TimeMagazine

April 7, 2008 Vol. 171 No. 14

The Clean Energy Myth PHOTO ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY ARTHUR HOCHSTEIN

COVER

The Clean Energy Scam Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato Grosso state, Brazil.

John Lee / Aurora Select for TIME

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a

nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian

cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe.

That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.

Why the Amazon Is on Fire This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island-size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert.

"It's approaching a tipping point," says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

I spent a day in the Amazon with the Kamayura tribe, which has been forced by drought to replant its crops five times this year. The tribesmen I met all complained about hacking coughs and stinging eyes from the constant fires and the disappearance of the native plants they use for food, medicine and rituals. The Kamayura had virtually no contact with whites until the 1960s; now their forest is collapsing around them. Their chief, Kotok, a middle-aged man with an easy smile and Three Stooges hairdo that belie his fierce authority, believes that's no coincidence. "We are people of the forest, and the whites are destroying our home," says Kotok, who wore a ceremonial beaded belt, a digital watch, a pair of flip-flops and nothing else. "It's all because of money."

Kotok knows nothing about biofuels. He's more concerned about his tribe's recent tendency to waste its precious diesel-powered generator watching late-night soap operas. But he's right. Deforestation can be a complex process; for example, land reforms enacted by Brazilian President Luiz Inรกcio Lula da Silva have attracted slashand-burn squatters to the forest, and "use it or lose it" incentives have spurred some landowners to deforest to avoid redistribution.

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact.

Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father's ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. "It's just exponential right now because the economics are so good," he says. "Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared."

That the destruction is taking place in Brazil is sadly ironic, given that the nation is also an exemplar of the allure of biofuels. Sugar growers here have a greener story to tell than do any other biofuel producers. They provide 45% of Brazil's fuel (all cars in the country are able to run on ethanol) on only 1% of its arable land. They've reduced fertilizer use while increasing yields, and they convert leftover biomass into electricity. Marcos Jank, the head of their trade group, urges me not to lump biofuels together: "Grain is good for bread, not for cars. But sugar is different." Jank expects production to double by 2015 with little effect on the Amazon. "You'll see the expansion on cattle pastures and the Cerrado," he says.

So far, he's right. There isn't much sugar in the Amazon. But my next stop was the Cerrado, south of the Amazon, an ecological jewel in its own right. The Amazon gets the ink, but the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, with 10,000 species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on earth, and more mammals than the African bush. In the natural Cerrado, I saw toucans and macaws, puma tracks and a carnivorous flower that lures flies by smelling like manure. The Cerrado's trees aren't as tall or dense as the Amazon's, so they don't store as much carbon, but the region is three times the size of Texas, so it stores its share.

At least it did, before it was transformed by the march of progress--first into pastures, then into sugarcane and soybean fields. In one field I saw an array of ovens cooking trees into charcoal, spewing Cerrado's carbon into the atmosphere; those ovens used to be ubiquitous, but most of the trees are gone. I had to travel hours through converted Cerrado to see a 96-acre (39 hectare) sliver of intact Cerrado, where a former shopkeeper named Lauro Barbosa had spent his life savings for a nature preserve. "The land prices are going up, up, up," Barbosa told me. "My friends say I'm a fool, and my wife almost divorced me. But I wanted to save something before it's all gone."

The environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious."

The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature. But biofuel technology began on a small scale, and grain surpluses were common. Any ripples were inconsequential. When the scale becomes global, the outcome is entirely different, which is causing cheerleaders for biofuels to recalibrate. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the

deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis. The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department for the Environment, recently warned that mandating more biofuel usage--as the European Union is proposing--would be "insane" if it increases greenhouse gases. But the forces that biofuels have unleashed--political, economic, social--may now be too powerful to constrain.

America the Bio-Foolish The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa. Last year fewer than 2% of U.S. gas stations offered ethanol, and the country produced 7 billion gal. (26.5 billion L) of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. But on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eyepopping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing such an expansive plan but for failing to support ethanol before she started trolling for votes in Iowa's caucuses.

If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn.

That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000.

But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."

Members of Congress love biofuels too, not only because so many dream about future Iowa caucuses but also because so few want to offend the farm lobby, the most powerful force behind biofuels on Capitol Hill. Ethanol isn't about just Iowa or even the Midwest anymore. Plants are under construction in New York, Georgia, Oregon and Texas, and the ethanol boom's effect on prices has helped lift farm incomes to record levels nationwide.

Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.

Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. It makes intuitive sense: cars emit carbon no matter what fuel they burn, but the process of growing plants for fuel sucks some of that carbon out of the atmosphere. For years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market.

Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleumbased fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits.

There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil;

clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers.

Not every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That's the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a "crime against humanity." Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems. Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion.

Industry advocates say that as farms increase crop yields, as has happened throughout history, they won't need as much land. They'll use less energy, and they'll use farm waste to generate electricity. To which Searchinger says: Wonderful!

But growing fuel is still an inefficient use of good cropland. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil. Sure, we should conserve fuel and buy efficient cars, but we should keep filling them with gas if the alternatives are dirtier.

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don't use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops--he's been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses--as long as they're grown on "degraded lands" that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

Changing the Incentives

That's certainly not what's going on in Brazil. There's a frontier feel to the southern Amazon right now. Gunmen go by names like Lizard and Messiah, and Carter tells harrowing stories about decapitations and castrations and hostages. Brazil has remarkably strict environmental laws--in the Amazon, landholders are permitted to deforest only 20% of their property--but there's not much law enforcement. I left Kotok to see Blairo Maggi, who is not only the soybean king of the world, with nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) in the province of Mato Grosso, but also the region's governor. "It's like your Wild West right now," Maggi says. "There's no money for enforcement, so people do what they want."

Maggi has been a leading pioneer on the Brazilian frontier, and it irks him that critics in the U.S.--which cleared its forests and settled its frontier 125 years ago but still provides generous subsidies to its farmers--attack him for doing the same thing except without subsidies and with severe restrictions on deforestation. Imagine Iowa farmers agreeing to keep 80%--or even 20%--of their land in native prairie grass.

"You make us sound like bandits," Maggi tells me. "But we want to achieve what you achieved in America. We have the same dreams for our families. Are you afraid of the competition?"

Maggi got in trouble recently for saying he'd rather feed a child than save a tree, but he's come to recognize the importance of the forest. "Now I want to feed a child and save a tree," he says with a grin. But can he do all that and grow fuel for the world as well? "Ah, now you've hit the nail on the head." Maggi says the biofuel boom is making him richer, but it's also making it harder to feed children and save trees.

"There are many mouths to feed, and nobody's invented a chip to create protein without growing crops," says his pal Homero Pereira, a congressman who is also the head of Mato Grosso's farm bureau. "If you don't want us to tear down the forest, you better pay us to leave it up!"

Everyone I interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed. It's unfair to ask developing countries not to develop natural areas without compensation. Anyway, laws aren't enough. Carter tried confronting ranchers who didn't obey deforestation

laws and nearly got killed; now his nonprofit is developing certification programs to reward eco-sensitive ranchers. "People see the forest as junk," he says. "If you want to save it, you better open your pocketbook. Plus, you might not get shot."

The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere.

And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions.

Advocates are always careful to point out that biofuels are only part of the solution to global warming, that the world also needs more energy-efficient lightbulbs and homes and factories and lifestyles. And the world does need all those things. But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren't part of the solution at all. They're part of the problem.

NATION

Still in It To Win It Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MARK HALPERIN, JAMES CARNEY

Hillary Clinton Diana Walker for TIME

Hillary Clinton is often compared with the conniving Lady Macbeth (by her enemies) or with the fierce and nurturing Roman goddess Juno (by her supporters). But these days she feels most like Cassandra, desperate to make the case for why she is staying in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton is well aware of the long odds she faces in the battle against Barack Obama for delegates. She knows that as the Democratic National Convention gets closer, the increasingly bitter back and forth between the two campaigns hurts Obama's chances of winning a general election and reinforces the image of the Clintons as a

power-hungry couple who will do anything to win, even if they damage the Democratic Party.

But for the Clintons, quitting isn't an option. "My family is not big on quitting," Bill Clinton said in West Virginia on March 26. When Clinton closes her eyes, she sees John McCain triumphing in November against Obama in a contest she believes she would win. Like all competitive candidates, Clinton is certain she would be a better leader than her rivals, and she feels an obligation to her supporters to fight on. "The people who are supporting me sure don't want to see it over," she told TIME while campaigning in Pennsylvania on March 25. "They tell me all the time that they want me to keep going. They want me to keep fighting."

That Clinton partisans want her to remain in the race is undoubtedly true. It is also largely irrelevant. Which is why Clinton is coming under pressure to explain her decision to continue through the summer, despite the nearly insurmountable lead Obama holds among elected delegates. "In order for your staying in to be regarded as anything more than the behavior of a sore loser," says a prominent unaligned Democrat, "you have to make the argument for how you'd be a winner. No one can articulate that argument."

Indeed, the scenario for a Clinton comeback remains remote. Even if she decisively wins Pennsylvania's April 22 primary and rides that momentum to upset Obama in both Indiana and North Carolina on May 6, she would probably still trail him in the delegate count. The news that neither Michigan nor Florida will hold do-over contests was another blow to the Clinton effort.

But not only does Clinton intend to stay in, she and her advisers are crafting a strategy that they think can swing the nomination her way. It essentially comes down to convincing superdelegates that they can't afford to take a chance on Obama, that she is the only candidate who can win the White House against McCain.

It's a breathtaking gambit. And it could work. But it has some Democrats asking, At what cost?

The question of who emerges from the primary season as the party nominee is not usually a subjective one. There is a process, however convoluted, through which candidates amass delegates; after the last state has voted and the numbers have been tallied, the one with the most delegates wins. This year is different. The two massively popular candidates have both earned large numbers of delegates, resulting in a situation in which neither can realistically obtain the required number of elected delegates that will put the candidate over the top.

Given this unusual turn of events, the Clinton campaign has seized the chance to promote an argument ground not in numbers but in sentiment: it is asking superdelegates to make a subjective decision about which candidate is best positioned to win the White House in November. The first exhibit of its case is demographic. "I've obviously done very well with women, who are a majority of the electorate," Clinton explained to TIME. "I've done very well with Hispanics. I've done well with older voters. We have to anchor our electoral map in the states that [Democrats] must win, and I think I'm in a good position to do that."

There's a flip side to this as well--the argument that Obama is dangerously weak among key Democratic and swing constituencies. The Clinton campaign has been raising questions about Obama's ability to win white blue-collar voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Hispanics in places like New Mexico and Colorado--all swing states that will most likely decide the election.

Then there's her old standby case based on experience. Clinton believes Obama's support is largely a mirage--a bunch of true believers whose passion might help him cinch the nomination, but that may prove an insufficient bedrock for winning a general election when the spell might be broken by tough questions about nationalsecurity credentials, economic-policy plans and rich experience. She can't stop from shaking her head in disbelief when longtime friends who are elected officials inform her that they are going to endorse Obama and were chiefly convinced by their children's enthusiasm for his candidacy.

But this argument has taken a hit in recent weeks as Clinton has found herself on the defensive about her experience as First Lady. On a variety of domestic and international issues, information has emerged that calls into question the extent of Clinton's policy involvement in the 1990s. And she was recently embarrassed by revelations that a 1996 trip to Bosnia was far less dangerous and dramatic than in her campaign-stump retelling.

That leaves the strategy Clinton is turning to more frequently--trying to define Obama on her terms. According to those close to her, she is hoping that as spring becomes summer, the potential for finding another skeleton or two in Obama's closet will prove him ultimately unelectable in the fall. In some cases, her campaign is even trumpeting attacks on Obama's circle from unlikely corners, like the American Spectator--a right-wing magazine that spent much of the 1990s targeting Bill Clinton.

(Obama's campaign has also stepped up its personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, escalating the conflict.)

It's these kinds of tactics that most worry Democrats, even those who haven't taken sides. "The problem with staying in," says one, "and with the idea that something mysteriously is gonna appear to disqualify Obama is that the only way it's going to mysteriously appear is if the Clintons are behind it. So the thing that convinces people Barack Obama can't win has to come from the hand of either Bill or Hillary Clinton."

That prospect doesn't appear to daunt the Senator from New York. Said a confidant who has talked to her regularly throughout the campaign: "This woman never quits.

Neither she nor her husband." So don't expect this race to end anytime soon.

