Mr. Brady said the bill would “create new opportunities and markets for our brightest technology minds.” Mr. Pascrell said the bill would “create new opportunities and markets for our brightest minds in technology.”

In nearly identical words, three Republicans — Representatives K. Michael Conaway of Texas, Lynn Jenkins of Kansas and Lee Terry of Nebraska — said they had criticized many provisions of the bill, and “rightfully so.”

But, each said, “I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Mistrial Declared in Murder Trial

Judge declares mistrial in 2007 drive-by murder case
By TONY RIZZOThe Kansas City Star
“I knew him prior.”
Those four words uttered recently by a police detective in front of a jury prompted a Jackson County judge Wednesday to dismiss the murder case against a Kansas City man.
The dismissal “with prejudice” means that prosecutors cannot re-try Markus D. Lee for the 2007 drive-by killing of Eliseo Thomas. Assistant Public Defender Molly Hastings requested, and the judge ordered, that Lee be released Wednesday.
It was the third time this decade that Lee, 25, was charged with committing a murder and the third time he has avoided conviction.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar could not be reached Wednesday about whether he will seek an appeal.
Kansas City police officials said they wanted to see the judge’s written order before commenting. The judge said he planned to have the written order available Monday.
In Wednesday’s oral ruling, Circuit Judge Robert M. Schieber said he believed that the detective’s comment during Lee’s trial earlier this month was an intentional effort to “goad” Lee’s attorneys into seeking a mistrial because the case wasn’t going well.
Because he considered the mistrial to be the result of governmental misconduct, Schieber ruled that trying Lee a second time would violate his constitutional protection against double jeopardy.
“It is with a great deal of angst that I do this,” Schieber said.
But the judge said that he had to hold law enforcement officers to the same rules and standards that attorneys must follow to ensure a “level playing field” in the courtroom.
“For me to not do that would render those rules meaningless,” he said.
Schieber said that if there was no sanction against such intentional misconduct then anytime a law enforcement officer felt a case “was going south” he could say something inappropriate and prompt a mistrial.
“I can’t allow that to happen,” Schieber said.
He noted that after he declared a mistrial in Lee’s case, the jurors and alternates told him that they would have voted unanimously for acquittal. They also told him that the detective’s statement about knowing Lee implied to them that he had been arrested previously.
That demonstrated that the comment was prejudicial, the judge said.
Lee, who has been in custody since shortly after the March 2007 incident, was charged along with two other men with killing Thomas and wounding three others during a drive-by shooting near 30th Street and Agnes Avenue. The shooting sparked a high-speed chase in which suspects fired shots at pursuing police officers.
The two other defendants are in custody pending their trials.
In 2006, a jury acquitted Lee on charges that he killed a man during a 2002 block party and later gunned down a witness to that crime. At trial, witnesses who had initially identified Lee changed their stories and said they didn’t witness the shootings.
His trial for allegedly killing Thomas began Nov. 9 and was close to wrapping up Nov. 12 when Detective Danny Phillips testified about collecting shell casings and obtaining a DNA sample from Lee after his arrest.
Phillips was being cross-examined by Hastings about when he collected the DNA sample when he added “I knew him prior.” Hastings moved for a mistrial, which Schieber granted.
She later filed the motion that Schieber ruled on Wednesday. Phillips could not be reached for comment after Wednesday’s ruling.
After Wednesday’s hearing, Hastings said she appreciated the judge holding police accountable.
“They are not exempt from following the rules,” she said.

