Saturday, February 26, 2011

The (Ex) Voice of the Village

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Wayne Barrett wrote for The Village Voice for 37 years.
WAYNE BARRETT wants to say nice things about people. He wants to, but he finds it so hard.
Susan Ferguson
PERILS OF REPORTING In 1985, while investigating the empire that Ramon S. Velez had built through a network of social services programs in the South Bronx, Wayne Barrett and a photographer visited a Velez property in Puerto Rico. Mr. Velez lunged at them with a broom as a gardener, left, watched. Mr. Barrett said he was also tackled and choked. The photographer rescued him.
“We haven’t had bad mayors,” ventured Mr. Barrett, the muck-raking investigative reporter who has made a career of hounding New York City’s chief executives. “They’ve all done some really good things,” he added, “though you probably wouldn’t know it to read my copy.”

To review: “Bloomberg’s first term was, I think, the best I’ve ever covered, but since then he’s treading water. I think the job bores him.

“I was very enamored of Rudy Giuliani when he was U.S. attorney, but as mayor, he poisoned the atmosphere, and he doesn’t get better over time.”

How about Edward I. Koch, who took office in 1978, shortly before Mr. Barrett became a columnist at The Village Voice, and stayed 12 years? The man about whom Mr. Barrett spilled more ink than about any other — 90 percent of it negative, by his own estimate?
His greatest professional regret, Mr. Barrett said, is “that I didn’t write more positive pieces about the things Koch did well.”

“Koch’s work on improving the housing stock in poor neighborhoods had enormous, lasting benefits.” Pause. “But he did embrace the criminal class that ran the Democratic Party.”
In 37 years of prolific writing for The Voice — 32 of them as an investigative columnist — and in four books, Mr. Barrett has become the unrivaled master of long, dense articles about the unsavory side of New York’s political culture. He has passed decades digging through government archives, court transcripts, property records, police blotters and campaign filings, weaving tales of corruption and hypocrisy involving union leaders, neighborhood power brokers, real estate developers, mayors and governors.

That ended in December, when he was laid off without explanation (he suspects budgetary reasons), prompting laments about the future of The Voice, of the city, of journalism itself.
“It’s like trading DiMaggio,” said Donald H. Forst, who was editor of the paper from 1996 to 2006. “It really won’t be the same without him.”

Finding himself unexpectedly unemployed at age 65, Mr. Barrett never stopped working. He walked out of The Voice with half a dozen ideas that he described excitedly, sure that each would blow the lid off someone or something. And every day, newspapers provide new inspirations.

He is at work on an article for The Nation (no, of course he will not say about what) and has a deal with an affiliated group, the Nation Institute, which commissions reporting and finds places to publish it. He is reporting another article for Tina Brown, newly named editor of Newsweek (something about celebrities, but, he promised, “the story has inherent value”), perhaps the start of a relationship.

Mr. Barrett, then, is doing fine, thank you very much. He even wants to say something nice about the editor of The Voice. Though he finds it a little hard.

“Tony Ortega is the hardest working editor and the most skillful editor of copy that I’ve ever had,” Mr. Barrett said. “But I’ve never liked him very much.”

Then again, Mr. Barrett has never had much use for editors. “I don’t think there was a single time I did a story an editor asked me to do,” he said. “It was extremely rare that they asked me, and every time they did ask, I didn’t do it.” It’s not that these editors had ideas that were bad, Mr. Barrett added — just that his were better.

One of the earliest ideas, back in 1978, was, as Mr. Barrett remembers it, something like “Ed Koch’s War on the Poor.” In the mid-1980s, there was the revelation that Cardinal John J. O’Connor was registered to vote as a Republican, and one of the earliest stories about AIDS being spread by intravenous drug use.

When Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato was assailing his 1998 challenger, Charles E. Schumer, for missing hundreds of votes in Congress while on the campaign trail, it was Mr. Barrett who dug up the documents showing that Mr. D’Amato had done essentially the same thing 18 years earlier.

“An enterprising reporter helped save us,” Mr. Schumer, who went on to win that race, wrote later.

Mr. Barrett uncovered the criminal record of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s father, who had committed armed robbery and went to prison during the Depression. As the former mayor was running for president in 2007, Mr. Barrett was the first to report that Mr. Giuliani owned four Yankees World Series rings, which had never been made available to the public, and that he had paid far less for them than they would have fetched on the open market.

Mr. Barrett and his Voice mentor, Jack Newfield, wrote “City for Sale,” the definitive account of the contracting scandals in the 1980s that were the darkest stain on the Koch administration and that sent several officials to prison.

If, as his targets and even some former colleagues say, Mr. Barrett was sometimes too quick to draw damning conclusions from the facts he unearthed, the facts themselves were solid.

“Did he write stories that I believed were unfair?” former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo asked in an interview. “From time to time, and I told him so. But he was also valuable and admirable. You weren’t going to frighten him or bargain him out of a story.” 

Writing for a more mainstream publication with a larger circulation might have given Mr. Barrett’s work more exposure, might have made people take it more seriously. But he stayed at The Voice, he said, because it provided nearly total freedom to do what he liked. It was not until the last few years, he said, that editors even asked that he run his projects by them before getting started.
“I’m a spoiled brat,” he admitted. “I know I’m never going to have that again. I have to get used to the idea that an editor like Tina Brown is going to have her own ideas about what I should be doing.”

