Iraq: Your Precious Tax Dollars At Work

Save for some Republicans who remain blindered to larger realities, most people concluded long ago that the Iraq war was a fool's mission that wasted thousands of American and many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, bled resources from the war in Afghanistan, bankrupted the federal treasury, lowered the U.S.'s standing in the world, and accomplished none of its goals save for taking out Saddam Hussein, who while a very bad man posed no threat to the U.S. or the Middle East, let alone had any links to the 9/11 attacks.

One of the goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to transform the country into a democracy, in this case at point of gun, which of course has not happened.  In point of fact, Iraq today is less stable than it was at the outset of the 2003 invasion with a Shiite thug beholden to Iran -- which has emerged as the big winner in the wake of the eight-year American occupation -- as its prime minister.

The latest casualty of the war is an ambitious multibillion-dollar State Department police training program that was to be the centerpiece of the post-occupation civilian mission.  The original 350 American law enforcement officers, backed by 1,000 support personnel, have been scaled back to 50 and even they may be withdrawn by the end of the year.

The failure of the program is a metaphor for waning American influence, indifference on the part of many Iraqis, and muscle flexing by the government led by Prime Minister Al-Maliki, whose assertion of national sovereignty took U.S. officials by surprise and hastened the withdrawal of the last combat troops.

Besides which, no one at State bothered to asks the Iraqis if they even wanted the program.  Oh, and repeated efforts by auditors for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) to examine the program's books have been rebuffed with "trust us, we're the government" rejoinders.

In all, some $7.3 billion has been spend on police training since 2003, which prompted HuffPo commentator Peter Van Buren to write, "Ka-ching! Anybody's hometown in need of $7.3 billion in federal funds? Hah, you can't have it if you're American, it is only for Iraq!"

Meanwhile, a SIGIR investigation found that some U.S. commanders believe funds for relief and reconstruction may have ended up benefiting insurgents.

The watchdog agency surveyed officers and officials associated with the Commander's Emergency Response Programme (CERP), a fund used by American military officers for projects totaling $4 billion to boost rebuilding in their areas of responsibility.

"Some commanders indicated that the diversion of CERP project funds may have benefited insurgents," SIGIR said in a report.  "Money . . . was found during raids on insurgents (along with) admission from contractors that they paid money 'for protection' . . . There was substantial evidence that the local authorities were stealing right off the top."

About 150 U.S. troops remain in Iraq under the authority of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Photograph by Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

With Friends Like House Speaker John Boehner, America Doesn't Need Enemies

Will the House Republican leadership ever learn? Probably not.

In a dizzying week of developments, House Speaker John Boehner again threatened to shut down the federal government by not agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (something that the great conservative god Ronald Reagan advocated and did himself several times), proposed three separate budgets for next year although none is required because of an earlier deal on spending caps (while lying through his teeth in claiming that one of the budgets was actually President Obama’s own proposal), and threatened to renege on the spending caps in proposing that the bloated Pentagon be given even more money and that cost-saving measures already in effect be postponed (with the predictable slash-and-burn cuts in social programs).

Those of us who do not share Boehner’s short memory recall what happened last year when he acquiesced to the House’s hair-on-fire Tea Party bloc: Bond rating agencies said that the U.S.’s reputation had been severely damaged and the government lost its AAA credit rating, something that the speaker, in another lie this week, blamed the president for. The stock market tanked, as it did last year, and Congress’s approval rating ticked down ever closer to single digits.

For good measure, Boehner also said that the House would vote before the November election to continue all the Bush tax cuts, which it cannot prevent from expiring on January 1. This would deprive the Treasury of more than $3.5 trillion in the coming decade that could be used for deficit reduction.

It is tempting to forgive Boehner’s ways by saying that his governing philosophy differs from those of the president and most Democrats, but extortion is not a governing philosophy.

Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral High Ground Gets A Vigorous Workout

The moral high ground is getting a vigorous workout in the wake of President Obama's endorsement of same-sex marriage, but what exactly is the moral high ground?

In ethical and political parlance, the moral high ground refers to having the status of being respected for being moral and adhering to and upholding universally recognized standards of justice and goodness.  But alas, there are no commonly accepted universal standards in these divisive times and the result is not unlike a wrench that is ratchetable to any setting that conforms with a person's own standards.

That is why people who believe there should be no restrictions on ownership and use of firearms and are obsessed with threats to their safety, real and imagined, as an unhealthy number of Americas are, believe that they have the moral high ground.  They would take heart in the illustration above of Jesus instructing a young disciple on the proper use of a 9mm Glock pistol.  Oh, and they believe Mahatma Gandhi was a wuss.

On the other hand, people who believe that ownership and use of firearms should be restricted if not banned outright and are convinced that the proliferation of guns and increasingly lax laws on their use are responsible for the epidemic of gun violence, including incidents like that which took the life of Trayvon Martin, believe that they have the moral high ground.  They would be appalled at the Jesus image and revere Gandhi's commitment to nonviolence.

The term moral high ground is being used with indiscriminate abandon by both supporters and opponents of Obama's endorsement of same-sex marriage (while unconscionably adding that he also supports states deciding the issue on their own), while he used the term himself early in his presidency.

In a veiled reference to the Bush-Cheney interregnum and its use of torture, Obama declared shortly after his inauguration that America would now be "willing to observe core standards of conduct not just when it's easy, but also when it's hard. We think that it is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world."

