The Blog

John Lundberg: Maya Angelou's Elegy For Michael Jackson

2009-07-12T14:42:18Z

Among the many notable moments at Michael Jackson's funeral was Queen Latifah's reading of the Maya Angelou poem "We Had Him." The popular poetess wrote the poem specifically for the occasion (no easy task) and just that morning asked Latifah to perform it, which she did with spirit and elegance.

"We Had Him" is typical of Angelou's work: inspirational and accessible, confident, and deriving power from its rhythms and repetition. You probably know her popular poem "Phenomenal Woman," and might remember another occasional poem she wrote, "On the Pulse of the Morning," which she read at Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

Here's a transcript of "We Had Him" (I took a best guess at the line breaks--Angelou may have intended them to fall elsewhere):

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing,
now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips
like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace.
Sing our songs among the stars and walk our dances across the face of the moon.
In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time.
No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.
Only when we confess our confusion can we remember
that he was a gift to us and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.
Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love,
and survived and did more than that.
He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style.
We had him whether we know who he was or did not know,
he was ours and we were his.
We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.
And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.
We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing.
He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana's Black Star Square.
In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England

We are missing Michael.
But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

The audience responded well to the poem. What do you think?

I find more poignancy in this quote from her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

Michael didn't seem to have a lot of answers, but for all of his faults, he sang a powerful song.

Larry Diamond: Obama and Democracy in Africa

2009-07-11T23:09:55Z

In his historic speech to Ghana's parliament today, President Barack Obama put democracy and good governance at the front and center of Africa's future and America's hope for it. That is just where it needs to be. Obama could not have been more eloquent or forthright in identifying bad governance -- corruption, lawlessness, abuse of human rights, and purely superficial deference to democratic norms -- as the bane of Africa's quest for development and dignity.

Of course, the point was forcefully made from the start in Obama's choice of Ghana for his visit to sub-Saharan Africa as president. Ghana is not immune from the ills of corruption and misuse of power that plague the continent, but among the continent's sizeable countries, it has gone the furthest in achieving a reasonably liberal democracy, with repeated free and fair elections, media freedom, a pluralistic civil society, and responsible governance. And it has generated significant economic progress and significant new flows of international development assistance (and to some extent investment) as a result.

The Accra speech was historic in a number of respects. No American president has ever spoken so candidly on African soil about the real roots of Africa's development malaise, which lie in the "big man" syndrome of patronage-drenched ethnic politics, contempt for the rule of law, and wanton abuse of human rights. Perhaps only an American president whose African grandfather felt the brunt of racist European imperialism could say to Africa as frankly as Obama did that--more than half a century after decolonization--the core problem is not the colonial legacy but what Africans themselves have done and failed to do with the hopes and dreams they carried into dependence. The speech was a clarion call for Africans to assume personal and national responsibility for their own futures, and I suspect it will leave an especially deep impact on young Africans, whom Obama addressed directly and inspirationally as only he can.

This is not the first time that Obama has spoken eloquently abroad about the importance of democracy, human rights, and good governance. It formed an important, if secondary, theme of his Cairo speech last month, when, in seeking to build a new bridge of partnership and understanding with Muslims around the world, he challenged the legitimacy and sustainability of oppressive regimes, with language that resonated powerfully among Arab publics who want democratic change. It was a major element of his speech this past week to the New Economic School in Moscow. Even though that speech again had another purpose--to help "reset" the American relationship with Russia on fresh foundations of mutual respect and shared interests--it also affirmed the "universal values" of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, the rule of law and competitive elections.

In fact, the succession of messages defining to the world what his administration stands for began with his historic public speech in Prague's Hradcany Square on April 5. Mainly, that address unfolded a broad vision and commitment to work for a world free of nuclear weapons, but it began with a passionate tribute to "the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like."

During his campaign and in his young presidency, Obama has spoken repeatedly and passionately of how the "arc of history" bends in the long run toward freedom. But there is also an arc across these speeches that is, no doubt surprisingly to some of his Republican and conservative critics, committing his Administration to support, encourage, and work for the advance of freedom around the world. Clearly, it will not take the same moralistic and grandiose tone that George W. Bush often assumed. Nor will it be so openly confrontational; Obama has taken pains repeatedly to stress that he does not wish to "lecture" to other countries. But for these reasons, it could also prove more effective.

In the months ahead lies the next and more difficult challenge. In several prominent speeches and now most explicitly in Accra, Obama has renewed the American commitment to support democratic values and institutions around the world. In Accra, he has gone at least as far as Bush did to identify the inextricable link between sustainable development and responsible, transparent, law-based governance. Further, he has pledged to increase American assistance to the individuals, organizations, and governmental institutions that fight corruption and build good governance. It is a truism--but nevertheless true--that his historic speeches will ultimately be judged by his success in delivering on these commitments.

Some obvious steps would help to move the policy forward. First, it is going to require more money for democracy and governance assistance, and for generating the incentives for countries to institutionalize more transparent and accountable governance. This is a tough thing to do in hard economic times, but it is essential if Obama's rhetorical commitments are to be taken seriously. Direct democracy and governance assistance programs require only a small percentage of the record $49 billion just appropriated by the House for diplomacy and development. But the budgets for the National Endowment for Democracy and for democracy and governance programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development can be incrementally increased. It is a welcome development that the House voted a modest increase in assistance for one of George W. Bush's signature aid programs, the independent Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). But it is important that the relative independence of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and its innovative, incentive-based approach to encouraging good governance be preserved.

Second, Obama must name a new Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development as soon as possible. Development specialists had hoped that the early naming of a high-profile, vigorous leader would energize and symbolize an elevation of the development function within American foreign policy. Instead, USAID has been drifting, uncertain and to some extent demoralized, in the absence of a new leader and a clarified role.

Third, new allocations of development assistance to countries, in Africa and around the world, must continue to be reformed to reflect their relative levels of commitment to good governance, not just through the MCA but in the overall development assistance budget of USAID. The United States and other donor agencies in Europe and Japan, not to mention the World Bank and other international donors, still pour far too much money into the coffers of governments that are wasting and stealing the aid. One can only admire Obama's commitment to substantially increasing U.S. development assistance over time, as well as his visionary and urgently needed push at the recent G8 summit, for a new international assistance to improve food security in poor nations. But if Obama takes seriously his own message in Accra--that better governance is the key to development in Africa--then aid programs must find better ways to link the two, and to leverage the former in order to advance the latter.

Finally, the new Administration needs to designate a high-ranking official who will have overall authority to craft its strategies and coordinate its programs to support democratic development around the world. This could either take the form of "dual-hatting" an existing official at the National Security Council in this role (as was the case in the Bush Administration), or naming a new special coordinator for democracy programs. In the end, policy implementation comes down to people and lines of authority. Designating a high-level NSC official to coordinate the Administration's efforts to advance democracy and good governance would show that Obama is serious about joining with African peoples--and others around the world still mired in poverty and bad governance--to become, in his words in Accra, "partners in building the capacity for transformational change."

Stephen Schlesinger: Obama's Internationalism: Echoes of FDR, HST and JFK

2009-07-11T22:26:30Z

President Obama gave a speech last week in Moscow that conjures up memories of our greatest foreign policy presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy. Two lines from Obama's address directly echo the themes and concerns of these three 20th century Democratic leaders.

First Obama stated: "Any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game -- progress must be shared."

And then he said: ""Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor should we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country."

His remarks are eerily reminiscent of two powerful speeches which President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, President Harry Truman, delivered within four months of each other in 1945.

FDR said in March 1945: "We shall have to take responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict."

And Truman's remarks in June 1945: "We all have to recognize -- no matter how great our strength -- that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. No one nation, no regional group, can, or should expect, any special privilege which harms any other nation. If any nation would keep security for itself, it must be ready and willing to share security with all. That is the price which each nation will have to pay for world peace."

Finally there are John Kennedy's comments in his talk at the University of Washington on November 16, 1961: "In short, we must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only six percent of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Obama's words represent a continuation of this historic tradition of internationalism in the Democratic Party that has helped build America into the most powerful land on earth. The Obama presidency gives hope for a return to such realistic multilateral diplomacy of yore in the coming years.

Arianna Huffington: Sunday Roundup

2009-07-11T21:59:00Z

The Democrats' handling of the health care battle continues to confound. This week brought us Rahm Emanuel floating the forget-the-public-option balloon. It landed with a thud -- and President Obama had to walk back his chief of staff's statement all the way from Russia (Sarah Palin could see the walk-back from her porch). We also saw Harry Reid telling health care roadblock Max Baucus to stop chasing GOP votes on health care -- and Baucus, whose office has been a breeding ground for health care industry lobbyists, ignoring him. The Congressional Budget Office recently scored the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee's health care plan, which includes a pubic option, and found that it would cover 97 percent of Americans and cost $600 billion over ten years. Add in the expansion of Medicaid needed to cover the poor and near poor, and the tab hits between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion -- a small percentage of the $33 trillion it's predicted we'll be spending on health care over that time. So why aren't all 60 members of the Democratic caucus clamoring to support it? Elsewhere, 11-year-old Paris Michael Jackson delivered the quote of the week when she stepped to the memorial mic and declared: "Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much."

