Tag, You’re It

Fun, Tours and a $3,000 Bill for Hardly Using an iPhone

By KATIE HAFNER

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 — When Neil Dingman recently went on a European vacation, he took his iPhone with him with no intention of using it much. In fact, for the 14 days he was there, he used it only a handful of times and had expected to see just a small increase in his next bill for roaming charges.

Instead, he was charged $852.31.

As it turned out, the cellphone carried by Mr. Dingman, a mortgage consultant in Minneapolis, made calls on a European data network several times each hour to check for e-mail messages. Because he didn’t deactivate the feature that automatically checks for new e-mail messages, during Mr. Dingman’s trip through Italy, Croatia and Malta, the phone went to retrieve e-mail more than 500 times.

Other iPhone users have felt the sting of high roaming charges with their iPhone, too. Some, like Mr. Dingman, are unaware that they need to disable the e-mail feature; others are billed erroneously; still others misunderstand the explanation of charges they are given by AT&T customer service representatives. Many of them are complaining to the company or on blogs.

The iPhone is no different from any other phone, said Todd Smith, an AT&T spokesman, with the exception of the BlackBerry, whose users can opt for a flat monthly rate when traveling. Any AT&T customer planning to travel outside the United States should contact AT&T to inquire about roaming plans, he said.

Dave Stolte did that before taking his iPhone with him on a two-week trip to Ireland and England in July. He signed up for a roaming plan, but he said the customer service representative’s explanation of the charges was unclear. His bill was $3,000.

When he was offered a $100 credit, Mr. Stolte said he felt insulted, and he sent letters to the chief executives of AT&T and Apple. The story of his bill quickly spread around the Internet. Before long, he was given a full credit.

“I can’t imagine AT&T would expect all their customers to be technicians and say, ‘O.K., if I go to use Google maps, how many kilobytes am I transferring?’ ” asked Mr. Stolte, a Web designer who lives in Temecula, Calif.

In July, Aaron Oxley took his iPhone with him to London, Dubai and Bangkok. Mr. Oxley said in an e-mail message that he was aware that there would be international roaming data charges, so he always made sure he was in an area with free Wi-Fi when he used his iPhone to access the Internet. But when Mr. Oxley’s AT&T bill arrived, the data charges totaled $300.

When Mr. Oxley called AT&T, he was told that even though he was using Wi-Fi, there was still a data transfer charge.

Indeed, according to Mr. Smith, the AT&T representative, iPhone owners are not charged for Wi-Fi connections. Mr. Oxley eventually received a full refund for the $300 roaming data charge.

Mr. Dingman said it didn’t occur to him to disable the e-mail feature. AT&T eventually reversed the charges, but only after Mr. Dingman signed up for a $24.99-a-month global data plan.

AT&T is not automatically crediting customers for such charges. Mr. Smith said that each complaint is being evaluated case by case.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.: “Drinking Up” As Coke, Pepsi Trade Places?

 

By Darren Rovell-CNBC.COM

This week, Pepsi is expected to give way to Coke as the official beverage of most of NASCAR’s tracks and speculation is that Pepsi will be putting some of the money they would have used for the tracks, to getting its Mountain Dew brand on Dale Earnhardt Jr’s, racing car hood next year.

If that trade-off really happens, it’s a cinch for Pepsi and a dumb move for Coke. The bottom line is people aren’t fans of tracks or fans of the organization itself (NASCAR). They watch races to see their favorite drivers and they are much more likely to support the brand of their favorite drivers than what they are required to drink at the track.

There is a little issue I have though if the Mountain Dew deal goes through. Since Mountain Dew, like Budweiser , is already such a big brand (it’s the nation’s fourth best selling soda behind Coke Classic, Pepsi and Diet Coke) if the deal is consummated it’s going to be nearly impossible to figure out if Earnhardt will have any effect on sales.

Part of me hoped that if a soft drink brand were going to sign Earnhardt, it would have been Coke. And that Coke would unveil a blast from the past that hasn’t been on shelves. That way you could really tell if “Little E” was making a difference.

Like how about Mello Yello? The drink was introduced as a competitor to Mountain Dew 28 years ago and had a great racing tradition. Its motto was “The World’s Fastest Soft Drink” and used a race car driver in its ads. Kyle Petty of course was sponsored by the brand in the early 90s, as was Tom Cruise’s character Cole Trickle in “Days of Thunder” had it on his No. 51 car.

On a related note, I’m pretty sure that Earnhardt is going to set the record next year for the most merchandise ever sold by a single athlete in the history of sport. His popularity combined with a potential sponsor and number change will be part of it (and trust me, Mello Yello would sell more than Mountain Dew). The other part is that–for the first time ever–a mainstream shoe and apparel brand (adidas) is going to make a driver’s outfit and sell it at retail. Reebok looked into getting into the sport in the late 90s, but passed. Puma sponsors Kasey Kahne, but aside from ads doesn’t have much of a retail presence and Nike has a deal to make shoes with Joe Gibbs drivers for its low cost Tailwind brand.

