My View From Las Vegas
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Maureen Dowd
Dance of the MarionettesBy MAUREEN DOWDPublished: September 26, 2004
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TIMES NEWS TRACKER
Topics
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United States International Relations
Elections
Bush, George W
Allawi, Ayad
t's heartwarming, really.
President Bush has his own Mini-Me now, someone to echo his every word and mimic his every action.
For so long, Mr. Bush has put up with caricatures of a wee W. sitting in the vice president's lap, Charlie McCarthy style, as big Dick Cheney calls the shots. But now the president has his own puppet to play with.
All last week in New York and Washington, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq parroted Mr. Bush's absurd claims that the fighting in Iraq was an essential part of the U.S. battle against terrorists that started on 9/11, that the neocons' utopian dream of turning Iraq into a modern democracy was going swimmingly, and that the worse things got over there, the better they really were.
It's the media's fault, the two men warble in a duet so perfectly harmonized you wonder if Karen Hughes wrote Mr. Allawi's speech, for not showing the millions of people in Iraq who are not being beheaded, kidnapped, suicide-bombed or caught in the cross-fire every day; and it's John Kerry's fault for abetting the Iraqi insurgents by expressing his doubts about our plan there, as he once did about Vietnam.
"These doubters risk underestimating our country and they risk fueling the hopes of the terrorists," Mr. Allawi told Congress in a rousing anti-Kerry stump speech for Bush/Cheney, a follow-up punch to Mr. Cheney's claim that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for another terrorist attack on America.
First the Swift boat guys; now the swift dhow prime minister.
Just as Mr. Cheney, Rummy and the neocons turned W. into a host body for their old schemes to knock off Saddam, transform the military and set up a pre-emption doctrine to strike at allies and foes that threatened American hyperpower supremacy, so now W. has turned Mr. Allawi into a host body for the Panglossian palaver that he believes will get him re-elected. Every time the administration takes a step it says will reduce the violence, the violence increases.
Mr. Bush doesn't seem to care that by using Mr. Allawi as a puppet in his campaign, he decreases the prime minister's chances of debunking the belief in Iraq that he is a Bush puppet - which is the only way he can gain any credibility to stabilize his devastated country and be elected himself.
Actually, being the president's marionette is a step up from Mr. Allawi's old jobs as henchman for Saddam Hussein and stoolie for the C.I.A.
It's hilarious that the Republicans have trotted out Mr. Allawi as an objective analyst of the state of conditions in Iraq when he's the administration's handpicked guy and has as much riding on putting the chaos in a sunny light as they do. Though Mr. Allawi presents himself as representing all Iraqis, his actions have been devised to put more of the country in the grip of this latest strongman - giving himself the power to declare martial law, bringing back the death penalty and kicking out Al Jazeera.
Bush officials, who proclaim themselves so altruistic about bringing liberty to Iraq, really see Iraq in a creepy narcissistic way: It's all about Mr. Bush's re-election.
As The Chicago Tribune reported, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage alleged that Iraqi insurgents have stepped up their bloody attacks because they want to "influence the election against President Bush."
At a recent G.O.P. fund-raiser, House Speaker Dennis Hastert claimed that terrorists would be happier with a Kerry presidency. "I don't have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another," he said, but "I would think they would be more apt to go" for "somebody who would file a lawsuit with the World Court or something rather than respond with troops."
Faced with their dystopia, the utopians are scaling back their grand visions for Iraq's glorious future.
Rummy suggested last week that a fractional democracy might be good enough. "Let's say you tried to have an election, and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country, but some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," he said at a hearing on Capitol Hill, adding: "Nothing's perfect in life."
At a Pentagon briefing on Friday, Rummy also blew off Colin Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule that if we broke Iraq, we own it. "Any implication that that place has to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces, I think, would obviously be unwise, because it's never been peaceful and perfect," he said. "It's a tough part of the world."
As he said after the early looting in Iraq: "Stuff happens."
Gaming News
2004-09-29 13:44 ET - News Release
LAS VEGAS -- (Business Wire) -- Sept. 29, 2004
Product Demonstrations Will Be Available at Stand 4052
Shuffle Master, Inc. (NASDAQ National Market: SHFL) and CARD, a
Shuffle Master International Company, announced today that they will
introduce several new products at this year's Global Gaming Expo being
held in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 5 through 7. In addition to
exhibiting well-established Utility Products like the Ace(R) and Deck
Mate(TM) automatic card shufflers and Entertainment Products like
Three Card Poker(R) and Let It Ride Bonus(R), the two companies will
feature the following:
Utility Products
-- The Easy Chipper(TM), a next-generation chip sorting device
that sorts different size chips quickly and efficiently.
Developed by CARD, the Easy Chipper optimizes roulette wheel
game play by dramatically increasing the volume of chips
sorted, and its patented color reading system accurately sorts
up to 10 different color chips while separating non-programmed
ones.
-- MD-2(TM), a two to eight deck batch shuffler that features an
optional card recognition system enabling it to check decks of
cards by simultaneously reading and verifying every card being
shuffled. This unique shuffler incorporates a patented
platform and gripper system that ensures a smooth, quiet
operation that minimizes card wear and tear.
-- Intelligent Shoe, a smart alternative to a traditional dealing
shoe that reads the rank and suit of each card being dealt and
reduces game manipulation. Developed to increase Baccarat and
Blackjack game security, the Intelligent Shoe holds up to
eight decks of shuffled cards.
Entertainment Products
-- Table Master(TM), an electronic, multiple-player table game
with five player stations that enables casinos to offer table
game hits like Blackjack, Three Card Poker and Let It Ride
Bonus electronically. Featuring a digitized human dealer with
exciting player interaction, Table Master combines the
excitement of table-style action with the latest interactive
video technology to create an innovative gaming experience.
-- Big Raise Hold'em(TM), a new table game featuring head-to-head
play against the dealer and an appealing bonus bet. A
variation of Texas Hold'em, Big Raise has it all: aggressive
betting, bad beats and miracle draws. Players receive two hole
cards that are combined with three community cards to make a
five-card poker hand that goes head-to-head against the
dealer's.
-- 6 Card Poker(TM), an exciting new game where the stronger the
player's hand, the more he can bet. In this game, players
compete against the dealer and against a bonus paytable. Once
players ante and receive their cards, they either fold or stay
in the game and, depending on their hand, they may bet 2x, 4x,
10x or even 20x their ante.
-- Hi-Lo Stud Poker(TM), a new game that rewards both really good
and really bad hands. Players win if they have a pair of 7s or
better, or if their hand is 9-high or worse. Hi-Lo has a 38%
hit frequency--high for a paytable game--and its betting
structure invites aggressive play.
-- Rapid Roulette(TM), a roulette table that enables players to
place their wagers on a computer generated Roulette table
layout. Developed by Stargames Corporation Ltd. and Crown
Ltd., Shuffle Master will be the exclusive distributor for
North and South America, the Caribbean and cruise ships.
"The significant development our Utility Products segment has
undergone during the last year is evident in the new products we will
be displaying at G2E," stated David Lopez, Vice President of Product
Management. "The MD-2 batch shuffler with card recognition
dramatically enhances a casino's ability to secure game play on tables
using multiple decks, and our Intelligent Shoe brings an unprecedented
level of game security to baccarat and blackjack tables. The Easy
Chipper's patented new technology enhances the roulette chip sorting
process by operating both faster and more efficiently than the other
products in the field. We are confident its superior features will be
welcomed by the gaming industry."
Paul C. Meyer, President and Chief Operating Officer, commented
that this year Shuffle Master will display more table games than ever
before. "Our G2E Entertainment Products line-up features eight
well-established specialty games, and the three new titles we are
releasing have already received positive feedback. We are confident
that Big Raise Hold'em, 6 Card Poker and Hi-Lo Stud Poker will be well
received by the industry and help casinos expand their table offerings
and increase their table revenues. Additionally, our electronic table
game platform Table Master will broaden the reach and popularity of
our specialty table games by offering our customers another format for
table game play."
