Starting Points

Feb 23, 2010

Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History

A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."

Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."

The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.

Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.

The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.

Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.

Disputes are normal at the site—the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.

Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."

Why Minority Students Don't Graduate From College

American universities are accepting more minorities than ever. Graduating them is another matter.

By Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, was justifiably proud of Bowdoin's efforts to recruit minority students. Since 2003 the small, elite liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, has boosted the proportion of so-called underrepresented minority students (blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, about 30 percent of the U.S. population) in entering freshman classes from 8 percent to 13 percent. "It is our responsibility, given our place in the world, to reach out and attract students to come to our kinds of places," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. But Bowdoin has not done quite as well when it comes to actually graduating minorities. While nine out of 10 white students routinely get their diplomas within six years, only seven out of 10 black students made it to graduation day in several recent classes.

The United States once had the highest graduation rate of any nation. Now it stands 10th. For the first time in American history, there is the risk that the rising generation will be less well educated than the previous one. The graduation rate among 25- to 34-year-olds is no better than the rate for the 55- to 64-year-olds who were going to college more than 30 years ago. Studies show that more and more poor and nonwhite students aspire to graduate from -college—but their graduation rates fall far short of their dreams. The graduation rates for blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans lag far be-hind the graduation rates for whites and Asians. As the minority population grows in the United States, low college--graduation rates become a threat to national -prosperity.

The problem is pronounced at public universities. In 2007 (the last year for which Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group, has comparative statistics) the University of Wisconsin–-Madison—one of the top five or so "public Ivies"—graduated 81 percent of its white students within six years, but only 56 percent of its blacks. At less-selective state schools, the numbers get worse. During the same time frame, the University of Northern Iowa graduated 67 percent of its white students, but only 39 percent of its blacks. Community colleges have low graduation rates generally—but rock-bottom rates for minorities. A recent review of California community colleges found that while a third of the Asian students picked up their degrees, only 15 percent of African-Americans did so as well.

Private colleges and universities generally do better, partly because they offer smaller classes and more personal attention. But when it comes to a significant graduation gap, Bowdoin has company. Nearby Colby College logged an 18-point difference between white and black graduates in 2007 and 25 points in 2006. Middlebury College in Vermont, another topnotch school, had a 19-point gap in 2007 and a 22-point gap in 2006. The most selective private schools—-Harvard, Yale, and -Princeton—show almost no gap between black and white graduation rates. But that may have more to do with their ability to cherry-pick the best students. According to data gathered by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, the most selective schools are more likely to choose blacks who have at least one immigrant parent from Africa or the Caribbean than black students who are descendants of American slaves. According to Guinier's data, the latter perform less well academically.

"Higher education has been able to duck this issue for years, particularly the more selective schools, by saying the onus is on the individual student," says Pennington of the Gates Foundation. "If they fail, it's their fault." Some critics blame affirmative action—students admitted with lower test scores and grades from shaky high schools often struggle at elite schools. But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are, in educators' jargon, "undermatched": they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. Some schools out for profit cynically jack up tuitions and count on student loans and federal aid to foot the bill—knowing full well that the students won't make it. "Colleges know that a lot of kids they take will end up in remedial classes, for which they'll get no college credit and then they'll flunk out," says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust. "The school gets to keep the money, but the kid leaves with loads of debt and no degree and no ability to get a better job. Colleges are not holding up their end."

A college education is getting ever more expensive. Since 1982 tuitions have been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation. University administrators insist that most of those hikes are matched by increased scholarship grants or loans, but the recession has slashed private endowments and cut into state spending on high-er education. In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public -university—after financial aid—equaled 28 percent of median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of median family income. More and more scholarships are based on merit, not need. Poorer students are not always the best-informed consumers. Often they wind up deeply in debt or simply unable to pay after a year or two and must drop out.

There once was a time when universities took a perverse pride in their attrition rates. Professors would begin the year by saying, "Look to the right and look to the left. One of you is not going to be here by the end of the year." But such a Darwinian spirit is beginning to give way as at least a few colleges face up to the graduation gap. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a "laserlike focus" on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost Damon Williams.

State and federal governments could sharpen that focus everywhere by broadly publishing minority graduation rates. (For now students and counselors must find their way to the Web site of the Education Trust, which compares data obtained from schools by the federal government.) For years private colleges such as Princeton and MIT have had success bringing minorities onto campus in the summer before freshman year to give them a head start on college-level courses. The newer trend is to start recruiting poor and nonwhite students as early as the seventh grade, using innovative tools like hip-hop competitions to identify kids with sophisticated verbal finesse. Such programs can be expensive, of course, but cheap compared with the millions already invested in scholarships and grants for kids who have little chance to graduate without special support.

With effort and money, the graduation gap can be closed. Washington and Lee is a small, selective school with a preppy feel in Lexington, Va. Its student body is less than 5 percent black and less than 2 percent Latino. While the school usually graduated about 90 percent of its whites, the graduation rate of its blacks and Latinos had dipped to 63 percent by 2007. "We went through a dramatic shift," says Dawn Watkins, the vice president for student affairs. The school aggressively pushed mentoring of minorities by other students and "partnering" with parents at a special pre-enrollment session. The school had its first-ever black homecoming. Last spring the school graduated the same proportion of minorities as it did whites. If the United States wants to keep up in the global economic race, it will have to pay systematic attention to graduating minorities, not just enrolling them.

Europe's Stark Choice on Immigration

Europe is on track to lose 52 million workers between now and 2050—unless it begins embracing immigrants fast.

PHOTOS

Exposing Europe's Invisible Army

The 'new Europeans'—illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on the continent.