Obama vs. Education

Obama speech to students draws conservative ire
By LIBBY QUAID and LINDA STEWART BALL, Associated Press Writers Libby Quaid And Linda Stewart Ball, Associated Press Writers 32 mins ago
DALLAS – President Barack Obama's back-to-school address next week was supposed to be a feel-good story for an administration battered over its health care agenda. Now Republican critics are calling it an effort to foist a political agenda on children, creating yet another confrontation with the White House.
Obama plans to speak directly to students Tuesday about the need to work hard and stay in school. His address will be shown live on the White House Web site and on C-SPAN at noon EDT, a time when classrooms across the country will be able to tune in.
Schools don't have to show it. But districts across the country have been inundated with phone calls from parents and are struggling to address the controversy that broke out after Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals urging schools to watch.
Districts in states including Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, Wisconsin have decided not to show the speech to students. Others are still thinking it over or are letting parents have their kids opt out.
Some conservatives, driven by radio pundits and bloggers, are urging schools and parents to boycott the address. They say Obama is using the opportunity to promote a political agenda and is overstepping the boundaries of federal involvement in schools.
"As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education — it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality," said Oklahoma state Sen. Steve Russell. "This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Arizona state schools superintendent Tom Horne, a Republican, said lesson plans for teachers created by Obama's Education Department "call for a worshipful rather than critical approach."
The White House plans to release the speech online Monday so parents can read it. He will deliver the speech at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va.
"I think it's really unfortunate that politics has been brought into this," White House deputy policy director Heather Higginbottom said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"It's simply a plea to students to really take their learning seriously. Find out what they're good at. Set goals. And take the school year seriously."
She noted that President George H.W. Bush made a similar address to schools in 1991. Like Obama, Bush drew criticism, with Democrats accusing the Republican president of making the event into a campaign commercial.
Critics are particularly upset about lesson plans the administration created to accompany the speech. The lesson plans, available online, originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."
The White House revised the plans Wednesday to say students could "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals."
"That was inartfully worded, and we corrected it," Higginbottom said.
In the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, the 54,000-student school district is not showing the 15- to 20-minute address but will make the video available later.
PTA council president Cara Mendelsohn said Obama is "cutting out the parent" by speaking to kids during school hours.
"Why can't a parent be watching this with their kid in the evening?" Mendelsohn said. "Because that's what makes a powerful statement, when a parent is sitting there saying, 'This is what I dream for you. This is what I want you to achieve.'"
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, said in an interview with the AP that he's "certainly not going to advise anybody not to send their kids to school that day."
"Hearing the president speak is always a memorable moment," he said.
But he also said he understood where the criticism was coming from.
"Nobody seems to know what he's going to be talking about," Perry said. "Why didn't he spend more time talking to the local districts and superintendents, at least give them a heads-up about it?"
Several other Texas districts have decided not to show the speech, although the district in Houston is leaving the decision up to individual school principals. In suburban Houston, the Cypress-Fairbanks district planned to show the address and has had its social studies teachers assemble a curriculum and activities for students.
"If someone objected, we would not force them to listen to the speech," spokeswoman Kelli Durham said.
In Wisconsin, the Green Bay school district decided not to show the speech live and to let teachers decide individually whether to show it later.
In Florida, GOP chairman Jim Greer released a statement that he was "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
Despite his rhetoric, two of the larger Florida districts, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, plan to have classes watch the speech. Students whose parents object will not have to watch.
"We're extending the same courtesy to the president as we do with any elected official that wants to enter our schools," said Linda Cobbe, a Hillsborough schools spokeswoman. Cobbe said the district, which includes Tampa, has gotten calls from upset parents but said officials don't think the White House is trying to force politics on kids.
The Minnesota Association of School Administrators is recommending against disrupting the first day of school to show the speech, but Minnesota's biggest teachers' union is urging schools to show it.
Quincy, Ill., schools decided Thursday not to show the speech. Superintendent Lonny Lemon said phone calls "hit like a load of bricks" on Wednesday.
One Idaho school superintendent, Murray Dalgleish of Council, urged people not to rush to judgment.
"Is the president dictating to these kids? I don't think so," Dalgleish said. "He's trying to get out the same message we're trying to get out, which is, `You are in charge of your education.'"

Madonna booed in Eastern Europe.

BUCHAREST, Romania - At first, fans politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies — and the cheers gave way to jeers.

The sharp mood change that swept the crowd of 60,000, who had packed a park for Wednesday night's concert, underscores how prejudice against Gypsies remains deeply entrenched across Eastern Europe.

Despite long-standing efforts to stamp out rampant bias, human rights advocates say Roma probably suffer more humiliation and endure more discrimination than any other people group on the continent.

Sometimes, it can be deadly: In neighboring Hungary, six Roma have been killed and several wounded in a recent series of apparently racially motivated attacks targeting small countryside villages predominantly settled by Gypsies.

