Analyzing George Will's columns on Castro's Cuba: Is There a Cure for Cuba?; In Cuba, Ignorance In Amber

Sunday March 9th, 2008

As with most George Will-penned columns, South Beach Hoosier's always felt there were
interesting original thoughts and nuggets of insight in his columns, even if you disagree with certain of his points, and these two recent columns are no exception.

What surprises me -though perhaps surprised isn't the word, since it's the Internet after all- are the high number of people responding with Pavlovian predictability in the Washington Post's comments forum-links below.

The responses there are very different from the comments that one sees at other media sites where these same Will articles are run, like TownHall.com, with facts being the favored approach to the latter.

That's not by accident.

Keep in mind, too, as you read them, that most of the writers on the forum clearly live outside of the immediate Washington area.

The Post readers' uniformly gratuitous/negative comments to these articles, based not on any particular clever use of quantifiable facts by the writer, or even some effective retort to Will's central argument or points, based on some great miscalculation or mis-statement on his part, but rather a more base general ignorance of American and World history.

A willingness to disregard a reality that's staring them in the face and that keeps them and their point-of-view firmly in the minority, and, therefore, firmly on the losing side of history.

But some people -and we all know folks like this- for reasons of their own, prefer to play the role of martyr.

To cast themself and their allies as the underdog, even if it's neither appropriate or an accurate depiction of the circumstances, because the underdog doesn't have to play by society's rules.

It's their conscious way of getting attention that they'd never gain by actually having an original and compelling argument -based in reason and human behavior- that would actually carry the day.

To me, compared to posts on these columns I've read elsewhere, the comments to the Post evince an almost juvenile point-of-view that says that because Will argues one thing, and Will is conservative, therefore Will must be wrong and Fidel Castro and his supporters must really just be misunderstood.

And that, in any case, it's all just a big media-supported manipulation of facts, and only THEY really know what's going on. (There's always that twist thrown in at the end!)

That sounds like a poorly-conceived mathematical formula that just doesn't add up -or explain.

Another often-heard argument is, "Why can't we just be like the Europeans?"
Yes, because that really worked so well for Europe in Bosnia and Croatia in the '90's, oui?
(Will kills this impulse with kindness by specifically mentioning Sartre below.)

To these folks, Castro & Company really haven't killed thousands of Cubans and put an equal or greater number of them in prison for having the temerity to disagree with him.

One thing that I immediately noticed in reading the comments was the way they STILL cling desperately to out-dated media anecdotes/stereotypes.

Not only about the State of Florida, but the GOP, and Bush's State Dept. -or any president's State Dept. really- being completely under the thrall and thumb of South Florida-based Cuban-Americans, rather than looking at the facts in front of them.

This myth persists, despite all the newspaper/magazine articles and TV stories that have been done -to death!- over the past five years about the changing face of Miami's Cuban-American community, and their notions of what should or shouldn't happen in Cuba in the future.
There's no unanimity besides good riddance to the Castro Brothers and their brethren.

These readers commenting in The Post consciously ignore that change in reality, because to
acknowledge that shift would be to eliminate the floor beneath their own flimsy arguments, revealing them as pathetic and desperate.

But then these are often the same people who either don't know, can't quite recall or ever acknowledge that the reason the U.S. has a military base in Guantanamo in the first place, has nothing to do with Fidel Castro and Communism, but everything to do with our defeating the Spanish Empire in the Spanish-American War in 1898, perhaps the single worst-taught chapter of American history by American schools, regardless of location.

Yet I constantly see caustic Letters to the Editor in papers all over the country, brought to my attention by out-of-town friends who forward them to me, by folks who have a bee-in-their-bonnet of the sort that would find common cause with Barack Obama's minister under-the microscope, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In arguing against this known history, the writers only publicly showcase their own ignorance of this history, as well as that of the Editor of the Letters page.

This is a particular problem with The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which routinely runs letters by ill-informed folks baying at the moon, whose central premise is undermined by known facts.

(The recent Geraldine Ferraro flap for instance is a perfect example of this problem, locally.
In her initial comments, she specifically acknowledged that if her name had been Gerald, not
Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, she wouldn't have been offered the Dem Veep spot in 1984 with Walter Mondale.
She specifically says that, and yet the Editorial page editor has no qualms about running a Letter to the Editor by a dummy who posits that if Ferraro was a he...

Yes, yes, thank you!
Those of us who follow things very closely and who actually read her entire remarks, already know that.
Why don't you join us on the train to knowledge by reading her entire comments, mon ami?)

Cuba was never a free country until after the U.S. defeated Spain, and the Spanish armed
forces were forced to leave the Carribean for good.
Not that free was the same thing as democratic, as we imagine it here.

It's the same reason we had military bases in The Philippines for decades until the too-close-for-comfort volcanoes and changing dynamics of Filipino politics and U.S. foreign policy made that a moot point.

Though many Americans -if not most!- don't know it, many years ago I learned at IU from several books on Congressional history that, in fact, there were non-voting delegates in the U.S. Congress from both Cuba and The Philippines when they became U.S. territories after that war.

Just as there are now delegates in Congress from Puerto Rico, The American Virgin Islands and Guam. And Washington, D.C.

No, many of the negative comments are from people who can't quite square their own personal and political beliefs with the obvious logic and reason of the FOG -the facts-on-the-ground.

There are hundreds of thousands of people living in this area with a familial, social or cultural connection to Cuba, a place that's only 90 miles away from Key West, many with family members still living there or who were born there themself.

A very high percentage of Cuban-Americans living here vote with regularity and don't need to be convinced to turn out and cast their ballot.

Like all Americans, they vote their conscience, regardless of how well-informed they may or may not actually be on the issues.

What the anti-George Will folks who prefer their slavish devotion to stereotypes can't ever publicly admit, is that there are only four nationality groups in the U.S. mainland whose
'motherland,' such as it is, can be reached directly by air from the U.S. in less than one hour:
Canada, Mexico, The Bahamas, Cuba.

That's the whole list folks!

Why would anyone expect the hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans now living here in South Florida, especially older folks, to have NOT behaved the way they do now -and have in the past?
I never understood that.

Yet for years as I was growing-up here in the '70's, and then later, when I'd be in South Florida
during summer break from IU, working 2-3 jobs, I'd constantly hear, see and read fairly well-educated but naive and foolish people from myriad U-M and/or Miami-area Peace Groups, saying things that only highlighted their ignorance of basic history and human psychology.

People who seemed to enjoy railing against the Reagan Administration, yet who foolishly seemed to predicate part of their arguments against U.S. involvement in Central America under President Reagan -especially in Nicaragua- as a two-for-one.

They could not only be against Reagan, but because it was in direct opposition to what a majority of South Florida's Cuban-American population genuinely wanted -a bulwark against the spread of communism in Latin America, even if in a country with only one reliable elevator- they could also be against the Cuban-American establishment here, too.

Frankly, it often seemed to be that if Cuban-Americans favored something, the Peace Now, Unitarians and ADA-type Dems were reflexively against it.

Having lived in the heavily-Polish Chicago area for three years in the mid-'80's, when Mayor Harold Washington tried to bring reforms to a city that was the most racially-polarized city in the country, where ethnic culture clashes are played out much differently than they are here in South Florida, I always wondered why it was always so much easier, politically, for Northeastern liberal Democrats to tweak and mock people who had fled Communism in the Tropics, than from those who had lived behind The Berlin Wall.

I'm joking; I understood EXACTLY why that dichotomy existed.

Because they could.

Because so many Cubans who came here succeeded in carving out some niche of middle-class happiness and accomplishment in their personal and professional lives, they became so powerful that they became part of the establishment, so, open to mockery.

I have an excellent memory and a nose for the truth, both of which have served me well over the years.

Yet I don't EVER recall anyone at the time laughing at or mocking Polish-Americans in Chicago, who publicly stated their desire to return to their homeland and live in peace under a true democracy, especially after there was a Polish Pope who came to Chicago, still a day that many will never forget.

(This, of course, is quite different than Cuban-Americans elected officials -especially those born here!- foolishly boasting in newspaper and magazine articles that their career goals include someday being Mayor of Havana.