As it is, supporters of the use of torture to extract information from terrorism suspects --  and these often are people who wave their religious credentials around like glow sticks --  believe that they have the moral high ground.  Never mind that it has been proven that torture is counterproductive when compared to less coercive interrogation techniques.  And one could only hope, these self-righteous supporters would feel extremely uncomfortable when it is pointed out that Jesus guy himself was tortured.

But Obama's hands are not exactly clean.  While his first official act as president was to prohibit the use of torture, the Guantánamo gulag remains open, military tribunals are alive and well, albeit a bit cleaned up from years past, and the CIA and military still operate secret prisons in Afghanistan and God knows where else.

Then there is the matter of medical marijuana, a proven and safe pain reliever for victims of cancer, glaucoma and other diseases.

In this instance, the Obama administration -- as opposed to the president himself, who has said little about the matter since he came off the election trail in 2008 -- has taken the view that federal drugs laws, which still classify marijuana in the same category as heroin and cocaine, trump states like California where voters approved ballot issues decriminalizing its use.  (Irony Alert: As opposed to states where voters approved ballot issues that essentially criminalize same-sex marriage.)

And so in the end, the moral high ground turns out to be more of a slippery slope.

Cartoon du Jour

Stuart Carlson

Barack Obama Belatedly & Finally 'Mans Up' In Endorsing Same-Sex Marriage

My Monday post originally was going to riff off of the words of former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell who urged Barack Obama "to man up" and endorse gay marriage, an issue which took on a new urgency with North Carolina this week becoming the 30th state to ban same-sex unions. Whether the president was heeding Rendell's advice or not, his endorsement in a television interview today carried very little political risk and was years overdue.

Hitting exactly the right note, Obama told ABC News that "At a certain point, I've just concluded for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married" in taking a definitive stand on what commentators call one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day.

Commentators, as usual, are well behind the curve.

The issue certainly is contentious for religious conservatives and most Republicans, but with every passing year a growing majority of Americans -- and that majority is growing faster that most pollsters have predicted -- say that gay and lesbian couples should be afforded the same rights as heterosexual couples. The reason is simple: Most of us know gays, some of us roomed with them in college and consider them to be among their best friends, we watch the television shows in which same-sex couples appear, and have come to understand that sexual orientation is an individual choice and certainly not something that the government should regulate.

In contrast, Mitt Romney, Obama's presumptive Republican rival, not only opposes same-sex marriage but favors a Constitutional amendment to forbid it.

That position is safe for Romney because to believe otherwise would alienate his already shaky party base.  It is just as safe for the president because  few voters are likely to cross over to the Republican side in November simply because he has now endorsed same-sex marriage and it will be a fundraising boon for him.

Opponents of same-sex marriage say that Obama's decision will hurt him in battleground states, most of whom have laws against such unions, but polls tell a different story.  The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that a plurality of swing voters favors same-sex marriage, 47 percent to 39 percent, and outside the South the margin widens to a majority of 53 percent in favor and 35 percent opposed. 

Across the aisle, at it were, is Mitt Romney, who to my knowledge has never placed principle above political interests.  The moral high ground is often based on unpopular choices, and the presumptive Republican nominee wouldn't know the moral high ground if it bit him in the ass.

Given my own background, the belated nature of the endorsement has been painful.

My parents taught my siblings and myself that people were to be judged by their actions, not who they happened to be.  It was no big deal that three of their best friends were gay -- two men who owned a restaurant had lived together for many years and a psych nurse who happened to be a lesbian.  I was especially found of her because she let me drive her MG convertible after I got my driver's license.

Several of my professional friends have been gays and lesbians, I hired the first openly gay editor at a newspaper where I worked and lost another gay friend -- who was married and closeted -- in the early 1980s to what we later came to understand was AIDS.

At the end of the day -- and it has been a singularly significant day for gay rights -- not one mind will have been changed on the issue.  It didn't take courage for Obama to recognize that.  It only took way too long.

10 Great Books For Summer Reading

DUST JACKET AND FRONT BINDING OF TURING'S CATHEDRAL

I inhale books like moviegoers inhale popcorn, and am fortunate enough to have the time to devour about one book a week.  The following 10 reads are particularly noteworthy, in my view, most are available in used paperback editions for a song through Amazon for or can be ordered from your local library through Inter Library Loan.

ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD (2000) is John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of traveling back and forth across the U.S. on Interstate 80, which roughly parallels to 40th parallel, often in the company of geologists who open the world beneath and beside the highway for he and the reader. From the Palisades overlooking the George Washington Bridge to the Golden Gate, McPhee writes about the geology we only catch glimpses of from a speeding automobile. He pretty much skips Missouri and Nebraska (b-o-r-i-n-g) and pauses especially long in geology-rich Wyoming.

THE ART OF FIELDING (2011) is the best baseball novel since forever.  While the book is ostensibly about baseball and lovers of the game will be held in thrall by Chad Harbach's deft descriptions of America's one-time passtime, it is most of all an intimate and beautifully told tale of how a single pitch in the climactic game of a season profoundly effects the fates of five very different people who are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties and secrets.

She sat on the throne of Peter the Great and ruled the largest empire on earth. She was intelligent, well read, had a quick wit and was a shrewd judge of character, was open minded but wielded the power of life and death. She was Catherine II of Russia, and her extraordinary life is vividly brought to life in CATHERINE THE GREAT: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN (2011), a magisterial biography by Robert Massie, who has spent almost a half century studying czarist Russia.

Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY: MURDER, MAGIC, AND MADNESS AT THE FAIR THAT CHANGED AMERICA (2004) was on best seller lists for months and it is easy to see why.  You know how the stories of the twin protagonists -- the architect responsible for the construction of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a charismatic serial killer who preyed on visitors to the fair -- will turn out from the opening pages, yet this still is a chilling and compelling read.

There have been a tsunami of books about George Washington in recent years, but none has captured the great man with such wit and charm than JOHNNY ONE-EYE: A TALE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (2009).  Never mind that Jerome Charyn's account of Manhattan Island during the Revolutionary War, save for the broad historical overlay and the deeds of familiar figures, is apocryphal from start to finish.  It is a hoot.  Or as the Brits might say, a rum tale.

Manning Marable, an eminent Columbia University professor and prolific author of books on race and racism, died a mere three days before publication of his brilliant MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION (2011), a long overdue corrective to Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcom X, which Marable found is rife with factual errors and inaccuracies, as well as accounts of Malcolm X's life based less on the historic record than what Malcolm wanted people to believe about him. 

When a load of rubber bath toys plummeted into the northern Pacific Ocean from a storm-tossed container ship in 1992, the toys eventually washed up on coastlines from Alaska to California to Massachusetts. For Donovan Hahn, it was an opportunity to set out on a series of seagoing adventures long on introspection, as well as laughs, that would culminate in an unalloyed joy --  MOBY DUCK:THE TRUE STORY OF 28,800 BATH TOYS LOST AT SEA AND OF THE BEACHCOMBERS, OCEANOGRAPHERS, ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND FOOLS, INCLUDING THE AUTHOR, WHO WENT IN SEARCH OF THEM (2011).

No less an authority than chillmeister Stephen King describes SWAMPLANDIA! (2011) as "brilliant, funny, original . . . also creepy and sinister."  Karen Russell, not yet 30 years old, has written a darned good but not quite great book about a family of alligator wrestlers in South Florida's now almost destroyed wilderness and the coming of age of three young innocents whose trials by water and fire are extraordinarily gripping.

I sometimes felt like my head was going to explode as I waded through TURING'S CATHEDRAL: THE ORIGINS OF THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE (2011), a sometimes highly technical book by George Dyson, the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson.  He chronicles in gripping detail the mesmerizing cast of character who worked at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and created, among other things, the first computers while wrestling with the ethical aspects of their military research and development work, which included the basic research that led to the hydrogen bomb.

By my lights, Danish writer Peter Høeg is the best practitioner of Arctic Noir, and his deeply suspenseful Smilla's Sense of Snow and The Quiet Girl are among the very best of that genre. But Høeg breaks the mold with THE WOMAN AND THE APE (1996), the story of the wife of an eminent behavioral scientist and a 300-pound ape that in the end is a searching quest for the nature of love, freedom and humanity.

Did You Hear About The Al Qaeda Massacre In Arizona? You Didn't?

It is worth noting yet again as the first anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden passes that while Islamic-driven terrorism remains a serious problem, right-ring domestic terrorism is a more substantial one.  And that the inability of the media and many other folks to connect the dots between one mass shooting and another -- and then another and then another -- renders us impotent to deal with the problem.

The latest unrelated (cough, cough) incident occurred in Arizona when a sick f*ck by the name of J.T. Ready, a longtime white supremacist and border vigilante who had amassed weapons (which was an open secret) and formed his own brigade of volunteers to walk alongside him as he hunted  “narco terrorists” on the Arizona-Mexico border (which also was an open secret). 

Ready previously had been a member of the National Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the U.S., and among his mentors was said to be  state lawmaker Russell Pearce, who would gain national notoriety for his part in crafting the state’s tough immigration law. According to the Phoenix New Times, Pearce mentored the young man and helped him convert to the Mormon faith.

When Ready met his Not 72 Virgins in Paradise on Wednesday, it was not at the hands of drug runners, but with his own gun during a rampage inside a home east of Phoenix. The Arizona Republic reported that four others died: Ready’s girlfriend, her daughter, the daughter’s boyfriend and the daughter’s 18-month-old baby.

Ready still managed to use the massacre to blame immigrants even after his death. A posting on his Facebook page appeared hours after the massacre.
"Reports are unconfirmed that a cartel assassination squad murdered JT Ready and several of his friends and family this afternoon in Gilbert Arizona," the posting said. "This page’s admin will keep you updated of the situation as soon as possible."

It is, of course, possible that something as awful as this could have happened in Vermont or Oregon, but Arizona is ready made for mass shootings because of lax law enforcement of anything not having to do with immigrants and drugs and allowing domestic terrorists like Ready to go their violent ways.

Report Lambasts Murdoch As Being Unfit To Run His International Media Empire

Rupert Murdoch is filthy rich and has amassed enormous political power in Britain, the U.S. and Australia that would have made even Citizen Kane blush, but he has never attained  and now never will attain the one thing he has most wanted -- respect.

In an extraordinarily damning report released today, a select Parliamentary committee concludes that Murdoch is "not a fit person" to run his huge international media empire. 

The report followed a months' long investigation into the phone hacking scandal at Murdoch's British newspapers and said he had exhibited "a willful blindness" to wrongdoing at his New York-based News Corporation, a global conglomerate of newspapers, magazines, Fox News and other broadcast outlets.

While the consequences of the Parliamentary panel’s findings were not immediately clear, it is unimaginable that a U.S. congressional committee would issue such a report, let alone investigate the unscrupulous and possibly criminal activities of the deeply conservative media baron.  In fact, requests by Senator Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat, that the FBI investigate whether News Corporation engaged in similar tactics in the U.S. have gone nowhere.

