Starting Points

Mar 11, 2010

Opponents File Challenges as Maliki Is Said to Hold Early Edge in Iraq Vote

Image by hbushra via Flickr

By ANTHONY SHADID and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s major coalitions were locked in a surprisingly close race Thursday, in initial results from elections that deepened divisions across a fractured landscape. Candidates were quick to charge fraud, heightening concerns whether Iraq’s fledgling institutions are strong enough to support a peaceful transfer of power.

The day was the most tumultuous since Sunday’s vote for Parliament, with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office saying he underwent surgery, officials with his chief rival complaining their ballots were dumped in the garbage, and a leading Shiite coalition claiming they had challenged the popular mandate Mr. Maliki needed to return to power.

The turmoil deepened both anticipation and uncertainty over an election to choose a government that will rule Iraq as the United States begins its military withdrawal in earnest next month.

“It is a very close race,” said a Western official, who viewed the early results but spoke on condition of anonymity since Iraqi officials were designated to release them. “Whatever the end results, we know it will be a fierce struggle to form a government.”

The initial returns, according to officials who have seen tallies from across the country, suggested a very tight race between Mr. Maliki’s coalition; Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and the leader of the Iraqiya coalition; and a Shiite coalition known as the Iraqi National Alliance. The Kurds, though divided, appeared poised to finish strongly as well, they said, leaving Iraq’s political map far more ambiguous than just weeks ago.

Although officials said Mr. Maliki appeared to have a plurality in returns so far, his rivals in the Shiite coalition and Mr. Allawi’s alliance trumpeted their gains — Mr. Allawi in Sunni regions and the Shiite coalition in rural southern provinces. And the early indications suggested Mr. Maliki fell short of the mandate he might have needed to guide negotiations over a coalition government that he could lead. At the very least, the showing could weaken his caretaker government during the months of negotiations that will follow the final results, which electoral officials expect by the end of March.

Mr. Maliki has not appeared in public since the election. He entered the hospital on Wednesday for a two-hour surgery to remove a cyst in his stomach, officials said. The government confirmed the operation on Thursday, saying he had returned to work.

After the last parliamentary election in December 2005, political leaders clashed for more than five months in an effort to form a new government, a period of indecision and confusion that allowed insurgents to gain strength and religious tension to worsen. Tens of thousands were killed in the sectarian fighting that followed, and many have worried that while Iraq is more peaceful, any transition will prove fraught with danger.

“We may witness long months of problems and bargaining,” said Hazim al-Nuaimi, a political analyst. “This is the bad face of liberalism.”

Nearly everyone had expected jockeying after Sunday’s vote, Iraq’s second parliamentary election, but the frenetic feel to the deliberations was striking. Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, an ally of Mr. Allawi, held meetings with rivals, with or without Mr. Allawi’s blessing. Shiite politicians said the followers of a radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, had performed surprisingly well, giving them a greater voice. Already, party leaders were suggesting alternatives to Mr. Maliki if his alliance entered a coalition.

In past days, Iraqi newspapers have speculated about every possible combination, and the muddled atmosphere has exacerbated divisions that have plagued Iraq since the American-led invasion. Some Sunni politicians have insisted a Sunni Arab succeed President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd. Kurdish officials themselves have worried that the entry of a dissident movement into national politics might weaken their hand in negotiations.

“Any government, to be successful, should consider the Kurds and include them in a coalition,” said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker. “That would be the logical thing, I think.” But he added, “We look to be weaker in this parliament, this time.”

Coalitions themselves already seemed to be fraying, with several politicians claiming that talks had begun this week to persuade candidates to leave their alliances.

“Many small blocs and figures will split,” said Safaauddin al-Safi, a minister and candidate with Mr. Maliki in Basra. “We are in dialogue with several of them.”

The United Nations had hoped preliminary results would be released Thursday morning, but by nightfall, only partial results from five of Iraq’s 19 provinces were made public. Electoral officials blamed the sheer logistics of the process, saying computers used to compile data were overloaded Wednesday and crashed for several hours. By early next week, electoral officials said they hoped to have 80 percent of the returns tallied.

A Western official said they had no reports of significant fraud, though some reports were being investigated. In fact, the official said, there were fewer complaints than in the provincial elections in January 2009, despite the far larger number of votes.

Since the day of the vote, several parties have complained of tampering in the count, with the Shiite coalition going as far as saying it might question the legitimacy of preliminary returns if its demands for more transparency weren’t met. But the charges by Mr. Allawi’s officials were the most extensive and almost sure to aggravate suspicions by Sunni Arabs, who have long accused religious Shiite parties of monopolizing power.

At a news conference, his representatives came armed with visual aids, including pictures and ballots, some of which they said were abandoned in a schoolyard in Kirkuk.

“Votes for the Iraqiya list are in the garbage,” said Adnan al-Janabi, a candidate from Baghdad with Mr. Allawi’s coalition. He said he did not know the extent of the alleged fraud. “One or one million, we don’t know,” he added.

In addition to claiming to have found abandoned ballots in the garbage, and boxes in some homes, the representatives also struck at the heart of Iraq’s election process, claiming that workers at the election commission, who have been entering data in to the computer systems, were caught fiddling with the tally for Mr. Allawi’s coalition.

The questions over the vote’s legitimacy, along with the uncertainty over the negotiations for a new government, have given rise to unease that violence could grow, as politicians seek leverage or as insurgents try to exploit the transition of power.

In Anbar Province, once the cradle of the insurgency, a candidate, Sheik Aiffan Saadoun al-Aiffan, said three of his men were killed by insurgents posing as policemen on Wednesday. One of them, Mr. Aiffan said, was beheaded.

“The violence is going to escalate against us,” he said. “But we’ll face them.”

Marc Santora, Riyadh Mohammed, and Zaid Thaker contributed reporting.

Mar 10, 2010

Upset by U.S. Security, Pakistanis Return as Heroes

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.

“People should be thankful, you made them so proud,” said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, during an interview in his studio on Tuesday with four of the six politicians, who railed against the security precautions at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Meetings with the Obama administration’s top policy makers on Pakistan, including the president’s special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, and visits to the Pentagon and the National Security Council, did not allay the anger the politicians said they felt at being asked to submit to a secondary screening on Sunday before boarding a flight to New Orleans. They declined to be screened and did not board the flight.

Pakistan is one of 14 mostly Muslim countries whose citizens must go through increased checks before they fly into the United States, a procedure mandated by the Obama administration in the wake of the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up an airliner flying from the Netherlands to Detroit on Dec. 25.

The inclusion of Pakistan on the list was broadly criticized as an insult to a country that the United States calls an ally.

The leader of the parliamentary group, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, said in an interview on Tuesday that before they were to board the flight for New Orleans, he and his colleagues were selected from a crowd of passengers at the airport and asked to stand aside.

They were then asked to accept a full-body scan by a machine, he said. Such body-scanning units are in use at 19 airports across the United States, and more are being installed.

