The Gray Jobs Enigma

Abstract: In her years as a probation officer north of Dallas, Patricia Lowell reckoned that she would work until age 65, confident that she could then retire halfway comfortably on her pension and Social Security. After retiring, she thought, she would pick up some extra spending money by working part-time retail jobs during the holiday season. In that way, Ms. Lowell was like the three out of four Americans who say they plan to continue working after they retire from their main job. But for Ms. Lowell, things did not turn out as planned. At age 58, she quit her job as a probation officer for Grayson County in order to care for her mother, who had cancer, diabetes and congestive heart failure. Her decision to leave her job of 23 years, she said, was made possible only by Texas’ then-recent decision to provide health insurance to longtime probation officers who retire before they qualify for Medicare at age 65. “I wanted to continue working, but then this opportunity came up allowing me to retire and take care of my mother,” Ms. Lowell said. “It all came together very nicely.” She retired in late 2004, spending dozens of hours each week caring for her mother, who died in 2010 at age 92. Now, nearly 10 years after leaving her job, Ms. Lowell is happily retired, with no plans to return to work. She is doing better financially than she anticipated, receiving her pension as well as $1,292 a month from Social Security. In an unexpected bonus, she remarried five years ago, and her husband’s retirement income has gone far to solidify their finances. “I don’t regret at all that I retired,” Ms. Lowell said. She is an active volunteer in her church, and she and her husband love taking road trips to explore Texas. And every few months they drive 300 miles south to Houston to visit her son and three grandchildren. Ms. Lowell personifies a disconnect among Americans: while nearly three-fourths of Americans say they will continue working after retiring from their main job, only 18.9 percent of Americans age 65 or older actually remain in the work force. Many workers in their 40s, 50s and early 60s are convinced that they will want to or need to work well past 65 and even after retiring from their principal job, yet many retire earlier than they anticipated. There are many reasons for this: Perhaps they had health problems or grew unsatisfied with their jobs, or they realized that their nest egg was large enough for them to get by in retirement — or, like Ms. Lowell, they needed to care for a loved one. Sara Rix, an analyst at the AARP Public Policy Institute, sees numerous reasons so many Americans retire considerably earlier than they had anticipated. “A lot of people have expectations and desires to work in retirement, but the number who actually do is pretty low,” Ms. Rix said. “A lot of things happen — workers suffer ill health or job loss and that propels them out of the labor force.” Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, notes that many Americans are working until later in life. The percentage of Americans 65 and over who remain in the labor force has grown significantly — to 18.9 percent from 12 percent two decades ago. Among the reasons she cites are people remaining healthier longer, fewer physically taxing lift-and-lug jobs, and, after the stock market plummeted during the recent recession, the conclusion that it is smart to work longer to build up one’s nest egg. Ms. Munnell also puzzles over why most Americans say they want to work after retiring from their main job while a far lower percentage actually work after turning 65. “Sometimes there’s a positive reason — your spouse retires, and you decide you want to retire, too,” Ms. Munnell said. She said there were numerous “shocks” that caused people to retire earlier than expected, like deteriorating health or an unanticipated change in wealth — perhaps because of a soaring stock market. Another common “shock,” she said, is a job change — maybe a layoff or a transfer to a less satisfactory position or getting a new, more demanding, hotheaded boss. “Sometimes people quit their main job and think they’re going to find another job,” Ms. Munnell said. “But there’s still discrimination in the workplace. A lot of employers don’t like hiring old people that much. Older people look for work, but studies show that they then get discouraged pretty easily. You go, you look and then you give up.” That was definitely not the case for Hue Galloway, who worked for 12 years as a field technician for Ticketmaster in Connecticut. In that job, he crisscrossed the state, maintaining and repairing Ticketmaster’s computers and printers at dozens of establishments, from the Mohegan Sun casino to theaters in Hartford. In 2008, during the depths of the recession, Mr. Galloway was laid off. He was 58 at the time. “I figured I’d be working there until 67 or 70,” he said. “That’s what I was shooting for. I’d need the money. Plus, I enjoyed my job.” Mr. Galloway was determined to find another job; he spent three years looking, applying for more than 200 technical jobs. “I got no place,” he said “I was like applying to five or six places a week, and over those three years, I might have gotten four interviews.” “I really feel I was discriminated against because of age,” he added. “They found young people with two years of college to do basically the same kind of work I was doing, and they paid them less.” He was earning $17 an hour when he was laid off. For two years he lived on unemployment insurance and his savings, but that was not enough to keep the bank from foreclosing on his house. He could no longer afford the $1,500 monthly mortgage payments. “It was very hard,” he said. “But I just couldn’t pay for it.” He is at least fortunate that his son lets him stay in one apartment of a three-family house that he rents out; — in return, he serves as the informal superintendent. In a survey of 1,502 Americans, AARP found that 31 percent of those who planned to continue working after retiring said they would do so because they “enjoy working.” Thirty percent said they would continue “for extra money” and 21 percent “to have something interesting to do.” Fourteen percent said they would continue working to be physically active and 11 percent to be mentally active. Ten percent said they would continue working to support themselves. Many Americans think it won’t be hard to continue working into their late 60s or even their 70s. But Ms. Rix of AARP says it is not always so simple. “Everyone is going to have to run faster and faster to stay in place at work, and that makes it more difficult for us to remain employed,” she said. And once people leave their longtime jobs, she added, “In this economy, it’s pretty tough to find something else.” Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement expert at the New School, said many aging Americans underestimated the difficulties of continuing to work and overestimated the difficulties of retiring. “People see the cost of not working isn’t so bad because they figure that they can get by,” she said. “And the benefits of not working are much greater than they thought — they can relax a lot more.” Professor Ghilarducci added that today’s jobs might not require as much lifting, bending and stooping as the manufacturing or warehouse jobs of old, but a lot of jobs are plenty demanding, requiring keen eyesight and intense concentration. “People thought their jobs would get a little easier, but they’ve gotten a bit worse,” she said. “There’s a proletarianization of the jobs that older workers have.” Helen Dennis, an author and consultant on retirement and an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, says it is not surprising that a far larger percentage of Americans say they are going to work into their late 60s and 70s than actually do. “A big factor is uncertainly,” she said. “People look at their savings and pensions and say, ‘I think it’s going to be O.K., but I don’t know. I don’t understand the Affordable Care Act, and my mother is 90 and I have a daughter who just got divorced who is coming to live with me. There are so many uncertainties that to be safe I’m going to work until whatever age.’ But then when people reach 61, 62, 63, a lot of them figure out that they can retire.” Many Americans constantly weigh the pros and cons of continuing to work once they reach their late 50s and early 60s. Many conclude it’s not worth it. Ms. Dennis explained: “With the stresses of the workplace, with the mantra of doing more with less, now I’m doing two people’s jobs. We have a new manager. They’re changing the whole team again. The traffic here in L.A. is killing me, and my best friend just died and there’s a big message that life is short. I think that’s part of why people decide to retire.” She added, “Some people realize that any job I can find is for a minimum wage, and it’s not worth my time.” Ms. Dennis is pushing an idea called “ Project Renewment ” that seeks to help the nation’s first generation of career women plan for retirement. She says the hope is to make retirement more than “a return to the kitchen.” “The whole piece is how to help career women face their next 20 or 30 years — to find something you love to do and to give structure to the next chapter in one’s life,” she said. Barbara Goldberg is a prime example of this approach. For 30 years, she conducted focus groups for Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Coca-Cola, American Airlines and General Motors. Ms. Goldberg, 72, held regular salons at her Los Angeles home for, in her words, “intellectual and socially aware women.” At one salon in 2008, a retired government official spoke about the problems facing drought-stricken countries in West Africa and the contaminated water that people drink there. Within months, Ms. Goldberg closed her marketing firm and started a foundation to underwrite the drilling and construction of wells in Africa. The foundation, Wells Bring Hope , focuses on Niger and has raised nearly $2 million and financed 268 wells. “I left my marketing work because I was so moved hearing about the dire need for water in West Africa and the plight of women and girls to get water,” Ms. Goldberg said. “At the time, my business was slowing down, which was fine with me because I was traveling more and enjoying life a bit more. When this opportunity presented itself, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do, although I had never worked in the nonprofit world.” Although economists would say she has technically retired because she no longer works for pay, Ms. Goldberg does not view herself as retired. She typically devotes 50 hours a week to raising money, holding meetings and speaking at elementary and high schools about Africa’s water woes. “I loved doing focus groups, and doing that suited me just fine,” Ms. Goldberg said. “But I was very conscious of what I wanted to do in the next chapter of my life. This is something that’s very meaningful to me, and it will leave a very powerful legacy to my three granddaughters.” Like Ms. Goldberg, Gary Westerman left his job voluntarily after three decades. He was an engineer and manager at a semiconductor company in Austin, Tex., and in the fall of 2012, his company announced plans to lay off 900 employees. “Two weeks before Christmas I volunteered to take the place of somebody else who had two or three kids,” he said. “I could have stayed another four or five years. I have been through 37 rounds of layoffs in 33 years. I survived all of them.” Mr. Westerman, 65, is looking for another job, but it is proving harder than he anticipated. He is an adviser to several job clubs where he teaches people how to network better, because networking is such an important part of finding jobs. “It will be another 10 years before I quit looking for jobs,” he said. Jerry Tollefson shares that sentiment, still reeling from leaving his job in November when the 500-bed nursing home in Milwaukee at which he worked announced it would close. For six years, Mr. Tollefson, 63, was its events coordinator, coaxing residents to tell stories of their youth, serenading them with Ella Fitzgerald and Perry Como records. “I loved it,” he said. “The nursing home gave me its above-and-beyond award.” “I can probably sneak by financially, maybe not taking all the trips you want to take,” he said. “I can afford my home and have two squares a day.” He has been looking for jobs, but “the job market is difficult,” he said. “Here in Milwaukee, probably like everywhere else, it seems that the jobs out there are geared to the I.T. computer business. When I get on a computer, I still hunt for the on-and-off switch. Young people who have grown up on computers, they have an advantage. Multitasking and being on the computer are not in my wheelhouse.” Still, Mr. Tollefson, who once did fund-raising for nonprofits, is intent on finding a job. “The bottom line is, I get very antsy. I like to be busy,” he said. “I want to work until 70. Maybe it’ll be part time.” A few days ago a nursing home invited him to interview for a position as its program and events assistant. “It’s a nice fit, and hopefully something comes of it,” he said. “Half the battle is having something you really enjoy doing.”

