History > 2006 > USA > States, Governors

Court Reprimands

Ohio Governor Over Gifts

December 28, 2006
The New York Times
By BOB DRIEHAUS

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Dec. 27 — The Ohio Supreme Court formally reprimanded Gov. Bob Taft on Wednesday for failing to report nearly $6,000 worth of golf outings and other gifts, a coda to his scandal-plagued final term in office, which ends Jan. 8.

The unanimous ruling followed the penalty recommended by the Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline, which evaluates charges of misconduct among lawyers and judges. Mr. Taft, a Republican, was admitted to practice law in Ohio in 1976 and may return to practicing after his term ends.

Public reprimand was the minimum penalty that could have been imposed by the court, which had the discretion to suspend Mr. Taft’s law license in Ohio or to bar him permanently from practicing law in the state.

The court said Mr. Taft deserved the minimum punishment because he had no prior disciplinary record and cooperated fully with the investigation. “Any sanction is an indelible stain on a lawyer’s professional record,” the ruling said.

Jonathan Marshall, secretary to the board, said, “I guess the significance is that regardless of how high a public office a lawyer enjoys, the same standards apply to all.”

Mr. Taft, a great-grandson of President William Howard Taft, pleaded no contest in August 2005 to four criminal misdemeanor counts for failing to disclose $5,682.26 worth of golf outings, meals, hockey tickets and other gifts from 19 benefactors from 1997 until 2004. He was fined $4,000 and ordered to e-mail an apology to all state workers as well as to Ohio news media outlets.

He is the only Ohio governor to have faced criminal charges while in office, and his pleas joined a wave of scandals among state Republicans that culminated in a Democratic sweep on Nov. 7 of all but one statewide office and the defeat of Senator Mike DeWine by Representative Sherrod Brown, a Democrat.

Mark Rickel, Mr. Taft’s press secretary, said, “The governor is pleased the matter is concluded and that the court recognized that his recording error was nothing more than an oversight.”

Mr. Rickel said Mr. Taft had not decided whether to return to practicing law or to pursue other interests.

    Court Reprimands Ohio Governor Over Gifts, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/us/28ohio.html

Robert T. Stafford, 93,

Former Vermont Senator and Governor,

Dies

December 24, 2006
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONTPELIER, Vt., Dec. 23 (AP) — Former Senator Robert T. Stafford, a staunch environmentalist and champion of education whose name is familiar to countless college students through a loan program named for him, died Saturday. He was 93.

Mr. Stafford’s death was announced by Neal Houston, his former chief of staff.

Mr. Stafford served 2 years as governor, 11 years in the House and 17 in the Senate before retiring in 1989.

As the ranking Republican on the Senate’s environment committee, he repeatedly defended the Superfund program to clean up contaminated sites and shepherded bills combating acid rain and automobile pollution.

In 1988, Congress saluted his dedication to education measures, renaming the Federal Guaranteed Student Loan program the Robert T. Stafford Student Loan program. The low-interest loans are now known almost universally as Stafford loans to the millions who qualify for them each year.

According to the federal Education Department, about 14 million Stafford loans were given to postsecondary students in 2006.

Mr. Stafford was not shy about bucking presidents of his own party. He led a successful effort to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of amendments that strengthened the Clean Water Act, and tangled with industry when he believed that it was thwarting efforts to clean the environment.

Born on Aug. 8, 1913, Mr. Stafford received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in 1935 and a law degree from Boston University in 1938.

Mr. Stafford served in the Navy in World War II. His father died during the war, and when Mr. Stafford returned to Rutland, Vt., he re-established their law practice. He was elected county state’s attorney before leaving to serve two years in Korea.

Upon his return, Mr. Stafford landed a job as a state deputy attorney general. In 1954 he won his first statewide race, for attorney general. That was supposed to have been the end of his political career. “I enjoyed that job,” he said. “I thought I would stay there four years and then go back to Rutland.”

But he lasted only two years before he was persuaded by Lt. Gov. Consuelo Bailey to run for lieutenant governor. He held that office for two years, then won the 1958 election for governor.

Two years later he won his first term in Congress and continued to win re-election until he was appointed to the Senate in 1971 on the death of Senator Winston Prouty. Mr. Stafford won a special election later that year to serve the five years remaining in Mr. Prouty’s term.

After his retirement, Mr. Stafford stayed mostly out of the public eye, though he pleaded with the public for civility in the divisive election campaign of 2000, the year his state passed civil unions, giving the benefits and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples.

“I consider that love is one of the great forces in our society and especially in our state of Vermont,” Mr. Stafford said days before the election. “It occurs to me that even if a same-sex couple unites in love, what harm does that do anybody or any society? So I felt compelled to come here and say that.”

Mr. Stafford is survived by his wife, Helen, and their four daughters.

    Robert T. Stafford, 93, Former Vermont Senator and Governor, Dies, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/us/24stafford.html

Hevesi Pleads Guilty to Charge,

Resigns From Office

December 22, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:59 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- State Comptroller Alan Hevesi's 35-year career in public service ended in disgrace Friday when he resigned and agreed to plead guilty to a minor felony for using state employees as drivers and companions for his wife.

The plea ends an investigation by Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who had been presenting evidence against the Queens Democrat to a grand jury. Hevesi will serve no jail time, but will pay a $5,000 fine and agreed not to file any appeal. He also agreed not to take office on Jan. 1. Friday's agreement also heads off a process that could have ended in the Legislature removing Hevesi from office.

"I want to apologize to the people of New York state who have given me the opportunity to serve them," Hevesi said after a morning court appearance. "I want to apologize to the 2,400 professionals who work in the comptroller's office and I want to apologize to my family who have been so strong and loving during this process."

Hevesi, 66, was first elected state comptroller in 2002 and was re-elected in November by a wide margin despite several investigations into his use of four employees to cater to his ailing wife from 2003 to mid-2006.

In October, with Hevesi coasting to a re-election win, the state Ethics Commission said the driving arrangements violated state law. Most of that driving was done by Nicholas Acquafredda, who also was a companion for Carol Hevesi and even helped with physical therapy. Three others also shared the duties early on, a subsequent investigation by the state attorney general's office found. Hevesi claimed the drivers were needed to provide security for his wife, but the bipartisan Ethics Commission said state police found no threat that justified the arrangement.

Further, the panel said Hevesi apparently had no intention of repaying the state for the drivers' service until his Republican challenger, J. Christopher Callaghan, went public with a complaint this year.

Hevesi immediately apologized for what he called the serious error of providing a "belated" reimbursement and quickly paid the state more than $82,000, but forcefully insisted he did not break the law. While the investigations dragged on, he continued to vow not to leave office and vigorously fight any attempt to throw him out.

The office of Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a one-time Hevesi ally who was elected governor in November, ordered Hevesi to pay back another $90,000 and then tacked on another $33,000 to bring the total for the scandal to $206,293.79. Hevesi and his wife last year earned more than $335,000 from his comptroller's salary and their public pensions. Still, he said he had to remortgage his Queens home to pay off the debt.

In justifying the use of the driver, Hevesi said his wife has been ill for decades, undergoing numerous back surgeries, heart surgery and attempting suicide in the 1990s.

    Hevesi Pleads Guilty to Charge, Resigns From Office, NYT, 22.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-NY-Comptroller-Driver-Advisory.html

N.J. governor to sign bill

sanctioning civil unions for gay couples

Posted 12/21/2006 9:07 AM ET
AP
USA Today

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey's gay couples are gaining all the rights and responsibilities of marriage under state law as New Jersey moves to become the third in the nation to institute civil unions and the fifth to offer some version of marriage.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine planned to sign the civil unions bill on Thursday.

When the law takes effect Feb. 19, New Jersey will join Connecticut and Vermont as states that allow civil unions for gay couples. Massachusetts allows gay couples to marry, while California has domestic partnerships that bring full marriage rights.

Gay couples granted civil unions in New Jersey will have adoption, inheritance, hospital visitation and medical decision-making rights and the right not to testify against a partner in state court.

The Legislature passed the civil unions bill on Dec. 14 in response to an October state Supreme Court order that gay couples be granted the same rights as married couples. The court gave lawmakers six months to act but left it to them to decide whether to call the unions "marriage" or something else.

Gay couples welcome the law, but some argue that not calling the relationship "marriage" creates a different, inferior institution.

Also, while the state law provide them with the benefits of married couples, they won't be entitled to the same benefits in the eyes of the federal government because of 1996 federal law that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. Surviving partners won't be able to collect deceased partners' Social Security benefits, for example, said family lawyer Felice T. Londa, who represents many same-sex couples.

Donna Harrison, of Asbury Park, has been with her partner, Kathy Ragauckas, for nine years. She isn't exactly celebrating the bill signing, though she said she and Ragauckas will probably get a civil union certificate.

"Although I think they provide some benefit, it is a different treatment of human beings," she said.

Chris Schwam and Steven Piacquiadio, of Collingswood, have been together for 20 years, have a 3-year-old son and had a big wedding in 1993, though it wasn't recognized legally. Schwam, 40, said they will get a civil union, but without a big fuss.

"I don't think my mother would be happy to pay for that again," he said.

The gay rights group Garden State Equality has promised to push lawmakers to change the terminology to "marriage." Others are considering lawsuits to force full recognition of gay marriage.

The bill creates a commission that will regularly review the law and recommend possible changes.

Corzine, a Democrat, said that seems a reasonable approach, but he said calling the arrangement a civil union rather than gay marriage is preferable.

"For most, people marriage has a religious connotation, and for many there is a view that that term is not consistent with the teachings of their religious belief," the governor said. "So there is not democratic support in the broader society for that label, even though there is strong support for equal protection under the law."

Senate President Richard J. Codey, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said time could bring change.

"The history of civil rights progress, whether it's women's rights, minorities' rights or any other movement, is one that is typically achieved in incremental steps," Codey said. "This is, by no means, the end, but it is a major step forward."

Social conservative groups and lawmakers opposed the measure, reasoning it brings gay relationships too close to marriage, but it easily passed the legislature. Some have vowed to push to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, but Democrats who control the legislature said such proposals won't be heard.

The three-day waiting period required by the law is the same as with marriage licenses. Licenses will be valid for 30 days, and ceremonies can be officiated by anyone who performs weddings, including clergy and mayors. As with marriages, civil unions will have to be witnessed by one additional adult.

    N.J. governor to sign bill sanctioning civil unions for gay couples, UT, 21.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-21-civilunions_x.htm

Florida Governor

Suspends the Death Penalty

December 16, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK and TERRY AGUAYO

Gov. Jeb Bush yesterday suspended all executions in Florida, citing a troubled execution on Wednesday and appointing a commission to consider the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injections.

Hours later, a federal judge ruled that the lethal injection system in California violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“Today has been the most significant day in the history of the death penalty in America in many years,” said Jamie Fellner, director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch. “These developments show that the current lethal-injection protocols pose an unacceptable risk of cruelty.

“The way states have been killing people for the last 30 years has yielded botched execution after botched execution.”

California has the largest death row in the nation, at about 650. The state has executed 13 people since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Florida, by contrast, has executed 64 people in the modern era of the death penalty, trailing four states.

The California decision, which followed a four-day evidentiary hearing and a session at the San Quentin prison, was eagerly awaited and probably represents the fullest and most careful consideration yet of whether the way inmates are executed violates the Eight Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of Federal District Court in San Jose delivered a mixed verdict, writing, “Defendants’ implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed.”

The new commission in Florida, which will include doctors, lawyers, scientists and law enforcement officials, will consider many of the same issues, including whether the state protocol satisfies “humanity, constitutional imperative and common sense,” Mr. Bush said in his order.

Deborah W. Denno, an authority on execution at the Fordham University Law School, said Judge Fogel’s decision was “both bold and safe.”

“Judge Fogel’s decision is the most definitive response so far in concluding that a state’s lethal injection protocol, in its current form, is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment,” Professor Denno said.

Even as Judge Fogel issued a withering critique of the way California executes condemned inmates, he invited the state to submit a revised protocol to remedy the shortcomings. Similarly, Mr. Bush suggested that executions in Florida might resume after his panel gives its final report in March.

Judge Fogel found that prison execution teams had been poorly screened and had included people disciplined for smuggling drugs and with post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the team members are poorly trained and supervised, he said.

Record keeping is spotty, the judge found, and the chemicals used are sometimes improperly prepared. The death chamber, he added, is badly lighted and overcrowded.

“Defendants’ actions and failures to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an Eighth Amendment violation,” Judge Fogel wrote. “This is intolerable under the Constitution.”

Judge Fogel also noted concerns about the chemicals that California, Florida and 35 other states use. The protocols vary slightly, but almost all call for a series of three chemicals. The first is a barbiturate to render the inmate unconscious. The second is a paralyzing agent that makes the inmate unable to speak, move or breathe. The third is potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Both sides in California agreed that it would be unconstitutional to inject a conscious person with either or both of the second two chemicals. The paralyzing agent would leave the inmate conscious while he suffocated, and potassium chloride is extremely painful.

The two sides also agreed that if the first drug was effective, using the others did not violate the constitution.

Judge Fogel suggested a way out. Were inmates executed in the same way that animals were euthanized, solely by an anesthetic, that would, he wrote, “eliminate any constitutional concerns, subject only to the implementation of adequate, verifiable procedures to ensure that the inmate actually receives a fatal dose of the anesthetic.”

Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the death penalty, said the decision was in that sense a welcome one.

“It’s unfortunate that we have another delay,” Mr. Scheidegger said. “But it does appear that there is at least one path to a constitutional procedure.”

Florida started its moratorium two days after Angel N. Diaz’s execution appeared to go awry. Dr. William Hamilton, medical examiner in Alachua County, Fla., said yesterday that the needle with the lethal chemicals that should have gone directly into Mr. Diaz’s veins punctured the veins before entering soft tissue. It took a second dose and 34 minutes for him to die.

    Florida Governor Suspends the Death Penalty, NYT, 16.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/us/16death.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

McCain Courts Crucial Support of Governors

December 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

DORAL, Fla., Nov. 30 — Last anyone checked, Senator John McCain of Arizona is not — and has never been — a governor.

But no matter. Mr. McCain turned up on Thursday morning at the Doral Golf Resort and Spa here for a guerrillalike visit to the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association. That is a group headed by Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts governor who is widely viewed as Mr. McCain’s chief rival for their party’s 2008 presidential nomination.

As Mr. Romney gamely presided over the morning session of the meeting, Mr. McCain commandeered a room at the Doral Resort for eight hours of meetings with nine Republican governors, including Gov.-elect Charlie Crist of Florida, according to Republicans familiar with his schedule.

On Thursday evening, many of those at the conference were bused to an elaborate reception, courtesy of Mr. McCain, at a resort hotel in Miami Lakes. Somehow, no reception rooms were available for him here.

Mr. Romney has hoped, like George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996, to use the overwhelming support of the Republican governors as a springboard to the presidential nomination. Mr. McCain served notice with his incursion that Mr. Romney could not take them for granted.

That said, the fact that Mr. McCain decided to fly here for three days and spend $50,000 on a reception that lathered governors with platters of shrimp and three open bars suggests just how much Mr. Romney has complicated his efforts to position himself as the inevitable nominee.

Mr. Romney politely deferred questions about 2008 when he appeared at a news conference with about 12 other governors who spent much of the session analyzing the reasons for the Republican defeats on Nov. 7 and what needed to be done to get the party back on track.

“We’re not getting into ’08 considerations at this press briefing,” he said.

But Mr. McCain’s team was only too glad to oblige, saying they were scooping up tentative endorsements on Mr. Romney’s watch.

“We have a number of governors who are committed to John, but we are not ready to announce them yet,” said John Weaver, Mr. McCain’s senior political adviser.

Mr. Weaver strode slowly and conspicuously through the Doral lobby, teeming with governors, aides and Washington Republican consultants.

Mr. Romney’s aides disputed Mr. Weaver’s statement, and indeed, it would not be out of character for Mr. Weaver to be exaggerating a bit as part of a strategy to persuade recalcitrant governors to jump on a departing train.

Mr. McCain, in an interview on Thursday evening, said he was in no way invading Mr. Romney’s territory.

“I’ve known these guys for years,” he said. “I’ve campaigned for these people. I don’t see how that’s anybody’s territory.”

All this provided a fair amount of entertainment and helped leaven a meeting that was otherwise filled with somber assessments of the recent election that saw Republicans swept out of power in Congress.

The Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, warned against viewing the losses as a temporary setback created by a tough electoral environment.

“We can’t simply write this election off as preordained, as the natural order of things to be automatically rectified in two years,” Mr. Mehlman said, warning that the party has to figure out ways to increase its appeal.

This very exclusive group that Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney are fighting over was also diminished in the election. There will be just 22 Republican governors next year, compared with 28 now.

Governors’ support has historically proved important in primary battles and general elections. Besides the presumed prestige of endorsements, governors can deliver political machines, troves of contributors and control over state offices like boards of elections.

The success of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, at establishing himself as a front-runner early in the 2000 race developed in no small part because he became the favorite candidate of Republican governors.

“Often more than House members and senators, governors have state structures and can make significant impacts in their state,” Mr. Weaver said.

Mr. McCain’s schedule included meetings on Thursday and Friday morning with the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Kentucky, North and South Dakota, Texas and Vermont.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota drove to the evening reception with Mr. McCain and later said in an interview he intended to support Mr. McCain if he ran for president.

Still, several governors said in interviews they would not be making a decision this early.

“I don’t know who a single governor is supporting,” said Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Barbour did say, though, that Mr. Romney, whose duties as head of the Republican Governors Association included handing out checks to Republican candidates for governor, was popular with this group of Republicans.

“Everybody likes him, and he did a very good job,” he said. “But look, nobody can assume anything.”

The guest list for Mr. McCain’s reception included Mr. Romney and his political team. They sent their regrets, saying they were too busy with the affairs of the conference.

Mr. Romney was in a bit of a tricky position. On one hand, aides said, he did not want to look as if he was commandeering the association as a campaign tool, particularly when some of Mr. McCain’s supporters have been suggesting that he was guilty of precisely that.

That said, Mr. Romney’s tenure as head of this group is one reason that he is viewed as being so strongly positioned for 2008. The post has allowed him to travel around the country, including visits to important states like Iowa, appearing before Republican activists and earning good will with the same candidates, elected officials and state party leaders who are going to be critical in winning battles.

A spokesman for Mr. Romney, Eric Fehrnstrom, said the governor was not available for comment on Mr. McCain’s political activities.

“Governor Romney’s focused on his speech, which looks at a new generation of challenges facing America and what we must do to meet them,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said. “It makes sense for Senator McCain to be here honoring Republican governors, because as a group they are fiscally conservative and innovators in education and health care policy. The answers to many of the challenges facing our nation can be found in what they are doing every day.”

    McCain Courts Crucial Support of Governors, NYT, 1.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/us/politics/01gop.html

Massachusetts Governor

Sues to Compel Vote

on Same-Sex Marriage Amendment

November 25, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Nov. 24 — Gov. Mitt Romney filed a lawsuit Friday asking the state’s highest court to order the legislature to vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage or to place it on the 2008 ballot if lawmakers do not take up the provision.

The legislature voted 109 to 87 on Nov. 9 to recess a constitutional convention before the measure was taken up, which appeared to kill it. The convention was recessed until Jan. 2, the last day of the legislative session.