One of Mr. Afridi’s colleagues, Akhunzada Chitan, told Mr. Mir on his “Capital Talk” program, “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”

The lawmakers were chosen to visit the United States by the Political Section of the American Embassy. American officials are eager to reach out to political figures from the underdeveloped and isolated tribal areas where the Pakistani Army is now fighting to reclaim territory from the Taliban.

The United States Agency for International Development pledged two years ago to spend $750 million on various projects in the tribal areas, but residents there complain that they see more of the Taliban than American assistance.

In preparatory briefings for their trip, the politicians were advised that they might have to submit to extra body searches, just as randomly selected Americans must submit to secondary screening by the new machines, two officials from the American Embassy said.

The Pakistanis were specifically warned that the United States was not a “V.I.P. culture,” unlike Pakistan, where politicians are often exempted from unpalatable procedures that other people have to tolerate, the American officials said.

“We are disappointed that the group took offense at the security procedures thousands of Americans and visitors must endure at airports every day,” said Larry Schwartz, the senior communications adviser at the American Embassy in Islamabad. “No offense was intended. Indeed, they were warmly welcomed at high levels in Washington.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad has been endowed with an extra $37 million by Congress to spend on exchange programs intended to show skeptical Pakistanis that the United States is a real ally, a country that wants to help, not hinder, Pakistan.

The people-to-people exchanges between Pakistan and the United States, which include American lecturers and teachers of English coming to Pakistan, is now the most ambitious of such efforts run by the State Department around the globe, Mr. Schwartz said.

About 2,000 Pakistanis are expected to participate in the strengthened educational and cultural programs this year, he said. Indeed, a prime motivation of the protest against the screening procedures by the tribal area politicians appeared to be an effort to appeal to their home constituencies, many of whom regard the United States as an enemy.

“Our people were very disturbed we were going to America,” Mr. Afridi said. “We were under threat for going to the United States. We took the risk to see if America was interested in solving the problems.”

The State Department paid each of the participants $200 a day for accommodations and food during their stay in the United States.

If the American taxpayers wanted the money for the expenses refunded, he would be happy to do so, said Mr. Afridi, 40, who described himself as a major trader in cement, with businesses across Pakistan and in Afghanistan.

“We can pay back the $200 a day, no problem,” he said.

Then, he drove off in his brand-new Hummer — an example of his affection for American autos, he said — to appear on another television program to tell his story of standing up to the American authorities.

Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting.

Food Aid Bypasses Somalia’s Needy, U.N. Study Finds

Image by DFID - UK Department for International Development via Flickr

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report.

The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.

Somali officials denied that the visa problem was widespread, and officials for the World Food Program said they had not yet seen the report but would investigate its conclusions once it was presented to the Security Council next Tuesday.

The report comes as Somalia’s transitional government is preparing for a major military offensive to retake the capital, Mogadishu, and combat an Islamist insurgency with connections to Al Qaeda.

The United States is providing military aid, as the United Nations tries to roll back two decades of anarchy in the country.

But it may be an uphill battle. According to the report, Somalia’s security forces “remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt — a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war.”

One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Germany.

The report’s investigators, part of the Monitoring Group on Somalia, were originally asked to track violations of the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia, but the mandate was expanded.

Several of the report’s authors have received death threats, and the United Nations recently relocated them from Kenya to New York for safety reasons.

Possible aid obstructions have been a nettlesome topic for Somalia over the past year and have contributed to delays in aid shipments by the American government and recent suspensions of food programs in some areas by United Nations officials.

The report singles out the World Food Program, the largest aid agency in the crisis-racked country, as particularly flawed.

“Some humanitarian resources, notably food aid, have been diverted to military uses,” the report said. “A handful of Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and become important power brokers — some of whom channel their profits, or the aid itself, directly to armed opposition groups.”

These allegations of food aid diversions first surfaced last year. The World Food Program has consistently denied finding any proof of malfeasance and said that its own recent internal audit found no widespread abuse.

“We have not yet seen the U.N. Somalia Monitoring Group report,” the World Food Program’s deputy executive director, Amir Abdulla, said Tuesday. “But we will investigate all of the allegations, as we have always done in the past if questions have been raised about our operations.”

The current report’s investigators question how independent that past audit was, and called for a new outside investigation of the United Nations agency.

“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this — we know what you are doing, you can’t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the presidency of the Security Council this month.

The report also charges that Somali officials are selling spots on trips to Europe and that many of the people who are presented as part of an official government entourage are actually pirates or members of militant groups.

The report says that Somali officials use their connections to foreign governments to get visas and travel documents for people who would not otherwise be able to travel abroad and that many of these people then disappear into Europe and do not come back.

“Somali ministers, members of Parliament, diplomats and ‘freelance brokers’ have transformed access to foreign visas into a growth industry, matched possibly only by piracy,” selling visas for $10,000 to $15,000 each, the report said.

The report’s authors estimate that dozens, if not hundreds of Somalis have gained access to Europe or beyond through this under-the-table visa business.

Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya, said: “Maybe there’s been one or two cases that have happened over the years. But these are just rumors. These allegations have been going around for years.”

The report also takes aim at some of Somalia’s richest, most influential businessmen, Somalia’s so-called money lords. One, Abdulkadir M. Nur, known as Eno, is married to a woman who plays a prominent role in a local aid agency that is supposed to verify whether food aid is actually delivered. That “potential loophole” could “offer considerable potential of large-scale diversion,” the report said.

The report accuses Mr. Nur of staging the hijacking of his own trucks and later selling the food.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Nur said he had sent the investigators many documents that “showed very clearly that the gossip and rumors they are investigating are untrue,” including the alleged hijacking or any link to insurgents. He said that his wife merely sat on the board of the local aid agency and that only “a tiny fraction” of the food he transported was designated for that aid agency.

In September, Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, wrote a letter to Secretary General Ban, defending Mr. Nur as a “very conscientious, diligent and hard-working person” and saying that if it were not for the contractors, “many Somalis would have perished.”

The report questions why the World Food Program would steer 80 percent of its transportation contracts for Somalia, worth about $200 million, to three Somali businessmen, especially when they are suspected of connections to Islamist insurgents.

The report says that fraud is pervasive, with about 30 percent of aid skimmed by local partners and local World Food Program personnel, 10 percent by the ground transporters and 5 to 10 percent by the armed group in control of the area. That means as much as half of the food never makes it to the people who desperately need it.

In January, the United States halted tens of millions of dollars of aid shipments to southern Somalia because of fears of such diversions, and American officials believe that some American aid may have fallen into the hands of Al Shabab, the most militant of Somalia’s insurgent groups.

The report also said that the president of Puntland, a semiautonomous region in northern Somalia, had extensive ties to pirates in the area, who then funneled some of the money they made from hijacking ships to authorities.

Puntland authorities could not be reached on Tuesday, but Mr. Aden, the Somali diplomat, dismissed the allegations, saying that the Puntland government had jailed more than 150 pirates and that it had not “received a penny from them.”