Those folks can be mocked mercilessly as far as I'm concerned, along with their hack pals, who someone imagine themself as kingmakers and Carnegie-style industry tycoons in a post-Castro Cuba someday, even though they aren't any of those things here, where it would be easier)

[My own maternal ancestors were Poles from a region of Prussian-controlled Upper Silesia, in what is now southwestern Poland, not far from the present day Poland-Czech Republic border,
when Poland as an independent country didn't exist.
Overnight, those ancestors became Texas Hill Country pioneers, whose proud descendants have lived in Bandera ever since 1855.
Due to its large number of Polish, German and Czech immigrants, Bandera County was one of only a handful of Texas counties that voted AGAINST seceding from the Union at the state convention in Austin in 1861.]

While now slightly more moderate in their approach to Cuba's future because so many leaders of the older generation of virulent anti-Castro forces have died, they all would prefer that Cuba be a democratic nation, full of the sort of checks and balances the U.S. political system enjoys.

Everything we know about human behavior, psychology and personal experience says this attitude and behavior of theirs is entirely predictable.
Yet it completely surprises those whose default position is that the U.S. is always wrong or at fault.

As proof of how common this mindset is, let me share with you the closing sentence from a Letter to the Editor that I saw in today's Sun-Sentinel, that was, ostensibly, praising the new book by Carter National Security Advisor and Obama supporter Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Second Chance:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-pbmail786pnmar24,0,1867422.story
"If we don't change our ways soon, we can be militarily strong, but morally weak and friendless, like Rome and others before the fall.
Alexander "Sandy" Simon, Delray Beach

Do you wanna bet that a person like Mr. Simon, a Delray Beach real estate developer who'd compare the U.S.A. in the year 2008 with pre-5th century Imperial Rome, probably couldn't help himself, and at least once in the past probably compared current U.S. involvement in Iraq with 1960's Vietnam in a previous letter? I'll check.

http://www.sandysimon.com/aboutsandy.htm
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/1999-04-29/calendar/nickel-for-your-thoughts/
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198605/the.arab.americans.htm

[This reminds South Beach Hoosier of a longtime pet peeve he's never mentioned here in this space before:
Why can't anything be unique anymore?
Per the absurd comparison to Rome above, why must people always diminish the latest incident or episode of anything, whatever it is, as simply the incarnation of something that's already happened?]

As to my own opinion concerning the future of Cuba, the most surprising thing would be IF Cuban-Americans in South Florida didn't care about what was happening in Cuba, 90 miles away.
Now that would make me suspicious!
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702838.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Washington Post
Is There a Cure for Cuba?
By George F. Will
March 9, 2008

On Dec. 29, 1962, 11 months before he was murdered by an advocate for Fidel Castro's regime (Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed propaganda on a New Orleans street for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee), President John Kennedy, speaking in Miami's Orange Bowl to veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, received from them a Cuban flag and vowed, "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana." In Cuba, too, regime change has turned out to be more problematic than American policymakers imagined.

Even after the Bay of Pigs -- arguably the most feckless use of U.S. power ever-- Cuba unhinged some American officials. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reports that one high-ranking CIA operative had a plan "to surface an American submarine just over the Havana horizon to fire star shells into the night sky, in the hopes of convincing the Cubans that the Second Coming was imminent, thus spurring them to get rid of the anti-Christ -- Castro." Skeptics called this "elimination by illumination."

The question of what should be done now begins with the matter of the U.S. trade embargo. Cuban Americans demanded its imposition in 1961, applauded its strengthening in 1996 and largely favor its continuation. Changing it would be politically problematic. The Cuban American vote can be decisive in Florida, whose 27 electoral votes are 10 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Add the 15 electoral votes of New Jersey, another state with a large Cuban American community, and 16 percent of the 270 can turn on policy toward Cuba.

The embargo was imposed when Cuba was a salient of Soviet values and interests in this hemisphere. Today, Cuba is a sad, threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy. Far from threatening Castro's regime, the embargo has enabled Castro to exploit Cubans' debilitating mentality of taking comfort from victimhood -- the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States.

Those facts do not, however, by themselves make the case for ending the embargo without some reciprocal liberalization by (the other) Castro's regime. Granted, it is arguable that the embargo should be abandoned, or significantly eased, regardless of how the Cuban regime behaves, because the regime has much to fear from any increased permeation of Cuba by foreign commercial and intellectual presences.

U.S. policy toward Cuba should, however, be conditioned, and perhaps haunted, by U.S. policy toward China. That policy was supposed to result in steady, slow-motion regime change through candid subversion in broad daylight. The premise has been that the cure for communism is commerce with the capitalist world. The assumption is that capitalism brings, because it requires, an ethic of trust and the rule of law in the form of promise-keeping (contracts). Also, the protection of private property gives individuals a sphere of sovereignty and whets their appetites for a politics of popular sovereignty.

This has been called "the Starbucks fallacy" (see James Mann's book "The China Fantasy"): When people become accustomed to many choices of coffee, they will demand many political choices. This doctrine may be being refuted by the emergence of a China that has become wealthier without becoming less authoritarian.

Cuba has negligible democratic traditions and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion. In Iraq, Russia and elsewhere, we have seen how decades of tyranny degrade a public's capacity for a democratic culture. We also have tested, and found questionable, the proposition that democratic institutions can precede and create such a culture.

The embargo is being partially vitiated by dollars -- about a billion of them, equivalent to about 2 percent of Cuba's gross domestic product -- sent to Cuba by the Cuban diaspora, 1.5 million strong. That diaspora supports the embargo, but dollar remittances from abroad can be spent only in government stores, so they accrue to the benefit of the regime.
Castro, whose personal worth is estimated at nearly $1 billion, has sternly -- and proudly -- told Cubans, whose average annual income is less than $200, "We're not a consumer society." That is not news where shampoo is scarce.

Six years ago, Castro's regime gathered 8 million signatures from among the 11 million captive Cubans for a petition -- was that necessary? -- to amend Cuba's constitution (is it necessary?) to declare communism "irrevocable." Let us now praise the much-misunderstood Viking King Canute, who commanded the tide to recede in order to demonstrate that it would not obey.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702838_Comments.html
________________________________________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030502889.html
Miami Herald
In Cuba, Ignorance In Amber
By George F. Will
March 6, 2008

The letter from a 12-year-old to "my good friend Roosvelt" [sic] is dated Nov. 6, 1940, one day after FDR won a third term. Saying he is "very happy" FDR won, he adds: "If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american." The letter, an enlarged copy of which is on display in the National Archives, ends: "Good by. Your friend, Fidel Castro."

Young Castro with his hand out prefigured his role in political history. Until its spell was broken, Marxism mesmerized millions by promising to solve mankind's economic problem -- abundance without the alienation caused by work, the French word for which is travail. Instead, Castro created mendicant Marxism, making Cuba dependent on huge subventions from the Soviet Union, which paid eight times the market price for sugar and in the process purchased young Cuban men to fight in various "wars of liberation." When Russia withdrew its aid, Cuba's economy quickly shrank 35 percent, more than the U.S. economy contracted (26.5 percent) in the Depression. Cuba under communism had to import sugar. Today, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela provides $4 billion of oil to a Cuba that has a gross domestic product of $45 billion.

The departure, if such it really is, of Castro, the weird uncle in the island's attic, cures nothing. Cuba's affliction remains: It is Castroism, which is communism colored by Bonapartism. Communism of any stripe is afflicted by terminal ignorance. Having no market, which is an information-generating mechanism, communism cannot know what things should cost.

Hence communism's amazing contribution to humanity's economic history is "value-subtraction" -- products worth less than the materials that go into them. That result is seriously inconvenient for Marxism's labor theory of value -- the theory that labor adds all value to the world's materials.

Castro's career, although calamitous for Cubans, has provided entertaining farce through its effect on Western political pilgrims seeking leftist saviors. Joseph Goebbels called the Nazi regime "ennobled democracy"; the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo called his "neo-democracy." In 1960, the second of Castro's 49 years as warden of Cuba as prison, Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist and Stalinist, published an enraptured book about Castro's democracy. Sartre marveled at what he called Castro's "direct democracy" as demonstrated when, at a roadside stand, Castro and Sartre were served warm lemonade.