TIME Audio Listen to Mark Halperin's interview with Hillary Clinton at time.com/podcasts

Exclusive: Clinton Vows to Push On Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008 By MARK HALPERIN

Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Diana Walker for TIME

Hillary Clinton is under a lot of pressure these days, but in a Tuesday interview she seemed cheery, confident and unapologetic as she talked about her determination to fight on in the presidential race. Speaking by phone from Pennsylvania, she explained why she plans to continue her push for the Democratic nomination, even as some question her chances of winning. She expressed confidence that her party would pull together in time to beat Republican John McCain, as well as a belief that the remaining contests — and perhaps some surprising shifts in the delegates already elected — would make her the Democrats' nominee.

HALPERIN: How would you describe your most likely path to victory now?

What would the elements be and how would it play out?

CLINTON: Well, first I think that it's important to point out that the premise of the whole discussion that some people are engaged in is off base because this is a very close race and neither of us will reach the magic number of delegates. We're both going to be short, and when you think about the many millions of people who have already voted, we are separated by a relatively small percentage of votes. We're separated by, you know, a little more than a hundred delegates. I've won states that

Democrats need to win in the general election in order to win the White House and obviously the strategy on the other side is to try to shut this race down, but I don't think voters want that. You know, there was a big surge in registration here in Pennsylvania. That seems to be happening in other states that are in the upcoming contests. Millions of people still remain to vote and to have their votes counted, so I think it's exciting and I find it very positive for our party. We're going to bring a lot of people into this race. Yesterday in Montgomery County I probably had six women tell me that they had changed their registration from Republican to Democrat to be able to vote for me, and I'm sure people are doing things to get prepared to vote for Senator Obama. I think this is all really good. And there's additional problems of Florida and Michigan, because I still don't see how the Democrats don't figure out a way to make sure their votes are counted. And I don't understand what Senator Obama was afraid of when I agreed and the DNC signed off on a re-vote in Michigan and he said no. So we're just going to keep this process going through these next contests.

You often talk about this need for balance in life and in policy and in politics. Are you now balancing all the reasons you just gave for going forward and having other voters vote with the word that some people are putting out that going forward is hurting the party? Are you balancing that or are you all on the side of your first answer?

Well, I obviously take that into account, but I just don't see any evidence of it. You know, it is clear that there's a lot of excitement and energy in this campaign. The people who are supporting me sure don't want to see it over. They tell me that all the time, that they want me to keep going. They want me to keep fighting, so this will all work out. We're going to have a unified Democratic Party and we'll go into the fall in a strong position to defeat John McCain.

You said earlier today at your press conference that we'll wait to see what happens in "the next three months." Does that mean that your assumption is, however these remaining contests turn out, that the race will go at least for the next three months?

Well, that certainly is what I anticipate. I think the elections that are yet to come deserve to be held because the people from Pennsylvania to Puerto Rico to all the others that are waiting in line deserve to be heard. And I think that's part of the good. You know, I remind a lot of people that my husband didn't formally wrap up the nomination until June and when he did he was behind both President Bush and Ross Perot. You know as well as anyone how dynamic elections are and how fluid they are, and I think that we're going to win in November and once we get our nominee chosen we're going to have a very vigorous campaign to make sure that happens.

Is there anything more important for the superdelegates and the voters who are still to vote, anything more important for them to look at besides electability, the ability to beat John McCain in November?

Well, I think who will be the best President is another element, but there's a lot to be excited about here. I think that there is unprecedented excitement in the Democratic Party. Now obviously people choose sides and they feel passionately about whichever one of us they are supporting, but it's still going on and I see nothing that suggests to me that the people in the states yet to vote are anything other than thrilled to have their voices and votes be part of this process. Look at what's happened with Pennsylvania registration. Its just shot through the roof, and it happened because, you know, people individually, with some encouragement from each of our campaigns, got up and said, you know, "I want to be part of this." And I think it will help both of us, and I think it will, more importantly, help the Democratic Party.

Some of your supporters have said this issue of Senator Obama's relationship with Reverend Wright is something that should give superdelegates pause on the electability issue. Do you think Senator Obama has answered everything he should on that? Has the press and the public asked the right questions about that?

Well, that's really up to the press and the public to determine, but I was asked specifically today what I would do if I had been in a similar situation and it was

obviously a personal opinion of mine and I said, you know, I would have left because that would not have been something I was comfortable with. But it's very personal and I think people are kind of thinking about it and are trying to determine what they believe about it.

You live in a household with a pretty high appetite and aptitude for polling data and for exit election returns. In looking at the exit polls from the states that have voted and from the returns from states that have voted, do you see any arguments you can make about your relative strength compared to Senator Obama in winning a general election?

Well, I think I have a lot of support that Democrats have to have in November. I've done obviously very well with women, who are a majority of the electorate, and the real core of the Democratic Party electoral victories. I've done very well with Hispanics. I've done very well with, you know, a lot of hard-working people who get up every day and know they need a President to try to straighten out the economy and get our country back on the right track. I've done well with older voters who are very solid part of the general election electorate and I feel very privileged to have that kind of support in states that Democrats have to win. You know, we have to anchor our electoral map in the states that we must win and I think I'm in a good position to do that.

You left out one group. It's a little sensitive in the current context to ask about it, but you didn't mention white voters. Is that an advantage you see in the states that have voted so far and in the exit polls?

Well, I think, you know, voters come in all sizes and shapes and every other characteristic and we usually put together coalitions of voters, but I want to be the President for everyone. I will obviously be reaching out to African-American voters, you know, whom I deeply respect, as they make their own decisions in these elections, but we're going to have to come together because no matter the differences between Senator Obama and myself, the differences between the Democrats and Senator McCain are monumental. I just finished giving a speech

about Social Security in which I quoted Senator McCain saying just a few weeks ago that he would continue George Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security. Well, you know, that's a very big difference and you know I think I am in a very strong position to be able to go toe-to-toe with John McCain, to be able to deal with him on national security and foreign policy and to trump him on the economy and health care and Social Security and so many of the other signature issues that we have to face. So it is something that I feel very good about my chances against Senator McCain.

Last question Senator. Some people look at the current state of the delegate counts and say the only way you can win the nomination is at the convention, with a convention where delegates move around perhaps, and you'll make your case side by side. Are you comfortable if that's the way you win the nomination, going all the way to Denver and winning it there?

Is that a comfortable outcome for you?

You know it's the same thing for Senator Obama. Neither of us will reach the number of delegates needed. So I think that that is, you know, the reality for both of our campaigns. And all delegates have to assess who they think will be the strongest nominee against McCain and who they believe would do the best job in bringing along the down-ballot races and who they think would be the best President. And, from my perspective, those are all very legitimate questions, and as you know so well, Mark, every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose. We talk a lot about so-called pledged delegates, but every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment. And, you know, I'm just going to do the best I can in the next 10 contests to make my case to the voters in those elections and then we'll see where we are.

Sounds like you'll still be in the race by the time the next few issues of TIME magazine get published.

(Laughs) Well, I think so.

Putting McCain to the Ethics Test Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MICHAEL SCHERER

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty

The U.S. Senate is a lousy launching pad for sainthood, a place of compromise and backslaps, of hidden doors that lead to gilded rooms where the real work gets done.

To succeed is to succumb, often to the courtship of big-ticket donors.

And yet for more than a decade John McCain has claimed to truck with angels. He condemns his colleagues who earmark bridges or bike trails, often at the request of contributors. When a powerful trade group is arrayed against him, he bellows, "The fix is in." He exploded with contempt for the corrupting ways of Washington at one hearing in 1999. "This is Congress," McCain declared, "where telecommunicationsindustry lobbying is no-holds-barred."

Such displays of outrage have fueled the G.O.P. nominee's political success, earning him a reputation as a reformer with higher nationwide favorability ratings than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It's because of that reputation, which particularly appeals to independent voters, that Democrats have started targeting McCain's reformer cred.

In recent weeks Democratic leader Howard Dean has called McCain a "situation ethicist" who "runs on his integrity, but he doesn't seem to have any." Obama has alleged that McCain puts lobbyists "in charge of his campaign," even though the Democratic candidates are also advised by current and former influence brokers. The Democratic National Committee regularly blasts out statements tagging McCain with ominous phrases like special-interest cronyism.

The McCain campaign has publicly welcomed the questioning. "We're happy to debate ethical standards and commitment to reform and ethics all day long," says Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, pointing to the Senator's record of reform in the Senate. But Davis' own rĂŠsumĂŠ, as a former telecommunications lobbyist who twice switched sides to work for McCain, illustrates the clouds circling the candidate's blue-sky reputation.

No longtime Senate leader can escape charges of favoritism, even a crusader against improper influence like McCain. This is especially true for a former chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. "The issues before the committee often pit industry against industry," explains Ivan Schlager, who served as the committee's Democratic chief counsel, "so you are always appearing to favor somebody."

Take that 1999 outburst about no-holds-barred lobbying, for example. The subject of the hearing was legislation to allow satellite companies to relay local network signals to viewers, an idea promoted by McCain but opposed by the broadcast and cable industries. A major proponent of the bill happened to be a McCain supporter, Charles Ergen, head of the Dish Network. Less than a month after the hearing, Ergen held a fund raiser at his Denver home for McCain, reportedly raising more than $40,000. A

few years later, Ergen's company gave more than $50,000 to a nonprofit institute that employed Davis and was chaired by McCain himself. No-holds-barred, indeed.

McCain's defense of such incidents is invariably twofold. First, he declares categorically that he has not betrayed the public trust. "I have never done any favors for anybody — lobbyist or special-interest group," he said last December. But he complicates matters by also admitting what other politicians rarely do: the system itself is corrupted and corrupting. "All of us are tainted," McCain said in 2002. "And I am one of them."

The self-image of McCain as a saint operating in a sinner's world has been carefully crafted over the years and embraces the contradictions of his job. He is both a vigorous fund raiser — collecting more than $135 million over his career — and the nation's leading G.O.P. campaign-finance reformer. His inner circle includes current and former lobbyists, but he has sponsored bills limiting their influence. He has begged discount private-jet flights from companies seeking his favor but also led an effort to end the discount lending practice. McCain is, in other words, not an easy man to judge.

The Problem of Appearance McCain's trouble with influence-peddling dates to 1987, when he found himself ensnared in the Keating Five scandal. He had met with federal regulators on behalf of banker Charles Keating Jr., a wealthy fund raiser and friend who had flown the McCain family on private jets to vacations in the Bahamas. A Senate ethics panel found that McCain had exercised "poor judgment" but had broken no rules. The honor-bound Senator was nonetheless rattled. "Appearance in politics," McCain said years later, "is reality."

The episode inspired McCain's rebirth as a reformer concerned above all with appearance. He successfully worked to outlaw unregulated, six-figure "soft-money" donations to political parties. That was followed by crusades against lobbying access and an extensive corruption investigation against the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But high standards are a double-edged sword. Even as McCain railed against the system, he worked it, sometimes creating unseemly appearances of his own. As with many other Senators, some of McCain's biggest corporate donors were invariably the companies that sought his favor — firms like FedEx, AT&T and Qwest Communications. At one point, he even allowed Fred Smith, a friend who ran FedEx, to sponsor a book party for McCain's memoir Worth the Fighting For.

The Ghosts Of Memphis Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By DAVID VON DREHLE

Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and 39 when he was murdered. Prodigies in music and math are familiar, but moral genius we typically associate with age. The gap between the brevity of King's life and its consequence is easy to state but hard to fathom, like the speed of light.

"We were all young people," the Rev. Billy Kyles muses as he recalls the colleagues surrounding King that fatal evening in Memphis, Tenn. They were vivid, vigorous, virile young men. In his last hour alive, King and his friends had a pillow fight in his motel room. History records that his last thoughts encompassed gospel music, neckties, soul food and the high price of righteousness. "I'd rather be dead than afraid," this threat-haunted man explained to his friends that day.

What would an older, time-tempered King think if he had lived to see today's world, with its black governors, black CEOs and Barack Obama? "You've made significant progress," King's close associate Andrew Young imagines him saying, "but you've still got a long way to go."

Now we mark the 40th anniversary of his assassination at about 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968. King has been dead longer than he lived. All but four of the top aides with him that evening have joined their leader in death. Some might say King is frozen in time, forever urgent and perspiring, but no--he's beyond time. On the night before his death, he said, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place." That place is nothing, though, compared with the brief, fierce blaze of the genuine hero.

The Rev. Billy Kyles THAT DAY

I thought I was having a nightmare. Forty years ago, I had no words to express my feelings. Forty years later, I still have no words to express how I felt.