By Stefan Theil | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

You'd never guess it from the rants of America's talk-radio Jeremiahs, but U.S. immigration policy isn't really a disaster. In fact, Europe has recently begun studying it enviously—or was studying it anyway. Then the recession struck. Now it's open season on foreigners across much of the continent. Italy's interior minister, a member of the xenophobic Northern League, has sent armed carabinieri to clear out camps of jobless migrants in Naples and other parts of the south. In Britain, Tory leader David Cameron recently promised that if his party wins upcoming elections he'll slash immigration by 75 percent—and that's on top of the visa quotas imposed last year by the current Labour government. Ahead of key regional elections in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a noisy debate about "French identity." Switzerland has outlawed minarets, and France, not to be outdone, is considering a ban on burqas.

The trouble isn't a shortage of immigrants. The European Union has attracted 26 million migrants in the past two decades—a full 30 percent more than America's 20 million over the same span. But most European countries tried to protect homegrown labor by shutting out foreign workers. The efforts mostly backfired, encouraging a massive influx of illegal aliens, who tend to accept rock-bottom wages and benefits because they have no legal recourse. At the same time, Europe's generous social benefits encouraged a massive surge of "welfare tourism." As a result, Europe has ended up with 85 percent of all unskilled migrants to the developed countries but only 5 percent of the highly skilled. Compare that with the United States, which has honed its innovative edge by attracting 55 percent of the world's educated migrants. And because immigration happens largely via networks, with established immigrants paving the way for their peers, such trends tend to endure. "It therefore takes decades to turn immigration policy around," says Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

For decades most European countries have consigned immigrants to the margins: in Germany, some professions were restricted to German citizens well into the 1990s, while eligibility for citizenship itself was based on bloodlines until a landmark reform in 2001. Millions of refugees were legally barred from working, which forced them into squalid welfare dependency. Muslims especially remain unintegrated and ghettoized in many European countries, including France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Now many European countries have tabled important policy reforms such as the drafting of a continentwide asylum policy and the formulation of smarter immigration criteria based on education and skills. Others, like Spain and the Czech Re-public, are actually paying migrants to go away. The danger is that Europe's worsening hostility toward foreigners will halt or even reverse efforts to assimilate those who are already there, spawning a fast--growing, permanent underclass. According to the OECD, immigrants have been losing jobs at almost twice the rate of native-born citizens during the current crisis, and in many countries the socioeconomic gap between immigrants and natives has begun to grow again.

All this comes at a critical moment for the global economy. Economists predict that global GDP will double in the next 20 years, and as many as 1 billion new, skilled jobs will be created. To avoid being left behind, Europe will need to upgrade its workforce to compete in knowledge-intensive sectors. It can't afford to neglect the education of its immigrant populations or to give up competing for its share of the global talent pool. If it makes the wrong choice, Europe will become smaller, poorer, and angrier. Instead of attracting newcomers, the continent will watch its own best and brightest decamp for better opportunities in the growing economies of China, India, and Brazil. (The economic booms in Poland and Romania have already been slowed by a severe dearth of skilled workers.)

As Europe fiddles, some countries aren't standing still. At the onset of the global crisis, the Canadian government briefly considered slashing immigration quotas to protect its labor market. It then decided to keep its borders open and even to speed up acceptance procedures for some highly skilled arrivals. While migrants have lost some ground recently, they're still twice as likely as native Canadians to hold doctorates or master's degrees. Even within Europe, there are a few countries doing it right. Sweden wasn't satisfied with merely implementing a new, skills-based immigration policy; it actually upgraded its integration efforts, including language and vocational training for existing immigrants, right in the middle of the crisis. But much more can be done to attract skilled migrants—raising the number of visas available in professions where shortages already exist, for example, or cutting the red tape that can make it all but impossible to get non--European diplomas recognized. Nations and companies could also do a much better job of recruiting more of the -estimated 1.4 million foreign students currently enrolled at European universities.

Europeans' concerns aren't totally misplaced. The rapid pace of immigration over the past decade has strained Britain's infrastructure and social institutions. Germans and the French are particularly worried about the underclass immigrants who have isolated themselves from society at large. But now the continent is facing a pivotal decision. Closing its borders will only divert more migration into illegal and uncontrollable channels. Europe is no defendable, homogenous island; it's surrounded by the wildly growing populations of Africa and the Middle East. Europe's choice is not whether to stop migration, but whether to channel it to its own advantage.

How the GOP Sees It

Image via Wikipedia

What Republicans would do if given carte blanche to run the country.

By Katie Connolly, Michael Hirsh and Weston Kosova | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

"We've offered to work with the president all year. We've been shut out, shut out, and shut out." —House GOP leader John Boehner

Such is the lament of the party out of power in Washington. Republicans on Capitol Hill say they have many good ideas and want to join with President Obama and the Democrats to alleviate the country's problems. They want to collaborate on a health-care bill, a jobs bill, a clean-energy bill. But they can't, because the Democrats—intent on pushing through a radical agenda that is out of touch with real Americans—won't listen to them. Republicans want to help the president succeed, but he won't let them.

This isn't true, of course—any more than it was true when the Democrats said the same thing as they dedicated themselves to thwarting George W. Bush. In zero-sum Washington, members of the opposition party have little incentive to help the president, especially if it means the credit for their actions could accrue to him and not them. If politics is the art of compromise, then politics as practiced in the capital is the art of preventing compromise at all costs. This is why, infuriatingly, our elected officials spend so much time plotting ways to stick it to the other side with "filibuster-proof super-majorities" and "nuclear options," while the unemployment rate hovers in the double digits and 46 million Americans go without health insurance. It is why not a single GOP senator voted for the health-care bill now stalled in Congress, and why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned against a GOP-inspired plan for a deficit commission once Obama endorsed the idea.