Castro got hot. The tepid drink, he said, "reveals a lack of revolutionary consciousness." The waitress, Sartre reported, shrugged and said the refrigerator was broken. Castro "growled"
(Sartre's approving description), "Tell your people in charge that if they don't take care of their problems, they will have problems with me." Sartre, deeply stirred, wrote:
"This was the first time I understood -- still quite vaguely -- what I called 'direct democracy.' Between the waitress and Castro, an immediate secret understanding was established. She let it be seen by her tone, her smiles, by a shrug of her shoulders, that she was without illusion."

Norman Mailer, the novelist, and Oliver Stone, embodiment of Hollywood progressives in heat, had illusions galore. In 1960, when Castro came to Manhattan, Mailer, banal even when in ecstasy, wrote of white horses: "One felt life in one's cold overargued blood. . . . It was as if the ghost of Cortes had appeared in our century riding Zapata's white horse." Just a few years ago, Stone, a slow learner, advised: "We should look to [Castro] as one of the Earth's wisest people."

In the wise man's prisons -- according to Armando Valladares's memoir of 22 years in them ("Against All Hope") -- some doors are welded shut and prisoners are fed watery soup sometimes laced with glass, or dead rats, or half a cow's intestine, rectum included, containing feces. In 2003, the wise man's pulverizing police state, always struggling to reduce Cuba's civil society to a dust of individuals, sentenced 78 democracy advocates, after one-day secret trials, to up to 28 years in those prisons. Pilgrims praising Cuban health care call to mind Pat Moynihan's acerbic observation that when travel to China was liberalized, many visitors seemed more impressed by the absence of flies than by the absence of freedom.

Castro has ruled Cuba during 10 U.S. presidencies and longer than the Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe. The Economist has called him "a Caribbean King Lear." Raging on his island heath, with nothing to celebrate except his endurance, his creativity has come down to this: He has added a category to the taxonomy of world regimes -- government by costume party. Useful at last, the Comandante, dressed for success in his military fatigues, presides over a museum of Marxism.

Reader comments at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030502889_Comments.html

Washington Post's eternal problem with female sportswriters

In looking for the WaPo articles I posted yesterday about the effort to bring MLB to Northern Virginia, I happened to come across an email I sent some friends about my own particular take over the problems that were then -and still- plaguing the Washington Post.
The short excerpt below is about their eternal & elusive search for a quality female sports reporter or columnist who'd actually stay in sports, and NOT migrate to other sections of the paper, notably, the Style section.
(Or, recognize a vacuum in the media sports world and make like Christine Brennan - http://www.christinebrennan.com/ -and leave for USA Today, while simultaneously becoming a ubiquitous, omnipresent author, media expert & star on figure skating -a sports I'm pretty knowledgable about- leaving the Post in the rear-view mirror.
Personally, I'm sort of hot-and-cold on Christine as a writer, as her good stuff is extremely good, but it's a little too infrequent for me, but I seem to be in a minority since she's still toiling at USA Today, which gives her a great national perch and the latitude to do speeches and make personal appearances.
Her USAT columns are at http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/index.htm)

The Style section has long been the golden section of the Post where writers really get the license to write in detail about subjects and personalities that they're curious about.
Or, more to the Post's p.o.v. -and the way that things are and branded in Washington- hope you'll first hear about in its pages.
It's where, literally one or two very good pieces gets you the kind of attention that leads to you getting in Vanity Fair, GQ or Esquire.
Or, in Rachel Nichols' unique situation, the Post was so desperate to keep her -so that they'd have more than zero females- at the newspaper as a reporter (she's been the beat reporter covering the Capitals hockey team among others), they even let her write about the team while living in New York for weeks and months on end.
Naturally, she repaid their bending over backwards by jumping to ESPN, despite only being very, very average.
__________________
Thursday Sept. 22, 2005

The author of this okay-not-great piece, Linda Robertson, is the very good Miami Herald reporter that I really hoped the Washington Post would hire a few years ago during one of WaPo Sports Editor George Solomon's occasional "there aren't enough women in the sports dept." harangues, wherein the Post, supposedly, would conduct a national talent search for a talented female Sports writer.
But the first rule for the Post is always raid your competitors first, addition by subtraction, so instead of having a real national search for a much-needed infusion of talent and fresh air, they hired away Jennifer Frey from the New York Times, as hinted at by The Washingtonian magazine.
How utterly predictable!

As soon as I read her first few columns, I knew in no time at all, she'd be angling for the Style section as soon as she got a desk on 15th Street, N.W.
It was no time at all before Frey's name started appearing frequently in the Style section and not at all in sports section.
My prescience proved crystal clear, witness this June 9th, 2001 set-up:

Focus on a Rarer Beauty:Former Fashion Photographer Views
Albinism Through a New Lens
By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer

She was standing at a bus stop on Park Avenue, all white-blond hair and pale, pale skin and giggly smiles. She had to be about 13, or not much older. Rick Guidotti, high-fashion photographer, a man who spent his days snapping Cindy and Claudia and Kate, remembers looking at the girl and thinking: "Now, that is beauty. So much life. So much happiness. That girl is gorgeous."

This time though, the Orioles beleagured bullpen held on...

I started noticing more and more often that Rachel Nichols, a very average writer in my opinion, but someone with a real talent for acting like every 50/60-ish male sportswriter's dream of a sports-loving niece -i.e. "Uncle Tony" Kornheiser!- started only doing big events like Wimbledon and the French Open and, insidiously, becoming an ESPN insider.
She still had no original insight to speak of when asked questions, but that didn't stop her from constantly being asked to comment.
Understand, I don't mind the clearly ambitious, as long as they bring something to the party, that isn't already there, but doesn't genuine talent and experience count for anything?
Five minutes after reading Nichols or listening to her, I couldn't remember anything of note she'd said or written. Zero.
(Certainly not like the situation with former Hoosier Jason Whitlock, who says things so interesting that you're thinking about them days later when you least expect it.)

Everytime I look at the Post sports section now, albeit online from South Florida, I ask myself, >
The Post could use a Maureen Dowd-type, STAT!!!
_____________________________
Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/columnists/linda_robertson/12708513.htm
Posted on Thu, Sep. 22, 2005
HURRICANE KATRINA NEW ORLEANS
Wuerffel searching for children he mentored
BY LINDA ROBERTSON

Danny Wuerffel is trying to find a boy named Heath.
And a boy named Walter, and a boy named Kevin, and Kevin's mother, and a boy named Choicy, and Choicy's siblings.
They could be anywhere from Utah to North Carolina. They could be dead.
They should be home, but home is the drowned city of New Orleans. They should be in school, but their school is submerged. They should be playing football, but instead they are scattered who knows where. Or worse.
Wuerffel, the quarterback turned missionary, is frantically searching for the families who lived in the Desire housing project. Until Hurricane Katrina devastated the poorest section of the poorest major city in the United States, Wuerffel was development director of Desire Street Ministries and the Desire Street Academy for boys.
That's Desire as in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams' play. Now, just like Blanche DuBois, Wuerffel is dependent on the kindness of strangers as he organizes a temporary boarding school in the Florida Panhandle, finds housing for the evacuees and raises money to keep the ministry solvent in the short term and to rebuild in the long term.
''It seems overwhelming, when I think of all the work to be done,'' he said from his cellphone a few days ago while driving to Gainesville. ``These are the times when we learn the difference between wants and needs. We lost everything, but not our spirit.''
The same traits that distinguished Wuerffel as a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Florida are serving him now. In the middle of turmoil, he is a calm leader.
''Nothing hardly ever rattles Danny Wuerffel,'' said his former coach, Steve Spurrier, during a conference call last week from South Carolina. ``He has such a sincere belief in God that things will work out.''
But Wuerffel admits he has wept often since the hurricane uprooted half a million people. Sometimes he cries at 3 a.m., when he can't sleep. ''I picture how people suffered, how they died, the fear and the chaos, and it makes me very sad,'' he said.
Sometimes he cries when he's on the phone and can't get the answers he seeks. Sometimes when he visits churches or shelters and can't comfort the homeless. Sometimes when he's in his car and can't get his mind off the lost boys. Heath was an eighth grader at the academy, a sweet, undaunted kid. Wuerffel paid for his scholarship.