The cross-party Parliamentary committee, which approved the report by a majority of six to four, scolded News Corporation for misleading Parliament and trying to cover up the hacking. It said that there had been huge failures in corporate governance which also raised questions about the competence of his son, James.

"News International and its parent News Corporation exhibited willful blindness, for which the companies' directors — including Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch — should ultimately take responsibility," it said. "Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators."

"Even if there were a 'don’t ask, don’t tell' culture at News International, the whole affair demonstrates huge failings of corporate governance at the company and its parent, News Corporation," the 85-page report concluded.

The impact of the report was blunted by divisions within the panel itself. The committee said it had been split on party lines in the assessment of Murdoch, with the dominant Conservatives opposing the criticism while the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner in Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, and the Labour opposition supporting it.

Murdoch, 81, and son James, 39, had long asserted and claimed last week in testimony before a separate judicial inquiry that the hacking was the result of a single rogue reporter and that they had no direct knowledge of its extent. This included the hacking in 2002 of a mobile phone belonging to Milly Dowler, an abducted and subsequently murdered teenager.

In a statement from its New York headquarters, News Corporation said it was "carefully reviewing the select committee’s report and will respond shortly." It also said the company "fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World" -- the now-shuttered Sunday tabloid at the heart of the scandal -- "and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded."

British police are conducting three separate investigations into phone hacking, e-mail hacking and bribery of police officers. More than 40 people have been arrested and questioned — though not charged — including senior editors and executives at the News International subsidiary.

The report also could embarrass Cameron, who has acknowledged that Britain's political elite has been dazzled and charmed by the Murdoch's media clout for years. 

The scandal also has threatened Jeremy Hunt, Cameron’s culture minister, who was in charge of overseeing a $12 billion BSkyB takeover bid by News Corporation that collapsed as the hacking scandal grew. As culture minister, Hunt had the power to waive regulatory scrutiny that could have doomed the takeover.

Cartoon du Jour

Schrank/The Independent

Mitt Romney & The Republican Party's Impossible Election Year Balancing Act

With the primary season pandering finally behind them, the Republican Party in general and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney in particular face an all but impossible balancing act: Being mindful of the interests of a party base that has evolved into a welter of angry Tea Partiers, self-righteous evangelicals and hard core right-wingers with nutty ideas while trying to court mainstream voters and independent women in particular who have shown little affinity for the GOP's social and economic platforms.

 Some historic perspective here: Romney enters the post-primary campaign season with the weakest favorability rating on record for a presumptive presidential nominee in ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1984 and trails a resurgent Barack Obama in personal popularity by a whopping 21 percentage points in one poll.  This on top of Romney's tepid showings in primaries last week despite the fact that Rick Santorum, his chief challenger, had stopped campaigning.

Other polls have Romney closer to the president and the occasional daily tracking poll shows him ahead by a nose, but none of them take into account his not-so-silent partner -- the House Republican caucus with its coddle the rich and screw everyone else mantra, and that will be an albatross around Romney's neck through to Election Day no matter how hard he flip-flops.

The crux of the balancing act is this: Can Romney appear moderate enough to attract the independents he needs to win without alienating the leaders of the House caucus, who in turn will be hectored by those rebellious freshmen who rode anti-Washington antipathy to victory in 2010?  In other words, is Romney trapped by his base?

Put another way, does Romney really believe in what Nobel prize-winning economist and pundit Paul Krugman calls the confidence fairy.  The confidence fairy rewards policy makers -- in this case House Republicans -- for their fiscal virtue, but in reality and as we know, the confidence fairy is a myth.

Romney has a further handicap that he has shown no sign of overcoming:  Defensiveness over his immense wealth and an inability to break out of the bubble world of the super rich in which he and his wife live.

Had Romney and his advisers been more in tune with how many voters will view him, he would have pulled out funds invested in offshore havens like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland long before that became an issue, as well as put off a $12 million renovation to his La Jolla home, which includes a car elevator, so that didn't become an issue. And a head's up here: With the warmer weather will come May Day and the reincarnation of Occupy Wall Street.  Romney will be squarely in their cross hairs.

Romney doesn't necessarily have to connect with average Joes and Janes to get elected, but in abandoning cultural and economic moderation in hearting the hardcore Republican Party line and surprisingly showing little sign of Etch A Sketching back toward the center, he is extremely vulnerable to attacks from Obama and his surrogates whether it's over something silly like his wife having two Cadillacs or more serious concerns like his support of the Paul Ryan budget plan.

Finally, beyond the balancing act is Romney's character.

I'm with commentator Charles Blow when he say that he has no personal gripe with him: "I don't believe him to be an evil man. Quite the opposite: he appears to be a loving husband and father. Besides, evil requires conviction, which Romney lacks. But he is a dangerous man. Unprincipled ambition always is. Infinite malleability is its own vice because it’s infinitely corruptible by others of ignoble intentions."

There is perhaps no one better at unprincipled ambition in American politics than puppet master Karl Rove, who is back from the dead with a gadzillion dollar super PAC to bankroll Romney in his quest to assault American democracy in much the same way that Rove' star pupil George W. Bush did.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

The 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' Movies: A Watchable Mess & A Great Remake

ROONEY MARA AS LISBETH SALANDER

Despite Hollywood's penchant for remaking old movies, the remakes are seldom as good as the originals and often worse. Conspicuous exceptions that I especially like include The Magnificent Seven (1960), a remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai epic Seven Samurai, and King Kong (2005), Peter Jackson's reverential remake of the original.

