And the Fighting Continues in the Middle East

War Over Gaza

By ETHAN BRONNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
Published: December 30, 2008

Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory. Still we fear that Israel’s response — devastating airstrikes that represent the largest military operation in Gaza since 1967 — is unlikely to weaken the militant Palestinian group substantially or move things any closer to what all Israelis and all Palestinians need: a durable peace agreement and a two-state solution.

Israel must make every effort to limit civilian casualties. Hamas’s leaders, especially those safely ensconced in Damascus, are unconcerned about their people’s suffering — and masters at capitalizing on it.

Before the conflict spins out of control, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will have to find ways to cajole or more likely threaten Hamas (or its patrons in Syria and Iran) to accept a new cease-fire.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should be pressing Cairo and Riyadh to use all of their influence with Hamas, and they should be pressing Israel to exercise restraint.

By Monday, some 350 Palestinians — mostly Hamas security forces — were reported killed. A Hamas security compound was among dozens of structures pummeled in the attacks, and the group’s leaders were supposedly driven into hiding. The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, promised a “war to the bitter end.”

We hope he does not mean a ground war. That, or any prolonged military action, would be disastrous for Israel and lead to wider regional instability. Mr. Barak and Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, both candidates to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in elections set for February, must not be drawn any further into a competition with the front-runner, Benjamin Netanyahu, over who is the biggest hawk.

There can be no justification for Hamas’s attacks or its virulent rejectionism. But others must also take responsibility for the current mess. Hamas never fully observed the cease-fire that went into effect on June 19 and Israel never really lived up to its commitment to ease its punishing embargo on Gaza. When the cease-fire ran out, no one, including the Bush administration, made a serious effort to get it extended.

Meanwhile, the peace process Mr. Bush launched with such fanfare in Annapolis last year is moribund. There is plenty of blame to go around for that, too. Mr. Olmert’s government failed to halt settlements and give the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas — Hamas’s sworn enemy — the support he needed. Mr. Bush refused to press Mr. Olmert to do what was needed but politically unpalatable. Arab leaders never did enough to boost Mr. Abbas, or to persuade or pressure Hamas to cut its ties with Iran and join peace efforts.

Ms. Rice once hoped to make a Middle East peace her legacy. It is too late for that. But she should do her job. That means getting on a plane for Cairo and Riyadh — now — to enlist their help in brokering a new cease-fire. Then it will be up to President-elect Barack Obama to quickly pick up the pieces and fashion a Middle East peace strategy that may actually bring peace.

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:
Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95

By TIM WEINER

W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif.

His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.

In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.

The disclosure even surprised Mr. Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Mr. Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Mr. Felt that he did not introduce him to Mr. Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal. The three met for two hours one afternoon last month in Santa Rosa, where Mr. Felt had retired. The reporters likened it to a family reunion.

Mr. Felt played a dual role in the fall of Nixon. As a secret informant, he kept the story alive in the press. As associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he fought the president’s efforts to obstruct the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Watergate break-in.

Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate — shorthand for the revealed abuses of presidential powers in the Nixon White House, including illegal wiretapping, burglaries and money laundering. Americans might never have seen a president as a criminal conspirator, or reporters as cultural heroes, or anonymous sources like Mr. Felt as a necessary if undesired tool in the pursuit of truth.

Like Nixon, Mr. Felt authorized illegal break-ins in the name of national security and then received the absolution of a presidential pardon. Their lives were intertwined in ways only they and a few others knew.

Nixon cursed his name when he learned early on that Mr. Felt was providing aid to the enemy in the wars of Watergate. The conversation was recorded in the Oval Office and later made public.

“We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex.

“Somebody in the F.B.I.?” Nixon asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Haldeman replied. Who? the president asked. “Mark Felt,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Now why the hell would he do that?” the president asked in a wounded tone.

No one, including Mr. Felt, ever answered that question in full. Mr. Felt later said he believed that the president had been misusing the F.B.I. for political advantage. He knew that Nixon wanted the Watergate affair to vanish. He knew that the White House had ordered the C.I.A. to tell the bureau, on grounds of national security, to stand down in its felony investigation of the June 1972 break-in. He saw that order as an effort to obstruct justice, and he rejected it. That resistance led indirectly to Nixon’s resignation.

Mr. Felt had expected to be named to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the bureau for 48 years and died in May 1972. The president instead chose a politically loyal Justice Department official, L. Patrick Gray III, who later followed orders from the White House to destroy documents in the case.

The choice infuriated Mr. Felt. He later wrote that the president “wanted a politician in J. Edgar Hoover’s position who would convert the bureau into an adjunct of the White House machine.”

Hoover had sworn off break-ins without warrants — “black bag jobs,” he called them — in 1966, after carrying them out at the F.B.I. for four decades. The Nixon White House hired its own operatives to steal information, plant eavesdropping equipment and hunt down the sources of leaks. The Watergate break-in took place six weeks after Hoover died.

While Watergate was seething, Mr. Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The F.B.I. had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because national security required it.

In a criminal trial, Mr. Felt was convicted in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Nixon, who had denounced him in private for leaking Watergate secrets, testified on his behalf. Called by the prosecution, he told the jury that presidents and by extension their officers had an inherent right to conduct illegal searches in the name of national security.

“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.”

Seven months after the conviction, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mr. Felt. Then 67, Mr. Felt celebrated the decision as one of great symbolic value. “This is going to be the biggest shot in the arm for the intelligence community for a long time,” he said. After the pardon, Nixon sent him a congratulatory bottle of Champagne.

Mr. Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth.

William Mark Felt was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, on Aug. 17, 1913. After graduating from the University of Idaho, he was drawn to public service in Washington and went to work for Senator James P. Pope, a Democrat.

In 1938, he married his college sweetheart, Audrey Robinson, in Washington. They were wed by the chaplain of the House of Representatives. She died in 1984. The couple had a daughter, Joan, and a son, Mark. They and four grandsons survive Mr. Felt.

Days before Pearl Harbor, after earning a law degree in night classes at George Washington University, Mr. Felt applied to the F.B.I. and joined it in January 1942. He spent most of World War II hunting German spies.

After stints in Seattle, New Orleans and Los Angeles, Hoover named him special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City and Kansas City offices in the late 1950s. Rising to high positions at the headquarters in the 1960s, he oversaw the training of F.B.I. agents and conducted internal investigations as chief of the inspection division.

In early 1970, while waiting in an anteroom of the West Wing of the White House, Mr. Felt chanced to meet a Navy lieutenant delivering classified messages to the National Security Council staff. The young man in dress blues was Bob Woodward. By his own description fiercely ambitious and in need of adult guidance, Mr. Woodward tried to wring career counseling from his elder. He left the White House with the number to Mr. Felt’s direct line at the F.B.I.