"There is generally widespread resentment against Gypsies in Eastern Europe. They have historically been the underdog," Radu Motoc, an official with the Soros Foundation Romania, said Thursday.

Roma, or Gypsies, are a nomadic ethnic group believed to have their roots in the Indian subcontinent. They live mostly in southern and eastern Europe, but hundreds of thousands have migrated west over the past few decades in search of jobs and better living conditions.

Romania has the largest number of Roma in the region. Some say the population could be as high as 2 million, although official data put it at 500,000.

Until the 19th century, Romanian Gypsies were slaves, and they've gotten a mixed response ever since: While discrimination is widespread, many East Europeans are enthusiastic about Gypsy music and dance, which they embrace as part of the region's cultural heritage.

That explains why the Roma musicians and a dancer who had briefly joined Madonna onstage got enthusiastic applause. And it also may explain why some in the crowd turned on Madonna when she paused during the two-hour show — a stop on her worldwide "Sticky and Sweet" tour — to touch on their plight.

"It has been brought to my attention ... that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe," she said. "It made me feel very sad."

Thousands booed and jeered her.

A few cheered when she added: "We don't believe in discrimination ... we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone." But she got more boos when she mentioned discrimination against homosexuals and others.

"I jeered her because it seemed false what she was telling us. What business does she have telling us these things?" said Ionut Dinu, 23.

Madonna did not react and carried on with her concert, held near the hulking palace of the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, said Madonna and other had told her there were cheers as well as jeers.

"Madonna has been touring with a phenomenal troupe of Roma musicians who made her aware of the discrimination toward them in several countries so she felt compelled to make a brief statement," Rosenberg said in an e-mail. "She will not be issuing a further statement."

One Roma musician said the attitude toward Gypsies is contradictory.

"Romanians watch Gypsy soap operas, they like Gypsy music and go to Gypsy concerts," said Damian Draghici, a Grammy Award-winner who has performed with James Brown and Joe Cocker.

"But there has been a wave of aggression against Roma people in Italy, Hungary and Romania, which shows me something is not OK," he told the AP in an interview. "The politicians have to do something about it. People have to be educated not to be prejudiced. All people are equal, and that is the message politicians must give."

Nearly one in two of Europe's estimated 12 million Roma claimed to have suffered an act of discrimination over the past 12 months, according to a recent report by the Vienna-based EU Fundamental Rights Agency. The group says Roma face "overt discrimination" in housing, health care and education.

Many do not have official identification, which means they cannot get social benefits, are undereducated and struggle to find decent jobs.

Roma children are more likely to drop out of school than their peers from other ethnic groups. Many Romanians label Gypsies as thieves, and many are outraged by those who beg or commit petty crimes in Western Europe, believing they spoil Romania's image abroad.

In May 2007, Romanian President Traian Basescu was heard to call a Romanian journalist a "stinky Gypsy" during a conversation with his wife. Romania's anti-discrimination board criticized Basescu, who later apologized.

Human rights activists say the attacks in Hungary, which began in July 2008, may be tied to that country's economic crisis and the rising popularity of far-right vigilantes angered by a rash of petty thefts and other so-called "Gypsy crime." Last week, police arrested four suspects in a nightclub in the eastern city of Debrecen.

Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia also have been criticized for widespread bias against Roma.

Madonna's outrage touched a nerve in Romania, but it seems doubtful it will change anything, said the Soros Foundation's Motoc.

"Madonna is a pop star. She is not an expert on interethnic relations," he said.

___

AP Writers Alison Mutler in Bucharest, William J. Kole in Vienna and Nekesa Mumbi Moody in New York contributed to this report.

Difficulty in justifying detention
from SCOTUSblog by Lyle Denniston

A federal judge’s lengthy but heavily censored opinion released on Friday demonstrated anew the difficulty that the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are having in trying to justify in court the continued holding of some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A prisoner with family links to terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, with personal encounters with Bin Laden, with at least a brief round of training in an Al-Qaeda military camp, with close knowledge of some of bin Laden’s bodyguards, and with other alleged links to Al-Qaeda soldiers — all of that was not enough, singly or together, to justify the detention of a Yemeni national, Mohammed Al-Adahi, Senior U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled.