Scott Atran: The Moral Failure of Our National Intelligence

2009-07-11T19:26:00Z

"The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear," Winston Churchill famously cautioned, "is the commonest explanation of mistaken policy." But perhaps an even greater failure of a leader is refusal to hear what he doesn't like. A number of competent government officials, from the White House to U.S. mission in Afghanistan, have told me that this attitude was their greatest frustration: for example, in trying to get the administration to tone down its promotion of public hysteria over a wildly overblown domestic terrorism threat, to face up to the considerable popular support for the Taliban in many areas of Afghanistan, or to deal with the murderous venality and duplicity of regional U.S. allies.

A new government report on the Bush administration's surveillance of personal commmunications reveals a familiar pattern of intellectual deafness and moral abuse of the country. As with the administration's promotion of waterboarding and other forms of torture, post- September 11 practices were implemented in defiance of existing law. On orders of the president, those in his close circle then approached second-tier government officials to elicit justifications for these practices after the fact: In November 2001, Justice Department lawyer James Yoo dutifully obliged with a legally flawed and factually inaccurate recommendation for warrantless wiretapping; in October 2002, military lawyer Lt. Col Diane Beaver readily commended "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" interrogations to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in knowing defiance of the Geneva Convention, and forcefully argued for hiding these practices from the International Red Cross. The lawyers' immediate superiors were misinformed, or not informed at all, about their underlings' recommendations, or even about the practices assessed. The president and his inner circle adopted the recommendations of Yoo and Beaver as official U.S. policy without bothering to elicit further legal opinion or consult Congress. President Bush liked what he had.

Once word did leak through about what was being done, however, other officials fought to stop the practices or at least bring them to light. In March 2004, Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Comey -- who is no slouch when it comes to zealously pursuing even the thinnest lead related to terrorism -- rushed up the steps to the hospital room of Attorney General John Aschcroft, to prevent then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez from wangling a signature from the heavily-sedated patient to re-authorize domestic eavesdropping. Gonzalez signed the document instead, and later willfully deceived Congress about the whole business (and many other matters) when he became Attorney General. To their credit, both Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller threatened to resign unless greater transparency and oversight were forthcoming.

In striking contrast to the rectitude of those officials who have risked their careers for the law of the land, there are the partisan stalwarts, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, who bend the law and the truth to fit their ends. Cheney's repeated claims that harsh interrogation and wiretapping "saved many thousands of American lives" are supported by no facts known to the public. And his appeal to classified evidence should be met with no greater confidence than his bogus claims about Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda acting in tandem against the United States.

Serving the aims of the Bush administration, were others who wanted to please and play with the Big Boys, like Gonzalez and Bush's first CIA director George Tenet. In December 2002, when plans to invade Iraq were being set to "go," Tenet promised the president a "slam dunk case" that would convince the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Tenet, though, was careful not to claim to his superiors that the evidence was in fact true, only that it would sell the war to the American people.

A telling example is over reliance on a source -- codenamed "Curveball" -- whose information was untrustworthy from the outset. German intelligence first interviewed Curveball, an Iraqi chemical engineer living in Germany, and informed the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA passed along the information to the CIA. When the CIA sought to interview Curveball, German intelligence told the CIA it was a waste of time because Curveball was "a fabricator and crazy." Tyler Drumheller, former head of the CIA European Division, told reporters that in 2002 he saw "dozens and dozens of e-mails and memos" impugning Curveball's credibility. Nevertheless, Tenet claimed that there was never a "formal memo" questioning Curveball's reliability until after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell proffered Curveball's fantasies as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" in a speech to the U.N. on February 5, 2003. When Powell realized he'd been duped, and started to complain about it, he was no longer pleasing to the administration, and he resigned.

Forgotten or ignored in the fiasco were at least three hard lessons, which Reginald V. Jones, Britain's Head of Scientific Intelligence in WWII, summarized years ago in his classic, The Wizard War:

(1) It is necessary to avoid "the steady and immediate broadcasting of each... uncollated fact," and to withhold such information from political decision makers until checked because "to spread half-truth is often to precipitate erroneous action."

(2) The intelligence community must provide an "independent voice" that takes no consideration of what political decision makers may want to hear because this, as Churchill concurred, is "vital" to "the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend."

(3) Information from disaffected nationals is usually the most unreliable source on weapons or methods available to actual or potential enemies and "must always be checked." As Machiavelli noted long ago:

How dangerous it is to trust the representatives of exiles... such is their extreme desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things that are not true, and add many others on purpose.... A prince therefore should be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury. (Discorsi, ch. 31)

In his apologia, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet argued that errors made in the eagerness to respond to any positive indications of terrorism, no matter how paltry, were justified by a pervasive but still hidden threat from "sleeper cells" and the like. In fact, the only bona fide sleeper agent in U.S. history was Soviet intelligence officer Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (aka Rudolph Abel), who was caught and exchanged for the CIA's U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962. Yet Tenet continued to insist even after leaving office that the U.S. is awash with "sleeper cells" -- a wolf cry still widely echoed in the media.

But what of the decent men and women whose public profile is not high enough to force the righting of a wrong by threatening to resign, and who are bound by law from not revealing any information that could contradict official policy? There are many of these people at all levels of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies who are faced with an almost tragic choice: resign into oblivion or continue to work for the common good but inside the belly of the beast.

Consider the case of Phil Mudd. Early last month, Mudd, President Obama's choice for intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security, withdrew from consideration over Congressional doubts about his knowledge of the CIA's "harsh interrogation" of terrorism suspects. I have in this forum elsewhere denounced the Bush administration's use of such techniques as criminally immoral forms of abuse that undermine the principles of due process of law and protection from cruel and unusual punishment -- Enlightenment principles that, for the first time in human history, established the sovereignty and integrity of each individual body and mind, and which gave rise to the founding of our Republic. But the Phil Mudd I've known in several encounters, from Washington to Riyadh, never conveyed support for torture of any kind.

On the contrary, Mudd's principal argument to leaders and law enforcement officials around the world is that the best way to end terrorism is to give hope to the young. On March 10, 2008 he confirmed to me for the public record: "Terrorism is not only a problem of ideology or religion but a global virus that attacks young people who have lost hope. I think there is a fairly strong correlation between hope and extremism. We have to provide hope." I watched him wince at the idiocies uttered by others about some central terrorist command and control of "sleeper cells," "brainwashing," "recruitment" and other nonsense but, as with torture, his only choice was to keep silent in public or cease serving the nation with his talent.

This insightful man may be paying a political price that I hope will not cost the country. How could President Obama drop Phil Mudd at the slightest doubt about his possible knowledge of torture, but let Guantánamo operate even a moment longer, where torture has been indubitable? If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that when petty politics play with moral principles, the nation's standing is undermined and society wobbles.

Jake Whitney: Betraying the Tribe: Michela Wrong and the Foundations of African Corruption

2009-07-11T16:29:28Z

The list of corrupt African leaders in modern history is a long one.

Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, Sani Abacha of Nigeria -- to name just a few -- pilfered their countries and/or brutalized their people to a flabbergasting degree.

Why so many? It's a question that's rarely asked. While the reticence might be attributed to fear of being labeled a racist, in fact it's the silence itself that reeks of racism. After all, doesn't the sustained quiet speak of lowered expectations of these rulers? Michela Wrong's new book, It's Our Turn To Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, confronts the question of African corruption head on and finds there's plenty of blame to go around.

In early 2003, Wrong's friend John Githongo was tapped by incoming President Mwai Kibaki to be Kenya's new anti-corruption chief. Kibaki had been swept into office on a platform of fighting graft, and his appointment of Githongo, a former journalist and Transparency International worker, was supposed to indicate that he meant business. Reeling from the scandals of the Daniel arap Moi regime, Kenyans had finally had enough of the rampant corruption that permeated virtually every aspect of their lives -- a 2001 survey found that the average city-dwelling Kenyan shelled out 16 bribes per month.

Githongo excelled at his job; corruption decreased during his years as czar. Two years after his appointment, however, Githongo fled Kenya afraid for his life. On February 6, 2005, he surfaced at Wrong's London apartment bearing secretly taped recordings of Kibaki's ministers. These recordings, along with other evidence Githongo would eventually make public, suggested that top government officials, including Kibaki, took part in a $750 million procurement scam - a scam that would become known as Anglo Leasing.

It's Our Turn to Eat, released in the U.S. a few weeks ago, recounts Githongo's attempts at bringing the architects of Anglo Leasing to justice. But it's only partly a political thriller. At its core, It's Our Turn to Eat is an examination of Kenya's - and by extension, Africa's - corrupt culture. In unearthing the foundations of this culture, Wrong points directly to colonialism and tribalism. But her book also serves as a searing indictment of western aid donors and the World Bank, which Wrong accuses of being complicit in Africa's corruption for turning a blind eye to thieving regimes.

None of this is entirely new, but Wrong, who covered Africa for 15 years for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times, argues convincingly that the evils of colonialism entrenched tribal differences to such a degree that the "patterns being reproduced today" - thieving regimes out to take care of one group at the expensive of everyone else - "began in the Nineteenth Century."

When the British colonized Kenya in the 1930s, they established separate tribal reserves, with virtually no travel allowed between them. These instilled a belief that members of other tribes were foreigners -- a belief that became so ingrained that today, Wrong says, many Kenyans expect their president to take care of his tribe first and the country second. All of the alleged participants in Anglo Leasing were members of the Kikuyu tribe. So was Githongo, which is why his fellow officials were in such disbelief when he went 'off the reservation.'