Wayne Barrett is not what you think, certainly nothing like an effete snob, as seen in the conservative caricature of the liberal news media.

A veteran of 1960s activism and the alternative press, he has seen several sexual and chemical revolutions unfold, but Mr. Barrett and several friends testified that he had never so much as tried marijuana, and he barely touches alcohol. He calls himself “a country boy from Lynchburg, Va.,” where he grew up the second of six children under the thumb of a strict father who was a nuclear engineer.

Journalists tend to be (or, at least, like to think of themselves as) relentless skeptics, mistrustful of institutions, authority and belonging. Yet Mr. Barrett held the same job for more than three decades, through more bosses than he can count.

His goal as a young man was to become a priest: he briefly went to a seminary and remains a practicing Roman Catholic — albeit one who has no more kind words for the church than he does for politicians.

“I respect authority almost too much, I think,” he said — another statement sure to raise eyebrows. “I’m not an angry guy. There’s just a lot to be outraged about.”

He is cheerfully ignorant of much culture, high or low: he does not watch movies, and his favorite television channel is NY1. A combative contrarian living in New York, his favorite team is, naturally, the Boston Red Sox. His taste in food runs to hamburgers; he forces himself to swallow the occasional green vegetable but, he said, he has “a total phobia of fruit.”

Mr. Barrett refuses to use a cellphone, insisting that people are not meant to always be in contact with one another; he is more animated and long-winded about this pet peeve than about any of the political corruption he has covered. He refused to use e-mail for years after it had become standard, insisting that his interns deliver their memos on paper to his home in Brooklyn. After he relented, it had to be explained to him that “.com” was not spelled “d-o-t-c-o-m.”

No one thinks Mr. Barrett is easy to deal with, least of all Mr. Barrett, which may be one reason he rarely went into the Voice newsroom in Manhattan. Instead, over the phone, he fought bitterly with editors who wanted to make even the slightest changes to his articles, each of which he viewed as a tightly woven pattern of facts that would unravel if one thread were pulled.

“Battling with Wayne Barrett has been one of the best experiences of my career,” said Mr. Ortega, the current editor of The Voice. “You work with the guy, you’re going to get into fights. I’ve found in my career that the people who are doing the best journalism are a challenge to work with.”

Back in the days when Mr. Barrett spent more time at the office, “he would critique us on the way we did interviews on the phone,” recalled LynNell Hancock, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who worked at The Voice in the 1980s.
“He taught me everything I know about investigative reporting,” she said. “But everything with him turns into a debate, and you can’t debate him. He’s better at it, he’s more relentless, and he’s bigger and louder.”

That mix of exasperation and affection, intimidation and loyalty, creeps into every conversation with former colleagues. “He’s the scariest, sweetest man alive, and I know that sounds like a contradiction,” said Jessica Bennett, one of a legion of his former interns, who now writes for Newsweek. “He was kind of a dad to all of us, took an interest in our personal lives. But you also had to write down his instructions verbatim, because if anything was slightly different, there would be a public berating of the intern.”

Interning for Mr. Barrett became, over the years, a coveted boot camp for aspiring investigative reporters. Veterans have endless tales of the lists of things he wanted them to pursue without explanation, and woe to the youngster who interrupted to ask who Vander Beatty or Ramon Velez was.

“For years I was his de facto intern wrangler, interpreting him to them,” said William Bastone, a Barrett intern in the 1980s, who became a staff writer for The Voice and then an editor of the Smoking Gun, the investigative journalism Web site that is probably best known for revealing that parts of a best-selling book billed as a memoir, James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” were fabrications. The site’s bread and butter is making public legal documents and government records, often involving famous people.

Barrett alumni from later days recalled getting off the phone with him and frantically doing Google searches for every name he had dropped. 

“Working with him was an incredible education that you couldn’t get anywhere else,” said Mr. Bastone. “He turned a lot of people on to that kind of journalism — and probably as many people, he showed them that they’re not cut out for it.”
Mr. Barrett kept in touch with interns long after they had moved on, helping them land jobs in the nation’s most prestigious newsrooms and taking particular delight in marriages between former interns.

As Ms. Hancock put it, “Wayne manages to be endearing and obnoxious at the same time.”
Or maybe Mr. Barrett is exactly what you think. His approach to his work goes beyond obsession — to a monomania that influences every facet of his life, in which gathering information trumps all else.

Fran Barrett, his wife since 1969, calls herself “Wayne’s liaison to the planet Earth.”
“He’s brutally honest, at work or at home,” Ms. Barrett said. “If I buy him a shirt and it’s not what he likes, he says, ‘Oh, I hate this kind.’ Or if you exaggerate something, he’ll jump in and say ‘Well, that isn’t exactly what happened.’ ”

Over the years, Ms. Barrett, who works for Atlantic Philanthropies, a charitable foundation dedicated to what the left would call social justice issues, has learned not to worry too much about the sketchy characters, the threats, even the occasional physical assault her husband suffers in pursuit of an article. It is often she who is left to deal with the politicians, mobsters, informants and journalists who knock or call at all hours (one of these, former Governor Cuomo, advised her several times that if she ever wanted a divorce, he would represent her).