SINCE THEN "We've made tremendous progress, there's no question about it, and people who say it's worse now can say that because they weren't here then. But he would be terribly disappointed with the behavior of the children of the black nation and all this anger that they feel."

WHAT HE'S DOING NOW Kyles, 73, still occupies the Memphis pulpit he stepped into nearly 50 years ago. He recalls showing the Lorraine Motel to Nelson Mandela, who wept as he said, "This is where Martin died."

The Rev. James Bevel THAT DAY I got this friend named Bernard LaFayette, and Bernard would always do tricks. So my first impression was that Bernard had shot a firecracker. But it was like, Martin doesn't play like that.

SINCE THEN "I think the big mess was not that King got killed. The big mess is that we didn't make sure that the man who was accused of killing him got his day in court. That summarily ended the nonviolent movement, when we would not stand up for the justice question."

WHAT HE'S DOING NOW A brilliant tactician, Bevel, 71, has remained an activist. He is scheduled to stand trial April 7 for committing incest with one of his daughters when she was a teenager. He says he is not guilty.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson THAT DAY The police were coming toward us with their guns drawn. We were saying "It came from that way! You should be running with the guns toward where the bullet came from!"

SINCE THEN "We are a better nation 40 years later. We're free but not equal. We've won the laws against barbarism and indecency. Now we must focus on the economic investments to close the gaps--he talked about that."

WHAT HE'S DOING NOW Jackson became the most renowned civil rights leader of the 1980s and the first black candidate to win a presidential primary. Now 66, he still meets "every Saturday morning" with the group of Chicago activists he organized as King's lieutenant in 1966.

Andrew Young THAT DAY When he came out, he didn't have a topcoat, and I said, "It's cool. You better go back and get your topcoat." And he was saying "Do I really need a coat?" And then the shot rang out.

SINCE THEN "We continued to make progress for black people who have a college degree. They have moved comfortably into the political and business life of America. But very few people have been able to deal with the poorest of the poor, which is what Martin was doing at the time of his death."

WHAT HE'S DOING NOW A former Congressman, ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, Young, 76, is cochairman of GoodWorks International, a consulting firm.

With Reporting by Madison Gray

The Burdens of Martyrdom Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

King's aides, from right, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy, lead the mourning of their slain leader.

Getty

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King Jr. and not think of death. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is death that ultimately defined him. To be sure, King was courageous in the face of death. But the unrelenting threat of bombs exploding and snipers shooting took its toll. King suffered desperate stretches of depression that sometimes alarmed his closest aides and friends. He fought valiantly to maintain sanity and focus in the midst of the surrounding turmoil. One of his top aides wanted him to consult a psychiatrist because of his steep descent into the doldrums. The sleeping pills he got from a physician friend stopped working. His vacations rarely allowed him to escape his troubles and pressures. And the somber tones of his voice evoked the nightmares that stalked him.

It is nearly miraculous that King managed to keep death in a philosophical headlock as often as he did. He was so preoccupied with his death, so obsessed with its likely occurrence, that in the last years, he could relax only in a room with no windows because he was tortured with worry about who might pull the trigger. His eyes fell on strangers, wondering if they were the messenger of death. King was increasingly marginalized in his own pain; a close aide says there were very few people to whom he could confide the depths of his obsession, and he suffered huge grief of soul and heart, largely alone.

King's depression was also fed by the fallout from butting heads with the soft, safe image manufactured for him. The more he protested poverty, denounced the Vietnam War and lamented the unconscious racism of many whites, the more he lost favor and footing in white America. For the first time in almost a decade, in January 1967 King's name was left off the Gallup-poll list of the 10 most admired Americans.

Financial support for his organization nearly dried up. Mainstream publications turned on him for diving into foreign policy matters supposedly far beyond his depth.

Universities withdrew lecture invitations. And no American publisher was eager to publish a book by the leader. In many ways King was socially and politically dead before he was killed. Martyrdom saved him from becoming a pariah to the white mainstream.

But martyrdom also forced onto King's dead body the face of a toothless tiger. His threat has been domesticated, his danger sweetened. His depressions and wounds have been turned into waves and smiles. There is little suffering recalled, only light and glory. King's more challenging rhetoric has gone unemployed, left homeless in front of the Lincoln Memorial, blanketed in dream metaphors, feasting on leftovers of hope lite.

White Americans have long since forgotten just how much heat and hate the thought of King could whip up. They have absolved themselves of blame for producing, or failing to fight, the murderous passions that finally tracked King down in Memphis, Tenn. If one man held the gun, millions more propped him up and made it seem a

good, even valiant idea. In exchange for collective guilt, whites have given King lesser victories, including a national holiday.

But blacks have not been innocent in the posthumous manipulations of King's legacy.

If many whites have undercut King by praising him to death, many blacks have hollowed his individuality through worship. The black reflex to protect King's reputation from unprincipled attack is understandable. But the wish to worship him into perfection is misled; the desire to deify him is tragically misplaced. The scars of his humanity are what make his glorious achievements all the more remarkable.

Both extremes of white and black culture must be avoided. Many whites want him clawless; many blacks want him flawless. But we must keep him fully human, warts and all. In the end, King used the inevitability of a premature death to argue for social change and measure our commitment to truth. There is a lot to be learned in how King feared and faced death, and fought it too. What we make of his death may determine what we make of his legacy and our future.

Michael Eric Dyson is university professor of sociology at Georgetown University. He is the author of 16 books, including April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America, from which this essay is adapted.

ESSAY

Is Al Gore the Answer?

Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008 By JOE KLEIN

Al Gore Carsten Koall / Getty

Unlike Barack Obama, Bill Clinton does not believe in "the fierce urgency of now."

The former President has an exquisitely languid sense of how political time unfurls.

He understands that those moments the political community, especially the media, considers urgent usually aren't. He has seen his own election and reelection—and completing his second term—pronounced "impossible" and lived to tell the tale. He remembers that in spring 1992 he had pretty much won the Democratic nomination but was considered a dead man walking, running third behind Bush the Elder and Ross Perot. He knows that April is the silly season in presidential politics, the moment when candidates involved in a bruising primary battle seem weakest and bloodied, as both Hillary Clinton and Obama do now. It's the moment when pundits demand

action—"Drop out, Hillary!"—and propound foolish theories. And so I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I'm slouching toward, well, a theory: if this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party's dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.

This April promises to be crueler than most. The two campaigns have started attacking each other with chainsaws, while the Republican John McCain is moving ahead in some national polls. At this point, Clinton can only win the nomination ugly: by superdelegates abandoning Obama and turning to her, in droves—not impossible, but not very likely either. Even if Clinton did overtake Obama, it would be very difficult for her to win the presidency: African Americans would never forgive her for "stealing" the nomination. They would simply stay home in November, as would the Obamista youth. (Although the former President is probably thinking: Yeah, but John McCain is a flagrantly flawed candidate too—I'd accept even a corrupted nomination and take my chances.)

Which is not to say that Clinton's candidacy is entirely without purpose now that she is pursuing a Republican-style race gambit, questioning Obama's 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. Democrats will soon learn how damaging that relationship might be in a general election. They'll also see if Obama has the gumption to bounce back, work hard—not just arena rallies for college kids but roundtables for the grizzled and unemployed in American Legion halls—and change the minds that have turned against him. The main reason superdelegates have not yet rallied round Obama is that the party is collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how he performs in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks?

What if he can't buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses all three states badly and continues to lose after that? I'd guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy—and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you're probably right. But let's play a little. Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely ... and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, "Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place." A congressional Democrat told me, "This could be our way out of a mess." Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. "I don't know that he'd be interested, even if you handed it to him," said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June. And yet ... is this scenario any more preposterous than the one that gave John McCain the Republican nomination? Yes, it's silly season. But this has been an exceptionally "silly" year.

Essay

Dumb Money Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MICHAEL KINSLEY

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for TIME

We don't need a conversation about race. At least not now. What we need is a conversation about money. It becomes clearer by the day that this is not your grandmother's--or even Barack Obama's grandmother's--economic downturn. This time we start with a huge government deficit and record private debt, all run up when times were good and we should have been storing up acorns. This is one that begins with people losing their homes, which is usually the last act of the drama.

This is one that is bringing back stagflation--that poisonous combination of economic slowdown and eroding currency we cured at a terrible cost back in 1981. When that red phone rings in the middle of the night, it probably won't be the National Security Adviser saying Osama bin Laden has struck again. It will be the Treasury Secretary

reporting that markets have opened in the Far East and the dollar has become worthless.

The three remaining candidates have finally given speeches that addressed the economic crisis. But the presidential campaign is bouncing into its second year inside a hermetic bubble where the discussion is mainly about itself. Who cares about the economy when there is the allocation of superdelegates to worry about?

John McCain has manfully admitted that he doesn't know much about economics.

Typically, this comment has been analyzed in terms of its effect on the campaign, not in terms of what it might mean to have a President who doesn't know much about economics. It has become an occasion for the popular Washington game Who Will His/Her Advisers Be? In a speech on March 25, McCain declared that he "will not play election-year politics with the housing crisis" but "will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be harmful or helpful." He promised to "not allow dogma to override common sense."

In other words, he hasn't got a clue. Another word for dogma is values, and another word for politics is democracy. So McCain, by his own admission, knows little about economics, has no underlying values or principles to apply in considering what action to take and isn't interested in your opinion either.

Hillary Clinton's speech on March 24 blamed everybody for the excessive borrowing at the root of this crisis--except the people who did the borrowing. Her proposal to help is a parody of old-Democrat thinking. Thirty billion dollars to states and cities to spend on "everything from police and fire support to graffiti removal and better lighting." She offers a complex plan to renegotiate the terms of troubled mortgages-ultimately with a federal guarantee, which she insists "would cost the taxpayers nothing in the long run." Republicans believe you can cut taxes and bring in more money. Democrats believe you can turn mortgages that people can't afford to pay into ones that they can and it won't cost anyone a cent. Most pathetically, Clinton calls for an "Emergency Working Group" composed of Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan. Let those guys figure it out if they're so smart.

As with most issues, there isn't much daylight between Clinton's position and Obama's. Obama also blames lenders and excuses buyers, while piling on new subsidies that will nicely compensate everyone involved for the new regulations he also wants them to endure. Obama's unique angle is blaming the war in Iraq. In the business, that is called "message discipline."

Where is the "conversation" about the economy that's even half as sophisticated as Obama's speech about race? One that explains to people that you can't just make everything better by sending out $1,200 checks? That there is a real cost to protecting overextended homeowners from the consequences of their own folly?

That, yes, there are villains here, but blaming the whole mess on villainy is missing the point? That immigration and international trade are part of the solution, not the problem?

Journalists don't help. This is a golden age of economic journalism, with wonderful business writers churning out great stuff every day. But they're not the ones covering the candidates. The endless political campaign has produced a permanent class of political journalists (or perhaps it's the other way around). Many are just as wise as the business journalists, but they devote their wisdom to the minutiae of campaign strategy and are mystified to the point of terror about economics.

C'mon, boys and girls--economics may be complicated, but it's no more complicated than the laws about campaign-spending limits or the mathematics of Democratic Party superdelegates, all of which you handle with ease. We all know about the economist who predicted nine of the past five recessions. But you don't want to miss this one. It's going to be a whopper.

Commentary

Fox on the Run Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

An electronic news ticker above a sign at the Fox News Channel television studios in New York City.

Stan Honda / AFP / Getty

On super Tuesday, Bush's former brain, Karl Rove, debuted on Fox News Channel as a political analyst. Genteel, wry and armed with terabytes of political minutiae, he won critical raves. ("One of the best things in television news right now," said the New York Times, the equivalent of a Westminster Dog Show hopeful getting endorsed by Cat Fancy.) But there was something poignantly valedictory about the old warrior playing referee: the lion, if not in winter, then in a petting zoo.

You could say the same thing lately for Fox News Channel itself. Fox hasn't gone soft, but from watching its coverage lately, I get a sense that the haven for conservative hosts, and viewers alienated by liberal news, needs to figure out its

next act. Fox News is not simply a mouthpiece for the Bush White House: it rose with Bush after 2000 and 9/11, was played on TVs in his White House and reflected the same surety and flag-lapel-pin confidence in its tone and star-spangled look. It was not just a hit; it was the network of the moment.