On July 1, 1971, Hoover promoted Mr. Felt to deputy associate director, the third in command at the headquarters, beneath Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime companion, Clyde A. Tolson. With both of his superiors in poor health, Mr. Felt increasingly took effective command of the daily work of the F.B.I. When Mr. Hoover died and Mr. Tolson retired, he saw his path to power cleared.

But Nixon denied him, and he seethed with frustrated ambition in the summer of 1972.

One evening that summer, a few weeks after the Watergate break-in, Mr. Woodward, then a neophyte newspaperman, knocked on Mr. Felt’s door in pursuit of the story. Mr. Felt decided to co-operate with him and set up an elaborate system of espionage techniques for clandestine meetings with Mr. Woodward.

If Mr. Woodward needed to talk, he would move a flowerpot planted with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment on P Street in Washington. If Mr. Felt had a message, Mr. Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20. Mr. Woodward would leave his apartment by the back alley that night and take one taxi to a downtown hotel, then a second to an underground parking garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Va.

Within weeks, Mr. Felt steered The Post to a story establishing that the Watergate break-in was part of “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” directed by the White House. For the next eight months, he did his best to keep the newspaper on the trail, largely by providing, on “deep background,” anonymous confirmation of facts reporters had gathered from others. The Post’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave him his famous pseudonym, taken from the pornographic movie then in vogue.

By June 1973, Mr. Felt was forced out of the F.B.I. Soon he came under investigation by some of the same agents he had supervised, suspected of leaking information not to The Post but to The New York Times. He spent much of the mid-1970s testifying in secret to Congress about abuses of power at the F.B.I. Millions of Americans knew him only as a shadowy figure in the 1976 movie made from the Watergate saga, “All the President’s Men,” which made “Woodward and Bernstein” legends of American journalism. In the movie, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) gives Mr. Woodward (Robert Redford) probably the most famous bit of free advice in the history of investigative journalism. It was a three-word road map to the heart of the matter: “Follow the money.”

Mr. Felt never said it. It was part of the myth that surrounded Deep Throat.

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie

www.ThroughYourBody.com

A humerous look at the Change of White House Décor when Obama Enters Office?

By PENELOPE GREEN

EVER since Mary Todd Lincoln overshot the White House decorating budget by $6,700 (a third of her $20,000 appropriation), infuriating her husband and delighting a press corps that had already turned against her, the redecoration of the president’s house has been a public relations minefield. Some new administrations tiptoe through it unscathed; others are less nimble, and bombs explode.

“It’s an old maxim that you can build a billion-dollar highway that’s the biggest pork barrel in the world and no one will say anything,” said William Seale, a White House historian, “but if you’re in public office and you try and change your desk, you’re going to end up on the front page. In presidential décor, one must remember the public eye is fixed on everything you do.”

Barack Obama’s transition team has not responded to inquiries about his interior design plans, so one can only speculate about how the Obamas will make their stylistic mark on the White House. Perhaps they will choose Nate Berkus, the engaging puppy dog of a decorator beloved by Oprah and other Chicagoans, to assist them.

Or perhaps, as the comedian Andy Borowitz suggested on the phone last week, they will follow the template the president-elect has laid out for his cabinet appointments. “That whole team-of-rivals approach,” Mr. Borowitz said, “so instead of one decorator there will be eight: four Republicans and four Democrats, none of whom can stand each other, and he’ll make them each do a room.”

However the Obamas decide to proceed, they’ll have to follow a few basic rules. For starters, they will have to pay for their own movers. And while Congress budgets $100,000 in household transition costs for every new administration, if the Obamas spend more than that — and most first families do — they will have to cover the expense of decorating their private quarters with private donations. In addition, they can’t change the public rooms without the approval of a committee of preservationists.

They would also be wise to remember that appearances do matter: Jimmy Carter’s earth-toned Oval Office read as both homespun and dreary (never mind that his predecessor, Gerald Ford, had chosen the décor and Mr. Carter was saving money by not redecorating), and the cost of Nancy Reagan’s china ($210,399) was seen as wildly extravagant (though the china was a private donation and considered a necessity — before then, state dinners were served on a mishmash of patterns because there wasn’t enough of any one set to go around). The Kennedy White House was too French; the Clintons’, too Arkansas. In recent history, only the Waspy Bushes (both 41 and 43) have escaped decorating derision.

Some stories about decorating missteps are apocryphal, like that of Nancy Reagan’s plan to tear down a wall in the Lincoln bedroom or that of the Clintons’ decorating costs running over budget (mentioned by the former deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, in a note shortly before he died in an apparent suicide). The bad press in both cases accrued to the president’s wife.

Attacking the first lady, said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, the author of a dozen books on first wives and their families and the historian of the National First Ladies Library, “is a way of not directly attacking a popular president.” Mr. Anthony ticked off a few of Nancy Reagan’s perceived sins, including that she asked the Carters to move out early so she could start redecorating and that she was decorating the private quarters in an inappropriately lavish way in a time of recession.

“Conscious of that, she used private funds” to shore up the house, Mr. Anthony said, “fixing floors, redoing hardware. The place was falling apart. Much of the money went to this, rather than the red decorating everybody remembers, because that’s what got reported. There’s a saying that in Washington, no good deed goes unpunished.”

The Clintons were savaged for packing up rugs, furniture and lamps given to them during their White House tenancy, and for soliciting donations of household objects for their post-White House residences (a house for her in Washington, and one for him in Chappaqua, N.Y.). They had always lived in public housing, Mr. Anthony said, and “in an effort to get up to speed, they put the word out that people could make donations.”

Money has historically been tight for White House families. Mr. Seale noted that James Monroe had a kind of pawn-shop arrangement, whereby he would finance diplomatic tours by selling pieces of the Directoire furniture he had collected in France to the United States government. “When he’d finished touring, he’d buy it back,” Mr. Seale said. “Then, of course, there was Mrs. Lincoln, who bought that famous Lincoln bed.”

When her husband was presented with the bill, Mr. Seale said, “He blew up.

“Let me see if I can get his quote right: ‘It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the president of the United States had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.’ ”

“Flub dubs,” Mr. Seale repeated, savoring the words. “Isn’t that a great phrase?” (Mr. Seale included it in his two-volume history, “The President’s House,” which was just published by the White House Historical Association.)

DECORATING the White House is the first lady’s job; she presides over the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, a board of appointees that includes her decorator and the White House curator, as well as art historians, furniture and decorative art experts and other advisers on historic preservation. (Laura Bush’s decorator, Kenneth Blasingame, a Fort Worth designer, has been steadily reworking rooms like the Lincoln Bedroom, which were revealed, to not much comment, in Architectural Digest last March.)