“One night, two different guys called, anonymous sources, who said, ‘Call me X,’ and I’m taking messages,” Ms. Barrett said. “I told the second one, ‘I’m sorry, X is taken today. I’m going to have to call you Y.’ ”

When they met, Mr. Barrett was a Goldwater Republican at St. Joseph’s University, a Jesuit school in Philadelphia. But by the time he graduated from Columbia’s journalism school, his politics, like many of his peers, had veered hard to the left.

To Mr. Barrett, there were two models of the leftist in that era: Tom Hayden, who wanted to work within the political system, and Abbie Hoffman, who mocked it.

“I very much identified with the Hayden types,” Mr. Barrett said. “I took the politics extremely seriously. I wasn’t interested in satire.”

After a brief stint as a reporter, he signed on as a New York City public school teacher in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, to avoid the draft. He joined a different kind of battle, going to work in the newly created Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn, a racially charged experiment in letting communities exercise some control over their schools. Administrators in the poor, mostly black district dismissed a group of teachers, and the mostly white teachers’ union went on strike. Mr. Barrett crossed the picket line.

The Barretts lived in Brownsville for more than a decade. It was there, he said, that he learned how charlatans and crooks could control the flow of money in a low-income neighborhood.

His lifestyle is, in its own way, deeply countercultural, upholding another stereotype about journalism, that it is a refuge for people too off-kilter to make it in a 9-to-5 office job.
He never takes vacations. Ms. Barrett ticked off a long list of faraway lands she has visited without him, including Ireland, where she went this month. Even when they go to their beach house in Ocean City, N.J., he works.

Ms. Barrett remembers driving to get a kitten for their son, Mac, who is now 30, only to have Mr. Barrett spot a car belonging to a politician he was tracking. He followed the car, and they never made it to the animal shelter. Another time, Mr. Barrett called from a remote spot in upstate New York; he had run out of gas following a legislator who he was trying to prove did not live in his district.

Their living and dining rooms are lined with books, all of them nonfiction, all of them read. Mr. Barrett cannot remember the last time he read a novel, and when asked if he felt he was missing something, he said, “Nyah.”

He has never used an A.T.M. “I don’t spend any money,” he says. “Fran gives me $20 on Monday, and I give her change on Friday.” She buys his clothes, too, and sometimes tells him which ones to wear. “None of that stuff interests me,” he says. “What does is the next story.”
February 26, 2011

Ireland’s Governing Party Ousted in Historic Loss

LONDON — Ireland ousted its discredited government on Saturday, electing new leaders who pledged to restore faith in the country after the trauma of a calamitous economic collapse.
With most of the votes counted after the general election on Friday, a coalition government of the center-right Fine Gael and the Labour Party was on track to win a comfortable majority in Parliament.
The next prime minister is likely to be Enda Kenny, a career Fine Gael politician who is expected to calm the turmoil of the past few years.
“I intend to send out a clear message around the world that this country has given my party a massive endorsement to provide stable and strong government with a clear agenda,” Mr. Kenny said after winning his parliamentary seat.
Fianna Fail, which has run the government for 14 years, suffered its worst showing in its more than 80-year history. It won 78 seats in 2007; this time, it was on course to win as few as 25 out of a total of 166. Of the 47 parliamentary seats in Dublin, only the seat held by Brian Lenihan, who served as finance minister, was set to go to Fianna Fail.
The results by late Saturday showed that Fine Gael was expected to win 76 seats and Labour 36. The Green Party was expected to lose all six of the seats it now holds, and Sinn Fein was on course to take 12 seats — one of them to be held by Gerry Adams, the party’s president, who resigned from his posts in the British Parliament and in the Belfast Assembly in Northern Ireland to run in the Irish Republic.
Fianna Fail has been blamed for presiding over an economy that spiraled out of control and then, unregulated and unmanageable, came crashing down. In 2008, when Ireland’s spectacular building boom collapsed, and the Irish banks that had fueled it threatened to collapse, too, the government, led by Prime Minister Brian Cowen, tried to solve the crisis by pledging to guarantee the banks’ debts.
That move has proved to be a huge drain on the nation’s finances, with the government pumping tens of billions of dollars into the banks to keep them afloat. In November, Ireland reluctantly accepted an international loan worth about $93 billion; in return, it pledged to adhere to a brutal four-year austerity program and to repay much of the money at onerous interest rates.
The terms of the loan humiliated Ireland, and many economists say they are worried that the country will be unable to keep up with even the interest payments.
Mr. Cowen, whose resignation as party leader last month led to the election, said in a television interview that his government had nothing to be ashamed of. He said he had explained his decisions fully and repeatedly.
“Everything I did, I did for the good of this country as I saw it; I did it conscientiously,” he told the state broadcasting network RTE.
Mr. Kenny’s party has put forth an ambitious program to reduce unemployment, cut government costs and restore confidence in the Irish economy. It has also pledged to renegotiate the terms of the $93 billion loan — a promise that might be hard to achieve.
Mr. Kenny said the country was ready to fight its way to prosperity and international credibility. “Ireland,” he said, “is open for business.”
News Analysis