It’s easy to see why all the big brands were scared off with NASCAR. Unlike the traditional sports, the shoes aren’t really shown since they’re in the car with the driver. With no opportunity to display anything, they shied away.

What Adidas will do that no one has done in the past is give NASCAR fans what they really deserve: An authentic firesuit. For too long, fans have had to buy replicas, but I expect adidas to give fans the real thing (it might be $200, but so are authentics from other sports). The alliance will also benefit Earnhardt Jr. plenty because a NASCAR driver has never really had the marketing force of a big apparel brand behind him. He’ll now have a greater distribution channel than ever before.

I expect a new wave to come from this as Adidas will prove this to be the next frontier. Unlike the hundreds of millions it has cost adidas and Reebok to have the rights to make the apparel of all the teams in the NBA and NFL, respectively, a shoe and apparel company will can outfit a race team for a fraction of the cost. By 2009, I expect to see more Adidas, Nike and Under Armour logos on firesuits and also expect that, with these deals, NASCAR merchandising will leap into the stores that carry the licensed apparel from traditional sports.

While we’re on the subject of what could sell more–Mello Yello over Mountain Dew, for example–I truly believe that Earnhardt Jr. would be best served by starting over with a new number next year. He has had No. 8 long enough so that a move wouldn’t alienate fans and a change of number–like Kobe Bryant when he changed from No. 8 to No. 24–would serve to prove just how big he is in the sport.

CNBC

 

Iraq Through China’s Lens

THOMAS FRIEDMAN

NEW YORK TIMES

Dalian, China

It’s nice to be in a country where Iraq is never mentioned. It’s just a little unnerving when that country is America’s biggest geopolitical and economic rival these days: China.

I heard China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, address an international conference here in Dalian, and what impressed me most was how boring it was — a straightforward recitation of the staggering economic progress China has made in the last two decades and the towering economic, political and environmental challenges it still faces.

How nice it must be, I thought, to be a great power and be almost entirely focused on addressing your own domestic problems?

No, I have not gone isolationist. America has real enemies that China does not, and therefore we have to balance a global security role in places like the Middle East with domestic demands.

But something is out of balance with America today. Looking at the world from here, it is hard not to feel that China has spent the last six years training for the Olympics while we’ve spent ourselves into debt on iPods and Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, we tried to effect change in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world by trying to build a progressive government in Baghdad. There was, I believed, a strategic and moral logic for that. But the strategy failed, for a million different reasons, and now it is time to recognize that and focus on how we insulate ourselves from the instability of that world — by having a real energy policy, for starters — how we protect our security interests there in more sustainable ways and how we get back to developing our own house.

By now it should be clear that Iraq is going to be what it is going to be. We’ve never had sufficient troops there to shape Iraq in our own image. We simply can’t go on betting so many American soldiers and resources that Iraqis will one day learn to live together on their own — without either having to be bludgeoned by Saddam or baby-sat by us.

So either we get help or get out. That is, if President Bush believes staying in Iraq can still make a difference, then he needs to muster some allies because the American people are not going to sustain alone — nor should they — a long-shot bet that something decent can still be built in Baghdad.

If the president can’t get help, then he has to initiate a phased withdrawal: now. Because the opportunity cost this war is exacting on our country and its ability to focus on anything else is out of all proportion to what might still be achieved in Iraq by our staying, with too few troops and too few friends.

Iraqis can add. The surge has brought more calm to Iraq largely because the mainstream Iraqi Sunnis finally calculated that they have lost and that both the pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis and the radical Shiites are more of a threat to them than the Americans they had been shooting at.

The minute we start withdrawing, all Iraqis will carefully calculate their interests. They may decide that they want more blood baths, but there is just as much likelihood that they will eventually find equilibrium.

I have not been to Dalian in three years. It is not just a nice city for China. It is a beautiful city of wide avenues, skyscrapers, green spaces, software parks and universities.

The president of Dalian University of Technology, Jinping Ou, told me his new focus now is on energy research and that he has 100 doctoral students dealing with different energy problems — where five years ago he barely had any — and that the Chinese government has just decided to open its national energy innovation research center here.

Listening to him, my mind drifted back to Iraq, where I was two weeks ago and where I heard a U.S. officer in Baghdad tell this story:

His unit was on a patrol in a Sunni neighborhood when it got hit by an I.E.D. Fortunately, the bomb exploded too soon and no one was hurt. His men jumped out and followed the detonation wire, which led 1,500 feet into the neighborhood. A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was in the area and alerted the U.S. soldiers that a man was fleeing the scene on a bicycle. The soldiers asked the Black Hawk for help, and it swooped down and used its rotor blades to blow the insurgent off his bicycle, with a giant “whoosh,” and the U.S. soldiers captured him.