Like Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid, released earlier this year, It's Our Turn To Eat argues that aid fuels corruption in African nations by removing accountability between governments and citizens: a government less reliant on taxes thinks it owes less to its people. While Wrong, unlike Moyo, sees some value in systemic aid, Wrong paints a more vibrant portrait than Moyo does of the sicknesses in the aid relationship.

Wrong offers up-close-and-personal accounts of World Bank directors so cozy with Kibaki that they lived on his estate; of Britain's diplomat Sir Edward Gray, who resorted to mocking Kenya's corruption in public after his concerns were ignored by the Blair Administration; and of a meeting between Githongo and Britain's development ministry in which Githongo's "allegations" were dismissed with an attitude of "This is Africa; it's always been corrupt."

Wrong is particularly critical of the World Bank. She, like Moyo, describes the Bank as the center of a barely tameable "aid industry" in which half a million employees rely on aid for their salaries. This creates an almost unstoppable impetus to keep the money flowing - even in the face of blatant thievery. Incentive structures are also a problem. "No one gets Brownie points back at head office for closing down a program or putting a relationship with a client government on ice," Wrong writes, "even if this was, in fact, the most constructive course of action."

So if colonialism, tribalism and aid compose Wrong's foundations of African corruption, the top layer, of course, is the thieving governments themselves. Wrong is certainly unblinking in her criticism of the Kibaki regime, but she occasionally veers toward excusing the corruption by pointing so often to its historical roots. She addressed this in a recent interview with me for Guernica Magazine.

To understand is not to absolve," she said. "Colonialism played its part in laying corruption's foundations - the belief that 'everything is permitted because it's us against the world' - and donors hypocritically indulged it. But the level of corruption in countries like Kenya and Nigeria stands as a terrible indictment of African leadership since independence. The fact that some nations have gone down a different path shows that it is not necessary, or inevitable, for African countries to be this way.

There are many tragic moments in It's Our Turn To Eat, not least of which is the end. Wrong leaves her hero with his findings dismissed, his name disgraced (in some quarters), and his life still in danger -- yet most of the Anglo Leasing suspects remain in power, including Kibaki, who managed to steal the 2007 elections. But Wrong's book nevertheless is an essential case study of one African government's descent into corruption placed within the context of the historical factors that made it such an easy plunge to take. The real tragedy of It's Our Turn To Eat is that you're left knowing one more name has been added to the long list: Mwai Kibaki.

Tara Stiles: What's In the Fridge? Three Reasons To Cook Your Own Meals

2009-07-11T15:01:54Z

"What's for dinner?" A lot of us ask that question right before popping our head in the fridge to see what the options are. If nothing edible is found in the house, three options with rather high probability of being significantly less healthy than the home-cooked-meal come to the table.

1. Hungry trip to the supermarket. We've all experienced this. With all the good intentions of buying the staples, we grab a bag of chips or box of cookies because our stomachs and brains were freaking out until we gave them something instantly satisfying. Those cookies are history five minutes after check-out.

2. Delivery menu scramble. Pizza, Thai, Chinese, Burgers, oh my! This rarely ends well.

3. Going out to eat. If you live near a restaurant that serves simple, organic, fresh foods, you may be ok. But that isn't the case for most of us. Even if there is a healthy joint nearby, when engulfed in a hunger rage our brain chemistry and psychology can turn us into zombies making our way to a not-so-healthy eating establishment.

If Michael Pollan and our parents (assuming they had a little common sense) have taught us anything it's that preparing our own meals is so much better than the other options for many reasons. We can create our portion size, know all the ingredients we are eating, and will probably enjoy our meal much more because we took the time to make it.

Sure, it's cheaper to eat at McDonald's. For $1.99 a day, you can become obese, get diabetes, and keep the pharmaceutical industry in business. Organic foods can become less expensive when there is more demand. We can decide to spend either on healthy foods that will keep your body working efficiently for a long time, or cheap foods that will make you sick and cost you much more in medication and hospital costs. As for time, there's always time to do what's important to you. Make it important!

So what's in the fridge? Go take a look. You can save yourself now, while you're not starving, with a trip to the farmers market or grocery store. When you're done with your fridge, go check out your neighbor's, your family's and your friends' too. Swap healthy recipes. Take your farmers market and grocery store trips together. Then have your friends over for dinner. You'll eat better, feel better, and probably have a good time while you're at it.

Andy Worthington: Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

2009-07-11T13:21:50Z

On Wednesday, I reported how Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy from 1997 to 2000, had delivered compelling testimony to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on "legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war," explaining why the only valid forum for trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay is the U.S. federal court system.

The lucidity and directness of Hutson's testimony was in marked contrast to the amendments to the existing Military Commission system -- and terrifying asides about the use of "preventive detention" -- that were proposed by Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's General Counsel, and David Kris, the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's National Security Division, in response to legislation already prepared by the Committee, which, it seems, will be presented to the Senate in the imminent future, even though it still allows (subject to certain restrictions) the use of information -- I hesitate to use the word "evidence" -- obtained through coercion, and other information that is nothing more than hearsay.

The day after Hutson delivered his testimony, the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on "Legal Issues Surrounding the Military Commissions System," in which Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld of the U.S. Reserves, a former prosecutor in the Military Commissions, delivered what should, I believe, be the final word on the unsuitability of Military Commissions as a valid trial system (PDF).

Vandeveld, who served in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan before volunteering for Guantánamo, and who has been decorated on several occasions, sent shockwaves through the Commission system under the Bush administration, when he spectacularly resigned last September, declaring, "I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain 'procedure' for affording defense counsel discovery." He added that the "incomplete or unreliable" discovery process "deprive[s] the accused of basic due process and subject[s] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct."

The particular trigger for the dissatisfaction that led him to tell the Committee about "the mistaken proposals to revise and revive the irretrievably flawed military commissions at Guantánamo Bay," and that turned him from, as he described it, a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived," was the incompetence and obstruction he encountered as he tried to build a case against Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan prisoner accused of throwing a grenade that injured two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator in December 2002, and it was this journey to the "dark side" that he reprised for the Committee on Wednesday to such devastating effect.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld explains how he became opposed to the Military Commissions

Telling the Committee that he had not always been "skeptical about the capacity of military commissions to deliver justice," Vandeveld admitted that, at the beginning of his assignment at Guantánamo, when Jawad "told the court that he was only 16 at the time of his arrest, and that he had been subjected to horrible abuse, I accused him of exaggerating and ridiculed his story as 'idiotic.'" He added, "I did not believe that he was a juvenile, and I railed against Jawad's military defense attorney, whom I suspected of being a terrorist sympathizer."

Vandeveld explained that, initially, the case against Jawad "seemed uncomplicated," because he had "confessed to his role in the attack on a videotape recorded by U.S. personnel," and, as a result, the case "seemed likely to produce a quick, clean conviction, and an unmarred early victory for the prosecution, vindicating the concept" of the Commissions.

As he "delved deeper into Jawad's case file," however, he "soon discovered a number of disturbing anomalies," and explained that when he "attempted to bring these anomalies to the attention of my supervisors, they were harshly dismissive of my concerns and actually, on some unspoken level, began to question my loyalty, even though my combat experience exceeded both theirs combined." He continued:

I began to realize that the problems with Jawad's case were symptomatic of the military commissions regime as a whole. Indeed, if any case was likely to be free of such anomalies, it should have been that of Mr. Jawad, whose alleged crime was as straightforward as any on the prosecutor's docket. Instead, gathering the evidence against Mr. Jawad was like looking into Pandora's Box: I uncovered a confession obtained through torture, two suicide attempts by the accused, abusive interrogations, the withholding of exculpatory evidence from the defense, judicial incompetence, and ugly attempts to cover up the failures of an irretrievably broken system.

Evidence from U.S. Army criminal investigators showed that Jawad had been hooded, slapped repeatedly across the face and then thrown down at least one flight of stairs while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. Detainee records show that once at Guantánamo, he was subjected to a sleep deprivation regime, known as the "frequent flier program," during which he was moved to different cells 112 times over a 14-day period -- an average of once every two and a half hours -- and that he had tried to commit suicide by banging his head repeatedly against a wall. Evidence from a bone scan showed that he was, in fact, a juvenile when he was initially taken into U.S. custody. Field reports, and examinations by U.S. personnel in the hours after Jawad had been apprehended, indicated that he had been recruited by terrorists who drugged him and lied to him, and that he probably hadn't committed the crime for which he was being charged. In fact, the military had obtained confessions from at least two other individuals for the same crime.

As a result, Vandeveld explained, he "came to realize that Mr. Jawad had probably been telling the truth to the court from the very beginning," but when his subsequent attempts to secure a plea bargain that would allow Jawad to be repatriated fell on deaf ears, he made the "enormously painful decision to ask to be reassigned from the Commissions." As he explained, "I simply could not in good conscience continue to work for an ad-hoc, hastily created apparatus -- as opposed to the military itself -- whose evident resort to expediency and ethical compromise were so contrary to my own and to those the Army has enshrined and preached since I enlisted so many years ago."

Lt. Col. Vandeveld condemns the Commissions

Lt. Col. Vandeveld's personal experience of incompetence and obstruction in the case of Mohamed Jawad is shocking for two reasons: firstly, because, although a military judge threw out the only supposed evidence against him in October and November last year, ruling that two confessions obtained on the day of his arrest in Afghan and U.S. custody were the result of torture, and although Vandeveld delivered a more expansive explanation of why there was no case against him in a submission accompanying his habeas corpus petition in January, the Obama administration has not followed his advice about repatriating him, and the Justice Department has refused to drop the case.