Renovations of the public rooms, additions to the formidable collections of art and furniture, and any restoration work is overseen by the committee and financed by the White House Endowment fund, which now has assets of about $27 million.

When it comes to the private quarters, on the second and third floors, and the Oval Office, though, the décor is the “personal decision of the first family,” said Tom Savage, director of museum affairs at Winterthur in Delaware and a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House during the Clinton administration. “But there are so many safeguards. The misconception of the public is that a first family can make very dramatic changes, and that’s just not so.”

There is drama on moving day, however. Gary Walters, who retired last year after 21 years of overseeing the 132-room mansion as chief White House usher, explained that on Inauguration Day it was his job to help the first families move, in the scant and hectic period between the time the exiting president departed for good (about 10:45 a.m., after greeting the president-elect under the North Portico and having a cup of coffee with him in the Blue Room) and the new president and his family left the inaugural parade in the late afternoon.

That leaves about five hours for the usher and 93 assistants, including household staff, painters, carpenters, florists and even calligraphers, Mr. Walters said, along with the new decorator and his or her staff, to unpack the family’s things and put everything away. “The goal is no unopened boxes,” said Mr. Walters, who used to move into the White House for a week before Inauguration Day, sleeping on a cot in the basement.

“It can be extremely difficult,” he added. “When Bush 41 was elected, for example, we expected to have the normal amount of time, until after the parade, but there were grandchildren and they got cold and came in about two hours early.”

Moving day is highly choreographed, the culmination of exhaustive prep work. After the ceremonial, post-election tour given to the president-elect and his family by the outgoing president and his wife, the chief usher meets with the new family. He presents them with floor plans and a book detailing the furniture and art owned by the White House and stored at a facility in Maryland.

“I asked questions like ‘What rooms do you want to use, and what beds? What would you like and where would you like us to put it? Do you have favorite foods?’ For the president, it’s ‘Which desk would you like?’ The questions are to elicit dialogue about things they might not have thought of,” Mr. Walters said.

Linens and mattresses are replaced, or “put out of service,” as he put it. “The new president will not have the linens of the previous president.”

This wasn’t always the case. Mamie Eisenhower complained that the linens were all mended, said Claire Whitcomb, co-author of “Real Life at the White House: Two Hundred Years of Daily Life at America’s Most Famous Residence” (Routledge, 2002). “And Eisenhower hated Truman so much, he didn’t bother to go on the tour. So when he woke up on his first day in office, he didn’t know where his office was.” Also, Ms. Whitcomb continued, the movers lost his suitcase.

Every family leaves something behind, intentionally or not. When the Fords moved in, Betty Ford found one of the Nixons’ boxes. “It was marked, ‘Tapes, Do Not Touch,’ ” Ms. Whitcomb said. Turns out, it was filled with the former president’s Mantovani recordings. And Ronald Reagan left a note in his desk drawer for George H. W. Bush, she added, that said, “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.”

Washington observers like Arianna Huffington predict no decorating pitfalls for the president-elect and his family, just another “teachable moment” for the rest of us.

“There have been a lot of these with the Obamas,” Ms. Huffington said, “like learning to get along with your mother-in-law and not holding grudges.” She imagines organic cotton curtains and nontoxic cleaning supplies.

For his part, Mr. Borowitz wondered if Michelle Obama might take “that victory dress and upholster a couch with it.”

“By repurposing it,” he said, “she could show how thrifty she was.”

“Money is important,” he continued. “Whatever furniture the Clintons didn’t take, the Obamas could auction off to pay down the costs of the auto industry bailout. Then they could get some modest things from Ikea or Craigslist. I’m sure there are some other people who have lost their presidents’ jobs in other countries who are putting their things on Craigslist. If Hugo Chávez gets defeated, maybe they could have his stuff.”

Iowa Justices Hear Same-Sex Marriage Case

By KIRK JOHNSON

In a case that could make Iowa the first Midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage, the Iowa Supreme Court on Tuesday pressed lawyers for both sides with sharp questions on topics like the 4,000-year-old history of marriage and whether a ruling favoring gay couples would open the door to polygamy.

The legal core of the case, Varnum v. Brien, is whether the state’s 10-year-old law defining a “valid” marriage as only “between a male and female” violates the Iowa Constitution’s guarantees of equal treatment and due process.

A trial court judge ruled last year that the law was unconstitutional and that a dozen gay men and lesbians had been wrongly denied marriage licenses in Polk County, which includes the state capital, Des Moines. The state appealed the ruling, leading to Tuesday’s oral arguments.

But the technical details of the law and the Constitution were only part of a free-wheeling discussion lasting nearly two hours in which the seven justices repeatedly interrupted the lawyers, demanding that they parse and defend their positions.

Where was the line, they asked, between religious and governmental interests in definitions of marriage? How did the state’s defense of the law defining marriage differ from the way it might have once defended now-defunct laws barring interracial marriage? Would allowing same-sex marriage encourage more gay couples to adopt, and was there anything wrong with that?

An assistant attorney for Polk County, Roger J. Kuhle, said the core of marriage, historically, was about children and creating stable systems for procreation.

“The essential factor of marriage, which is procreation, which is raising children, which is replenishing society, has never changed,” Mr. Kuhle told the court.

Justice David S. Wiggins then pointed out that society’s notion of what was acceptable in marriage had evolved over time.

“Thirty years ago you couldn’t have interracial marriage — I mean things are just changing,” Justice Wiggins said. “Is marriage, as you call it, a static relationship?”

But the panel was equally tough in pressing Dennis W. Johnson, the lawyer for the gay couples, led by Katherine and Patricia Varnum of Cedar Rapids. At one point several justices asked Mr. Johnson whether opening the door to same-sex marriage by striking down the state’s law defining marriage might allow marriages of more than two people.

It would not, he responded, because the body of law that has evolved around the institution of marriage is premised on two consenting adults. Gender, he said, is irrelevant to that institutional framework.

When asked whether recognizing same-sex marriage would not in fact change the institution itself, Mr. Johnson responded: “We’re not suggesting a new institution. We’re suggesting that everyone be able to participate equally.”

In his lower-court ruling, which found for the gay plaintiffs, Judge Robert B. Hanson of the Fifth Judicial District was sweeping in his dismissal of the state’s claims that heterosexual marriage was bolstered by an exclusionary definition.

“The law is extremely over-inclusive in its attempt to strengthen heterosexual marriage and procreation by preventing an entire distinct group of individuals — homosexuals — from marrying,” Judge Hanson wrote.