This release contains forward-looking statements that are based on
management's beliefs as well as on assumptions made by and information
available to management. The Company considers such statements to be
made under the safe harbor created by the federal securities laws to
which it is subject, and assumes no obligation to update or supplement
such statements. Forward-looking statements reflect and are subject to
risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ
materially from expectations. Factors that could cause actual results
to differ materially from expectations include, but are not limited
to, the following: changes in the level of consumer or commercial
acceptance of the Company's existing products and new products as
introduced; competitive advances; acceleration and/or deceleration of
various product development and roll out schedules; product
performance issues; higher than expected manufacturing, service,
selling, administrative, product development and/or roll out costs;
changes in the Company's business systems or in technologies affecting
the Company's products or operations; reliance on strategic
relationships with distributors and technology vendors; current and/or
future litigation or claims; acquisitions or divestitures by the
Company or its competitors of various product lines or businesses;
changes to the Company's intellectual property portfolio, such as loss
of licenses, claims of infringement or invalidity of patents;
regulatory and jurisdictional issues (e.g., technical requirements and
changes, delays in obtaining necessary approvals, or changes in a
jurisdiction's regulatory scheme, etc.) involving the Company and its
products specifically or the gaming industry in general; general and
casino industry economic conditions; and the financial health of the
Company's casino and distributor customers, suppliers and
distributors, both nationally and internationally. Additional
information on these and other risk factors that could potentially
affect the Company's financial results may be found in documents filed
by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including
the Company's quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and annual report on Form
10-K.
Contacts:Shuffle Master, Inc., Las Vegas
Mark L. Yoseloff or Paul C. Meyer, 702-897-7150
Fax: 702-270-5161
or
Investor Relations Advisors
Tom Ryan/Don Duffy, 203-222-9013
Fax: 203-222-9372
Las Vegas Forges Onward and Upward
Nearly 3.6 million people pass through Vegas airport last month
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A rush of late-season travelers to Las Vegas powered another surge in monthly passenger traffic at McCarran International Airport last month.
Nearly 3.6 million people traveled through the nation's sixth-busiest airport in August, up 12.2 percent from the same month a year ago.
McCarran's August and year-to-date passenger growth of 27.77 million easily exceeds national averages tracked by the Air Transport Association of America.
The Washington-based trade group's 14 reporting carriers enjoyed four percent passenger growth last month.
Dallas-based Southwest remained McCarran's top carrier in August with nearly 1.2 million passengers, a 12.6 percent increase and its sixth consecutive month with more than 1.1 million local customers.
Year-to-date, Southwest's 8.7 million passengers was up 10 percent from 2003.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
September 29, 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Riding a Crimson Tide Over the South By FRANKLIN FOER Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania By Warren St. John 275 pages. Crown. $24.
If you reside in the spiritual heartland of blue-state America, the Great Northeast, then you probably regard college football as a phenomenon in the same class as Wal-Mart and evangelical Christianity. You know that it occupies a good deal of your compatriots' weekends. And you have a sense that it does more than that: it is part of life's fabric, capable of exerting an almost mystical grasp. But the reasons for the fuss are entirely befuddling.
Two characters supplied in the introduction to Warren St. John's book ''Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer'' encapsulate the slavish devotion that many Americans feel toward college football. Like almost all of the fans whom Mr. St. John describes, Freeman and Betty Reese own an R.V. that they drive across the South chasing after the University of Alabama football team. The Freeman's tricked-out R.V. cost a nice chunk of change, about $300,000, and it has roof-mounted air horns that screech the 'Bama fight song ''at roughly the decibel level of a civil defense siren.'' Such are their feelings for Alabama that the Reeses skipped their own daughter's wedding to attend a game.
To understand the mindset that leads fans to ascend to such heights of absurdity, the author spent a season among them. He bought a used Allegro brand R.V., nicknamed ''The Hawg,'' which chugs gas at 4.5 miles to the gallon, and passed his weekends tailgating in smog-filled encampments on the fringes of college towns where Alabama played the 1999 season. Gonzo journalists have applied their style to football before; the godfather of the genre, Hunter S. Thompson, even writes columns on the sport for ESPN.com. But Mr. St. John brings a singular empathy for his subjects. He is, after all, a lifelong devotee of the Crimson Tide who provides the unsettling image of himself curled up on the floor of a Columbia University dorm, sobbing himself to sleep after an Alabama loss.
Unfortunately, this empathy doesn't lead to many interesting anthropological conclusions. Mr. St. John, a reporter for The New York Times, can't pin down why fans behave like such fools or why college football games prove to be ''the most intense emotional experiences of their lives.'' In fact, he doesn't really try to posit an explanation, even though he suggests that is the reason for his book.
But, in the end, it is hard to be bothered by this omission because he writes so hilariously about such charmingly eccentric characters. In many ways, ''Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer,'' a title borrowed from the lyrics of an interminably repeated cheer, serves as the American counterpart to Nick Hornby's diary of obsessive soccer fandom, ''Fever Pitch.''
If you only looked at an outline of ''Rammer Jammer,'' it would be hard to imagine that the book could sustain any momentum. Mr. St. John introduces one crazed fan after another, with only his travelogue propelling the narrative forward. Fortunately, these oversized personalities are rendered with irresistible zeal and light up like the book like a stadium scoreboard.
Take, for example, Jerral Johnson, a bumpkin who made a small fortune selling ice. He now suffers from rich man's ennui, so he passes the time by breeding ''show chickens,'' paying a childhood friend to fish with him and traveling to Alabama games. Everything in Mr. Johnson's house celebrates the legendary coach Bear Bryant, including a bedspread and headboard.
The success of these portraits owes much to Mr. St. John's ear for dialogue -- a gift well suited to Alabama, where the citizens he encounters speak in a Southern fried slang that somehow never grows tiresome. They bust out exclamatory lines like ''oh, horse hockey!''; deride enemies as ''mullet heads''; and describe beautiful belles who ''really crank my tractor.''
Mr. St. John is blessed with such likable subjects that even his villain, a columnist and radio shock jock named Paul Finebaum, who has built a career of trashing the Crimson Tide, comes off as an adorable crank. (Typical Finebaum line: ''Welcome to the State of Alabama -- Loserville, U.S.A.'') This has made him among the most hated men in the state. Before Mr. St. John's first meeting with Mr. Finebaum, a stranger warns: ''Be careful. Stray bullets don't have names on them.'' Mr. Finebaum's appearances endow the book with much-needed tension and genuine danger.
There's only one fleeting moment in which Mr. St. John turns against his fellow fans. After a victory over Florida, they gather around a television set to watch highlights. When ESPN breaks news of an Alabama scandal -- a cop made a player's speeding ticket disappear -- the fans spew racist invective. The incident disgusts Mr. St. John, who spends a few pages feeling guilty about his association with these bigots. But he never really investigates the underlying sentiment or explains the racial history of the program.
This failure is symptomatic of his unwillingness to address some of the complexities of fandom. Teams like Alabama's don't just represent 11 men on the field; they have far larger cultural significance. Piles of interesting scraps in ''Rammer Jammer'' beg to be developed and might have enhanced our understanding of this significance. For instance, most of Mr. St. John's fans never attended the University of Alabama, let alone any university. Many are unabashed rednecks. Nevertheless, they think of themselves as genteel and taunt opponents as low-class cow-tippers. How'd that happen?
In the end, one suspects that Mr. St. John is inflicted with acute homerism, the tendency to write kindly about one's own team. But there could be another reason that he doesn't delve into any dark and heavy stuff: That might ruin the fun of his picaresque adventures. After all, a great road trip doesn't require stopping at every cultural center and historic monument. Like college football itself, a road trip can be a pleasure pure and true.