That image of a $6 million high-tech U.S. helicopter with a highly trained pilot blowing an insurgent off his bicycle captures the absurdity of our situation in Iraq. The great Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said it best: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

That is where we are in Iraq. We’re wasting our brains. We’re wasting our people. We’re wasting our future. China is not.

NEW YORK TIMES

PEACHES TIGHTENS THE GIRDLE

Maureen Dowd

Joe Biden didn’t talk that much yesterday for Joe Biden.

And he told Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that they shouldn’t talk too much, either, so that members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would have time to get in their questions. Even though the senators often didn’t ask questions but simply gave little partisan lectures or told stories about themselves, or in the case of Barbara Boxer, had an aide hold up a blow-up picture of herself with General Petraeus in Iraq.

Nevertheless, Mr. Biden, the committee’s chairman, took time at the end of yesterday’s first hearing with the Surge Twins to make the points, a bit repetitively, that there is no plan to get out of Iraq and that the Bush administration is not leveling with Americans.

John McCain was standing behind Mr. Biden, waiting to sit down for the next hearing — the Armed Services Committee — with the witnesses.

First, the Republican presidential candidate smiled archly at having to cool his heels as the Democratic presidential candidate yakked — sniffing at the Surge that Mr. McCain supports. Then Mr. McCain turned to his G.O.P. colleague Susan Collins and flapped his fingers in the universal hand sign for yakking.

It pretty much said it all.

For months, everyone here has been waiting with great expectations to hear whether the Surge is working from the top commander and top diplomat in Iraq.

But the whole thing was sort of a fizzle. It’s obvious that the Surge is like those girdles the secretaries wear on the vintage advertising show, “Mad Men.” It just pushes the fat around, giving a momentary illusion of flatness. But once Peaches Petraeus, as he was known growing up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, takes the girdle off, the center will not hold.

And it was clear from their marathon testimony that the Iraqi politicians are useless, that we’re going to have a huge number of troops in Iraq for a long time, that there’s no post-Surge strategy, that they’re just playing for time, hoping that somehow, some way, things will look up in the desert maze of demons that General Petraeus referred to as “home.”

The strategy is no more than a soap bubble of hope, just as W.’s invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy about W.M.D.’s and an illusory view of Iraq.

Even though it was 9/11, Osama was barely mentioned all day.

Republican Senator John Warner, freer than ever now that he’s announced his retirement, turned the screw on the two witnesses.

Do you feel, he asked the general, that the Surge “is making America safer?”

“Sir, I don’t know actually,” Peaches replied. “I have not sat down and sorted out in my own mind.”

The Surge Twins seemed competent and more realistic than some of their misbegotten predecessors, but just too late to do any good. They’re like two veteran pilots trying to crash land the plane.

Ambassador Crocker has expressed a darker, more rueful vision in background briefings with reporters, and he emanated a bit of Graham Greene yesterday.

He noted that the Iraqis know that “they’re going to be there forever,” while we will not.

Pulling troops out too soon, he fears, could “push the Iraqis in the wrong direction. It would make them, I would fear, more focused on, you know, building the walls, stocking the ammunition and getting ready for a big, nasty street fight without us around.”

Asked by Senator McCain if he was confident that the Maliki government will get the job done, the ambassador said dryly: “My level of confidence is under control.”

The star witnesses gave shell game answers, trying to make the best of a hideous hand.

“It’s a hand that’s unlikely to improve in my view,” Hillary Clinton — one of five senators running for president on the two panels — told the Surge Twins. “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Hillary’s plan is to posture and criticize W.’s war all the way to the White House. But then President Clinton will be stuck with figuring out how to pull out the more than 100,000 troops still there policing a lot of crazy sectarian street fighting.

The Republicans seemed happy that the witnesses’ calm presentation bolstered the president’s case for continued war funding. In his speech on Thursday night, W. will be able to accept the recommendations of the Surge Twins, who are only recommending what he wants to hear.

Republicans seemed oblivious to the fact that they may have scored points short term while laying the groundwork for disaster long term. W. won’t care because he’s not running, but it will be political suicide for Republicans entering the campaign with 130,000 troops still in Iraq.

As Lindsey Graham joked to the witnesses about Congress, referring to the talk of the dysfunctional Iraqi government, “You could say we’re dysfunctional and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

New York Times

THE NEW YORK TIMES

September 9, 2007

Streetscapes | Woolworth Building

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

IT’S like a fungus that runs up and down the tower of the Woolworth Building, at Broadway and Park Place. From every angle the cream-colored surface has dirty, discolored patches, the unanticipated consequences of a major restoration project three decades ago.