More than 170,000 people have signed a petition asking the legislature to amend the state’s Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. Massachusetts is the only state that permits it.

Mr. Romney, a Republican who did not seek re-election but is considering running for president, announced plans to file the lawsuit at a rally of same-sex marriage opponents on Sunday. The next day he sent a letter to the 109 lawmakers who had voted to recess, saying they were “frustrating the democratic process and subverting the plain meaning of the Constitution” by refusing to vote.

The lawsuit, filed by Mr. Romney, acting as a private citizen, and 10 other opponents of same-sex marriage, said the legislature had a “legal duty to act” on citizen petitions but had relied on procedural devices to “avoid a vote and evade its constitutional duties.” The legislature recessed before voting on the measure two other times this session.

The suit named the Senate president, Robert E. Travaglini, saying he had “failed to carry out his ministerial duty to require final action” on the petition. A spokeswoman for Mr. Travaglini, a Democrat, could not be reached for comment.

The suit asks the Supreme Judicial Court to “step into the constitutional breach” and direct Secretary of State William F. Galvin, also named in the suit, to place the amendment on the 2008 ballot if the legislature does not act.

Fifty of 200 legislators must vote in favor of the constitutional amendment in this session and in the next one for it to appear as a referendum on the 2008 ballot. Both sides have said the amendment has enough support to advance to the next session.

In a statement, Kris Mineau, the president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which circulated petitions for the amendment, applauded the lawsuit. Mr. Mineau said that the recess was a “deliberate effort by those in the legislature to kill the marriage amendment” and that the legislature had failed to “afford the citizens a fair up or down vote.”

Gary Buseck, legal director for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which won the lawsuit that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage before the same court, called the lawsuit frivolous.

“I can’t see any way in which this lawsuit has any merit whatsoever,” Mr. Buseck said. “The bottom line is, the legislature acted in accordance with its rules and the Constitution and did the right thing to protect the now-declared constitutional rights of same-sex couples to marry. There’s no getting around that.”

Lawrence M. Friedman, a specialist on Massachusetts constitutional law at the New England School of Law, said the court must decide if the State Constitution requires the legislature to vote. Professor Friedman signed a brief supporting same-sex marriage in 2003 but has not been involved in the issue since then.

“This case is not about same-sex marriage,” he said. “This is a case, first, about what the legislature is required to do, and second, if there is anything the court can do about it.

“It’s not at all clear to me how this is something the court can remedy. It doesn’t seem likely to me the court will order the legislature to take a vote or subvert constitutional procedures and just put it on the ballot.”

    Massachusetts Governor Sues to Compel Vote on Same-Sex Marriage Amendment, NYT, 25.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/us/25marriage.html

Iowa Finds Itself

Deep in Heart of Wine Country

November 19, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

ADEL, Iowa — Stan Olson used to grow corn and soybeans on hundreds of acres here on the Raccoon River west of Des Moines, but no more. These days, Mr. Olson’s empty grain silo is useful only as a rustic image to promote his new vineyard and tasting room.

Mr. Olson’s Penoach Winery is a tiny operation in a red barn behind his family’s farmhouse, next to a small grape nursery. It does not have much of a customer base yet or any vintages that go beyond last year, but Mr. Olson is thrilled nonetheless.

“I will make as much selling grape plants off of two acres this year as I did many years on 1,000 acres of corn and raising 3,000 head of hogs,” said Mr. Olson, who makes much of his money selling cuttings to other aspiring vintners.

“This year was a very good year,” he said.

When wineries began popping up around the region in the 1970s — the first rebound of a local industry killed by Prohibition — many people thought it was a fad that would go the way of herbal diets and frozen yogurt stands.

But across the Midwest, wineries are thriving, both as tourism magnets and profit-making businesses. Some are even producing quality wine, sommeliers say, made possible by French-American grape hybrids that are bred to thrive in cold climates.

They have been so successful that more corn, soybean and tobacco farmers are clearing fields and planting grapes. In Iowa alone, a new winery has been licensed every two weeks for the past year, officials say. Now, more than 700 acres are devoted to grapes (compared with 15 in 2000) and there are close to 70 commercial wineries. Iowa has also just hired its first state oenologist to help guide the novice winemakers.

Other Plains and Midwestern states are also producing grapes, and uncorking more of the bottles they produce.

In South Dakota, for instance, the number of wineries has more than doubled recently, to 11. In Indiana, the local wine industry has added $34 million to the economy annually. And Ohio is spending $900,000 to promote its local vintages, competing with more established regions in California, the Goliath of American wine.

“We’re not afraid to take them on,” said Fred L. Dailey, director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Bragging about a recent West Coast competition where an Ohio Riesling won an award, Mr. Dailey said dismissively, “We beat out all those over-oaked chardonnays over there.”

Much of the soil in the Midwest is too rich for good grape production, but grapes can grow and even thrive, experts say, in sunny areas with sandy, well-drained soil. Because of the extreme temperatures around much of the region, traditional European grape varieties tend not to do well, but some newer hybrid grape types can withstand the cold.

In a region where farmers have suffered through hard times for decades, the prospect of Bacchus smiling down upon the fields has produced a kind of farm-based optimism rarely seen in these parts.

“I go to sleep and wake up with a smile on my face,” said David Klodd, a native Iowan and an assistant winemaker at the Summerset Winery in Indianola, where sales have been increasing by about 20 percent a year. Summerset expects to sell a total of 130,000 bottles of a dozen varieties this year at $10 a bottle. Mr. Klodd is passionate about grapes, and his biggest problem is running out of Summerset’s best seller, a semisweet red, now that the wine is under contract to be sold in stores.

“People used to think it was funny, the idea of grapes and wine in Iowa,” he said. “They laughed at me when I’d go into the farm service to buy chemicals. Well, they don’t laugh anymore.”

Summerset has also become a tourist destination, with concerts on the weekends, themed parties and grape-stomps that draw thousands. Tourists will actually pay for the privilege to stomp grapes, Mr. Klodd was surprised to learn.

“I put a couple thousand pounds into a tank and people go nuts,” he said. “This is a tourist industry. If we were here just as a winery, I wouldn’t have a job. You have to develop a base, and we do that with harvest parties and weddings.”

The lifestyle is still new to many in the Corn Belt. “Even on a bad day you can be happy — just drink some of your own stuff,” said Mr. Olson, whose thick workman’s hands now gently pour Penoach’s delicate blends.

Agricultural economists say the timing is right for wineries like Summerset and Penoach — the original Indian name for Adel — because the American public is becoming more wine-friendly and is increasingly fond of all things local. Nationally, wine sales grew by 5 percent last year, to a retail value of $26 billion, according to the Wine Institute, an advocacy group for the industry.

“In the Midwest, it goes back to wanting to make homemade wine and having it represent the character of the region,” said Bruce P. Bordelon, an associate professor of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University. “The wineries aren’t trying to be Napa, they’re trying to be Illinois. And there’s a place for all of them.”

Indeed, most Midwestern wine is consumed locally. But even at home, the wine can sometimes be a hard sell because the newly developed cold-hardy grapes are often unfamiliar to consumers. They go by names like vidal blanc, seyval blanc and chambourcin.

“You just say, ‘You like merlot? Well, here’s something similar, and we grow it out back. See if you like it,’ ” Dr. Bordelon said. “Most of the time, guess what? They do.”

Outside the Midwest, the wines face even more of an uphill battle.

“I’m not really feeling it here,” said Izabela Wojcik, programming director at the James Beard Foundation, a New York group that promotes regional cuisine. “I’m not seeing anything from the Midwest at this point.”

Ms. Wojcik recently held a dinner that featured wine from Idaho, and though it turned out to be excellent, she said, “We felt a little bit like it was a gamble.”

Still, food and wine experts agree that things are changing.

“The Europeans have had centuries to understand their vines,” said Doug Frost, a master sommelier based in Kansas City, Mo. “Lately, Midwesterners have produced some lovely wines from these vines, aided by greater experience in the vineyards and in the wineries.”

Perhaps most important in Iowa is the fact that wine — whatever it tastes like — is giving farmers the possibility of a decent living again. Some young people are choosing the vineyard back home over jobs in cities and suburbs.

Corey Goodhue is one such young farmer. His family cultivates 3,300 acres of corn and soybeans near Des Moines. Upon graduation from Iowa State University in December, Mr. Goodhue, 23, will have many options but says he will go back to the farm. He has big ideas about grapes.

“We’re not getting enough value out of corn and beans,” he said. “But these grapes, there’s a tremendous market emerging. On one acre of ground, if we net $40 with corn or beans we’ve done good. With grapes, you could net upwards of $1,500 an acre. For us, growing grapes, it’s the holy grail of high-value crops.”

And that is without a winery or tourism. Mr. Goodhue said he was interested only in growing, not winemaking. He investigated apples, raspberries and rhubarb as potential moneymakers, to no avail. But grape-tending even fit nicely into the slow months of the corn- and bean-growing season.

“My dad said that if he was my age he would do it because it makes sense,” Mr. Goodhue said. “But most importantly, I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. I like to put on my iPod and work on the grapes.”

In April, Mr. Goodhue planted his first acre of vines with the help of some buddies from Iowa State. Start-up costs were $6,000, and he said he planned to plant six additional acres next year.

“When we were putting up the trellises, people were rubber-necking and stopping on the road to ask, ‘What are you guys doing?’ ” he said. “They had no idea, but they were certainly interested.”

    Iowa Finds Itself Deep in Heart of Wine Country, NYT, 19.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/us/19wine1.html

For a Young Industry,

Hints of Possibility

November 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC ASIMOV

Michigan, Missouri and Iowa don’t quite have the ring of Napa and Sonoma. They will probably never connote the golden good life that California has marketed. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make wines that are not only decent, but also enjoyable and distinctive.

It’s natural that states in the earliest stages of their vineyard development should rely on the grapes that are easiest to grow — make that least difficult — as they decide where the best vineyard sites are and which grapes will ultimately perform the best. Europe took centuries to determine which grapes should grow where; California has made great progress over the last 60 years but is still working at it. If Midwestern states prove serious about winemaking, it will take decades at least to get pointed in the right direction.

For now, modest wines are to be expected. Of five bottles of Iowa wine that I tasted, two stood out, both from the Jasper Winery in Newton. The winery’s Behind the Shed Red, a nonvintage wine made from the St. Croix grape, is juicy and pleasing with a floral spice to it, like a Beaujolais nouveau. A Jasper Winery 2005 chancellor, made from chancellor grapes grown in the Cherry Creek Vineyard, is a little more polished, if not as exuberant. But others I tasted were sweet and cloying, more like wine coolers or backyard scuppernong wines than something you would want on your dinner table.

The inconsistency is no surprise, nor is the rusticity. While producers in Ontario, Canada, have made gorgeous sweet wines of hybrid grapes like the vidal, those grapes rarely produce wines of great character. Certainly they would require a much cooler summertime climate than is found in Iowa.

For years, New York producers specialized in wines made from hybrid grapes like seyval blanc and vidal. Some still do, and the wines aren’t bad. But real recognition and wide public acceptance came only after wineries from the Finger Lakes to Long Island figured out how to grow classic European grapes like riesling, merlot and cabernet franc.

It may take years of trial and error before many Midwestern producers can do the same thing. But don’t laugh, it could happen. Just last weekend I tasted one of the better American rieslings I’ve had in recent years. It was the 2004 Peninsula Cellars, made from grapes grown on Old Mission Peninsula. Where’s that? It’s just north of Traverse City, Mich.

    For a Young Industry, Hints of Possibility, NYT, 19.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/us/19pour.html

Immigrant Protection Rules Draw Fire

November 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 9 — Dr. Stephen B. Turner built a profitable business here by providing low-cost “immigrant medical exams,” including immunizations and blood tests, to hundreds of newcomers to America. Many of his clients did not speak English, but they paid in cash, spending a total of nearly $250,000 at Dr. Turner’s practice from 2003 to 2005.

It was only later, after a tip from a suspicious client, that the San Francisco police and the district attorney’s office learned the truth: Dr. Turner had been throwing out his clients’ blood samples and injecting them with “inoculations” of saline.

Kamala D. Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, said the case, which led to a seven-year prison term for Dr. Turner, was one of many her office had been able to pursue under San Francisco’s so-called sanctuary policy, which forbids police and city officials from asking people they encounter in the course of an investigation about their immigration status. It is a protection Ms. Harris says has made immigrants — legal and illegal — more willing to come to forward about crimes.

With immigration continuing to flare and frustrate as a national political issue, sanctuary cities like San Francisco may soon be the next battlefront. Critics argue that sanctuary policies discourage the police from enforcing laws, though about 50 cities and counties have enacted variations on sanctuary, according to the National Immigration Law Center. They include Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. A handful of states have similar policies, including Alaska, Maine and Oregon.

Conservative legal groups and politicians have begun to challenge such policies. Yet on the other side, cities like Chicago have announced they will avoid involving their police in issues that smack of federal immigration enforcement. And while a federal proposal to punish sanctuary cities recently failed to become law, some states have passed laws discouraging sanctuary policies.

“To say to a law enforcement official, if you encounter a foreign national who is in this country illegally and you believe that information would be of use and benefit to federal authorities, that you can’t call them, that’s just wrong,” said Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, who authored a provision in the federal Homeland Security bill that would have denied federal antiterrorism money to cities with sanctuary policies. The provision passed the House, but was not part of the bill eventually signed by President Bush.

But even with Democrats in control of Congress, immigration hard-liners say the issue is here to stay.

“It’s mind-blowing for us to see taxpayer dollars spent to subsidize criminal activity — that’s the end result,” said Christopher J. Farrell, director of research for Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that is suing the Los Angeles Police Department over its sanctuary rule.

Some states have also taken up the issue. In Colorado, a law signed by the governor in May prevents localities from passing ordinances that stop officials or police from communicating or cooperating with federal officials on immigration.

Other states have taken up larger immigration issues involving local cooperation with the federal authorities. A Georgia law enacted in April authorizes the state to enter into an agreement with federal officials to train and certify state law enforcement officials to enforce immigration. The Georgia law also requires the police to make a “reasonable effort” to determine the legal status of those they arrest for felonies or drunken driving.

Both the Colorado and Georgia laws include some protections against and stiffer penalties for exploitation of illegal immigrants.

In September, a sanctuary debate erupted in Houston after an illegal immigrant was accused of killing a police officer. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, a Republican city councilwoman who ran for Congress as an unsuccessful write-in candidate in place of former Representative Tom DeLay, called on the mayor to declare the city off-limits to illegal immigrants.

“Terrorists, drug runners and cartel members could be among us, and police officers are not allowed to check their identities,” Ms. Sekula-Gibbs wrote in an e-mail message to supporters. “Why? Because some politicians fear that asking people who have no ID about their legal status might intimidate all illegals into not reporting crimes. This policy of appeasement must be stopped.”

Craig E. Ferrell Jr., general counsel for the Houston Police Department, said the city did not have a formal sanctuary policy. But he said a tangle of laws — police codes and legal decisions, including those involving racial profiling and the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unlawful search and seizure — required caution by police officers.

“We’re not just trying to be obstructionist or not trying to help,” Mr. Ferrell said. “What we’re against is the federal government mandating that local enforcement be initiated without addressing these issues.”

Sanctuary supporters have pushed back. In San Francisco, Supervisor Gerardo C. Sandoval — who authored a resolution affirming the city’s policy, which dates to 1989 — said the federal government was simply trying to pass the buck for failing to secure federal borders.

“If they want to enforce the law,” Mr. Sandoval said, “they should put troops on the ground to do that.”

Lt. Paul Vernon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, which has operated under sanctuary guidelines since 1979, said, “We didn’t want people to fear cooperating with police.” Lieutenant Vernon added, “And the local police department job is not to enforce the federal immigration law.”

An organization of police chiefs, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said that requiring the local police to enforce immigration policy did not “take into full account the realities of local law enforcement dealing with this issue on the ground.” The association said its concerns included a lack of authority, training, and resources, as well as risks of liability.

Advocates for illegal immigrants, meanwhile, said they feared that getting rid of sanctuary rules would encourage immigrant communities not to report crime, including human and drug trafficking, prostitution, domestic violence, and even terrorism.

“Once the police are seen as agents of the immigration service, it discourages and deters immigrant communities from going to the police,” said Lucas Guttentag, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s a whole mixture of people in these communities — some recent, some illegal — and its going to cause the entire community to fear going to the police if they feel going to the local cop is essentially going to the immigration service.”

But opponents say localities should be forced to participate in solving some of the problems that accompany illegal immigration.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies for stronger immigration enforcement. “If you want to harbor people who are in the country illegally, you can’t expect to have federal funds for issues that arise from having illegal people in your community.”

Sanctuary policies are often less sweeping than opponents make them out to be. In San Francisco, for example, where resources cannot be used in immigration investigations, the police can inquire about immigration status in felony or drug cases.

Joan Friedland, an immigration lawyer for the National Immigration Law Center, said the concept of sanctuary cities was often misunderstood and that it gave the impression that such cities were lawless havens for illegal immigrants.

“It’s not like people, if they are charged with a crime, they just escape immigration,” Ms. Friedland said. “Even the cities that have ordinances limiting inquiries about immigration status cooperate and are in touch with the Department of Homeland Security when a serious crime is involved.”

    Immigrant Protection Rules Draw Fire, NYT, 12.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us/12sanctuary.html

Senate race

reveals regional divide in Virginia

Fri Nov 10, 2006 1:56 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

BRIDGEWATER, Virginia (Reuters) - More than 140 years after the Civil War raged across its tobacco fields, Virginia finds itself in a new north-south conflict pitting its northern suburbs against the rest of the state.

Democrat Jim Webb narrowly defeated incumbent Republican Sen. George Allen in Tuesday's election, thanks to strong support from the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia, tipping control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. The region's voters also have sent two successive Democrats to the governor's mansion.

It's a sign that what was once an overwhelmingly conservative state is increasingly dominated by Northern Virginia's racially diverse, densely populated suburbs across the Potomac River from Washington, experts say.

Those in the northern part of the state say their cosmopolitan outlook stands in stark contrast to the rest of Virginia, which was the home of the Confederacy's capital during the Civil War in the 1860s.

"Folks there tend to be independent and by independent I mean not that affiliated with the rest of the world," business consultant Tim Miller, 24, said at a Starbucks coffee shop in the restored historic district of the Washington suburb of Alexandria.

Webb drew 71 percent of the vote in Alexandria, as well as 73 percent in adjacent Arlington County.

Allen's strongest support came farther south in the suburbs of Richmond and in the Shenandoah Valley -- places like rural Rockingham County, where he won support from nearly three out of four voters.

Residents of Bridgewater in Rockingham County and surrounding areas said they did not care for the big-city attitude they encountered on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"I didn't like the people. They were rude. Here, they treat you like family, they'll listen to you," said Dave Hall, 37, an aircraft mechanic.

HIGH-TECH FUELS INFLUENCE

Manners aside, Northern Virginia's political influence will only increase as the booming high-tech economy continues to attract highly educated, Democratic-voting residents from across the country, said University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato.

"The northern part of the state is a Middle Atlantic state, the southern part of the state still belongs to the South," Sabato said. "Virginia ... is only going to become more Middle Atlantic."