Just last week, this inexplicable obstinacy on the part of the DoJ led his civilian lawyers at the ACLU to lodge a petition urging the judge to throw out information extracted during 57 subsequent interrogations, which was aptly described by one of his lawyers, Jonathan Hafetz, as confirmation of the government's "continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse," which "violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past."

However, while this is certainly a painful example of the Obama administration's insistence on pursuing worthless and embarrassing cases that seem only to confirm a dogged determination to defend the colossal errors made by the Bush administration (as I also explained here and here), Lt. Col. Vandeveld's experience of Jawad's case enabled him to confirm to the Committee not just that one particular case was tainted by incompetence and obstruction, but how the entire system was irredeemably flawed, and cannot be repaired by changing a few of the rules. As he explained in his statement:

I am here today to offer a single, straightforward message: the military commission system is broken beyond repair. Even good faith efforts at revision, such as legislation recently passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, leave in place provisions that are illegal and unconstitutional, undermine defendants' basic fair trial rights, create unacceptable risks of wrongful prosecution, place our men and women in uniform at risk of unfair prosecution by other nations abroad, harm the reputation of the United States, invite time consuming litigation before federal courts, and, most importantly, undermine the fundamental values of justice and liberty upon which this great country was founded.

He added, crucially, "The military commissions cannot be fixed, because their very creation -- and the only reason to prefer military commissions over federal criminal courts for the Guantánamo detainees -- can now be clearly seen as an artifice, a contrivance, to try to obtain prosecutions based on evidence that would not be admissible in any civilian or military prosecution anywhere in our nation." This was similar to Admiral Hutson's observation that "You can't have a legitimate court unless you are willing to risk an acquittal. If you aren't willing to accept the possibility that a jury will acquit the accused based on the evidence fairly presented, then it isn't really a court. It's a charade." However, Vandeveld then proceeded to provide three concrete examples of institutional problems, "each of which I witnessed during my time at Guantánamo and which would remain problematic under the present proposal":

"the rules of admissibility of evidence, including the relaxation of restrictions on the admissibility of evidence obtained through coercion and hearsay"

"the gathering and handling of evidence, including legal and institutional restrictions on the disclosure of sensitive or classified evidence to the defense"

"institutional deficiencies, including the insufficient experience and qualifications of both judges and counsel, and the inadequate provision of resources to the defense"

The problems with coercion and hearsay

After stating that each of these shortcomings "will prove persistent even in the face of the most ardent, well-meaning legislative repackaging," Vandeveld attacked the Senate Committee's proposal to "continue to allow into evidence statements obtained through coercion." The wording of the legislation (see Section 1031) stipulates that "A statement in which the degree of coercion is disputed may be admissible in a trial by military commission ... only if the military judge finds that (1) the totality of the circumstances renders the statement reliable and possessing sufficient probative value; (2) the interests of justice would best be served by admission of the statement into evidence; and (3) the interrogation methods used to obtain the statement do not amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment prohibited by section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

For Vandeveld, however, this remained unacceptable, and he stated, bluntly, "The impetus for this rule is obvious. The sad reality is that virtually every detainee -- Mohamed Jawad is a salient example -- has been subjected to torture and abuse repeatedly. Many of them are mentally ill as a result, some profoundly so."

In addition, after noting that the prohibition on the use of coerced statements exists because of "moral repugnance," and because they are "unreliable," Vandeveld noted that, although in some cases, including those of the "high-value detainees," coerced statements "may be corroborated by evidence that would be admissible," for many other prisoners the decision to proceed with coerced statements is desperately unsound:

Disallowing evidence obtained through coercion would result in the evisceration of many of the cases that might otherwise, on the most tenuous of theories, have been prosecuted. Instead of recognizing this sad reality and resettling or repatriating those prisoners against whom the government has insufficient and tainted evidence, the present legislation, in effect, opts to continue the charade.

For similar reasons, Vandeveld then dismissed the use of information obtained through hearsay, disputing Sen. Carl Levin's explanation, during the Senate Committee hearing on Tuesday, that the Committee's revisions ought to be acceptable because they were designed to "eliminate the extraordinary language in the existing law which places the burden on detainees to prove that hearsay evidence introduced against them is not reliable and probative."

He also took exception to President Obama's claims that the use of hearsay "would be consistent with international standards, such as those employed in international criminal tribunals," because, he said, the president's opinion failed to take into account that judges in those cases are "qualified to consider hearsay and determine its value," whereas the "lay jurors" in the Commissions -- whose role would essentially be the same in any system revised by Obama -- are not.

The problems with the gathering and handling of evidence

Moving on to the "gathering and handling of evidence," Vandeveld noted that the Commissions suffered from "enormous problems," primarily because, unlike "the investigations and case files assembled by military or civilian police agencies and prosecution offices," the Commissions had -- and will continue to have -- "no central repository for case files, no method for cataloguing and storing physical evidence, nor any other system for assembling a potential case into a readily intelligible format that is the sine qua non of a successful prosecution."

This is damning enough, but, citing his experience with Jawad, Vandeveld also explained why the case files were so chaotic. "The obvious reason behind the shoddy preparation of evidence against Mr. Jawad," he said, "is that it was not gathered in anticipation of any semblance of a 'real' trial." He added:

With the government setting an extremely low evidentiary bar for continued detention without charge, with the focus on extracting information through coercive interrogations rather than on prosecution, and with the understanding that any trials will forego fundamental due process protections, there is little incentive for investigators to engage in the type of careful, systematic gathering of evidence that one would find in a typical civilian trial.

Allied to this particular problem, which, it is clear, can only be addressed adequately by dropping cases in which "the government has insufficient and tainted evidence," and putting the rest into federal courts, where this type of systemic evasion will be impossible, are what Vandeveld referred to as "the excessive restrictions on the disclosure of classified or sensitive evidence to defense counsel."

This, again, is clearly part of the very architecture of the Commissions, designed, in an essentially lawless manner, to prevent any obstacles to prosecution, and as Vandeveld spelled out, in practice the almost obsessive focus on secrecy serves only to discredit the entire process. Unmoved by Sen. Levin's unsubstantiated claim that the Committee's revisions will "eliminate the unique procedures and requirements which have hampered the ability of defense teams to obtain information and led to so much litigation," he described a process in which secrecy (to the detriment of the defense) was absolutely central, and made it clear that he found it inconceivable that the necessary changes were even remotely feasible.

"Over-classification and protective orders can make it almost impossible for defense attorneys to formulate a viable case," he said, adding that, although there was "no reason" to deny attorneys access to this information, because they "can and should be trusted not to share such information with their clients as the law requires," the endemic focus on secrecy meant, in reality, that "names of potential defense witnesses are routinely redacted from discovery materials, and protective orders hinder the defense's ability to ascertain such witnesses' identities through its own investigation."

Institutional deficiencies

Beyond the chaos that makes it "nigh impossible for prosecutors to comply with the discovery obligations mandated by their rules of professional conduct," Vandeveld also identified numerous other "institutional deficiencies" with the Commissions, which as he stated, "undermine the pursuit of justice and have created a kind of 'circus' atmosphere at GTMO." These include the lack of experience of the military judges, even though many of them displayed a "remarkable independence," and refused to "serve as little more than an 'amen chorus,' witlessly endorsing every pronouncement, however thin, false, or ill-conceived," that was put forward by the prosecution, and the inadequate provision of resources to the defense.

Although he was "pleased to see" that the Senate Committee referred to a call from the Office of the Chief of Defense Counsel at the Commissions for more resources to defense counsel, including bringing to an end the patently biased practice of allowing the prosecution to have "input on defense resources," he insisted that, for these particular reforms to meet necessary standards, they "cannot be simply recommended, they must be mandatory."

Lt. Col. Vandeveld's conclusions

In a neat conclusion, Lt. Col. Vandeveld asked the Committee to consider how they would react to "the kind of role reversal that senior military officers routinely consider":

Imagine that U.S. soldiers captured on the battlefield were, today, being subjected to the type of trial proceedings that we plan to set up through these military commissions. Imagine that our service members had been tortured or abused, and that the commissions hearing their cases allowed into evidence statements obtained through coercion. Imagine that defense counsel were thoroughly under-resourced and prohibited even from viewing information critical to their cases, and that exculpatory evidence was hidden. Imagine that the evidence against our soldiers was so weak, and had been gathered in such a shoddy and disorganized manner, that the commissions allowed hearsay into evidence -- to be analyzed not by professional judges but by lay jurors -- just to "make sure" that any and all prosecutions were successful. How would out government react to such trials? I imagine the uproar would be close to deafening.

Vandeveld added that "even the well-intentioned changes made to the military commissions by the Senate Armed Services Committee legislation will create a real risk that, in future, American men and women in uniform will be subject to a farcical trial of this nature," and, in his final words, emphasized the only just manner in which to proceed:

We do not need Military Commissions. They are broken and beyond repair. We do not need indefinite detention, and we do not need a new system of "national security courts." Instead, we should try those whose guilt we can prove while observing "the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples" -- in other words, using those long-standing rules of due process required by Article III courts and military courts-martial -- and resettle or repatriate those whom we cannot. That is the only solution that is consistent with American values and American law.