Judge Hanson said that Iowa law already allowed gay couples to adopt children, and that of the more than 5,800 same-sex couples in the state, 37 percent were raising children under age 18.

Laws barring same-sex marriage have been struck down by state courts in Massachusetts, in 2004, and in Connecticut and California this year. But public attitudes have not entirely kept pace with those legal shifts. Voters in three states approved same-sex marriage bans in last month’s elections, including in California, where they essentially nullified the State Supreme Court’s ruling by passing an amendment to the State Constitution that recognizes marriage only between a man and a woman.

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie

www.ThroughYourBody.com

Puck's Gay Love Potion Splashed Across Town

A Note From Alan:

Puck's love potion sprinkled in the eyes of all who voted for Proposition 8 . Might turn this world into a love friendly world versus a hate filled world. (In regards, to California's Gay Marriage Ban.)


By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: November 21, 2008

What teenager hasn’t fantasized about wielding magic to transform an indifferent object of desire into a besotted lover? In “Were the World Mine,” an indie alternative to Disney’s “High School Musical” franchise, Timothy (Tanner Cohen), a persecuted gay student at a private boys’ school outside Chicago, acquires such magic while rehearsing the role of Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

When a purple flower spurting Cupid’s love juice mysteriously springs up in Titania’s bower, Timothy plucks it and later tosses its liquid into the eyes of his secret crush, Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker), the ostensibly straight star of the rugby team. Mutual puppy love is instantaneous and intense.

In Timothy/Puck’s prankish scheme, every helpless target of such magic falls madly in love with the first person in sight, inappropriate or not. And for the next 24 hours Timothy dashes around his small town making unsuspecting homophobes, including the rugby coach, fall ridiculously in love with dumbfounded members of the same sex; before long, the streets are crawling with cow-eyed, spooning gay couples.

This small, endearing film, directed by Tom Gustafson from a screenplay he wrote with Cory James Krueckeberg, has already won a number of awards, including outstanding narrative feature at Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. In its giddiness, “Were the World Mine” echoes “High School Musical 3” right down to featuring balletic choreography on a basketball court.

With original music by Jessica Fogle, and lyrics (some original and others adapted from Shakespeare) by Mr. Krueckeberg, it is an enchanting, mildly subversive fantasia that reconciles sassy teenage argot with Elizabethan. One moment it is this, the next that. Ms. Fogle’s most striking music, especially the title song, sets Shakespearean dialogue in an ethereal Minimalist style that has the entranced intensity of centuries-old sacred music.

The movie doesn’t burst into song all that often. Some numbers are no more than clever asides, played on guitar and sung by Timothy’s sullen friend Frankie (Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin), a self-possessed tomboy who describes herself as “hetero-flexible.” Frankie morosely takes it in stride when Timothy experiments with the love juice on Max (Ricky Goldman), his best friend and her crush.

A subplot involves Timothy’s embattled relationship with his divorced mother, Donna (Judy McLane), who is having difficulty coming to terms with his sexuality. Donna takes a job as a door-to-door saleswoman for the cosmetics line invented by Nora (Jill Larson), the vain, bigoted wife of the school’s stuffy headmaster (David Darlow).

To some degree, Donna and Nora are John Waters-style female caricatures. So is the film’s mysteriously powerful guardian angel, Ms. Tebbit (Wendy Robie), the airy, arty English teacher who casts the Shakespeare production, oversees rehearsals and refuses to shut it down after the town goes erotically bonkers.

Ms. Robie, who bears a strong resemblance to Patricia Clarkson, plays the teacher as a benign sorceress who wears a secretive smile while using “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to impart some lessons in tolerance. In what is shown of the final production, the gawky high school boys playing both men’s and women’s roles have turned into graceful actors comfortable with Elizabethan English.

“Were the World Mine” begins tentatively, but once its tone is established, its charm overcomes the inevitable weaknesses of a musical made on a stringent budget. Like its Disney counterparts, it operates on the assumption that the movie musical is a world unto itself in which ordinary rules of logic don’t apply. One thing doesn’t have to lead to another, and not everything need be explained. Movie-musical magic makes up the difference.

WERE THE WORLD MINE

Opens on Friday in New York, San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif.

Directed by Tom Gustafson; written by Cory James Krueckeberg and Mr. Gustafson; director of photography, Kira Kelly; edited by Jennifer Lily; music by Jessica Fogle, adapted and original lyrics by Mr. Krueckeberg; choreography by Todd Underwood; production designer, Mr. Krueckeberg; produced by Mr. Gustafson, Mr. Krueckeberg and Peter Sterling; released by Speak Productions. In Manhattan at Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Tanner Cohen (Timothy), Wendy Robie (Ms. Tebbit), Judy McLane (Donna), Zelda Williams (Frankie), Jill Larson (Nora Bellinger), Ricky Goldman (Max), David Darlow (Lawrence Bellinger) and Nathaniel David Becker (Jonathon).

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie

www.ThroughYourBody.com

1103 Peveto St.

Houston, TX 77019

713-942-0923

The Party of Yesterday

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: October 26, 2008

Two years ago, a list of the nation’s brainiest cities was put together from Census Bureau reports — that is, cities with the highest percentage of college graduates, which is not the same as smart, of course.

These are vibrant, prosperous places where a knowledge economy and cool things to do after hours attract people from all over the country. Among the top 10, only two of those metro areas — Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky. — voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election.

This year, all 10 are likely to go Democratic. What’s more, with Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia now trending blue, Republicans stand to lose the nation’s 10 best-educated states as well.

It would be easy to say these places are not the real America, in the peculiar us-and-them parlance of Sarah Palin. It’s easy to say because Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American — a tactic that dates to Newt Gingrich’s reign in the capitol.

Brainy cities have low divorce rates, low crime, high job creation, ethnic diversity and creative capitalism. They’re places like Pittsburgh, with its top-notch universities; Albuquerque, with its surging Latino middle class; and Denver, with its outdoor-loving young people. They grow good people in the smart cities.

But in the politically suicidal greenhouse that Republicans have constructed for themselves, these cities are not welcome. They are disparaged as nests of latte-sipping weenies, alt-lifestyle types and “other” Americans, somehow inauthentic.

If that’s what Republicans want, they are doomed to be the party of yesterday.

Not only are we becoming more urban as a nation, but we’re headed for an ethnic muddle that could further shrink the party of small-mindedness. By 2023, more than half of all American children will be minority, the Census Bureau projects.

Ronald Reagan was lashed by liberals for running a “Morning in America” campaign, but he knew this country, at heart, was always tomorrow-looking — and he fared very well in educated cities as well as small towns. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” said Reagan, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears.” Barack Obama, who brings that music to the stage, leads by 30 points on the “hope and optimism” question in polls.