To which can now be added the 2011 American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which hews to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's posthumous runaway international bestseller -- the first book in the so-called Millennium Trilogy -- but improves on the 2009 Swedish film in almost every way.

Over the years, I've read my way through the great murder mystery writers -- Dashielle Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and P.D. James, to name but a few -- and thought I had pretty much tapped out the genre.

That was until I picked up the English translation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Since then I have been cherry picking my way through Scandinavian murder mysteries -- a genre sometimes referred to as Arctic Noir. They have been a revelation, while the work of Danish writer Peter Høeg is especially good.

I am prepared to make and defend the argument that the best of these Scandinavian mysteries equal or rival the mystery classics of yore, which is an unusual claim considering that Sweden, Norway and Denmark collectively are just about the most murder-free societies on the planet and seem unlikely to spawn a host of great murder mystery writers. But part of the power of these novels are their deceivingly tranquil settings, which make it all the more shocking when a crime occurs, as well as the powerful psychological dramas woven through them.

* * * * *

Both film versions of Dragon Tattoo hew to the book with a conspicuous exception that I'll get to. They open with investigative reporter Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist losing a libel case involving allegations he published about a billionaire financier. Lisbeth Salander, a pale and skinny young woman with red hair, which she dyes black, and a dragon tattoo, among others, is a world-class computer hacker whom is contracted to investigate Blomkvist by a lawyer for Hendrik Vanger, an 82-year-old retired industrialist.

Vanger subsequently hires Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece, Harriet, who vanished from the remote northern Swedish island where he lives on Childen's Day in 1966. Vanger believes that Harriet was murdered by a family member, several of whom are or were Nazi sympathizers.

Meanwhile, Salander's state-appointed legal guardian suffers a stroke and is replaced by Nils Bjurman, a sexual sadist who takes control of her finances and metes out money only in return for sexual favors, which escalate into anal rape.

Blomkvist moves into a cottage on the Vanger estate. Inside Harriet's Bible he finds a list of five names alongside what appear to be phone numbers. Using photographs taken during the Children's Day parade, Blomkvist believes that Harriet may have seen someone that day who may have killed her.  Salander discovers the meaning of the numbers next to the names and together they connect all but one of the names on Harriet's list to murdered women.

And that's just the start.

* * * * *

The challenge for filmmakers has been to adapt Arctic Noir books for the big (and little) screen while retaining the psychodramatic aspects.

The three "Masterpiece Theater" episodes based on Henning Mankell's books about Kurt Wallander, a soul-searching Swedish cop, largely succeeded. Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), starring Julia Ormond and based on Høeg's 1995 bestseller, largely failed.

Compared to a fuddy duddy like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or a hard-boiled period piece like Hammett's Sam Spade, the eccentric Salander has a steel-trap mind, a penchant for getting back at her enemies, and is positively hip with her arsenal of Mac Books, electronic eavesdropping devices and hacking skills, while Blomkvist digs deeply into the dark side of Sweden's political, corporate and social worlds. Holmes' Victorian parlor society and Spade's Tenderloin district escapades seem positively quaint by comparison.

The 2009 film version of Dragon Tattoo, with Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nykvist as Blomkvist, is a mess but nevertheless eminently watchable.

Larsson's book has too many subplots to count and director Niels Arden Oplev apparently felt compelled to shoehorn every last one of them into 152 minutes. The result is a jumble that only viewers who have read the book will be able to sort out.

This brings us to the David Fincher-directed remake, which is six minutes longer than the Swedish version but hurtles along at a ferocious pace.  Rooney Mara is Rapace's equal as Salander and Daniel Craig a bit better -- which is to say more believable -- as Blomkvist, and my only criticism is that a key plot twist connected to Harriet's fate is eliminated to the movie's detriment.

No matter.  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is even better the second time around.

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall

Levon Helm (1940-2012)

MORE HERE.
Photography by Susan DeChillo/The New York Times

Barack Obama's Secret Weapon

LILLY LEDBETTER & YOU KNOW WHO

The 2012 presidential campaign, now underway with the withdrawal of Rick Santorum, promises to be a study in contrasts. All presidential campaigns are, of course, but the contrasts between presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney and President Obama are striking and nowhere more so than when it comes to populism, an ideology that I loosely define as contrasting the needs of the people against the entrenched elite in pushing for social change.

Romney is tacking furiously toward the center and away from some of the more reactionary views that he espoused in sucking up to the right-wing GOP base in securing the GOP nomination while at the same time convincing few Republicans that he has the right stuff, let alone any stuff at all.

But even if Romney's advisers told him that he had to do so, it is much too late for him to shed the anti-populism that he espoused during the primary season as represented by Paul Ryan's Reverse Robin Hood budget plan.

Preaching from the populist hymnal comes naturally for Obama, whose first paying gig was as a community organizer in Chicago. He has been riding that horse hard since last December when he stepped up to a podium in Osawatomie, Kansas, the town where Teddy Roosevelt had delivered his famous New Nationalism speech in 1910 to decry a Republican economic agenda that favored the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.

Obama delivered a virtually identical message in firing the opening salvo of his re-election campaign. In presenting himself as the defender of working-class Americans and Republicans as defenders of a small elite, the so-called 1 percenters, Obama in effect rolled a grenade into the Republican presidential tent -- and filthy rich Romney's in particular -- that will reverberate all the way to November.

In this Obama has a secret weapon: Lilly Ledbetter, a 70-year-old widow who lives in Jacksonville, Alabama on a small pension and like many Americans worries about losing her home.