Taliban Bet on Fear Over Brawn as Tactic

KABUL, Afghanistan — This year the spring offensive by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has a new and terrifying face: the insurgents are using suicide bombers who create high casualties to sow terror and are planning an assassination campaign as well, Afghan and American military analysts say.
Pajhwok Afghan News/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Suicide bombers attacked a bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Feb. 19, killing at least 40 people.
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The insurgents’ deadly bet is that fear will trump anger and that Afghans will lose any faith they had in their government’s security forces and eventually turn to the Taliban.
“You have to ask yourself, ‘If you were the Taliban now, what would you do?’ ” said Gen. Jack Keane, who retired from the Army in 2003 and is now a consultant to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the NATO commander for Afghanistan.
Given the massing of NATO forces in the south, the answer appears to be attack the urban, civilian population, creating widespread insecurity in an effort to reinforce the existing resentment of foreign troops and doubts about President Hamid Karzai’s government.
In less than four weeks, 116 Afghans have died in seven suicide attacks, most recently in Faryab Province on Saturday. Two of the attacks, one in Jalalabad on Feb. 19 and another in Kandahar on Feb. 12, involved multiple assailants and were carefully choreographed and skillfully timed to obtain a high death toll and maximum media coverage. In at least one case, the mission was carefully rehearsed.
This is a striking change from Afghan suicide bombings of just six months ago, in which the bombers exacted few casualties.
These new tactics highlight the challenge of an adaptive insurgency with a reservoir of potential fighters, many of them madrasa students in Pakistan’s tribal areas. They show too the increasingly integrated network of insurgent groups that lend their expertise to one another as well as the difficulties the Afghan government has had in rallying its own people to fight them.
President Karzai has compounded the problem, some Afghan analysts say, by insisting that the Taliban are not to blame for the violence and that they are “upset brothers” rather than mortal enemies.
Underlying the latest attacks are the region’s geopolitics. Both Pakistan and Iran are known to be supporting the Taliban and play out their antagonism to the United States on Afghan soil. “You have to see these attacks in the broader strategic context,” said Haseeb Humayoon, the director of a risk consulting firm here.
A period of relative calm last year in Afghan cities coincided with an easing of tensions between the Afghans and Pakistan over negotiations with the Taliban. Now the Afghans appear to be trying to negotiate with the Taliban on their own, and there is talk of permanent American bases here, which Pakistan and Iran see as a potential loss of their influence.
“Our neighbors interpret that as Afghans’ seeking guarantors of security other than them,” Mr. Humayoon said.
“Both the international military and our own government are distracted,” he added. “Our government is not focusing enough on rallying people against these forces, and the international military coalition has not focused enough on Pakistan.”
American commanders play down the significance of the attacks in terms of the overall fight in Afghanistan, but Afghan security officials say they see a troubling and potentially crippling development. “It’s not that the American surge operations will be affected by this directly,” said a former Afghan security official. Rather, he predicted that the suicide attacks could preoccupy Afghan security leaders, diminishing their ability to contribute to the fight in the south.
The Americans had not expected the suicide bombings on this scale but were bracing for assassination attempts this spring against officials, said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, NATO’s chief of strategic communications.
The Taliban in the past have been careful not to single out civilians, although civilians are often killed in attacks. At least some Taliban factions seem worried about the latest tactics. Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for the north and east of the country, said an investigation was under way into the Jalalabad attack, which killed 40 people, nearly half of them civilians.
“We are taking this issue seriously as we have appointed a delegate to assess the civilians casualties,” he said. “We are not happy when there is even one civilian lost.”

Despite such statements, attacks on civilians are clearly on the rise and the sophistication of the suicide bombings has been striking, Admiral Smith said. American and Afghan officials now believe that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that planned the attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, has been working with the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan. Lashkar-e-Taiba specializes in planning complex suicide attacks.
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“The suicide bombings are, we believe, predominantly requested and funded by Haqqani but facilitated by LET and AQ,” said a senior American military official, referring to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda. “The latter groups provide bombers and material in exchange for money. Haqqani chooses targets.”
The bombing of the Kabul Bank branch in Jalalabad used a formula Lashkar-e-Taiba has used elsewhere: multiple attackers, a first bomber to clear the way for the others and the holding of one bomber in reserve to attack the police and medical workers who arrive to help. Other signatures included having a suicide bomber on a cellphone with a handler, as was the case in the Mumbai attacks.
What cannot be ignored, however, is the situation across the border in Pakistan. While American troops have made clear gains in uprooting the Taliban from Kandahar and large areas of Helmand Province, Pakistan has not made similar strides in ousting the Taliban from the tribal areas, according to analysts here. The Haqqani network, among the most brutal, remains anchored in North Waziristan despite a stream of drone strikes by the Central Intelligence Agency.
And in bad news for Afghanistan, a little-noticed peace deal took place late last year between the Haqqani network and Shiite tribes in the Kurram Agency in Pakistan, which opened up a new route for Haqqani agents to enter Afghanistan, American and Afghan intelligence officials said. A number of fighters have been observed crossing the border over the past several weeks, American intelligence officials said.
No one yet seems to have figured out how to deal with the two largest underlying problems: the poor performance of the Afghan government, which makes many of the country’s citizens reluctant to fight for it, and the millions of Pashtuns in the tribal areas who feel they are unrepresented and even discriminated against and are willing to cross the border to fight in Afghanistan.
“You still have two major factors,” General Keane said, “the ineffectiveness of the central government and the Pakistani sanctuaries.”
The situation is strikingly reminiscent of Iraq in 2005, when that country’s cities were gripped by violence, the government was unable to keep the people safe and fighters flowed in from other countries. It took four years to stem that violence, and an influx of troops like the one that Americans have now carried out in Afghanistan. The rash of recent bombings risks undermining the psychological advantage that had come with increased American troop strength in southern Afghanistan.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
News Analysis