“It’s unfortunate that this monitoring group thinks they can stick everything on the Somalis,” he said.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Gisenyi, Rwanda, and Neil MacFarquhar from New York.

Pennsylvania Woman Tied to Plot on Cartoonist

Image by Norm Walsh via Flickr

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A Pennsylvania woman who called herself JihadJane was tied Tuesday to an alleged assassination plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the prophet Muhammad atop the body of a dog.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors accused Colleen R. LaRose, an American from the Philadelphia suburbs, of linking up through the Internet with militants overseas and plotting to carry out a murder.

Ms. LaRose, 46, was arrested in Philadelphia in October, but her case was kept under seal. Although the indictment does not identify the target, a law enforcement official said her case was linked to the arrests Tuesday of seven Muslims in Ireland in connection with a scheme to kill the cartoonist, Lars Vilks. A group linked to Al Qaeda had put a $100,000 bounty on his head for the cartoon, which the group perceived as an insult to Islam.

European news reports said Irish police, who arrested the four men and three women, had coordinated the operation with the United States.

A police statement issued Wednesday in Dublin said the Irish arrests followed a joint investigation by police in Ireland, the United States and “a number of European countries,” and that the suspects were being held at four police stations in an area about 100 miles south of Dublin, under a law that allowed for them to be held for up to seven days for questioning.

News reports in Ireland said that the seven being held were from Algeria, Croatia, the Palestinian territories, Libya and the United States, and were aged between their mid-20’s and late 40’s. The Irish Times reported that American investigators believe that the leader of the group was an Algerian who has been living in Ireland for the past 10 years.

A Justice Department spokesman would not confirm whether Ms. LaRose had been involved with the plot.

Mark T. Wilson and Rossman D. Thompson, federal public defenders in Philadelphia who are representing Ms. LaRose, declined to comment.

Michael L. Levy, the United States attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, said in a statement the case illustrated how terrorists were looking for American recruits who could blend in. “It shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance,” he said.

Ms. LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The official said Ms. LaRose was born in Michigan and later lived in Texas and Montgomery County, Pa.

The indictment said that in mid-2008, Ms. LaRose, using the aliases JihadJane and Fatima LaRose, began posting on YouTube and other Internet sites messages about her desire to help Muslims. A MySpace profile for a woman who refers to herself as JihadJane displays pictures of bloodshed and violence in the Middle East scrawled with messages like “Palestine We Are With You” and “Sympathize With Gaza.”

By early 2009, the court papers said, she was exchanging e-mail messages with unidentified co-conspirators in Southeast Asia and Europe and expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.

The indictment refers to e-mail messages in which a conspirator, citing how Ms. LaRose’s appearance and American passport would make it easier for her to operate undetected, allegedly directed her in March 2009 to go to Sweden to help carry out a murder. She agreed to do so, writing, “I will make this my goal till I achieve it or die trying,” the indictment says. She and another unnamed American later posted online solicitations for money for that project, the document said.

Ms. LaRose had attracted the government’s attention by then. She was questioned by F.B.I. agents on July 17, 2009, and falsely told them that she had never solicited money online for terrorism, had never used the alias JihadJane and had never made postings on a terrorist Web site, the court papers say.

Despite drawing the F.B.I.’s attention, the indictment says Ms. LaRose traveled to Europe in August, joined an online community hosted by the intended Swedish victim in September and performed online searches to track him. She apparently never attempted to carry out the killing.

The indictment also says Ms. LaRose recruited other people on the Internet to wage or support jihadist attacks.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Vilks, the cartoonist who was the target of the alleged murder plot, said that he learned of the American and Irish investigations from reporters, who tied up his telephone line. Unable to get through by phone, the police who were trying to contact him to send a patrol car to his home in rural Sweden, he told the paper.

Mr. Vilks said he had grown concerned early this year when someone using a Somali mobile phone began calling him. But he said his home’s remote location gave him some protection.

Mr. Vilks defended his drawing, saying that it was not meant as an attack on Muhammad but rather as a satire.

“But people have no sense of humor,” he was quoted as saying.

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting from New York, Eamon Quinn from Dublin and Brian Knowlton from Washington.

Tricks to Keep Your Device’s Battery Going and Going

Image via Wikipedia

By ERIC A. TAUB

If you’re a recent convert to smartphones, you’re probably still discovering all the amazing things that your new BlackBerry, Android phone or iPhone can do. But one thing you most likely found out right away: the more you do, the shorter your phone’s battery lasts.

While a standard cellphone’s charge can easily go three days or more, many smartphone owners are dismayed to learn that their new mobile toy requires charging every 24 hours, or even more often. It was great that I could use one device — my iPhone — to check my calendar and respond to multiple incoming calls during January’s Consumer Electronics Show, but I paid the price when its battery died at 2 p.m.

The answer was not to desperately search for an electrical outlet to recharge the phone (though I’ve done that) or to consider giving up the phone (done that too), but rather to figure out a strategy to reduce energy consumption while still having it available for essential tasks.

Whether you’re using a laptop or a smartphone, the devices can be tweaked to get the most out of its lithium-ion batteries.

Reconsider Your Network

All things being equal, the C.D.M.A. mobile standard used by Verizon uses more power than a G.S.M. network, principally used by AT&T and T-Mobile. If battery life is critical, you might want to consider G.S.M. as long as its coverage meets your needs.

Dim It

The brighter your screen, the more juice you’re using. If you’re in a dimly lit room, turn down your LCD screen’s brightness. If you have an autodimming feature on your device that detects the light in a room, use it. The same advice holds for sound; if you use your smartphone or laptop to play music, lower the volume.

If you have a BlackBerry, the company’s own holster will automatically turn off the screen when you insert the phone.

Stop Searching

It is great that you can use Bluetooth technology to connect your smartphone to a headset, or use Wi-Fi to speed up the downloading of e-mail messages. But when you’re not using that headset or you’re not near a Wi-Fi hotspot, turn off those features on the phone or laptop.

The reason is that portable devices don’t know that there isn’t any Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth headset and continue to search for them, using unnecessary power.

Similarly, put your phone to sleep when it is in standby. On an iPhone, you do so through the “Settings” icon. On a BlackBerry, use the “Manage Connections” icon.

Skip a Generation

Your smartphone is also continually looking for a cellphone signal. If you’re in a weak signal area, your phone must work even harder to find one, decreasing battery life. If you know that there is no coverage in your area, turn off your portable device’s mobile capabilities.

If your G.S.M 3G network is not available or the signal is weak, the battery will drain faster looking for one. Consider turning off the phone’s 3G network or using the slower EDGE network instead. It will make Web access slower but won’t affect the quality of phone calls.

Check Mail Manually

Mobile smartphones can check for e-mail messages and instant messages automatically. Or they can be set to “push” notifications as soon as they arrive in your server’s mailbox.