Even in the heart of Allen country, residents don't always agree on hot-button social issues. Schoolteacher April Detamore, 36, said she voted for Allen because she opposed gay marriage.

"I'm a traditional conservative," she said as her husband gassed up their Chevy Trailblazer. "It was a difficult issue to try to explain to my children."

At a saloon down the street, Hall and fellow airplane mechanic Jon Marshall, 35, said they thought that government should stay out of the lives of gay people, though they both voted for Allen as well.

"I don't think that should have been a campaign issue," Marshall said. "Who's to say that a ban on interracial marriage isn't next?"

Like many Southern states, Virginia outlawed interracial marriage until the 1960s and parts of the state shut down their public schools during that period rather than integrate them between blacks and whites.

Race relations have improved since then and in 1989 Virginia became the first U.S. state to elect a black governor, Democrat Douglas Wilder.

Rockingham County and other areas of the Shenandoah Valley remain overwhelmingly white but Northern Virginia's booming economy has drawn a flood of immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

That's not necessarily a good thing for Alexandria caterer Jodi Carr, 31, who said the prevalence of illegal immigrants might force her to move from Northern Virginia to a more distant suburb.

Though Republicans made a crackdown on illegal immigration a centerpiece of their agenda this year, Carr said she voted for Webb because she was fed up with the war in Iraq.

"I just am very sick of the Bush administration and Allen's support of it," said Carr, a registered Republican who used to work for Arizona Sen. John McCain.

The Iraq war also was the most important issue for Miller, a Democrat who moved to the Northern Virginia area two years ago.

"I would have voted against any Republican right now," Miller said. "It's like they're all hiding out under Bush."

    Senate race reveals regional divide in Virginia, R, 10.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-11-10T185557Z_01_N10458629_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-ELECTIONS-VIRGINIA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Polls raise hopes of Democrats

in 36 governor races

Updated 10/29/2006 7:48 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats long expected they would take back the governor's office in New York this fall. And they had high hopes for Massachusetts, even though Republicans have held on there for 15 years.

But Arkansas, Republican-held for the past decade? Colorado, which chose Republicans in the last three presidential elections? Ohio, which has not elected a Democratic governor since 1986?

If the polls are accurate and a Democratic wave hits on Nov. 7, it seems poised to reach beyond Congress all the way to governor's mansions. With roughly a dozen seats in play, Democrats are well ahead or in a close contest in all of them. Nationwide, voters will elect 36 governors though more than half the races are not that competitive.

Democrats confidently predict they will win a majority of governorships, reversing the Republican edge since 1994. Republicans, after years of celebrating their numerical advantage — now 28-22 — are fighting to limit their losses.

"The math is troublesome and the overall environment is challenging for Republicans," said Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who visited at least five states in the past week to boost Republican gubernatorial hopefuls. "But we've got a number of really strong candidates who are fighting an uphill battle."

Governor's races generally do not get as much attention as the contests for control of the House and Senate.

Yet a state's top politician has a much more immediate impact on a person's day-to-day life than congressional representatives, affecting schools, roads, even the companies that set up shop in a city or town.

Governors also craft domestic policy on health care, welfare, education and more. It was governors, for instance, who led the charge for welfare reform in the mid-1990s.

Political parties see the national implications, with strategists arguing that an effective governor can help organize and promote the state party, which in turn can help deliver votes for Congress and the presidency. And governorships can cultivate future national leaders, with four out of the last five presidents having first served as governor.

"Winning a majority of governorships is just as significant as us winning the House and Senate," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, head of the Democratic Governors Association. "That will help us in winning back the White House in '08."

As this year's races have unfolded, Democrats have enjoyed a nearly unbroken stream of encouraging news. They have had to broaden their strategy as more states have become competitive, including some previously seen as solidly Republican, like Nevada and Florida.

"The good news is we're up in so many races. The bad news is we're up in so many races, in terms of the resources," said Penny Lee, DGA executive director. The group has spent more than $11 million so far, a record, though still far behind their Republican counterparts' $20 million to date, on top of candidates' spending.

The latest polls show Democrats well ahead in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Arkansas and Colorado, with close contests in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Maryland and Nevada.

That means Democrats are within reach of seven of the eight open seats where a Republican is leaving office — with only Idaho looking solidly Republican. And they are in the running to knock out two sitting Republican governors in Minnesota and Maryland. The only open Democratic seat, in Iowa, is too close to predict.

Republicans hoped to take Democrat-held seats in Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin. In all three races, Democrats have pulled slightly ahead in recent weeks, though all remain close. The best news for the Republicans is in California and Rhode Island, where Republican governors who at one time looked vulnerable have pulled ahead.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the narrowest of majorities with 26 governorships.

If Democrats end up with a majority, what would that actually mean in the states?

•In Massachusetts, where Democrat Deval Patrick, vying to be the state's first black governor, is ahead by more than 20 percentage points, the state would likely have one-party rule, with Democrats long in control of the legislature and all other statewide offices. Patrick has promised to cut inefficiencies in government, reduce gun crime, support a health care program the state recently approved and pursue alternative energies like a disputed wind farm off Nantucket Sound.

•In Ohio, Democrat Rep. Ted Strickland, with a commanding lead in pre-election polls, has vowed to address the tax structure of school funding, an issue that Republicans in control of both houses of the Legislature have been unwilling to revisit, even though the state Supreme Court ruled the current system unconstitutional.

•In New York, Democrat Eliot Spitzer — ahead by about 50 percentage points in recent polls — has campaigned on raising school spending, closing hospitals to cut costs and a promise to not raise taxes. With a Republican stateP Senate and a Democratic Assembly, he will have to negotiate.

Despite the polls, both parties are focused on raising more money for the home stretch and marshaling get-out-the-vote resources.

Phil Musser of the Republican Governors Association maintained that each race will be decided by issues in that state, but did not dispute the trend emerging nationwide.

"I don't think we're seeing a wave per se. But to say there isn't some impact of the national environment on governors elections is probably disingenuous," he said. "We are running in the head wind here. That's a fact of life."

    Polls raise hopes of Democrats in 36 governor races, UT, 29.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-29-democrats-governors_x.htm

The Border Dividing Arizona

October 15, 2006
The New York Times
By JOSEPH LELYVELD

When House Republicans calculated that their best bet for saving their majority was to run this fall as if illegal immigration and border security were the most urgent issues facing the country — bigger by far than that great unmentionable, Iraq — they were finally speaking the language of a Republican state legislator from Mesa, Ariz., named Russell Pearce. The Arizonan was there before Tom Tancredo, the Colorado congressman who talks of making a run for the White House on the issue; there before even Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh if not Pat Buchanan. A fast-talking former cop, Pearce went into electoral politics only after it became clear that he wouldn’t soon be able to realize his dream of becoming sheriff of Maricopa County, the area around Phoenix where more than half of Arizona lives. As a lawmaker, Pearce hasn’t just embraced the issue of illegal immigration as a tactic; for him it’s a passion — his opponents say an obsession — “the root cause” of almost any other problem Arizona and the nation face. Talk about terrorists and high crime rates, he’ll say the border is undefended. Are schools failing? They’re being overwhelmed by “a population that don’t put a high value to education.” Are there a million people in Arizona without health care? “Yeah, they broke into the country illegally. They came into the country poor, they’re gonna stay poor. You’ve imported them!”

Russell Pearce’s single-mindedness has proved to be a force in Arizona, setting the political agenda, helping to make illegal immigration the single most important and contested issue in the state. “He’s in the catbird seat,” a Democratic officeholder conceded last spring. Pearce can point to nine bills on illegal aliens that he has helped drive to passage in the State Legislature: to authorize major expenditures of state money on border enforcement, normally a federal responsibility; to deprive “undocumented” residents of social services; to ban Spanish as a language of communication by state agencies and officials; to define being in the state illegally as “trespass,” a misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second; to empower the local police to enforce immigration law. But nine times, the Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, has turned him back with vetoes on crisply asserted fiscal and constitutional grounds, urging him and his Republican supporters to stop playing “political games.”

“Shame, shame, shame on those who continue to ignore the No. 1 issue facing America,” Pearce fumed last month when I visited his office at the State Capitol in Phoenix, which displayed not one but two portraits of John Wayne. The anathema he pronounced was intended not just for his governor but also for the Republican president and the Republican sponsor of the immigration-reform bill the president had backed; in Pearce’s terms, “the treacherous, treasonous bill” the Senate passed in March. It was known as the McCain-Kennedy bill, McCain being, of course, Arizona’s senior senator and, it is presumed, a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. And it contained two provisions Russell Pearce could not abide: a path to citizenship for longtime residents who, after entering illegally, held steady employment, learned English and paid their taxes (plus fines to be levied for entering the country without a visa); and an opening for hundreds of thousands of temporary “guest workers” to come across legally for limited periods of work.

Was he saying that John McCain himself was “treacherous, treasonous?” I asked, interrupting Pearce’s discourse in midflow.

“Yes, I am,” he replied, not pausing for breath as he raced on.

In Arizona, it becomes evident, the battle over illegal immigration is, in one of its dimensions, a battle over the future of the Republican Party in the state and, because of McCain’s ambitions, nationally as well. It also becomes evident that what anti-immigrant zealots call an “invasion” is taking place not in spite of federal policies but, at least in Arizona, partly because of them. For 12 years the Border Patrol has deliberately funneled the immigrant flow away from settled urban areas like El Paso and San Diego (and, later, small Arizona border communities like Douglas and Nogales) into the Arizona deserts, where intruders can be more easily spotted, tracked and apprehended by its officers, using everything at their disposal, from high-tech sensors and drones to helicopters, jeeps, floodlights and horses. The number of arrests in Arizona alone has been running at more than half a million a year (slightly more than California, Texas and New Mexico combined for three years running). The number of arrests is larger than the number of individuals who get caught, since many are stopped two or three times. By the same token, it is almost certainly smaller than the number who eventually make it past the patrols — by a factor of two, three or four, depending on who’s doing the extrapolating in order to score what point. The average number of arrests on Arizona’s 376-mile border works out to more than 1,400 a day over the last two years. An Arizona politician running on the border crisis can therefore safely assert, since no one really knows, that 5,000 or 6,000 illegal aliens cross into the state every night.

What cannot be disputed is that year after year, hundreds die in the desert, usually from hyperthermia (267 by the official count in fiscal year 2005, and 199 for almost the same period in 2006). Among the people who make themselves heard on radio talk shows and in Internet postings, there are some who argue that the intruders get what is coming to them. “Break the law, pay the price. And another one bites the dust!” said a posting by a reader reacting to another report of a death in the desert. After crosses were displayed at a small pro-immigrant rally in Phoenix on Labor Day to commemorate the dead, a talk-show host named Bruce Jacobs, who speaks about little besides the “invasion” on his drive-time program on the Phoenix station KFYI, objected furiously to the display, in an accent that betrayed his own distant origins, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island. “Whites didn’t kill these people, America didn’t kill these people,” he said, his voice rising. “They killed themselves!” He meant that they’d be alive if they had stayed where they belonged, instead of giving in to the siren call of gainful employment in the globalized economy promoted by the United States.

So there’s enough raw feeling out there and enough raw reality — or so you’d think — to make a state that has become the main thoroughfare for illegal border traffic responsive to the electoral line of House Republicans. While there were probably enough votes in the House last spring to enact some version of McCain-Kennedy had it been brought to the floor, that would have taken an ad hoc bipartisan coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans — something the current House leadership forbids, allowing bills to come to a vote only when “a majority of the majority” supports them. The majority of the majority, responding to what’s called its “base,” wants to seal the border and deny permanent residence — which they say would amount to “amnesty” — to the uncounted millions of “illegals” already in the country; estimates run from 8 million to 11 million to more than 20 million (roughly half of whom happen not to have crossed the border on foot but simply overstayed visas).

Surely a red state that has supported a Democrat only once in the last 14 presidential elections might rally to such a program. But then how come Governor Napolitano, who’s up for re-election next month, was so obviously unfazed by a showy visit by the House Republican leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, to the border last summer and two hearings that were staged in her state as a way of whipping up support for the caucus’s position? “If they don’t know about the border by now, they don’t want to know,” she told me dismissively, spreading out her hands with the palms up and mugging a humorous look that said something like, “Who do they think they’re kidding?” Then, realizing that my recording device could not capture her look, she filled in the blank with a sound culminating in a loud laugh. “Pshaw,” she said. “That’s how I’d describe it. Pshaw!” What was needed from Congress was a workable reform, she said, not more posturing.

A former U.S. attorney and state attorney general — described by her opponents as well as her supporters as “smart” and “tough” — Napolitano has been dealing with immigration issues for a dozen years. Political photo ops by newcomers to the border don’t impress her. For all the Republican efforts to nail her on immigration, it will be a huge upset if she’s beaten. Does she know something the majority of the majority in Washington has yet to figure out?

And how come, if the issue of illegal immigration is the House majority’s ticket to remaining in power, its own creature, the National Republican Campaign Committee, was spending money in the Republican primary held last month to defeat one of Russell Pearce’s most conspicuous allies, a down-the-line, seal-the-border, anti-immigrant crusader named Randy Graf, in the one House race in Arizona in which a seat was clearly up for grabs? A self-proclaimed Minuteman, running in the Eighth Congressional District — a border district in the southeastern corner of the state, the very one that gave rise to the volunteer militia known as the Minuteman Project — Graf was leading in polls of likely primary voters. Yet the smart money in both parties seemed to be betting that a Graf victory would guarantee that the seat, Republican for the last 22 years, would swing Democratic. So while national parties normally steer clear of local primaries — and virtually never intervene in the other party’s — out-of-state Republican money was flowing in the Eighth to a moderate with a “common sense” approach to immigration issues not unlike John McCain’s, while national Democratic money, in a peculiar twist, was paying for ads portraying that same moderate as a wimp on illegals, in hopes of putting the supposedly beatable Randy Graf over the top in the other party’s primary.

In talking tough on the border and on illegal immigration, Republican candidates can be said to be running against themselves. After all, they control the White House, along with both chambers of Congress, which so far this year have produced two irreconcilable pieces of legislation and therefore a stalemate. The cleavage in the party is between those who want to systematize the country’s widening dependence on foreign labor (the Senate version) — to try to take the “illegal” out of illegal immigration — and those who want to slam the door (the House version). Every 10 years or so Washington is seized with the issue of immigration, and eventually a complicated, contradictory law is produced, making matters worse. After supposed reforms in 1986 and 1996, it became conspicuously harder for migrants to come and go on a seasonal basis; therefore they stayed and, at great hardship and cost, brought their families. The systematizers talk about the needs of a global economy while more and more alien workers, depending on forged Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, get paid off the books by subcontractors. Taking a more populist stand, Republican door-slammers call for a crackdown on employers who have become addicted to cheap labor, just as union leaders once did before union jobs were shipped abroad.

In a border state like Arizona, this history is not unknown; the promise of reform and the promise of enforcement are each viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. Besides, red states are seldom red all over; often they have patches of blue, especially around large cities and universities. Arizona’s Eighth is decidedly purple. It takes in much of Tucson, which is liberal by Phoenix standards, and runs to the edge of the University of Arizona campus. Republicans have a registration edge, but nearly one-third of its voters call themselves independent. Many in older generations can remember voting for Morris Udall, a venerated liberal Democrat. Also worth mentioning may be the fact that its 9,000 square miles all belonged to Mexico until the 1853 Gadsden Purchase established the border where it now stands.

Since 1984, the district has been represented by Jim Kolbe, a friend of John McCain and like McCain a U.S. Navy Vietnam vet. Kolbe has been considered a leader on Capitol Hill in fights for the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and programs to combat AIDS in Africa. Ever since a gay publication threatened to out him 10 years ago, the congressman has lived with a label: “the only openly gay Republican in Congress.” (For an example of the spread of knowledge in the information age, type those words into Google; you’re instantly informed you have 958,000 “results.”) Arizona’s Eighth faithfully re-elected Kolbe thereafter and, having come out, he was quietly forthright on issues touching on sex and sexual orientation, identifying himself as pro-choice and a supporter of same-sex marriage. Kolbe seemed invulnerable, but in the 2004 Republican primary he got a bad scare from Randy Graf, who, running to his right on immigration and border issues, pulled in nearly 43 percent of the vote.

Last year Kolbe announced he was stepping down. When I visited his office on Capitol Hill in June, he insisted that he could have beaten Randy Graf by a wider margin in a rematch. Graf and the immigration issue, Kolbe told me, hadn’t driven him from politics. (“I want to get out while people are still urging me to stay,” he said. “I want to get out while I can walk out and not be carried out of here.”) Kolbe had already endorsed one of Graf’s primary opponents, Steve Huffman. He would never support Graf, he vowed. If, despite his best efforts, his old opponent took the nomination, Congressman Kolbe said, it was “an absolute certainty, guaranteed” that the seat would go Democratic. The Eighth could never be won, he said, by a “know-nothing party person — anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell-research, anti-gay-rights, anti-everything, right down the line.”

Randy Graf is anti all those things, but his disposition is sunny and easygoing in a Midwestern way. He informs you pleasantly that he was born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Green Bay, Wisc., two months before Vince Lombardi became head coach of the Packers. Obviously he does not view this as a non sequitur. (Only 30 percent of Arizonans were born in the state, so it’s not unusual for a politician to have been born somewhere else. John McCain, son of a naval officer, was born in the Panama Canal Zone; the state’s other senator, Jon Kyl, a Republican, in Nebraska; Janet Napolitano, in New York City, then raised in Albuquerque.) Graf, who is now 47, moved to Green Valley south of Tucson to take up a post as a golf pro when Jim Kolbe was in his first term in Congress. Green Valley has a median age of 72.2 and a population, though it is only 40 miles from the border, that is 96.6 percent “white non-Hispanic,” according to a Web site for retirees looking for a place to settle. Eventually Green Valley sent Graf to the State Legislature. Though many of his supporters were also from the Midwest, they were not inclined to think of themselves as migrants.

Graf’s political mantra was standard for a Reagan Republican when he was elected to the state House of Representatives in Phoenix in 2000. He talked about lowering taxes, downsizing government, lowering taxes, protecting the rights of gun owners and lowering taxes. The year 2000 actually set the high-tide mark for the flow of illegal aliens in what the Border Patrol calls its Tucson sector — already by then its busiest — encompassing an area of 90,000 square miles along 262 miles of border and including all of Graf’s legislative district: the Border Patrol detained 616,346 aliens that year in the sector. As Graf tells it, it wasn’t the numbers or the growing presence of the Border Patrol giving chase on highways between Green Valley and the border that drove him to seize on the issue. It was an epiphany one evening in a supermarket. He found himself, so he says, in line behind a grandmother, mother and daughter from a single Hispanic family — the daughter, eight months pregnant — all making their purchases with food stamps and uncomprehending when the sales clerk addressed them in English. He had no way of being sure they were here illegally, but for Graf it became a vision of a connection between taxes and illegal immigration that needed to be elevated to a cause.

Sept. 11, 2001, added a whole other layer to this parable. “We live in a different day and age in the post-9/11 world,” Graf now says. “Ninety-nine percent of them may be coming to support their families, but 1 percent of four million is still an awful lot of people.”