Taliban Bet on Fear Over Brawn as Tactic

KABUL, Afghanistan — This year the spring offensive by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has a new and terrifying face: the insurgents are using suicide bombers who create high casualties to sow terror and are planning an assassination campaign as well, Afghan and American military analysts say.
Pajhwok Afghan News/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Suicide bombers attacked a bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Feb. 19, killing at least 40 people.
At War
Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog »

Related

The insurgents’ deadly bet is that fear will trump anger and that Afghans will lose any faith they had in their government’s security forces and eventually turn to the Taliban.
“You have to ask yourself, ‘If you were the Taliban now, what would you do?’ ” said Gen. Jack Keane, who retired from the Army in 2003 and is now a consultant to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the NATO commander for Afghanistan.
Given the massing of NATO forces in the south, the answer appears to be attack the urban, civilian population, creating widespread insecurity in an effort to reinforce the existing resentment of foreign troops and doubts about President Hamid Karzai’s government.
In less than four weeks, 116 Afghans have died in seven suicide attacks, most recently in Faryab Province on Saturday. Two of the attacks, one in Jalalabad on Feb. 19 and another in Kandahar on Feb. 12, involved multiple assailants and were carefully choreographed and skillfully timed to obtain a high death toll and maximum media coverage. In at least one case, the mission was carefully rehearsed.
This is a striking change from Afghan suicide bombings of just six months ago, in which the bombers exacted few casualties.
These new tactics highlight the challenge of an adaptive insurgency with a reservoir of potential fighters, many of them madrasa students in Pakistan’s tribal areas. They show too the increasingly integrated network of insurgent groups that lend their expertise to one another as well as the difficulties the Afghan government has had in rallying its own people to fight them.
President Karzai has compounded the problem, some Afghan analysts say, by insisting that the Taliban are not to blame for the violence and that they are “upset brothers” rather than mortal enemies.
Underlying the latest attacks are the region’s geopolitics. Both Pakistan and Iran are known to be supporting the Taliban and play out their antagonism to the United States on Afghan soil. “You have to see these attacks in the broader strategic context,” said Haseeb Humayoon, the director of a risk consulting firm here.
A period of relative calm last year in Afghan cities coincided with an easing of tensions between the Afghans and Pakistan over negotiations with the Taliban. Now the Afghans appear to be trying to negotiate with the Taliban on their own, and there is talk of permanent American bases here, which Pakistan and Iran see as a potential loss of their influence.
“Our neighbors interpret that as Afghans’ seeking guarantors of security other than them,” Mr. Humayoon said.
“Both the international military and our own government are distracted,” he added. “Our government is not focusing enough on rallying people against these forces, and the international military coalition has not focused enough on Pakistan.”
American commanders play down the significance of the attacks in terms of the overall fight in Afghanistan, but Afghan security officials say they see a troubling and potentially crippling development. “It’s not that the American surge operations will be affected by this directly,” said a former Afghan security official. Rather, he predicted that the suicide attacks could preoccupy Afghan security leaders, diminishing their ability to contribute to the fight in the south.
The Americans had not expected the suicide bombings on this scale but were bracing for assassination attempts this spring against officials, said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, NATO’s chief of strategic communications.
The Taliban in the past have been careful not to single out civilians, although civilians are often killed in attacks. At least some Taliban factions seem worried about the latest tactics. Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for the north and east of the country, said an investigation was under way into the Jalalabad attack, which killed 40 people, nearly half of them civilians.
“We are taking this issue seriously as we have appointed a delegate to assess the civilians casualties,” he said. “We are not happy when there is even one civilian lost.”

Tea Party Group Issues Warning to the G.O.P.

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Like many addressing the Tea Party Patriots, Tim Pawlenty got in a dig at President Obama.
PHOENIX — While heaping scorn on President Obama and the Democrats for overspending, more than 2,000 members of the Tea Party Patriots gathered here for a national conference also had strong words on Saturday for Congressional Republicans and vowed to vote them out of office next year if they did not move aggressively to cut the budget.