A handful of Republicans—Sen. Olympia Snowe on health care, Sen. Bob Corker on financial reform—have tried on their own to break from this tit-for-tat and deal with Democrats. They see what most politicians know but don't talk about: that on many issues, the differences between the two sides are not nearly so great as the party bosses would have us believe. Too often it is politics, not policy, that stymies progress. Certainly Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, scornful of Republican ideas and motives, have not gone out of their way to solicit Republican views. And the GOP leadership has made known its displeasure at moderates' overtures to the other side. Some of Snowe's colleagues treated her like an apostate. Corker has been frustrated in his efforts. "We've probably had the most selfish generation in Congress … in modern times," says Corker. "It's beyond belief to me that the deficit commission did not pass."

There is a luxury to being the party of "no." As Obama himself has now discovered, it is much easier (and, to some, more viscerally satisfying) to stop something in Washington than to start it. But what if the Republicans had their way? What if Obama and the Democrats simply stepped aside and allowed the GOP to take charge of fixing the nation's troubles? What would they do—and how different would it be, really, from the Democratic proposals Republicans say are so extreme that compromise is all but impossible? A guide to what the GOP wants:

JOBS
For Republican leaders, there is one way to create new jobs that trumps all others: tax cuts. Leave more money in the hands of business owners, Republicans say, and they will use it to place orders—stimulating job growth—or hire new workers themselves. "We're not going to look to Washington to create the jobs," says GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, summing up the Republican liturgy. Most in the party (like most Americans, according to polls) want nothing to do with another expensive stimulus that would smack of expanded government. Yet the GOP has also rejected Democratic bills that tried to lure Republicans by including significant tax cuts. Earlier this year Republican Sen. Charles Grassley reached an agreement with Democratic Sen. Max Baucus on an $85 billion jobs bill. It combined small-business tax breaks with an injection of money for the Highway Trust Fund, more unemployment insurance, and agriculture emergency assistance. Other Republicans resisted Grassley's entreaties to sign on, even though the bill was adorned with the tax-credit extensions for businesses that Republicans wanted.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wound up withdrawing the bill the same day he offered it. Democrats had complained that Republicans were going to slam them for the expensive bill, despite the GOP gifts it contained. Reid replaced it with a meager $15 billion version, made up mostly of tax breaks for businesses that Democrats and Republicans agree on. But such small-bore efforts aren't likely to make much of a difference. That leaves the Republicans in a tough spot. Obama is out there boasting that the stimulus plan the GOP rejected saved jobs in the worst months of the recession. Now Republican leaders risk being seen as lining up against any bill that contains spending to promote job growth, even if it also includes the tax cuts they favor. To avoid the appearance that they're merely obstructing, they'll have to come up with something better than that.

Next: The Debt »

THE DEBT
How big a problem is the $1.4 trillion budget deficit and the ever-expanding national debt? (Just FYI, the debt now tops $12 trillion and grows an average of $3.87 billion each day.) Pose that question to five economists and prepare for five different answers. Some believe a large debt burden could cripple the economy and scare off foreign creditors. Others say that the numbers, though scary to look at, are still manageably low as a percentage of the overall economy. Democrats worry that attacking the deficit too harshly now could result in a double-dip recession. Small-government Republicans come down squarely on the side of smaller deficits. It is an issue that goes to their deepest principles, and appeals both to their base and to the growing tea-party movement they hope to win over. Cut spending, reduce government, and restore America's strength.

Sounds great. Except that no one in either party has figured out how to do that in a way that won't cause a rebellion among the voters. Republicans attack Obama's deficit-ballooning budget every chance they get, but the GOP leadership has put forward no serious proposals that would slow, let alone reverse, the growth of government while still providing everything we demand from Washington. (Remember that George W. Bush, an avowed small-government conservative, presided over a massive increase in the size of government.) Politicians can talk all they want about eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But the truth is, we could pull the plug on the entire federal bureaucracy and it would barely make a difference. The real problem is runaway costs in three sacred entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Until something is done to bring them under control before the baby boomers start retiring en masse, the rest is just talk.

This is no secret. Ross Perot was screaming about it two decades ago. Yet Republicans and Democrats are equally afraid of speaking honestly about the looming crunch. One Republican, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has introduced a detailed proposal to cut the deficit by reining in Medicare and Social Security spending. It would shift some of the burden from the government to individuals and introduce, among other things, a voucher system for Medicare. The result? Ryan has attracted just nine Republican cosponsors and zero Democrats. Small-government gospel or not, the overwhelming majority of Ryan's colleagues won't risk being anywhere in the vicinity of the truth on this one, especially in an election year.

Next: Health Care »

HEALTH CARE
When President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress last September to push for health-care reform, Republicans engaged in a quiet protest. They brought along copies of what they said was a GOP health-care bill, and waved them at the president to show that they too had a plan, and it was better than his. It made for good TV, but in reality there was no unified GOP bill; the Republicans hadn't actually agreed on an alternative to the Democratic reforms they were working so hard to kill.

Since then, House Republicans have come forward with a plan to rival the Democratic versions now sitting idle in the House and Senate. It has a catchy name—the Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act—and its authors proudly say that they got the job done in a mere 219 pages of Washington-speak; the House Democratic version weighs in at 1,990 pages. The GOP bill would prevent insurers from dropping people from their rolls if they got sick; ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get insurance; and require insurance companies to let children stay on their parents' plans until they reach their mid-20s.

Nothing new there. All those provisions are part of the Democratic bills. But that's where the similarities end. The two parties have different goals in reforming health care. Democrats believe that more government regulation of the health-insurance industry is needed to make sure just about everyone can get coverage while at the same time controlling rising costs. Republicans want the opposite: to free health-insurance companies from regulation and allow market forces to bring down costs and provide affordable insurance options.