Both strategies can be power hogs. To increase your battery life, turn off push and increase the interval between when the phone checks for new messages. Or better, set up your phone to check for messages manually.

Turn Off Everything

The simplest way to cut power to a minimum is to put your smartphone into “airplane mode.” You turn your BlackBerry or iPhone into a music player and personal organizer, and you won’t be able to receive e-mail messages or make or receive phone calls, but you will stretch your battery.

“In airplane mode and running just the alarm clock, your iPhone battery will last up to a week,” said Kyle Wiens, co-founder of ifixit.com, an online iPhone and Mac laptop repair company.

Disable the Animations

The hotter your laptop feels, the more battery power it is using. And one of the biggest users of power is Flash animation, the technology behind many online videos and animated ads. To improve battery life, disable Flash when not using wall power. BashFlash and ClicktoFlash for Macs and Flashblock for PC are programs that will automatically restrict Flash.

Get an App to Aid You

There are a number of applications that can help monitor battery life and shut off various functions that cut down on a mobile device’s effective power.

BatteryGo and myBatteryLife tell iPhone owners how much charge they have left and how that power translates into minutes of talk time, music, video and Web surfing.

NB BattStat alerts BlackBerry owners to the amount of battery charge remaining, as well as the battery’s temperature. (Hot batteries lose power more quickly.) The device can be set to vibrate or sound when a predetermined low battery level is reached.

Radio Saver will monitor your BlackBerry’s mobile coverage and shut off the device’s mobile circuitry when you are out of range of a cellular signal.

Best BatterySaver allows owners of mobile phones using the Symbian operating system (including models from Nokia and Sony Ericsson) to create battery-saving profiles. For example, certain features can be automatically turned on when the phone is connected to a wall plug, or Bluetooth can be automatically disconnected when the battery charge drops below a certain level.

For laptops, programs like Battery Health Monitor (Mac) and Laptop Battery Power Monitor (PC) keep track of battery charge and estimate how many more times you’ll be able to recharge your battery.

Realize the End Will Come

The older generation of nickel cadmium batteries suffered from memory issues; if you didn’t fully charge and discharge one, it would hold a progressively smaller amount of juice.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from memory loss, so it is safe to top off a battery.

Lithium-ion batteries cannot be overcharged; a device’s circuitry cuts off the power when they are full. However, manufacturers still recommend that a laptop not be continually connected to power once the battery is at its capacity. If a laptop won’t be used for several months, it should be stored with the battery in a 50 percent charge state. All batteries can be fully charged and discharged for a fixed number of cycles; lithium ion batteries typically last between 300 and 500 cycles. Information on the number of cycles can be obtained at manufacturers’ Web sites. Another good source of battery information can be found at batteryuniversity.com.

No matter how well you husband your battery’s resources, there comes a time when you’ll need to send your battery to its final resting place.

How will you know? Like most things nearing the end of their life, your battery will stay awake less and sleep more.

“If your battery lasts only an hour after you’ve charged it,” said Anthony Magnabosco, owner of Milliamp.com, a battery replacement company, “you know its time is up.”

Novel Idea for Japan - Airport for Budget Travel

By HIROKO TABUCHI

MITO, JAPAN — The diktat from the governor was the kind of sweeping order that gives Japanese bureaucrats heart attacks: plans for a three-story airport terminal, painstakingly laid over years, were to be scrapped and replaced with a single-floor layout.

The New York Times

Trimmings would be pared to a minimum. Boarding bridges would be eliminated, with passengers told to board planes from the tarmac and even handle their own check-in luggage — an idea so blasphemous in service-conscious Japan that one local official said his “mind went blank” when he heard of the plan.

Ibaraki Airport, which opens Thursday about 85 kilometers, or 53 miles, north of Tokyo, is intended to be a completely new type of Japanese airport: a no-frills facility that could finally open up Japan’s expensive capital city to low-budget airlines.

Ignored by Japan’s big-league carriers, the little airport is up against all odds. It is the 98th airport in a country with a landmass smaller than California’s. Ibaraki Prefecture is devoid of tourist attractions, except for an ancient garden, known for its plum blossoms, and famous purveyors of natto, or pungent, fermented soy beans.

For now, Ibaraki will offer just two flights a day: one to Seoul by the South Korean carrier Asiana Airlines, and another to Kobe, a medium-size port city in western Japan, by the Japanese budget carrier SkyMark Airlines.

Even Japan’s transportation minister, Seiji Maehara, has been hard-pressed to muster much enthusiasm for the airport’s opening, despite its roughly ¥22 billion, or $243 million, in funding from local and national coffers. The news media have painted Ibaraki as just another money-losing airport, an example of the useless public works projects that dot Japan’s countryside.

“I’m not about to beg airlines from Japan and elsewhere to fly to Ibaraki,” Mr. Maehara said last week. “The prefecture needs to do what it can to make use of the airport.”

A closer look at Ibaraki, however, reveals a strategy that could jolt Japan’s long-stagnant aviation sector. Some experts say Ibaraki — with its explicit focus on cutting costs and budget carriers — could be just the kind of airport the country needs at a time when traffic demand is slumping, consumers are scrimping after a recession and airlines are being pressed to cut costs to the bone.

Some experts say low-cost air services have the best potential for growth, especially as incomes rise in big countries like China and India, bringing air travel to more people. Budget carriers have sprung up across the region, but Japan’s airline industry, dominated by giants Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airlines — and plagued by expensive and inefficient airports — has been largely left behind.

Experts say the greater Tokyo area, especially, could use another airport to handle flights by low-cost carriers, much like the Stansted or Luton airports outside London. The capital and its environs, the largest metropolitan sprawl in the world with a population of 40 million, are served by two airports, Narita — which handles most of the international traffic — and Haneda.

But capacity is notoriously tight, and that is expected to continue even after expansions at both airports in the next year. Strict regulations have stifled the flexible allocation of flights. Moreover, high landing and other costs put Narita and Haneda beyond the reach of low-cost carriers.

“Ibaraki is definitely on the right track,” said Ushio Chujo, a professor of transportation economics at Keio University in Tokyo.

“The airport’s success would hinge on whether more low-cost carriers will start up in Japan and in neighboring countries,” he said. “That could take 5 to 10 years, so Ibaraki will have to prepare for the long haul.”

In 2007, long after blueprints for an impressive terminal building at Ibaraki Airport were drawn up, and contractors hired, Ibaraki Prefecture’s governor, Masaru Hashimoto, called for building “an airport Japan had never seen before.”

“Just another standard airport wasn’t going to work. We’d be behind the times as soon as we opened,” Mr. Hashimoto said in an interview. “We needed to turn our thinking upside down.”

Mr. Hashimoto ordered a redesign of the terminal from scratch, brainstorming ways to cut operating costs, both for the airport and for carriers. He scrapped a plan to place arrivals, departures and a viewing deck on separate floors, instead putting everything on one level. That meant passengers could be served with fewer staff members.