Now, with two Democrats locked in what seems like a general-election campaign and lame-duck Bush fading from the headlines, it has to figure out how not to seem like yesterday's news. At times recently, the network has appeared uncertain about its focus. Its primary-night coverage has felt staid and listless. Sometimes it has gone tabloid with celebrity-news, true-crime and scandal stories (WEBSITES POSTING SEXY PICS LIFTED FROM FACEBOOK). At other times it has retreated into a kind of war-on-terrorism news-talgia, playing up threatening chatter and new missives from al-Qaeda leaders while its rivals are doing the election 24/7; flipping to Fox can feel like time-traveling to 2002.

Fox is still the top-rated news channel, but there are signs it's plateauing. Its ratings started to lag in 2006, and in February, CNN's prime time (boosted by several presidential debates) beat Fox among 25-to-54-year-olds for the first time since 2001. (CNN and TIME are owned by Time Warner.) Maybe even more galling, the network has lately faded in the ephemeral category of buzz. MSNBC--with far fewer viewers--has been the political-media obsession of the 2008 primary, largely because of feuds between the Clinton campaign and the network for its perceived pro-Obama bias.

Ratings shmatings: if a Rupert Murdoch network cannot dominate the field of ticking off the Clintons, that has to sting.

Now let's not jump the gun. Somewhere in a cabinet at Fox headquarters, there must be a bulging file of the premature obituaries written for it. Fox debuted in 1996 and quickly flourished in the Clinton era. After Bush won, some thought the channel-and Rush Limbaugh et al.--would suffer from an outrage deficit.

Not exactly! Instead, it adopted a sexy, muscular triumphalism through 9/11 and Iraq. It wasn't just the politics; it was the aesthetics. News on Fox looks like a video

game, full of bluster, blondes and blaring graphics. Ideology aside, Fox makes the news urgent, even when nothing's going on.

But for better or for worse, Fox became the signal cultural artifact of the Bush era, so it will need to remodel itself again. A President McCain could actually represent the trickiest shift. No matter how he has repositioned himself since 2000, he's still the Republican who knocked Rumsfeld and criticized 24, on Fox's sibling broadcast network, for glamorizing torture. Worst of all, the "liberal media" like him, which would play havoc with Fox's us-vs.-them, fair-and-balanced formula.

And if a Democrat wins? A Clinton restoration would give Fox the devil--or demonized figure--it knows. But TV abhors a rerun, and the challenge would be to make it fresh. As for Obama, the network is still figuring out how to palatably antagonize him. While the Jeremiah Wright story was a gift--Fox turned him into a dashiki-clad screen saver--Fox's Chris Wallace embarrassingly chastised the hosts of Fox and Friends on-air for "distorting" Obama's words. And Bill O'Reilly caught flak for using the phrase "lynching party" in a critique of Michelle Obama.

As it wades through the fin de rĂŠgime, Fox News will have one important asset: its loyal viewer base. But even for them, it will need to shake up its comfortable Bushera routine, perhaps by cultivating new hosts, perhaps by taking a page from McCain and branding itself as the channel of maverick authenticity, not of establishment dogma. The viewers are Fox's to keep. It just has to figure out what's going to make them mad starting in 2009.

WORLD

Postcard: Bhutan Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By SIMON ROBINSON

Voters line up at a polling station in the Punaka province of Bhutan.

Sumit Dayal / Sipa

Change is a word often used at election time, but in Bhutan you can sense it at every political meeting and on every door-knocking drive. In the run-up to the country's first-ever general election on March 24, voters and politicians had to figure out how democracy works and, more important, how to import the concept without hurting their traditions. A few weeks ago, in Khuruthang, a town in the verdant Punakha Valley, workers from the People's Democratic Party--the older (at just over a year) of Bhutan's two main parties--pitched a tent in the courtyard of the town's temple.

Buddhism is central to life in this tiny Himalayan kingdom, and temple grounds are regularly used for town meetings. Just then, a local election official called with news: no political party could hold a meeting near a temple, since the brand-new draft

constitution separates church and state, much as the U.S.'s does. The party organizer argued that the choice of venue had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the temple's nice lawn and handy power outlets. But a rule's a rule, so campaign workers tore down the tent and moved the meeting to a dusty, half-built hotel nearby. "It's all new to us," says volunteer party worker Yeshey Tenzing with a smile. "But we're learning."

They have to. In 2005, Bhutan's fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, announced that he would abdicate in favor of his son and that the country, after nearly a century of mostly benign royal rule, would become a constitutional monarchy with a popularly elected parliament. Most Bhutanese were horrified, fearing that democracy could lead to instability, as it had in neighbors such as Nepal and Bangladesh. But the King insisted, explaining that no nation should be in the hands of one person and that change should happen while the country was still peaceful and prosperity was growing.

Still, the Bhutanese remain uncomfortable with the changes under way and especially with one basic political act: mudslinging. Bhutan is a fiercely traditional place, polite and formal. Slow vehicles pull over to let faster cars go by. Etiquette dictates that you wear formal clothes in the presence of the national flag. The vast majority of the nation's 700,000 people subscribe to ex-King Jigme Singye's emphasis on something he calls gross national happiness, which measures not just wealth but how content, healthy and well educated people are, as well as the state of the environment and strength of the culture.

The two parties that competed in the election have nearly identical platforms, but accusations (mild by Western standards) of influence-peddling and smear tactics have begun to enter the discourse, and people are worrying that Bhutan's close-knit society will suffer. Lyonpo Sonam Tobgye, Bhutan's Chief Justice and the main architect of the draft constitution, understands that there should be political debate but laments that differences are splitting villages and even families. "I don't think we should be enslaved to the nature of politics," he says.

The political change--the election was swept by the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT, or Virtuous Bhutan Party), which is seen as the more royalist of the two--comes as Bhutan grapples with its shifting place in the world. Squeezed between giants China and India, it has slowly opened up over the past few decades. There still may not be a single stoplight in the capital, Thimphu, but there are Internet cafĂŠs. Bhutan's royal leaders are prodding their tiny nation into the rushing stream of globalization. "The concerns of the nation are the same--everyone is aware of them," says Dorji Namgay, an engineer, during a visit to his home by Lyonpo Ugyen Tshering, then a candidate for the DPT. "And while our parents may not like to see ugly arguments, we younger people understand that there needs to be some of that. But we should argue the policies, not personalize things, or it becomes somewhat childish." Ugyen sat, hands in lap, ankles together, nodding, and said, "I think politeness is something we hope to keep alive."

GLOBAL DISPATCH For a new postcard from around the world every day, visit time.com

BUSINESS

Starbucks Looks for a Fresh Jolt Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By BARBARA KIVIAT / SEATTLE

The Starbucks executive team at the Starbucks coffeehouse at Starbucks Support Center, Seattle Washington.

John Keatley / Redux for TIME

I'm walking up to a starbucks with Howard Schultz when we spot a barista standing in the parking lot, passing 11 cups of coffee through a car window. "I've never seen that," says Schultz, who took over Starbucks in 1987 and transformed it from a sixshop seller of beans into a thread that runs through our social tapestry. He asks the barista what she's doing. She says the drive-through order was so large she decided to bring it out. Schultz waves to the driver to roll down her window--"Where are they going with 11 beverages?" he wants to know--but as he approaches the car, the driver speeds away. Sometimes it's tough to connect with your customers. But Schultz is trying. Very, very hard.

Starbucks has been so successful, it may seem unassailable, untouchable-unavoidable. It's not. In fact, the company has had a very difficult year. Traffic at U.S. stores dropped for the first time in its history, and then comparable-store sales-a key measure of a retailer's health--turned negative too. Its stock has slid some 40% in the past 12 months, shaving more than $400 million from Schultz's personal bean pile.

But perhaps most hurtful have been the mounting complaints from customers, employees and even Schultz himself that in its pursuit of growth, the company has strayed too far from its roots. As Schultz memorably wrote to the company's top execs on Valentine's Day, 2007, "We have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand." The company that taught us that coffee is not a commodity has itself become one.

So Schultz is taking it upon himself to restore the cult of caffeine. On Jan. 7, the passionate entrepreneur--whom employees call Uncle Howie--again became CEO, a position he ceded in 2000 for a seat on the board. He has lured back some apostles from the start-up years, and they've designed a plan to yank Starbucks' focus from gaining efficiency and appeasing Wall Street back to selling exemplary coffee with the kind of service and ambiance that makes a $4 latte worth the price.

"We are doing everything we can to differentiate Starbucks from everyone else that is attempting to be in the coffee business," Schultz said at the company's annual meeting in March, alluding to McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and several conveniencestore chains that have been making a run at Starbucks' customers. Starbucks will once again grind beans in its stores for drip coffee. It will give free drip refills, offer latte upgrades and provide two hours of wi-fi to anyone with a registered Starbucks stored-value card. Soon the company will roll out its new armor: a sleek, low-rise espresso machine that makes baristas more visible and gives them more control over the process. It has launched MyStarbucksIdea.com for consumers to talk to one another and the company. "This," says Schultz, "is just the beginning."

He says it with the zeal of an empire builder. And that's precisely the issue: having built one, Schultz is trying to alter the momentum of a company with $10 billion in yearly sales and 16,000 stores in 44 countries. But creating intimacy and authenticity on that scale may be beyond expectation. "They have come about as close as you possibly can to being big yet still retaining some uniqueness," says John Moore, who was a marketing manager at Starbucks until 2003 and now runs the blog Brand Autopsy. "I can't think of a company that's done it better--but can it really be done?"

We are about to find out.

Diluting the Coffee After the woman with the 11 coffees drives away--running a recognized brand apparently doesn't mean you get recognized--we head inside and walk through the store with Harry Roberts. Roberts helped Schultz build Starbucks from 1987 to '96 and heeded the call to return as chief creative officer. The three of us stand and look at the area by the cash register--a clutter of CDs, breath mints, chocolate-covered graham crackers, chewing gum and trail mixes. "There's no story," Roberts says.

Schultz adds, "We're selling a lot, but the point is to take a step back and ask, Is it appropriate? We've been selling teddy bears, and we've been selling hundreds of thousands of them, but to what end?"

Partly to the alienation of customers. "If I go in there first thing in the morning, it smells like McDonald's, not a coffee shop," says blogger Jim Romenesko, who runs StarbucksGossip.com referring to the egg-based breakfast sandwiches the company started selling a few years ago. When he posted Schultz's Valentine's Day e-mail, Romenesko was shocked by the worldwide media pickup: he thought the things Schultz was saying were obvious since he had heard them so many times before from the Starbucks workers and customers who post to his blog.

Of course, every change that Starbucks has made over the past few years-automated espresso machines, preground coffee, drive-throughs, fewer soft chairs and less carpeting--was made for a reason: to smooth operations or boost sales, two inescapable goals for a publicly traded company. Those may have been the right

choices at the time, Schultz wrote, but together they ultimately diluted the coffeecentric experience. "We want to have the courage to do the things that support the core purpose and the reason for being and not veer off and get caught up in chasing revenue, because long-term value for the shareholder can only be achieved if you create long-term value for the customer and your people," Schultz says. "We have to get back to what we do."

The Origin of CafĂŠ Culture In 1981 schultz was working in his native New York City for a housewares company when he first traveled to Seattle and stepped inside Starbucks--a narrow store with a worn wooden counter and bins of coffee beans--which sat across the street from Seattle's waterfront Pike Place Market. The aroma and romance captured his imagination, as the well-told story goes, and after a year of begging for a job, he was hired to do marketing. Two years later, a trip to Milan led to more inspiration.

He returned to Seattle convinced that Starbucks should start opening espresso bars and bring cafĂŠ culture to America. The founders of Starbucks, who had been trained by the legendary coffee retailer Alfred Peet, weren't so sure about expansion-wouldn't that obliterate the intimacy they'd established? So Schultz left to start another company, Il Giornale, but he returned in 1987 with $3.8 million that he'd raised to buy Starbucks and turn it into the company he envisioned.

In 1992 Starbucks went public with 140 stores, and from practically the very beginning, the company expanded at a breakneck pace, growing store count 40% to 60% a year. It wasn't just about coffee. Starbucks took care of its employees as well as its beans. In an almost unheard-of move for a food retailer, the company offered health insurance, a costly policy that Schultz insisted on; as a child, he had watched his family's finances crumble when his father suffered a broken ankle at his job as a delivery-truck driver.