To do this, Republicans would allow insurers to sell policies across state lines and encourage small businesses to band together to leverage their bargaining power. Democrats aren't necessarily opposed to this idea. "That is why we created the national insurance exchange," says Democratic Rep. John Dingell, who argues that creating a marketplace where both individuals and small businesses can shop for insurance plans "will spread risks, reduce costs, and help everyone get into the system." But there are big differences in how the two parties envision this working. Democrats favor one vast nationwide pool and would require insurers to offer plans that meet government minimum requirements for coverage and costs so the industry can't steer the old and sick into more expensive plans with stingier benefits.

Republicans see that as intrusive government meddling. They want a system of small, self-selecting pools of people with similar needs. The free market will see to it that insurance companies meet demand, they say—a claim that is met with skepticism by many economists and health-care analysts, who note that it hasn't worked that way in places where such ideas have been tried. "Republicans trust the American people to do what's best for themselves, instead of turning decisions over to a bureaucrat," says Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel.

Take genuine philosophical differences and layer on this sort of chest-thumping, and it's not hard to see why health-care reform, once considered a sure thing this year, now seems anything but. It's also not hard to see why the public is fed up. According to the new newsweek Poll, Americans say they oppose Obama's health-care plan 51 to 37 percent. Yet they overwhelmingly favor its specific provisions: 73 percent want to require businesses to offer insurance; 78 percent are in favor of requiring insurance companies to cover everyone, regardless of their health; and 81 percent like the idea of insurance exchanges. Still, when those polled were told that those things are part of Obama's plan, support jumped just 10 percent.

Next: Foreign Policy »

FOREIGN POLICY
Oddly enough—given the sharp exchanges between Obama and John McCain during the 2008 campaign—this is probably the area of policy where there are the fewest disagreements between the parties. That may be because it's where Obama has tacked most rightward since taking office, blunting opposition. Whereas Republicans pounded the administration last summer for its months-long review of the war in Afghanistan, now the White House appears to be having some success in combating the Taliban and persuading Pakistan to crack down hard on militants. One sticking point: Obama's insistence that he'll start bringing troops home from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011—a deadline McCain and other Republican hawks oppose.

On Iran, after a long, not very successful effort at outreach, Obama is likewise taking a tougher line on sanctions. On China, he announced new arms sales to Taiwan and met last week with the Dalai Lama, quieting conservative critics who said he was too soft on the communist regime. All these policies mesh with GOP goals. Even Dick Cheney admitted that he approves of Obama's direction in Afghanistan, and most Republicans support the president's slow, cautious Iraq-withdrawal timetable.

Next: Terrorism »

TERRORISM
Now here is where the serious disagreements set in. Few issues have caused more acrimony between Republicans and Democrats than what to do with detainees still being held at Guantánamo Bay and with other captured terrorist suspects. President Obama—like President Bush and McCain—wants to close Gitmo, in part because it has become a propaganda tool for Al Qaeda and its allies. Many Republicans want to keep it open, if only to prevent Obama from carrying out his intention of moving some of the men to prisons within the United States. Republican leaders are even more strongly opposed to the administration's plan to try terror suspects in federal civilian courts instead of military tribunals.

The dispute over the prisoners comes down to a core disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, and one that isn't easily bridged: should captured terror suspects be regarded as criminals subject to the U.S. criminal-justice system, or as enemy combatants subject to military justice? This divide was highlighted at the end of last year with the arrest of failed Christmas Eve bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Republicans sharply criticized the Obama administration when it was revealed that the terror suspect had been read his Miranda rights and was provided a lawyer. "He should have been declared an enemy combatant so that he could have been questioned without a lawyer for a much longer period of time," says Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee. "At the right time, after all intelligence was obtained, there should have been a discussion about whether criminal charges or a military commission was appropriate."

Another lingering source of tension: interrogation methods. President Obama has banned the use of harsh techniques, and with the exception of Dick Cheney, who still declares himself a "big supporter of waterboarding," Republicans have largely backed away from that practice. But some GOP leaders continue to endorse the use of other extreme interrogation methods—stress positions, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation—that Obama stopped. "The government should be able to use any interrogation techniques that are within the boundaries of our laws and moral values, and are effective," says Bond. He would still prohibit waterboarding, but says vaguely that he "would allow our interrogators to use other lawful and effective techniques, even if they are not in the Army Field Manual." Republicans insist that revealing which methods can and cannot be used only helps the enemy train against U.S. interrogation. Bond and other Republicans argue it is important for the United States to keep its options open. If Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri were to be captured, Bond says, U.S. officials must have the ability to declare them enemy combatants so that they can be "interrogated until we have obtained every bit of intelligence they possess."

Next: Education »

EDUCATION
Since the 1980s, Republicans have led the debate on education. They have introduced some of the most successful reform ideas for improving failing schools: increasing competition and choice, raising standards and expectations, and relying on hard data to determine what works and what doesn't. Democrats, long focused on school integration and protecting teachers' unions, were slow to come around. Over the last decade, as proof grew that some of these ideas were working, Democrats began embracing many reforms first floated by the GOP. Republicans still love, and Democrats by and large still hate, the idea of vouchers, which allow families to use tax dollars to pay for private school. That aside, there's more agreement than not.

So when the Obama administration rolled out its $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative—offering rewards to the states that had the most ambitious school-reform programs—they expected an enthusiastic Republican response. Instead, nearly every Republican in Congress wound up voting against the plan because it was part of the president's stimulus package.

There may be hope for cooperation in the future. Most Republicans have good things to say about Education Secretary Arne Duncan; like Obama, he sides with the GOP on charter schools. And Republicans largely approve of the president's plans for revising Bush's No Child Left Behind program. Checker Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and an education official in the Reagan administration, believes that amid all the acrimony in Washington, "education may be the one significant policy domain where the Obama agenda is winning reasonable points from a lot of Republicans, myself included." It may not be enough to stop the shouting. But it's a place to start.