Ledbetter filed suit against the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company because, as one of its few woman area managers, it had paid her significantly less than male counterparts with similar seniority. Her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where a five justice majority led by Samuel Alito fell back on a technicality in dismissing the suit -- that employers cannot be sued under the Civil Rights Act over race or gender pay discrimination if the claims are based on decisions made 180 days ago or more.

The upshot of the defeat was the the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which passed Congress despite ferocious Republican opposition and closed the 180-day loophole.

This brings us back to Romney, who initially refused to be pinned down on whether he supports the act (in a now familiar refrain, his advisers told reporters that "we'll get back to you on that") but at the same time has blamed Obama in claiming that more women than men have lost jobs during and in the aftermath of the Bush Recession. That may be technically correct if a narrow set of parameters are used, but it is a fiction because in reality there are fewer jobs available for men.

Then came the inevitable Romney flip-flop.

Realizing the damage that Democrats had inflicted in pushing back against the candidate's refusal to take a stand on the act, the campaign sent out a spokeswoman who said that Romney supported "pay equity" and is "not looking to change current law," a position that puts him at odds with an overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress.

Then there is the not unimportant matter of whom Romney picks to be his running mate.

Among the current leaders in the veepstakes are Ryan and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Ryan's reverse budget plan doesn't merely discriminate against middle-class and poor women, it discriminates against everyone, while Walker, who faces a June recall, has signed a law making it tougher for women to sue in state court over pay discrimination.

As Talking Points Memo reporter Benjy Sarlin noted, Romney's ham-handed moves over the Lilly Ledbetter Act were a classic example of what is becoming a familiar maneuver: Projecting his own vulnerabilities onto his opponent, in this instance the fact that he is polling extremely poorly among the independent women who will determine whether Obama serves a second term and he goes home to play with his car elevator.

Cartoon du Jour

Jack Ohman/The Oregonian

Rick Santorum's Oh So Cowardly Exit

A semi-respectful period of time has passed since Rick Santorum cited the ongoing illness of Bella, his three-year-old daughter in bowing out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. With wishes for a long and happy life to Bella and with all due respect to the Santorum family, this is about as cowardly an end to a presidential campaign that I can recall.

Bella has been chronically ill since birth and her hospitalizations for Trisoma 18, a sometimes fatal disease with side effects like pneumonia, have been frequent. Santorum was careful to say that he "was suspending" his campaign as opposed to ending it, a nicety that masks the reality that he is toast. But why now? Because at heart he is yet another political coward who could not stand the prospect of being pummeled in the April 24 Pennsylvania primary by Mitt Romney and used little Bella as a convenient prop like Sarah Palin has with her son Trig, who is a special needs child.

Pennsylvania, of course, is Santorum's home state, yet the last time he was on the ballot there he was defeated by a record margin for a sitting U.S. senator and he had no chance of coming close to beating Romney, who is the presumptive GOP nominee. This is because Pennsylvanian voters have done something that many right-wing Republicans and especially Santorum's hard-core evangelical base have not: Figured out that he is a fraud with some extremely strange ideas.

Santorum’s success in the 2012 primary season, of course, had been entirely the function of his being a Republican not named Romney. He was a humorless tight ass whose ideological claptrap and gimmicky ideas were never taken seriously beyond his Bible-thumping constituency, but the news media was game as long as he kept yapping at Romney's heels. Oh, and he stands zero chance of being Romney's running mate because his unfavorables among voters nationally are so high.

I do not question not Santorum's repeated invocations of Bella's serial recoveries as "miraculous turnarounds" that may indeed have been God jobs. But Bella is getting the best medical care money can buy because of Santorum’s lavish Senate retirement benefits and personal wealth, something that he would deny ordinary Americans who cannot afford decent care. In fact, doing a little extrapolating, of the 45 million Americans without health insurance, there probably are at least a million or so three-year-olds in that situation, while about 1,000 children die of pneumonia, which has plagued Bella on and off, in the U.S. each year.

By the way, Bella's most recently hospitalization ended on Monday.

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Further On Down The Road: Mitt Romney's Cornucopia Of Big Problems

Although he stands a better chance of beating Barack Obama than his Republican clown car compatriots, Mitt Romney is in a key respect the perfect challenger for the president because he represents all that is wrong -- and then some -- about the distribution of wealth in America at a time when that has belatedly become a pungent social issue.

Romney, who is worth $250 million give or take a few million, has been squirrely about being a card-carrying member of the 1 percent of the 1 percent from the outset of the 2012 campaign although it was obvious that his challengers for the GOP nomination and Obama himself if he won the nomination would exploit that.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

* Romney, like most extraordinarily wealthy people, is predisposed to being hedgy regarding details of his fortune. Yes, even if it is something relatively minor as the car elevator he has installed at one of his mansions.

* Romney still doesn't get it regarding how mere mortals view his wealth and his defensiveness about it. He seems pathologically unable to use that wealth as an asset -- hey, I worked hard and got rich in the finest American tradition, by golly -- and not something to continually run from.

Now comes a report that one pundit calls catnip for Obama -- his exploitation of a loophole in federal ethics laws that enables him to conceal the size and nature of his financial holdings in Bain Capital, which he founded and ran for 15 years.

While we have a pretty good idea about what Bain is doing with its money -- which includes buying a division of a Chinese company that is the largest supplier for the Beijing government's Big Brother surveillance system to watch over university campuses, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts -- we don't know how or where his money is invested. And more importantly, whether his policies as president would affect his investments.