''We've had no word on Heath,'' said Wuerffel, who has located about 60 percent of the 192 boys enrolled in the academy. ``My heart will be broken if we don't find him.''
Wuerffel's house was flooded to the ceiling. A friend paddled by it in a boat five days ago and reported that the water had receded to five feet. Wuerffel lived a block from the 17th Street Canal levee that was breached. He and wife Jessica, 21-month-old son Jonah and their dog Chester fled in their car with only a few changes of clothes, some pictures, a video camera, vital documents, two pillows and a Bible. They rode out the storm in Natchez, Miss., and are now staying at his parents' home in Destin.
His alma mater has lent a hand. The university donated $50,000 from TV proceeds of the Gators' first football game, and is allowing Wuerffel to use a camping area on university land near Niceville for the academy. Wuerffel hopes to round up as many students as possible and resume school next week. With any luck, they could put together a football team. They were a week away from beginning their first high school season in New Orleans on Aug. 29 when the storm hit.
At the moment there are no textbooks, let alone uniforms, but, as always, Wuerffel sees the silver lining. The boys will be under the ministry's supervision 24 hours a day whereas back home they were often returning to unstable households and the temptations of drug dealers.
Wuerffel's faith has been tested. But he clings to hope the way his neighbors clung to their chimneys.
''On the one hand there's a sense of loss, but also an unexplainable confidence because people are experiencing the love of others in incredible ways,'' he said. ``Ultimately, God is doing something good. My sorrow, my joy -- all the emotions have done nothing but draw me closer to God.''
Wuerffel, 31, chose the road less taken.
He seemed too sensitive for the brutal game of football. Whenever the Gators scored and everyone else went berserk, Wuerffel clasped his hands in prayer and glanced heavenward with a beatific smile. He was nicknamed Danny Wonderful.
His greatest glory as a player occurred in the Superdome, in the 1997 Sugar Bowl, when he led the Gators to the school's only national title in a 52-20 rout of Florida State.
But he found his greatest fulfillment in a different part of New Orleans -- the forgotten and forsaken part.
Wuerffel first heard about pastor Mo Leverett's church when he was a rookie backup for the NFL's Saints. One day he went to have a look at the Ninth Ward neighborhood. He figured the dilapidated apartment buildings were condemned and vacant. Then he saw a little girl carrying a doll walk out a front door.
''I realized people were actually living there and it shocked me,'' he said of the project.
Two years ago he left behind a life of plenty and privilege as a pro athlete and immersed himself in the impoverished community. He and Jessica, a former social worker, have seen the ministry grow. Desire Street built the school, a gym and a pediatric clinic.
All are underwater now.
The people who had the least were punished the most. Kids who had one parent have none to take care of them. Small businessmen who struggled to break even are wiped out.
While most of America gaped in horror at the scenes of desperation on rooftops and degradation in the Superdome, Wuerffel was not surprised.
''Our families deal with neglect and violence and hunger year-round, but it doesn't make the news,'' he said. ``We have a serious problem in the inner cities of our country. It can't be quarantined. It spills outward. This time everyone could see it on national TV.''
In the aftermath, at the juncture of blame and emptiness, Wuerffel sees hope. Where others saw blight, he saw a little girl carrying a doll. Her imagination had not been crushed. Neither has his.
''Katrina actually means cleansing,'' he said. ``We can do greater good than ever before. We can make this place better than it ever was. Katrina can be a catalyst for compassion and change.''
As the floodwaters recede, Wuerffel acknowledges he's up against a society in which most Americans will turn their attention back to celebrity gossip and Monday Night Football.
Wuerffel isn't giving up. If there's one thing engrained in him from those years in the huddle, it is how to come from behind.

For information on how to help, check http://www.desirestreet.org/.

My Backstory on Bringing MLB to Northern Virginia

One of the subjects that I've most wanted to write about here at South Beach Hoosier, and will at much greater length in the not too-distant future, complete with photos and presentation materials, are my ruminations about my personal involvement with two grassroots groups I was very involved in with both my head as well as my heart: the Arlington Baseball Coalition and Virginians for Baseball.

The effort to bring MLB baseball to Northern Virginia was a campaign -ultimately, a failed one- that I was deeply involved in on two separate occasions, over a period of ten years, until returning to South Florida in late 2003.

Despite the vast resources of the Northern Virginia area, both in terms of a highly desirable and well-educated population, and amazing demographic profiles and con$umer $pending pattern$, not to mention, the amazing amount of sheer talent and brain power of some of the most enthusiastic NOVA supporters -who wanted to see MLB relocate the Expos- of the Collins ownership group, led by Bill Collins, continually failed to develop anything even remotely like a logical and comprehensive marketing strategy.

That failure, shared my MANY people other than just Mr. Collins, was systematic and multi-level.

At its most basic level, they failed to take into account completely predictable human behavior: the determined efforts of a smart and organized opposition, particularly the failure to publicly acknowledge the oppostition of certain powerful Washington, D.C. parties, both private and within local and state governments.

Except in our case, we were fighting a two-front war: one against the folks who wanted a team in the District, and the second against various neighborhood groups -and pseudo-groups- in NOVA that didn't want a team near them, their homes or business, for reasons that ranged from the serious to the banal, despite their own admission that they were already there for the very same reason we wanted to be -great proximity to mass transit via the D.C. MetroRail.

(Among other notables associated with Mr. Collins' group were Mark Warner, before he was elected Virginia's governor in 1999, as well as veteran sportscaster James Brown, then with CBS-Sports, and a beloved, longtime Washington presence, in front and behind the camera.)

You can't simply ignore your opponents just because you want to give the impression of an inevitable victory, a lesson that shouldn't be lost on other well-intentioned South Florida civic groups trying to cobble together a winning coalition in an area like ours on transportation issues, where everyone's used to putting their parochial concerns above others in order to be heard.

Which Sounds like something that some of the Kendall groups that Transit Miami has been writing about lately.)

This failure to develop a simple, logical and comprehensive coalition of interest groups dedicated to the common goal of getting MLB back to the DC area, and to Northern Virginia specifically, showed a lack of common sense that was often breath-taking, I'm sorry to say.

Yet nobody ever seemed interested in adapting what we'd learned over time to the overall plan, so we kept making ther same mistakes over and over again.

Ouch!!!

Since the Harvard Business Review is clearly unlikely to memorialize their failed marketing campaign, it looks like it falls upon me to describe how you fail when you have the largest untapped media market in the country.

I'll also delve into the larger role of how the Washington Post, thru their Editorial Page pronouncements and curious story selection and placement, helped kill Northern Virgina's effort, in favor of the one The Post always favored.

That would've been one in The District, proper, and preferably, with a large minority participation, even if by by political/sports celebs like Colin Powell or Franklin Raines, then the head of Fannie Mae

Which is to say, men with nothing even remotely close to the baseball pedigree of the Collins Group, whose family had long been involved with minor league baseball.

In fact, it was at an early Minor League Baseball Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill in the early '90's where I first met Mr. Collins, his father and sister, all part of the collective effort over the years.

Those meetings on The Hill were chaired by then-NY congressman Sherwood Boehlert, one of the smartest and nicest persons I met in my 15 years in Washington, whose congressional district included Cooperstown.

Until I start anew, though, let me leave you with something to chew on: excerpts from two emails of mine from 2005.

The first was one I sent to a very talented writer in May of 2005, who'd written me earlier seeking some info on a matter that I was deeply involved with, and I wanted to connect some dots on the issue just to show him what was percolating out-of-sight.

The second email is an excerpt from a December 2005 email I sent to some knowledgable

friends around the country, who all had a connection to Washington, D.C. or baseball to some degree, and all of whom were also all-too-familiar with the behind-the-scenes manuvering and posturing then going on in the nation's capitol to get a foothold, however that could be accomplished.

And then, finally, the Washington Post finally started doing some hard-hitting stories on the shenanigans at Fannie Mae, whose head was one of the supposed stalking horses for a baseball team in Washington proper, and thus, the opposition for the groups that I was working with

___________________________________________________________

27 May 2005

re Colin Powell: How much does a Teflon mannequin cost these days?