With Mark Hosenball, Pat Wingert, and Sarah Kliff

Somalia: Why the Haven for Extremists is Back in the News

Image by Australian War Memorial collection via Flickr

By Alex Perry / Nairobi

On the night of Sept. 21 last year, U.S. diplomatic staff in South Africa were telephoned at home and told not to go to work the next day. A State Department official refused to explain the warning, but a Western intelligence officer in Africa told TIME the alarm was raised after a phone call from an al-Qaeda operative to a number in Cape Town was intercepted — a call in which an attack on U.S. government buildings in South Africa was discussed. No attack took place, and after three days, the embassy in Pretoria and three consulates reopened. But with South Africa expecting half a million fans for the soccer World Cup this June and July, security officials are understandably jittery. Especially because of the origin of the phone call. It came, TIME was told, from Somalia. (See pictures of South Africa preparing for the World Cup.)

Somalia is much on the minds of those fighting terrorism these days. On Feb. 1, Sheik Fuad Mohamed Shangole, a leader of an Islamist group known as al-Shabab (the Youth), which is fighting for control of the nation on the Horn of Africa, made a public declaration of allegiance to Osama bin Laden. If that summons memories of the old relationship between the Afghan Taliban and bin Laden, it should. Both Somalia and Afghanistan have been at war for more than a generation. Both wars have followed a similar progression: a toppling of the central government that was followed by years of warlord feuding (18 U.S. soldiers died protecting a U.N. mission in Mogadishu in 1993, an episode that later became the subject of the book and film Black Hawk Down) and then the rise of a movement — the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Shabab in Somalia — that proposed an extremist vision of Islam as a solution to the lawlessness. The two countries are both poor and populated mostly, it can often seem, by men with a uniform taste for beards, AK-47s and pickup trucks. (See what the U.S. Army can learn from Black Hawk Down.)

For years, when it came to host countries, al-Qaeda seemed to prefer the inaccessible mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Somalia's flat, open scrub. The handful of jihadis based in Somalia staged international attacks: in August 1998, they killed 224 people in twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in November 2002, 13 people died after a car-bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel on Kenya's coast. But they attempted nothing on the scale of Sept. 11. Now there is a fear that their ambitions may be rising. The worry over Somalia also has a regional dimension: just across the Gulf of Aden is Yemen, long a staging ground for al-Qaeda attacks and the place where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day, is thought to have been trained. (See pictures of a jihadist's journey.)

Al-Shabab's Long Reach
If Somalia's extremists are becoming an international threat, that's partly because of their cosmopolitan leadership. One sure result of war is refugees, and decades of fighting in Somalia have seen the rapid growth of a large Somali diaspora in places from Cape Town to Minneapolis. But not all who have been forced to make new lives far away from Africa have done so easily. The past few years have seen the arrival in Somalia of 200 to 300 young ethnic Somali men from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, Norway and Sweden, migrants' children returning to their ancestral homeland, according to diplomatic and intelligence sources in East Africa. A Western soldier working in Somalia says these foreign-born Somalis now dominate al-Shabab. "All their cells are commanded by a foreigner," he says. "All tactical and strategic decisions are taken by foreigners."

To extend their reach overseas, al-Shabab's leaders in Somalia are thought to circle back to the diaspora, looking for those who can be recruited to extremism. The FBI is tracking more than a dozen Somali Americans who disappeared from their homes and are suspected of joining al-Shabab, and in November, 14 Minnesota men with connections to Somalia were charged with offenses like aiding a terrorist organization; four have pleaded guilty. In August, Australian police arrested five men from the Somali community in Melbourne on suspicion of plotting to attack an army barracks outside Sydney. The September call to Cape Town was picked up because a group of ethnic Somalis in the city were already under surveillance on suspicion of raising funds for al-Shabab, according to the intelligence officer. "If you've been waiting for a moment to declare Somalia a priority threat, what else do you need?" asks the Western soldier in Somalia. "There's no longer a serious risk that southern Somalia could become a jihadi operational deployment facility. It already is."

So how to respond? In Somalia, authority is notionally held by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), led by an Islamist who preaches pragmatic engagement with the West. The TFG was installed by Ethiopia, a principal U.S. ally in Africa, after its forces invaded Somalia in 2006 and toppled an earlier Islamist government whose more extreme members had unwisely declared jihad on Somalia's bigger and more Christian neighbor to the west. But many members of the TFG seem to effectively live in Nairobi. (Exceptions include President Sheik Sharif Ahmed and his Defense Minister, Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a veteran warlord who survived an assassination attempt by suicide bomb in Mogadishu on Feb. 15.) Despite the protection of 5,300 African Union (A.U.) troops — mainly Ugandans and Burundians — the TFG in reality controls little more than a few blocks of Mogadishu. "To defeat the Shabab," says the intelligence officer, "you need a functioning government. That's exactly what they lack." (See more about the Somalia.)

From outside Africa, the response has been patchy. There is some financial assistance, much of it from the U.S. (The A.U. peacekeepers have cost $160 million so far.) In 2007, the U.S. sent special-operations teams in with the Ethiopians and — says Abdirashid Mohamed Hiddig, a Somali Member of Parliament who assisted the Americans — captured 10 to 20 foreign fighters. Since then, according to Pentagon spokesmen, the U.S. has carried out at least six aerial attacks inside Somalia, killing al-Shabab leader Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, who was hit by a missile in May 2008, and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the mastermind of the 2002 attack in Kenya, who was killed by U.S. helicopter gunships last September. The U.S. has had no military support from other nations, although some have made contributions to help deal with Somalia's long humanitarian crisis. Only piracy and the threat it poses to world trade have resulted in concerted international muscle. An armada of warships from more than 20 countries now hunts pirates and escorts convoys of merchant vessels in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. (See pictures of the brazen pirates of Somalia.)