The argument that the border must be secured because of the threat of terrorism remains largely theoretical. The Border Patrol keeps a count on non-Mexicans it detains (O.T.M.’s, they’re called, for “Other Than Mexican”). Mostly they’re from Central America and farther south, but a trickle can be traced to what the Department of Homeland Security classes as “special interest” countries (a euphemism that refers mostly to countries in the Muslim crescent from North Africa to Pakistan). In the Tucson sector, just 15 such persons had been picked up by Sept. 10 in the fiscal year that was about to end — scarcely one a month, a total that could easily be exceeded in an afternoon at a busy airport receiving flights from those same places. (In all its sectors, on the northern as well as southern borders, the Border Patrol detained a total of 418 aliens from the “special interest” countries in a period of nearly a year. The argument that the influx includes gang members and other criminal elements stands up better. The more difficult crossing the border becomes, the more opportunities there are for the human traffickers known as coyotes, who promise to steer those heading north to safe houses or cars driven by accomplices or relatives, at prices ranging as high as $2,000 a head. The Border Patrol keeps tallies of those it catches who prove to have criminal records, once its computers recognize their fingerprints. In the Tucson sector, about 440 a month are picked up with records of burglary, assault or narcotics charges. Coyotes, when they are caught, face charges of “alien smuggling” under the U.S. Criminal Code.)

Randy Graf’s second epiphany was also not driven by numbers. It came at the start of 2004, when he heard a Republican president speak feelingly of immigrant families from Mexico who “bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work and self-reliance.” Citing his own experience as a border governor, George W. Bush said that the border needed to be secured but also that a broken immigration system had to be made “more compassionate and more humane.” Congress should “increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to citizenship,” the president said. This was not what Graf wanted to hear from the leader of his party. He had a snapshot of himself and the president hanging in his office at the State Capitol; he turned the picture upside down and left it hanging that way for a couple of days as a symbol of his protest. And he decided to run for Congress, in opposition to what the president was calling a comprehensive reform.

Graf isn’t interested in reforming the system; he wants stricter enforcement of laws on the books — “zero tolerance” for illegal migrants, those trying to cross the border and those already here. If that takes putting the National Guard on the border in a military role and giving the local police the authority and resources to enforce immigration law, he’s all for it. In 2004, Graf, Russell Pearce and Randy Pullen, a Republican national committeeman, were the prime shapers of Proposition 200, an Arizona state ballot initiative designed to limit the spending of government funds on services for anyone in the country illegally. Governor Napolitano and every single member of the Arizona Congressional delegation opposed it, yet it passed with 56 percent of the vote.

An “honest debate” is needed about “changing demographics,” Graf argues. The mass border crossings are not just illegal; in their scale, they suggest that the cultural identity of his adopted state could change. “You can almost say that Los Angeles has been transformed already,” he says, clinching his point with an example he seems to think will cause a shudder. A half million immigrants demonstrated there last spring. The mayor, a Latino himself, supported them. Graf saw that as a warning for Arizona.

One pillar of Graf’s support has been in the retirement communities around Green Valley, where few residents seemed to wonder who built their houses or mowed their golf courses. Another was in frontier Cochise County, where the U.S. Army subdued the Apache chief Geronimo, where the shootout at the O.K. Corral occurred, where the Wobblies battled the copper bosses — and where, after all that history had been turned into lore for tourists, ranchers who graze their cattle on large tracts of scrub land leased from the state became infuriated by the constant incursions of illegal aliens in large numbers. In their desperate passage, the intruders cause regular livestock losses by snipping fences, by littering the desert with plastic bottles and other debris that can play havoc with the delicate insides of a ruminant and by now and then partaking of a calf, despite the risk that even a small roasting fire might betray their whereabouts. The Graf campaign got under way in the county in 2004 at about the same time as the Minuteman Project; inevitably, they formed an alliance — the candidate, having declared himself a Minuteman, receiving the endorsement of the movement’s leader, Chris Simcox.

I’d encountered Minutemen at the Hispanic rally at the Capitol in Phoenix on Labor Day, which failed dismally to attract a respectable fraction of the estimated 150,000 who turned out on Phoenix’s streets in May waving banners and signs that said, somos america or we are america. This time the signs of the counterdemonstrators were almost as conspicuous. you are central americans, we are north americans, you are trespassers, so — vacate — leave, a Minuteman placard demanded. what part of illegal don’t you understand? asked another. I hadn’t gotten far trying to chat with the people planted under those signs, so I asked Randy Graf to introduce me to a Minuteman. To my surprise, he managed to match me up with one from my part of the country, a former consultant on new product lines who once worked in Manhattan and last lived near Princeton, N.J., before retiring in Sonoita, where he now tended several head of longhorn cattle as a hobby.

No other houses or human activities are visible in the view through the picture windows of Gene Cafarelli’s spacious high-ceilinged stucco home, exquisitely sited on a piece of what was once a 2,000-acre ranch, now divided into two dozen parcels for high-end dwellings like his, none of which are supposed to be visible from any other. What you see is not obviously different from what a Spanish conquistador passing this way in the 16th century might have seen — a long view across a rolling valley, usually dun-colored but now, in September, turned green by the heaviest rainy season in years, to the Whetstone Mountains shimmering at a distance. But when Cafarelli goes out at night, he packs a gun, something he never thought to do in New Jersey.

Although he has had no direct encounters with migrants, he senses their presence. Some of his neighbors have had their homes broken into while they were away; necessities like food and clothing were seized, tradable luxuries like TV’s and laptops left behind. Elderly neighbors have heard Spanish outside their windows at night; the serene landscape is actually teeming. Cafarelli imagines that he was often at close quarters with illegal immigrants when he commuted to New York, but he didn’t recognize the look. Now he thinks he would. If there’s a problem of racism, it’s the racism of the Mexican ruling classes, he thinks, cynically pleased as they are to export their poor in return for dollar remittances in the billions that the laborers then send home.

The Minuteman Project was in part symbolic, he acknowledged, a way of calling attention to the failure of government to secure the border. The volunteers have no power of detention; they can only call the Border Patrol when they spot intruders through their night-vision binoculars. (In fact, other citizen patrols have been known over the years to detain migrants at gunpoint.) Now, despite his 68 years, the semiretired consultant — tall, white-haired, bronzed — is in training with a new search-and-rescue team the Minutemen are forming. Humane Borders, a Tucson church group, trucks fresh water to stations it has planted in the desert along heavily traveled routes. The Border Patrol sends out its own rescue teams to treat dehydrated, footsore aliens. Even the Minutemen, known widely as vigilantes, have their kinder, gentler side, it seems. The day before, Cafarelli was on two four-hour training missions in the bush, returning just before midnight. Each man carried two gallons of water, one for himself, the other for anyone they might encounter. As it happened, they encountered no one.

“I’ve always admired people who combine intellectual activity with action,” Cafarelli told me. In his mind, the Minutemen are patriots deserving of the description.

In the minds of other Arizonans, the Minutemen and the broader anti-immigration movement put at risk major sectors of the economy, which have long depended on a supply of migrants. Cochise growers, for instance, are often on the other side of the issue from its ranchers. I spoke to an onion farmer who said he expects to plant 100 acres next year instead of 200 because he didn’t think he’d be able to hire enough harvesters. “They yak about securing the border, yak about ‘no amnesty,”’ the farmer said. “We need to secure the border, but we’ve got to have a guest-worker program.” A builder I spoke to couldn’t say enough about the work ethic of the migrants employed on his projects, primarily roofing or putting up drywall. “God, do I love my boys,” he said. “Mind you, I don’t know whether my boys are legals or not.” He would not be surprised, the man admitted, to learn that 25 percent of them had given him bogus Social Security numbers.


Randy Graf, the former golf pro, wasn’t the only self-described Minuteman running. Early in the year another offered himself as a Republican candidate against Governor Napolitano, running essentially a one-issue, tough-guy campaign on Arizona’s responsibility — whatever the feds did or failed to do — to control its own southern border. Were it not for the fact that he bore Arizona’s most potent political name, Don Goldwater — a real estate investor and nephew of the late senator — would have been described as a political nonentity: his campaign résumé mentioned that he’d been a delegate to one national convention, volunteered in some campaigns and served as a den leader for the Cub Scouts. Some active Republicans said they had never heard of him. But running basically on shoe leather, the illegals and the name — “A name you know, a name you can trust,” his brochures said — the candidate, who proved to be a tireless campaigner, overcame a lack of funds and built a lead over the summer in polls on the Republican primary race.

Goldwater’s most original promise was his pledge to empower the local police to detain illegal aliens and corral them in an encampment on the border — a “temporary tent city,” he called it — where they could be put to work building fences and clearing the desert of the refuse they and those like them had scattered when they came across. When a Spanish news agency reported that Goldwater wanted to build a “concentration camp” for illegals, he demanded and got a retraction, but not before a statement had been put out in Washington by Senator McCain denouncing any plan for a concentration camp on the Arizona border.

I chatted with Goldwater in September outside a movie theater in the northernmost shopping mall on Scottsdale Road, where the desert and Scottsdale’s newest housing tracts bump against one another. The theater was previewing a documentary called “The Border War,” and a large audience of anti-immigrant stalwarts had turned out. I’d looked for evidence that his uncle had crusaded on the question of immigration, I told the candidate, and hadn’t found any. Barry Goldwater, he said, always felt strongly about the rule of law. How was he feeling these days, I asked, about Senator McCain? “He knows he won’t control the state party when Don Goldwater is elected governor,” the candidate said with calm certitude. “He’s facing a revolt by the grass roots.”

Randy Graf endorsed Goldwater. So did Russell Pearce, one of several more prominent Republicans who’d flirted with the idea of taking on Janet Napolitano. (“I’d love to get in the ring with her,” he said.) Another was Maricopa County’s popular, showboating sheriff, Joe Arpaio, a former station chief in Mexico for the Drug Enforcement Administration who seems to enjoy the attention he gets when he hints he might run for higher office but then never does. (It was Arpaio who put up Arizona’s first tent city in Phoenix, to house the county jail’s overflow behind razor wire, making the point that there would be no limit to jail capacity in his jurisdiction. It has since become a photo op for presidential candidates, including George Bush in 2000 and Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, this year. Pearce, once Maricopa’s chief deputy, says it was all his idea.) Most obvious as a potential candidate was Representative J.D. Hayworth, a late but fervent convert to the cause of sealing the border, who finally decided, he says, that in a time of national crisis it was more important that he hang on to his seniority in the House, for Arizona’s sake.

Each said he thought Napolitano could be beaten. Each had a reason not to take her on. That left the little-known Goldwater facing off in the Republican primary against Len Munsil, a “movement conservative for 20 years,” by his own description, whose dogged campaigning on pro-life, pro-abstinence, anti-pornography, anti-same-sex-marriage issues had won him a solid base among evangelicals. For Munsil — an able candidate but far to the right by Arizona standards — illegal immigration seemed at first to be an afterthought. But just after Labor Day, with less than two weeks to go to the primary, he proclaimed it his highest priority. As governor, he pledged, he would station the National Guard on the border, spend state money to put sensors and fences where the federal authorities had yet to put them and establish a new Arizona Border Patrol to back up the U.S. Border Patrol, which already has 3,300 officers in the state and stands to have more than 5,000 by 2008 under President Bush’s promised expansion of the federal force.

Janet Napolitano watched the escalating arms race between the two far-right Republican gubernatorial candidates with wry humor and maybe a hint of disdain, from her office on top of a stubby tower that is built into the Arizona Capitol. She wondered where her opponents would find the cash to back up their costly promises. Would they raise taxes or cut programs and if so, which ones, she asked, offering a preview of her own campaign. Her way had been to proclaim, in August 2005, a state of emergency on the border and demand that Washington station Guard troops there and pay for them. She wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, after a month, heard from a deputy who said it was a matter for the Department of Homeland Security. Then she sent a legal brief in the form of a letter jointly addressed to Rumsfeld and the secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. All she got back was an answering legal brief from deputies with more citations of laws and policies, bland assurances of how seriously they’d considered her plea, how earnestly they recognized the problem, how deeply they intended to deliberate on it and how little they could do. Then in May everything changed: the president announced in an Oval Office speech that he was sending the Guard to the border to take on some of the Border Patrol’s auxiliary duties. The next day he flew to Yuma and posed for pictures on the border with Janet Napolitano. Arizona newspapers reported that he’d embraced her plan. Republicans who’d geared up to fight Napolitano on border issues were less than pleased. Their president had made it possible for this Democrat to claim that progress was being made. (In the same way, she’s even likely to benefit from the recent announcement that the Department of Homeland Security will be paying Boeing $67 million over the next eight months to develop a system combining radar, ground sensors, cameras and unmanned aircraft that will first be tested in Arizona.)

In fact, the number of border intruders actually started to come down over the summer. This may have had more to do with the heavy monsoon rains than with the National Guard. Napolitano herself suspects that some Mexicans have yet to figure out that the Guard is on the border to build roads, repair fences and set up observation posts, not to shoot border crossers. “I know people need a sense that laws are being enforced,” she told me. “They get nervous and frustrated when they think it’s out of control. And Arizonans got to the point where they believed — I believed — it was out of control.” Those, she figures, who want to seal the border and bar immigrants, period, rather than “manage the border” won’t vote for her anyway. Those who want a system that’s less cruel, less chaotic are ready, she says, to consider realistic approaches.

So when Republicans accuse her of talking a good game and doing little or nothing, she’ll retort, she says, “When are you going to call on Washington, D.C., to do their part?” Her idea of a workable system is more expansive than the bill the Senate passed. Like President Bush, she would go beyond a temporary “guest worker” program to a system that would allow for more visas and green cards for Mexican workers seeking permanent residence. The numbers would have to be adjusted to changing economic circumstances. Most important, there would have to be real penalties for American employers who hired illegals. Many such employers contribute to political campaigns, which may be why, year after year, Congress has withheld financing from agencies charged with making the sanctions it long ago enacted stick.

Napolitano presents herself as a problem-solver, not an ideologue. (“I think that’s just so anachronistic,” she remarked when I noted the absence of liberal rhetoric in her pronouncements.) Her tone is brisk, managerial; the language she uses is markedly cooler than the appeals to tradition and compassion found in Bush’s several addresses on the subject. But she is prepared to ask, in response to Russell Pearce’s complaints about the high costs of educating the huge number of Spanish-language children in Arizona schools, “whether we want to take a failed national immigration policy out on a child in school.”

“I’m the governor of this state,” Napolitano continued, a suggestion of heat now in her voice. “I’ve got, let’s assume, 160,000 kids in school who speak Spanish. They need to read and write and speak English if they’re going to succeed in school. And they’ve got to succeed in school if they’re going to succeed in life. To me, if you don’t deal with these issues forthrightly, you’re well on your way to creating a permanent underclass.”

Arizonans, she says, are not easily sold on simplistic solutions to the border crisis involving little besides expenditure on law enforcement and technology. Earl de Berge, a Phoenix pollster, offered some survey results from May that seemed to show that a “comprehensive” reform had its own appeal in the state: 73 percent said it should be made possible for migrant workers to enter and leave the country without breaking the law.


It’s often argued that work-seeking Mexicans drawn to the border should instead find the line at a consulate where they can apply for a visa, then wait their turn. What’s missing from the discussion is the realization that there basically is no such line for the sort of semi-skilled border-crossers I repeatedly encountered on roadsides from Tucson on south, forlornly waiting to be processed and taken away by ICE (the unusually apposite acronym, for an agency called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is pronounced as one word). On State Highway 86, a road heading west from Tucson, for instance, there were 15 who’d just been hauled from two old Chevy Cavaliers that had their backseats removed and blocks of wood jammed into the springs so that the back of the car would ride unnaturally high, not betraying the weight of the human cargo inside, covered by blankets. For the Border Patrol a high-riding old car, in which only two passengers are visible, can be as much of a tip-off as one that sags. These were young men who said they’d come all the way from Chiapas in southern Mexico to find work.

Here’s the data on legal immigration from Mexico: In fiscal year 2005, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, 157,992 Mexicans were admitted to the United States on immigration visas, less than half the number that were caught entering the Tucson sector illegally in that same period but still about 14 percent of all immigrants who legally entered the United States that year. Of the Mexican total, 45 percent were immediate family members of persons who had already qualified for legal residence; another 40 percent were more distant relatives of legal U.S. residents, most of whom had to wait 15 years or more to have their papers processed, paying regular fees to government agencies to keep them pending. The remaining 15 percent were people who either got in on special visas for highly qualified immigrants with technical training and skills deemed to be desirable, or were among the small number officially sponsored by a prospective employer.

The men from Chiapas lined up next to the ICE bus had no such connections. Typical of the thousands bused back across the border every day, they may have had relatives in the United States. But it’s highly unlikely that these relatives would have been legal residents. Therefore, if the migrants were determined to take the jobs that were undoubtedly waiting for them in Phoenix and points north, east and west, on construction and landscaping crews or in hotels, slaughterhouses or poultry factories, then the trek across the desert, scary and expensive as it was bound to be, would have been their only obvious and realistic way in.

Russell Pearce sees them, these newcomers, when he drives through the district he represents, which happens also to be the district where he grew up. They shape up early each morning in the city of Mesa at the major intersections along Broadway, an area that was the heart of the original Mormon settlement here. Sometimes Minutemen demonstrators show up with their placards and noisily chase them into sidestreets, hoping to embarrass the crew bosses and ordinary householders who come by in their pickups to engage them for a day or a few hours. Many of the migrants, it is presumed, are in transition, hoping to put aside enough cash to finance the next stage of their journey, which will take them to California or Illinois, Nebraska or North Carolina.

But some settle in Mesa. This is evident from the latest figures published by the Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. In 2005, Mesa — now the nation’s 40th biggest city — was found to be 24 percent Hispanic, up from 19.7 percent only five years earlier. Its overall growth was 10 percent, more than half that growth obviously Hispanic, enough to give the City Council district around the Mormon Temple a Hispanic majority. (This could be read as a fulfillment of a panel in the frieze that goes around the temple, a panel said to depict “the Hispanic people. . .leaving their old homes and coming to join the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”)

But there are still no Latinos on the Mesa City Council and no discernible increase in the number of Latino voters. Kyle Jones, a Mormon in his second term representing the district, said he would have considered stepping aside for a highly capable Latina candidate who ran against him in the last election if he had thought she had a chance of winning. She came in third, finishing with only 18 percent of the vote, behind not only Jones but a Minuteman running to Jones’s right and drawing votes from that portion of the community that is permanently riled by their newer neighbors’ tendency to hold big parties in front yards instead of on more seemly rear patios, and to play loud, unfamiliar music in an unfamiliar language. Mesa is farther from the border than Cochise County. But since it’s sometimes a destination, not a thoroughfare, resentments accumulate just as surely.

The gap between the demography of his district and its voter profile strongly suggests to Pearce that the new residents are virtually all illegal. In his lexicon, that makes them “felons.” Overall, 7 or 8 percent of the state’s population may fall into the category of those who crossed the border without going through any legal channel, accounting for at least one-fourth and possibly one-third of its Hispanic residents. Russell Pearce acknowledges that children born in this country to these migrants are entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment, but he thinks something should be done about that.