Even the lawyer who advises Republican candidates on financial disclosure issues thinks that federal ethics officials are giving Romney a free ride:

"(This exemption) turns the whole purpose of the ethics statute on its ear," says Cleta Mitchell. "I don't know what legal authority exists for the federal ethics office to allow Mitt Romney not to disclose these assets. The statute intends for presidential candidates to publicly disclose underlying assets."

It should be noted that the same officials gave the same exemption in 2004 to Democrat John Kerry in 2004, who had assets in a Bain account held by his wife, Teresa. The Bush re-election campaign, of course, portrayed Kerry as a rich wind-surfer who was out of touch with average Americans.

MAZEL TOV, MR. PRESIDENT

Republicans predicted that this was going to be the year that Jewish voters would abandon Obama and Democrats in general, but a funny thing happened on the way to Passover.

They aren't.

A poll of Jewish voters by the independent Public Religion Research Institute found that 62 percent favor Obama and only 30 percent prefer a Republican. The biggest reason? Israel is not the biggest issue for most American Jews. Economic injustice, the growing gap between the Romneys and everyone else, is a far more pressing concern.

JUST GO BAKE COOKIES, LADIES

In another gift to Obama, Republicans have worked assiduously this election year to alienate women voters, perhaps the key constituency if the party is to retake the White House.

And while Romney is now tacking furiously away from his endorsement of the party's misogyny platform, it may be too late. Polls show him trailing Obama badly among women voters -- by 20 percent in a new Pew poll and 18 percent in a new Gallup poll.

This is a neat trick for a party that had its best overall national result in 18 years among women voters in the 2010 midterm election, but the reality is that the GOP's problems with these voters have persisted so long that they can now be called historic, while the strategies the party has tried to use to close the gender gap, including hiring corporate marketers and communication specialists to craft women voter-friendly language, have flopped.

The reason is as obvious as the trunk on an elephant's face: In their heart of hearts, many influential Republican believe that women are second-class citizens and should be treated as such.

LET THE VEEPSTAKES BEGIN

There are three factors that you can be sure won't be in play when it comes to Romney picking a vice presidential running mate:

* No unvetted candidate a la Sarah Palin has a chance of making Romney's A List.

* The A List will consist of people with deeply conservative bona fides to help counterbalance the reality that Romney is a moderate in conservative's clothing.

* Unlike Romney, the eventual pick will have a pulse.

Photograph by Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Cartoon du Jour

Chris Britt/Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register

Why General Motors' Electric Chevy Volt Is The Wrong Horse In The Right Race

The Driver in Chief behind the wheel of a pricey Volt

Many automakers have been slow to embrace hybrids and for some who have the technology doesn't seem to run a whole lot deeper than a badge with a green leaf on the trunk lid. A conspicuous exception has been Toyota, which introduced the fuel stingy Prius in the U.S. in 2001 and now offers hybrids throughout its Lexus lineup.

There are many ways to skin the hybrid cat and Toyota's approach has been through the ingenious Atkinson cycle gasoline-electric system that optimizes economy while not sacrificing performance. We've had a Lexus CT200h with the system for seven months and are averaging 45 miles to the gallon highway and 50 city -- or about 20 bucks to a fill-up -- at a time when gasoline prices are going through the roof.

Then there is General Motors, which marketed the EV1 electric car in small numbers between 1996 and 1999 but, depending upon who you want to believe, decided that this niche market wasn't profitable enough or self-sabotaged the car despite growing public interest. It was a stupid move in any event, but not the last that the General would make when it came to a hybrid market that is now growing by leaps and bounds.

GM belatedly reentered the hybrid fray last year with the Volt, an electric car with a standby gasoline engine that gets a boffo 94 miles to the gallon but has a puny 39 mile electric-only range and an outrageous $39,195 sticker price, nearly $10,000 more than an entry-level Lexus CT200h that is substantially better equipped. Tax credits apply only to more affluent buyers.

The goal was to sell 45,000 Volts this year, but GM sold a mere 8,000 in 2011 and only 1,000 or so in February and again in March. (Some 15,556 Priuses were sold in its first full year in the U.S., a time when gasoline was a fraction of the price it is today.) One reason for sluggish Volt sales is a recall for potential fires in the car's battery pack, but the biggest reason is that despite its slick engineering GM has priced the Volt out of the market at a time when people want an economical and affordable ride.

Some auto press pundits have suggested the GM lower the cost of the Volt by subsidizing it with the profits from its brisk-selling pickup trucks, but this is a non-starter that arch competitor Ford would use to its benefit.

It probably has not helped -- although it can't hurt that much -- that the Volt has become a whipping boy for Republicans because the Obama administration has used it to tout the resurgence of the American auto industry.

Rush Limbaugh has blasted the car as part of a nefarious White House plot to take away the precious right of Americans to own gas guzzlers, while Newt Gingrich has noted that it is too small for a gun rack.

"As for the Volt, it is emblematic of a larger problem the GOP has: the sense that they are rooting for America to fail," Paul Begala, Democratic strategist and adviser to President Obama's super PAC. "When a good jobs report comes out, Mitt Romney looks sad. When Clint Eastwood makes an unapologetic, patriotic Super Bowl ad for Chrysler, Karl Rove says it makes him sick. They booed a gay soldier at a GOP debate, and didn't even want to give the President his due for ordering the mission that killed bin Laden. One wonders if they will be rooting for communist China during the summer Olympics."

Indeed.

GM has announced that it is halting production of the Volt until sometime this month, so as to maintain "proper inventory levels" (cough, cough), but sales could improve should gasoline prices continue to go through the roof.