Mr. Hashimoto got rid of boarding bridges, which are expensive for carriers to use, and for airports to maintain. Passengers instead will board from the tarmac. (“People will love it — they can pose for photos in front of the plane,” he said.)

He also wants passengers to carry their own check-in luggage to the plane, in a setup similar to some regional American airports — though he is still negotiating with officials on the point. (“We think that’s a bit too much,” one provincial official said on condition of anonymity, saying he was unauthorized to speak to the media.)

Planes landing at Ibaraki will taxi and park in a way that does not require the help of a tractor to push them back onto the runway before taking off — another reason passengers will board from the tarmac. That move, the first for an international airport in Japan, saves tractor usage fees for airlines and slashes maintenance costs for Ibaraki.

When officials protested that Japan’s finicky passengers would complain about the rain, Mr. Hashimoto and his aides offered this plan: give out free umbrellas on rainy days. (Japanese people love freebies, he said.) The governor is also pushing to accept private jets, as well as a helicopter link with downtown Tokyo, and is renting out extra space for parties and conventions.

Those efforts have paid off: Landing fees for a Boeing 737 on a scheduled flight at Ibaraki are about ¥89,000, two-thirds of Narita’s ¥139,600 fee and less than half of the ¥189,600 at Haneda, according to the industry publication Orient Aviation.

Other factors may work in Ibaraki’s favor: Its finances are not as dire as many of Japan’s other airports, in part because it was built as an extension of a military air base. And foreign carriers can serve regional airports without the bilateral agreements necessary for access to Haneda and Narita, making it easier to add routes. Asiana has had difficulty adding to the six routes it flies from Seoul to Narita and Haneda, for example.

Ibaraki offers unlimited free parking, while parking costs at Narita and Haneda are sky-high, and also plans to offer bus service from central Tokyo for 500 yen, or less than $5 — a fraction of the cost it takes to travel to Narita, and comparable to the cost of reaching Haneda.

Accounting for the time it takes for the plane to taxi on Narita’s runway and the passenger to make his way through that sprawling airport, the total journey to central Tokyo from Ibaraki is about the same — less than 90 minutes — according to Katsuichi Yabunaka, an Ibaraki official.

Meanwhile, the airport serves a big market in its own right: about 20 million people live within 100 kilometers of the new airport, according to Ibaraki Prefecture.

The airport faces plenty of headwinds. Haneda and Narita are planning extensions. Japan’s economy remains depressed. Foreign arrivals in Japan are also on the decline, though the trend could change with better access, particularly by budget carriers, experts say.

The airport is expected to lose ¥20 million in its first year of operation.

Still, Ibaraki is going on a sales offensive. The airline is in discussions with low-cost carriers in China, Malaysia, Philippines and Macao. Asiana, meanwhile, is studying an additional route to the South Korean port city of Busan.

“Ibaraki is the first airport in Japan to break the mold by really focusing on cost and efficiency,” said Dongshil Hyun, executive vice president at Asiana and head of the airline’s Japan operations.

“We finally have a much-needed new and cost-efficient route to Tokyo,” he said. “How could we not be excited?”

Mar 9, 2010

A Bike Theft in the Time of Twitter

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Austin Horse Immediately after his bike was stolen, Austin Horse alerted his followers on Twitter, posting camera-phone images of the bike, including this one.

Austin Horse thought he was just leaving his bike for a second when he ran into the lobby of an office building at 28th Street and Madison Avenue last Tuesday afternoon to make a pickup.

Mr. Horse, a messenger since 2005, expected a quick turnaround — run up to the desk, get the package, get back on the bike — and locking his bright orange track bike would just slow the whole process. “I had it fakie-locked,” he said, describing how he had placed a U-lock through the back wheel without closing it, as a decoy. “Normally, a pickup like that, it takes 30 seconds.”

But there had been some confusion at the company, and the package was not ready for him. Ten minutes passed, with Mr. Horse standing around the lobby, watching the bike through large glass windows, growing increasingly antsy. Finally, the package arrived, and he went to the desk to get it, turning his back to the windows.

A minute later, the bike was gone.

His immediate thought was “somebody’s playing a prank on me,” Mr. Horse said. He rushed outside, checking all around the planter where his bike had been leaning, half expecting at any moment to hear the sound of his messenger friends laughing. Despite riding daily for years, Mr. Horse had never had a bike stolen, and at first he did not believe it was happening to him.

Yet it is practically a ritual of spring — as the bikes come out in greater numbers, so do the thieves. Even with the recent police crackdown on one East Village shop for buying stolen bikes, anecdotal evidence suggests that thefts are seeing a seasonal rise. Even Bike Snob, the venerable, anonymous blogger, is not safe: on Monday, his handlebars — and all that comes with them — were stolen during lunchtime.

While it is too early to tell whether thefts are in fact increasing, new technologies are making it easier for riders to tap into the wider bike realm quickly when there is a theft. If three years ago, it took days to recover a missing bike via online message boards, Twitter has exponentially shortened the time.

(Of course, the amplification effect of Twitter can work negatively as well, and jokingly tweeting about a stolen bike can quickly spiral out of control, as Bike Snob also recently discovered.)

Björn Wallander Mr. Horse riding his orange bike.

Back on Madison Avenue, Mr. Horse quickly realized his bike was gone and immediately took out his cellphone and posted to Twitter (“STOLEN BIKE! My orange gangsta just got stolen 28th & mad”). He then found a few pictures of the bike that he had shot previously and retweeted them. It was just after 4 p.m.

With the digital alarm sounded, Mr. Horse went back into the building to see if the security cameras had captured anything. Mr. Horse knew he had to move quickly if he hoped to see the bike again. While some bicycles are recovered long after being stolen, as time passes, the thief has more opportunity to stash, alter or resell the bike.

Security guards in the building were able to locate footage of the thief, he said, but all he could see was a “grayish-blackish blob on an orange blur.”

Meanwhile, his tweet was picked up by other local riders and reposted on several online forums, including fixed.gr/nyc, a members-only site for local fixed-gear enthusiasts. That is where Eddie Brannan, a freelance creative director for magazines and a friend of Mr. Horse, first heard about the theft. “They have a pretty good track record of recovering bikes,” Mr. Brannan said.

Bikeless, Mr. Horse headed downtown on foot — “I’m just not comfortable taking the subway” — to get a replacement ride and finish his day’s runs, which were piling up. And, he figured, “if the guy was going to go anywhere, he was going to go to the Lower East Side.”

Around 6:30 p.m., Mr. Brannan was with his wife outside the New Museum before an opening, feeling a bit peckish.