All that said, the threat from Somalia needs to be kept in perspective. Al-Shabab is far smaller than the Taliban. "There are bigger gangs in L.A.," says the intelligence officer. It is prone to factionalism and has found it hard to garner support among ordinary Somalis. The U.N. has reported that al-Shabab receives funds and weapons from the Middle East and the Eritrean government. (Al-Shabab fights Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is Eritrea's archenemy.) But that support is small compared with the assistance that extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan have received from radical Islamists around the world. Finally, the risk that Somalia could ignite a wider conflagration across the Horn of Africa — sucking in Ethiopia, Eritrea and even Kenya — is real but, again, nothing like the one in Afghanistan's neighborhood. As U.S. ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger never tires of pointing out, none of Somalia's neighbors are nuclear powers. "We are a little wary of the comparisons," he says.

But in the asymmetrical calculations of terrorism, small numbers aren't the key; determination to do damage is. As Ranneberger concedes, no change in Somalia means "further deterioration." Increasingly bold ways of dealing with al-Shabab are being considered. The A.U. peacekeeping force is being expanded, with the hope of creating a "green zone" in Mogadishu. Hundreds of al-Shabab fighters have been pouring into Mogadishu recently in anticipation of a rumored TFG offensive. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has gone further, proposing invading Somalia, occupying the southern port of Kismayu and using it to take the fight to al-Shabab. Memories of the disastrous intervention in 1993 remain sharp, so that is not a proposal that seems likely ever to gain much U.S. support. But it is a measure of the increasing anxiety that Somalia inspires that it is still on the table.

Tea Party Nation: On the Movement's Rapid Rise, Protests

Image via Wikipedia

By David Von Drehle

If any one person is the founder, it's Rick Santelli. A year ago, the CNBC commentator blew a gasket on the air over a plan by the Obama Administration to tackle the foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli's rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party," Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama's digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents of the President's agenda have made themselves a major factor in U.S. politics.

Naming the Tea Party movement, however, is easier than defining it. Tea Partyism covers a lot of ground and a world of contradictions. It contains Nashville lawyer Judson Phillips, who recently organized the first Tea Party convention at the posh Gaylord Opryland Hotel, charging $549 per ticket and pocketing an undisclosed profit. But the movement also embraces the volunteers who denounced Phillips and his convention as a money-grubbing mistake. The crowd in Nashville cheered as speaker Joseph Farah demanded proof that Obama is a U.S. citizen. "Show us the birth certificate!" Farah cried. But other Tea Partyers were equally delighted when influential blogger Erick Erickson responded to Farah soon afterward by banishing "birthers" from his blog, RedState. "The Tea Party movement is in danger of getting a bad reputation" by courting conspiracists, Erickson wrote.(See TIME's photo-essay "Portraits of the Tea Party Movement.")

Whether bitter or sweetened, the tea is winning admirers. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly 1 in 5 adult Americans identifies with the Tea Party movement, which scored its first major victory last month when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy. Brown's promises to bolster U.S. defenses against terrorists and block Obama's health care reforms gave him a blinding Tea Party aura, the glow of which sent fear through the Administration and fried the circuits of Congress. But you can no more trace that aura to a home address than you can pinpoint the rainbow's end. The Tea Party is not a political party, not yet, and maybe never will be. Rejecting the idea — widely held by Democrats — that a government of brainy people can solve thorny problems through complex legislation, the Tea Party finds its strongest spirit among conservative Republicans. Yet a powerful current of "blame both sides" also pulses through the movement. "We're equally disgusted with Republican and Democrat Congressmen," says Lynne Roberts, a volunteer organizer of a Tea Party gathering in Albany, N.Y. Her group is one of hundreds, maybe thousands, animated by Tea Party energy — millions, perhaps, if you count the groups of just one or two people perusing the daily news and muttering, "They've got to be kidding." (See TIME's video "Meet the Tea Party.")

Small Is Beautiful
Now those people have a sort of political home. Across the country, from Muskegon, Mich., to Wetumpka, Ala., Tea Party meetings are being convened in restaurants and living rooms and libraries and office buildings — and online. Tea Party thinking has inspired hundreds of websites and Facebook pages. Yet there is no headquarters to visit, no chairman, no written platform and no chosen candidate — although the scramble for that mantle by the likes of Sarah Palin and Representative Ron Paul is as furious as the charge for the inside track at Talladega.

Perhaps this isn't surprising. With the economy shaken and unemployment sky-high, with the federal debt mounting by the trillion as Washington politicians pay lip service to fiscal responsibility (picture a sermon on humility delivered by Shaquille O'Neal), an outbreak of outrage was inevitable. The Tea Party movement is just one expression of a vast discontent unsettling the country. Recent polls have found that two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as dissatisfied or angry with their government — a huge, not-so-silent majority that ranges from conservatives convinced that Obama is a Maoist to liberals convinced that he is a corporate tool to Obama loyalists who resent that the President is suddenly facing such a rough road. Two out of three is an ocean of unhappiness, among the highest levels on record. (See pictures of Tea Party protests.)

For Eileen Blackmer, whose Tea Party group in West Central Florida is called the Pinellas Patriots, the issue is trust. She doesn't have any left for the federal government. The answer, therefore, is a smaller government on a very short constitutional leash, with less spending and balanced budgets. Blackmer was galvanized to action by the debate over health care. "I read the entire bill, page after page after page," she said recently. "Everything's 'A committee will be formed.' We do need health care reform, but there are other things to do to control those costs. Quit making backroom deals, and let us have that transparency you keep talking about."