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A balloon delivery for fans of Representative Ron Paul, who also spoke.
They offered up Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, locked in a standoff with his state’s public-sector unions, as a model of budget-cutting fervor.
Mr. Walker remained in Wisconsin, but the mere mention of his name led to a standing ovation.
It was Washington, not Wisconsin, though, that seemed the source of the most ire.
“The mood here is that we’re a little disappointed in the Republicans in the House in not living up to their pledge,” said Sally Oljar of Seattle, a member of the national coordinating team for the Tea Party Patriots, a coalition of several thousand Tea Party groups. “We realize we have to keep the pressure on these guys all the time. If you leave them alone they revert back to their own ways.”
The Tea Party Patriots chose Arizona as the site of its first policy conference — a meeting that was part strategy session, part pep rally — to show support for a state that has been boycotted by many groups because of its crackdown on illegal immigration. And although border issues came up, the federal budget dominated discussions.
Republicans lawmakers face a delicate balancing act as negotiations to avert a government shutdown reach a critical phase this week. Senate Democrats have said the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by House Republicans are too severe, although Tea Party members consider them not severe enough.
If the parties cannot reconcile their differences, the federal government could be shut down for the first time in 16 years.
“If these politicians don’t get the message, they had better step aside,” said Carter Brough, a retiree from Whitney, Tex. “Right now, I can’t tell the difference between the parties. I’ve chopped my credit cards. I’m watching my spending. This country needs to do the same.”
Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, heard the displeasure firsthand when he addressed the conference on Friday night. He called the $61 billion in cuts that cleared the House “the largest spending cuts in history” and a “good start in the right direction,” but Tea Party activists were having none of it.
“More!” the crowd cried.
Mr. Barton also drew grumbles when he urged patience. “You’re not going to get to the finish line the first time you set out,” he said.
Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a prospective Republican presidential candidate in 2012, was greeted more enthusiastically when he spoke of the need to get the country’s books in order.
“The government’s too damn big,” he said, making a play on the catchphrase of Jimmy McMillan, the candidate for New York governor who ran on the Rent Is Too Damn High ticket.
“Just because we followed Greece in democracy doesn’t mean we should follow them in bankruptcy,” Mr. Pawlenty said.
Like many speakers, Mr. Pawlenty also slipped in a jab at the president. “Now, I’m not one who questions the existence of the president’s birth certificate,” he said. “But when you listen to his policies, don’t you at least wonder what planet he’s from?”
After playing a critical role in propelling the Republicans to a House majority in 2010 — but ending the careers of some establishment Republicans along the way — the Tea Party members here were clearly eager to mix things up again in 2012.
“We’re not an appendage of anyone,” Ms. Oljar said. “If someone is not a real fiscal conservative, they will be outed very quickly. There are politicians who have taken on the Tea Party mantle. That’s fine. But we care about the issues, and we’re watching them all.”
The issues raised in Wisconsin and other states where Republicans are proposing cuts in state workers’ benefits clearly resonated with the audience in Phoenix. A discussion on how to curtail the political power of labor unions, which are closely allied with the Democrats, drew a standing-room-only crowd and a long line out the door.
“It’s a travesty, all the protests in Wisconsin,” said Bruce Miller, a nondenominational minister from Tucson. “The unions have served us well for years, but they’re turning into nothing more than a political machine for the Democrats.”
In interviews, Tea Party members who were here from across the country expressed deep displeasure with the nation’s course, in particular the way Washington spends taxpayers’ money.
Many said they were new to politics in the last election but intended to stay involved. They added that they were willing to make personal sacrifices as government programs were pared back, but only if the cuts were broad based.
“It’s going to hurt,” said Patricia Morlen of Albuquerque. Ms. Morlen said she was a longtime teacher and union member, but wondered, “Why don’t we share the sacrifice, act as Americans and come together to solve the national debt crisis that we have?”
Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and the national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, called the federal budget cuts that had been approved so far “a drop in the bucket.” Talking about Governor Walker, she said, “Maybe that courage and the example he’s setting will give courage to other elected officials.”
Salvadore Rodriguez contributed reporting.
February 26, 2011

Governors Look for Means to Cope With Budgets

WASHINGTON — Democratic governors warned Saturday that federal budget cuts could crimp a fragile economic recovery, and governors of both major parties asked the Obama administration to give them more flexibility in running education and health care programs so that they could cope.
On the first day of the National Governors Association’s winter meeting here, several governors also said that they did not want any federal bankruptcy protection and that Congress should explicitly renounce the option. The mere discussion of it, they said, had increased their borrowing costs.
Democratic governors criticized the hard line against labor unions taken by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican. But they muted the criticism, saying they wanted to preserve the bipartisan traditions of the governors’ association.
The recession may officially have ended but, “we are still faced with unprecedented fiscal challenges,” said Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, a Democrat and the association’s chairwoman. States cut $75 billion from their budgets in the last two years, but collectively face a $175 billion gap between projected spending and revenues in the next two years, Ms. Gregoire said.
As part of the fiscal stimulus package signed by President Obama in early 2009, Congress provided extra money to the states for Medicaid and schools, but that will end in a few months, a loss that Ms. Gregoire said was “not unexpected.”
“We know there is no new money coming to the states,” Ms. Gregoire said, but further cuts in federal grant programs could “undermine the economic recovery in our states.”
Maine’s new governor, Paul R. LePage, a Republican, said: “What the federal government can do for us is not money, but flexibility. We can slow down layoffs in a lot of private and public sector jobs if the states are given more flexibility.”
Seconding that sentiment, Ms. Gregoire said states wanted “more flexibility in the classroom.”
Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, said: “If we could get Medicaid as a block grant with total flexibility to run the program as we see fit, I would be willing to take a cap on growth of 2 percent a year. Many governors feel that way.” There is no cap on federal and state Medicaid spending, and anyone who meets the eligibility requirements is entitled to coverage.
The federal aid helped states survive the worst of the recession, but left a difficult legacy in some states. “The stimulus money was used to start new programs, including social service programs, and we don’t have the money to continue them,” Mr. LePage said. The Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the final quarter of last year, and added that spending cuts by state and local governments had apparently held back growth.
Likewise, Ms. Gregoire said Saturday, hiring by private employers has been overwhelmed by layoffs at state and local government agencies, contributing to slow growth in overall employment.
Governors said their economies were still far from vibrant.
“We are recovering, not recovered,” said Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a Democrat.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, also a Democrat, said, “Unemployment remains uncomfortably high in Connecticut at a number, 9 percent, that we are simply not used to.”
The governors’ association signed an agreement on Saturday with provincial officials from China in hopes of building a relationship that will increase trade and create jobs here.
The confrontation between Governor Walker and state employees in Wisconsin generated a lot of discussion at the meeting.
In a pointed contrast to Mr. Walker, Ms. Gregoire said that when she negotiated with public-employee unions, they had agreed to certain sacrifices on pay and health benefits, as well as changes in their pensions.
“I believe in collective bargaining rights,” she said.
Governor Barbour expressed support for Mr. Walker in his effort to curb collective-bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin.
“Mr. Walker is doing what he said very directly and repeatedly he was going to do,” Mr. Barbour said. “I support him in it. We don’t have collective bargaining in Mississippi. About half the states don’t. The idea that this is some constitutional right of the public employee unions is incorrect.”
February 26, 2011