Last Monday, the judge released a one-page order finding his detention unlawful, and ordering the government to take steps to arrange for his release, and to report back on Sept. 18 on what had been done to bring about release. On Friday, after clearance by a court intelligence-reviewing officer, her 42-page, redacted opinion explaining that ruling was made public. It can be downloaded here.

The Al-Adahi case is both typical and somewhat novel. It is like many other cases in which the government is relying on intelligence reports based on what people said or said they observed, rather than on hard, physical facts, evidence that is sometimes second-hand statements of what others had said or claimed they saw, coincidences that seem to add up to a “mosaic” that suggested involvement with terrorist “jihad” or enemy soldiers, and information from other detainees, as well as interviews with the detainee himself.

The case is somewhat unusual because the evidence offered against Al-Adahi goes considerably beyond the detail that government intelligence has produced in other detainee cases. Judge Kessler, in fact, described the evidence assembled against Al-Adahi as appearing to be “sensational and compelling.” In the end, however, she found it did not add up to enough to meet the legal standard she adopted for U.S. military detention of terrorist suspects.

While her definition of who may be detained is not novel (she borrowed it from another District judge), it does demand more proof of terrorist links than the standard used by some of Kessler’s other colleagues. She requires proof, for example, that a detainee have been a part of a terrorist “organized armed forces,” not just an individual who may have provided some support for Al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. In that sense, the Pentagon’s burden of justifying detention is higher.

Between the lines of the Kessler opinion, it was clear that government officials believed they had a very strong case for keeping Al-Adahi imprisoned. While the kind of evidence was typical, the scope and detail of it, they clearly assumed, would be more convincing.

But that was not how this judge found it. The end result was that information that showed enough linkages to satisfy the standards for an intelligence report, or series of reports, was found to be wanting as legal evidence to support further detention.

Here is the way Judge Kessler summed up: “When all is said and done, this is the evidence we have in this case. Al-Adahi probably had several relatives who served as bodyguards for Usama Bin Laden and were deeply involved with and supportive of al-Qaida and its activities. One of those relatives became his brother-in-law by virtue of marriage to his sister,…Al-Adahi accompanied his sister to Afghanistan so that she could be with her husband….The wedding celebration was held in Bin Laden’s compound and many of his associates attended.

“At that celebration, [Al-Adahi] was introduced to Bin Laden, with whom he had a very brief conversation. Several days later, [he] had a five-to-ten-minute conversation with Bin Laden. Thereafter, [he] stayed at an al-Qaida guesthouse for one nhight and attended the Al Farouq [Al-Qaeda] training camp for seven to ten days. He was expelled from Al Farouq for failure to obey the rules. This training represents the strongest basis that the government has for detaining Al-Adahi.”

But, the judge said at that point, those assertions “simply do not bring him within the ambit of the Executive’s power to detain.”

She then went on: “After his expulsion [from Al Farouq], Al-Adahi returned to the home of his sister and brother-in-law for several weeks and then traveled to other places in Afghanistan because he had no other obligations. Like many thousands of people, he sought to flee Afghanistan when it was bombed shortly after September 11, 2001.”

On the other side of the case, Kessler concluded, “There is no reliable evidence in the record that [he] was a trainer at Al Farouq, that he ever fought for al-Qaida and/or the Taliban, or that he affirmatively provided any actual support to al-Qaida and/or the Taliban. There is no reliable evidence in the record that [he] was a member of al-Qaida and/or the Taliban.”

Thus, she concluded, “while it is tempting to be swayed” by Al-Adahi’s admitted meetings with Bin Laden and his link by marriage to Bin Laden bodyguards who were “enthusiastic followers of Bin Laden,” that evidence does not constitute actual, reliable evidence that would justify the Government’s detention of this man.”

Kessler ordered government officials to use diplomatic measures to find a way to release him to another country. She indicated, as other judges have, that she could not order his outright release, because the D.C. Circuit Court — in a ruling facing an early challenge in the Supreme Court (Kiyemba v. Obama)– has denied that authority to federal judges handling Guantanamo cases.