Sadly, Lt. Col. Vandeveld's unparalleled dissection and repudiation of key deficiencies at the heart of the Commission system -- which, as he correctly observed, are without doubt immune to the kind of cosmetic changes endorsed by the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the Senate Committee -- already appears to be a mere footnote of dissent in the revival of the Commissions.

As Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained to me in an email on Thursday, although he cannot fundamentally understand why Obama is determined to go forward with the Commissions, a plausible theory was put forward during the Committee meeting; namely that "the president has too many issues he's concerned with, and has to rely on his advisers to advise him correctly. Of course, these advisers all come from the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, most of them holdovers from the prior administration, so I suppose their recommendations were and are predictable."

I received a more withering analysis from someone else who intimately understands the irremediable deficiencies of the Commissions, a former senior official who was involved in the novel trial system for many years, who explained to me that, although he was certain when Barack Obama was elected that we were seeing the final days of both Guantánamo and the Commissions, it was "disappointing, to put it mildly, that despite being promised 'change we can believe in' we're getting more of the same old Bush-Cheney policies when it comes to national security."

Expanding on Lt. Col. Vandeveld's concerns about "holdovers" from the Bush administration, the former senior official explained that it was no surprise that Bush-era policies were still being pursued, because Robert Gates is still running the Defense Department, Susan Crawford, a close friend of Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, David Addington, is still in place as the Commissions' Convening Authority, responsible for deciding who should be put forward for trial, Brig. Gen. Thom Hartmann, her discredited legal advisor, continues to orchestrate the Commissions, George Toscas is still serving as the senior Justice Department attorney on matters of national security, and Capt. John Murphy, the new chief prosecutor, has "taken off his Justice Department suit and put on a Navy uniform giving DoJ control over the prosecution."

In a sentence that sums up the increasing sense of disillusion felt by those who expected Barack Obama to work closely with those who resisted the grossest iniquities of the Bush administration, the senior official also noted that it was disappointing that Justice Department and Defense Department officials who stood up to Bush and Cheney and were ostracized for their integrity continued to be ostracized by Obama.

In conclusion, I can only agree wholeheartedly, and add my own disappointment that those of us who spent long years pointing out the horrors of the Bush administration's policies, and waiting for the demise of that particular cabal in the expectation that America would once more respect its role as a nation founded on the rule of law, are still obliged to struggle to have our voices heard, even though what is at stake -- repairing the damage wrought by the Bush administration, and ensuring that the handful of genuine terror suspects at Guantánamo are tried in a forum that will meet international recognized standards -- is of critical importance.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.

Tom Gregory: My Opinion: Michael Jackson's Grave (VIDEO)

2009-07-11T02:36:52Z

Michael Jackson's life has always been a contradiction of outlandish oddity and pinpoint perfection. Now in death, with the unknown location of his body, the enigma continues. It's Hollywood's real life "Where's Waldo," but unless the family is into inflicting undue pain on itself, I am almost certain he is in his final resting place, and I have found its location.

Driving east along Wilshire Boulevard -- just as you drive under the notorious 405 freeway, you enter Westwood Village. Westwood is one of LA's oldest enclaves. It's the enduring home to shops, grand movie theatres, medical buildings, federal offices, and UCLA. During the seventies and eighties -- and especially during the 1984 Olympics, Westwood was the place to go because Hollywood had become too decrepit for any wide-eyed wandering.

Nestled in Westwood Village among the office buildings and condos that line Wilshire Blvd., {Pierce Brothers} Westwood Memorial Park is the end of the road for scores of Hollywood's elite and the well heeled. Located on LA's fashionable west side, directly behind the AVCO movie theatre and an office building, the cemetery, founded in 1904, boasts a roster of stars that -- even in death, any agent would love to represent. Archie Bunker himself Mr. Carroll O'Connor, Dean Martin, Donna Reed, Natalie Wood, Truman Capote, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe are all among those interred at this peaceful, pleasant park. Recently the grand dame of the fighting spirit Farrah Fawcett was interred next to Merv Griffin's final resting place -- bound together for a Los Angeles eternity.

Arguably America's most pricey land at hundreds of thousands of dollars for a "bench estate" to over one million dollars for a "family estate," it's still all virtually free when averaged out over an eternity. Westwood has no dark, Gothic headstones mostly just flush mauve marble memorials of those wealthy ones who have left their mark on the world.

When I first heard of Jackson's death in Los Angeles (officially at UCLA), I thought Westwood Memorial was the only cemetery worthy of the kind of fan traffic and star power he will undoubtedly draw in death. Over the last days, I've been bicycling out to the Westwood cemetery to see if any recent additions have been made to her well-heeled legions of the dead.

Lo and behold between Monday night and Wednesday morning a new grave was opened and closed, and absolutely no one at the place would answer my questions about who is buried there. Look, I could be wrong, but I it all makes sense. Elizabeth Taylor's mother Sara is nearby -- it's public knowledge Taylor will spend eternity herself here one day. The place is small and secure. They've handled Marilyn Monroe's millions of visitors over the decades, security cameras abound and barbed wire contains the manageably sized hallowed grounds.

Even on the chance I'm wrong, in time all will be exposed, even if the family remains secretive on the final resting place. (Roy Orbison and Frank Zappa headstones have never been identified at Westwood). It is certain Jackson's legions of fans will find his plot to visit and pay their respects, Neverland seems too lonely -- too far away, too broken, and potentially too commercial for Michael Jackson's soft, secretive demure life.

Enough of this frenetic death hunt for me. I've done my Jimmy Olsen sleuthing. It's time to put into action the lesson that death teaches all of us and get back to the living while I still have some time.

John R. Price: Who Killed Obama's Health Care Reform?

2009-07-10T22:55:00Z

President Obama's health care initiative isn't dead yet. It's not even on life support. It is, however, in grave danger as long as either the approval or rejection of legislation in Congress rests in the domain of political ideologues and their media lapdogs.

Americans want meaningful changes in the way health care is managed and distributed. They want fair and equitable (mutually exclusive terms?) universal insurance coverage and an intelligent way to pay for it. They want all their elected representatives to understand how the "new and improved" health care system would work and then they want those representatives to come home and explain it to them. If they cannot, they will surely be voted out of office this coming election. Americans really don't understand the granular issues of medical rationing and single payer systems. They are demanding that their representatives do, and that their trust in Congress not be misplaced this time.

More and more, Americans are rejecting the pundits, left and right, and their tired polemic. Limbaugh's claim that the current health care reform proposal is tantamount to gang rape and O'Reilly's framing of coverage for the poor as extra-Constitutional are simply devices to exercise their constituents. Matthews' demand for passage of a coverage bill on moral grounds is as specious as Krugman's exhortation to Congressmen that approving any Obama-based legislation without detailed cost benefit analysis is the mark of a true Democrat.

Americans want a bi-partisan effort on health care reform. They want Republicans and Democrats to keep this from becoming a European soccer match with partisan crazies loathing the opposing team and those wearing its colors. More and more I hear from colleagues in the broad center trying to marginalize the fringe. I am listening for respectful appreciation of opposing views from die hard members' political forums and finding that "yellow and blue dogs" and "grand old party" members are looking for compromise. Hopefully that attitude will push upward from the grass roots to Congress.

The current debate on how to fix health care is over thirty-five years old. In 1974, then-President Nixon introduced the Comprehensive Health Insurance Act that mandated health insurance, costs to be paid for by employers and employees. The Act was coupled with an optional federal health care plan paid for by individual contributions based on income levels. At that time, there were 25 million uninsured Americans. There were opposing bills, including one sponsored by Senator Kennedy and founded on the belief that "only the federal government could operate health insurance that is in the best interest of all the people." The genesis of the political differences in approach to health care lies in the underlying question of who should best care for the interest of the populace. Is health care reform best left to the capitalists, or to the government?

These are not appealing choices. They might have been when we still naively believed that both were competent. With apologies to the few good folks who work in these institutions, Americans are more and more afraid that either Wall Street or the DMV will manage their health care choices.

In 1986, then-President Reagan championed the Tax Reform Act, which was intended to be revenue neutral, meaning that as some revenues were added (new taxes) others were reduced (judicious lowering of taxes). In fact, "revenue neutral," is a theory only, and is so dependent upon future estimates of potential revenues based on projected income growth rates that it becomes an immeasurable concept. There is a lesson for health care reform in the concept.

I propose a different approach. Cost neutral. Like balancing the budget, for every new dollar of health care costs the federal government assumes, an equal dollar of health care cost savings must be found. It is impractical to presume that this zero-sum-game cost approach could be implemented ratably during the first few years of any bill, but a time line based on reasonable savings estimates can be crafted if there is the will to have reform linked to a cost neutral proposition. The added benefit to a longer term approach is that fluctuations based on inaccuracies can be smoothed out in future years.

We then need to address issues of profit motivation in the distribution of our services at the insurer level, the drug company level, the hospital level, and the doctor level. Every one of these groups drive up the cost of the service we receive. Americans do not want to eliminate the profit motive in medicine but they do want it managed.