Spurning the Reagan lesson, John McCain made a fatal error in turning his campaign over to the audience of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. In so doing, he chose the unbearable lightness of being Sarah Palin, trotted out Paris Hilton and labeled Obama a socialist who associates with terrorists.

At a recent Palin rally, the crowd started chanting, “We want Fox!” McCain has given them just that. But how isolated and out-of-touch is this audience? At the end of each debate, a sure-fire way to decide who won was to look at the Fox viewers poll — typically showing a landslide for McCain. Within a day, scientific surveys found big wins for Obama.

Whether Americans are real or fake, they can see through Palin, a woman who couldn’t correctly answer a third grader a few days ago when asked to explain the duties of vice president. Somewhere, between the shuffling to costume and accessorize Palin with a $150,000 wardrobe, her handlers never handed her a copy of the Constitution.

Republicans blow off the smart cities with the counterargument that they win the exurbs — the frontier of new homes, young families and the fresh middle class. And it’s true, in 2004, George Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America.

That will not happen this year. Polls show McCain is losing 20 percent of self-described moderate Republicans. And new registration figures and other polls indicate that Obama will likely win such iconic exurban centers as Washoe County, Nev., Loudoun County, Va., and Wake County, N.C.

But in the kind of pattern that has held true since McCain went over to the stupid side, his brother recently referred to suburban northern Virginia as “communist country” and a top adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, said it was not “real Virginia.”

Here in Seattle, it’s become a one-party city, with a congressman for life and nodding-head liberals who seldom challenge a tax-loving city government. It would be nice, just to keep the philosophical debate sharp, if there were a few thoughtful Republicans around.

That won’t happen so long as Republicans continue to be the party of yesterday. They’ve written the cities off. Fake Americans don’t count, but this Election Day, for once, they will not feel left out.

RNC Spends Thousands on Clothes for Palin & Family

Is she a maverick, or a clotheshorse?

The Republican National Committee paid more than $150,000 for clothing, makeup and accessories in September that apparently went to Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, according to an article on Politico.com.

That included $9,447.71 to Macy’s, $789.72 to Barneys New York, $5,102.71 to Bloomingdales; $49,425.74 to Saks Fifth Avenue and $4,902.45 to Atelier.

In one heavyweight shopping trip in early September, $75,062.63 was spent at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, a host city of the Republican National Convention.

The expenditures were listed on the R.N.C.’s monthly financial disclosure forms.

Those forms also documented $4,716.49 on hair and makeup in September, expenses that were not incurred in August.

On the campaign trail, Ms. Palin is always impeccably turned out, sometime changing jackets, high heels and hairstyles twice or three times a day.

When asked for comment, Alex Conant, a spokesman for the R.N.C., said only: “The R.N.C. does not discuss expenses as it relates to strategy.”

Homosexual Culture: Corpus Christi & The Laramie Project

FOR American gay culture this month marks a doubly somber anniversary.

Ten years ago, on Oct. 12, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, died in a Colorado hospital almost a week after two men viciously beat him and left him tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyo. That same night Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi,” about 13 gay men who perform the story of Jesus, had its final preview performance at Manhattan Theater Club; due to weeks of protests and bomb threats, ticket holders had to pass through metal detectors before taking their seats.

In retrospect the events seem linked. Beyond the coincidence of timing, both were seen as stark reminders of lingering homophobia, and like Mr. McNally’s play the events in Laramie eventually found life in the theater. Shortly after Mr. Shepard’s murder the Tectonic Theater Project created “The Laramie Project,” a documentary drama about the crime and its aftermath that has been produced almost 2,000 times.

Now a new epilogue for “The Laramie Project” and a new production of “Corpus Christi,” which opened last week at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, are extending the stories that began a decade ago, making Mr. Shepard’s murder and Mr. McNally’s script once again part of the nation’s conversation about gay America.

Moisés Kaufman, artistic director of Tectonic, said the issues in his play are just as relevant now as they were in 1998. “These last 10 years have not been the best 10 years for social change — not only for the gay and lesbian community, but also for any issue of social justice,” he said. “As an artist I feel like the question is: ‘What can theater do now in America? How can we play a role in the national dialogue?’ ”

In “The Laramie Project” most of the script is taken directly from Tectonic’s interviews with Laramie citizens, so an actor playing, say, an older gay man from Wyoming is speaking a real man’s actual words.

“Learning lines uttered by other people, and realizing those lines articulate something about yourself and your community, is a profound exercise,” Mr. Kaufman said. “It points out the similarity between Laramie and the rest of the country.”

Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother, said that “The Laramie Project” forces performers and audience members to discuss cultural conflict. She said the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which she co-founded, gets e-mail messages all the time, even from gay people, “saying the play opened their eyes to things — especially that people have a right to their opinions, even if you don’t agree with them.”

Recently the piece has also become a living history lesson. “High school students and young college students are especially affected by it,” Ms. Shepard said. “They didn’t realize what was happening in 1998, so for them it isn’t a rerun.”

But eventually the play’s events could seem so distant that they become irrelevant. That’s why Tectonic re-interviewed many of its original subjects last month. The transcripts will be shaped into an epilogue for all future productions.

“My hope is that the epilogue will continue to shed light on where we are,” Mr. Kaufman said. “What has changed? What has not changed? In that way it continues the dialogue.”

With “Corpus Christi,” which hasn’t played Manhattan since its controversial premiere, the challenge may be fostering the conversations that Mr. McNally originally intended. “I’m glad it’s coming back, because it was not seen fairly,” he said. “If you’re going to have a controversy about your work, it should at least accurately reflect what the work is about.”

The original outcry began in 1998 when The New York Post reported that the play would depict a gay Jesus having onstage sex with his apostles. That was not true — the show features gay, modern-day Texans gathering to celebrate and portray the story of Jesus (renamed Joshua), but there are no overtly sexual scenes.

At the time, however, the rumors turned the play into a tabloid sensation. Religious leaders led a news media campaign against the show, while Mr. McNally and several employees of Manhattan Theater Club received anonymous threats.

The theater initially canceled the production, though it was reinstated after much protest. “By that point the play was perceived as a freedom-of-speech play, which was not the issue I was addressing when I sat down to write it,” Mr. McNally said. “I was trying to invite gay men and women back to the table of spirituality. We’ve been made to feel we are sinners and that we have no business in the story.”

But if the play’s spiritual aspect was overshadowed during its premiere, it has been integral to the revival by the Los Angeles theater company, 108 Productions. For one thing, the company first performed “Corpus Christi” in a church.