Dear X:

For years one of the principal reasons I've turned to your stories on a consistent basis has been that your sensibility and interests closely seem to mirror my own, a comment that friends have constantly told me after I've turned them on via email to one of your funny, prescient articles that ask the questions nobody else will ask.

Except this time, your column on Powell, good as it was, hardly even begins to scratch the surface on what's been afoot in DC over the past few years in the effort to bring MLB to the capitol area.

Allow me to connect the dots on some things that you don't know about, many of which are still galling and exasperating to me months and years after the fact because of my own long-time involvement in trying to bring MLB to Northern Virginia.

Where to start....

About two years ago, I was in the lobby of the Army-Navy Bldg. on Eye St., which as some one like you knows full well is the home of the New York Times' Washington Bureau.
As it happens, I have a ton of friends there at the paper and at the law firms there, as well as with former Minneapolis Star-Tribune folks who used to be there.

(It's where my copy of Daily variety was delivered, just across the street from the MPAA- the Motion Picture Association of America.)

Late one afternoon, just after quitting time, I was talking to a bunch of my friends in the lobby, most of whom were African-American and either Times writers, editors or administration people. Not surprisingly, gieven what we'd be going back and forth about for awhile, the topic soon turned to the charade of what "black mannequin" Fred Malek would prop in his window for window dressing in order to co-opt both the DC City Council MLB and get the franchise.

FYI: I was VERY, VERY involved with the Northern Virginia effort tragically led my Bill Collins and his Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

I personally realized many years ago that he was far from the perfect vessel to bring a team to the area. Personally, I favored someone who was clearly intelligent, and personable if not charismatic, favoring someone like former VA Lt. Gov. Don Beyer of McLean or Gov. Mark Warner -who hadn't been elected yet- who's from Alexandria, since Collins was, I hate to say this, a bit of a sad sack in person.

(Many people called him "Grover Cleveland" for reasons that are obvious when you see him.)

Worst moment: We're in the penthouse of a very nice Arlington hotel near Pentagon City that's full of good food and drinks, and sports a spectacular 360 degree view of the area, including DC, for a press conference that announcing some new investors, as well as the latest on the Collins Group's efforts to lure MLB to NOVA.

The reporters make quick work of the food, as expected, and after a terrific video narrated by James Brown of CBS Sports -a minority investor, along with a former Redskin whose name escapes me now!- you'd think this is when you turn on the hard-court press schmoozing, right?

Yet instead of doing that, the presentations are so leaden and cardboard -what is that weird combination called exactly?- that the attention of most of the men in the room was not on Collins or the members of his group, who, sadly, didn't realize like I did that you need to tell a more compelling hook and story than just 'Here's our new video that MLB just got... MLB tells us to be patient... Nope!

Though we'd spent lots of time and effort to make this information as accessible as possible, and had a real story to tell, the Channel 7 intern who had been assigned to event, a gorgeous blonde from FSU who looked straight out of a film noir flick, commanded everyone's attention.
These suits were no competition.

As The Sports Junkies would say, it was a "debacle."

_________________________________________________________________

Monday Dec. 5th, 2005
Connecting the dots on some recent baseball matters:

So, former DC man of the moment Franklin Raines is going to use some of his ill-gotten loot

to be a partner in one of the DC baseball groups, http://www.baseballindc.com/, i.e the Colin Powell, Darrell Green & Vernon Jordan group that didn't put up any real money?

So predictable.

Couldn't the Malek group at least make sure that the financial numbers on Raines' bio on the group's website were accurate? They sound fishy to me, given what we've discovered thru the congressional investigations that unmasked the phony numbers.

More than ten years ago, when I was very involved in the original Bill Collins' group effort to get a MLB team for Northern Virgina, I knew that no matter what, a character like Malek would still be around until the bitter end, no matter how cheap and transparent his efforts were, despite the fact that the Collins family already owned several well-regarded minor league teams.
(I'd met his father and sister at a Capitol Hill meeting of the Minor League Baseball Caucus in the early '90's, when the subject of MLB's antitrust exemption was being discussed -again.)

Even as late as the fall of 2003, when I left DC and returned to South Florida, Malek would never say publicly how much money his group would pony up towards stadium construction, while the Collins group was always willing to say that they'd do at least $100 million or one-third, whichever was greater, towards a $300-400 million stadium.

That the Washington Post's reporters never pinned him down on such a very basic question was a never-ending source of frustration to me, given the Post's clear desire for a MLB team to be located within DC proper, and not in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where most of the area's growing and affluent population -and baseball fans-actually lived.

The Collins Group, which then included present-VA Governor Mark Warner, FOX Sports' James Brown and a prominent ex-Redskin among many others, once held a great newser atop an Arlington penthouse hotel along the main Jefferson Davis Hwy. commercial strip on the way out to Reagan National Airport.

Our intent was simply to take the talk of getting a team out of the abstract and show in a very tangible way, the wonderful panoramic view of The National Mall and the monuments and NOVA from an ARLINGTON stadium site p.o.v., and how that would look on TV.

(Since I lived in Arlington at the time, and used the Metro everyday to and from work in downtown DC, this could've become the standard for combining future stadiums, transportation and a sense of public place -and be somewhere that people went even when nothing is scheduled, like the area near Camden Yards during the winter.)

The DC TV stations dutifully sent camera crews, but undercut us by sending mostly "fluff" reporters to the event, not sports people or political reporters, so they were ill-prepared to ask the kind of good, meaty questions that would actually get us -and them- much airtime.

For one of the few times, we actually provided a really great spread of food and drinks, and after some great state-of-the-art multi-media presentations, esp. James Brown's, we were really looking forward to schmoozing and spinning the crowd with facts and figures that would help us get our message out to the local audience, to undercut the Post's long-standing and conscious cold-water treatment of MLB in NOVA.

Unfortunately, most of the people there, 99% male, ended up paying closer attention to the drop-dead gorgeous, blonde ABC-7 -WJLA- intern from FSU, than they were to anything we were saying or showing them in our carefully prepared handouts.

After the prepared remarks, unaccustomed as most of the TV people there were to being at events where they had to engage in a certain amount of give and take with the participants, which sports or political reporters would be accustomed to, they either ran out the doors, or hung around demolishing the food and drinks and staring at the intern.

That was our Waterloo.
"I was defeated, you won the war..."

In a later conversation with the Ch. 7 cameraman, he told me that the intern's appearance -wish I'd written down her name!- often caused a commotion at events, and that for those reasons and many others he didn't want to get into at the time, most of the female reporters at the station didn't like having her around with them when they were covering a story.

Given the Marlins' pathetic and unprofessional attempts to get a baseball stadium down here since their World Series victory two years ago, from NOT having a savvy professional lobbyist in Tallahassee at important times -per Hank Goldberg's comments on his WQAM radio show- to not even having the support of a majority of the local members of the state House and Senate when you need THEIR help, it's sometimes a case of too much deja vu for me to stomach.

___________________________

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400728.html

Washington Post

New Paths for Mortgage Giants

Old Way of Doing Business Will Not Work Anymore For Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
By Annys Shin

Washington Post Staff Writer

December 5, 2005

Struggling through the aftermath of multibillion-dollar accounting scandals, officials at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say their most difficult decisions may lie ahead. With stiffer competition from other companies and the changing tastes of home buyers in the types of loans they want, the companies face a choice between moving into riskier types of investing and acknowledging to stockholders that their potential for growth is limited.

In either case, company officials say, the business model that has generated record profit in recent years -- buying standard 30-year mortgages from banks so bankers would have more money to lend -- must change.

"Where in the olden days, you had a choice of selling your mortgage to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, in the future, there are lots of alternatives," a fact that has prompted a search for ways to diversify, Fannie Mae chief executive Daniel H. Mudd said in a recent interview.

The companies' options include becoming more deeply involved in the adjustable-rate mortgages that many consumers have preferred in recent years, financing more multifamily developments, and changing the standards for granting mortgages to take more risks with consumers who have spotty credit records.