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TODAY'S PAPERS
The Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox and Los Angeles Times lead with the release of eight hostages in Iraq, including, most famously and focused on, two Italian women. Two Iraqi colleagues of the Italians were also released, as were three Egyptian telecom workers. "The two girls are well and will be able to embrace their loved ones tonight," said Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi. A Kuwaiti paper reported that the Italian government paid $1 million ransom. Asked about that, Berlusconi avoided the question. The New York Times leads with "several setbacks or missteps" that the paper warns might keep thousands of expats from being able to vote. The Times focuses on the fact that eight of 15 swing states didn't send out ballots by Sept. 19, the federally recommended cut-off for ensuring that the votes get back in time. Most of states sent them out a week or less late; here's the list. The Washington Post leads with word that Major League Baseball is "close" to a deal to move the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C. USA Today says it's a done deal, but leaves that nugget on the sports page and instead leads with oil briefly hitting $50 per barrel, an all-time high--at least when inflation isn't taken into account. When it is, explains USAT in a lead-defeating caveat, oil is "about $30 a barrel cheaper than at its peak in 1981, despite soaring 75 percent over the past year."
Two British soldiers and five Iraqi intel officers were killed by gunmen in separate attacks in the southern city of Basra. So far as TP can see, none of the papers headline the deaths on the Page One or anywhere else. U.S. planes also struck Fallujah again and against fought with guerillas in Baghdad's Sadr City. Meanwhile, Iraq's interim president contradicted Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and said it would be better to delay elections than to have partial ones.
The NYT fronts a security contractor report showing that, despite administration assertions, guerrilla attacks are happening everywhere but in the Kurdish north. There were 2,368 attacks recorded over the last 30 days, with about 1,000 of them in Baghdad. (Though the story doesn't mention it, the accompanying graphic suggests that the south is relatively peaceful.) The WP had a similar piece a few days ago.
The Post goes below-the-fold with current CIA officials and active-duty military officers saying the situation in Iraq is far worse than the White House is portraying, and approaching FUBAR. "There are things going on that are unbelievable to me," said one Army officer. "They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago." Another officer said, "There's a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out." One outside intel put the reality check in context: "There's a real war going on here that's not just" the CIA against the administration on Iraq "but the State Department and the military" as well.
The Post off-leads a detailed piece on doubts about the missile defense system that the administration has decided to deploy before the election despite a lack of tests or confidence that it will work. "A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability," said one recent head of the U.S.'s nuke force. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner." The Post has a done a good job of covering the lack of tests and other foul-ups, though most of the stories have landed inside. That's better than NYT which, with one or two exceptions, has simply skipped it.
The Post's Jim VandeHei and Howard Kurtz tag Kerry on Page One for joining Bush in "playing on the public's security fears and sometimes using incendiary charges to stoke them." The article bemoans, "Virtually every day, Kerry has warned that if Bush is reelected, the situation in Iraq will worsen and continue to divert attention from nuclear threats and terrorism." Perhaps Messrs. VandeHei and Kurtz should turn to their paper's editorial page this morning: "Mr. Kerry is arguing that the nation is less safe because Mr. Bush waged war in Iraq and paid too little attention to al-Qaida; that's a legitimate case to present to voters."
In a NYT op-ed, Al Gore has one big debate tip for Kerry: Go after Bush's record. Then he gets all nostalgic:
I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: 'The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined.'
Comparing these grandiose promises to his failed record, it's enough to make anyone want to, well, sigh.
Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2107436/
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004
General Dynamics Interactive Awards $1.7 Million High Definition Set-Top Box Order to Eagle Broadband for Deployment at New Las Vegas Luxury Casino HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 28, 2004--
Latest Order Represents Largest High Definition Set-Top Box Deployment in Hospitality Industry to Date and First Eagle Broadband Order in Lucrative Casino Market
Eagle Broadband, Inc. (AMEX:EAG), a leading provider of broadband and communications technology and services, announced today that the company has received a $1.7 million order from General Dynamics Interactive, a business area of General Dynamics C4 Systems and a leading provider of interactive in-room digital entertainment and information systems to the hospitality industry, for Eagle's advanced, Media Pro set-top box technology for deployment at a new world-class luxury resort and casino on the Las Vegas strip in the fourth quarter of 2004.
Dave Weisman, CEO of Eagle Broadband, commented, "This is a big win for Eagle Broadband. This latest order represents the largest high definition set-top box deployment in the hospitality industry to date and our first order in the lucrative casino market, a new market opportunity for us. More and more customers are choosing Eagle's Media Pro set-top box technology to power their high definition in-room entertainment systems and this new order further demonstrates Eagle's high definition set-top box is becoming the preferred choice among leading luxury hotels and casinos."
"The Media Pro's industry-leading high definition capabilities, quality and reliability represent a quantum leap forward in technology, enabling new, high demand guest services that can increase guest satisfaction and revenues for hotel and casino operators. With our advanced set-top box product portfolio and blue chip partners such as General Dynamics Interactive, Eagle is well positioned to capitalize on the high definition wave that continues to accelerate across the hospitality industry," Weisman added.
Eagle's high definition Media Pro set-top boxes will be used with General Dynamics Interactive's Intrigue(R) multimedia in-room entertainment and information system to deliver high definition movies and music-on-demand with DVD functionality, high-speed Internet access, an interactive television guide, guest messaging, online advertising, electronic concierge services, online shopping, online checkout, and other revenue generating guest services. The state-of-the-art system will provide the new luxury resort and casino with a unique competitive advantage that can increase occupancy rates, maximize revenues and deliver an exceptional guest experience.
Eagle's advanced Media Pro set-top box product line, either standalone, or combined with the company's EZ-Magic middleware software delivers a full range of standard and high definition, high quality entertainment and information services that can generate higher margin revenues for hotel and casino owners, hospitals, apartment/condominium owners, municipalities, real estate developers and schools.
The Media Pro line of set-top boxes feature a highly reliable, full function computer with a very small footprint and an extremely quiet, guest-friendly, fan-less design that enables a host of on-demand applications including high-speed Internet access, streaming video, superior digital audio/music, video-on-demand, 3D gaming, video conferencing and more. In addition, Eagle's customizable EZ-Magic middleware software platform delivers stunning high definition streaming video, improved digital audio, easier navigation of hotel and community services (i.e., concierge, local restaurants and events, etc.), advanced content and system security and support for wide variety of hardware platforms.
For additional information regarding Eagle's solutions for the hospitality industry, please call 800-628-3910 or 281-538-6000.
About Eagle Broadband
Eagle Broadband is a leading provider of broadband and communications technology and services. The company's product offerings include an exclusive "four-play" suite of Bundled Digital Services (BDS(SM)) with high-speed Internet, cable TV, telephone and security monitoring, and a turnkey suite of financing, network design, operational and support services that enables municipalities, utilities, real estate developers, hotels, multi-tenant owners and service providers to deliver exceptional value, state-of-the-art entertainment and communications choices and single-bill convenience to their residential and business customers. Eagle offers the HDTV-ready, Media Pro IP set-top box product line that enables hotel operators and service providers to maximize revenues by offering state-of-the-art, in-room entertainment and video services. The company also develops and markets the exclusive SatMAX(TM) satellite communications system that allows government, military, homeland security, aviation, maritime and enterprise customers to deliver reliable, non-line-of-sight, voice and data communications services via the Iridium satellite network from any location on Earth. The company is headquartered in Houston, Texas. For more information, please visit www.eaglebroadband.com or call 281-538-6000.