This production (which features women in some roles) opened in 2006 at the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in West Hollywood. It then toured several California cities and as far away as Edinburgh and Dublin.

So far the trip to New York has stirred no controversy. “To know that it opened to such intense backlash — that it was automatically deemed blasphemous — is incredible to me,” said James Brandon, who has played Joshua since 2006. “In our experience we’ve been completely embraced.”

Mr. Brandon said that without the fog of outrage the play’s religious themes become clearer. “If you put a label on it, it is a ‘gay Jesus play,’ but in my eyes it’s much bigger than that,” he said. “It’s about recognizing that all people are the same. Gay men and women are just as divine as everyone else.”

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Harvey Milk: 30 Years Later a Film is Made

LOS ANGELES — One morning in 1978 a disgruntled San Francisco politician, Dan White, climbed through a City Hall window, assassinated Mayor George Moscone, then shot and killed an openly gay adversary on the city’s Board of Supervisors named Harvey Milk.

It was a fractured moment in a troubled time and place. Memories of it soon will be roiling the Oscar race.

On Oct. 28 Focus Features expects to introduce its film “Milk,” directed by Gus Van Sant with Sean Penn in the title role, at a gala in San Francisco hosted by local luminaries, at least one of whom — Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the president of the board of supervisors — was just steps away when Mr. Milk and Mayor Moscone were shot. The movie will begin playing in some theaters on Nov. 26, just ahead of the 30th anniversary of the killings on Nov. 27, then gain wider release as the awards season gets under way.

Already the film is drawing attention as an early contender in the coming Oscar race. Following early screenings, for instance, Hollywood insiders and others have been startled by Mr. Penn’s picture-perfect rendering of Mr. Milk, a politician who was at once gawky, ambitious and unforgettable to those whose lives he touched. “Sean’s portrayal of Harvey is so beautifully right,” Cleve Jones, a Milk friend who is played in the film by Emile Hirsch, said in a phone interview.

Yet the movie presents no small challenge for Focus, the specialty division owned by NBC Universal that two years ago pushed its gay-theme “Brokeback Mountain” to the cusp of Oscar glory with eight nominations, only to see “Crash” win best picture.

This time around, studio marketers are wrestling with an inherently political film at a time when audiences have been wary of them. Only last weekend the combined star power of Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe was not enough to save an issues-oriented thriller, “Body of Lies,” which opened poorly for Warner Brothers.

Focus and Mr. Van Sant will have to connect millions of filmgoers with a world that could seem weirdly disconnected, even back then. Only nine days before the murders, for example, the Rev. Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple had become influential in San Francisco politics, had orchestrated the death of more than 900 followers and others at Jonestown in Guyana.

The publishing heiress Patricia Hearst, meanwhile, was tucked in a Bay Area prison, the consequence of her engaging in a bank robbery for the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnapped her.

“You’re giving me an acid flashback to all the chatter before ‘Brokeback,’ ” said James Schamus, chief executive of Focus, responding to a question about the universal message in Mr. Milk’s struggles. Those could turn on matters as weighty as gay rights, or as slight as an ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets.

“Harvey said, ‘This is a quest for everybody’s rights,’ ” Mr. Schamus said. “That was his genius.”

If the ranch hands of “Brokeback” were subdued, nothing about Mr. Milk was. He loudly insisted that gay people should be out of the closet, at a time when public homosexuality was largely confined to San Francisco and a few like-minded enclaves.

Mr. Milk’s grandest political battle was his successful fight against a California initiative that would have banned gay teachers from the state’s public schools. His roughest was the backroom scrap in which he helped to block Mr. White’s reappointment to a supervisor’s post from which he had resigned two weeks earlier. Mayor Moscone was planning to discuss that decision publicly on the day of the murders.

(Upon Mr. Moscone’s death Ms. Feinstein, as president of the board of supervisors, became mayor, propelling her political rise. Mr. White would later use a “Twinkie defense,” in which his junk-food diet was cited as representative of his diminished capacity, to avoid conviction for first-degree murder; his conviction on the lesser counts of manslaughter sparked the so-called White Night riots in the city.)

According to the film’s producers and others, some of the political intricacies were whittled from Dustin Lance Black’s script. Though the People’s Temple had supported Mr. Milk, for instance, Mr. Jones was largely cut. “It would take so much time to explain to people who Jim Jones was,” said Dan Jinks, who with his business partner Bruce Cohen are among the movie’s producers.

What remained, according to Mr. Jinks, was the story of a “regular guy” — before politics, Mr. Milk was best known as co-owner of a camera store in the Castro district of San Francisco — who decided to make a difference.

The documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” directed by Rob Epstein, won the Oscar for best feature documentary in 1985. “Execution of Justice,” shown on the Showtime cable network in 1999, was a drama based on the murders.

Mr. Van Sant’s film came together suddenly last year after he and other filmmakers, Bryan Singer and Oliver Stone among them, had struggled for two decades with various attempts to find a feature film in Mr. Milk’s life.

Mr. Black, himself a director, bypassed those earlier efforts, many of them based on Randy Shilts’s book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” and began researching an original script with the help of those who knew Mr. Milk. In early 2007 one of those friends, Mr. Jones, showed the script to Mr. Van Sant, whom he had known for years.

Mr. Van Sant, speaking by telephone, said he signed on partly because Mr. Black had managed to confine the story to the brief and heady period that preceded Mr. Milk’s death. “He made choices,” Mr. Van Sant said.

Mr. Penn joined up, as did Mr. Jinks and Mr. Cohen. They next connected with Groundswell Productions and its chief executive, Michael London, who in turn joined Focus in financing a film that cost a relatively modest $20 million or so to make.

Yet “Milk” acquired a kind of epic quality as much of San Francisco became involved. “It took on almost Tolstoyan proportions,” Mr. Schamus said of the movie’s familial sprawl.

A number of Mr. Milk’s aging associates are not only portrayed in the film, they also have bit parts. Danny Nicoletta, who worked in Mr. Milk’s camera shop, for instance, is played by Lucas Grabeel of “High School Musical” and, in turn, plays Carl Carlson, an aide to Mr. Milk who was one of the last to see him alive. In addition Mr. Nicoletta advised Mr. Black on the script and worked as the film’s still photographer.

In one more twist this month’s premiere, a benefit for various gay and lesbian youth groups, will open with a screening at the Castro Theater, near the site of Mr. Milk’s old camera shop, and will end with dinner and dancing at City Hall, where he died.

The moral in all of it, Mr. Van Sant said, is ultimately political. “It’s an illustration of pretty extreme grass-roots politics,” he said of his film’s message, “that you can do it.”

But others are hoping that he has found the beating heart in Mr. Milk.