Frank Woolworth began accumulating his 5-and-10-cent store fortune in 1879, and by 1886 he opened a headquarters in New York City. He was a multimillionaire by 1900, when he built a lacy Gothic-style limestone house at Fifth Avenue and 80th Street, a building demolished in the 1920s.

It was designed by Charles P. H. Gilbert, a mansion specialist who worked up and down the avenue. He also designed the main building of the Jewish Museum, at 92nd Street.

In 1911, Woolworth announced plans for the tallest building in the world, to be constructed on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street. Like his house, Woolworth’s new building was to be neo-Gothic and designed by a Gilbert — in this case, Cass Gilbert, who was not related to Charles but was instead an aggressive out-of-towner who had elbowed his way into New York City architecture.

In 1905, Gilbert had designed the boxy Gothic-style West Street Building, at West and Cedar Streets, one of many structures to use the new technology of glazed terra cotta to clad a tall building, and the architect used it as a model for the Woolworth Building.

For Woolworth, Gilbert doubled the size of the 23-story West Street building and then some, to 55 floors, with a pyramidal roof 792 feet high. That topped the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower, built at Madison Avenue and 24th Street in 1909.

Paul Starrett was one of the contractors bidding on the Woolworth project, and in his 1938 book, “Changing the Skyline,” he recalled trying to persuade Woolworth to use more traditional materials.

“In stone it would be magnificent,” he said, but in terra cotta, “it would look like a 5-and-10-cent store proposition.”

He did not get the job.

The utility of terra cotta was irrefutable: each block of fired clay, usually hollowed out, was a fraction of the weight of brick or stone. The blocks were easily modeled in intricate forms and were protected by a glaze that shed dirt.

A 1912 ad by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in The Real Estate Record and Guide boasted, “Cream color in another material would be dark and dirty after a few years’ exposure.”

Unlike many prior skyscrapers, the Woolworth Building was well received by the architectural intelligentsia. It had no raw blank side walls, and the Gothic-style detailing seemed an honest reflection of the new steel-frame technology.

Writing in The Architectural Record in 1913, Montgomery Schuyler particularly admired the way Gilbert adjusted the scale of the ornament. The finials, shields, crockets and other details were not simply giant-sized to look good from a distance but also held up to close view from neighboring buildings.

Compared with European models, “this brand-new American Gothic loses nothing,” Mr. Schuyler said.

But Mr. Starrett’s misgivings were well founded. In his 1938 book he recalled, apparently from years earlier, “the spectacle of the upper part of the Woolworth Building, wired up with metal mesh to catch the falling terra cotta.”

By 1962, The New York Times reported that riggers were repairing broken pieces all year round.

These problems only grew worse, and in the 1970s the Woolworth company retained Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz & Associates (now Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn) to examine every one of the 400,000 terra-cotta blocks. The architecture firm found that 25,000 of them needed complete replacement and selected precast concrete instead.

The concrete had a surface coating, meant to be renewed every five years, to shed soil and moisture, like the glaze on the terra-cotta blocks.

Timothy Allanbrook, now a senior consultant at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, an architecture and engineering firm in Northbrook, Ill., worked for Ehrenkrantz at the time and was on and off the scaffolds at the Woolworth Building for three years.

He says the prescription for periodic resealing has not been followed, so the porous concrete has been absorbing water and dirt for years. He suspects that the concrete has absorbed so much dirt that it cannot be cleaned sufficiently so that it matches the original terra cotta, which may leave another replacement as the only option.

Mr. Allanbrook said that 30 years ago, the terra-cotta industry was in decline, making concrete “the optimal choice in a narrow field of imperfect choices.”

Now, terra cotta has seen a resurgence, so the original material could be a reasonable replacement, Mr. Allanbrook said; so could newer materials like concrete reinforced with glass fiber.

Roy Suskin, a vice president of the Witkoff Group, the building’s owner, declined to discuss the problem and any plans for remedying it.

ANOTHER SIX MONTHS FRIEDMAN AT IT AGAIN

One of the most troubling lessons of the Iraq invasion is just how empty the Arab dictatorships are. Once you break the palace, by ousting the dictator, the elevator goes straight to the mosque. There is nothing in between — no civil society, no real labor unions, no real human rights groups, no real parliaments or press. So it is not surprising to see the sort of clerical leadership that has emerged in both the Sunni and Shiite areas of Iraq.

But this is not true in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan. Though not a full-fledged democracy, Kurdistan is developing the key elements of a civil society. I met in Erbil with 20 such Kurdish groups — unions, human rights and political watchdogs, editors and women’s associations. It is worth studying what went right in Kurdistan to understand what we still can and can’t do to promote democratization in the rest of Iraq and the Arab world.

The United States played a critical role in Kurdistan. In 1998, we helped to resolve the Kurdish civil war — the power struggle between two rival clans — which created the possibility of a stable, power-sharing election in 2005. And by removing Saddam, we triggered a flood of foreign investment here.