Forward-looking statements in this release regarding Eagle Broadband, Inc., and General Dynamics Interactive are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, continued acceptance of the company's products, increased levels of competition, new products and technological changes, the company's dependence upon third-party suppliers, intellectual property rights, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Contacts
Eagle BroadbandClareen O'Quinn, 800-628-3910 or 281-538-6000coquinn@eaglebroadband.comorPress & Media Relations:CWR & PartnersRonnie Welch, 508-222-4802ronnie@cwrpartners.comorInvestor Relations:The Ruth GroupDavid Pasquale or Andrew Rodriguez646-536-7006/646-536-7032dpasquale@theruthgroup.com
DiCaprio buys Las Vegas home Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio has developed such a huge affection for American gambling haven Las Vegas, he's now purchased himself a home there.The 29-year-old actor, who stars as Howard Hughes in the upcoming biopic The Aviator, has bought a $1.5m (€1.2m) abode in the city which was once one of Hughes' haunts.The new pad, which is actually two apartments put together, is in a 33-storey glass high-rise called Panorama Towers.
September 27, 2004
Crashes claim lives of three childrenBy Eric Leake <eric.leake@lasvegassun.com>LAS VEGAS SUN
Three children and a Las Vegas man were killed in traffic accidents across the Las Vegas Valley in the last several days, authorities said.
A 5-year-old girl and her cousin died after a rollover accident as they and their family were traveling from California to Las Vegas for a wedding, Nevada Highway Patrol troopers said.
The family was northbound on Interstate 15 near Sloan about 11 a.m. Friday when a tire blew out on their Chevrolet Suburban, Trooper Angie Chavera said. The driver overcorrected, hit his brakes, sent the car into a skid and went off the road, Chavera said.
The girl and her young cousin were not wearing seatbelts and were thrown from the car, Chavera said. They were pronounced dead in the desert. Three women, the male driver, and a 17-year-old man were taken to University Medical Center.
The trooper said the deaths were preventable.
"If you get a blowout, do not overreact and (do not) slam on your brakes," Chavera said. "And wear your seat belt. These people did not need to die out here if they would have had their seat belts on."
A seat belt failed to save 7-year-old Debra Blinder of Las Vegas, however. She died Friday from injuries she suffered the day before when an SUV collided with her mother's car at the corner of Hualapai Way and Desert Inn Road. Police say Sharon Rapstad, 57, was traveling south on Hualapai in her 2002 Chevy Suburban when she failed to stop at the stop sign and struck a 1997 Toyota Avalon driven by Dawn Blinder, 35, and carrying her two children. Rapstad's SUV and Blinder's sedan then spun into a 2004 Chevy Silverado pickup driven by Juan Santos, 41.
Blinder's 4-year-old son remained in critical condition at University Medical Center this morning, Metro Sgt. Frank Weigand said.
Other than the children, no one else was injured, police said. Investigators are still looking into what caused the accident. Rapstad had not been cited as of this morning, Weigand said.
No citations were issued in connection with a pedestrian death on Sunday because the pedestrian was at fault, police said.
The Las Vegas man, whose name and age had not been released this morning, died after he was struck by a car while he walked on Rancho Drive near Jones Boulevard, Metro said.
The man was wearing dark clothes while walking north on Rancho about 10:20 p.m., officers said.
He was struck by a 1997 Ford driven by 53-year-old Julio Rodriguez, who officers said did not see the victim until he hit him.
The man died at the scene, officers said. Rodriguez's passenger, 47-year-old Ofelia Mora, was not injured. It was the 95th traffic-related fatality in Metro's jurisdiction this year.
In another accident, 13-year-old Robert Martinez was taken to UMC in critical condition with severe leg injuries after he and two friends were hit by a minivan as they waited with their bikes to cross Windmill Lane.
Police and witnesses said that the Ford Windstar minivan was stopped at a traffic light, waiting to turn east on Windmill Lane across Maryland Parkway. The light changed and the driver, 41-year-old Larry Moss of Las Vegas, did not move until a vehicle behind him honked, witnesses said.
The minivan then sped across the intersection, hit a Cadillac waiting to turn onto Windmill Lane, and ran off the road towards the bike path and three boys on their way home from Jack Lund Schofield Middle School, witnesses said.
Investigators are looking into whether Moss suffered from a medical condition that could have caused the collision, Weigand said.
Aaron McConnell was waiting with his friends on the curb to cross the street when he saw the minivan hit the Cadillac and veer towards them.
"I got off my bike, ran, and I kept running," McConnell said. "My friend, he got caught under the car, and Patrick got hit into the air and fell to the ground."
The two boys were taken to UMC, Martinez in critical condition and the third in moderate condition. Two people in the Cadillac went to St. Rose Dominican Hospitals' Sienna Campus.
Rebecca Hoviss was on her way to pick up her daughters from school when she saw the minivan head towards the bike path and the boys, who are schoolmates with her daughters. She ran to help.
"I just remember a little kid on the bike there and that sign went through his leg," she said of Martinez, who was pinned under the car and against debris. "He was saying, 'Help me with this sign.' "
The minivan driver "didn't even look like he knew what was going on," she said.
Weigand said test results revealed no alcohol in the driver's system, but noted the driver said he was on medication.
"He says he's an epileptic, that he does take medication and never has seizures. But he doesn't remember what happened," Weigand said.
Sun reporters Stephen Curran and Ed Koch <koch@lasvegassun.com> contributed to this report.
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Sunday, September 26, 2004
The genius next doorIn Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous new study, William Shakespeare emerges as a drab and conventional burgher who somehow became the greatest writer the world has ever known.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Laura Miller
Sept. 27, 2004 In the 1998 movie "Shakespeare in Love," the most recent pop culture incarnation of the bard is a doe-eyed swain with writer's block who drapes himself fetchingly over a series of rough-hewn benches, bemoaning his lack of a muse, until his art and his career are saved by the love of Gwyneth Paltrow. The film's historical details, from the closure of London theaters during plague outbreaks to the layout of the Rose itself (not the Globe; that was later), are solid. However, the main premise is not only sappy but preposterous. A few years later, in a much lower-profile documentary called "Much Ado About Something," conspiracy theorists explained why they believe that William Shakespeare was merely a front man for fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, who supposedly only pretended to die in 1593, the same year "Shakespeare in Love" is set. Not so sappy, but still preposterous.
There's plenty room for such speculation, though, because we know so little about Shakespeare. No letters or diaries have ever been found; in fact, there's only one sample of his handwriting. What we have is a bunch of official documents (christening records, bills of sale, etc.), a few coy references in contemporary texts and a bunch of dubious gossip that mostly dates to the years after his death. On this handful of old bones scholars have gnawed for over 400 years, and it's hard to believe that any more flavor can be got from them.
Nevertheless, believe it. Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" is such a graceful effort to spin a life out of a few scraps of paper that only a churl would be unpersuaded by it. Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard, takes the bits we do know, nourishes them with a thorough understanding of the Elizabethan world Shakespeare inhabited and then coaxes each bud of information to flower within our understanding of the plays. A pageant performed for the Queen in Leicester in 1575, the squalid death of a fellow poet, the discovery and routing of the 1605 plot to blow up the Parliament House -- each of these undergoes what Shakespeare called (in a lovely phrase, sadly spoiled these days by journalistic overuse) "a sea change, into something rich and strange."
It's not the precise accuracy of any particular theory -- for example the suggestion that Shylock was inspired by the Queen's Portuguese-Jewish physician -- that Greenblatt makes so persuasive. Rather, he convinces you that he has sunk so deeply into Shakespeare's time, mind and imagination that his guesses must be better than anyone else's. As a founder of New Historicism, a once controversial, now widely accepted school of literary criticism holding that writers works are profoundly shaped by the physical, cultural and political worlds they live in, Greenblatt has plenty of experience in this department.