“He wasn’t Mother Teresa,” Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco supervisor who appears in the movie, said of Mr. Milk. “He just connected with people, one by one.”

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie

Not Sure When Baseball became Important in the Presidential Elections....but Apparently it is Now

Palin Splits Her Baseball Loyalties

By Mark Leibovich

Gov. Sarah Palin has added a twist on the old baseball maxim of “root root root for the home team” – as in, “root, root, root for the home team, depending on where you are.”

As The Caucus noted, Ms. Palin visited Salem, N.H. Wednesday night and said she looked forward to watching Senator John McCain debate Senator Barack Obama “right here, in the heart of Red Sox Nation.” Ms. Palin said that “Red Sox fans know how to turn an underdog into a victor,” a timely applause line given that the Sox trail the Tampa Bay Rays three-games-to-one in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series.

It seems, however, that Ms. Palin voiced a similar sentiment – actually, identical sentiment – last week at a rally in Florida.

“How about those Tampa Bay Rays?” Ms. Palin said after the Rays defeated the Chicago White Sox.

“You know what that tells me? It tells me that the people in this area know a little something about turning an underdog into a victor.”

The Democratic National Committee was quick to point out — and mock – Ms. Palin’s apparent sporting duplicity.

“Apparently this team of mavericks thinks straight talk means saying one thing to Rays fans and another to Red Sox fans,” said Damien LaVera, D.N.C. spokesman

The Red Sox or Rays will meet the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series.

Ms. Palin is scheduled to visit eastern Pennsylvania later this week.

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Watch the Body Brilliance Movie

Obama Details Plan to Aid Victims of Fiscal Crisis

TOLEDO, Ohio — Senator Barack Obama proposed new steps on Monday to address the economic crisis, calling for temporary but costly new programs to help employers, automakers, homeowners, the unemployed, and state and local governments.

In an address here, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, proposed giving employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire to encourage job creation. He said he would seek to allow Americans of all ages to borrow from retirement savings without a tax penalty; to eliminate income taxes on unemployment benefits; and to double, to $50 billion, the government’s loan guarantees for automakers.

Mr. Obama also called on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to create a mechanism to lend money to cities and states with fiscal problems, and to expand the government guarantees for financial institutions to encourage a return to more normal lending. He also proposed a 90-day moratorium on most home foreclosures; it would require financial institutions that take government help to agree not to act against homeowners who are trying to make payments, even if not the full amounts.

“We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of more than 3,000 people at the SeaGate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo.

Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, will make new proposals for the economy on Tuesday, advisers said. They did not provide any details.

Late Sunday, after Mr. McCain and his team looked at a variety of policy options over the weekend, a campaign spokesman said Mr. McCain, who has been losing ground to Mr. Obama in the polls, would have no new proposals unless events warranted. Mr. McCain has been emphasizing his plan to help people with financial difficulties get more affordable mortgages, with taxpayers picking up the tab.

In his speech on Monday, Mr. Obama said: “I won’t pretend this will be easy. George Bush has dug a deep hole for us. It’s going to take a while for us to dig our way out. We’re going to have to set priorities as never before.”

The package of new proposals was the most detailed and ambitious offered by Mr. Obama since the financial crisis became acute last month, clouding the economic outlook and transforming the presidential campaign.

This struggling manufacturing city is representative of both the economic crisis and the political battle for industrial-belt swing states that could determine the winner of the election. Mr. Obama is spending three days in northwestern Ohio, just south of the auto-making capital, Detroit, mostly sequestered with advisers to prepare for the third and final presidential debate on Wednesday at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.

Mr. Obama’s advisers emphasized that many of the new steps he called for could be taken quickly by the Democratic-controlled Congress in a lame-duck session this year, instead of waiting until after the new president is sworn into office in late January. Several steps could be taken by the Treasury and Federal Reserve using their powers under current law, the advisers said.

At the Capitol on Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not commit to calling Congress back immediately after the elections to consider a stimulus plan, given the potential that Mr. Bush would veto it. House Democratic leaders met with economists and afterward said they would develop a package for increased spending on public works, health care subsidies for states, extended unemployment pay and food stamp assistance.

Obama advisers put the cost of Mr. Obama’s full economic stimulus plan at $175 billion, including $60 billion for the steps announced Monday.

Of the earlier $115 billion, $50 billion would be used to help states and to speed construction of roads and other infrastructure projects that create jobs. About $65 billion of it would be the cost of a second round of rebates to taxpayers this year.

Mr. Obama had initially proposed to offset the rebates’ expense with a new windfall-profits tax on oil companies, but the campaign indicated Monday that he would scrap that plan assuming that oil prices do not rise above about $80 a barrel. The shift was just one sign of how the economic crisis has shoved concerns about budget deficits to the sidelines.

Despite criticism from the McCain camp that increasing taxes would further endanger the economy, Mr. Obama has “no plans to change” his longstanding proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts next year for households with an annual income of more than $250,000, said Jason Furman, Mr. Obama’s economic adviser. Under Mr. Obama’s plan, most individuals and families would get a tax cut, and in terms of total dollars, he would cut taxes on lower- and middle-income people more than he would raise them on upper-income people.

McCain advisers on Monday reiterated their argument that the higher taxes, together with Mr. Obama’s plan for expanded health care, would hit small businesses with costs they could ill afford. Many small businesses pay taxes as individuals. But the Obama campaign and independent fact-checking groups argue that relatively few would be affected by the tax increase on upper-income levels.

The recent surge of government spending to bail out financial institutions and other corporations are likely to drive projections for the federal deficit this year and beyond far above the $438 billion shortfall recorded for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Yet the McCain campaign insisted Monday that Mr. McCain would balance the budget by 2013, which would be the end of his first term. Nonpartisan analysts consider that unlikely if not impossible. Mr. Obama is promising to reduce annual deficits from the current level.

The most costly of Mr. Obama’s new proposals is the one giving businesses a $3,000 income tax credit for each new full-time employee they hire above their current work force. The proposal, which would be effective for the next two years and is based on a concept that has been used in past downturns, would account for about $40 billion of the new package’s $60 billion price tag.

About $10 billion of the $60 billion would go to eliminating income taxes on unemployment benefits and extending aid to the long-term unemployed by 13 weeks, on top of the existing 26 weeks.

Mr. Obama’s proposal from last week to allow struggling small businesses to apply for loans from the Small Business Administration’s disaster funds would cost more than $5 billion. The expense of covering additional loan guarantees for the auto industry would mean more than $4 billion more.

While not costly to the Treasury, perhaps more controversial is Mr. Obama’s proposal to allow Americans to withdraw without tax penalty 15 percent of their retirement savings, up to $10,000, from their tax-favored Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)s. They would still have to pay income taxes on the withdrawal. Current law requires savers younger than 59 ½ to pay taxes and a 10 percent penalty.