But that is all we did. Today, there are almost no U.S. soldiers or diplomats in Kurdistan. Yet politics here is flourishing, as is the economy, because the Kurds want it that way. Down south, we’ve spent billions trying to democratize the Sunni and Shiite zones and have little to show for it.

Three lessons: 1) Until the power struggle between Sunnis and Shiites is resolved, you can’t establish any stable politics in southern Iraq. 2) When people want to move down a progressive path, there is no stopping them. When they don’t, there is no helping them. 3) Culture matters. The Kurdish Islam is a moderate, tolerant strain, explained Salam Bawari, head of Kurdistan’s Democracy and Human Rights Research Center. “We have a culture of pluralism,” he said. “We have 2,000 years of living together with people living around us.” Actually, there are still plenty of Arab-Kurdish disputes, but there is an ethos of tolerance here you don’t find elsewhere in Iraq.

While visiting Kurdistan, I read a timely new book, “Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government,” by my friend Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign affairs expert at Johns Hopkins University. It is highly relevant to America’s democracy project in Iraq and beyond.

Mr. Mandelbaum argues that democracy is made up of two elements: liberty and popular sovereignty. “Liberty involves what governments do” — the rule of law, the protection of people from abuses of state power and the regulations by which government institutions operate, he explains. Popular sovereignty involves how the people determine who governs them — through free elections.

What Baghdad exemplifies, Mr. Mandelbaum says, is what happens when you have elections without liberty. You end up with a tyranny of the majority, or what Fareed Zakaria has labeled “illiberal democracy.” Kurdistan, by contrast, has a chance to build a balanced democracy, because it is nurturing the institutions of liberty, not just holding elections.

What the Kurdistan-Baghdad contrast also illustrates, notes Mr. Mandelbaum, is that “we can help create the conditions for democracy to take root, but people have to develop the skills and values that make it work themselves.”

In the southern part of Iraq “you have people who are undemocratic who have a democratic government,” said Hemin Malazada, who heads a Kurdish journalists’ association. “In Kurdistan, you have a democratic government for a democratic people.”

One way a country develops the software of liberty, Mr. Mandelbaum says, is by nurturing a free market. Kurdistan has one. The economy in the rest of Iraq remains a mess. “A market economy,” he argues, “gives people a stake in peace, as well as a constructive way of dealing with people who are strangers. Free markets teach the basic democratic practices of compromise and trust.”

Democracy can fail because of religious intolerance, the curse of oil, a legacy of colonialism and military dictatorship, or an aversion to Western values — the wellspring of democracy. The Middle East, notes Mr. Mandelbaum, is the one region afflicted by all of these maladies. That doesn’t mean democratization is impossible here, as the Kurds demonstrate. But it does mean it’s really hard. Above all, Iraq teaches us that democracy is possible only when people want both pillars of it — liberty and self-government — and build both themselves. We’re miles away from that in Baghdad.

  WEIRDO NEOCON DREAMER MICHAEL O’HANLON

By large majorities, Americans distrust Gen. Petreaus’ report and, in general, claims about Progress in Iraq.

GLENN GREENWALD-SALON

Sep. 09, 2007 | (updated below)

The Washington Establishment has spent the last several months glorifying Gen. David Petraeus, imposing the consensus that The Surge is Succeeding, and most importantly of all, ensuring that President Bush will not be compelled to withdraw troops from Iraq for the remainder of his presidency. The P.R. campaign to persuade the country that the Surge is Succeeding has been as intense and potent as any P.R. campaign since the one that justified the invasion itself. While this campaign has worked wonders with our gullible media stars and Democratic Congressional leadership, it has failed completely with the American people.

Ever since the Surge was announced (and allowed) back in January, Conventional Beltway Media Wisdom continuously insisted that September was going to be the Dramatic Month of Reckoning, when droves of fair-minded and election-fearing Republicans finally abandoned the President and compelled an end to the war. But the opposite has occurred.

Democratic Congressional leaders — due either to illusory fears of political repercussions and/or a desire that the war continue — seem more supportive than ever of the ongoing occupation (or at least more unwilling than ever to stop it). They are going to do nothing to mandate meaningful troop withdrawal. Most Republicans are hiding behind the shiny badges of Gen. Petraeus and his typically sunny claims about Progress in Iraq, and they, too, are as unified as ever that we cannot end our occupation.

None of that is notable or surprising to anyone other than our nation’s media stars. It has been depressingly predictable (and predicted) for months that Petreaus would descend on Washington in September, hail the Great Progress we are making, and the entire D.C. Establishment — and more than enough members of both parties — would meekly fall into line and support whatever scheme prevailed at the time for ensuring that we stayed in Iraq through the end of the Bush presidency. The notion of the “Moderate Congressional Republican” who will stand up to the President has long been an absurd Beltway myth, as was the expectation that Democrats in Congress would ever force the President to end the war.