When Pearce puts the tax burden on Arizona citizens resulting from unauthorized immigrations at well over $2 billion, he’s rolling together the citizen and noncitizen Spanish speakers in public schools. What’s often missed in the public debate is the fact that individual immigrant families often are neither strictly “legal” or “illegal” but an ambiguous blend. The father may have a green card, the mother not; the older children may not be naturalized, while the younger are deemed citizens by birth. In such households, there’s an abiding fear of doing anything that might call attention to the dubious status of some of its members. So a child who has been an outstanding student may be discouraged by her family from applying to college if her Social Security number, or even that of a sibling, won’t stand up to scrutiny.

I met one evening in September with five young women and their mothers, residents of a remarkably rundown trailer park in western Mesa that looked as if it hadn’t been refurbished since the Korean War. Meaning to encourage candor, I said I didn’t need to know their last names. Lucy, a high-school senior whose English was easy and idiomatic, completely unaccented, did much of the talking. She already understood, she said, that the local community college would be beyond her reach. Her father had spent thousands on lawyers without seeming to bring the noncitizens in the family closer to legal residence. The obstacles seemed insurmountable.

“I don’t want people to think we’re, like, invading,” Lucy said. “We’re just trying to make, like, a better life.”

The Republican races got a little crazy in the last days before the primary on Sept 12. Len Munsil, the movement conservative battling for the nomination for governor on the strength of his stand on family-values issues, found himself accused, in a “push poll” of uncertain origins, of having fathered an illegitimate child. This crusader for abstinence before marriage then had to confess that he and his wife had yielded to temptation and conceived the first of their eight children a month before their wedding. In the race for Jim Kolbe’s seat, the congressman’s designated successor, Steve Huffman, was “unendorsed” by The Tucson Weekly, which had backed him, for refusing to talk about a bungled undercover mission by a campaign aide caught snapping pictures through a window of a home occupied by an opponent’s former wife.

Before the results were in, two Arizonas were put on display in events held in separate hotel ballrooms. The first was a dinner honoring Congressman Kolbe, which brought 600 persons connected to Tucson’s business, political and cultural elites together in the ballroom of a resort in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. These were people who prided themselves in their ability to work across party lines. The Democratic governor was there to lead the celebration, which included videotaped tributes by Condoleezza Rice, Bono and John McCain on big screens and a cycle of love songs rendered by a soprano, winding up with “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” which she sang sitting knee to knee with the honoree. Kolbe seemed swept away but managed a response in which he bemoaned the rise of extreme partisanship in Congress and the decline of the art of compromise. He then thanked supporters, friends and relatives, ending with his partner, a Panamanian national, who half-rose from his seat next to Janet Napolitano to receive a round of applause that did not sound perfunctory.

The mood was decidedly more righteous and embattled in the smaller, second ballroom in a south Tucson hotel, where fewer than 200 of Randy Graf’s supporters gathered on primary night for what they hoped would be a victory party. Testing the ability of the party to come together, I asked one of Graf’s supporters whether he’d be able to back Huffman if his man lost. “I’d vote for any derelict off the street before I voted for him,” the man said. An hour later the crowd was shouting: “Randy! Randy! Randy!” as their candidate claimed victory.

But there wasn’t much evidence in the results of a groundswell of fresh anger over border issues strong enough to determine the outcome of the races in November. Don Goldwater, the one-issue candidate Graf and Russell Pearce had backed, was easily beaten by Len Munsil, who waited till the last days of the campaign to broaden his base by running a TV ad in which John McCain, the nemesis of anti-migrant diehards, called him “a man we can trust.”

Even Graf’s victory raised questions about his prospects, for his percentage of the vote was no greater than what he drew two years earlier. If the result was to be read as a referendum on immigration reform, it was hard to miss the fact that the combined vote for two runner-up candidates who supported a new guest-worker program — the Kolbe position all these years — amounted to slightly more than 50 percent among Eighth District Republicans. A portion of those voters were now likely to be tempted to defect to the Democratic nominee, Gabrielle Giffords, a vivacious former state senator, just 36 years old, who lines up with McCain and Napolitano to support a “viable guest-worker program that meets the needs of Arizona’s economy.” Of course she’s also for “improved border security,” more Border Patrol agents, more technology in the form of radar, sensors and drones. Arizona, she says, has paid a heavy price for Republican failures on the border. Like the governor, she aims to show that the immigration issue underscores the need for change in Washington; in other words, that the abiding anxiety about the border and illegal aliens can be made to work for Democrats. It may come as a surprise to tacticians in the Republican House caucus, but no candidate in red-state Arizona or anywhere else is calling for less border security.

Having battled his way to the nomination on the issue, Randy Graf’s best shot now is to portray Gabrielle Giffords as a coddler of illegals, “an extreme liberal” (as she is described in a negative TV ad put up by the Minutemen) who yearns to hand out Social Security benefits to illegal aliens. (The ad even shows a check made out to “Illegal Alien.”) Anything can happen in a campaign, but the first poll showed Giffords, the Democrat, with a commanding lead. Of course it’s also possible that the Republicans will make little headway on the immigration issue in Arizona, or beyond, but still retain control of the House. In that case, the “majority of the majority” would be likely to continue to bar any vote on a version of the reform that passed the Senate. They’d do so out of an instinct not to cede power to moderates in their own ranks.

Randy Graf seemed to define the breach in the Republican Party when I asked him whether he’d seek Senator McCain’s support. “I look forward to talking to John McCain,” he said. “It will give me a good opportunity to talk about immigration with him.” McCain had meant to withhold his endorsement from Graf but reversed himself for the sake of a Republican majority in the House and his own relations with his party in his home state. His endorsement was silent on Graf’s anti-immigrant stand. And in fact, the senator had no plans to meet the candidate.

Joseph Lelyveld is the author most recently of “Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop” and a former correspondent and executive editor at The Times. His last article for the magazine was a profile of Senator Chuck Hagel.

    The Border Dividing Arizona, NYT, 15.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15immigration.html?hp&ex=1160971200&en=d643bc3aa60baecc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Arnold swaps agendas for political resurgence

Updated 10/13/2006 12:10 AM ET
USA Today
By Martin Kasindorf

LOS ANGELES — Last year, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looked very much like the Republican he is: He waded into confrontations with the Democratic Legislature and unions of public employees. He proposed caps on state spending and eliminating legislators' long-lasting power to design their districts.

This year, Schwarzenegger has all but become a Democrat. Reversing course after his popularity rating sank to 37%, he joined Democrats in placing proposals on the Nov. 7 ballot to borrow a record $37.3 billion for highways, schools and levees. And he signed a law that made California the first state to try to reduce global warming by forcing industries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Last year he took every one of his moves out of the Republican playbook," says Fabian Núñez, Democratic speaker of the State Assembly. "It was an unsuccessful attempt to make a Democratic state a Republican state. Now he has surrounded himself with people who have encouraged him to wrap himself around the Democratic flag, and it has worked."

Judging from lopsided polling figures, Schwarzenegger is cruising toward election to a second term next month with the panache he exudes at the handlebars of his Harley-Davidson.

Schwarzenegger, elected in 2003 to replace recalled Democrat Gray Davis, holds a 17-point lead in statewide polls over state Treasurer Phil Angelides, 53, the Democratic challenger. The former Hollywood action star had a job-approval rating of 56% in a Los Angeles Times Poll published Oct. 1.

"You rarely see in politics anybody come up from where the governor was," says Mark Baldassare, polling director of the Public Policy Institute of California. "It's a lot easier for voters to lose faith than to regain faith in their leaders."

This year's self-reversal exemplifies the central political mystery of Arnold Schwarzenegger: continual change that has kept voters and politicians guessing whether the Austrian-born, self-made megamillionaire is at heart a Republican, a Democrat or a combination of the two.

In 2004, Schwarzenegger made a last-minute campaign stop with President Bush in crucial Ohio, where the governor runs an annual bodybuilding exposition. This year, he stays out of photo range of Bush, ducking the president's fundraising trips to California.

"I've worked with the governor for three years now, and I still don't know what his values are," says political foe Barbara Kerr, president of the 340,000-member California Teachers Association, who led the successful campaign against the governor's 2005 ballot propositions. "It's very confusing. We just don't know who we're going to see next."

A moderate image

As a Republican in a heavily Democratic state, Schwarzenegger, 59, has clearly abandoned the hard-edged conservatism of 2005. He's managed to re-establish the moderate image that catapulted him to Sacramento after his surprise announcement of candidacy on The Tonight Show, with Jay Leno, in 2003.

He appeared with Leno again Wednesday and joked that political ads linking him to Bush are as silly as "linking me to an Oscar." The Angelides campaign asked NBC for equal time.

Schwarzenegger originally ran as a business-oriented Republican who could make Sacramento's deficit-plagued government work. Yet he favored abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and expanded environmental protection — issues not embraced by more conservative Republicans.

Barely more than half his appointments to state jobs have been Republicans. Half of his judicial appointments are Democrats or independents.

Within a few months of taking office, however, the governor yawed from bipartisan deficit-cutting agreements to ridiculing the Democrats who control the Legislature as "girlie men" and bashing unions of teachers and nurses.

This year, he again has reached out to top Democrats. Together, they chalked up a slate of legislative successes that Schwarzenegger touts in his campaign.

"Who can you trust to do the right thing?" Angelides said Saturday in the only televised debate with the governor. "For three years, Arnold Schwarzenegger was very consistent. Only in the last 60 days, as he sought to save his own job, has he tried to move to the middle."

Squaring his epic shoulders against dramatic backdrops — a Malibu beach, the San Francisco skyline — the governor has signed legislation committing California to reduce emissions of carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gases 25% by 2020; raising the state minimum wage from $6.75 to $8 an hour and pressuring drugmakers to lower prices of prescription medicines for families earning less than $60,000 a year.

"As people watched him work with opposite numbers in the Legislature, people say, 'Yeah, this is the guy we voted for in the recall. The governor of last year wasn't that guy,' " says Matthew Dowd, the governor's chief campaign strategist.

Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., says: "The classic question in politics is: What have you done for me lately? And Schwarzenegger has done quite a lot lately."

Some of the twists and turns that make Schwarzenegger so hard to pinpoint:

•In the special election he called last November, voters defeated a proposal that would have made it tougher for teachers, police, nurses and firefighters to use union dues for political contributions. Also rejected were measures to give the governor more say over spending, to strip legislators of power to map their districts and to fire teachers more easily.

Unions spent $100 million and humbled Schwarzenegger, defeating all his initiatives. The unions are still so angry that they are airing TV ads against his re-election.

The special election was unpopular not only because Schwarzenegger wanted the measures passed, but also because of the expense of holding a fourth election in just over two years.

The defeat on last year's ballot measures deprived Schwarzenegger of the club he had held over legislators' heads: the threat to go directly to the people if the Legislature didn't do his bidding. "In 2005 he decided he was so popular that he could go off on his own and could get things passed by the ballot initiative," Baldassare says. "He didn't need the Legislature. Now he does."

Schwarzenegger has expressed contrition since that November night. "The people sent a message loud and clear," he said in the debate with Angelides. "And that message was, 'Don't come to us for every little thing. Go to the legislators. You guys work it out.' "

•Within days of the November debacle, Schwarzenegger purged his staff. He started by replacing a Republican chief of staff with Susan Kennedy, a Democrat and former aide to Davis. The move enraged conservative GOP activists.

Núñez says the governor made the staff changes on the advice of his wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat of the Kennedy family dynasty.

"She's obviously a very, very important adviser for the governor," Dowd says. "She's as smart as anyone. She has a network of people she talks to. She provides advice, suggestions."

•Schwarzenegger named more Democrats to his Cabinet and hired Republican strategists from Bush's 2004 campaign, including Dowd and campaign manager Steve Schmidt. The odd team of pragmatists meshes well, Dowd says.

•An improving economy pushed a $7.5 billion windfall into thetreasury, enabling Schwarzenegger to restore $3 billion he'd cut from school funding in previous years. A budget deficit of $16.5 billion when he took office is down to $3.5 billion, he said in the debate.

•Schwarzenegger has raised $41.3 million this year for his campaign, nearly doubling Angelides' $23.2 million. The governor's fundraising from oil, tobacco, real estate and other industries has given Angelides ammunition to charge that the governor has violated a recall-campaign pledge to end the influence of "special interests."

•After he abruptly switched to embracing a Democratic agenda he had battled for three years, the California Chamber of Commerce, a longtime business ally, opposed Schwarzenegger over the global warming law. The chamber has endorsed his re-election, anyway.

While Schwarzenegger schmoozed with Democrats, he ignored the Legislature's Republican minority this year. "While we were disappointed, there were no real surprises," Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman says. "When he ran in the recall election, we knew he was going to be a moderate Republican."

Núñez and other Democrats say they are ambivalent about handing Schwarzenegger accomplishments that have blocked Angelides' headway on minimum wage and other issues. Democrats had little choice but to help the governor: The Legislature's approval ratings were even lower than Schwarzenegger's.

"Do I go out and stall any effort to advance my own agenda, which is very self-defeating?" Núñez says. "The governor has been able to benefit from that cooperation. But it is a political year. We also want a Democrat elected governor. And it puts us in sort of a quagmire."

Keeping distance from Bush

Angelides' commercials replay Schwarzenegger with Bush in Ohio to rouse the Democratic base. These days, though, Schwarzenegger's positions oppose Bush on global warming, stem-cell research and other issues.

All of this inconsistency opens Schwarzenegger to charges that he's a flip-flopper. Schwarzenegger's shifts haven't hurt him so far. "One does have to remember at all times that he is an actor," says Kerr of the teachers union. "And people have short memories. He did apologize and appear very sincere. He is a very good actor."

Attempts to link Schwarzenegger with Bush haven't registered in Angelides' polling, says Bill Carrick, Angelides' senior campaign strategist. So Schwarzenegger's zigzagging record is getting more attention from the trailing Democratic candidate.

During the debate, the polished Schwarzenegger attempted to disarm the policy-wonk Angelides with jokes and gentle jabs.

Granted one chance to ask Angelides a question, Schwarzenegger playfully asked the Democrat what his funniest moment was in the campaign.

"Every day is just a hoot — I can't tell you how much fun," Angelides said.

True to 'no new taxes'

Though some Republican activists are miffed at Schwarzenegger, "conservatives will come out" on Election Day, Ackerman says. "He's stayed true to his pledge of no new taxes."

Schwarzenegger has been so hard to pigeonhole that he provokes a wide range of guesses about what a second term would look like. On the campaign trail, he offers few clues.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a University of Southern California public policy analyst, theorizes that Schwarzenegger will "move to the left because he's more comfortable there.

He feels far more comfortable as an activist liberal than with the conservative part of his party's base."

Ackerman takes an opposite view. He expects Schwarzenegger to again challenge Democrats over legislative reapportionment, cutting public-employee pension costs and winning more budget-cutting power for governors.

Dowd says Schwarzenegger will hew to the bipartisan approach of 2006.

If he wins, Schwarzenegger is apt to start 2007 with his former movie-star appeal restored with Californians. The Los Angeles Times Poll showed that 60% of likely voters have a favorable impression of him.

"They want to like him, because he's fun," Pitney says. "It's fun to have him as governor, fun to tell people you have Arnold Schwarzenegger as your governor. It's something you can brag about to people in other states."

    Arnold swaps agendas for political resurgence, UT, 13.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-12-schwarzenegger_x.htm

Philanthropy From the Heart of America        NYT        11.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11leonhardt.html?hp&ex=
1160625600&en=ce464782cde0acac&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Economix

Philanthropy From the Heart of America

October 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Valley County, not far from the center of Nebraska, seemed to be one of those Great Plains communities that was dying. From World War II to 2000 it had lost almost half its population, and the decline was gathering speed at the end of the century. The I.G.A. and Jack & Jill grocery stores closed, as did most mom and pop gas stations and the local dairy processing plant.

In the last five years, though, something utterly unexpected has happened. The decline has stopped. More people are moving to Ord, the county seat, than leaving, and the county’s population is likely to show its first increase this decade since the 1920’s.

The economics of rural America have not really changed. If anything, the advantages that Chicago, Dallas, New York and other big cities have over Nebraska have only continued to grow. But Ord has finally figured out how to fight back.

It has hired a “business coach” to help teach local stores how to sell their goods over the Internet and to match up retiring shop owners with aspiring ones. Schoolchildren learn how to start their own little businesses — like the sixth-grade girl who made a video of the town’s history and sells it at school reunions — so they will not grow up to think the only job opportunities are at big companies in Omaha or St. Louis. Graduates of Ord High School who have moved elsewhere receive mailings telling them about job opportunities back in town.

None of this happens naturally in a free-market economy, because the efforts cost money that will never be fully recouped. But it has happened nonetheless thanks to one of the few advantages that Ord does have over Chicago, Dallas and New York: it is in a state with some of the most generous wealthy people in the country.

In San Francisco, a retired money manager named Claude Rosenberg has founded a small organization called New Tithin g Group. It tries to persuade Americans to base their charitable giving on their assets as well as their income, given how many now have substantial assets. And using tax returns, NewTithing has put together a devilish ranking of the 50 states.

It began by estimating the liquid assets of households with more than $200,000 in annual income, counting cash, stocks, bonds and the like, but not houses or retirement accounts. Then, with the same federal tax data, it calculated what percentage of those assets the households have given to charity, on average, in recent years.

Nebraska ranked third, with its affluent residents giving away just over 1 percent of their assets each year. That does not include the state’s most famous donation, Warren E. Buffett’s huge gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this year, which came too late to be counted in the ranking. But it does include many smaller gifts to local charities like the Nebraska Community Foundation, which is trying to resuscitate Ord and other towns.

What is striking about the top of NewTithing’s list is that it is dominated by a group of states that run from the Rockies through the Plains and down into the Southeast. The only ones ahead of Nebraska were Utah (where the Mormon Church asks members to donate 10 percent of their incomes) and Oklahoma, while Minnesota and Georgia came next.

As Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, points out, these are places that do not have many beaches, famous cultural institutions or other obvious ways to attract residents. “So how do you build a community that is a destination?” Mr. Carson asked. “You have to be a lot more intentional about it.”

The states with beaches and museums, those that have been winning a growing share of the nation’s economic pie, generally failed to crack the top 20 in the ranking. The average affluent resident of New York (23rd on the list) or Florida (41st) owns about one-third more assets than the average affluent Nebraskan, but the Nebraskan still gives away a bigger pile of money. Also lagging are California (21st), Virginia (25th), Massachusetts (32nd), Texas (34th) and Washington (35th).

No single list, of course, can fully capture how generous a state’s residents are. Through federal taxes, wealthy states like California and New York transfer a significant amount of money to poorer states every year. The NewTithing ranking, by its nature, also fails to count donations that are not tax-deductible, like informal gifts and time spent on community service.

But the ranking makes an important point. The middle of the country has developed a culture of philanthropy that the coasts and the Southwest, for all their wealth, do not yet have. Ord is never going to turn into anything resembling New York, no matter what it does. But New York could become a little more like Ord and, in the process, blunt some of the rough edges of inequality that have come with prosperity.

There is even a bit of evidence that some people on the coasts are starting to catch on. Next week, Mr. Carson will be leaving the Minneapolis foundation he has run for 12 years to take over the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Part of his mandate, he said, is to transplant some of Minnesota’s culture to the donors of Northern California.