That trust deficit comes up in conversations with Tea Partyers everywhere. In Arlington, Va., Kevin Murphey said he would love to see a better health care system but has no confidence that the government can deliver one. "I can't trust them, and we can't afford it. They haven't proven to me that they can do anything efficient," he said. Murphey's recent Tea Party meeting consisted of just five guys in a bar, but that's not so bad for Arlington, home of the Pentagon. Protesting Big Government in Arlington is like disdaining microchips in San Jose. (See the screwups of Campaign '08.)

Smaller government is a venerable American philosophy — though one not always consistent with the public's passion for Medicare, farm subsidies, mortgage deductions, aircraft carriers and name-your-favorite-cut-of-pork. And calling forth the spirit of America's tea-dumping colonists in Boston has never been easier than it is now. One irony for Obama is that the Tea Party movement is using his own organizing techniques against him: Meetup.com announcements, Twitter tweets, viral videos, e-mail trees and all the other innovations falling under the politically potent umbrella known as social networking. Indeed, in the online age, the whole purpose of physical gatherings has changed. Real crowds draw virtual crowds, and vice versa, as David DeGerolamo, a Tea Party organizer from North Carolina, explained during a seminar in Nashville. Recounting how he built a statewide operation from scattered local groups, DeGerolamo said he started with a rally. "I went around and contacted as many of these groups as I could find and invited them to Asheville for what we called the first N.C. Freedom Convention." That was last May. When everyone was gathered, DeGerolamo coaxed the groups — notoriously prickly about their independence — to join under the banner of a single website, NCFreedom.us. Next, he convened a town-hall meeting "for one reason — to get YouTube videos," DeGerolamo said. "YouTube is one of our best allies in terms of becoming a communications network." Today, DeGerolamo's group sends out more than 6,000 e-mails a week, stages informal protest parades called Rolling Tea Parties and posts dozens of videos of the movement in action.

The rapid rise of Tea Partyism has derailed much of the Democratic agenda in Washington, cuing a chorus of intramural recriminations and setting off a string of congressional retirements. With Brown delivering the 41st vote to sustain a threatened Republican filibuster in the Senate, health care reform may be on ice until next year. Another signature Obama initiative, capping carbon emissions, is snowed under. The House blames the Senate, the Senate blames the House, and both chambers point accusing fingers at the White House. Obama, meanwhile, is struggling to find a tone of voice that resonates in Tea Party America, alternating chords of raging populism and calm centrism, sometimes both on the same day. (See 10 elections that changed America.)

But Democrats are not the only ones rattled. Tea Partyers are boosting former Republican state legislator Marco Rubio's challenge to Governor Charlie Crist for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination in Florida. In Arizona, the movement is targeting Senator John McCain, whose willingness to compromise on issues like immigration makes him vulnerable to former Representative J.D. Hayworth in the primary. Indiana Republican Dan Coats, a former Senator, is itching to get his job back after the retirement of Democrat Evan Bayh. But he too hears rumblings on his right. It is the sound of Tea Partyism on the march.

The Three Flavors of Tea
Is anyone organizing all this? Or trying to? Tom Jenney is the Arizona state director of a Washington-based group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a low-tax, libertarian advocacy group funded primarily by the wealthy Koch family of Wichita, Kans., and its foundations. With its sister organization FreedomWorks — run by former House majority leader Richard Armey — the AFP nurtured the Tea Party movement in its early days, offering training and logistical support. When Santelli sounded his trumpet, Jenney organized the first Tea Party protests in his state. But the larger the movement has become, the less sway professional organizers have, Jenney told TIME. "We've done quite a bit of coaching. At the same time, a lot is self-done with these groups that are largely organized on the Internet," he said. "For example, the Tucson Tea Party folks are very independent. They have knocked out one city councilman and now want to recall the governor and two other city-council members." The old line about herding cats comes up repeatedly when Tea Partyers describe their movement. The Gadsden flag — "Don't Tread On Me" — is an unofficial emblem. But hard as the movement is to pin down, certain strands of thought keep turning up when Tea Partyers gather.

See more about the Tea Party.

The first is an explicit rejection of progressive philosophy. Until recently, progressivism was stowed on a dusty shelf of history, but many Democrats now embrace the label in place of the term liberal. It's an apt adoption. Like many Democrats today, the progressives of a century ago believed in the ability of social-science-minded intellectuals to analyze civic problems and engineer a way for government to tackle them. Tea Partyers say that belief, an integral part of the Obama team's mind-set, is crazy, even dangerous. They believe problems are better solved by individual efforts than through government programs. And they are suspicious that the real point of progressivism is not to solve problems but to concentrate power. No matter the crisis, whether it's a terrorist attack or a bank failure, they like to note, the government always gets bigger. "I'm not sure exactly why, but [Obama's] into this progressive movement," said Martin Michaels at an evening event in Rochester, N.Y. A silver-haired man dressed in biker gear and an unprintably anti-Obama T-shirt, Michaels added, "I don't think Obama's looking out for freedom, for the people."(See who's who in Barack Obama's White House.)

A second recurring note is darker. Like many other populist movements in American history, Tea Parties have become magnets for conspiracy mongers and nativists. Nashville conventioneers roared their approval when former Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo blamed Obama's election on voters who can't speak English. Because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," Tancredo declared, Americans "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama" — with an ominous emphasis on the President's middle name. Perhaps the most talked-about book of the convention was The 5,000 Year Leap, by the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, which argues that the Founding Fathers set up the U.S. on firm Christian bedrock and designed the Constitution to maximize individual liberty and free enterprise. Speaker after speaker commended the volume, a favorite of Glenn Beck's, and though it is far from Skousen's most extreme statement, with Skousen, even the mild stuff is controversial. A proponent of the idea that Wall Street bankers are plotting to replace the Constitution with a new world order, Skousen roamed so far beyond the fringe that his own Mormon church distanced itself from his work and the thoroughly conservative magazine National Review described him as an "all-around nutjob."