Eventually, though, Starbucks had to grow up and get professional managers. In 2000 Orin Smith ascended from president to CEO; Schultz stayed on as chairman of the board. During Smith's five-year tenure, Starbucks maintained its mind-blowing

growth, but at the same time, it introduced sophisticated testing and R&D and took steps to boost efficiency and sales, like installing automated Verismo espresso machines. By no longer having to scoop and tamp coffee for each shot, baristas could make a drink 40% faster, moving customers through lines more quickly. Drivethroughs became standard, and the company released its first CD. Smith's successor was a Wal-Mart veteran, Jim Donald, who took the company into books, movie promotions and oven-warmed breakfast sandwiches, which added about $35,000 to the average store's $1 million annual sales.

Tensions over what Starbucks was becoming--cluttered, corporate, soulless--were rising within the company even before the Valentine's Day memo. "These were real conversations we were having," says Michelle Gass, whom Schultz promoted in January to head of global strategy. "A lot of last year was figuring out what really matters to our customers."

At the same time, the slowing economy started to dent sales. "They finally got to the point where their customer base was so broad it wasn't recession-proof," says Bear Stearns analyst Joseph Buckley. The summer of 2007 was particularly bad because of consumers' growing boredom with Frappuccinos, which make up about 15% of sales, according to UBS analyst David Palmer. Then, in the quarter ending in September, traffic at established U.S. stores fell 1%, the first drop ever. The next quarter, traffic dropped again--down 3%--and comp-store sales fell 1%, the first time Starbucks had ever swung negative.

On Jan. 7, the board reinstated Schultz as CEO to revive the coffee empire. "It's a time for reinvention, and there's no one better to do it than Howard," says Howard Behar, who ran Starbucks' international operations throughout the late 1990s and as a board member voted to reinstall Schultz. The stock rallied 8%, and baristas went wild. "Woooohooooo!" read two posts on StarbucksGossip.com "Welcome back, Howie!!! All of Starbucks missed you, and we can't wait to see where you take us," read another. More than a few posts skeptically pointed out that Schultz had never gone far (his office was next to Donald's), but overall the tone was jubilant.

Schultz is no less messianic. "I came back because it's personal," he says. "I came back because I love this company and our people and feel a deep sense of responsibility to 200,000 people and their families." On the afternoon of Jan. 7, he gathered the 4,000-some people who work at Starbucks headquarters. "I said, 'We need everyone in this room to believe in the mission of the company, and if you don't, there's nothing wrong, but you shouldn't be here,'" Schultz recalls.

And it's not just Schultz who's back. It was as if he were reassembling the band: Roberts, the merchandising guru; Wanda Herndon, who left in 2006 but returned to run global communications; and Arthur Rubinfeld, the company's first vice president for store development, who has known Schultz since the two were in their 20s.

Schultz holed up with them and others he'd promoted from within at the Palace Ballroom in downtown Seattle for three days of 14-hour strategy sessions. The retreat started by listening to Beatles music and talking about how great icons reinvent themselves.

Schultz moved swiftly. On Jan. 30, he announced that Starbucks would close 100 underperforming stores and curtail U.S. store openings to about 1,175 in 2008, down 34% from the prior year. The breakfast sandwiches were toast in North America. To get focused on the long term, it would stop reporting comp-store sales to Wall Street. Then, at the March 19 annual meeting, the company laid out its initiatives to reinvigorate the "coffee experience." Some of the projects had been kicked around, but with Schultz back in the CEO chair, everything started to get done more rapidly.

"The rate at which we're making these moves is far and away faster than anything I've experienced the last few years," says COO Martin Coles.

Some of the changes Starbucks is making are big, risky bets. By giving people with a registered Starbucks card free upgrades on lattes, for instance, the company could be leaving as much as 30¢ to 70¢ per drink on the table. When I ask Coles how much that program, which also includes free drip refills, will cost the company overall, he simply says, "We believe it's worth it."

The Founder's Dilemma

Only a figure like Schultz can pull off such bold action, says R端diger Fahlenbrach, an assistant professor of finance at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business who has studied the return of founder CEOs. "A founder may come in, and because he started the company, people more readily accept these things," says Fahlenbrach.

That's clearly what's happening at Starbucks. "Howard, frankly, is the only person who could do what we needed to do," says global strategy head Gass. That courage was on full display on Feb. 26, when Starbucks closed all 7,100 of its companyowned U.S. stores (4,000 licensed locations remained open) for three hours to retrain 135,000 baristas. Part of the training involved the correct way to pull an espresso: into a shot glass, not a paper cup, a shortcut that had evolved to move the line more quickly. It was a strong statement that Starbucks cares about quality--with a clear shot glass, a barista can make sure the espresso correctly settles into three layers--and isn't led by a fast-food-style obsession with throughput.

By restoring the smell of freshly ground coffee to stores and working in visual cues about how Starbucks sources its coffee--Roberts is jazzed about a series of prints from artists in Rwanda, where Starbucks is opening a regional farmer-support center--the company is trying to re-emphasize its heritage. "We haven't been as good at telling our story as we once had in the past," says Schultz. "The good news is, unlike many other companies, this is not a story that has to be invented. It's real."

But is it what customers really want? Are most people looking for an experience, the "third place" community feel that Schultz likes to talk about, or do most of them just want a good cup of joe, pronto? "Howard is a brilliant visionary and a genuinely compassionate human being, but he runs the danger of being trapped by his past," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management who has extensively studied CEOs. "Entrepreneurs sometimes don't grow with the business.

You shouldn't pretend the model can't keep evolving." Schultz is fond of saying that the current energy and optimism reminds him of the early days, when Starbucks was "fighting for survival." It is a nostalgic way to look at things, and that, says Sonnenfeld, is a big problem.

To Schultz, keeping in touch with the past is key to future success. Remembering who you are is the first step to becoming who you should be. Sometimes in the morning, he goes down to the original Starbucks at Pike Place. Before the store opens, Schultz lets himself in. He puts his hands on the wooden counter and thinks about how he felt at the beginning, what it was he was trying to do. Over the past few months, Schultz has also taken to passing around a memo he wrote in 1986. The letterhead says Il Giornale--Starbucks would come later--but the vision was the same. "We recognize this is a unique time; when our coffee bars will change the way people will perceive the beverage," he wrote 22 years ago. "It's an adventure and we're in it together." He signed it the same way he signs the company-wide memos he's taken to writing since coming back as CEO: "Onward, Howard." Starbucks turned out to be a beautiful adventure. Will it be a single or a double?

Reinventing Starbucks The java giant's new strategy puts the focus back on the coffee WHAT'S IN WHAT'S OUT Grinding beans in stores Will restore the coffee aroma; the new Pike Place Roast will be the first ground Breakfast sandwiches Hot sellers, but they sometimes overpower the scent of coffee MyStarbucksIdea.com A site invites customers' gripes and suggestions Reporting comp-store sales Too much focus on numbers means less focus on customers The Mastrena You can see the barista over this new espresso machine The Verismo The old machine gives baristas less control over the steaming of milk and blocks their view of patrons Conservation International The group will certify where beans come from--one more sign that Starbucks is about coffee Cluttered counters The mishmash of stuff distracts from coffee Loyalty Free drip refills and latte extras for repeat customers Stores on every corner Unwieldy U.S. growth will slow; the company will still push ahead overseas.

SOCIETY

Tea's Got a Brand New Bag Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By LISA MCLAUGHLIN

Flowering tea from Numi Organic Tea. Numi Organic Tea

Serious tea drinkers have always known that the perfect cup comes from loose leaves. Traditional tea bags may offer tidiness and convenience, but the taste is often lacking. The thickness of the bag means the tea inside must be ground until it is little more than dust, and when wet, the bag collapses onto itself, preventing the water from circulating through the leaves enough for a proper brew. But as interest in tea-drinking rises--U.S. tea sales have quadrupled in the past 10 years and are expected to grow from $6 billion in 2005 to $10 billion by 2010--tea-steeping innovations combining the best of both worlds (the flavor of leaf tea and the ease of a bag) are coming onto the market, changing the look and taste of a tea break.

Saline Solutions Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN

A woman relaxes in the Galos Caves in Chicago, Illinois.

Saverio Truglia for TIME

Since ancient Rome, people have believed in the physical and mental healing powers of hot springs, which, in the American South and West, are still popular tourist destinations. U.S. spas promoted mud baths in the 1940s, and the '70s brought inhome saunas and hot tubs. Now comes the next step in the quest for holistic relaxation: salt caves.

Eastern Europeans have long thought that just sitting in naturally occurring salt caves could relieve allergies, asthma, eczema, hypertension, ulcers and stress.

Recently, they've built simulated caves in the U.S. The Chicago area, because of its large Polish population, is the epicenter of the trend. Several spas in other parts of the country have installed salt breathing rooms. And the Florida-based Silesia Group

builds salt rooms for private homes and sells portable salt caves for the backyard.

"The atmosphere helps regulate your breathing, gets the stress out," says Madzia Stoklosa, whose Megi's Spa Salt Cave in Park Ridge, Ill., is constructed of 10 tons of salt from a 600-year-old mine in Wielczka, Poland.

The caves draw clients from professionals just wanting to chill out after a hard day at work to people with more serious ailments. Anna Wuszter, who has a rare bone cancer that has led to the removal of her lower jaw, has had 38 surgeries since 2006. But since sitting in Megi's for an hour at least twice a week for a year, she says, "I can sleep better. I don't have nightmares anymore. The doctors told me that the scars are healing better and faster."

On a recent afternoon, 10 people reclined in deck chairs and on blankets under salty stalactites in Galos Caves in Chicago. The recorded sound of waves filled the dimly lit room. It smelled like a seaside town. The floor is made of loose rock salt from the Dead Sea and is warmed to enhance the scent and coziness. After 45 minutes, for which they had paid $15 each, Dan Zegar, 50, and Denyse Waters, 57, didn't want to leave. Waters thought the salt air had cleared her sinuses. But Zegar's appreciation was broader: "If there are some medicinal properties to it, great. But it doesn't matter. It was so relaxing."

HEALTH & MEDICINE

Eat Your Germs Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By SANJAY GUPTA, M.D.

Illustration by David Plunkert for TIME

No doubt you have heard that yogurt is teeming with bacteria--and no doubt you try not to think about that as you dig into a cup of the stuff. Yes, they're supposed to be good bacteria, ones that not only don't make you sick but actually improve your health. Still, a spoonful of critters with unlovely names like Lactobacillus reuteri, Lactobacillus rhamnosus and Bifidus regularis will never sound like a palate pleaser to even the most dedicated health nut.

Whether or not you've ever developed a taste--or even a tolerance--for living things in your lunch, more are on the way. Food companies have been coming to the conclusion that if a few of these superstar bacteria are good for you, then more will be even better. This is giving rise to a small but growing product line called probiotics, in which the bacteria population is boosted, sometimes considerably. For consumers, of course, the question is, Do these products work?

Probiotics have been around for a long time, mostly in the form of dietary supplements. They're also found naturally in foods like yogurt, buttermilk, sauerkraut and tofu. Recently, however, the Dannon Co. has been making a marketing splash with a yogurt line named Activia, which is fortified with extra bacteria. So far, this bet

seems to be paying off, with more than $100 million in sales in the product's first year in the U.S. alone. Other companies are coming forward with probiotic yogurt drinks and fortified beverages, which are also finding a market. There is a fair body of science suggesting that some consumers are spending their dollars wisely.

"The superstar bacteria stick around in your intestines a lot longer," says Dr. Gary Huffnagle, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and coauthor of The Probiotics Revolution. In the digestive tract, the bacteria help regulate and restore peristalsis, the rhythmic motion of the intestine that pushes digested food through. There's a reason one of the bugs has the word regularis as its second name, and this intestinal toning is it. "Doesn't matter if you are constipated or the opposite," Huffnagle says. "These bacteria can help make you, um, regular."

Huffnagle's research also suggests that the bacteria can battle numerous kinds of allergies--and not just food allergies. This is a somewhat harder scientific case to make, but Huffnagle's belief is that since anything you breathe you may also swallow in at least some quantity, the good bacteria in your gut could help control allergens.

Not everyone is sold on probiotics. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is relatively neutral, using the growing popularity of the products as an opportunity to caution manufacturers not to pitch the foods as some sort of panacea for any specific disease. More important, some people should avoid the products altogether. Those with weakened immune systems or who are critically ill would be well advised to stay away from eating live bacteria. Certainly anyone in the hospital would also count.

Furthermore, the products can take a little getting used to, even for the otherwise healthy. If you are new to the world of probiotics and you suddenly start eating a lot, there is a good chance you could experience uncomfortable bloating.