He strolled around the corner onto Stanton Street to get a snack and discovered, parked upside-down in front of the deli he was aiming for, a bright orange Gangsta Track bike, by Brooklyn Machine Works. “I noticed straightaway that it was Austin’s, and called him to tell him that I was with his bike,” he said. (Mr. Horse, remembering the conversation, attempted to imitate a happy British accent: “He said, “Hey, mate, I’m standing right next to your bike.’ “)

After waiting a few seconds to see if anyone would emerge from the deli, one hand placed on the bike, Mr. Brannan decided to flip it over and steal it back. “It’s completely unique, one of a kind,” he said. “I’d actually rode it a few years ago — it was a prototype model of the model.”

Mr. Horse rushed down and: “Boom, there it is. He reunites me with my bike.”

“I was kind of tempted to go back to the deli. … I don’t know, I’m curious,” he said. But there was not time. Almost immediately after he got his bike back, there was a call from the dispatcher: Triple rush, Midtown.

“I knocked out the triple on my recovered bike,” he said. “All’s well with the world.”

Follow Spokes on Twitter, twitter.com/spokesnyt, where links to the column will appear along with other bike-related tweets.

At the Tea Party

By Jonathan Raban

(Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

People who watched the Tea Party Convention in Nashville on television in early February saw and heard an angry crowd, unanimous in its acclaim for every speaker. Standing ovation followed standing ovation, the fiery crackle of applause was nearly continuous, and so were the whistles, whoops, and yells, the Yeahs!, Rights!, and cries of "USA! USA!" Inside the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, it was rather different: what struck me was how many remained seated through the ovations, how many failed to clap, how many muttered quietly into the ears of their neighbors while others around them rose to their feet and hollered.

It wasn't until the last night of the event, when Sarah Palin came on stage, that the Tea Party movement, a loose congeries of unlike minds, found unity in its contempt for Barack Obama, its loathing of the growing deficit as "generational theft," its demands for "fiscal responsibility," lower taxes, smaller government, states' rights, and a vastly more aggressive national security policy. "Run, Sarah, Run!" everyone chanted, though if Palin could have seen inside the heads of the 1,100 people at the banquet, she might have felt a pang of disquiet at the factional and heterogeneous character of the army whose love and loyalty she currently inspires.

I went to Nashville not as an accredited reporter but as a recently joined member of Tea Party Nation. (I had my own quarrels with big government, especially on the matter of mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and the rest, and I counted on my libertarian streak to give me sufficient common ground with my fellow tea partiers.) When I presented my Washington State driver's license at the registration desk, the volunteer said, "Thank you for coming all this way to help save our country," then, looking at the license more closely, "Seattle—you got a lot of liberals there." I accepted his condolences.

As we milled around in the convention center lobby, we might easily have been mistaken for passengers on a cruise ship. We belonged to a similar demographic: most—though by no means all—of us had qualified for membership of AARP a good while ago; 99.5 percent of us were white; in general, smart leisurewear was our preferred style of dress. (The TV cameras made far too much of the handful of exhibitionists in powdered white pigtail wigs and tricorn hats, and of the peculiar, bug-eyed gentleman from Georgia, who was sometimes costumed as an eighteenth-century American revolutionary, sometimes as a kilted Highland chieftain, his copper tea kettle lashed to both outfits, and spoke to his many interviewers in a hokey and ponderous English accent.) Few of us would see much change from the $1,500–$2,000 we'd spent on travel to Nashville, the $558.95 convention fee with service charge, a room at the hotel, and a couple of drinks at the hotel bars, where a glass of the cheapest wine or whisky cost $12. Seen as a group, we were, I thought, a shade too prosperous, too amiably chatty and mild-mannered, to pass as the voice of the enraged grassroots.

I asked one woman whether she'd been part of "9/12," as tea partiers call the great taxpayer march on Washington, D.C., last September. No, she'd missed it, she said, and "felt really guilty" about doing so, but she and her husband had been on vacation.

"Where did you go?"

"We spent a week in Amalfi, then we toured Tuscany, then we spent a week in Rome."

Another woman, hearing my accent, told me about her and her partner's second home in Torquay, England, which they visited three times a year from their base in Atlanta, and about their thirty-five-foot powerboat, in which they'd crossed the Channel to Le Havre and cruised down the French canals to Marseilles.

Most of us were political novices. When we were asked how many attendees had never been involved in politics before joining the Tea Party movement, roughly four out of every five people raised their hands. On the outside balcony where the smokers gathered, I was joined at a table by an intense, wiry, close-cropped, redheaded woman from southern Virginia who dated her conversion to hearing Sarah Palin for the first time.

"She was me! She's so down-to-earth! If Sarah was sitting here with us now, she'd be just a normal person like you and me. You could say anything to her. She's not like a politician—she's real. And Sarah always keeps her word. If Sarah promises something, you know she'll do it. She's just am az ing."

Before Sarah, the woman said, her interest in politics had been limited to voting in general elections. Her one big involvement was with her church. Now she was traveling around the country on behalf of Team Sarah and Conservative Moms for America, a fundamentalist group whose "Conservative Moms Pledge" begins with a quote from the first epistle of Saint Peter:

Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear.

In the last year, she'd marched on 9/12, gone to CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference—and attended a string of acronymic events, which she recited to me. Soon she'd be off to New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

Lighting her second cigarette in ten minutes, she talked about missing her family on these political jaunts. After their own children were grown, she and her husband had adopted two infant daughters, now aged six and nine. The girls were the light of their sixty-ish lives. One was autistic, the other severely developmentally disabled: her birth mother was an "alcoholic" and a "drug addict," and the baby had suffered a series of strokes in the delivery room, where her heart had twice stopped beating.

"The hospital said they doubted if she was salvageable. Salvageable! Imagine talking about a human life as 'salvageable'! You see why I love Sarah? We have so much in common." She rattled on about her girls' accomplishments—how nearly normal they were, how happy, how responsive to the warm climate of affection in which they now lived. "Here, I'll show you...." She found her cell phone in her bag and treated me to a slide show of family photos: her husband, a heavily built man in plaid shirt and jeans, playing with their daughters in a well-kept backyard. She hadn't bothered to mention that both girls were black.

Her crowded freshman year in politics made her a veteran by comparison with most people I met, whose experience was limited to membership of a local Tea Party group and attendance at rallies, in which everyone seemed to have found a mirror of his or her own temperament and character. A dour man from Hilton Head, South Carolina, said of the 9/12 march, "You didn't see one person—not one!—with an adult beverage, and when we left the Mall there wasn't a single cigarette butt on the ground." He eyed me, no doubt scenting these vices on my own clothes and breath. "And they call us a bunch of radicals."