The companies are even concerned about sustaining their staple business -- bundling mortgages into securities that are sold to investors throughout the world -- now that large institutions such as Countrywide Home Loans Inc., Lehman Brothers Inc. and Bear Stearns & Co. have moved into it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's share of the mortgage-backed-securities business has fallen from more than 60 percent in 2000 to around 40 percent this year, according to the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.

District-based Fannie Mae and McLean-based Freddie Mac are two of the area's largest and most visible businesses, employing more than 8,000 in the region.

"The challenge for us is to reassert our presence in those areas where we've lost a bit of competitive advantage," said Patricia L. Cook, Freddie Mac's executive vice president for investment and capital markets.

The companies have not faced such fundamental questions about their underlying business model since the 1980s, when the collapse of the savings and loan industry under billions of dollars in bad debt pushed Fannie Mae into the red.

The current dilemma, in contrast, follows an era of explosive earnings growth at both firms, which helped turn a pair of bread-and-butter, government-chartered mortgage finance companies into high-performing growth stocks and prompted Fannie Mae chief executive Franklin D. Raines to promise Wall Street similar results far into the future. The companies' earnings, it was later disclosed, were inflated through accounting techniques that masked some investment losses.

Top executives, including Raines, were forced out, and the companies had to remove a combined $16 billion in profit from their books. Freddie Mac officials say they are nearing the point where they can produce reliable financial results. Fannie Mae is further behind and remains the subject of several federal investigations.

As they emerge from those crises, executives say part of their post-scandal life is to set more realistic expectations. Fannie Mae's stock is down about 30 percent this year, closing Friday at $47.99 a share. Freddie Mac's share price is off by slightly over 7 percent for the year and ended the week at $62.90.

"We've transitioned from growth to a value stock," Cook said. "The investment and analyst community appropriately expects us to be getting back to business."

The companies are also trying to cope with a mortgage industry much freer in its lending and much more likely to hold mortgages in-house for longer periods and with consumers more willing to take on riskier, adjustable-rate loans to keep their monthly payments down.
Fannie Mae, founded during the Great Depression to keep the home mortgage market liquid, and Freddie Mac, chartered in 1970 to compete, built their businesses around the fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage and a more conservative banking climate. Their presence, as a source of cash and a standard-setter for how to rate mortgage applicants, encouraged banks to lend money. Lenders could initiate loans and pocket the fees, confident that as long as the borrower met Fannie Mae's or Freddie Mac's standards, they could resell the loans to one of them, get their capital back, and make another loan.

The companies tended to shy away from delving too deeply into adjustable-rate and other unconventional mortgages, regarding them as too risky. Such loans, however, have soared in popularity and now account for more than 30 percent of U.S. home mortgages issued in 2004, said Dale Westhoff, Bear Stearns's senior managing director of mortgage research.

In contrast, loans that conform to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's basic guidelines -- the companies cannot, for example, accept loans of more than $417,000 because their basic mission is to support middle- and low-income housing -- have fallen from more than 62 percent of loans issued in 2003 to less than 36 percent of loans issued this year, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

"So much of the new mortgages don't fit into their framework," said William C. Apgar Jr., a former assistant housing and urban development secretary now with Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "Fannie and Freddie did a big service taking a relatively unorganized system and saying, 'If you present a mortgage of this type, we can bundle them together and sell them to investors.' Now the flow of product is so much more complex and requires so much information," he said.

"Fannie and Freddie haven't figured out a way to get into that segment of the market," Apgar said. "They're constrained because of their concern about how well they can manage that risk."
Demand for adjustable-rate mortgages has begun to taper off lately as interest rates have risen. But housing finance experts say adjustable-rate mortgages are here to stay.

"It's unlikely Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will ever see the market shares they saw in the early 2000s," Westhoff said. "We will continue to see a higher share of adjustable-rate mortgages than we've seen historically."

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not willing to let the market pass them by. Executives of both companies argued that they will have to adapt to fulfill their government-chartered mission to keep money flowing into the housing market.

"As we look at our business, we realize we have a special role to fulfill in the market," Mudd said. "Various strategies we may consider clearly need to be examined in terms of our mission to support the market and help low- and middle-income families." Mudd said that after the firm puts its accounting problems behind it, it will "participate in more markets with more products... and more flexible products for people with a credit blemish on their record and for first-time minority home buyers."

Freddie Mac already has stepped up its investment in adjustable-rate mortgages, although about 80 percent of its holdings still are long-term, fixed-rate loans.

As the firms look for new ways to grow, both will have to be careful not to grow too much. Their investment portfolios, which grew rapidly in the 1990s, were a major source of the accounting violations at both companies. Congress is considering legislation that would give a new regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac varying levels of authority to scale back the size of their holdings. A Senate proposal would limit the kinds of assets they can hold.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already been forced to become smaller to satisfy regulatory requirements, shedding a combined $200 billion in portfolio holdings.

"The market is so competitive that even if our favored and friendliest customer sees us as being off by a [tenth of a] point, they're going to sell the business to somewhere else," Mudd said.

"We've got to build the company to manage that and be ready for it."

_________________________________

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112501383.html
Washington Post

Baseball and the District: Dancing With Wolves

By Mike Wise

November 26, 2005

The home stretch is upon the men who want to own Washington's baseball team, and this is how they look plodding toward the post:

Ted Lerner has become more reclusive than Howard Hughes, as accessible as Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger. (Does anyone know what Lerner looks like? When he was last seen?) I know baseball told everyone to stay mum, but this man has duct-taped his lips. His bid was probably air mailed from Guam.

Jeff Smulyan can be seen grinning in celluloid, campaigning harder than John Kerry. The Indianapolis media mogul is so desperate to erase the portrayal of himself as the outsider, he returned my call. Soon enough, he'll be on stage with Bruce Springsteen in a barn jacket.

And Fred Malek? Poor Fred Malek. He sent Colin Powell last week to lobby the D.C. Council on his group's behalf. Imagine the indignity for such a great American with just a infinitesimal financial stake in Malek's group: One minute, you're addressing the United Nations on matters of global security, the next, you're at Corner Bakery with Jack Evans and Anthony Williams. Very disconcerting.

Fortunately, it's almost over. And this is how it will most likely go down: The penny-wrangling between the District and Major League Baseball should end in about a week, the final details of a lease for a new stadium to be worked out.

By Friday, Stan Kasten, the former Braves president, will have met with Bud Selig and formally be told, "Join forces with Lerner because we all know your group is toast."

Smulyan's group will also meet with Selig, and the commissioner will then make his final call. Within two weeks, at the latest, the Nationals will no longer be on the baseball public-assistance plan. They'll have a real live owner, not to mention the final touches on plans for a new stadium. This is just a hunch, but it will probably be announced at a joint press conference.
Which rich guy should it be? Only Bud knows.

Reading Selig, the only tea leaf in baseball that matters, is akin to living your life by horoscope: You hear what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. Beyond the rhetoric, here is what Selig is weighing in a two-, maybe three-horse race, depending whether you're in the camp of Smulyan or Malek.

(By the way, Malek's big supporter, the lame-duck mayor, has really come up small on this issue. While baseball was trying to sew up the lease deal, Williams left town. Williams has tethered his legacy to the economic redevelopment of Washington, and for more than a year baseball has been his baby. It's time he was there to see it grow up.)

Lerner is purported to have the inside track for two reasons. One, he is of D.C., which, perception-wise, means he loves Washington too much to move the Nationals. Two, baseball is happy he adhered to its secrecy request. With the way he has comported himself in this campaign, Lerner is someone baseball feels could carry the ownership banner without making a spectacle of himself. If a baseball man like Kasten is added to the mix, well, that erases the inexperience factor.

Smulyan is still in the running for several reasons. Cold-calling, grabbing everyone he can, he has enlisted a number of local investors, who happen to be black. They include Alfred Liggins, Rodney Hunt and Jeffrey Thompson, who brought along two of Joe Gibbs's former players, Art Monk and Charles Mann. Including Eric Holder and Bill Jarvis, Smulyan's group of African-American owners would represent the largest minority ownership in baseball, some $50 million. And Selig wants to champion diversity at the highest levels of the game. Further, some feel he has the backing of old friend Jerry Reinsdorf, the man Selig charged with assembling the cast of buyers.