"You have just started a civil war in your intestines between good bacteria and bad bacteria," Huffnagle says. Fortunately, the war is usually over in one or two weeks, and, stresses Huffnagle, "the good guys win."

Expect to see lots of those good guys on store shelves soon. At least five companies in the U.S. either are in the probiotic game or are planning to enter. Plain yogurt

remains the best product for added bacteria because it has three things the bugs absolutely love: lactose (or naturally occurring sugar), fat and water. Another food out there with both sugar and fat is chocolate, and--you guessed it--the company Attune already has a probiotic chocolate bar. That's something that may prompt me to give the superstar bacteria a try after all.

PROBIOTIC BACTERIA Name What it's said to do Foods that may contain it Bifidus regularis Regulates the movement of food through the digestive tract Yogurt Lactobacillus casei Inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria; boosts immunity Cottage cheese Lactobacillus acidophilus Aids digestion; diminishes effects of bad bacteria in the intestines Cereal Sanjay Gupta's Fit Nation series airs on House Call on CNN, Saturdays and Sundays, at 8:30 a.m. E.T.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

R.E.M.: Finding Their Religion Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By JOSH TYRANGIEL

The band R.E.M. Cass Bird

In your leisure time, you most likely enjoy fun, which is why you most likely did not enjoy any of R.E.M.'s past three albums. If memory serves--and the thick layer of dust coating 1998's Up, 2001's Reveal and 2004's Around the Sun is a stern warning to let it--these records paled in comparison with R.E.M.'s earlier, essential material but were right on a par with Woody Allen's recent output. Which is to say, there were vestigial hints of artistry but a disturbing lack of purpose and energy. Facing the age-old choice of burning out or fading away, R.E.M. appeared to have settled on a third option: loitering.

The reasons for any great band's decline--and from 1983 to 1992 R.E.M. was one of the greatest, not only cranking out an unmatched series of jangly, literate records but also tracing a heroic arc from arty Athens, Ga., bar band to arena filler without any of the usual soul-selling--are not particularly surprising. Imagine if your livelihood depended on constantly being with, and agreeing with, your three best friends from college. It's enough to make a rock star want to become a farmer, which is exactly what drummer Bill Berry did when he retired from the band in 1997. Singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills continued, but they put more weight behind their vow to rock on into middle age than into any actual rocking, and it soon became clear that Berry's departure had done quite a number on the group's psychology.

Bands are built on an agreement, signed in the exuberance of youth, that what they do together matters more than what they do separately; if one person punctures the bubble, the whole enterprise can deflate--and in R.E.M.'s case, it did. As three consecutive sonic duds got filed under R, Stipe started producing movies, Buck moonlighted with other bands (and slagged his own in Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death ... and Insects, a documentary about the singer), while Mills claims he contemplated quitting a few hundred times.

If their current trajectory puts expectations for R.E.M.'s 14th album, Accelerate, out April 1, at sneaker level, it's worth noting the band faced up to a few hard truths before getting into the studio last year. Given their ages (all three are nearing 50), the steep decline in their album sales and the fact that they don't particularly enjoy tarnishing their legacy with inferior records, they all agreed it was time to kill or cure: make a good album or call it a career.

Accelerate is awfully good--if not quite great--but what's indisputable is that it goes by fast. Producer Garret (Jacknife) Lee, who worked on U2's "still-got-it!" record, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, thereby earning a Ph.D. in jarring legends from complacency, grasped that making an album that didn't stop to think would solve R.E.M.'s two biggest problems: Stipe's tendency toward romantic drift and Buck's stunted, decadelong desire to plug in his guitar and blow people away. Dispensing

with dirge-y ballads and long musical bridges to nowhere, Accelerate clocks in at a frenzied 35 min., with five of the 11 tracks zooming by in under-3-min., leave-theroom-and-you-missed-it blurs. It sounds less like a recent R.E.M. album than three men fleeing the scene of a recent R.E.M. album.

It's Buck's resurgence that hits you first. The album opens with a yawping power riff that establishes a melody line, tells you who's in charge and hits the verse in a joyous explosion of fuzz. Egged on by the whomping of former Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, Buck blows off 10 years of rust in 10 seconds on Living Well Is the Best Revenge and keeps right on flying through the first ecstatic third of the album.

But the defining moment of Accelerate, and perhaps the defining moment of whatever R.E.M. goes on to become from here, takes place a few seconds into the fourth song, Hollow Man. At the band's peak, Stipe's lyrics conveyed emotions with an abstraction summed up in a line from Losing My Religion: "Oh no I've said too much." He chose his words carefully, out of a sense of privacy and poetic economy, and trusted that the tremors in his voice would convey the feelings. But the success of 1992's Everybody Hurts led to some bad habits; soon after, his every wounded thought became explicit and Stipe became kind of a drag. So when Hollow Man's melancholy keyboard and opening lyric--"I've been lost inside my head/echoes fall off me"--drip into the air, there's an understandable temptation to scream. But before Stipe can indulge his mopey impulses, Buck's guitar rises out of the mix with a propulsive riff that picks up song and singer and delivers them safely to R.E.M.'s most anthemic chorus in an age.

Not all of Accelerate is that optimistic, but the best bits are. On Houston, about people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, there's venom for the government but hope too ("Houston is filled with promise/Laredo's a beautiful place"), while Supernatural Superserious zooms from summer camp to a Harry Houdini reference to a classic pop climax ("inexperience, sweet, delirious/supernatural, superserious") with giddy confidence.

If there's anything to quibble with, it's that R.E.M.'s 14th album never quite generates the moody atmospherics of their first 10; it's a little hard to lose yourself in something that doesn't pause long enough for you to get lost. But then, judging R.E.M. by the acoustics of their back catalog may no longer be fair. The band is finally headed in a new direction, and getting there fast.

Recession Chic Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By KATE BETTS

A model on the runway at Balenciaga's fall 2008 show in Paris, France.

Giovanni Giannoni / Corbis

Just as the world's financial markets are experiencing a serious mood swing, from exuberance to gloominess, so too is fashion. Enjoy while you can the bright bursts of floral prints sprouting up on department-store racks this spring. Come fall, fashion will follow the downward spiral of home values and investment portfolios, as designers embrace restraint with a dark palette and severe silhouette. As Amy Winehouse would so aptly croon: Back to black.

Historically speaking, fashion trends and tastes often serve as early harbingers of economic change. In the booming, pre-Crash 1920s, flapper hemlines bounced giddily to the knee before falling down to the ankles in the depressed 1930s. The 1960s' youthquake, complete with postage-stamp-size miniskirts, heralded a similar stylistic ebullience before the oil crisis of the 1970s plunged fashion back into an earnest, hippie frame of mind.

The current shift back to black has none of the elements of the sloppy secondhandRose ethos of early 1990s' grunge. This time around, fashion's mood swing has a decidedly sharper edge, as designers like Nicolas Ghesquière of Balenciaga, Alber Elbaz of Lanvin and Narciso Rodriguez are trading in last season's brights for severe black cocktail dresses and structured suits. At Yves Saint Laurent, designer Stefano Pilati dressed his models in black bowl-cut wigs and black lipstick to give his simply spliced jackets and tunic dresses a somber, graphic edge. Even Christian Lacroix, famous for his flamboyant use of color, opened his fall show with a parade of models in all black.

"Of course, black is like a mask," says Lacroix, who calls this shift in sensibility a new minimalism. "The new pureness of lines centered on cut rather than decoration, the laser geometry of shapes and silhouettes are all maybe signs of a graphic protection linked unconsciously to recession, just like at the end of the '80s." Like Lacroix, Ghesquière was channeling a more austere sensibility in his Balenciaga collection, which, he said, was inspired by film noir, specifically the actress Simone Signoret's hard-edged look in the 1955 movie Les Diaboliques.

More recent films, like Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, have also inspired the somber palette. "We're seeing a lot of dark movies these days, and they definitely influence the color story," says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. "Black is always the color people rely on most often in tough times, especially if they're going to spend on big-ticket items." Eiseman, who prepares an annual color forecast for the fashion and home markets, says black will most likely be included in Pantone's selection of the top 10 colors of 2008. "Psychologically, it's also the color people wrap themselves in to become impervious to the outside world. It's a security blanket," she adds.

Black is seeping into the beauty and home markets too. Baccarat just introduced a collection of black crystal goblets, and Chanel BeautĂŠ's black satin nail polish is one of the brand's best-selling products. Costume jewelry from Lanvin, a fashion insider must-have, features black ribbons and stones. French perfumer Kilian Hennessy, who introduced a fragrance collection last November called By Kilian, has set himself apart from the trend of transparent scents by introducing a more complex and mysterious composition called L'Oeuvre Noire.

But some designers don't see the dark shift in palette and mood as reason for despair. "I think it's more of a reflection of practicality and reality," says Rodriguez.

"When times get tough, people want things that are real and lasting. Black is certainly reflective of that. It's what you can bank on, and it's the most elegant color." And what woman, regardless of her economic situation, doesn't want to look elegant?

A Piece of Our Time Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By RICHARD LACAYO

Henry Diltz / Corbis

Just like Madonna and Michelle Pfeiffer, the peace symbol is turning 50 this year.

When an icon turns that age, you can start making some judgments about whether it has what it takes to endure. Madonna? Hanging in there. Pfeiffer? We'll see. But the peace symbol--it's 50 years young and going strong.

By now, the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single inventor, Gerald Holtom, whose story is woven into two new histories, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol by Ken Kolsbun with Michael S. Sweeney (National Geographic; 175 pages) and Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles (Reader's Digest; 256 pages).

Holtom was a London textile designer who had been a conscientious objector during World War II. By 1958, as Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were well into the nuclear arms race, a grass-roots movement to "Ban the Bomb" was gathering force in the United Kingdom. Early that year, a fledgling disarmament group called the Direct Action Campaign (DAC) started to put together what would be Britain's first major demonstration against nuclear weapons. The plan was for a 52-mile (84 km) march from London to the town of Aldermaston, home to an A-bomb research center.

Enter Holtom, who brought to the DAC his design for a symbol that marchers could carry on banners and signs. He had arrived at the image by combining the semaphore signals for the letters N, for nuclear, and D, for disarmament. The first is a figure with arms held downward and out from both sides; the second, a figure holding one arm above its head while the other points to the ground.

The symbol was simple--a few straight lines inside a circle. But like a Chinese character, its form was suggestive. The straight lines hinted at the human body. The circle brought to mind Planet Earth. (It also looked a bit like the Mercedes-Benz logo, which has led to some confusion over the years.) Importantly, anybody could draw it.

Before long, millions of people did. It debuted on April 4 in London's Trafalgar Square, the assembly point for the four-day march. Over the next few days, it appeared in countless newspaper photos and TV reports. Bayard Rustin, an American protĂŠgĂŠ of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who took part in the march, brought the symbol home to a growing civil rights movement dedicated to nonviolence. When the Vietnam War started getting out of hand, protesters discovered they had a readymade icon to signal their feelings.

There were people who didn't like the symbol any better than they liked the movements it represented. They saw it as an inverted broken cross or "the footprint of the American chicken." But it kept spreading through the culture. Like the Christian cross, which has served the purposes of soup kitchens and Crusaders, the

Sisters of Mercy and the Ku Klux Klan, it was adaptable. Over time, it evolved from its narrow association with nuclear disarmament into an insignia for countercultures of all kinds. Hippies made it a sort of all-purpose symbol of peacefulness. The environmental group Greenpeace, the militant wing of flower power, adopted it for its eco-defense campaigns.

And inevitably, the market found it. By the late 1960s, peace symbols were appearing on coffee mugs, miniskirts and ponchos and were dangling from chains around the necks of guys you would expect to see at the Playboy mansion.

Duplicated endlessly as a hip fashion accessory, it threatened to devolve into a meaningless emblem of benign and groovy sentiment. It started looking corny, a kind of smiley face before there were smiley faces.

But events have conspired to keep giving the peace symbol fresh life. The arms race rumbles along, wars keep happening, and it continually comes back into circulation as, well, a peace symbol. The war in Iraq has created all kinds of opportunities for it at rallies and demonstrations. If it's true, as John McCain has suggested, that the U.S. may have to remain in Iraq for 100 years, then the peace symbol probably has a long life ahead of it.

Sign of the Times For a photographic history of the peace symbol, go to time.com/peace

The Confessions of Mary Poppins Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By LEV GROSSMAN

Illustration by Quickhoney

If Julie Andrews were a young star today, instead of in the 1960s, she wouldn't have had so much trouble shedding that squeaky-clean, permafresh, NutraSweet public image she got from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. The paparazzi would have already spotted her at 16 snogging a comely Danish acrobat who appeared with her in a stage production of Aladdin, and that would've been that. Instead, we've had to wait for her to tell us about it herself in a frank and fascinating memoir called Home (Hyperion; 339 pages).