A third strand of thinking is more prosaic and might feel familiar to survivors of politics of the early 1990s. That too was an era of deep divisions and wildly swinging opinion polls: Obama's recent roller-coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that is the spiritual ancestor of today's Tea Parties — right down to the hand-painted placards and the occasional powdered wig. Suzanne Curran, a Tea Partyer from Virginia, sounded as if she had stepped out of a time machine straight from a Perot rally when she said recently, "It's time that we speak up — we the people. We are the employers. All these elected reps are the employees. And we need to stop calling them officials, giving them more credit than is due them." (See pictures of the Tea Party tax protests.)

Yet it's striking that the Reform Party, founded by Perot to keep his crusade alive, has virtually no appeal to the Tea Party crowd. There is a lesson in that. Grass-roots uprisings come and go, and protest candidates rise and fall. In the flush of righteous battle, people focus on the beliefs they share and tolerate points of difference. Eventually, though, the battle ends, the smoke clears, and even when the movement has some success, its troops tend to go their separate ways. After Perot retired from politics, his movement fell to pieces; Patrick Buchanan carried the Reform Party's banner in one election, and Ralph Nader did so in the next, which makes about as much sense as a radio station alternating between hip-hop and harp music. Building an enduring party that is able to outlast leaders, heal divisions, withstand opportunists and adjust to changing times turns out to be extremely difficult.

And that's fine with Joe Conard, a Tea Partyer in Scottsdale, Ariz., wearing wire-rim glasses and toting a sign that says "Stop Socialism Now — No Government Health Bill." Conard is fed up with political parties and has no interest in starting another one. "Don't call me a Republican. I am an independent thinker against Big Government," he said. "The Tea Party movement isn't a party at all. I'd like politics without parties."

George Washington wanted the same thing, but history went in another direction. It gave us Democrats and Republicans, and we're likely to be living with them for a long time to come. What the Tea Party movement tells us, though, is that the hold those traditional parties have over politics is never as tight as their leaders would like to believe, and that in times of trouble — times like these both R's and D's are well advised to be afraid. Very afraid.

— With reporting by Jay Newton-Small / Nashville; Sam Jewler / Arlington; Kevin O'Leary / Scottsdale; Sophia Yan / Albany; and Wendy Malloy / Pinellas Park

Fewer Casualties From Mines in Cambodia, but Reduced Funding Means Risk Remains

Robert Carmichael | Phnom Penh 23 February 2010

Photo: VOA - R. Carmichael

Children sit near a minefield outside their home in the northwestern Cambodian province of Battambang, one of the most heavily-mined in the country

The number of Cambodian casualties from land mines and explosives left from decades of conflict has been steadily declining. But cuts in donor funding for demining could see this trend reversed.

Cambodia has an unenviable reputation as one of the most heavily-mined countries on earth, along with countries such as Angola and Afghanistan.

So the news that the number of people killed or injured by land mines and leftover explosives dropped 10 percent last year is welcome.

Chhiv Lim heads the office that compiles the statistics on Cambodian mine casualties. He says more than 63,000 people have been killed or injured by mines and explosives since the Khmer Rouge government was driven out of power in 1979.

"From 1979 up to the year 2000 the number of casualties was still high because during that time Cambodia had the civil war, but since year 2000 until the year 2005 the number of casualties [was] still 800 per year," he said. "But since the year 2006 until now the number of casualties has dropped down - this is good news for Cambodia."

Chhiv Lim says that last year 243 people were killed or injured by land mines and leftover explosives in Cambodia, down from 271 the year before.

Chhiv Lim says the decline is due to Cambodia's demining program, which uses clearance teams from the government as well as from private groups such as Halo Trust and Mines Advisory Group, or MAG.

Efforts to educate people about the dangers of mines and explosives have also helped.

Jamie Franklin, the country head of MAG, says better coordination and improved clearance methods devised over the past two decades contributed to lower victim numbers too.

"And I think ongoing clearance and the increasing clearance that has been achieved over the last 10 years along with the risk-reduction and mine-risk education and the high level of awareness of the dangers of mines and UXO [unexploded ordnance] and the risks that they pose have helped contribute toward the ongoing reduction in annual casualty rates," said Franklin.

Franklin says the peace and stability that Cambodia has enjoyed since the civil war ended has also helped.

One-third of the casualties are children, and almost all of those are boys. Chhiv Lim says studies show men and boys tend to be more willing to play with or examine explosives than women are. "But some boys they're clever, [they say] 'I cannot play with this one, I must go home.' But there are still some boys whose behavior has not changed," he said.

That makes education a key part of the country's effort to reduce mine casualties.

Removing mines remains the primary task, and that is slow, dangerous and expensive work. Franklin says it took MAG's 15 de-mining teams the whole of last year to clear just three square kilometers, at a cost $3 million.

The Cambodian government says more than 600 square kilometers of land remains contaminated with land mines. Cambodia has signed the international treaty to ban land mines, and was supposed to clear all land mines by the end of last year.

Given the scale of the problem, that was impossible, and the country was recently granted a 10-year extension to rid itself of mines. But there is a risk that even the 2019 deadline could be missed.

MAG's Franklin says funding for demining worldwide is decreasing as donors switch spending priorities to other areas. If there is less money for removing mines, at a time when Cambodia's growing population needs more land, that could mean more casualties.

"And so there is a risk that if the support to clearance and the clearance reduces that we could see either a slowdown in the reduction of annual casualty rates or a reversal of the trend that we have been seeing for the last 15 to 17 years," he said.

Demining experts say if donors cut funding, Cambodia can not meet the 2019 deadline to make its people safe from land mines.