Although much of the convention was designed to stoke our wrath at the iniquities of the Obama administration, its less reported half was meant to teach us how to take our first baby steps in the new world of politics. One session I attended, on "How to Organize a Tea Party Group," nicely reflected both the innocence and the age of so many of the conventioneers. The speaker, Lori Christenson, was a retired corporate trainer from Evergreen, Colorado, a small, wealthy, lakeside town in the foothills of the Rockies, thirty miles west of Denver. Her PowerPoint presentation was a handy vade mecum of hints and tips for absolute beginners. How to open an account at Meetup.com. How to name your group. Why alliterative phrases like "Tea Party Tuesdays" or "Tea Party Thursdays" work better than other days of the week, because they are more easily remembered by older people. Why school gyms are to be avoided as meeting places (the elderly will have difficulty climbing the risers). Ms. Christenson advised against using churches because too many people associated the movement with the Christian right; she suggested booking a room at the local public library as a more neutral territory. If you set up a card table outside a grocery store to recruit new members, you must remember to call yourself a "community group," not a political one. Everybody was nodding and taking notes.

She took us through the ins and outs of 501(c)3s and 527s, and for-profits versus nonprofits. She told us how to make fliers and hide them inside "conservative" library books, like those of Glenn Beck, and put them on the windshields of cars with old McCain-Palin bumper stickers. With a note of plaintiveness that I heard often at the convention, she said, "We've got to work on the youth."

At question time, someone stood up to say, "We did Obama Bingo at the State of the Union address—did you guys do that?" Good idea, said Ms. Christenson. Someone else suggested entering floats in town parades, so that members could sing patriotic songs from them. It was a restful hour, like being back in nursery school.

We said prayers, recited the Pledge of Allegiance (with the words "under God" pronounced as if they were underlined and in bold type), and clapped in time with the beat of country music. Lisa Mei Norton, a former Air Force senior master sergeant, sang, "The shining light, on the right, the left just doesn't get,/Sar—ah Palin for change you won't regret...." It would have taken a finely calibrated stopwatch to measure how very rapidly such folksy piety and patriotism could swivel into crude nativism, conspiracy theory, and xenophobia—and to measure, too, the dawning discomfort at this switch of tone registered by a sizable part of the audience.

The first night's speaker, Tom Tancredo, ex-congressman from Colorado and no-hope presidential candidate in 2008, gave a taste of what was to come as he warmed up the audience with a show of self-deprecating, clownish good humor. He told stories—some of them extremely tall, as when he described visiting a new high school in the richest Denver suburb, where the students all drove new BMWs and, on Monday mornings, were fresh from skiing weekends in Vail. He had, he said, picked up their textbook on American history, whose first sentence was—"and this is exactly what it said"—Columbus came to America and ruined Paradise. Shaking his head, he repeated the sentence, which I took to be a fantastic, garbled invention, loosely inspired by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. But we were still in the realm of good, relatively clean, political fun.

The drollery vanished as he climbed aboard his old anti-immigration hobby horse. "The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism, aided by leftist liberals all over, who don't have the same ideas about America as we do." Since George H.W. Bush's administration, RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) had been conspiring with Democrats to boil us like frogs in the "cauldron of the nanny state." "Then something really odd happened," Tancredo said, "mostly because, I think, we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama."

Though a ripple of cheers and applause spread through the ballroom, I was taking my cue from a middle-aged couple sitting immediately in front of me. When they clapped, I clapped. When they rose to their feet, I did too. Now they exchanged a hard-to-read glance and their hands stayed in their laps.

My guess was that few in the room were offended by the association of the "literacy test" with the Jim Crow laws, though some may have been. But everyone I'd met so far was in a position to know immigrants, legal and otherwise; they employed them in their houses and businesses, to look after their children and work on their yards. The idea that Maria and Luis, or Tatyana and Dmitri, had somehow subverted the political system to bring about Obama's election struck them as insulting and absurd.

Something very similar happened the next night, when Joseph Farah, the author and impresario of the right-wing news site WorldNetDaily, took to the stage. Farah, self-consciously handsome, with his swept-back gray hair and bootblack chevron mustache, spoke in that tone of patient, inexorable, commonsensical logic that seems equally distributed between long-tenured professors and certified lunatics. He took us on a quasi-scholarly tour of the first chapter of Saint Matthew's gospel, where Christ's genealogy is traced from the patriarch, Abraham, down through many generations to "Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ," then invited us to compare Jesus' unassailable ancestry with Obama's dubious family tree. "I have a dream," Farah said. "And my dream is that if Barack Obama even seeks reelection as president in 2012, he won't be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, 'Where's the Birth Certificate?'" Again, I saw as many glum and unresponsive faces in the crowd as people standing up to cheer.

Having established Obama as a Ken-yan imposter, Farah went on to explain how his administration is using 1960s Marxist theory to bring about the destruction of the "American free-enterprise system." The President and his red henchmen are employing the "Cloward-Piven strategy"^[1] —"turning make-believe crises into real crises" to paralyze capitalism, as, for instance, when they manufactured crises and bailouts, like those of the banks, AIG, and the auto industry. Farah seemed untroubled by the implication that, since these crises and bailouts dated back to September 2008 and before, George W. Bush must have been in on the plot too. Proof of his argument, Farah said, had come when Rahm Emanuel inadvertently let drop the secret of this master plan by saying, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." This was Cloward-Piven strategy, succinctly stated. "It is the only paradigm that makes any sense," Farah told us.

I was off to the smokers' ghetto after Farah's speech, so missed the confrontation in the lobby between him and Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com, another prominent and forceful speaker at the convention. But David Weigel of The Washington Independent, who was live-blogging from Nashville, was himself caught up in the row, and captured it on audiotape. Breitbart attacked Farah for raising the "birther issue" because it was "divisive." Here's a snatch of Weigel's transcription, with Farah speaking first and Breitbart second:

"It is a winning issue!"

"It's not a winning issue."

"It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility—"

"You don't recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order."

Out with the smokers on the freezing balcony, I was feeling sufficiently at home with my fellow attendees to voice, as mildly as I could, my own impatience with the birther stuff and the Cloward-Piven strategy. I wasn't surprised to find people agreeing with me. "Stupid," a woman said. "My first thought was, 'This guy's a liberal plant.' I thought we came here to talk about taxes and government spending and national defense."

The rhetorical extravagance of Tancredo, Farah, and other speakers was in tune with the extravagance of our surroundings. The convention had begun in discord and controversy, with the last-minute withdrawals of two star performers, the Republican congresswomen Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, and sniping from rival Tea Party groups who accused Tea Party Nation and its proprietors of trying to hijack the movement for personal profit. Much of the criticism was directed at the cost of the event and the choice of the gigantic Opryland resort hotel as a venue.

The scenic route from my hotel room to the convention center led through nine acres of jasmine-scented tropical rain forest, contained by interlocking atriums that resembled London's 1851 Crystal Palace. Bridges and winding pathways ran past waterfalls and fountains through a dense jungle of banana trees, palms, hibiscus, bougainvillea, cannas, ferns, vines, and orchids. "Mississippi flatboats" took passengers on circuits of the shallow canal that looped around Delta Island, and on my walk, I'd pass Epcot-style recreations of old French New Orleans; an antebellum planter's mansion; a bit of Italy; a quaint village street, possibly English; and a Dublin pub. Such a concentrated dose of surreality, taken before breakfast, helped to prepare one for life in the alternative world that was on offer in the ballroom.