Or not. Toyota has introduced a plug-in version of the Prius in Japan that is selling poorly while its conventional hybrid continues to sell briskly. That has everything to do with the price: A whopping 3,400,000 yen ($41,000), which is more or less that the Volt costs.

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Bend Over & Spread 'Em: It's Now The Law In This Great Land Of Ours

Your daughter is arrested for walking the family dog off its leash at a county park. She is taken into custody and before being jailed is strip searched. A guard instructs your daughter to disrobe. Her mouth, vagina and anus are then inspected for contraband while other guards leer at her and make jokes about how she trims her pubic hair.

Your son is arrested while driving on a county highway for having an unpaid littering ticket. A guard instructs your son to disrobe. His mouth and anus are then inspected for contraband while other guards laugh at him because he has a tattoo above his penis.

Are these the malevolent machinations of an authoritarian state? No, at least not yet, but strip searches no matter how minor the offense may be and strip searches even if officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband are now the law of the land following a Supreme Court ruling on Monday that further erodes the basic liberties that Americans once took for granted.

The ruling was by yet another 5-4 vote with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who joined the court's conservative wing in delivering a body blow to the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches.

Kennedy's rationale, which gives new meaning to judicial overreach, is that courts should not second guess prison officials who might consider not just the possibility of smuggled weapons and drugs, but a suspect's possible gang affiliations and health. This from a court that has no difficulty second guessing other institutions that are a bulwark against violations of personal and civil rights.

Law enforcement arms of the federal government and 10 states forbid strip searches for minor violations, while such searches are in violation of international human rights treaties.

"Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed," Justice Kennedy wrote, noting that about 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails. His ruling did not address body cavity searches, but neither did it prohibit them.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said the strip-searches the majority allowed were "a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy" and should be used only when there was good reason to do so."

Obscured in the welter of reactions to the ruling is the fact that it offers a built-in opportunity for those misogynist Republicans who insist on dictating what women can and cannot do with their bodies: Why not have officials give your dog-walking daughter a thorough gynecological workup while she's being strip and body cavity searched.

A perfect twofer for folks on the hard right for whom individual rights are reserved only for them and their ilk.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

Nukes Conflict: Of Rogue Men & States

Entire forests have been denuded in recent weeks as pundits speculate whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been bluffing about launching air strikes against Iran's nascent nuclear program. If ever an important issue needed a time out this is it, and talks between Iran and the U.S. and five other major powers scheduled to begin next week could provide just that opportunity.

Let's get some stuff out of the way before we dive into the deep end of this superheated situation.

The Islamic Republic is a rogue state that threatens regional stability, as well as Israel's existence. No nation is more responsible for this than the U.S., which is justly viewed by the Tehran government, the ayatollahs who are its puppet masters, and many Iranians as a rogue state itself that propped up the Shah and backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war while providing Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons that scarred a generation of Iranian men.

Israel is becoming a rogue state that also threatens regional stability because of its bellicosity toward its enemies real and imagined and an occupation of the Gaza Strip that has gone beyond the humanitarian pale, as well as its insistence on continuing to build settlements across the green line on the West Bank that by any reasonable definition are not only illegal but the reason there probably never will be a two-state solution.

After eight years of counterproductive Bush-Cheney sabre rattling, the U.S. finds itself being in the unusual position of being on the side of reason on the issue of Iranian nukes. The Obama administration has led the charge on tougher sanctions against the Islamic State that are having the desired effect -- compelling Tehran to join in those talks as a prelude to hopefully wind down its program. The U.S. and its allies also have had a welcome assist from the Arab Spring.

A personal note: Like my Jewish grandfather, I believe that Jews are people of the world and did not need to have their own state, but like my grandfather I would spill my own blood to protect its existence. This makes Israeli's devolution from a pillar of democracy into a mockery of its core values painful and deeply depressing. Add to this the fact that Netanyahu, like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is at least a little bit crazy.

My expectations for progress being made during the talks are extremely low. Netanyahu, who leads a nation with a nuclear bomb program that is an open secret, has set the bar too high while the ayatollahs have set it too low. Bluffing or not, the Israeli prime minister speaks in apocalyptic terms while the religious leaders see their nuclear program as an affirmation of Persian pride against the tutelage of the West, as one pundit well put it.

Then there is the reality that airstrikes, with or without the support of the U.S., would not cripple Iran's program. The uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, is so far underground as to be invulnerable to attack.

Then there is the probability that Iran's nuclear program is nowhere near ready for prime time. This is borne out in most intelligence analyses, and as one Obama administration official put it, "They're keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it."

Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections and are confident that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made. It was on this basis that Obama has argued that there remains time to see whether sanctions will compel Iran's leaders to halt any bomb-building program.

Finally, there is one scenario that I and others are not taking into account in predicting that President Obama will win -- and possibly win in a landslide -- in November: A unilateral Israeli air strike that would plunge the Middle East into war and rupture relations between Washington and Jerusalem.

This is what would happen in the following days:

* Many of Iran's centrifuges, warhead and missile plants would be destroyed and the nuclear program merely delayed.

* There would be lethal reprisals against Israel although Iran's air force is not particularly strong and its navy is puny.

* The price of oil would spike.

* Communities across the Jewish diaspora, including in the U.S., would be put in danger from Iranian-sponsored terror attacks like recent attacks in India and Thailand.

* Relations between Jerusalem and Washington would end, leaving Israel only marginally safer and without the support of its largest benefactor.

This is not a happy prospect.