Rallies for Labor, in Wisconsin and Beyond

MADISON, Wis. — With booming chants of “This will not stand!” at least 70,000 demonstrators flooded the square around the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday in what the authorities here called the largest protest yet in nearly two weeks of demonstrations.
It was a call heard in sympathy protests that drew thousands of demonstrators to state capitals and other cities from Albany to the West Coast.
The protesters were rallying against a proposal by Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, Scott Walker, that would strip the state’s public employee unions of nearly all their bargaining power and impose sizable take-home pay cuts by diverting more of their paychecks to finance health care and pension plans.
“We’ve had bargaining for 50 years, and he wants to end it in a week,” Al Alt, who has taught school for four decades in Waukesha, Wis., said as he paused on a bench after marching around the Capitol with other protesters.
A spokesman for the Madison police, Joel DeSpain, who provided the crowd estimate, said there had been no arrests during the rally.
The demonstrators in Madison were loud but peaceful, according to the Madison police.
But there was unease and confusion over the fate of the hundreds of people who have spent every night in the hallways, stairwells and public areas of the Capitol and have become the heart of the protest movement. State officials have said they would be evicted on Sunday afternoon.
“There will be no more sleeping over in the Capitol” beginning at 4 p.m. Sunday, Jodi Jensen, a senior official at the Department of Administration, the state agency that includes the Capitol police, said in an interview.
After that, she said, the building would be open during normal daily hours and closed at night. She said the decision was made because of health and safety concerns and that Mr. Walker did not influence the move as far as she knew.
Some union officials and protesters said the evictions could lead to conflict. “It’s a bit confusing,” said Alex Hanna, co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association.
Later, Jim Palmer, the leader of a large law enforcement union, said that he had been told that the Capitol Police were backing away from the eviction plan.
“Now it sounds like they are going to let people stay,” said Mr. Palmer, whose union, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, has 11,000 members. The police, he said, might only ask for people to “voluntarily comply” with requests to leave the building. He added that his union and other labor leaders had urged their members to comply with whatever the police asked.
“We don’t want anything to happen to create a blemish on what has been a model for civil discourse,” Mr. Palmer said. The Capitol Police referred all inquiries to the Department of Administration.
Two protesters, Alexandra and Alison Port, twins who attend the University of Wisconsin, were turned away Saturday because they were carrying sleeping bags as they tried to enter the Capitol. If people are evicted Sunday, the twins said, the protesters will circle the building holding hands.
Mr. Walker’s plan is far from the only proposal to curb union power, and crowds of teachers, firefighters and other public workers held rallies Saturday in cities from Albany and Miami to Olympia, Wash.
“This is a national issue,” Jim Goodnow, who attended the demonstration in Miami, where about 150 people rallied at Bayfront Park. Many of them said they were concerned that Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, might try to strip away the few protections that unions have in Florida. A bill in the Legislature would block union dues from being automatically deducted from paychecks.
Still, the revolt in Wisconsin has become the main stage for arguments on both sides. Mr. Walker and other Republicans say the changes are necessary to put the state back on solid financial footing and to prevent wide-scale layoffs.
The protesters and Wisconsin’s Democratic leaders — including 14 state senators who are hiding out in Illinois to prevent a vote on Mr. Walker’s proposal — say the bill is an attempt to use fiscal problems to deal a crippling blow to the unions that are traditional Republican opponents.
Democrats from the Indiana House of Representatives also remained sequestered in Illinois on Saturday to avoid being forced by the State Police to attend a legislative session on a bill that would limit unions.
Although the Wisconsin protests have been peaceful, they have also reflected a strong personal dislike for Mr. Walker, who was elected in November, and many of the placards criticized his relationship with Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll conservative causes and Republican campaigns, including Mr. Walker’s race. “We will not tolerate Koch heads in Wisconsin,” one said.
The largest unions have said they would agree to the benefit changes that Mr. Walker is seeking. State officials have said that the resulting cut in take-home pay could be 6 to 8 percent for the typical state worker. But for many lower-income state workers, the proposal would mean cuts in take-home pay of more than 10 percent.
Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Madison, Wis., and Timothy Williams from New York. Erik Bojnansky contributed reporting from Miami.