We need to look at the way we educate doctors. We need to open more medical schools, educate more of them at a more reasonable cost, and break the hold that medical societies have on the acceptances and entrance requirements. We don't need tort reform that caps awards; Americans want to be able to sue their doctor or hospital or even their drug company. We could limit the amount of fees their attorneys get but that won't pass muster with so many lawyers in Congress. We do need to do something about the spiraling cost of malpractice insurance which is driving doctors away from some specialties and some out of the profession altogether. We can create low cost government backed malpractice insurance (and therein regulate attorney litigation costs), not unlike flood insurance. We need to have rational discussions about the cost of care for lifestyle illnesses. Should we require people who smoke to pay for private cancer and lung disease insurance? Is the public really served by allowing drug advertising on television? Should we use our emergency rooms for only true emergency care? And finally, what do we do with the millions of people living in America who have come here illegally and now demand health care service without paying for it. It is decidedly un-American to turn these people away. It is decidedly un-American not to demand some form of compensation. But we now have 47 million people without proper insurance in our system.

All these issues and the many like them are not Republican or Democratic. They are American. And it is up to Americans to demand that our representatives address them as they work toward intelligent health care reform that will not bankrupt our country. That will take a truly bi-partisan approach. And that will keep the Obama Health Care Reform agenda alive.

Dan Glickman: The G-8 Announcement on Agricultural Development: Can it Save the World From Hunger?

2009-07-10T22:47:56Z

The new pledge to commit $20 billion to global agricultural development, announced at this week's G-8 summit, has the potential to dramatically improve the livelihoods of more than 700 million of the world's poor living in rural areas. If realized, this would be the most significant investment in the developing world's agricultural systems since the first Green Revolution in the 1960 and 70s, which saved millions of lives from hunger and created new agricultural infrastructure in parts of the world. Although this pledge should be commended, if the world's hungriest are to benefit, President Obama and leaders from the other G-8 nations will need to provide sustained leadership, funding over the long-term, and support for this effort, or it cannot succeed.

The number of people who live on less than $1 per day reached 1 billion this year. Over 70 percent of these are smallholder farmers and their families living in rural areas of the developing world that lack the technology and skills to produce enough food to feed themselves. The majority are women working to support their families on less than 2 hectares of land. Conditions for the world's farmers are only expected to worsen in years ahead as populations burgeon, the effects of climate change decrease their lands' arability, and fresh water becomes scarcer.

The G-8 announcement signals a significant change in U.S. assistance policy, which has heretofore focused almost exclusively on delivering food to the world's hungry (clearly necessary to provide humanitarian assistance and deal with famine and natural disaster) instead of also helping the developing world produce its own food and create the self-sufficiency of long-term agricultural infrastructure. In 2006, the U.S. government spent 20 times more on food aid than on support for agriculture. The international community's support for agricultural development in Africa has declined 70 percent since the 1980s. The impact of this neglect on the continent is clear - while population has rapidly grown in the last decade, crop yields have declined.

Left unchecked, food insecurity leads to regional instability. We saw in last year's food crisis how quickly escalating food prices can lead to violent political confrontations that compromise weak governments. The backlash to rising food prices makes a lot of sense considering that agriculture comprises a large part of most developing nations' economies: in Pakistan, the agricultural industry accounts for 25 percent of the nation's gross domestic product alone.

Given the importance of food security, a renewed international effort towards building food systems in the developing world, and helping people feed themselves, holds great promise for supporting political stability and economic prosperity if it is sustained for these next three years and beyond. In fact, no country has successfully been lifted out of poverty without significant development of its agricultural economy. A report released by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs suggests, if funds are committed and used effectively to support agriculture research, education, and extension, it is possible to develop systems to feed the world's hungry, and support future population growth. Research suggests that significant investments in agricultural research alone could lift 282 million people from poverty by 2020.

President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and others in the Administration, as well as the other G-8 leaders, have taken the first step towards solving the problem of world hunger by including a commitment to agricultural investment as a key part of the solution. Agricultural policies may not hold the same appeal or glamour as those on climate change or energy (although they are inextricably linked), but the first Green Revolution proves that if funded and sustained, agricultural development can change the world and materially alleviate poverty. The commitment of the G-8 leaders, if given the right support, and especially the right leadership, can have this same impact.

Dan Glickman is the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture; Catherine Bertini is the former Executive Director of the UN World Food Program. Both cochair The Chicago Council on Global Affairs' study on global agricultural development. Its final report, Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty, is available online at www.thechicagocouncil.org/globalagdevelopment.

James Zogby: What Arabs Can Do to Support Peace

2009-07-10T22:41:23Z

In 1991, as part of its overall approach to post-Gulf War peace-making, the Administration of George H. W. Bush secured an Arab agreement to suspend their secondary boycott against companies doing business with Israel, in return for an Israeli commitment to freeze settlements.

Three years later, in 1994, as Co-Chair of Builders for Peace, a US private sector initiative launched by then Vice-President Al Gore, I made the first of many visits to Israel/Palestine accompanying Mr. Gore, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown or delegations of Arab American and American Jewish businessman.

We had just arrived in Ben Gurion Airport and were heading to a meeting in Tel Aviv. I was riding with an American Jewish colleague, who, it turns out, had in the past, been a frequent visitor to Israel, but who had not been there in three years. As we approached Tel Aviv, looking at the city's night lights -- neon signs aglow, advertizing a broad array of products, my companion noted with delight "these signs are the first fruits of peace. Because of the boycott, many of these businesses weren't here three years ago. Now they are."

The next day, we left our hotel in Jerusalem travelling north to Ramallah. On our way, we passed massive construction sites of new housing up and down the hills surrounding the Holy City, encapsulating tiny Palestinian villages now trapped in their shadows. "Are these new settlements?" I asked. "No," was the reply, "this is just an extension of Ramot"--pointing to another large aggregation of homes, on an entirely different hill.

These were impressions. Here is the hard data.

In 1991, Israel's per capita GDP was $14,000. Three years later, after the ending of the secondary boycott and Madrid and Oslo, Israel's per capita GDP had risen to almost $16,000. Palestinians did not fare as well. In 1991, their per capita GDP was $900. Three years later, new Israeli restrictions on Palestinian labor and continued control over all access to and egress from the territories, resulted in the Palestinian per capita GDP only increasing to $1,100.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1991 there were 243,000 settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem. By the end of 1994, they were nearing 300,000. (Note: most recent figures show Israel's per capita GDP at around $25,000, in contrast to a stagnant $1,300 for the Palestinians. And there are now almost 500,000 settlers in the occupied lands!)

This history bears repeating if only to understand why some Arab states may be reluctant to offer new concessions to Israel in return for the same settlement freeze that was to have been implemented 18 years and 250,000 settlers ago.

This being said, I believe that there are good reasons for the Arab side to find a careful but creative approach to elaborating on their 2002 and 2007 Arab Peace Initiatives.

It is clear that the Obama Administration is making a real effort to press Israel to suspend all settlement construction -- using, at times, language not heard since the time of President Carter. In this context, positive Arab gestures should not be seen as a reward for Israel (which they have not earned and do not deserve), but rather as a sign of support for the US effort and as a further Arab commitment to peace-making.

Secondly, it is clear from the frequent statements coming from the US, and now being echoed in Israel, urging Arabs to take new steps, that the pressure (both public and private) will not let up. Given this, a new Arab initiative can be useful and important, if only so as not to be boxed in and portrayed as presenting an obstacle to peace.

Thirdly, up until now, with only the US and Israel doing the talking, the nature of the expected Arab response is being defined by them. Given all that has transpired in recent years and given, as well, current regional tensions, many of the ideas proposed may be viewed as problematic in much of the Arab world.

Nevertheless, should the Obama Administration succeed in securing a complete and verifiable halt in all construction, a positive response, by those Arab states able to do so, would be in order, both to support the US effort, as well as to ensure that no further so-called "facts on the ground" are put in place. Stopping E1, before it starts, and aborting other expansion and "thickening" projects, are goals worth supporting. But the Arab gestures offered must be carefully considered, so as to be calibrated (not turning the Arab Peace Initiative on its head by providing recognition and normalization before peace) and conditioned on Israeli performance (unlike with the end of the secondary boycott, which produced benefits for only one side).

While these limited steps may be taken by some Arab states, there are other avenues open to the Arab consensus that would both make clear their intentions to seek peace, while not inflaming their publics or compromising the only remaining leverage available to them.

Here's what the Arab states could propose. First, there should be the insistence Israel meet the following initial conditions (all of which are either called for in the Roadmap and/or supported by the Obama Administration): a total freeze on all settlement construction; removal of outposts, internal check points and roadblocks; an end of the blockade on construction goods and other needed supplies to Gaza; and the beginning of serious negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. With these conditions met, the Arab League could authorize a representative delegation to participate with the Israeli and Palestinian teams in a series of Track II negotiations on critical issues of regional importance: water, energy, Jerusalem, refugee resettlement, and the establishment of an economic development fund/plan for a future Palestinian state.

These talks and the plans they develop should run in tandem with the Track I Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese talks, and be implemented, as agreed by the parties, at times deemed appropriate to support the implementation of the Track I talks.

Such an Arab consensus effort, complimentary to the more immediate and limited gestures made by some, will support US peace efforts, allowing the Arab States to define, for themselves, their elaboration of the Arab Peace Initiative, while making clear their intention to participate as full partners in a comprehensive Middle East peace.