But what is notable about all of this, if not surprising as well, is that the overwhelming majority of the American people now harbor such intense distrust towards our political and media elite that they are virtually immune to any of these tactics. Several polls over the past month have revealed that most Americans do not trust Gen. Petraeus to give an accurate report about Iraq. And a newly released, comprehensive Washington Post-ABC News poll today starkly illustrates just how wide the gap is between American public opinion and the behavior of our political establishment.

The majority of Americans have emphatically rejected the Beltway P.R. campaign of the last several months, and are as opposed more than ever before to the war. Perhaps most remarkably, in light of the bipartisan canonization rituals to which we have been subjected, a strong majority (53-39%) believes that Gen. Petreaus’ report “will try to make things look better than they really are” (rather than “honestly reflect the situation in Iraq”).

Moreover, huge majorities continue to believe that the war was not worth fighting (62-36%) and that the U.S. “is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order in Iraq” (60-36%). Only a small minority (28%) believe the Surge has made the situation in Iraq better, while vast majorities believe it has made no difference (58%) or has made the situation worse (12%). And a sizable plurality continues to believe the U.S. is losing the war (48-34%).

More significantly still, overwhelming numbers of Americans understand what the D.C. Establishment refuses to accept: namely, that even if there are marginal and isolated security improvements, there is still no point in continuing to stay in Iraq. Large majorities want the number of U.S. troops in Iraq decreased (58-39%); believe overwhelmingly that a decrease should begin “right away,” rather than by the end of the year or next year (62-33%); and favor legislation now to compel troop withdrawal by the spring (55-41%).

Yet the “debate” taking place in the Beltway regarding Iraq could not be any further removed from the views most Americans hold, and the war-continuing actions of our political class over the next several weeks will be — yet again — in complete defiance of the pervasive belief in this country that it is long past time to end the war. Just as they do with regard to the realities in Iraq, our political class just pretends that these facts about American public opinion are not true. As but one particularly egregious (though representative) example, this is what Fred Thompson advisor Mary Matalin said last week on the Meet the Press:

MS. MATALIN: Yes, because what we’re seeing for the first time last week, is a majority of people now support and believe that the war can be won.

Matalin’s claim that a majority “believe that the war can be won” is extremely dubious (the Post-ABC Poll found the opposite: that a plurality believes the U.S. will lose the war; only a minority (39%) believes we will win). But Matalin’s claim that “a majority of people now support” the war is just an outright lie.One poll after the next for at least two years has found that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war and want it to end. But Matalin, a Serious Member in Good Standing of our Beltway Establishment, can go on Meet the Press, sitting there with Tim Russert and her husband and others, and spout lies like this about what Americans think about the war because the D.C. Establishment wants to believe that they are trusted and respected. Matalin also said this about what “Americans believe”:

It does not comport with the critics of the president who say progress is being made, including front-runners Hillary Rodham Clinton and, and Barack Obama. So people are very nuanced about this. They understand not only that it can be won, but that it must be won. They understand the consequences of defeat. Further, two thirds of them trust — and nobody more than the generals — when Petraeus and Crocker come and give their report, that will be the positive time.

These are total falsehoods. Yet The D.C. Establishment, including Democratic Congressional leaders, are wedded to the premise that Gen. Petreaus must not be challenged, that we are making Progress due to the Surge, and that — whatever else is true — compelled withdrawal (i.e., withdrawal before George W. Bush wants to withdraw) is irresponsible and dangerous.In his Washington Post Editorial this morning, Fred Hiatt came as close as he ever has today to admitting that there is no point in continuing to remain in Iraq, rhetorically asking: “If Iraqis are not moving toward political reconciliation, what justifies a continuing commitment of U.S. troops, with the painful sacrifices in lives that entails?” That question answers itself: nothing justifies our ongoing occupation. Yet Hiatt can’t bring himself to follow that premise to its logical conclusion: namely, that withdrawal is the only rational option.

The Establishment is so invested in ensuring that the war they created can be painted as a Success, and even more so in the notion that forced withdrawal is something only the Unserious People advocate, that they will never follow their premise (we are doing nothing good in Iraq) to its logical conclusion (therefore we should force Bush to withdraw whether he wants to or not). And the entire leadership strata of our political class, including Congressional Democrats, either shares those premises and/or are far too weak and afraid to defy them. The war thus continues, and the gap between our political class and American public opinion continues to grow.