Smulyan's ownership history in Seattle hurts him (cash-strapped and hamstrung by a stadium lease, he sold the team in 1992), but at least he's been there.

Any vote to move the team would be taken by the club's Washington owners, not Smulyan. Smulyan has removed himself from the equation just to make sure people believe him when he says he is not the second coming of Bob Short, who moved the Senators some 30 years ago.
"If you believe nothing I've ever said, let me say this: Indianapolis is never going to get baseball," Smulyan said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The value of the team is in Washington. Why would someone spend $450 million to buy a team in the fifth-largest media market and the area with the country's second- or third-most disposable income and then move it? Nobody is that dumb. Not even me.

"I'll buy a home there, I'll be there. Nobody will work harder than we will."

Take it easy, Senator. We know you want to be president.

Malek's group is still smarting from the perception, wrongly or not, that it initiated the negative campaign against Smulyan. Baseball does not like connivers, and only puts up with them because George Steinbrenner makes it. There is the existing relationship between the city and the Malek group to promote baseball in the district dating back several years. Before anybody believed a return was possible, Malek was the forefront of the movement, and the mayor has been loyal to him.

But his past has come back to haunt him, too. Though prominent Jewish leaders have said Malek has atoned for his role as a Nixon White House aide who counted the number of Jews working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's still out there.

Asked if he believed the Malek group was behind the out-of-town characterization and whether Smulyan's Jewish faith had anything to do wit h it, Smulyan said: "You hear things, but I can't believe that. I don't think there's any anti-Semitism involved. If I would have been part of a group of Episcopal bishops from out of town, the same thing would have happened."

I'm still perplexed by the localism issue. How is the area you live in more important than the stewardship of the team? This entire Sale-By-Zip-Code rationale has got to stop. After all, Bob Short lived in Washington for 15 years before he moved the team. The Griffith family lived in the District only their entire lives before they made sure baseball left Washington the first time.
Shouldn't more pressing issues be on the table at this point? Like, who is going to bring in wonder boy Theo Epstein? He's 31. He does not want to work for Larry Lucchino and the Red Sox anymore and he has direct ties to Washington.

(Okay, so his sister is merely a writer on the new Geena Davis series, "Commander in Chief." That counts, right?) The point is, it's getting late in the game. It's time to pick someone in this race, and I don't care what Selig is thinking. I'm going with Smulyan in the hopes he can bring in a rock star like Theo to lure some rock-star players.

What? The guy called me back.

2005 The Washington Post Company

Pardon Libby! Or at least read his book, "The Apprentice"

I was fortunate enough to swing by the Aventura library branch in 2005, before the series of hurricanes laid it down and out-for-the-count, and secure a copy (in very good condition) of this well-received book by Maureen Dowd's Catholic University classmate, Lewis Libby, for about 75 cents or so. I read it a few times before Scooter was ever indicted.
(See David Frum's insightful comments on this case at http://frum.nationalreview.com/
as well as Plan of Attack - Google Books Result by Bob Woodward - 2004
Unlike his bosses, Libby had graduated magna cum laude. He had written a little noticed novel in 1996, The Apprentice, an adventure tale with some erotic ...books.google.com/books?isbn=0743262875... )

Lest you forget, the underlying crime for which Chicago prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was supposed to be investigating -and which has cost Lewis Libby a reported $5 million dollars in legal fees- was the crime of publicly leaking supposed-covert CIA NOC employee/desk jockey Valerie Plame's name, was committed by Richard Armitage, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top assistant.
But then Fitzgerald already knew that before Libby was ever indicted. Armitage, of course, has yet to be indicted and Powell has yet to say publicly -under oath- when he first knew that his aide was the person that was responsible for this whole controversy, or even more to the point of Powell's integrity and character, what he specifically advised Armitage when first given the true facts.

That nobody of any prominence, say the King of Conventional Wisdom, David Broder, has asked about this sort of thing publicly in their columns only shows the true strength of commitment Colin Powell secured from the national media he tamed years ago thru his selective and assiduous use of the unattributed quote to level people below the knees.

____________________________
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E2DB1339F930A35752C1A960958260
November 3, 1996
Books in Brief: Fiction
By ERIK BURNS
THE APPRENTICE By Lewis Libby. Graywolf, $22.95.

At the turn of the century in the snowy highlands of Japan, a strange adventure unfolds: Setsuo, a young man who is an apprentice at a remote inn, falls in love with an overnight guest, the delicately beautiful Yukiko, one of a roaming troupe of actors. They come together in the middle of a blizzard, a ferocious storm that ensnares a strange group of travelers.
With delicate prose and stirring descriptive passages, Lewis Libby elevates the youth's narrative to the level of myth, setting his confused adolescent reactions to love at first sight against the mysterious goings-on of the other travelers. At the center of these is a bearded man who dashes off into the storm, followed by a hunter who is later discovered dead, his throat cut.
Unbeknown to Setsuo, his frantic pursuit of these strange guests entangles him in shadowy political intrigue. Questions abound: Who is the bearded man? What is in the small box Setsuo finds? Why are killers creeping around the snowy village, searching everywhere?
Mr. Libby's storytelling skill neatly mixes these conspiratorial murmurs with the boy's emotional turmoil: his heartache and confusion become part of a larger emotional landscape. Erik Burns
______________________________________________
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102201439_pf.html
Correction to This Article
In some Oct. 23 editions, an article about I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby incorrectly reported that he has two sons. He has a son and a daughter. Also, the law firm of Dechert, Price and Rhoads, where Libby once worked, was misidentified.

In the Spotlight And on the Spot Scooter Libby, Backstage No More
By Mark Leibovich, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 23, 2005; A01