Obama's election was "our Pearl Harbor." We were now living in "the Third Reich": the first two Reichs were FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. Liberal environmentalists were leading us into "socialist totalitarianism disguised as polar bears." Luxuriant and overreaching metaphors bloomed like the tropical foliage just outside. I suspected that few of the cheering tea partiers took them very seriously. They were, rather, the floor show, a contrived entertainment, meant to add spice and dazzle to proceedings that would otherwise have been tedious in their emphasis on modest, neighborhood politics. The same speaker who roused us with talk of Pearl Harbor and the Third Reich later told us to run for our local school board, and be careful to avoid "divisive social issues."

Only once did I find myself with a group of people from whose company I was glad to escape. At dinner on Friday, our eight-person table was talking—somewhat facetiously—about emigration. "We may have to leave this country sooner than we thought," a woman said, and laughed. Australia was mooted as a possible destination. "Well, you could have gone to Australia once," said a beefy man in his sixties, with coiffed silver hair and matching beard, the alpha male of the table; "but now they've got another liberal in charge—even in Australia."

The woman's husband shook his head, and said, "It may still come to shooting," the tone in which he made the remark delicately balanced between eagerness and regret.

Then conversation swerved on to the subject of Obama, "the idiot," "missing a few marbles up here," "that nitwit." (It's curious how the Tea Party view of the President exactly mirrors the way the left talks about Palin: both are self-evidently stupid.) Obama was an unknown quantity when he was elected. He had no record, no experience; he was an empty suit about whom we knew nothing.

"Well," said the alpha male, producing his ace of trumps, "we knew he was black."

I heard—and joined in—some grumbling about the religiosity of the event. "It's Tea Party Nation," a woman said. "They're a very religious group. You notice how they won't serve alcohol at dinner?" Another told me that several people had left a "breakout session" she'd attended, apparently because they'd taken offense at the copious prayers. "It's a regional thing. This is the Bible belt. You don't see this at Tea Party groups in the Southwest."

This wasn't a trivial issue. It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends—Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.

For the Saturday night banquet and Palin's speech, I was assigned a seat beside the woman who told me about people quitting a meeting because of the prayers. Had we been strangers on a plane together, we would have had nothing politically in common (she liked to refer to Obama as "the idiot"), but here we were confidential allies, in harmonious agreement about the birthers, the Marxist conspiracy, the demonization of immigrants, and the churchiness of the convention.^[2]

That evening, our prayer was led by Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the founder and president of a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. We were asked to join hands with our neighbors while Moore delivered a long, impassioned appeal to God, imploring Him to compel the United States to show unwavering loyalty and devotion to the State of Israel. I felt an increasingly steady pressure on my right hand from the woman holding it, as she sang out her "A-mens!"; but my left hand, lightly held by my new partner in skepticism, registered a quick double-blip from her forefinger and thumb that unambiguously said, "Uh-oh."

As we sat down to our steak-and-jumbo-shrimp dinner, my neighbor said, sotto voce, for my ears only, "You know, I phoned my husband last night. I told him that being here has made me realize that I am a liberal conservative."

Whatever cracks and fissures had begun to open beneath our feet during the convention were instantly healed by Palin's appearance on the platform. A great wave of adoration met the small, black-suited woman, as she walked to the microphone with a sheaf of papers. The entire ballroom was willing Sarah to transport us to a state of delirium with whatever she chose to say, and perhaps our expectations at the beginning of her speech were a guarantee that we'd leave feeling rather let down at the end.

From the start, she struck me as off-form, speaking too hurriedly, sometimes jumbling the words in her script, saying that "Alaska" was a beacon of hope to the world (she meant to say "America"), and generally using a tone of voice and style of delivery that seemed too low-key for the size of the audience in the ballroom. Whoever writes Palin's speeches now is clearly not a patch on Matthew Scully, her speechwriter on the 2008 campaign. This speech lacked structure, memorability, and direction. Its best bits were Palin's slaps at Obama, like "How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?" Most of it was a rambling tour d'horizon of policy issues—national security, defense, Iran, the economy, bailouts, and debt—on which Palin had little more to offer than humdrum remarks like, "So, folks, with all these serious challenges ahead, we've got private-sector job creation that has got to take place and economic woes and health care, the war on terror."

Some of what she said was inaudible in the ballroom. When she said, "We need a commander in chief! " the audience stood to applaud. Through the din, I watched Palin's lips continue to move on the giant monitor screens mounted on either side of the stage. An hour and a half later, watching a replay of the speech on C-SPAN, I heard the rest of the sentence: "...not a professor of law standing at the lectern." When she was speaking live, plowing through her text, I thought she must be late for her plane to Houston, where she was due to address a rally for Governor Rick Perry the next morning, and was gabbling to save every second that she could, in order to get to the airport. Later, I'd see that I was wrong.

The huge standing ovation ("Run, Sarah, Run!") at the end was more for the concept of Palin, her epiphanic appearance among us in the flesh, than it was for the lackluster speech she'd just delivered. On the way out of the convention center, I heard no one talking about how fired up they were by what they'd heard. In the elevator, a man said, "She messed up some of her lines. She'd've been better with a teleprompter." I reached my room in time to see a reporter from C-SPAN interviewing a young woman in the ballroom lobby about her response to the speech. She thought about the question for a while, and said, carefully, "Well, I didn't disagree with anything she said."

Then I watched the replay of the speech on television and was surprised by how much more effective it sounded in my room than it had in life. Palin wasn't so much speaking to the convention as she was addressing the nation, in its millions of separate rooms like mine. Her rapid, self-interrupting style of delivery was meant for the small screen, where her jokes worked better, and her banalities about policy had the pitch of kitchen-table conversation. It was far from a great speech, and I doubt if it won her many fresh converts, but it sounded a new note in her ever-surprising career: she was trying to find a "presidential" voice, and this was her State of the Union.

It happened that a Washington Post /ABC poll was being conducted as Palin was speaking (the convention ran from February 4 to 6, the poll from February 4 to 8). Palin's numbers were down across the board, among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. More than 70 percent of respondents said that she's unqualified for the presidency, up from 60 percent in November last year. Even among "conservative Republicans," only 45 percent think her qualified, down from 66 percent in November. No significant shift of opinion was observed between the 6th and the 8th. But it's the provenance of the poll that tea partiers will have seized on. The Washington Post and ABC News? What else would one expect of the liberal, lamestream media?

Notes

^[1]Named for Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's article, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," The Nation, May 2, 1966. According to Wikipedia, "The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force US politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation 'establishing a guaranteed national income.'" Since Obama's election, the Cloward-Piven piece has been widely cited on the American right as "a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government." (James Simpson, "Cloward-Piven Government," The American Thinker, November 23, 2009.)

^[2]After her speech, taking soft questions from the convention organizer, Palin remarked that "it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again"; the applause that met this line was intense but conspicuously scattered.