Mona Gable: On Nancy Pelosi and Michael Jackson

2009-07-10T22:34:43Z

I'd like to thank Nancy Pelosi for nixing the resolution to honor Michael Jackson. It's not like Congress doesn't have anything to do. (Health care, anyone?) But it was a spectacularly bad idea from the start. And now with revelations about the late singer's drug problems, the coroner's office subpoenaing Jackson's medical records, and questions about Jackson being the biological father of his children, what if this had been brought to a vote? Can you imagine the nastiness that would have ensued?

Hopefully this means we'll be seeing less of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the Texas Democrat who introduced the resolution. Jackson Lee attended the memorial at the Staples Center. And for reasons that are unclear, she chose the occasion not only to give a stump speech but to push her resolution. Classy!

For the millions of people around the world who wished they'd been in Los Angeles for the event, count yourself lucky. Traffic in the Valley and near Dodger Stadium was a mess. I had to leave early for work because the freeway was closed for Jackson's motorcade. Even our normally media-happy Mayor left town to vacation in South Africa.

I hope he's back because now we've got to pay the bill. Jackson's memorial cost L.A. $3 million, and some of us (okay, me) aren't happy about it. This includes more than $40,000 that was spent on police lunches from a deli 80 miles away. What's wrong with our local taco trucks? I enjoy eating in new neighborhoods, too, but I try not to on the taxpayer's dime.

Talk about priorities. This year summer school was canceled because city officials deemed it a great way to close LA's $26-billion budget gap. The last time I checked the high-school dropout rate in LAUSD was almost 50 percent. So now we have thousands of students sitting at home watching The Hills or roaming the streets. Terrifying.

Councilwoman Jan Perry told CBS she'd "love it" if the Jackson family helped pay for their loved one's memorial. But so far, Joe Jackson has been mum. He did, however, pull aside a reporter the day his dead son lay in a gold casket to talk about a record deal.

Maybe Kobe and Magic, who praised Jackson during the Staples celebration for helping them be better at basketball, can chip in?

Don't get me wrong. I loved Jackson's music. I'm actually old enough to remember when the Jackson Five appeared on Ed Sullivan. In my 20s, during a brief and unremarkable stint as a jazz dancer, I performed "Beat It" at a gospel church in Oakland. (Thank god for no YouTube then!) The other night my husband dug my old Thriller album out of the closet and we danced to it in the living room.

Michael Jackson was undeniably gifted. But he was also undeniably tragic. And contrary to that gratuitous remark Al Sharpton made to Jackson's children at the memorial, I think most of us can agree on this: the singer was a little "strange."

How many grown men wish they were Peter Pan? And then build a multimillion-dollar fantasy world called Neverland with zoo animals and carnival rides? Or name their child "Blanket"?

Jackson's friends have been appearing endlessly on the talk shows burnishing his legacy. That's not surprising. What is is how they profess to have been so close to him yet apparently didn't notice his devastating drug problem. The Hulk was training the emaciated singer for his "This Is It" tour. Yet when asked about Jackson's health by Larry King, it was all good!

Well, it's all coming out now. Just this morning, a senior law enforcement officer told ABC News that Jackson was "heavily addicted" to OxyContin and taking daily doses of the painkiller Demerol.

During the memorial CNN.com paired with Facebook so that fans could express their grief. For a while I watched the comments scrolling down the screen. Many of them simply said "MJ: RIP."

One can only hope.

Paul Slansky: This Preposterous Week in Review: Sarah Palin, Michael Jackson, And More!

2009-07-10T20:03:29Z

Jackson, Michael

• brainlessness of

• columnists Bob Herbert and Gail Collins weigh in on

• crowd at Staples Center memorial service for is astonished by resurrection of ... oh, never mind, that was just that insufferable jerk Corey Feldman dressed up like

Palin, soon-to-be-ex-Gov. Sarah

• ability of to spout incomprehensible babble is undiminished by decision of to quit in a huff

• Anderson Cooper isn't buying the inane excuses of the spokeswoman for

• angry tweets of

• David Letterman is still making fun of

• eagerness of to get back to "slaying salmon"

• efforts of to make people stop saying bad things about or they are going to get so sued by

• excuse offered by for quitting is -- as is so much of what passes the lips of -- of questionable veracity

• explanation by that, as President, unfair ethical allegations against would be dealt with by the (nonexistent) "Department of Law"

• Fox News contributor is unimpressed -- "the woman is inarticulate, undereducated ... She just begs for adjectives like flaky and wacky ... (she) has no credentials for any job" -- by

• self-pitying Facebook page of

• Shannyn Moore says "Bring it on!" to

• "whining" about unfavorable media coverage used to "bother"

• wondering by author of this index if presenting enough unflattering material about, like this and this and this and this, and this, will prompt the threat of a lawsuit by

For more, click here!

Jeremy Abelson: Embrace For Impact: Alex Bogusky Discusses Social Media and Long Term Changes in the Media Landscape

2009-07-10T19:24:29Z

I sat down with Alex Bogusky, the Golden Boy of Advertising, to get a sense of what he plans to do with the media industry.

The world of media is changing quickly--faster than many of us can comprehend. Most people have come to understand that how and where the public consumes (and now interacts with) media is changing, but few consider the long-term impact of the subsequent shift in dollars. The economy is an easy scapegoat; most people conveniently blame the recession and are simply awaiting the recovery out of laziness, fear, or a lack of other options.

For the first time in history, the most important entity in the media equation is the advertising agency.

Huh?

Advertising agencies have always controlled where ad dollars are spent. Prior to 18 months ago, that meant controlling what medium to use (TV, print, online, etc) and then with which specific outlet within that medium to place its ads (i.e., making the challenging decision to buy more impressions on Thrillist than on Urban Daddy). The client still set the media budget; the agency simply spent it. While media outlets created content to attract advertisers, they have always maintained control over their own product. Agency work, meanwhile, could be summed up as building a nice ad banner or 30-second spot, then deciding which media outlet to pay to serve that advertisement adjacent to their content.

Times have changed. A guy like Alex Bogusky, a creative director (probably the best in the business), is now playing with the future of the media institutions.

Media budgets now include social media. Agencies currently control how many media dollars are being spent in media as compared to social media, a completely different industry. In most cases, dollars spent within the social media space are dollars not spent with a traditional media outlet--TV networks, newspapers, or gawker-esque blogs. Many media dollars now go towards fees for labor. The media dollars used to pay an agency (whether a social media shop or an international giant) to create, manage, and grow a Twitter profile are media dollars that once funded a banner campaign. The money used to pay an agency to create a brand's own viral site content and then get that content bookmarked on the homepage of Digg once funded a TV campaign.

Marketers may not all completely understand what it is or how to do it, but they want social media, they want engagement with their consumers, they want conversation with their target market. They aren't getting these things on NBC. They aren't getting them on CNN. They aren't even getting them on NYTimes.com.

Alex postponed our first interview because he was at Cannes. Coincidentally, AdAge published an article entitled "Cannes Swept by PR, Integrated, Internet Winners," claiming that the "age of interruption is over." At Cannes this year, PR campaign won the most Grand Prix awards in history; AdAge states, "This is a [winners] list dominated by attempts to engage consumers and deeply involve them in brands."

This development is hugely significant for the world of media. For advertising agencies, it means they need to be creative and learn how to advertise within the social media world. The award is proof that smart marketers are doing a very good job of that. The media world however, can't change that fast--and the marketing executions (ad dollars) themselves are actually being removed from their airwaves, pulled from their pages, and nixed from their sites.

The "interruption" mentioned above refers to interrupting the consumption of traditional media with advertising. That interruption is over not because the media world is changing its branded executions, but because brands are moving on from standard media-based advertisements.

I'm not saying people don't love to turn on their television and watch Lost. I'm saying brands want more than the 30-second spot adjacent to that content. It's a dollars-and-cents issue.

Bogusky continually returns to the consumption of news. Breaking news went from the morning newspaper, to the seven o'clock news, to all-day breaking news with CNN, to breaking online publishing, to interactive personal publishing and the ability to engage with the people publishing the news. Each revolution dramatically shakes the foundation of the previous one. Consumers want more than just consumption; they want interactivity. Brands want more than adjacency; they want interaction as well.

Bogusky says "traditional media" outlets are "freaking out." He sees a significant shift in dollars to the social media space. He says he doesn't understand how television networks continue to increase their prices while delivering less and less. Bogusky controls how consumers interact and engage with brands. This includes controlling where consumers interact and engage with brands: the more it happens on Twitter, Facebook, and Digg, and in various forums and communities, the less it happens on NBC, in The Wall Street Journal, and on PerezHilton.com. Bogusky holds the fate of these media outlets and the production of this media in his hands.

Why is Alex Bogusky so good at what he does? He expects change, he embraces change, and he's prepared for change. He told me it's imperative that he be the one who destroys his own business model -- he won't wait to react and let a change in the industry dictate how he changes the way he works.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jeremy Abelson: So, Alex, you are a true captain of the industry, you're really a legend, and I appreciate the time and the insight.

Alex Bogusky: Now you're being silly.

Jeremy Abelson: So, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing advertising industries today?

Alex Bogusky: Facing agencies today. Oh man, there's a bunch of challenges. One of them that I think a lot of agencies seem to be scared of is the whole outsourcing thing. I've heard a lot of conversations about, you know: is this going to ruin the existing model and what is the new model? And is creativity a commodity? And you know, my attitude is that creativity might be a commodity, I really don't know.

Jeremy Abelson: Well I mean, it's still people doing it, it's just a matter if they're employed somewhere or not.