In one sense, it is quite unhealthy in a democracy for such a large majority of Americans to so distrust the political and media establishment that they even believe in advance that war reports from our leading General will be nothing more than self-serving and misleading propaganda. But in another, more important sense, when a democracy’s political establishment becomes as rotted and deceitful and corrupt as ours has become — enabling the most unpopular President in modern American history to continue what is so blatantly a senseless war for years and years, in complete defiance of what Americans want — the one encouraging sign is that a majority realizes how corrupt our establishment is and has stopped believing anything they say.

One of the very few governmental institutions that inspired respect among Americans has been the military, and that is still the case. But anyone who becomes a part of our political class, such as Gen. Petraeus, is inherently distrusted. This war has completely eroded the relationship between our Beltway ruling class and the rest of the country. That would normally be something to lament, but in this case, it is something to celebrate. The Beltway ruling class — political and media figures alike — deserves nothing but scorn and distrust. As they spend the next several weeks enabling George Bush to continue this war for as long as he wants, they will earn a lot more of both.

UPDATE: One of the most depressing aspects of this entire Establishment spectacle is how mind-numbingly predictable it all is. Here is what I wrote back in May about what would happen in September. I excerpt this not because I was the only one saying it — to the contrary, virtually every blogger I read was saying the same thing — but only to illustrate how dishonest the DC Establishment is in everything they say and do:

The single greatest and most transparent delusion in our public discourse right now — and that is a distinction for which there is always an intense competition — is that Something Weighty and Significant is Going to Happen In September with regard to the Iraq War.September, you see, is the real turning point, the real Day of Reckoning. Finally, our political elites are going to face the cold, hard truth in an unvarnished and hard-nosed way about The Facts on the Ground. That is the read deadline for George W. Bush. No more leniency for him come September. Republicans, Democrats and their pundit and opinion-making comrades alike have all banded together — strength in numbers — and boldly decreed: “No More.” Either we have Real Progress in September, or that is the end of the line.

That’s what one hears over and over from all of our Serious and Sober Beltway denizens — the ones who advocated the war in the first place and assured us it was going well for the last four years (and therefore have great credibility on such matters). As but just one example, the very serious, sober, smart expert Michael O’Hanlon, bearing the title of Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, was on Fox News yesterday explaining how “smart” the Democrats were for funding the war with no limits because their real opportunity is September, when — if things are not going well — everyone will support them in imposing real limits.

But all that is going to happen In September is that we are going to await with bated breath for General David Petraeus — he of infallible wisdom, judgment and honesty, and unquestionable objectivity — to descend upon Washington and reveal whether there is Real Progress being made (by him) in Iraq. We are all going to leave partisanship and politics to the side and turn to the source who resides above all of that, the one who can be counted on to speak the Real Truth — General David Petraeus.

And, needless to say, General Petraeus will, cautiously though emphatically, declare that progress is being made, though there is much work that remains to be done. And therefore we must redouble our resolve and stay until The Job is Done. . . .

And with General Petraeus heralded as the Objective Source of Honor to be Trusted, the White House and Congressional Republicans and Fred Hiatt will immediately proclaim that it would be irresponsible and reckless (and terribly unserious) not to continue with our Great Progress, that we should leave such judgments to the Generals on the Ground, not Politicians in Washington. Joe Lieberman and Bill Kristol will warn that anyone who speaks out in dissent at this Important Time of Opportunity is Emboldening Al Qaeda, and General Petraeus will agree.

And in September, when the great (though incomplete) progress is unveiled by General Petraeus, our pundit class will continue their canonization of The General, and thus, that there is Progress in Iraq will be the conventional wisdom which all serious and responsible people recognize (“Finally, after four years of frustration, General David Petraeus, in dramatic testimony before Congress, highlighted the great improvement the U.S. is seeing in its war against Al Qaeda in Iraq”). And a sufficient number of Democrats will either be persuaded by this ritual or will be sufficiently afraid of it to do anything other than let the entire spectacle continue.

The central unyielding truth in our political landscape is that — no matter what — the War in Iraq is not going to end before the end of the Bush presidency. That has been obvious for a very long time, and that is why it is so bizarre to watch the Beltway establishment continue to pretend that there is some Big Decision Day coming in September — the day when Republicans take a stand and our political elite put their foot down.

Nothing has changed. Republicans and media-war-proponents are far too invested in the war to do anything other than claim it is finally going well. And there are more than enough Democrats who either (a) believe we should stay in Iraq indefinitely, (b) perceive political benefits from staying, and/or (c) fear forcing withdrawal.

Kevin Drum recently claimed that Gen. Petraeus “outplayed” bloggers and war opponents by secretly launching a brilliant P.R. campaign — unbeknownst to naive bloggers — to persuade the D.C. establishment that the Surge was Succeeding (“I’ve been thinking about is how badly the liberal blogosphere and the liberal establishment have been outplayed here. . . . We’re only seeing the results of Petraeus’s PR blitzkrieg now. . . . The general has profoundly outplayed the amateurs on their home turf. . . . Bravo, general. Well played”). That is completely wrong.