Slavering bardolatry is always a peril in such projects, and no doubt Greenblatt hung a photo of Harold Bloom over his desk while he worked: Exhibit A of Where Not to Go. By contrast, his own account of Shakespeare the man remains as grounded as the playwright's vision, described by Greenblatt as "bound to the familiar and the intimate," so that it "never soared altogether above the quotidian, never entered the august halls of the metaphysical and shut the door on the everyday." Stars wiped from his eyes, Greenblatt gives us a Shakespeare who can't fail to stir -- he's still Shakespeare, after all -- but also a writer who presents some unsettling questions about the nature of creative genius.
"Shakespeare in Love," on the other hand, offers an easy, pleasing dream about great artists. It tells us they are just like the rest of us, only more so. Because Shakespeare's words have the power to flood us with overwhelming sensations -- both the recollection of our own strongest feelings and those transports we only experience in the presence of made beauty -- people, perhaps naturally, want him to have been a grand and passionate man. According to the film, the only force capable of propelling Shakespeare -- or anyone, for that matter -- into the ranks of the immortals is romantic love, that Holy Grail of popular culture, and "Romeo and Juliet," the play that results from his dalliance with Paltrow's stagestruck noblewoman, becomes his entrée to greatness.
Although Greenblatt writes with tactful kindness about "Shakespeare in Love" (he got the idea for "Will in the World" during conversations with the movie's screenwriter, Marc Norman), he surely can't think much of this premise. Firstly, it pretends that romantic love was Shakespeare's prime subject, which is patently untrue, however closely it hews to the image of poetry held by people who never read it. Second, it makes Shakespeare himself out to be a romantic, and Greenblatt devotes two chapters of "Will in the World" to arguing just the opposite.
Shakespeare wrote about love because he wrote about all of life, and some of his works -- the sonnets, "Romeo and Juliet," "Antony and Cleopatra" -- put romantic love at their center. But even in these, the world seeps in, and the world in its fascinating particulars is the enemy of the all-consuming love that swallows Romeo and Juliet. Even the sonnets, supposedly devoted to praise of the beloved, get distracted by their own eloquence and slip into boasting about the triumph of art. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" begins Sonnet 18 (written, according to "Shakespeare in Love," to Paltrow's crossdressing heroine, although in real life to a young man), but it ends by proclaiming that while fleshly beauty fades, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
"Shakespeare in Love" briskly dismisses the inconvenient fact that its hero has a wife and three children back in his hometown of Stratford by writing off the marriage as sexless. Greenblatt also subscribes to the opinion that Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was unsatisfying. Perhaps the two were mismatched, but Greenblatt, after contemplating the traces in Shakespeare's work of other affairs, suspects that "no single person could ever have satisfied Shakespeare's longings or made him happy." The playwright's imagination, after all, was anything but "single;" it had the "signature characteristic" of an "astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and slip free of all constraints."
In an earlier chapter Greenblatt writes of how in Shakespeare's work his "fascination with the lives of aristocrats and monarchs" serenely coexisted with his affection for the country life of his childhood. He did not feel compelled to choose, and Greenblatt proposes that "he simply loved the world too much to give any of it up." Romeo and Juliet die to preserve their love, and as Greenblatt points out, the two most developed portraits of marital intimacy in the plays are problematic to say the least: Gertrude and Claudius in "Hamlet" and Lord and Lady Macbeth, marriages that are homicidal in one way or another. If romantic love must murder the world in order to replace it with the couple, Shakespeare wasn't interested.
The Marlowe partisans have greater pretensions to seriousness than Hollywood, but they share its desire to fabricate a flashier vessel for Shakespeare's gifts. Although both men came from modest families (Shakespeare's father was a glove-maker and Marlowe's a cobbler), Marlowe had more formal education. He belonged to a group of writers called the "university wits," who had in common "impressive learning, literary ambition, duplicity, violence, and rootlessness." One of them, Thomas Nashe, the Dale Peck of his day, made his reputation by penning "a harsh review of recent literary efforts -- the cruel judgements of a brash young man," but the university wits wielded more than metaphorical hatchets. Like his friends, Marlowe, who died after being stabbed in the eye during a tavern brawl that many suspect was a hired killing, freely dabbled in crime, espionage and declarations of atheism, a particularly dangerous practice at the time.
Marlowe was also a writer of immense talent, and ever so much more dashing than the prudent, frugal Shakespeare. Admittedly, the painted portrait of Marlowe included with the illustrations of "Will in the World" cannot be authenticated. But the bold, amused and supremely confident Elizabethan it depicts personifies everything the Marlovians find appealing in their man when compared to the more tentative, even anxious face we see in portraits of Shakespeare. Who wouldn't consider the glamorous, shadowy, reckless Marlowe as better casting for the creator of Iago, Lady Macbeth and Mercutio?
Anyone who's actually read the two men's plays is who. Greenblatt doesn't deign to mention Marlovian conspiracy theory (or any other such claims involving aristocrats and intellectuals of the time) in "Will in the World," but he does compare Marlowe's work with Shakespeare's, brilliantly and at length, to demonstrate the fundamentally different sensibilities behind each.
Marlowe was a kind of proto-Nietzschean fascinated by characters who overreached, regardless of the consequences. His "Tamburlaine" is, as Greenblatt puts it, an "incantatory celebration of the will to power." He might have invented Iago, but the likes of Falstaff and Hamlet are surely beyond him. By way of example, Greenblatt details how both men wrote plays with Jewish villains, stock characters in a country that was virtually devoid of real Jews. But, as Greenblatt points out, Marlowe's Jew was thoroughly and gleefully wicked, while Shakespeare's is shot through with veins of dignity and pathos, a display of the "strange, irrepressible imaginative generosity" that distinguishes the Stratford-born playwright from his rival.
But if the real Shakespeare wasn't the dreamy, love-struck poet of "Shakespeare in Love" and wasn't imbued with the (equally romantic if more sophisticated) bravura of Marlowe, then who was he? According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare was "a prosperous, self-made man," who dabbled in but ultimately rejected the "chaotic, disorderly life" of London's literary scene. Having been raised among clandestine Catholics, people who risked everything for their outlawed faith, he distrusted true believers and outright rebels, and developed what Greenblatt delicately terms "a complex attitude toward authority, at once sly, genially submissive, and subtly challenging." He may not have loved his wife, but he certainly never loved anyone else enough to abandon her. Due to his "lifelong interest in property investments" (most of the records of Shakespeare's life are real estate documents) he retired at the top of his game to a quiet, comfortable life as a country burgher.
As Greenblatt writes, a look at Shakespeare's life makes the playwright seem a "drabber, duller person" than one might hope. Worse, there's more than a hint of parsimony. In one of the book's most fascinating chapters, Greenblatt finds a possible model for the portly rascal Falstaff in the writer Robert Greene. Greene is now most famous for a deathbed rant in which he denounced an "upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers," obviously Shakespeare, who has infiltrated the circle of the university wits and passed himself off as their successor. Greenblatt speculates that Shakespeare earned Greene's wrath when he "turned down some [probably monetary] request from the indigent, desperate scoundrel." Instead, Shakespeare "conferred upon Greene an incalculable gift, the gift of transforming him into Falstaff," a legendary character.
Audiences have always been somewhat chilled by the climactic banishment of Falstaff by Prince Hal -- "I know thee not, old man" -- at the end of "Henry IV, Part II." As commoners, as audience members, we can afford to cherish Falstaff, but Hal has become king, in effect another person, and there is now no place in his life for his old drinking buddy. Hal's rejection parallels Shakespeare's, writes Greenblatt; it was "what he had to do in order to survive." But if Hal repudiates Falstaff, the play immortalizes him. Shakespeare may have refused to give Greene money, but he "also performed a miraculous act of imaginative generosity, utterly unsentimental and, if the truth be told, not entirely human." (Greene, like Falstaff, would surely have preferred, and squandered, the cash.)