Alex Bogusky: I think that if it is a commodity, or if there are aspects of it that can be commoditized, then I think the idea is to figure out what can be commoditized and what can't be commoditized, and then to see if you can find the right mixture.

Jeremy Abelson: In your position you are controlling interactive dollars that two to three years ago all went towards ad banners etc, and now a good portion of them are going towards more engaging types of opportunities. Do you see the actual media publications or media outlets needing to change their formats to offer more engagement?

Alex Bogusky: Well this is something that I've just noticed very recently and talked to people about in the business. It seems like--I don't know what traditional media is exactly, but I think if you use the term we all kind of think of a certain thing that's fairly accurate--the traditional media seems to be, I would use the term freaking out.

There is inability to break a story with traditional means. Traditional media has gone into an almost 100% editorial mode. And the idea is that you won't get the story first from us, but we'll tell you what it means and why it's important.

Now I think its gone further than that--not only are they not able to necessarily bring you the news first, they're not even able to tell you what it means as well as other people can.

Jeremy Abelson: Let's look at the media world as a business, and we can even look at traditional media buys as strictly online media buys. What media always tried to do was to provide content and then work with advertising agencies that bought advertising adjacent to that content. There was complete separation of church and state. With the social media space, there is no separation. It's all about engaging and conversing with brands. How is that going to affect these traditional media outlets whether they're blogs or television statements or print publications etc?

Alex Bogusky: The church and state thing I think has existed to some degree, I'm not sure that that feels like something that's at risk.

Jeremy Abelson: I'll put it like this. You guys are controlling dollars, and three years ago you were buying ad banners adjacent to content. Now you guys are getting more creative and your clients want more engagement. The dollars that you once spent supporting these media institutions by buying media against their content are experiencing a tremendous shift to social media. So how are these media institutions going to adapt?

Alex Bogusky: The media institutions--I'm not sure whether they have to adapt. But What's happening is that both paths seem to be moving along at a pretty vigorous pace and if you take a 30 second commercial, I think at one point people talked about how at risk that form was. Now, that form seems to be having a bit of a comeback in that there are more delivery options. So Hulu is one of our accounts and Hulu is a space where you can deliver pretty traditional advertising alongside pretty traditional content, and the content is really good. It's difficult for the social media space to compete for that level of content and that level of viewer engagement.

In other cases, the brands are just going an creating their own content and figuring out how to broadcast that without going through the traditional media...More money will probably be moving into social media, but again, part of the democratization of this space is that it doesn't actually cost a lot of money to do. So how much money is moving? I'm not sure.

Jeremy Abelson: There's a lot of speculation that the economy is turning around. The S&P is up, the decline in lost jobs is starting to flatten, the DOW has had a couple good weeks and there's even been a lot of speculation about the real estate market. I think that the economic downturn has had a pretty significant effect on the advertising industry. I'm wondering what you think will be the permanent effect of this last recession.

Alex Bogusky: I think we'll see some smaller agencies become bigger agencies. We've seen that in the democratization of capabilities, and I'm sure in this revolution of social media, we'll see a lot of longstanding big agencies struggling. Depending on how you access crowd sourcing, potentially the agency can be really driven by that stuff yet keep a layer of editorial and expertise at the top that allows them to still deliver the same kind of work people expect from a larger firm.

Jeremy Abelson: The economy has obviously had a large impact on media spending across the board. What do you think the permanent impact will be?

Alex Bogusky: When we see a recession, and we've been through a few now, and when we see the industry pull back, we always think that's an opportunity, because there are a lot of people that just use that as an excuse to not work that hard. They say, "Ok, everything's bad, we've got nothing going on and we'll call it in for a while."

Jeremy Abelson: What do you think the impact on the media world will be?

Alex Bogusky: Well, I do wonder how television continues to become more and more expensive as it delivers less. You see the up-fronts every year, and I'm not a media person, I'm just a creative person, I don't really understand these things, they're very complex. But I have wondered why rates continue to go up for fewer folks. I think that's gonna break at some point, and that's where you'll see some of these dollars come from and you'll see them flow into other spaces.

Jeremy Abelson: The reason why I think this interview with you is so poignant is because most people when they're asking questions like this will go to a media expert or someone from the account side of an agency, but the fact of the matter is that right now it really is the creatives who are controlling where people are marketing, and I see this tremendous shift from any form of traditional marketing--everything we pitch is all about engagement.

Alex Bogusky: I think the other thing for me that is really part of this whole story is the transparency that comes with social media. So though a lot of creatives are very excited about moving into that space, a lot of clients are nervous about the level of transparency that occurs.

For me, as an advertising guy I'm well known, outside of advertising no one knows who I am, but in advertising, I'm well known enough that people know me who I don't know, and people comment on me and they say things that hurt your feelings, and you're like, "I don't want to be in social media anymore, take me out, I'm gonna live in a cave." And it takes a few months or years or whatever for the person to get used to that. But that open conversation is really powerful. We talk about transparency and we encourage our clients to go there.

Consumers, even when they like you, they play really rough. When we were kids we would be going to Taco Bell but we called it Taco Hell on the way there. Just because we were calling it Taco Hell doesn't mean we hated it; it just meant that we were playing a little rough. That's the way you play with your friends.

So you're talking about the media space and smaller companies replacing bigger, more traditional companies in media and advertising, and large companies have a great advantage, but if they can't learn to be transparent, they're gonna be swept away by more transparent companies which are smaller now but are going to grow very quickly because the ability to grow in this economy with social media is way beyond anything it's ever been.

Jeremy Abelson: Where does that leave traditional media then?

Alex Bogusky: What I'm seeing is that 30-second video unit is actually finding its way into spaces that it couldn't before. So one of the problems was that to buy what would be traditional commercials online, you'd buy the top ten websites. But now the technology is out there where people learn all sorts of recesses and odd spaces on the web. If you're into lawn mower racing you're going to wind up at a very different space than if you're into gardening, and you'll spend a lot of time there. But delivering to those units of one individual on a website--that model is actually starting to work and they're starting to figure out how to do that. So although in some ways I think it's gonna fracture, the modeling of the delivering of the units is going to consolidate, if that makes sense.

Jeremy Abelson: It does and it also proves my point as I'm not looking at the 30 second spot per say, I'm looking at the 30 second spot as it pertains to it being run adjacent to standard television.

Alex Bogusky: And I think we're agreeing. I'm saying that the long tail is going to be those odd spaces, but I still think that there's gonna be the Hulus and things like that, where there's a big enough audience and there's the ability to reach them in fairly traditional ways that advertising will support the content creation. But it's gonna long tail.

Jeremy Abelson: Will broadband ever replace broadcast?

Alex Bogusky: Oh I think it absolutely will.

Jeremy Abelson: Couple quick fun questions: with a company built on Apple products, how are you persuading people to buy Microsoft products?

Alex Bogusky: When we started working on this we swung everyone in the agency over to PC's, and really all of the senior people on the account are working on PCs, and we thought it was really important because we do a thing called method advertising, which is if you don't use it, you don't know how to talk about it. And I think in the past Microsoft's creative had a lot of swirly magical kind of stuff going on, and it might have been because their agencies weren't working on PCs. So once you start working on it and you understand you can do a better job on it, and I think we've done a really good job on it and, you know, one of the key factors is that we use them. I had never worked on a computer other than an Apple, and I thought, "Oh my god! Will I be able to do this?"

Jeremy Abelson: What do you prefer?

Alex Bogusky: Well I prefer the PC, but it's very similar. I have Vista Ultimate, and at a lot of things it's better, and what surprised me was that it was a little more seamless in terms of going from application to application. Anyway, it's good, it's a great machine.

Jeremy Abelson: How tired are you of talking about the subservient chicken?

Alex Bogusky: I haven't talked about it in a while.

Jeremy Abelson: I still see press about it all the time.

Alex Bogusky: I just saw a thing that I hadn't known, but I saw a link on our site because its pulling in all this social media and I saw that we have over a billion hits now on that site, which seemed pretty cool.

Jeremy Abelson: Do you have the suit in the office?

Alex Bogusky: No we don't, know.

Jeremy Abelson: You could eBay that bad boy.

Alex Bogusky: You absolutely could.

Jeremy Abelson: It would go for at least six figures. What's your favorite Crispin campaign to date?

Alex Bogusky: I have never been into favorites. My attitude is hopefully the things you're working on now are the one's you are most excited about and if you don't put anything under glass--if you come to our office, we don't have any work on the walls, we don't have the video display playing things, so we have no way to get stuck in thinking this is what we do or this is what we do best, and I think that's very good and healthy.

Jeremy Abelson: Last question: what attracted you to Daddy as an agency, and how attractive is Sweden as a creative market?

Alex Bogusky: It started in a weird way with Jeff Hicks, who's CEO and has been my partner for a long time, and I was thinking about Jeff and thought how he likes the summer in Sweden and wouldn't it be great if that's where we did our agency thing, and we never want to go where anyone else is which is why we're always in weird places, so it started in that weird area, and that's how we make decisions. We make emotional decisions and then we make rationalizations. And then as I continue to make rationalizations and look at Sweden and Hyper Island and all the digital work coming out of Daddy and the other shops, there's obviously something going on there.

Jeremy Abelson is the Co-Founder of Samson's Barber

You can find Jeremy Abelson on Twitter.

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