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is known for his sarcastic, world-weary and at times dark sense of humor. He once quipped to an aide that he planned to stay as Vice President Cheney's top adviser until "I get indicted or something."
That was during President Bush's first term, brighter days for the administration and, more to the point, before a special prosecutor was investigating Libby's possible role in disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame.
The joke -- recounted by the aide, who no longer works in the administration -- sounded absurd at the time, given Libby's renown for canniness and prudence. He adheres to a favorite Cheney maxim that the vice president credits to the late Sam Rayburn, a longtime House speaker: "You never get in trouble for something you don't say."
Yet Libby could find himself in big trouble for saying too much. And this jibes with a lesser-known side of Libby, the audacious novelist and daredevil skier who has long been gripped with concern about exotic terrorist scenarios; who fervently argues his own viewpoints, particularly on matters of foreign policy; and who can become, friends and associates say, overly passionate in the face of opposing ones.
Libby, 55, has displayed this aspect of himself in a series of heady stations throughout his career -- at the State Department, the Pentagon and, for the past five years, in the Bush administration. Reporters have seen this side of Libby, too, in his full animated conviction. But almost always on deep background, out of public view.
Now Libby's cover of anonymity is blown -- and for possibly blowing the cover of a CIA operative. People close to Libby point out the incongruity of the whole thing.
"He's always been excruciatingly careful, which is ironic in his situation," says World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz, a former deputy secretary of defense and a longtime mentor of Libby's.
The "situation," of course, refers to the Plame case. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to be focused on whether Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove had a part in divulging Plame's identity in an attempt to discredit her husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson.
Wilson, who undertook a mission to Africa in 2002, was widely critical of the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Fitzgerald is investigating whether officials in the administration sought to undermine Wilson by outing his wife.
Libby has testified in at least two grand jury appearances about his conversations with reporters on the Plame matter -- including two from The Washington Post. He also spoke at least three times with the New York Times's Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before accepting permission from Libby to tell the grand jury about their conversations. The Times published a nearly 6,000-word account last Sunday about Miller's dealings with Libby. The story revealed that the misspelled moniker "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook Miller used during an interview with Libby. (In a separate first-person article, Miller wrote she told the grand jury that she believed the name came from another source, whom she could not recall.)
The grand jury's term expires next Friday, and Fitzgerald is expected to reveal his intentions in a matter of days.
Friends describe Libby as engaging and unfailingly chivalrous; it is his habit to stand when a female dining partner excuses herself. He is diligent about returning reporters' calls, albeit on deep background and, in most cases, "telling you absolutely nothing," says William Kristol, a conservative columnist and longtime acquaintance of Libby's who served as chief of staff to Vice President Quayle. Kristol says Libby "is someone who would seem to spend a lot of effort at not getting caught up in something like this."
Libby, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is taut and compact, with small eyes and a short mop of graying brown hair. As has been the case through much of his career, he works long hours and complains that he doesn't see enough of his wife and two children. He's been hobbled after breaking a bone in his foot while running up stairs. He has looked gaunt and tired of late, according to those who have seen him, and he told at least two friends and associates that he was thinking of leaving the administration after the 2004 election to spend more time writing and skiing.
But those plans would seem to be on hold, at least until the Plame case is settled.
Among vice-presidential aides throughout history, Libby is distinctive for the power and authority he wields, a product largely of Cheney's outsize role in the Bush administration. Libby holds three titles: chief of staff and national security adviser to Cheney, and assistant to Bush. Like few other advisers, he attends the highest level of White House meetings. He attends the weekly gathering of Bush's top economic advisers and -- according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack," about the Bush administration's run-up to the Iraq war -- was one of two non-principals who attended National Security Council meetings with the president after Sept. 11, 2001 (the other was Condoleezza Rice's then-deputy, Stephen Hadley).
In these meetings, Libby rarely speaks. He fixes his eyes on whomever is talking and often presses his fingers over his lips. "He sits there in the background with this little half-smile," says former senator Alan Simpson, the Wyoming Republican and one of Cheney's closest friends. Cheney vacations in Wyoming, and Libby usually goes along. "He's a dissector," Simpson says of Libby. "He is the ultimate, clinical professional."
Then there is the Libby whom Cheney adviser Mary Matalin calls "the other Scooter" and "the man who you pray you get seated next to at a dinner party."
It took him 20 years to complete "The Apprentice," a soaring, erotically charged novel set in rural Japan during a blizzard in 1903. "I went out to Colorado, drank tequila and wrote," Libby told CNN's Larry King in 2002 in a rare television interview, the bulk of which he spent discussing the 1996 novel, which had just been issued in paperback.
Wolfowitz, Libby's political science professor at Yale in the 1970s, recalls Libby telling him that "The Apprentice" was originally set in Vermont, but he eventually decided it would work better in Japan. He threw 300 pages away and started again.
The author's "storytelling skill neatly mixes conspiratorial murmurs with a boy's emotional turmoil," the New York Times Book Review said of the novel.
A more recent piece of Libby's writing also drew attention, if not acclaim.
"You went to jail in the summer," Libby wrote in a letter to Miller, waxing pastoral after he freed her to speak to the grand jury about their conversations. "It is fall now. . . . Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life."
The spy-novel dexterity of Libby's mind and the odd flamboyance of his prose raised questions that he might have been trying to say something more.
"How do I interpret that?" Fitzgerald asked Miller during her grand jury testimony, according to her account in the Times.
Friends say Libby cultivates an enigmatic bearing, one epitomized at the end of Miller's first-person account. She tells of her last face-to-face encounter with Libby, in August 2003 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., after she had attended a conference in Aspen, Colo. "At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me," Miller wrote. "He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.
" 'Judy,' he said. 'It's Scooter Libby.' "
Several aspects of Libby are subject to varied interpretations, or at the very least, casual mystery. Libby is loath to disclose -- even to close friends -- what the "I" stands for in his name. Matalin credits USA Today with "breaking" the story that Libby's first name is "Irv" (though other publications had reported "Irving" and public databases list him as "Irve").
Cheney's office would not confirm or deny what the "I" stands for.
Likewise, there are differing accounts of where "Scooter" comes from. He told the New York Times in 2002 that his father, an investment banker now deceased, coined it upon seeing him crawl across his crib. The same year, in an interview with King, Libby spoke of a childhood comparison to New York Yankees Hall of Fame shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto ("I had the range but not the arm," Libby said).
Libby was born in New Haven, Conn., raised in Florida and -- like Bush -- attended prep school at Phillips Andover and college at Yale. He lives in McLean with his children and wife, Harriet Grant, a former lawyer on the Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Until he broke his foot, Libby played in a weekly touch football game in Chevy Chase.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, Libby was practicing law in Philadelphia in 1981 when Wolfowitz, then an assistant secretary of state, recruited him as a speech writer. At the time, Libby was reading William Stevenson's "A Man Called Intrepid," which described the British and American spy operation before and during World War II. "The characters' lives seemed considerably more exciting and meaningful than Libby's work in Philadelphia," wrote James Mann in the 2004 book "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet."
Libby also worked for Wolfowitz during Wolfowitz's stint as policy undersecretary of defense during the first Bush administration. He had long been interested in unconventional warfare, particularly in the Middle East, and his portfolio included the biological and chemical capabilities of Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, shared Libby's interest in weapons of mass destruction and was, according to a Pentagon official of that era, impressed by his diligence and analytical skill.
It was during the Gulf War that Miller also took notice of Libby. In a book that she co-wrote, "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," Libby is described as "a trim, boyish lawyer" who was frustrated that intelligence reports about Iraq's biological weapons program contained words like "probably" and "possibly."
"Libby," the book said, "told colleagues that intelligence analysts had an unfortunate habit: If they did not see a report on something, they assumed it did not exist."
The Gulf War era integrated several themes that have pervaded Libby's career: his interest in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, his frustration with the U.S. intelligence apparatus and his willingness to make leaps and support preemptive action. He shared the disappointment of his Pentagon bosses -- Wolfowitz and Cheney -- that the U.S. effort in the Gulf War had not toppled Hussein.
During the Clinton years, Libby practiced law at the Washington office of Dechert, Price and Rhoads, where he represented Marc Rich, the fugitive billionaire whom Clinton pardoned hours before he left office. Libby was called to testify before a congressional committee investigating Clinton's pardons during the first months of the Bush administration.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks confirmed Libby's long-held view that Islamic terrorism was the foremost threat of the post-Cold War era. He had studied the topic for years and had spoken often of its horrific perils to the United States. "I was hounded by Scooter about what we were doing about things like anthrax," Wolfowitz says, referring to 2002. "He was very concerned about what he saw as a general lack of preparedness."
Libby greatly admires the work of Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian who posits that warfare is an inevitable part of civilization, evil is a basic condition of humanity, and tyrants must be confronted by the harshest possible means. (In late 2002, a few months before the Iraq invasion, Cheney -- also a Hanson devotee -- invited the historian to the vice president's mansion for a small dinner gathering that included Libby.)
Hanson's stark perspective comports with Libby's view on Iraq. He was among the administration's fiercest proponents of the invasion, and his office prepared a 48-page document of intelligence on Iraq WMDs for Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003. (Powell couldn't confirm a lot of the data and wound up not using much of it.)
In his office in the Old Executive Office Building -- once occupied by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt during their respective stints as assistant secretaries of the Navy -- Libby keeps a photograph of Winston Churchill. Like Wolfowitz, Cheney and many of the Bush administration's Iraq hawks, Libby reveres Churchill for his willingness to confront evil boldly and his unwillingness to compromise. In a December 2001 interview with James Mann, Libby read from "The Gathering Storm," Churchill's memoir of the years preceding World War II. "I felt as though I were walking with destiny," Churchill wrote of the moment he became the British prime minister, "and that all my past life had been a preparation for the hour and for this trial."
That passage, Libby told Mann, could also have applied to his boss, Cheney, on Sept. 11.
In this context of urgency, Libby can be impatient. And, associates say, he could become infuriated over discordant views over Iraq, both from within and outside the administration. On Friday the Los Angeles Times -- quoting former aides -- reported that Libby became so enraged about Wilson's public statements that he monitored all of the former ambassador's television appearances and urged the administration to wage an aggressive campaign against him. (Cheney's office declined to comment on the report.)
Friends and associates say Libby remains unbowed about the U.S. action in Iraq, and despite the setbacks of recent months has shown no hint of doubt. In times of travail, Libby recalls the excitement of his job and the grandeur of his mission.
"Cheney and Scooter play chess on several different levels," Matalin says. "That's how their minds work. It's not about what's right in front of him. They look at things in the sweep of history.
"The Wilson thing was almost mosquitoesque."

Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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