North Koreans Struggle, and Party Keeps Its Grip

Gao Haorong/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Kim Jong-il, far left, and his heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, second from right, on Feb. 17.
SEOUL, South Korea — As military and political tensions persist on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea is trudging through another winter of shortages, bitter cold, not much food and precious little fuel.
A recent report from the North described the longest stretch of subzero temperatures since 1945. A number of countries and international aid groups have reported desperate appeals from the government in Pyongyang for humanitarian food aid in the past few weeks. And an epidemic of foot and mouth disease has infected more than 10,000 cows, pigs and draft animals.
But even in the face of such hardships, analysts said, the Communist government showed no sign of relaxing its political grip or opening up its economy beyond agreeing to some joint ventures with China and allowing some private traders to operate.
“Reforms mean death,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert and professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. “It’s a matter of survival and control.”
Recent refugees, scholars of North Korea and South Korean government officials see no signs that the economic hardships are pointing toward political instability. They see no existential threat to Kim Jong-il and his government, whether through civil unrest, political factionalism or a military revolt.
A change in government, as tantalizing as it might be to Seoul and Washington, seems remote. Mr. Kim, who turned 69 this month, looks to be in passably good health. And the apprenticeship of his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, appears to be under way, albeit slowly and quietly.
North Koreans certainly struggle to eke out a living, but they are not starving. And the situation is nothing at all like the so-called Arduous March famine of the mid-1990s. More than a million North Koreans reportedly died from starvation then when aid from Russia stopped, crops failed and the socialist system of food allotments fell apart.
“The gap between the elite and the rest of the country has probably never been wider,” said John Everard, a former British ambassador to North Korea who is now a fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. But at the same time, he added, “there’s no reason to expect things to change anytime soon.”
China, North Korea’s principal benefactor and major ally, has suggested that the North might do well to consider making some market-style changes. The message is, profit by our example.
But North Korea has “a long track record of listening politely to — and then ignoring — these Chinese requests,” Mr. Everard said.
China has been making major investments along its long-neglected northeastern border, its Rust Belt, and Chinese enterprises have struck major deals with well-connected North Korean trading companies, principally swapping roads, dams and bridges for iron ore and coal. (Because they are described as “humanitarian development,” the deals circumvent the various international sanctions.)
“They’ve clearly opened up to China in a way that’s unprecedented,” said Bradley O. Babson, chairman of the DPRK Economic Forum of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
But “I don’t sense they’ve adopted a reform mentality at all,” he added.
A New Year’s Day editorial, which typically sets the political tone and economic priorities for the coming year, said light industry would serve as a kind of defibrillator for stimulating the economy heading into 2012 — the 100th anniversary of the birth of the founding president, Kim Il-sung. A 10-year economic plan announced recently echoed the New Year commentary, which said the principal goal was becoming “a strong and prosperous country.”
“Light industry” was mentioned 17 times, and Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, interpreted the terminology as an oblique reference to Kim Jong-un, the heir apparent.
There are, it must be said, glimpses of change. After a crackdown that started in late 2009, private markets and traders are now being tolerated again, if they pay off the police and enjoy the protection of a political or military godfather. They sell food, black-market grain, household goods and electronics — secondhand televisions, used rice cookers, VHS machines and the like.
“Whatever the Chinese are discarding become prized luxury items in North Korea,” said John S. Park, director of the Korea Working Group at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.
Orascom, the Egyptian telecommunications giant, is now providing cellular service in many North Korean cities. A student exchange program with Syracuse — the only one in the United States — continues to operate. A new science and technology university also has opened in Pyongyang, built from scratch, with Internet access and classes in English. The school is financed by American and South Korean evangelical Christians.
Hard currency earned from the Kaesong industrial park operated jointly with South Korea will help the North toward its 2012 goal. But the conservative government in Seoul is hardly inclined to let a hundred Kaesongs bloom, mostly for fear that the profits and resources would be funneled to the North Korean military.
Instead, the heavy economic lifting in the near term will have to be done by China. “China is the oxygen mask,” Mr. Park said. “North Korea is not so happy to have to rely on China, but they really have no alternative.”
Analysts said the roadblocks to change remained daunting, principally the Communist elite, which is elderly, hard line and financially illiterate.
Mr. Everard, the former ambassador, described most of them as “very old men, often in their 80s, who have hardly traveled and have no education in bourgeois disciplines like economics.”
After the fall of East Germany, Mr. Everard said, top North Korean leaders were shown videos of former East German officials selling pencils in the streets, as a cautionary lesson on what can befall those who relax their grip on power.
“I think,” he said, “that most of them got the message.”
North Issues a Warning
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has warned the South Korean military it will shoot at South Korea if the South continues its leaflet campaign, the North’s official media KCNA news agency said on Sunday. South Korea’s military has been dropping leaflets into North Korea about democracy protests in Egypt, a legislator said on Friday.