If Shakespeare identified with Hal, whose destiny demands a certain cold-bloodedness, then perhaps he would have agreed with another author named Greene, Graham, who said that a chip of ice lies in the heart of every writer. To celebrate and identify with all of creation, to effortlessly submerge yourself in a clownish bumpkin like Bottom, a mad old man like Lear, a brave girl like Rosalind, or, as Greenblatt elegantly demonstrates with passages from Shakespeare's early poem, "Venus and Adonis," a hare, a horse and the goddess of love -- this uncanny mercurial aptitude suggests an absence of the usual preferences and attachments that is, yes, generous, but again, not entirely human.
Yet why should an inhuman generosity be surprising in a man whose "work is so astonishing, so luminous, that it seems to have come from a god and not a mortal, let alone a mortal of provincial origins and modest education"? What Greenblatt's "Will in the World" pushes us toward is the realization that enormous talent is always freakish, always defies explanation and may be the last shred the secular world retains of the divine. It is the fabulous cuckoo's egg in the nest of ordinary life. There is simply no reason why a fairly conventional Elizabethan Englishman should have become the greatest imaginative artist the language and perhaps the world has ever known. We can find shards of Shakespeare's life and society in his work, but we can't find intimations of the work in his life or ever nail down how Shakespeare became Shakespeare if by "became Shakespeare" we mean "came to be able to write those plays."
We're like Lear, finally reunited with Cordelia and assuming that she does not love him. Unlike her sisters, he says, she has "some cause" to do him wrong. Cordelia answers, "No cause, no cause." Her love for her father, which is her great talent and a decidedly more natural one than Shakespeare's, is not the sort of thing that has a cause. It just is.
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About the writerLaura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
Tough truths vs. patriotic prideWhen Bush and Kerry finally face off Sept. 30, which version of Iraq will the public buy?
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Mary Jacoby
Sept. 25, 2004 WASHINGTON -- Ayad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, stuck to the Bush administration's talking points in Washington this week. In media interviews, he insisted that U.S. troop levels in his violence-wracked country are just fine and that if Saddam Hussein were still in power, "terrorists [would] be hitting there again at Washington and New York." In an address to Congress, the onetime CIA operative -- using language that appeared to be lifted from a Bush campaign speech -- spoke of the "determination of the Iraqi people to embrace democracy, peace and freedom." Handpicked by the Bush administration and rubber-stamped by the United Nations after its choice was rejected by the United States, Allawi stood smiling in the Rose Garden next to President Bush as he called critics of his Iraq policy weak-kneed pessimists.
For Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., these scenes were surreal. The House Armed Services Committee member returned on Monday from Iraq, where American civilians are being kidnapped and beheaded, Iraqis are dying in suicide bombings and U.S. forces are being driven from much of the Sunni triangle. In Baghdad, the first thing she noticed was the raw sewage flowing through the streets. "Children were playing in puddles that you know are basically human excrement," she told Salon in a telephone interview Friday. "Clearly, we had a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis."
Tauscher added: "There's been a major effort by both the administration and the administration's advocates, which include Allawi, to put a happy face on the situation. They are trying to accent the positive as opposed to being realistic."
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Instead of stumping on the economy and domestic issues, as he had planned for the election homestretch, over the past week John Kerry has relentlessly attacked Bush's invasion and handling of postwar Iraq as dangerously wrong and incompetent. The president struck back Friday, accusing Kerry of undermining Allawi with his criticism. In the battleground state of Wisconsin, Bush told supporters: "You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you questioned his credibility."
On Capitol Hill on Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and said that, if Iraq is too insecure to hold national elections in January, "well, so be it." Not every Iraqi needed to vote, he said. "Nothing's perfect in life."
Tauscher found Rumsfeld's insouciant attitude about the elections disturbing. "You can't have San Francisco and Chicago and Dallas not vote in a national election and have anybody believe it is a credible election," she said. But without a major military operation to return control of insurgent-held cities in the Sunni triangle to the central government, Iraq will not be able to claim that it held a free and credible vote, Tauscher said. "I'm not criticizing the prime minister for being an optimist, or even for being in lockstep with the administration, who did, after all, appoint him. But expectations have got to be recast. There is a major counteroffensive that we have to launch in Fallujah, and I expect it will come after the elections. That means casualties will mount at Thanksgiving and Christmastime, and the American people aren't expecting this."
But the election comes first. Will voters respond to Kerry's gritty realism? Or will they prefer Bush's sunny optimism? What role will reality play? With Bush claiming that criticism of his Iraq policies shows disrespect for U.S. troops, the facts can easily be lost in a festival of patriotism. The danger, as Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., recently put it, is that Americans will become deluded with "some grand illusion that we're winning."
Sheba Crocker, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the think tank's reports on Iraq indicate "a fairly negative picture at this point, and I think strongly belies the idea that it's only anecdotal evidence that goes against these more positive public pronouncements."
CSIS has gathered data from American, international and Iraqi sources and conducted nearly 700 interviews with ordinary Iraqis, using Iraqis as researchers to enable speaking with people whom the security situation would prevent foreigners from reaching. The study found that Iraqis are happy that Saddam is gone, but they also want Americans to depart, and they express uncertainty about Iraq's ability to govern itself. The violence, lack of electricity and water, and absence of healthcare and employment opportunities have degraded their quality of life.
Next page "It's like if Tennessee were to declare war on Arkansas"1, 2
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Tough truths vs. patriotic pride 1, 2
"There is a disconnect between the very positive public pronouncements that we are hearing and the reality on the ground," Crocker said. "It's maybe understandable because of the politics of it. But to be faced with beheadings, daily bombings and vastly increased attacks against U.S. forces, and the establishment of these 'no-go areas,' and to then say it's only dire pessimists raising questions seems to deny the reality."
Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress this week that while he could use international and Iraqi forces to bolster his 135,000-person operation in Iraq, he didn't think the United States itself would need to send more troops.
But Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., one of the administration's most vocal critics, challenged that notion during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing at which Rumsfeld spoke. Reed read from a new report by a Pentagon-appointed panel, the Defense Science Board, which identified "a lack of long-term endurance" in the military. Troops are stretched so thin, the report found, that if Iran, North Korea or some other hot spot flares up, the United States would be hard-pressed to respond. Rumsfeld shrugged off the report, telling the committee that better management, such as using civilians to do tasks now performed by uniformed personnel, would free more troops for combat.
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In an interview with Salon, Reed called that approach "legitimate," but pointed out that the Defense Department "has been trying to do that for a couple of years," and yet "the experts who have been looking at this have come to the conclusion that we [still] need more troops."
Asked about reports that Fiji is considering contributing troops in Iraq, Reed diplomatically praised the South Pacific island nation, saying, "We certainly appreciate the contributions of any country around the globe." But they are of little help, he added, if troops "are not capable of doing particular missions and of supporting themselves logistically. And, I mean, how many troops is Fiji really going to bring?"
Another gaping hole in the Bush line about Iraq exposed this week is the notion that 100,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained to fight alongside Americans. In fact, only about 4,700 of those new forces so far are trained for military action, as opposed to police work or other less intense security tasks, Reed told Salon.
What's more, the few forces that Americans have been able to train and equip are not always reliable. In an interview on NBC Thursday, Tom Brokaw told Allawi that the network had recently sent a correspondent and crew to Samarra, where they encountered Iraqi troops working with anti-American insurgents -- helping them smash radios the U.S. military had distributed in the hopes that the local people would tune into American-sponsored radio programming. Allawi breezily replied: "Now the situation has changed."
Rep. Tauscher understands why Iraqi troops' loyalties are divided: "It's like if Tennessee were to declare war on Arkansas. I don't think we, as Americans, could imagine the Tennessee National Guard running into Arkansas to fight the Arkansas National Guard," she said. The American-trained Iraqi troops are being asked to fight people who "all look like they do, are from their tribe, or live down the street. It's an unnatural act."