“They have the wealth,” he said. “They want to capitalize on it and build a community.”

    Philanthropy From the Heart of America, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11leonhardt.html?hp&ex=1160625600&en=ce464782cde0acac&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 In the Congressional Hopper: A Long Wish List of Special Benefits and Exemptions        NYT        11.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11religside.html

In the Congressional Hopper:

A Long Wish List of Special Benefits and Exemptions

October 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

For all their gains, some advocates for religious freedom see the last 15 years not as a time of increased accommodation for religious groups but as a long battle in which religious groups have had to fight hard just to hold their own against a tide of unsympathetic policies. Indeed, they say government must do more to protect religious institutions of all kinds from the hostile environment of modern America.

A Congressional wish list supported by some religious leaders and other advocacy groups would accomplish that.

One bill, H.R. 235, would exempt churches and other religious institutions — but not secular nonprofits — from the I.R.S. rule against partisan political endorsements by tax-exempt organizations. Another, H.R. 27, would grant religious employers even more leeway to discriminate on religious grounds in their hiring, specifically in job training programs paid for with federal tax dollars.

There’s also H.R. 2679, which passed in the House on Sept. 26 by a vote of 244 to 173. It would prohibit the courts from awarding damages, lawyers’ fees or costs to any plaintiff who successfully sues over possible violations of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, cases involving things like the erection of crosses or nativity scenes on public land.

The Public Prayer Protection Act, H.R. 4364, would protect the right of government officials “to express their religious beliefs through public prayer” by barring federal courts, including the Supreme Court, from hearing lawsuits raising constitutional objections to those prayers.

The list also includes the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, H.R. 1445 and S. 677, introduced last year with bipartisan support in both houses, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to require employers to be more accommodating to the religious observances of their employees. The bills do not say whether religious employers would be exempt, as they are from the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination based on religion.

Another bill, H.R. 1054, would transform into law the executive orders that created President Bush’s “faith-based initiative,” to make federal grants and contracts more available to religious groups.

Among those who think more should be done is Anthony R. Picarello Jr., vice president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, one of a growing roster of law firms and legal advocacy groups ready to provide free legal help for religious groups or individual believers involved in First Amendment litigation or disputes.

“I don’t think we can say the climate for religious freedom is so dramatically improved that we don’t need these laws,” Mr. Picarello said.

There are still fierce battles over individual religious practices and the display of religious symbols on public property, he noted. And religious organizations — especially those outside the nation’s mainstream traditions, like small Latin American or Asian sects and non-Christian houses of worship like mosques, Orthodox synagogues and Hindu temples — still face discriminatory zoning decisions in towns across the country.

He is also concerned that the sexual abuse cases pending against the Catholic church will erode the longstanding judicial doctrine that protects religious employers from lawsuits by disgruntled clergy members and other employees.

“I don’t necessarily view the climate as improving,” he said, adding a few moments later: “The idea that special protection in the law for religion is unconstitutional has been rejected over and over and over. Yet all these statutes are under continuous attack.”

“A lot less frequently, perhaps,” he added, “but it hasn’t stopped.”

Given the broad and expanding benefits available to religious organizations, from tax breaks to government contracts, what explains the continuing complaints about a nationwide hostility toward religion and religious organizations?

A number of legal scholars say some justifiable discontent is warranted over the erratic path the Supreme Court has followed on First Amendment cases since 1990. Derek H. Davis, formerly the director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, said that although the courts had clearly become more accommodating to religion, “the whole landscape is in disarray about what the law is.”

But at a more human level, specialists on religious law said, basic changes in the workings of government — more lenient rules on revenue bonds, new tax breaks for faculty housing at church schools, higher barriers to workplace lawsuits, beneficial exemptions from licensing rules — just don’t attract the emotional lightning that flares over same-sex marriage and religious symbols on public land.

For example, a federal court ruled that a giant cross on city-owned land at the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial in San Diego was unconstitutional and ordered it removed by August of this year. The public reaction was so fierce that Congress took less than six weeks in the summer to approve a law providing for the federal government to buy the site and preserve it intact.

Much of the angry talk about a national war on religion “is a reaction to modernity and the pace of change in our society,” said Edward R. McNicholas, a director of the religious institutions law practice at Sidley Austin. “People want to cling to their religious values as they encounter more cultures that are different and foreign to them. So the language of exclusion has been taken up in the political rhetoric.”

Beyond just the talk, the Becket Fund and other religious freedom advocacy groups can cite what they say are examples of unfair attacks on people of faith: a devout librarian fired for refusing to work on Sunday; a local zoning law that allows no churches; a student rebuked for saying “God bless you” to a classmate who sneezed. With the involvement of these advocacy groups, battles like these are getting far more attention, adding to the public concern about threats to religious freedom.

While many of these cases are quickly resolved with a single warning letter or sometimes just a telephone call, they leave a bitter aftertaste in the political arena, said the Rev. Barry Lynn, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Some scholars and leaders of faith worry that the real threat to religious vitality in the United States is not the “hostility” of a secular culture.

“What’s happening with all these tax breaks and exemptions is a soft, subconstitutional establishment of religion returning to the country,” said John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school. That increasing level of indirect support and patronage, he said, “breeds a level of dependency that I think is dangerous for both religion and government.”

Professor Davis, now the dean of humanities at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Tex., agreed with that view, but said he was also troubled that religious organizations were pursuing more regulatory exemptions even as more government money is heading their way through contracts, vouchers and grants under the faith-based initiative.

“That suggests to me that they don’t want government involved in monitoring religious institutions, but they want the benefits that government is dispensing anyway,” he said. “To me, that’s unfair. If you’re going to take government money, you should abide by the rules, like everyone else.”

    In the Congressional Hopper: A Long Wish List of Special Benefits and Exemptions, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11religside.html

In the Race for Governor of Michigan, the Struggling Economy Is Topic A

October 9, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

THREE RIVERS, Mich., Oct. 4 — If for much of the country the economic signs seem relatively healthy, they do not in places like this town. A plastics plant nearby closed days before Christmas, a company that makes mirror parts for cars has shrunk, and the mayor says he heard talk, just this month, of possible cuts at a factory that makes drive shafts.

And so, while elections in other regions have turned to matters like national security, the war in Iraq and Congressional scandal, Michigan’s races for governor and, to a lesser degree, the United States Senate are hinging this year almost entirely on the struggling economy and the question of who is to blame for it.

In the state’s cloud of sinking numbers, Republicans see an opportunity to pick up two key seats. In other postindustrial states, including Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, economic worries are playing a similar, if far more subtle and layered, role this fall.

“We’ve thought about moving south,” said Deb Hallock, 44, who said she had lived in Three Rivers for 20 years but lost her home about a year ago when she and her husband could no longer pay the mortgage. Ms. Hallock makes pizzas at a fast-food restaurant; her husband makes cargo trailers at a factory but had no job when they were evicted. “I don’t really know what a governor can do to stop all of what’s happening here, but I wish someone would do something.”

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, an enormously popular Democrat when she took office four years ago, now faces a serious challenge from Dick DeVos, the former president of Amway Corporation and the son of its co-founder.

While campaigning, Mr. DeVos regularly ticks off dire statistics: With major cuts at the Detroit-area automobile companies, Michigan’s unemployment rate of 7.1 percent is one of the worst in the nation; the state has lost 85,000 jobs in the last four years; and it has ranked second in the number of young people moving elsewhere.

In a testy first debate between the candidates in early October, the answers to questions on almost every topic seemed to circle back to this single issue.

Mr. DeVos, who says his own business acumen is just the medicine Michigan needs, said Ms. Granholm was responsible for failing to create “the atmosphere” for job creation in Michigan despite the economic recovery plan she talks about at nearly every campaign stop.

“I find it amazing,” Mr. DeVos said, “to hear the governor say the plan is working when the people of Michigan aren’t.”

Ms. Granholm, who said hers was the most aggressive economic recovery plan in the nation, seemed to sidestep responsibility for what has happened here, saying she had “stepped into this current” in a state that had long depended on cars for its livelihood.

“The question is, Why did we get here, and how are we going to get out?” Ms. Granholm said.

Elsewhere, the economic questions are less extreme, less consuming and, in some cases, far more ambiguous. For the most part, challengers in nearby states have bemoaned economic failures, while incumbents have pointed to opposing, upbeat economic signs or stayed mainly silent on the matter.

In Ohio, the loss of manufacturing work, along with political corruption and scandal, has contributed to “a generally sour atmosphere” among voters, said Herbert Asher, a political science professor emeritus at Ohio State University.

Sherrod Brown, a Democratic challenger to Senator Mike DeWine, has worked to remind voters of their economic portrait, “a thriving manufacturing base dismantled piece by piece,” in the words of Mr. Brown’s spokeswoman, Joanna Kuebler.

Indiana’s economy has improved. But Russell L. Hanson, a political scientist at Indiana University, said the recovery had been slow and spotty in parts of the state, especially where the auto industry’s troubles had affected Indiana’s component suppliers — sparking an issue for challengers in several House races considered competitive.

A complicated picture has also emerged in Pennsylvania, with candidates, even those from the same political party, pointing to opposing signs as evidence of the relative healthiness, or the horror, of the state’s economy. Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, has boasted of new job creation. But Bob Casey, another Democrat and an ally of Mr. Rendell, who is running against Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican, has complained of an environment in which tuition and health care costs are rising while incomes cannot keep up.

In Michigan, meanwhile, no candidate is boasting.

Mr. DeVos and Ms. Granholm pepper their speeches, commercials and Web sites with proposals for reversing the economic tide. Mr. DeVos has pressed for change, proposing that the state speed the granting of permits for businesses and that the tax on businesses known as the Single Business Tax be ended.

His campaign has scoffed at Ms. Granholm’s efforts, like a “Cool Cities” program to give grants to cities for economic development, as too paltry. He has also suggested that she did not try hard enough to persuade Japan to open a Honda factory in Michigan.

“A cool city is one where you get a job,” said John Truscott, Mr. DeVos’s director of communications. “We never thought we would surpass Mississippi in a race for the bottom, but we’re there.”

Mr. DeVos, a relative political newcomer from Ada who aides say has poured about $17 million of his own money into the race, began advertising in February, which helps explain how every voter interviewed in towns in the Kalamazoo area, like Three Rivers, and near Lansing said they knew his name.

For a time, polls showed Mr. DeVos even or slightly ahead of Ms. Granholm, but more recent surveys suggest she has pulled ahead slightly. In a survey of 600 likely voters taken this month for The Detroit News and several television stations, Ms. Granholm was leading, with 46 percent saying they would vote for her, compared with 40 percent for Mr. DeVos; the margin of error was four percentage points. But of those polled, 12 percent said they were undecided.

Ms. Granholm, a former federal prosecutor and a former state attorney general, said she was pressing to diversify the state’s economy into fields like alternative energy, life sciences and domestic security; wanted to double the number of college graduates in Michigan within a decade; and hoped to change the way the state handles work force training for those without jobs.

And while Mr. DeVos has tried to blame Ms. Granholm for the state’s struggles, in an interview, she directed the blame elsewhere: to circumstances beyond her control (“No other state is the automotive capital of the world”); to the Bush administration (“He has sat idly by while the industry reels”); and even to Mr. DeVos, who supported the trade agreements, Nafta and Cafta, that she said had helped leave the Michigan economy in a wreck.

“If we had diversified our state 10 years ago, we wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Granholm said. “I’m going to go anywhere and do anything to change the economy of Michigan.”

Similarly, in the Senate race here, Debbie Stabenow, the Democratic incumbent, and Mike Bouchard, a sheriff and her Republican challenger, have each touted economic recovery plans: “Jobs Agenda” for her and “Renewing Michigan’s Economy” for him.

But at a Laundromat in Three Rivers, all the plans in the world could not convince Steve Brunn that Michigan could be turned around. Like others here, Mr. Brunn, 54, said he was doubtful that any campaign promise would add up to jobs after all the commercials were over and the votes were in.

“We’re being batted back and forth between the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “DeVos is talking like everybody else — he wants to make change — but what is he really going to do to change this? We’re competing with these other countries, and there are no answers.”

Thomas Lowry, who for 11 years has been mayor of Three Rivers, said this town of 7,400 still had its share of manufacturing companies, though the numbers, he said, seemed to shrink little by little each year. The echoes reach far beyond the factories, Mr. Lowry said. The diner downtown loses business. More and more “for sale” signs fill front yards along quiet streets.

Even his own business, a bookstore in the center of downtown, has seen the sale of magazines, a minor luxury item for many, fall off. “It ripples everywhere,” he said.

Mr. Lowry, who said he expected to vote for Ms. Granholm, said he was not sure to what extent the voters would hold their political leaders responsible for all that had happened — and all that had not. “There’s something about our species, though, that wants a scapegoat,” he said.

    In the Race for Governor of Michigan, the Struggling Economy Is Topic A, NYT, 9.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/us/politics/09michigan.html

Ann Richards to Lie in State Sunday

September 17, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:17 a.m. ET
The New York Times

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Former President Clinton delivered poignant and at times funny recollections of former Gov. Ann Richards, a woman he called ''spontaneous, unedited, earthy, hilarious.''

Clinton tearfully escorted a flag-draped casket Saturday carrying Richards into the state Capitol. Her body will lie in state a second day Sunday before her funeral and burial on Monday.

Clinton told about 50 of her close friends and family about a lunch he once shared in New York with Richards and a group that included comedians Billy Crystal and Robin Williams.

''I thought to myself, I bet this is the only time in their entire lives that Billy Crystal and Robin Williams are the second and third funniest people at the table,'' he said, drawing chuckles from misty-eyed family members.

Richards, the Democrat known for her big, frosty white hair and sharp wit, died Wednesday at the age of 73 from esophageal cancer.

''In this case, goodbye is also a celebration, because of the big things that Ann Richards did,'' Clinton said.

A Texas Department of Public Safety honor guard rolled the casket into the Capitol rotunda, followed by Clinton and Richards' daughter, Cecile, as a girl's choir sang a hymn from a gallery above. Across the rotunda, Richard's painting hung next to one of President Bush, her successor as Texas governor, in its place among all their predecessors. Her portrait was draped in black.

Clinton called Richards ''Texas on parade.''

''For 30-plus years, that is certainly what she was to me and Hillary,'' he said. ''First she was big: big hair, big bright eyes, big blinding smile. She also had a big heart, big dreams, did big deeds.''

During her one term as governor from 1991-95 she championed what she called the ''New Texas,'' appointing more women and minorities to state posts than any of her predecessors.

He described the world that Richards wanted for her grandchildren as one ''where young girls grew up to be scientists, engineers, police officers and teachers ... where the dreams and the spirit were as big as the sky in her beloved home.''

When Clinton finished speaking, Richards' daughter, Ellen, thanked him for ''all the great times that you shared with our mom.''

Clinton paused for a moment beside the casket, then greeted family members, hugging or shaking hands with each one in attendance. At one point, he bent down to comfort Richards' 8-year-old grandson Wyatt, who broke down in sobs.

After Clinton spoke, the Capitol Rotunda was opened to the public. Hundreds of mourners snaked around the building. Later, some visitors left tributes to Richards on a grassy area in front of the Capitol.

One note read: ''Ann, Thank you for all that you've done for women in Texas. We will miss you dearly.''

Richards is survived by her four children -- Cecile, Daniel, Clark and Ellen Richards; their spouses and eight grandchildren.

    Ann Richards to Lie in State Sunday, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ann-Richards.html

Appreciations

Ann R., Alcoholic

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By MAURA J. CASEY

Former Gov. Ann Richards of Texas will be remembered for her wit, her one-liners and especially for the keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention, which was, in retrospect, the high point in the party’s dismal campaign for the presidency that year. To intrigued television viewers nationwide, Ms. Richards, with her big hair and big attitude, epitomized the kind of formidable woman that is a hallmark of the Lone Star State. People liked her down-home phrases. When she said, “We’re gonna tell how the cow ate the cabbage,” they believed her. She leavened a plain-spoken manner with wisecracks. Both helped elect her governor two years later.

But her political career eclipsed what Ms. Richards called “one of the great, great stories” of her life: her recovery from alcoholism and her nearly 26 years of sobriety. That triumph deserves to be more than a line in her obituary.

In so many ways, her decision to stop drinking and enter a rehabilitation program in 1980, after a painful intervention by family and friends, was necessary for her continued rise in public life. What made Ms. Richards different was her decision to be forthright about the fact that she was a recovering alcoholic. She didn’t hide it. “I like to tell people that alcoholism is one of my strengths,” she said. She was right. Alcoholics know that seeds of healthy recovery grow from the need to mend their own flaws to stay sober, one day at a time. Ms. Richards faced her imperfections fearlessly, and that enabled others to be fearless, too, if only for a little while.

She never stopped helping people. One well-known author said the first mail she received after enrolling in a rehabilitation program was an encouraging letter from Ms. Richards. A politician who left rehab and wondered how on earth he was going to avoid drinking when he got home well after midnight found Ms. Richards waiting for him when he arrived. As governor, she started treatment programs in Texas prisons. When she visited, she would tell the inmates the simple truth: “My name’s Ann, and I’m an alcoholic.” Her imperfection had become a source of inspiration for others.

Ann Richards was funny, wise and compassionate. At 73, she died too soon. But she died sober.

MAURA J. CASEY

    Ann R., Alcoholic, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/opinion/16sat4.html?ex=1158638400&en=8fee55d1c8a77b38&ei=5087%0A

Pataki Appointments Leave a Lasting Stamp

September 15, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

In his final months in office, Gov. George E. Pataki has appointed or reappointed hundreds of officials to state boards, commissions and authorities, assuring his imprint on state government for years after his term expires on Dec. 31.

The appointments include Peter S. Kalikow, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to a new six-year term and overseers of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, who could play a role in the redevelopment of the West Side. Many are Pataki contributors, political allies or their relatives.

Mr. Pataki has submitted dozens more nominees to the Republican-controlled Senate for confirmation today, and Albany Democrats estimate that he could fill at least another 50 vacancies before leaving office. The appointments lock them into policy-making and regulatory roles over a range of matters, including mass transportation and economic development — in some cases until 2013.

Rewarding political supporters with “midnight appointments” to terms fixed by law is a practice that dates back to at least the early 19th century, when President John Adams tried to stack the deck against his successor, Thomas Jefferson.

What distinguishes Mr. Pataki’s going-away appointments, besides the sheer volume, is the fact that this is the first time in decades that a departing governor’s party enjoys a majority in the Senate. That opportunity last presented itself in 1974, although other governors have made midnight appointments that did not require Senate confirmation.

The process first raised alarms earlier this summer when Mr. Pataki tried to make two $90,000-a-year appointments that, to provide the longest possible terms, did not take effect until Jan. 1, 2007. Senate Democrats balked, citing an unofficial opinion from the United States Naval Observatory that midnight — when the governor’s term expires — is actually the last moment of Dec. 31, not the beginning of Jan. 1. Mr. Pataki withdrew those nominations.

“It’s what I call ruling beyond the grave,” said Senator David A. Paterson of Manhattan, the minority leader and now the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor on the ticket with Eliot Spitzer, who hopes to succeed Mr. Pataki. “In wills, trusts and estates law we have pretty much gotten rid of ways people could direct actions of other people in perpetuity. For some reason, in government we haven’t addressed it.”