There was nothing sweet about Andrews' childhood. She was born in England in 1935 and grew up poor. When she was 4, her mother, a pianist, took up with a handsome vaudeville tenor who later became an alcoholic and at one point forced a creepy, toe-curling kiss on her. Meanwhile, Andrews' real father, a tender and saintly

man, turned out not to be her "real" father at all: when she was 14, her mother bluntly informed her that she had been conceived in a one-time liaison with an acquaintance.

Andrews' golden ticket out of the squalor was her freakish singing voice: pure, light and agile, with a tremendous range and perfect pitch. By 9 she was out on tour with her mother and stepfather. It was the dying days of vaudeville, and she belted out her high Fs on sticky, splintered stages to halls full of cigarette smoke, but by 13 she'd been asked to perform for the Queen, and by 17 the family mortgage was in her name. By 19 she was on Broadway in The Boy Friend.

Home is subtitled A Memoir of My Early Years, and it takes us only through 1962, post--My Fair Lady and Camelot but pre-Poppins. But it gives us a full helping of backstage gossip, from a drunken, amorous Richard Burton to an explosively flatulent Rex Harrison. Andrews comes across as plainspoken, guilelessly charming and resoundingly tough. Maybe too tough--she lets us backstage, but she never quite takes us upstairs, into her head. (Moss Hart, trying gamely to get Andrews to emote in My Fair Lady, said, sighing, "She has that terrible British strength that makes you wonder how they ever lost India.") But she shows us where the toughness comes from: only somebody who fought her way out of the muck could ever be that squeaky clean.

India Ink Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By LEV GROSSMAN

Jhumpa Lahiri's stories reveal their intentions with a stately slowness that is starting to seem distinctly 20th century. Her writing is completely free of humor or cleverness. It's almost totally devoid of narrative suspense. In the title story of her new collection, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH (Knopf; 333 pages), a widowed man comes to visit his daughter; their family is Indian, but she married an American. Will the father move in with them? Will he tell his daughter that he has a new lover? Lahiri (who won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies) gives us nearly 60 pages of precisely narrated time and delicate emotional tension before the story finally gathers its energies for one sharp, perfectly aimed stab of achy sadness and hope. This is the short story as Hemingway practiced it--or Chekhov, for that matter--in all its demanding, reactionary glory.

What to Expect Now Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By ANDREA SACHS

OLD ADVICE NEW ADVICE Prenatal care starts right after the stick turns blue. Then it's vitamins, diet, the whole shebang Awaiting Conception Get yourself in shape before sperm meets egg, with diet, exercise, genetic tests and dental care Permanents and hair-straightening should be avoided. Hair-coloring may be affected by hormones Beauty Treatments Best to put off such enhancements as tattoos, belly piercings and Botox until after the baby is born Relax. Probably those doughnuts you ate during your first trimester. Or maybe you have a small frame Looking Too Large?

Get ready to buy in bulk. Multiple births are on the rise.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Joe Torre Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

Manager Joe Torre of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Elsa / Getty

After all those years in Yankees pinstripes, what did it feel like when you first put on a Dodgers uniform? Mike McGillicutty ECHO PARK, CALIF. You don't feel it until you look in the mirror and all of a sudden people are starting to make comments that "boy, you don't look the same." I knew what the Dodgers uniform represented, as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. But it certainly felt strange.

How will you adjust your managing style to work with the type of talent we have here in L.A.? Angelique Tapia, LOS ANGELES

We have a lot of fine young players, [but] you have to make sure you take nothing for granted, as far as what they know. I have to keep reminding myself that. You have to make sure you do chapter and verse with all of them.

In March your team traveled to Beijing for exhibition games. Do you think the pollution there is going to affect the Olympics? Ian Kachemov, HIGHLAND, MD. The pollution is pretty bad over there. I think it could really have an effect unless they clean it up. You could cut it with a knife.

Do you think the ongoing steroids scandal will prevent Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire from ever entering the Hall of Fame? Chris Oneto, SAN FRANCISCO I think they both deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. You can lump Barry Bonds in.

The ability they all had and what they accomplished before anything came into question is worthy of the Hall of Fame.

Do you believe that during your time with the Yankees, you benefited by not having a salary cap? Jeff Fulton, POCATELLO, IDAHO Ball clubs can spend their money the right way. It's been proven by clubs that have won [the World Series]--the Angels have won, the Marlins have won. Those clubs seem to spend their money on pitching. In my time with the Yankees, I always felt that, yeah, we got Jason Giambi, we got Alex Rodriguez--but what we really needed to do was shore up our pitching in order to be a better postseason club.

What do you want to achieve by joining another team? Chris McHale, NEW YORK CITY When I went to Tampa to meet with the Steinbrenners and when I did say goodbye to the Yankees, I certainly didn't envision myself doing any more of this. But the last three years in New York really weren't a lot of fun. I just wanted to see if managing could be fun again. It's a great life, and I'm not ready to lose the excitement yet.

With the way the team treated you in the off-season, would you have any problems attending a Joe Torre Day at the new Yankee Stadium? Greg Cohen, EDGEWATER, N.J. Right now I'm not thinking of going back there. Am I going to say I'd never go back?

Never is a long time. But at this point in time, I can't give you a solid answer on that.

Who is cooler, you or Derek Jeter? Nick Vincent, HIGHTSTOWN, N.J. Oh, Derek Jeter without a doubt. He doesn't show emotion. I don't want to say he's emotionless, but he harnessed it as good as anybody. It took me a long time to get this poker face. He's in his early 30s.

Whom would you rather beat in the World Series, the Red Sox or the Yankees?

Stuart Oldham, LOS ANGELES Both of them would be pretty high-charged. The Yankees would be an emotional high. There's no question about it.

Apart from becoming a baseball player, what did you dream of doing as a child?

Soyeun Yang, SUPERIOR, COLO. Baseball is the only thing I ever wanted to do. When I was 16 years old, my brother Frank said, "You'd better become a catcher, because you're too big and fat to do anything else." Well, I took his advice. It was a quick way to get to the big leagues, and I've never regretted it.

For more from Torre and to subscribe to the 10 Questions podcast on iTunes, go to time.com/10questions

LETTERS

Inbox Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

Please Help Yourself our economy closes in on a possible recession, the end of customer service will only help it slide into one [March 24]. While shopping might become quicker and more convenient, what about the jobs that will be lost? Companies will make more money without needing to pay as many employees, but will that really make the world better? I'm no economist, but I feel it will just make the rich richer. Jeff Richmond, MONROVIA, MD. As someone who runs a company dedicated to automating customer-service systems, I think your article should have been titled "The End of Customer Service-As We Know It." Thanks to the Internet, not only are people more empowered to access information on their own, but in many cases, they also end up more knowledgeable about a company's product than the customer-service agents themselves. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain employees, making service inconsistent at best. Technology will fill these gaps and provide better, more consistent service. John Putters, President, Visionstate EDMONTON, ALTA. I'm curious to know where the saved dollars are going. Are they lowering prices for customers, or are they padding CEOs' retirement funds? Betty Kroupa, EAST TROY, WIS. Jesus in a New Light Viewing Jesus as a member of the house of Israel is prevalent today in academia, though that has not yet made it to the pulpits and pews [March 24]. Grasping the full Israelite identity of Jesus of Nazareth and his family is essential to understanding his historical roots, behavior and teaching. It will go a long way toward demolishing the

delusion of Jesus as a blue-eyed Aryan, defanging Christian anti-Semitism and affirming that Judaism and Christianity have a common ancestry. Among his own people, Jesus was known as an Israelite and his followers were known as Galileans or the "party of the Nazarenes." (The Rev.) John H. Elliott, Professor Emeritus, University of San Francisco OAKLAND, CALIF. A Crusader Crashes All the psychoanalyzing about what drove Eliot Spitzer to risk his career by getting into illegal extramarital entanglements seems pointless [March 24]. I doubt such urges in elected officials are different from those of ordinary people who jeopardize their families and careers with similar behavior. My heart goes out to Spitzer's family members, who have to endure publicly what others suffer privately. Nadia El-Badry, DOBBS FERRY, N.Y. I can't help recalling Bill Clinton's impeachment. While the underlying circumstances of the events are different, they do share some common elements: marital infidelity and alleged criminal acts (perjury for Clinton and violation of the Mann Act for Spitzer). Isn't it curious that at the end of the day, Clinton stayed in office because of his popularity and Spitzer got thrown under the bus for his lack of it? It's little wonder the public has so little regard for elected officials. Scott Thompson, DALLAS Is There a Doctor in the House?

I was pleased to see the article examining Hillary Clinton's role in her husband's Administration [March 24]. A brain surgeon's wife doesn't become a brain surgeon by watching her husband operate, even if she was the nurse handing him the scalpel.

Clinton may have more knowledge than Barack Obama because she has been in the operating room, but I'm not certain I'd want her handling the scalpel. David Wilson, CARSON, CALIF.

NOTEBOOK

Campaign Insider Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By JAY NEWTON-SMALL

"So you think you gave a historically significant speech, huh?" Valerie Jarrett teased Barack Obama after he delivered his well-received address on race, in Philadelphia.

During the speech, Jarrett sat next to Michelle Obama, the two old friends promising each other they wouldn't cry. "Ten minutes in, and we just looked at each other, and the tears started flowing," Jarrett says. But in the greenroom afterward, she was back to ribbing the Illinois Senator on the comparisons already being made to Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

Jarrett, 52, is that kind of friend to the Obamas--she can tease and cry and in the next moment weigh in on policy matters. She has been called the dean of Barack's kitchen Cabinet, but her role has changed over their 17-year friendship: first as Michelle's boss at Chicago's city hall, later as finance chair for Barack's Senate campaign.

In her day job, Jarrett runs the Habitat Co., a real estate firm, and she chairs the board of the University of Chicago Medical Center as well. She has also served as chair of both the Chicago Transit Board and the Chicago Stock Exchange. But as Jarrett sees it, her most important position may be the role of honest critic for the man she hopes will be President. "I'm very frank, and I always tell them what I think," says Jarrett. "But that's probably easier to do when you're good friends."

Dashboard Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By BRIAN BENNETT

Washington Memo Several State Department workers and contractors stirred national controversy by snooping through the confidential passport records of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama. But beyond those high-profile intrusions is a much larger government push to make everyone's passport data more readily accessible to a host of federal agencies. The same database that the prying workers peered into is being opened up to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and other federal bureaucracies. The stated aim: To tap into the records "for counterterrorism and other purposes such as border security and fraud prevention."

DHS is pushing State to integrate the passport database with a DHS program called E-Verify. The Web-based program is now mandatory for companies in several states and voluntary everywhere else. It helps some 52,000 employers make sure that workers are in the country legally (even though it has a 10% error rate for foreignborn U.S. citizens). Linking E-Verify to the passport records--especially passport photos--"will help reduce data mismatches," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke says, and help ensure that employees are who they say they are.

But will data-sharing lead to data-snooping? DHS found that employers were improperly using the tool to screen employees before they were hired, which could lead to discrimination. And identity thieves could pose as an employer to confirm that stolen Social Security numbers will pass the system. At the moment, says a DHScommissioned study, the safeguards in place do not prevent these misuses. "It's another stitching together of the national identity infrastructure," says Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute. "We have to worry about the privacy consequences for average Americans." Not just presidential candidates.

Verbatim Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

'Mr. Richardson's endorsement came around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate.'

JAMES CARVILLE, Hillary Clinton adviser, blasting New Mexico governor--and former Clinton Administration official--Bill Richardson after his endorsement of Barack Obama 'This case is about as far from being a private matter as one can get.'

KYM WORTHY, Wayne County, Mich., prosecutor, in charging Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick with lying under oath about an affair with his chief of staff 'So?' DICK CHENEY, when told that two-thirds of Americans do not support the war in Iraq. He went on to argue that polling should not dictate the war's conduct 'I've made enough money. I can afford to invest a little in myself.'

DOLLY PARTON, country-music star, on why she self-financed her new album, Backwoods Barbie 'Tibet, rightfully so, is on the front page. But it would not be on the front page if the Games were not being organized in China.'

JACQUES ROGGE, president of the International Olympic Committee, arguing that holding the Games in China raises awareness of the country's human-rights record 'I do not think that is any of your business.'