Seeking to defend his version of the Iraq war this past week, the president dismissed the CIA's dire National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's future as a "guess," delivered a defiant speech before the United Nations, welcomed the cooperative Allawi and dispatched his political surrogates to attack Kerry as aiding and abetting terrorism. But next week, during the first debate, he and Kerry will finally clash face to face. salon.com
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About the writerMary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent. Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
Related stories"Fantasy" clashes with reality over Iraq policyAnalysts say the new National Intelligence Estimate gets it right. One intriguing question remains: Who commissioned it and why?By Mary Jacoby09/17/04
The rise of the new Iraqi "tough guy"Old CIA asset and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi comes to Washington to convince Americans that contrary to reality, all is well in Iraq. By Andrew Cockburn09/22/04
HellSalon's war correspondent on the Iraq inferno.By Phillip Robertson09/23/04
The Washington Post leads with a grim review of the escalating violence in Iraq. According to statistics prepared for the U.S. government, insurgent attacks on private contractors and against U.S. and Iraqi forces have increased dramatically since the country regained sovereignty in June. The Los Angeles Times leads with an overview of the of the tightening race for the White House. The piece touches on Electoral College strategy, debate prep, and the "unknowables" such as Iraq. The New York Times leads with a discussion of a potentially serious flaw in the new Medicare drug benefit: The insurance companies that will pay for seniors' medicine may not cover some of the most popular drugs.
The Post's lead indicates that Iraq is collapsing into chaos, despite Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's assurances while visiting Washington this week. The violence is especially unsettling in light of the argument in the LAT's off-lead that Iraq has become a focal point for radical militants from around the world. According to another Post article, U.S. and Iraqi officials are preparing a response to the insurgency that they hope will allow elections to proceed as planned in January. Whether such a plan can succeed in just four months remains uncertain. Meanwhile, the LAT reveals the monetary cost of the strife: As much as three-quarters of U.S. reconstruction aid is going to security, contractors, and related expenses, rather than supporting the Iraqi economy.
While the LAT's lead highlights all the important issues in the presidential race, the other papers front in-depth reports on specific aspects of the campaign. The Post offers a thorough review of the different skills George Bush and John Kerry will bring to Thursday's presidential debate in Miami. The piece describes the essence of both men's styles, but does not add much to the conventional wisdom--Bush is plain spoken and appealing; Kerry is flamboyant and aggressive. The best debate preview remains Jim Fallows' exhaustive article "When George Meets John" in the July/August Atlantic Monthly. The NYT fronts a thoughtful examination of Kerry's management style. The piece mostly avoids the inside-baseball details that plague similar articles and does a decent job explaining how Kerry actually would run the White House. The article does reveal the all-too-unsurprising detail that Kerry spent four weeks considering the design of his campaign logo; apparently the senator was particularly troubled over which font to use.
The NYT also looks at how the race is shaping up in two key swing states. The paper hit the ground in Ohio and Florida to examine the voter registration campaigns that have consumed Democrats and Republicans alike. In both states, the Democrats seem to have a significant edge in the number of new registrations. Turnout remains the key to victory, however, and no one seems to know how many of these new voters will head to the polls on Election Day. The Republicans have a highly effective get-out-the-vote operation that may compensate for any Democratic edge in registrations.
The Post and the NYT both front sweeping pieces that aren't tied to specific newspegs but are nonetheless worthwhile. The Post runs the first article in a four-part series about growing up gay in rural America. Although the author overreaches in her attempt to capture detail, the piece offers an excellent portrait of a deeply religious and resolutely anti-gay world that is no doubt alien to many Post readers. The NYT examines a loose network of warring gangs that stretches from Central America to Los Angeles to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Gang members traveling back and forth from the United States constitute a new kind of transnational threat that goes unnoticed as most Americans remain focused on terrorists.
The Post reveals new details about a complicated scheme in which a pair of Washington influence peddlers worked to shutter a Texas Indian casino so that they could earn fees from the tribe that wanted to reopen it. As previously reported, the duo (lobbyist Jack Abramoff and P.R. consultant Michael Scanlon) hired Christian activist Ralph Reed to spearhead a public campaign against the casino. But the Post now has unearthed emails between Abramoff and Scanlon that reveal the extent to which the pair exploited both sides of the casino dispute. The paper examines another side of the money-and-influence game with an evergreen about the fundraisers and receptions that comprise the Capitol Hill social scene.
The NYT has a great story about a small town rescued by the war on terrorism. Playas, New Mexico--an all-but-abandoned company town built by a mining concern in the 1970s--is being saved from collapse by the Department of Homeland security. The Department awarded a $5 million grant to New Mexico Tech so that the school can acquire the entire town and use it as an antiterror training facility.
Some other good articles stuffed below the fold: The LAT reports on another hurricane battering Florida and asks whether the storm surrounding Dan Rather will force him out at CBS; the NYT explains why state and local governments are feuding with American Indians about the sale of cigarettes over the l.Alexander Barnes Dryer is a Slate intern.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2107182/
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Also in today's Slate:in other magazines: Iraq in a Hard Place: Elections could help stem the violence, but only if they can take place.summary judgment: Best Forgotten: Julianne Moore's new movie offers less, not more. explainer: American Indian vs. Native American: Which is the proper term?
Last Updated: Sunday, 26 September, 2004, 07:33 GMT 08:33 UK
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Barrichello grabs China win
CHINESE GP RESULT
1 R Barrichello (Ferrari)2 J Button (BAR) 3 K Raikkonen (McLaren)4 F Alonso (Renault)5 JP Montoya (Williams)6 T Sato (BAR)7 G Fisichella (Sauber)8 F Massa (Sauber)
Race as it happened
Race in pictures Ferrari's Rubens Barrichello won the inaugural Chinese Grand Prix after a tense race-long fight with Jenson Button and Kimi Raikkonen.
The Brazilian led almost from start to finish, but was pressured throughout.
Button moved up to second when he made one less pit stop than his rivals, and just managed to hold off a charging Raikkonen on the final lap.
Michael Schumacher had an eventful race after starting from the pit lane and could finish only 12th.
The German spun on his qualifying lap, and Ferrari chose to start him from the pit lane to give him the best possible strategy.
He fought up to ninth place by lap 15 despite banging into Christian Klien's Jaguar but a quick spin dropped him briefly down to 12th delaying his fightback by a few seconds.
Schumacher shrugs off troubles Then he suffered a puncture in his left rear tyre while running 11th on lap 35, dropping him further back down the field.
Schumacher found himself behind Jacques Villeneuve's Renault after both his problems and struggled to pass the Canadian both times.
Villeneuve aims to improve The Ferrari star made three pit stops and had to settle for 12th place behind the man to whom he lost a battle for the 1997 world championship.
Schumacher's team-mate Barrichello never had to fight off a passing attempt from Raikkonen, but nor could he ever relax as the McLaren driver kept the pressure up until their second stops.
But an attempt by McLaren to leapfrog Barrichello with a short third stint backfired when Raikkonen ran into traffic.
When you know the other guys are doing a three-stop and you are doing a two it makes it very tough mentally
Jenson Button
More Button reaction The Finn slipped back behind Button, and while the McLaren closed right up on the BAR in the last 10 laps Button was able to hold Raikkonen off.
Barrichello said: "It was hard. I was under pressure but was able to be cool at the stops, open a decent gap and maintain first place.
"We knew at the beginning that we would have some trouble because we were graining the front tyres a little bit, but the tyres did a superb job. They held on really well.
"Towards the end I didn't push that much because I had an eight-second lead, but the graining stayed longer and I was struggling a little bit."
It was Barrichello's second win in a row and he said he was pleased to be finishing the season strongly.