“The Cuomo administration didn’t do it,” Mr. Paterson said, “but, to be fair, the Cuomo administration required the consent of the Senate.”

A spokesman for Mr. Pataki, Michael Marr, defended the appointments, saying yesterday: “The governor is the governor until Dec. 31, and he will continue to fulfill the constitutional and legal obligations of the office for the remainder of his tenure. As vacancies come up on state boards and commissions, the governor will continue to submit qualified nominations to ensure the continued efficient operation of state government.”

The administration has been able to make hundreds of appointments in part by putting permanent appointees in posts that were previously filled on an interim basis, or by dismissing holdovers so that Mr. Pataki can then make appointments to longer terms.

The administration has also invoked another tool: shifting its appointees back to Civil Service titles that protect them from dismissal, a process that may bump current employees into lower-paying jobs.

In other cases, officials who are likely to lose their state jobs with the arrival of a new governor are being placed on boards and commissions with fixed terms.

In June, Mr. Pataki sought to reappoint Ellen O. Paprocki, whose father, John F. O’Mara, is an influential lobbyist and one of Mr. Pataki’s closest advisers, and to name Lisa Wright, the former wife of an upstate Republican state senator, to the Workers’ Compensation Board, even though Ms. Paprocki’s current term does not expire until after Jan. 1. Those positions pay $90,800 annually.

Today, the Senate will consider the reappointments to the board of Ms. Paprocki and of Michael T. Berns, a former Conservative Party county chairman from Manhattan.

In a variation of musical chairs, they would be swapping seats. Ms. Paprocki would serve through 2011, Mr. Berns through 2007.

Mr. Pataki’s most controversial late-term appointment so far was of Mr. Kalikow, a real estate developer and Pataki patron, to a new six-year term as unsalaried chairman of the transportation authority. Mr. Kalikow said at the time that he was committed to his unfinished transit agenda and had no intention of quitting even if the incoming governor asked him to.

“Appointing people to the M.T.A. into 2013 — we’re at the end of the second Spitzer administration,” Mr. Paterson said.

Mr. Kalikow was far from alone. Among other such recent appointees are Maureen Harris, whose brother is a lobbyist and was Mr. Pataki’s chief counsel, and Cheryl Buley, whose husband is counsel to the Republican State Committee, to six-year terms at $109,800 a year on the Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities.

Mr. Pataki also appointed Eileen Long-Chelales, the daughter of the state’s Conservative Party chairman, to a five-year term on the State Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board. She is a former Pataki aide and a veteran of state government.

Charles A. Gargano, the chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation and one of the governor’s closest advisers, was reappointed to the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a term expiring in 2012.

Caroline W. Ahl, a deputy secretary to the governor, was named to a $90,800 slot on the Civil Service Commission.

Today the Senate will also consider nominees to a number of agencies, including the New York Convention Center Operating Corporation, the State Insurance Fund and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

In June, Senator Paterson calculated that Mr. Pataki had made 262 such appointments since Jan. 1, to positions on agencies and boards that include the State Liquor Authority, the State Parole Board, the State Racing and Wagering Board and the State Council on the Arts.

Mr. Paterson said that when those nominations were rushed through the Senate during the last week of June, on one of several days when the votes were taken, he “voted against everybody in a symbolic gesture.”

“I feel really bad voting against people I don’t know,” he said.

While many of the appointments are honorary and unsalaried, they often include perquisites. And appointments to policy-making positions can tie the hands of a successor.

Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester County Democrat, said that after treating supposedly independent authorities as cash cows and patronage mills for years, the Pataki administration is justifying the filling of vacancies by maintaining that the authorities are supposed to be independent of any governor. “It’s like an emancipation proclamation: ‘On my way out, I’m liberating you,’ ” said Mr. Brodsky, a frequent critic of public authorities.

To which Mr. Marr, the governor’s spokesman, replied, “Some of the loudest voices talking in the past about the independence of authorities and commissions now seem to be arguing that their boards be completely dependent on who they wish to be the next governor.”

As of late yesterday, Governor Pataki had submitted about 50 more nominees to the Senate to consider today. That would bring the number since Jan. 1 to more than 300, with more than three months remaining before he leaves office.

    Pataki Appointments Leave a Lasting Stamp, NYT, 15.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/nyregion/15pataki.html?hp&ex=1158379200&en=b76bd380e34ade49&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ann Richards, Flamboyant Texas Governor, Dies at 73

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

Ann W. Richards, the silver-haired Texas activist who galvanized the 1988 Democratic National Convention with her tart keynote speech and was the state’s 45th governor until upset in 1994 by an underestimated challenger named George W. Bush, died Wednesday at her home in Austin. She was 73.

Ms. Richard died, surrounded by her four children, of complications from the esophageal cancer, the Associated Press reported.

Ms. Richards was the most recent and one of the most effective in a long-line of Lone Star State progressives who vied for control of Texas in the days when it was largely a one-party Democratic enclave, a champion of civil rights, gay rights and feminism. Her defeat by the future president was one of the chief markers of the end of generations of Democratic dominance in Texas.

So cemented was her celebrity on the national stage, however, that she appeared in national advertising campaigns, including one for snack chips, and was a lawyer and lobbyist for Public strategies and Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand.

“Poor George, he can’t help it,” Ms. Richards said at the Democratic convention in 1988, speaking about the current president’s father, former President George Bush. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Her acidic, plain-spoken keynote address was one of the year’s political highlights and catapulted the one-term Texas governor into a national figure.

“We’re gonna tell how the cow ate the cabbage,” she said, bringing the great tradition of vernacular Southern oratory to the national political stage in a way that transformed the mother of four into an revered icon of feminist activism.

Dorothy Ann Willis was born Sept. 1, 1933, in Lakeview, and graduated in 1950 from Waco High school where she showed a special facility for debate. She attended the Girl’s Mock State government in Austin in her junior year and was one of two delegates chosen to attend Girl’s Nation in Washington.

She attended Baylor University in Waco — on a debate scholarship — where she met her future husband, David Richards. After college, the couple moved to Austin where she earned a teaching certificate at the University of Texas in 1955 and taught social studies for several years at Fulmore Middle School.

She raised her four children in Austin.

She volunteered in several gubernatorial campaigns, in 1958 for Henry Gonzalez and in 1952, 1954 and 1956 for Ralph Yarborough and then again for Yarborough’s senatorial campaign in 1957.

In 1976, Ms. Richards defeated a three-term incumbent to become a commissioner in Travis County, which includes Austin, and held that job for four years, though she later said her political commitment put a strain on her marriage, which ended in divorce.

She also began to drink heavily, eventually going into rehabilitation, a move that she later credited with salvaging her life and her political career.

“I have seen the very bottom of life,” she said. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I just knew that I would lose my zaniness and my sense of humor. But I didn’t. Recovery turned out to be a wonderful thing.”

In 1982, she ran for state treasurer, received the most votes of any statewide candidate, became the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in 50 years and was re-elected in 1986.

In 1990, when the incumbent governor, William P. Clements Jr., decided not to run for re-election, she ran against a former Democratic governor, Mark White, and won the primary, then later fought a particularly brutal campaign against Republican candidate Clayton Williams, a wealthy rancher, and won.

Among her achievements were institutional changes in the state penal system, invigorating the state’s economy and instituting the first Texas lottery, going so far as to buy the first lotto ticket herself on May 29, 1992.

It was her speech to the Democratic convention in Atlanta, though, that made her a national figure.

A champion of women’s rights, she told the television audience: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

In 1992, she was chairwoman of the convention that first nominated Bill Clinton.

Two years later, she underestimated her young Republican challenger from West Texas, going so far as to refer to George W. Bush as “some jerk,” a commend that drew considerable criticism. Later, she acknowledged that the younger candidate has been much more effective at “staying on message” and made none of the mistakes that her campaign strategists had expected. She was beaten, 53 percent to 46 percent.

Her celebrity, however, carried her onto the boards of several national corporations, including J.C. Penney, Brandeis University and the Aspen Institute.

She also co-wrote several books, including “Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places” in 1989 with Peter Knobler and “I’m Not Slowing Down” in 2004, with Richard M. Levine.

On her 60th birthday, she got her first motorcycle license.

“I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends can kill you,” Ms. Richard once said.

Survivors, according to The AP, include her children, Cecile, Daniel, Clark and Ellen Richards, and eight grandchildren.

    Ann Richards, Flamboyant Texas Governor, Dies at 73, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/us/14richards.html?hp&ex=1158292800&en=22b04a312a2fd14f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Boredom in the West Fuels Binge Drinking

September 2, 2006
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

CODY, Wyo. — Barely five people per square mile live on the high, wind-raked ground of Wyoming; the entire state is a small town with long streets, as they say. The open space means room to roam and a sense of frontier freedom.

It also means that on any given night, an unusually high percentage of young people here are drinking alcohol until they vomit, pass out or do something that lands them in jail or nearly gets them killed.

“Had a kid, drunk, flipped his car going 80 miles an hour, and that killed him; and another kid, drunk, smashed his boat up against the rock just a couple months ago, killing two; and then there was this beating after a kegger — they clubbed this kid to death,” said Scott Steward, the sheriff here in Park County, recounting casualties that followed long nights of hard drinking by high school students.

A federal government survey recently confirmed what residents of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas already knew: people there drink to excess, at very early ages, well above the national average.

The survey, conducted over three years by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said south-central Wyoming led the nation with the highest rate of alcohol abuse by people age 12 and older. In Albany and Carbon counties, more than 30 percent of people under age 20 binge drink — 50 percent above the national average.

In examining behavior in 340 regions of the country, the survey found that 7 of the top 10 areas for under-age binge drinking — defined as five or more drinks at a time — were in Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota.

At the other end of the scale, some of the lowest areas for under-age binge drinking were in the nation’s most densely packed cities — parts of Washington, D.C., Detroit and Los Angeles. An earlier federal study found that rural youths ages 12 and 13 were twice as likely as urban youths to abuse alcohol.

With methamphetamine ravaging small towns, Wyoming and other rural states have also been fighting a persistent drug problem.

And while it may be a mystery to some why the least-populated part of the country leads the nation in the percentage of young people drinking to excess, it is no surprise to many people in Wyoming or Montana. Teenagers, police officers and counselors offer the same reason: the boredom of the big empty.

“After living in the city, it’s obvious to me that kids just get bored here,” said Karen Grimm, who moved here from Seattle 10 years ago. “There is this feeling of isolation, especially in the wintertime.”

Ms. Grimm’s daughter, Risa, a freshman at Cody High School, estimated that about half the students at her school regularly drank alcohol.

Friday nights in Cody can mean football and a movie, but after 11 o’clock, with nothing else to do, teenagers say they head to somebody’s ranch or into the mountains toward Yellowstone National Park to drink.

“I think so many kids drink because the state is barren, desolate and boring to some people, and there is not really anything to do,” said Isaiah Spigner, a recent high school graduate from Cheyenne who is headed for the University of Wyoming.

But geography alone does not fully explain why there is such a drinking problem among young people.

“We’re a frontier culture, and people say, ‘I work hard and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to have a beer or two on the way home,’ ” said Rosie Buzzas, a Montana state legislator who also oversees alcohol counseling services in the western part of the state. “There’s a church, a school, and 10 bars in every town.”

It has never been hard for young people to get alcohol in Montana, Ms. Buzzas said, in part because many parents think it is a rite of passage for children to drink.

“There are plenty of adults who tell me, ‘What’s the big deal? Kids just have to learn to drink,’ ” she said. Not long ago, three children, ages 9, 11 and 12, died of alcohol poisoning in an isolated town in Montana, but the deaths did little to change attitudes, she said.

“Something like that has a sobering effect, but it doesn’t last,” Ms. Buzzas said. “Kids aren’t listening to what we say; they’re watching what we do.”

This year, Montana made it an offense to drink while driving, one of the last states to do so. But there was heavy opposition.

Wyoming still allows passengers in a vehicle to drink, as long as the driver is not holding the container. A bill that would have made that illegal was defeated. A minor in possession of alcohol can be fined, but will typically not lose a driver’s license for a first offense.

At the nightly rodeo in Cody, beer signs are ubiquitous, and on the town’s main commercial strip, a giant beer banner welcomes tourists.

Some say a legacy of forcing children to grow up early in the empty West may contribute to the problem. From 1854 to 1929, about 200,000 orphan children arrived by train from the East and were offered to families for adoption. The orphan trains, as they were called, left a psychic print, some counselors and historians say.

“The idea that life is harsh and you learn it at an early age is part of our history,” said Ralph Boerner, who counsels alcoholics of all ages in Butte, Mont.

“I asked everyone in my group the other night when they started drinking,” Mr. Boerner said. “The latest was 15. The earliest was age 5.”

Binge drinking, he said, is a way for young people to prove themselves in the West.

“You get validation by saying, ‘Boy, did I get hammered,’ ” Mr. Boerner said.

Here in Park County, where the sheriff has four deputies to patrol an area much larger than Connecticut, parents can be as much a problem as their children, Sheriff Steward said.

“We’ll bust a party where every kid is drinking, call the parents, and they’re mad at us for getting them out of bed,” he said.

The recent surveys show that girls, starting in middle school, are much more likely to drink than earlier studies found. In part, some say, that is because of flavored drinks that hide the taste of alcohol, so-called alcopops.

“People who want to get wasted but don’t like the taste of beer, they’re drinking something like Mike’s Hard Lemonade,” said Sienna White, a sophomore at Cody High School who says she does not drink.

Sienna estimated that half the students at her school drank. “Living in a cowboy town,” she said, “it’s really hard to find a party without drinking.”

But Sienna and other students are part of a program at the school where students pledge not to drink or take drugs. The program has had a fair amount of success drawing athletes and cheerleaders, offering positive role models, school officials say.

Sheriff Steward, however, is skeptical. Like other adults who now preach against what they once practiced, the sheriff remembers his own high school days of beer.

“Obviously we’ve all been there,” said Sheriff Steward, who went to Cody High School 20 years ago, and said 60 to 65 percent of his fellow students drank. “The problem, then and now, was that there was nothing to do in Cody after a certain time.”

    Boredom in the West Fuels Binge Drinking, NYT, 2.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/us/02binge.html?hp&ex=1157256000&en=eb71dabe422753bb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

California Seeks to Clear Hemp of a Bad Name

August 28, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

STRATFORD, Calif. — Charles Meyer’s politics are as steady and unswerving as the rows of pima cotton on his Central Valley farm. With his work-shirt blue eyes and flinty Clint Eastwood demeanor, he is staunchly in favor of the war in Iraq, against gun control and believes people unwilling to recite the Pledge of Allegiance should be kicked out of America, and fast.

But what gets him excited is the crop he sees as a potential windfall for California farmers: industrial hemp, or Cannabis sativa. The rapidly growing plant with a seemingly infinite variety of uses is against federal law to grow because of its association with its evil twin, marijuana.

“Industrial hemp is a wholesome product,” said Mr. Meyer, 65, who says he has never worn tie-dye and professes a deep disdain for “dope.”

“The fact we’re not growing it is asinine,” Mr. Meyer said.

Things could change if a measure passed by legislators in Sacramento and now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk becomes law. [The bill reached Mr. Schwarzenegger last week; he has 30 days to sign or veto it.]

Seven states have passed bills supporting the farming of industrial hemp; their strategy has been to try to get permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration to proceed.

But California is the first state that would directly challenge the federal ban, arguing that it does not need a D.E.A. permit, echoing the state’s longstanding fight with the federal authorities over its legalization of medicinal marijuana. The hemp bill would require farmers who grow it to undergo crop testing to ensure their variety of cannabis is nonhallucinogenic; its authors say it has been carefully worded to avoid conflicting with the federal Controlled Substances Act.

But those efforts have not satisfied federal and state drug enforcement authorities, who argue that fields of industrial hemp would only serve as hiding places for illicit cannabis. The California Narcotic Officers Association opposes the bill, and a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington said the measure was unworkable.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican running for re-election, has been mum on his intentions, with the political calculus of hemp in California difficult to decipher. The bill was the handiwork of two very different lawmakers, Assemblyman Mark Leno, a San Francisco Democrat best known for attempting to legalize same-sex marriage, and Assemblyman Charles S. DeVore, an Orange County Republican who worked in the Pentagon as a Reagan-era political appointee.

Their bipartisan communion underscores a deeper shift in hemp culture that has evolved in recent years, from ragtag hempsters whose love of plants with seven leaves ran mostly to marijuana, to today’s savvy coalition of organic farmers and health-food entrepreneurs working to distance themselves from the drug.

Hundreds of hemp products, including energy bars and cold-pressed hemp oil, are made in California, giving the banned plant a capitalist aura. But manufacturers must import the raw material, mostly from Canada, where hemp cultivation was legalized in 1998.

The new hemp entrepreneurs regard it as a sustainable crop, said John Roulac, 47, a former campaigner against clear-cutting and a backyard composter before founding Nutiva, a growing California hemp-foods company. “They want to lump together all things cannabis,” said David Bronner, 33, whose family’s squeeze-bottle Dr. Bronners Magic Soaps, based in Escondido, Calif., are made with hemp oil. “You don’t associate a poppy seed bagel with opium.”

The differences between hemp and its mind-altering cousin, however, can be horticulturally challenging to grasp. The main one is that the epidermal glands of marijuana secrete a resin of euphoria-inducing delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or T.H.C., a substance all but lacking in industrial hemp.

Ernest Small, a Canadian researcher who co-wrote a major hemp study in 2002 for Purdue University, compared the genetic differences to those that separate racehorses from plow horses. Evolution, Mr. Small said, has almost completely bred T.H.C. out of industrial hemp, which by law must have a concentration of no more than three-tenths of 1 percent.

To its supporters, industrial hemp is utopia in a crop. Prized not only for its healthful seeds and oils, rich in omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, but also its fast, bamboo-like growth that shades out weeds, without pesticides.

“Simply put, you create a jungle in one year,” said John LaBoyteaux, who testified in Sacramento on behalf of the California Certified Organic Farmers association. “There’s a growing market out there, and we can’t tap it.”

The bill before Governor Schwarzenegger is the latest installment in a hemp debate that reached its height in 2004, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that federal antidrug laws did not apply to the manufacturing or consumption of industrial hemp. The court ruled that decades earlier, Congress had exempted from marijuana-control laws the stalks, fibers, oils and seeds of industrial hemp, and that the government had no right to ban hemp products.

That opened the floodgates for Patagonia hemp jeans and the Merry Hempsters Zit Zapper (with hemp oil).

Patrick D. Goggin, a lawyer for the Hemp Industries Association and Vote Hemp, said there would probably be legal snarls to work out with the California legislation, assuming it is enacted, so that farmers would not be placing their property in jeopardy if they chose to grow industrial hemp. But if the federal government clamps down, Mr. Goggin said, “we’re prepared to raise the issue in court.”

“Were trying to get an arcane vision of the law contemporized,” he added.

Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the agency would not speculate about pending legislation.

The bill’s adherents point to hemp’s hallowed niche in American history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated hemp (neither effort was profitable). Colonists’ boats sailed the Atlantic with hempen sails. Old Ironsides carried 60 tons of hempen sail and rope. The word “canvas,” in fact, is derived from cannabis, a high-tensile fiber naturally resistant to decay.