CHELSEA CLINTON, shooting back in response to a question asked during a Q&A session at Butler University, about whether she thinks her mother's credibility was damaged by the Monica Lewinsky scandal MORE OF THE BEST QUOTES AT TIME.COM For daily sound bites, visit time.com/quote Sources: New York Times; AP; ABC News; AP (3)

Numbers Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

SANITATION 216 Reported cases of salmonella poisoning in Alamosa, Colo., stemming from unsanitary tap water, which could take months to fix $3 billion Amount spent by the U.S. Agency for International Development on overseas projects that include water-sanitation programs STABILITY 24 Rank of the U.S.--behind Malta--in a new report that measures countries by stability and prosperity 193 million The estimated number of guns in America; the report cited the proliferation of small arms in the U.S. as a reason for its low score WILDLIFE 521 The total number of species that Bill Clinton added to the endangered-species list during his two terms as President; George H.W. Bush designated 231 species in one term 59 The total number of species that George W. Bush's Administration has added to the list in the past seven years; WildEarth Guardians has filed a lawsuit to add 681 species at once COMMUNICATION 50% Decline in British pay-phone use in the past three years as a result of the increasing popularity of cell phones

30,000 The approximate number of iconic red phone booths--one-third of the nation's total--that British telecom giant BT has removed in the past six years in response to decreased usage Sources: AP; USAID; Times of London; Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; Washington Post (2); USA Today (2)

Milestones Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By HARRIET BAROVICK, GILBERT CRUZ, JACKSON DYKMAN, ELISABETH SALEMME, CAROLYN SAYRE, TIFFANY SHARPLES, ALEXANDRA SILVER DIED He became an astronaut at the young age of 28, and over the course of his 12-year career, G. David Low made more than 540 laps around Earth. Low held degrees in physics, mechanical engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, but much of his fascination for outer space was inherited: in 1960 his father George Low was a member of the NASA team that first suggested to then President John F. Kennedy the possibility of putting a man on the moon within 10 years. Low died of colon cancer. He was 52.

Spicy chicken and wildly extravagant living are what Louisiana native Al Copeland will be best remembered for. The founder of the fast-food chain Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, Copeland stumbled at first with a bland recipe but found success in 1972 when he used local Cajun flavors. His business ideas didn't always produce results, particularly in the case of his 1989 purchase of Church's Chicken, which ended in bankruptcy. Yet whatever his success, he wasn't shy about public displays of wealth, indulging in over-the-top Christmas-light displays and Lamborghinis and RollsRoyces--though he generated less fanfare about his local philanthropy. He died of a rare form of salivary-gland cancer. He was 64.

Called the Fifth Beatle by members of the band, Neil Aspinall used to shuttle the foursome to nighttime gigs in Liverpool while holding down an accounting job by day. Devoted friend, roadie and unofficial manager, he came to run the Beatles' music empire, Apple Corps, deftly negotiating with all four members--and the wives of the deceased--even when communication was most strained, and producing the popular Beatles Anthology retrospective albums, among others. Unwavering in his loyalty, Aspinall, unlike many other Beatles insiders, never told his--or their--story.

He was 66.

In nearly five decades of reporting, broadcast journalist Bob Dyk covered everything from earthquakes and riots to the death of Winston Churchill and, most notably, the Iran hostage crisis. He started as an editorial assistant for CBS News at the 1960 Democratic Convention, when J.F.K. became the presidential nominee. Later, while working for ABC News, he was the first journalist reporting from Tehran after the U.S. embassy was overrun and 52 Americans were taken hostage in 1979. Nightly broadcasts featuring his reporting on the two-year crisis later became the show Nightline. Dyk was 71.

He preferred the stage to the screen, but many will remember actor Paul Scofield best for his Academy Award--winning performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film version of A Man for All Seasons. Born in the south of England and trained in theater from an early age, Scofield led an intensely private life offstage but onstage captivated audiences with his precision and fervor. A master of Shakespearean roles, he played everyone from Henry VIII to Hamlet, also delivering memorable performances in parts ranging from Don Quixote to Salieri in a 1979 production of Amadeus. He was 86.

Before he turned 13, Cuban Jazz musician Israel (Cachao) L贸pez was playing professionally--though he had to stand on a wooden crate to reach the neck of his bass. In 1937 he and his brother Orestes composed a tune called El Danz贸n Mambo, which later rocketed to popularity simply as the mambo when the pace was slowed for dancing. His freestyle jam sessions paved the way for groups like the Buena Vista Social Club, with whom his nephew now plays bass. Throughout his career, L贸pez was revered by fellow musicians, but he was launched to international fame when Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia featured him in documentaries and produced his albums, including the 2004 Grammy-winning Ahora S铆. He was 89.

With her 20-lb. (9 kg) camera braced in the window of a tiny airplane, Mary Meader captured images of the Nazca Lines of Peru, the white summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and the massive pyramids of Egypt. Her aerial photographs were some of the first taken of parts of Africa and South America. She was 91.

People

Marley Sans Music?

AP How do you tell the story of Bob Marley's life without his music? The makers of a new biopic about the reggae icon, based on his widow's book about him, might need to figure that out. Marley's family is refusing to license his music for the film — and is instead backing a Martin Scorsese documentary set to release at about the same time.

The Page Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MARK HALPERIN

BY THE NUMBERS That's a Whole Lot of Pennies In the competition for cash in this election cycle, Democrats have trounced Republicans. That doesn't mean they simply have more fat-cat contributors. In this presidential campaign, their critical edge has come from those who give $200 or less-and so can give and give again without reaching contribution limits: 41% BARACK OBAMA From January 2007 through February 2008, 41% of Obama's funds came from lowdollar donors.

26% HILLARY CLINTON She trails Obama in both the percentage of funds raised from and the total number of small-time contributors.

13% JOHN MCCAIN McCain is sticking with the high-roller approach to fund-raising. A hefty 43% of his donors have given at least $2,300.

VACATIONS

Some Rest for the Weary Obama's recent St. Thomas spring break was a reminder that even presidential candidates need an escape now and then. And when they kick back, it's not in Iowa: JOHN MCCAIN Days before clinching the GOP nomination in March, he hosted reporters at his Arizona vacation home.

HILLARY CLINTON The Clintons spent Easter 2007 at Oscar de la Renta's resort in the Dominican Republic.

BARACK OBAMA Taking advantage of a rare lull in the campaign, Obama went to St. Thomas for an Easter break.

FACT-CHECK Under Fire (for Real) It all began with Sinbad. In early March, the comedian refuted claims by Hillary Clinton that a 1996 trip to Bosnia (on which he was a guest) was accompanied by sniper fire and a mad dash across an airport runway. On March 24, Clinton, who used the anecdote as evidence of her experience, recanted when CBS footage showed her and daughter Chelsea being received with flowers on the airport tarmac.

Politics up to the minute Mark Halperin reports from the campaign every day on thepage.time.com

Briefing Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008

NEW YORK CITY New Yorkers celebrate Easter with parade down Fifth Avenue MONDRAGONE, ITALY Mozzarella hit by dioxin fears PORTLAND, ORE. Former presidential candidate Bill Richardson endorses Obama EUREKA, MO. Residents work to fortify levees against heavy flooding MUTSAMUDU, COMOROS Rebel forces routed on isle of Anjouan seven years after their coup The War Iraq's Fallen 4,000: Where They Came From On March 23, just days into the sixth year of the Iraq war, the U.S. death toll reached 4,000 when a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad killed four soldiers. A breakdown of American casualties: By age 18-21 30% 22-24 24% 25-30 25% 31-35 10% Over 35 11% By service Army 72%

Marines 25% Navy 2% Air Force 1% By month March 2003 Fewest 20 Jan. Feb. 2004 Most 137 Nov. Jan. 2005 Jan. 2006 Jan. 2007 Jan. 2008 THROUGH MARCH 26 March 30 War death by locality Dots are sized proportionally to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq from each area Highest fatality rates Soldiers killed per 100,000 residents of home state or territory DEATH RATE Samoa 7 12.14 Mariana Island 5 5.91 U.S. Virgin Island 6 5.53 Palau 1 4.80 Guam 6 3.46 Vermont 19 3.06 Micronesia 3 2.78 Alaska 17 2.49 A SOLDIER'S VIEW An Army Ranger in Iraq reflects on the ongoing cost of the war, at time.com/4000

Patriot Games Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By DAVID VON DREHLE

The idea of Olympic boycott as political protest goes back at least to 1956. Several European countries refused to go to Melbourne because the Soviet Union had crushed the Hungarian uprising, while some Middle East nations stayed away because of a fight over control of the Suez Canal.

All these years later, it's not clear how keeping athletes out of a track meet in Australia was supposed to affect postcolonial politics in Egypt. But by the 1970s and 1980s, boycotts were as much a part of the Olympics as spandex is today. The U.S. boycotted the Moscow Olympics. The Soviets boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles.

African nations boycotted the Montreal Games because New Zealand refused to boycott South African rugby. And rugby's not even an Olympic sport.

Boycott fever lifted with the end of the cold war. The Olympics turned to simpler concerns like doping and bribery. But with China's recent crackdown on dissenters and Tibetan nationalists, the first murmurs were heard of a possible boycott of this summer's Beijing Games.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he could not "close the door" to the possibility that he might skip part of the Beijing Olympics. Hollywood figures Steven Spielberg, Richard Gere and Mia Farrow have invoked the idea of a boycott for reasons ranging from Tibet to Darfur. Meanwhile, protesters are disrupting the winding path of the Olympic torch from Greece to the opening ceremonies.

Perhaps the temptation to declaim on such a grand stage is too much to resist. And because the Olympics have become a sort of debutante ball for nations entering the global ĂŠlite, governments must ask whether mere attendance confers a stamp of approval on the host. The boycott logic is easy enough to follow.

But boycotts are empty gestures. Governments boycott, athletes suffer, and the only thing that changes is that the credibility of the Olympics as a festival of goodwill

suffers another dent. Jesse Owens had the right idea. In 1936 he led the U.S. team at Hitler's Berlin Olympics--a black man in the land of Aryan supremacy. His four gold medals proved that quiet excellence can be a most eloquent statement.

More Planets Like Earth?

Tuesday, Jun. 17, 2008 By JEFFREY KLUGER

An artist's impression of "super-Earths" orbiting a nearby star discovered by European researchers.

ESO / Reuters

Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are more than 70 sextillion — or 70 thousand million million million — stars in the cosmos, and that doesn't include uncountable moons and asteroids and comets and more. With all that, you wouldn't think you could generate much buzz by announcing that astronomers had spotted a few dozen more bodies whirling about out there. But a buzz is just what was created yesterday at a meeting in Nantes, France, when Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory reported that he and his team had discovered 45 previously unknown planets orbiting a handful of nearby stars. There's good reason for all the excitement.

There was never much doubt that planets other than the known nine (or the known eight, now that Pluto has been demoted) existed, but it wasn't until 1995 that the first of these so-called exoplanets was discovered. The vast distance between stars makes a comparatively small body like a planet invisible to even the sharpest-eyed telescopes. Instead, astronomers had to rely on a less-direct method, looking for tiny wobbles in the star itself. A star that couldn't stand still was almost certainly being

tugged on by something, and that something was likely to be the gravity of an orbiting planet.

Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns.

There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does — and it's delivered the goods.

Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth — tiny by exoplanet standards. One star, just 42 light-years away, is home to a trio of such worlds — which Mayor is now calling "super-Earths." The largest of the three is just 9.5 times as big as Earth, the smallest just 4.2 times. It was not only the modest size of all the new worlds that got astronomers so excited; it was the sheer number of them too. Mayor found his planets by studying a group of just 200 stars — an infinitesimal sliver of the total number out there. That has led him to estimate that at least a third of all sun-like stars may be home to Earth-like worlds.

"Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," he told the conference. "Does every single star harbor planets? We may not know the answer, but we are making progress."

Even Mayor's newest, smallest planets are unlikely to be pastoral places. All of them lie so close to their suns that they complete one orbit in 50 days or less — compared to the lazy, 365-day journey Earth makes — meaning that any water or incipient life on their surfaces would simply sizzle away. But HARPS is already sensitive enough to spot planets that are 100,000 times smaller than their parent star. Refinements both in HARPS itself and in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes should make them able to spot smaller and smaller stellar wobbles. Those little wiggles would be

the signature of Earth-like worlds lying at a not-too-hot, not-too-cold distance from their suns. And it's on those planets that you just might find Earth-like life.

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