"It's been a season where I have been playing catch-up to Michael. He started at a high level and for some reason I wasn't able to chalIenge him, but now things are going well," he said.
Ralf Schumacher had driven a solid race in his Williams on his return to F1 after three months out with an injury and was on course for fifth place but he was forced to retire after David Coulthard hit him from behind on lap 37.
The German eclipsed team-mate Juan Pablo Montoya, who said he struggled with his car at the technically demanding Chinese track.
Montoya inherited his team-mate's fifth place.
Coulthard, who has yet to secure a drive for next season, was an unconvincing ninth behind Takuma Sato's BAR and the Saubers of Giancarlo Fisichella and Felipe Massa.
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GIANTS WIN
NY Giants 27, Cleveland 10
Preview - Box Score - Recap
By TOM CANAVAN, AP Sports WriterSeptember 26, 2004
AP - Sep 26, 5:40 pm EDTMore PhotosEAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) -- With the way Kurt Warner and Michael Strahan played, the New York Giants never had to worry about a letdown against the injury-ravaged Cleveland Browns.
Warner set up a touchdown run by Tiki Barber with a long pass, and the veteran quarterback capped another drive with his second career regular-season TD run in a 27-10 win over the Browns on Sunday.
``More important than who we were playing today and what the Cleveland Browns brought to the table was, 'Can the New York Giants not beat themselves?''' Giants center and former Brown Shaun O'Hara said.
The Giants (2-1) won their second straight under Tom Coughlin because they got big games from their playmakers, and they did all the little things right.
They won the takeaway battle 3-0, held edges in time of possession and field position and converted 45 percent of their third downs while limiting Cleveland to 2-of-10.
Warner was outstanding for the second straight week, going 19-of-27 for 286 yards and no interceptions. He hurt an ankle late, but said it was not serious.
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``Kurt is putting the ball in places where we can catch it,'' said Amani Toomer, who had five catches for 126 yards and helped set up two touchdowns. ``I'm really happy with the way he can buy a little extra time and get the ball out.''
Strahan, who played with a sore left hand, had two sacks and two fumble recoveries as the defense made life miserable for quarterback Jeff Garcia in handing the Browns (1-2) their second straight loss.
Strahan's biggest play came in the opening minutes of the second half when he recovered a fumble by Garcia at the Giants 5 with New York leading 10-0.
``That play kind of took the air out of their sails, because we went down and scored,'' said Strahan, who also had six tackles.
With Ron Dayne out with a calf injury, Barber rushed for 106 yards and scored on an 8-yard run in the first quarter.
The two-game winning streak matched the Giants' high for last season, when they went 4-12 under Jim Fassel.
``I think we are starting to believe in ourselves,'' said Giants punter Jeff Feagles, who landed four punts inside the 14-yard line in the first half. ``Everybody in this league knows how important confidence is. We're getting turnovers, we're not giving the ball up and (we're) playing sound football. We're getting on a roll.''
AP - Sep 26, 5:40 pm EDTMore PhotosSteve Christie added field goals of 43 and 25 yards and Mike Cloud iced the game with a late 5-yard touchdown run for New York.
Garcia, who had a 0.0 quarterback rating against Dallas last weekend, hit Quincy Morgan on a 3-yard touchdown pass and Phil Dawson kicked a 49-yard field goal for the Browns, who got all their points after falling behind 17-0.
``We had too many mistakes and penalties that erased positive plays,'' said Garcia, who finished 21-of-31 for 180 yards and an interception. ``We had turnovers in bad situations. We never seemed to get anything headed in the right direction until much too late.''
Cleveland had six starters hurt in last week's loss to the Cowboys, and also lost linebacker Ben Taylor with a pectoral injury in the first quarter.
``There was so much made out of our having six or seven starters out of the game,'' Brown coach Butch Davis. ``You start thinking this guy has to do this and this guy has to do that, that you almost paralyze yourself.''
The Browns were held to 89 total yards in the first half, in which four of their six series started inside their own 14-yard line.
Warner gave the Giants the lead with a three-play, 71-yard drive on their second possession that ended when Barber scored on a sweep.
After Garcia fumble early in the second half, Warner drove the Giants 95 yards in 11 plays. A personal foul against Cleveland safety Robert Griffith for a late hit helped the drive early and Toomer and Warner combined on a 38-yard pass to set up Warner's TD run.
A holding penalty against Morgan in the third quarter also nullified a 49-yard touchdown run by William Green.
Notes
Amani Toomer extended his own Giants record by a catching a pass for the 86th straight game. ... Giants TE Jeremy Shockey had five catches for 41 yards after complaining about his role in the offense. ... Browns RB William Green rushed for 91 yards on 15 carries. ... Cleveland started Michael Lehan and Leigh Bodden at the cornerbacks with Anthony Henry and Daylon McCutcheon sidelined. ... Giants rookie Gibril Wilson started at SS with Shaun Williams out with a knee injury. Wilson had his second interception in as many games.
Updated on Sunday, Sep 26, 2004 6:35 pm EDT
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CHINA FORMULA ONE GRAND PRIX
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Everyone races to cash in on Shanghai's momentous day
By Calum MacLeod in Shanghai
27 September 2004
The Red Army marched again on Shanghai last night, but this was Michael Schumacher's brigade, not Chairman Mao Tse-tung's. In blood-red Ferrari shirts and caps, waving their team flags, over 100,000 Chinese motor racing fans returned to the city from its spectacular suburban circuit, satisfied with another Ferrari victory but disappointed it fell to Rubens Barrichello and not the world champion.
"Red is a lucky colour for Chinese, and Ferrari is also the best team, so that's why we support them," explained Wang Shipeng from Beijing, who like most Chinese spectators only knew Formula One from television until yesterday's inaugural Grand Prix. "It was so exciting to see it in person, and definitely worth the 1,000 yuan [£70] ticket price."
The rising incomes of China's swelling middle classes made the country the obvious new addition to the Formula One corporate agenda. Yu Zhifei, the Chinese organiser, has promised to turn the Shanghai leg into the biggest cash machine in Chinese sports. Given the spirit of free enterprise dominating this communist country, it was no surprise to find everyone cashing in on the largest sporting event China has ever held.
On arrival at the track yesterday morning, fans were met by local farmers hawking binoculars. "Buy a pair, only 50 yuan [£4]!" urged a woman in a large straw hat. She guessed her weekend break from the fields would realise £70, several months' income to the average peasant.
While peasants aplenty had watched the magnificent circuitrise from the marshlands of Anting, there were gasps from city slickers glimpsing it for the first time. Sitting on concrete piles and a sea of polystyrene that keeps it from sinking into the bog, the track is another triumph in a resurgent era for the Chinese people.
Schumacher is called the "Prince of Cars" or "Car God" by the Chinese media, but a local hero would soon displace him. "If there was a Chinese F1 driver, I'd definitely support his team," admitted a Ferrari fan from Nantong, two hours' drive away, as the 2pm race time approached. The stands and grass embankments were packed with 160,000 people, including over 50,000 foreign visitors. In the carnival atmosphere, Chinese spectators waved at the TV helicopters overhead, and tucked into noodles and Foster's beer.
"Big Schumacher", as he also called, to differentiate him from brother Ralf, or "Little Schumacher", earned a huge roar on overtaking Jenson Button, even though it was just the parade lap. once the action was under way, the crowds applauded his surge up 10 places, from the very back of the field, then grew quieter as the German's nightmare weekend continued.
A car missing a wheel aroused the biggest buzz in the later half of the race, for China would appreciate a little more incident: crowds quickly gather at any accident site in this country. But the generally smooth passage of the Formula One experience completes another stretch of the country's modernisation. "I have been watching F1 for six years on TV," said a Shanghai student. "Today I felt so proud that it has come to my city and my country."