Hemp flourished as an American crop from the end of the Civil War until the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act ended production. During World War II, when Japan seized the Philippines and cut off supplies of Manila hemp, the crop got a brief reprieve in the United States, where farmers were encouraged to grow “Hemp for Victory,” for boots, parachute cording and the like. But contrary to lore, most such hemp was never harvested.

Today, China controls about 40 percent of the world’s hemp fiber, and its ability to flood the market “could result in price fluctuations the American farmer would have to weather,” said Valerie Vantreese, an agricultural economist in Lexington, Ky. (Kentucky was once the leading hemp-producing state).

Hemp is grown legally in about 30 countries, including many in the European Union, where it is mixed with lime to make plaster and as a “biocomposite” in the interior panels of Mercedes-Benzes.

In the United States, the chief argument against hemp has been made by drug-control officials, who are concerned that vast acreages could be used to conceal clandestine marijuana, which they say would be impossible to detect.

“California is a great climate to grow pot in, and no one from law enforcement is going through the fields to do a chemical analysis of different plants,” said Thomas A. Riley, a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington.

To some people intimate with the nuances of marijuana, however, the idea of hiding marijuana in a hemp field, where the plants would cross-pollinate, provokes amusement.

“It would be the end of outdoors marijuana,” said Jack Heber, 67, a marijuana historian and author who runs a group called Help End Marijuana Prohibition, or HEMP. “If it gets mixed with that crop, it’s a disaster.”

In North Dakota, the state agricultural commissioner, Roger Johnson, has proposed allowing hemp farming, and has been working with federal drug regulators on stringent regulations that would include fingerprinting farmers and requiring G.P.S. coordinates of hemp fields.

“We’ve done our level best to convince them we’re not a bunch of wackos,” Mr. Johnson said.

Fifteen years ago, he noted, there was little market for canola, which is now a major crop produced for its cooking oil. He sees hemp in a similar vein and dismisses the fears that it would lead to criminality.

“It would take a joint the size of a telephone pole to have an impact,” he said.

But up north in Garberville, the Central Valley of marijuana, the lines between hemp and marijuana are often a hazy blur, as they are at a store called the Hemp Connection, where hemp hats and yoga clothing are sold alongside manuals on pot botany and Stoneware baking pans (“makes six groovy brownies per pan”).

The proprietor, Marie Mills, who said she once crafted paper from marijuana stalks, remains committed to cannabis in all its guises.

“We want to educate people and take away the stigma,” Ms. Mills said. “We want hemp without harassment.”

    California Seeks to Clear Hemp of a Bad Name, NYT, 28.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/us/28hemp.html?hp&ex=1156824000&en=91ceae32c041982e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

An Oil Leak Rattles a State and Its Workers

August 10, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

DEADHORSE, Alaska, Aug. 9 — There was a newspaper here once. It was back in the boom years of the 1980’s, when the crude oil surging up from 9,000 feet beneath the earth and ice was still transforming Alaska’s North Slope from Arctic wilderness to flush frontier.

Now this frontier town has no newspaper. Nor a resident mayor or town council or even any real residents. It is just a drill site with as many as 5,000 people — no one seems to have a firm count — who cycle in and out, year round, often on two-week hitches.

They are mostly men, and they work on wells controlled by BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and other companies. Or they repair trucks and pumps. Or they run the desk or the kitchen at the camps that house and feed the work force. And this week, some of them worry more than they ever have.

“Everybody’s scared,” said David Marshall, a field hand for ASRC Energy Services, a subcontractor with BP. “Everybody’s scared for their jobs. Everybody’s calling everybody.”

The outlook has improved for some since Sunday, when BP said it would indefinitely shut down its largest field here, Prudhoe Bay, halting half the oil production on the North Slope, about 8 percent of the nation’s total oil production. The company has revised that forecast and now says perhaps only a fourth of the production will be cut, because repairs could happen quickly.

Yet Alaska, which receives about 86 percent of its general fund revenues from taxes on the oil industry, remains shaken.

On Wednesday, Gov. Frank H. Murkowski ordered a freeze on hiring state workers and said he would ask the state attorney general to investigate the circumstances surrounding the shutdown, said John Manly, a spokesman for Mr. Murkowski, a Republican.

Here in Deadhorse, some slopers, as the regulars call themselves, track the developments closely on television and worry aloud. Others say concerns that the shutdown will have lasting consequences are overblown. Many even see opportunity.

The rhythm of work here is distinctive, as are the commutes. Some companies pay to fly their employees to Fairbanks or Anchorage between hitches, while other workers travel farther to go home. Many people said the motivation for working was not the money itself but the short time it took to earn it. Workers say they earn enough in overtime here to compensate for working essentially only half the year.

“Time off,” said Joree Lawson, who rents rooms, sells cigarettes and sundries and solves endless problems from her perch at the front desk of the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. “That’s what everybody works for.”

Dale Otcheck, working behind the counter at Brooks Range Supply, predicted that business would pick up because of the disruption. Mr. Otcheck recalled the surge in activity in March after BP discovered a 270,000-gallon spill. “That last spill, it just went nuts here,” he said.

Brooks Range Supply is part hardware store, part general store, part post office and pretty much all there is for retail in the rock-road bustle of tractor-trailers and droning machinery that defines Deadhorse, ZIP code 99734, seven miles south of the Arctic Ocean.

Far north of the Brooks Mountain Range, Deadhorse can seem a strange coastal prairie when summer melts away the winter ice. Even on the clearest days little is in view but distant peaks, water, marsh and spare steel structures. Signs on many doors warn, “Bears in the area,” and, indeed, on Tuesday night a grizzly caroused among the corrugated exteriors.

The seat of local government, the North Slope Borough, is 200 miles west in Barrow, and there is no road from here to there. The route south to civilization in Fairbanks is a 12-hour haul through the tundra. The nearest tree of any reckoning, those who travel here regularly claim, is 160 miles away.

As oil markets shudder and BP struggles to maintain the image of an energy company with an environmental conscience, the focus here is on getting the corroded transit lines repaired or replaced and getting back to work.

On Monday night, Gary Williams, a mechanic for VECO, a major support contractor for oil companies here, shopped for knee pads. “It’s job security, actually, for me,” Mr. Williams said when asked if the shutdown had had an effect on the tiny yet globally critical local economy.

Mr. Williams was among several people who said early in the week that he had heard that BP was sending some workers home to make way for others to come in and make repairs. Others said they had seen no change at all, except for some seasonal employees being shipped out early. A spokesman for BP, Neil Chapman, said that no layoffs were planned and that about 180 workers were being sent in to help the 800 people the company employs here make repairs.

“It’s too early to say what personnel impact there is going to be,” Mr. Chapman said.

BP’s workforce on the North Slope is far below its peak of around 2,000 in the 1990’s, Mr. Chapman said. The original Prudhoe Bay oil field was discovered in 1968, and pumping began in 1977. That first year, up to 1.5 million barrels a day were pumped from the site, he said. Now the site is what is called a mature field, and it is far less productive, pumping a maximum of about 400,000 barrels of oil a day into the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, where it then travels 800 miles south to the port of Valdez.

The future of oil production at Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in the United States, is tangled in issues like depletion of the fields, global pressure to find alternate sources of energy and debate in the state capital, Juneau, over whether to increase taxes on oil companies. There are also plans, remote for now, to spend about $20 billion for a natural gas pipeline that would tap the gas that is as abundant below ground here as oil seemed in the 1960’s.

Some here see the shutdown as less about protecting the environment or BP’s image than as BP flexing its muscles to influence the state debate over taxes and natural gas.

“They can just shut off the valve and say, ‘O.K., Alaska, tax this,’ ” said Charles Thorpe, who supplies wells and other production sites for VECO.

Mr. Chapman dismissed that notion. “We’re not in the business of power plays by disrupting production, disrupting our business, by having to stand and apologize to the nation,” he said. Asked about the prospect of a state hiring freeze, he said: “Again, the immediate reaction is an apology. It’s something we deeply regret, the impact this is having on others.”

For now, Deadhorse lopes onward. Ms. Lawson, of the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, plans to continue as she has for 14 years, splitting her months between Deadhorse and her hometown, across the continent in Opp, Ala. When the workday is over, people mostly disappear into tiny rooms with twin beds and, if they are lucky, 10-inch television screens.

“We don’t look for entertainment,” Ms. Lawson said. “When we’re not working, we all go to our room.”

While there are tales of ribald and reckless frontier nights from the early years of production, alcohol is now prohibited practically everywhere. A six-pack of Sharp’s, a nonalcoholic beer, costs a flat $10 at Brooks Range Supply. The store stocks an eclectic inventory, including the new Kris Kristofferson album, “This Old Road,” which runs $22.95; long racks of Carhartt work clothes; and a formidable selection of adult publications.

The origin of the name Deadhorse is uncertain. A column that ran in the long-ago closed Prudhoe Bay Journal offers a range of colorful explanations but settles on a tale of a wealthy New York businessman who backed his son in a local gravel business called Deadhorse Haulers.

The business failed, and the father eventually stopped investing. According to the column, by Deborah Bernard, who now works in the general store at Brooks Range Supply, he told someone, “I hate to put money into feeding a dead horse.”

    An Oil Leak Rattles a State and Its Workers, NYT, 10.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/us/10prudhoe.html?hp&ex=1155268800&en=61bddf58f8033c64&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ode to Kansas

It's stridently anti-abortion, fervently behind creationism, considered flat, bland 'flyover land' to most left-leaning Americans. But, finds Paul Harris, there's plenty to love about Dorothy's homeland

Thursday June 15, 2006
Paul Harris
Guardian Unlimited

It is called Flyover Land: the vast American heartland which coastal dwellers look down upon (figuratively and literally) as they shuttle between cities like Washington, New York and Boston and their Western counterparts of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

A disdain of Flyover land is common among many coastal Americans, especially those of a left-leaning bent. It is also common among Europeans living in America or just visiting and who tend to congregate on the coasts claiming to have more in common with coastal dwellers than those strange denizens of America's centre.

At the heart of Flyover Land is Kansas, again both figuratively and literally. It sits in the centre of the country and - according to coastal dwellers - breathes a fiery brand of religious conservatism alien to coastal liberals. Which is why what I am going to say next tends to surprise people, especially my American friends in New York.

I love Kansas. It is one of my favourite spots in all of America. In short, and to butcher a Shakespearean quote: I come to praise Kansas, not to bury it.

It is true Kansas does get a bad press. Some of that is understandable. Kansas's state school board has been at the head of efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools. It is also an extremely religious state and therefore stridently anti-abortion. But liberals ignore two things. Firstly, not all Kansans believe the same ideology. In 2004 a full 37 percent of the state voted for Kerry, meaning if you took 10 Kansans, on average about four of them are Democrats. Secondly, it may be obvious, but just because someone has different beliefs doesn't mean you can't get along with them and love their state. The tribal inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest probably believe some pretty strange things, does this mean I should dislike Brazil?

Foreigners tend to share liberal prejudices against Kansas and add their own. They see the state through the prism of the Wizard of Oz. It is where Dorothy calls home and represents a bland, endless utterly flat landscape of small towns, farms, corn and homely values. It is no place, they imagine, for the European visitor entranced by the splendours of New York, Hollywood and Florida's beaches.

They are all making a mistake. Firstly, Kansas is not flat. The prairie soil rolls across the landscape like a choppy sea. Secondly, small town America is one of the most fascinating places in the country. If to travel is to try and understand a country, then what has the visitor to America learned when they just go to New York, Hollywood or Daytona Beach? Not much at all. There are extraordinary people in small towns across America.

These are not bland communities. They are also - unlike many big cities - hyper-friendly. Once, at a political meeting in a tiny little hamlet, a very friendly woman heard my foreign accent and invited me home to dinner on the spot with the intention that I should meet her daughter. That was probably going a bit far. But you get my point.

Also, a basic knowledge of history makes it impossible to call a state like Kansas boring. It was forged in the blood and prejudice of conquering Indian country. Its towns include such famous old Western names as Dodge City and Abilene: famed for their gunfighters, saloons and brothels. This was cowboy country long before it was farmland.

Perhaps most surprisingly, it has not always been a rightwing place. Kansas was settled by people seeking to stand against slavery and joined the Union as a free state just before the Civil War broke out. It suffered for it too: enduring the raids of slavers who burned farms and entire towns as retribution. Kansas has a liberal past. In the late nineteenth century the leftwing Populism movement was powerful here. Kansas did not vote Democrat or Republican: it voted Populist. The state used to be seen as a hotbed of socialism, radicalism and all sorts of other then wild ideas.

The original phrase 'What's the matter with Kansas?' now used by liberals to deride the Midwest, was in fact coined by a political essayist criticising the ultra-leftism of the state. Now, obviously, things are different. Kansas has been at the heart of the Republican and evangelical takeover of American politics. Whatever else one thinks about this, one can hardly call it boring or dull. In fact, Kansas is constantly reinventing itself. It is a place of great and rapid change. It always has been.

But let's just forget politics for a moment. It is not the be all and end all of America. My favourite spot in Kansas is the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. It is set in the magnificent Flint Hills and preserves a slice of the old rolling grasslands that once covered the Great Plains of America. It is a staggeringly beautiful place where the horizon stretches forever, the sky suddenly seems bigger and the prairie wind never stops blowing. It reminds one that the name Kansas comes from the Sioux word, Kansa: the people of the south wind.

I travelled out on the prairie once with other visitors, guided by a ranger from the reserve. He drove to a craggy outcrop and pointed out to an unspoilt landscape with no farms or trees to break the contours of the grasslands. 'This is where I like to come to see what it was like it before anyone ever came here,' he told us. For me, that summed up both America and Kansas. It explains why millions of people still flock to this country despite its many flaws and problems. They still see it like that ranger saw the prairie. It is a blank canvas. It is waiting to be drawn upon. It is the promise, despite everything, of opportunity. That is Kansas.

    Ode to Kansas, G, 15.6.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,1797501,00.html

Journey to the heart of Bushlandia

The wide open spaces of Idaho have little room for anti-war sentiment

Saturday June 3, 2006
Guardian
Oliver Burkemann in Boise, Idaho


The governor of Idaho, an affable rancher named Jim Risch, stretched back in his chair and outlined his alternative history of the last few years in America. "Hurricane Katrina - they heaped that on George Bush!" said Mr Risch, in his shirt-sleeves in the blasting dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital.

"Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."

This, of course, is not how most Americans view last year's disaster in New Orleans. But then Idaho, to borrow a term gaining popularity on leftwing blogs, is part of "Bushlandia": the three remaining states, clustered in the mountainous west, where the president still enjoys approval ratings of 50% or more. According to the latest polls, Idaho tops the league at 52%, with neighbours Utah and Wyoming on 51% and 50%, making Mr Risch the de facto leader of this nation-within-a-nation. "President Bush is one of our greatest presidents, and he's one of our bravest presidents," the governor said. "People know what's in his heart."

To liberals on both coasts, Idaho is redneck country, famous only for its potato industry and its white supremacists (the now-defunct Aryan Nations group was based in the isolated north of the state until 2001). "Sexual relations with livestock are still commonplace," a columnist for the Nation magazine claimed recently. Idahoans would prefer to focus on their spirit of rugged independence, but the redneck label is fine with them, too. "Many people would say if it stops people coming here and ruining our tranquillity, they're welcome to go on thinking like that," said Bryan Fischer, a former pastor who now runs the staunchly rightwing Idaho Values Alliance.

If you oppose gay marriage, though, or especially if you support the war in Iraq, you will find many friends in Idaho. "A guy called me the other day and said he wanted to join our alliance. He made it clear he was new to the state," Mr Fischer said. "I asked where he was coming from, and he said California. I asked what prompted him to move to Idaho, and he said: "California."

Up to 35% of Idahoans identify themselves as affiliated to neither political party, and the state has elected Democratic officials before. But it has not supported a Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson. "It wasn't so long ago," a car-rental employee said, half-jokingly, "that if you voted Democrat round here, you'd get shot."

The divide between Bushlandia and the rest of America - or, more generally, between the president's core supporters and everyone else - is not a question of mere policy arguments. It is a clash of two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on completely different meanings. For Idaho Republicans, escalating violence in Iraq illustrates precisely the scale of the challenge there, and the consequent need to stay loyal. Mr Bush's errors, meanwhile, are not an argument for his removal so much as a sign of his human fallibility. "You go into something like Iraq, nobody can know how it's going to turn," Governor Risch said. "People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?"

Core supporters

In the hills outside Boise, on a road where every telegraph pole sports a yellow ribbon in support of the troops, the owner of the Rumor Mill bakery explains the problem in one sentence. The media, Tona Henderson says, is biased to the left, and so the good news from Iraq never gets reported.

In an effort to send a different message, she has decorated nearly every available inch of her cafe - which counts local National Guardsmen and women among its clientele - with photographs of combat veterans. There is also a Bible verse, a shot of Iraqi children grinning in front of a US tank, and a poster in the window that drives home the point. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it," it reads.

"Of all the people I know that went to Iraq, I've not talked to one who said they think they went there for a bad reason," said Ms Henderson, who has her doubts about Mr Bush on some issues, but not the war. "They said: 'We went over there for a good reason, and we did something good there. And if it came down to it, they'd go back.'"

Supporting the troops but opposing the war is not a popular option. "It's ludicrous!" Bryan Fischer said. "It's like you're saying you think our soldiers are over there doing something immoral, but you support them doing that? That makes absolutely no rational sense."

Being a Democrat in this setting can be a lonely existence. "We do still find ourselves whispering in the supermarket about it," said Maria Weeg, executive director of the Idaho Democratic party. "There's such an overwhelming psychological thing. No one wants to be part of 'the other', and the Republicans have done a pretty good job of making Democrats here into the enemy."

But she declines to mock her opponents. "These are people who have deep, core values and it behoves us to try to understand those values," Ms Weeg said. "Bush has this rugged, everyday average guy sort of persona that speaks to Idahoans, and there's a strong feeling that we've just got to stick by our president because he's our president.

Bumper stickers

"It takes a lot of discretionary time and energy to find the kind of information that gives you both sides of the story. And if you're working three jobs and feeding four kids, you don't have that time. So the bumper-sticker messages will be the ones that resonate."

At a national level, Democrats disagree over what to do about places such as Idaho. Some would give them up as a lost cause, targetting resources on marginal states instead. Unsurprisingly, Ms Weeg supports the alternative "50-state strategy", championed by the party chairman Howard Dean. The Republicans, this theory holds, won Idaho as part of a long-term, bottom-up, nationwide strategy to change the focus of politics from economics to morality. Only a similarly broad Democratic initiative has any hope of turning things around.

This is not to say that the Republicans might not one day lose Bushlandia, whose population holds decidedly lukewarm views about the party's two most likely nominees for 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Even the president's 52% approval represents a steep fall from prior levels of support. But a core of affection for Mr Bush, Jim Risch insisted, would always remain.

"I'll give you the best example I can think of," the governor said. "We had a fellow by the name of Bill Clinton. You might remember him - he was the president of the United States. He sexually harrassed an employee in his office. The women's groups around America should have been ready to crucify him ... But what did they do? They came to his support in spades. Why? Because they knew his heart. They knew his heart."

    Journey to the heart of Bushlandia, G, 3.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1789613,00.html