While our media stars and Democratic politicians may not have been aware of it, most bloggers realized exactly what Gen. Petreaus was doing, and apparently, so, too, did most Americans. It’s the same game that the D.C. Establishment has been playing for four years with regard to the war and it’s anything but difficult to recognize.

— Glenn Greenwald

THIS IS INTERESTING…..

September 10, 2007

By BROOKS BARNES

NEW YORK TIMES 

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 9 — In the race to become a major supplier of original video programming to the Web, Warner Brothers has decided to reverse its direction.

The studio, part of Time Warner, plans today to introduce 24 Web productions in a range of formats including minimovies, games and episodic television shows.

But for this latest online push, Warner Brothers has discarded its initial strategy of insisting that advertisers shoulder production costs from the start. Instead, it has decided to finance most projects itself and worry about lining up advertisers to recoup costs later.

“In trying to get the business off the ground,” said Craig Hunegs, executive vice president for business development, “we ended up in a bit of a dance with advertisers about what various projects would look like.”

The shift underlines a growing realization among the big Hollywood studios: Web entertainment is evolving so quickly that they must take on more financial risk to keep up.

So far, Warner and most other traditional studios have tried to lock down a comfortable, low-risk business model before venturing too far online. That approach has slowed them down, delivering a competitive edge to scrappier, upstart production companies.

In the year since Warner moved into original production for the Web, it has delivered just one project: Hardly News, a satirical pop-culture quiz show that had its premiere on Anheuser-Busch’s entertainment Web site, Bud.TV, in April. It failed to gain an audience, although the studio is not giving up on the concept and is weighing new distribution options.

“We may have initially had a narrow view,” said Bruce Rosenblum, president of the Warner Brothers Television Group, which houses the studio’s digital production unit. He is now operating on the idea that as long as the studio churns out quality digital entertainment, advertising dollars will follow.

The slate of short-form Web productions that Warner plans to announce today are already deep in the production pipeline and range across genres including science fiction and animation.

“The Jeannie Tate Show,” created by Liz Cackowski, is a 10-episode series about a neurotic soccer mom who presents a television talk show from her minivan. A puppet comedy for adults from the Jim Henson Company, unofficially titled the Simian Undercover Detective Squad, follows a group of ape investigators.

The comedy projects can hit close to home. A mockumentary titled “Viral,” from Joey Manderino and David Young, looks at the dysfunction that overtakes a digital studio as it tries to come up with the next big online hit.

The studio says that a half-dozen more video projects are in development, including an animated offshoot of “The Wizard of Oz” and an online dating game produced by Lauren Graham of “Gilmore Girls.” Joseph McGinty Nichol, a director of the “Charlie’s Angels” movies who is known as McG, also has a project in the works.

Although Warner is spending more cash up front, executives point out that the combined budget for the 24 projects is less than $3 million, or the approximate cost of one episode of a high-end television drama.

And Mr. Rosenblum has distribution plans for most of its new digital entertainment. RealNetworks has agreed to distribute the Jim Henson project. With other projects, Mr. Hunegs said, programming will appear on Joost and other video portals. Warner plans to sell its digital projects to advertisers through its own media sales unit.

The studio is trying to gain traction in an increasingly crowded field. More than a dozen new production companies are angling for a share of the exploding online video business. Among the upstarts achieving early success are Generate, co-founded by a former Warner executive, and Vuguru, a new media company backed by Walt Disney’s former chief, Michael D. Eisner.

Brent Weinstein, chief executive of 60Frames Entertainment, a digital studio co-founded by the United Talent Agency, said, “We can get things to market a lot quicker than traditional media companies because we aren’t hamstrung by all their legal and rights issues.”

The agency, like most of its rivals, is building an internal unit devoted to scouting up-and-coming creators of Internet content and to securing new media deals for existing clients with the likes of Warner.

Jason U. Nadler, director of UTA Online, said, “Artists know the Web is a great place to both showcase their talent and incubate new ideas without the pressure of delivering a full-blown movie or television hit out of the gate.”

Although Warner’s digital venture, dubbed Studio 2.0, has gotten off to a slow start, the company has emerged as a leader in other areas of Web entertainment.

Mr. Rosenblum announced a deal in May 2006 to allow local television stations that buy reruns of the Warner-produced comedy “Two and a Half Men” to stream the episodes on their Web sites. The studio’s TMZ.com, a Web celebrity tabloid, has grown so popular since its debut in December that Warner will introduce a television spin-off this week.

And Warner’s chief executive, Barry M. Meyer, announced plans last week for a virtual online world populated by animated characters from the company’s library. A spring debut is planned for the site, called T-Works. It will also stream episodes of Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes cartoons.

“Some of the announcements you will see from us over the next several months will show how dedicated we are to this business,” Mr. Rosenblum said.