Economists and nonpartisan analysts generally oppose making it easier for Americans to tap into retirement savings, considering that the United States has a net negative savings rate that is the lowest among the world’s industrialized nations. But Obama advisers counter that many Americans need that money to get by and should not be penalized when major financial institutions are getting bailouts.

For savers, the downside to withdrawing money now is that they would get less value given the slide in the stock markets. With that in mind, Mr. McCain last week proposed waiving federal rules that require older Americans to begin withdrawing funds as soon as they reach age 70 ½. On Monday, Mr. Obama praised Mr. McCain’s proposal, telling the Ohioans, “I want to give credit where credit is due.”

To impose the 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, Mr. Obama would have the government, using its existing authority, require financial institutions that take advantage of the Treasury’s rescue plan to agree not to foreclose on the mortgages of any homeowners who are making “good faith efforts” to pay, even if their payments fall short.

Love your way... you are Brilliant!

Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report

"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your

Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a

Sensational Life"

available at www.throughyourbody.com

Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance:

Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)

http://bodybrilliancebook.com/bbb_movie/

Alaska Inquiry Concludes Palin Abused Powers

Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper’s boss.

A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing, largely as a result of his temperament and past disciplinary problems.

“Such impermissible and repeated contacts,” the report states, “create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior’s displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure.” The report concludes that the action was a violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

What now lies ahead is not fully known at this point. Ms. Palin could be censured by the Legislature, but that is unlikely.

Ms. Palin, who had been elected governor in 2006, was tapped as Senator John McCain’s running mate in late August, about a month after an inquiry was opened into her firing of Mr. Monegan. Her political ascendancy took what was essentially a state personnel matter and elevated it into a national issue, one that has been simmering in the background of an increasingly heated presidential race

In the report, the independent investigator, Stephen E. Branchflower, a former prosecutor in Anchorage, said that Ms. Palin wrongfully allowed her husband, Todd, to use state resources as part of the effort to have Trooper Wooten dismissed.

The report says she knowingly “permitted Todd Palin to use the governor’s office and the resources of the governor’s office, including access to state employees, to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired.”

Further, it says, she “knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda.”

Three years ago, Trooper Wooten and the governor’s sister, Molly McCann, were locked in a harsh divorce and child-custody battle that further turned the Palin family against him. The couple divorced in January 2006.

As a result of several complaints against Trooper Wooten, he was suspended from the state police force for five days. However, Mr. Branchflower’s report found numerous instances in which Ms. Palin, her husband and her subordinates tried to press for harsher punishment, even though Mr. Monegan and others told them they had gone as far as the law and civil service rules would allow.

Ms. Palin has denied that anyone told Mr. Monegan to dismiss Trooper Wooten, or that the commissioner’s ouster had anything to do with the trooper, who remains on the force.

Mr. Monegan has said that he believes he lost his job because he would not bend to pressure to dismiss Trooper Wooten. On July 28, the Legislative Council, a bipartisan body of House and Senate members that can convene to make decisions when the Legislature is not in session, approved an independent investigation into whether the governor abused the powers of her office to pursue a personal vendetta.

Mr. Monegan said in an interview Friday night that he felt relieved.

“I feel that my beliefs and opinions that Wooten was a significant factor, if not the factor, in my termination have been validated,” Mr. Monegan said, adding, “I was resisting the governor from the very beginning on the Wooten matter to protect her from exactly what just happened to her here, being found to have acted inappropriately.”

The report was released after Alaska lawmakers emerged from a private session in Anchorage where they spent more than of six hours discussing the ethics report and what portions should be made public. The legislative council ended up voting unanimously to make part of the overall report public.

At a news conference Friday evening, a local McCain-Palin campaign spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, said that Mr. Branchflower’s abuse of power finding was the result of an “overreach” by the investigator who went beyond “the intent of the original” inquiry.

Ms. Stapleton added that the governor “feels absolutely vindicated” because the report concluded that Ms. Palin was acting within her legal authority when she “reassigned” Mr. Monegan. On July 11, he was told by the governor’s acting chief of staff that Ms. Palin wanted him to head the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, and that she wanted to take the public safety agency in a new direction.

In an e-mail statement, Ms. Stapleton said the report showed that the investigation was a “partisan led inquiry run by Obama supporters and the Palins were completely justified in their concern regarding Trooper Wooten given his violent and rogue behavior.”

Minutes after the report was released, the Obama campaign sent an Associated Press article in an e-mail message to reporters, with the subject line, “Palin ‘unlawfully abused her authority.’ ” It contained no other comment.

A pre-emptive report on the investigation by the McCain-Palin campaign, released late Thursday, said that beginning in October 2007, the governor and members of her administration repeatedly clashed with Mr. Monegan over budgetary issues and the direction of his agency.

After months of “repeatedly ignoring the governor’s budget priorities, making public statements that directly challenged the governor’s policy agenda and taking numerous unilateral actions in conflict with the governor in support of his own policy agenda, his replacement in July 2008 should have come as no surprise,” that report said.

Mr. Branchflower based his finding of abuse of power on Alaska’s Executive Branch Ethics Act, which was established to “discourage executive branch employees from acting upon personal interest in the performance of their public responsibilities and to avoid conflicts of interest in the performance of duty,” the report says.

It says, however, that “Governor Palin’s firing of Commissioner Walt Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.” It cites the Alaska Constitution, which says “the governor may discharge department heads without cause.”

The report continues, “In light of this constitutional and statutory authority, it is clear that Governor Palin could fire Commissioner Walt Monegan at will, for almost any reason, or no reason at all.”

The report states that, while there is no doubt that Mr. Monegan’s “failure to fire Trooper Wooten was a substantial factor in his own firing,” the evidence suggests it was not the sole reason.

The report chastised Ms. Palin for declining to be interviewed.

Legislative leaders said that in cases like this, a violation of the ethics law would typically be resolved by the state Personnel Board. However, that chain of events is complicated by the fact that the panel is conducting an inquiry of its own. Ms. Palin has pledged to cooperate with that investigation.

Even as Ms. Palin drew large crowds as she campaigned across the United States, the issue was brewing in Alaska. But the campaign repeatedly shrugged off the accusations, stating that they were not serious and that she was not guilty of any wrongdoing.

Still, the accusations undermined the campaign’s portrayal of Ms. Palin as a “maverick” and an ethics reformer who has taken on special interests and fought for average residents.

The McCain campaign flew operatives into Alaska to wage a public relations campaign to discredit the investigation and to help mount legal challenges to it.