Jobs
Retirement
Layoffs
Job Recruiting and Hiring


Matt Cassel to Make First Postseason Start in 11 Years

Abstract: KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The uplifting story of the Chiefs ’ rebirth is bittersweet for their quarterback, Matt Cassel . In his sixth year as a pro, Cassel led Kansas City to 10 regular-season victories, as many as it had in the previous three seasons combined, and a date Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens in the first round of the N.F.L. playoffs. From worst in their division last season to first in 2010, the Chiefs’ turnaround in the A.F.C. West is straight out of a Hollywood script. And therein lies the rub for Cassel, who will be making his first postseason start since his senior year at Chatsworth (Calif.) High School in 1999. Cassel’s success is rooted in a passion for competition and a dreamer’s persistence, characteristics he inherited from his father, Greg, a Hollywood scriptwriter who imbued in his four children a love of sports and the outdoors. When Cassel was 14, his parents divorced. Cassel, his sister and their two brothers lived with their mother, Barbara, a set decorator, in the San Fernando Valley. Greg Cassel struggled financially and was living alone in a mobile home in San Bernardino, Calif., when he died of natural causes in December 2008, at age 57. For Cassel, his father’s death was a wound that began throbbing again after his wife, Lauren, gave birth to the couple’s first child in May. Bonding with their daughter, Quinn, has given Cassel a deeper appreciation of the parent-child connection. “The thing I never got to do is say goodbye to my dad,” Cassel said after a practice last week. “That’s something that troubles me. Because we didn’t spend a lot of time together the last few years, you always say, ‘What could I have done differently to help him?’ ” There can be no editing the past, so Cassel consoles himself with this: He can honor his father by writing his own blockbuster script. Cassel passed for 3,116 yards and 27 touchdowns in the regular season and threw seven interceptions, down from 16 in 2009. His plus-20 differential is the second best in the N.F.L. behind the plus-32 of Tom Brady, Cassel’s mentor for four seasons with the New England Patriots. In Jamaal Charles and Thomas Jones, the Chiefs have the league’s top tandem of running backs , which accounted for 2,363 yards rushing. But do not be surprised if the Baltimore game turns on the throwing arm of Cassel, who has watched enough tape of the 12-win Ravens to notice that in their four losses — at Cincinnati, New England and Atlanta, and against Pittsburgh — the defense, anchored by linebacker Ray Lewis, saw an average of 42 passes. “Watching a defense like theirs,” Cassel said, “you’re thinking, gosh, these guys are really good. The more tape you watch, the more comfortable you get because every defense has a tendency. The fun part is finding that tendency and figuring out a way to exploit it. I love watching film. I love drawing up plays.” Nobody outworks Cassel, 28, who received a parking spot only steps from the entrance to the Chiefs’ practice facility as a reward for outperforming his teammates in the off-season conditioning program. Each Tuesday, technically the N.F.L.’s day of rest, Cassel spends hours watching tape. Cassel’s practice habits were shaped at Southern California, where he arrived amid much fanfare but spent five years sitting behind two Heisman Trophy winners , Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart. He threw 33 passes in four years. “When there was really nothing to look forward to,” he said, “I loved to compete in the weight room, loved practice because that was my opportunity to compete.” Drafted by the Patriots in the seventh round in 2005 , Cassel became Brady’s shadow. He arrived at the facility to work out before the first scheduled activity of the day because that is what Brady did. Everything he knows about being a leader, he learned by watching Brady, who won three Super Bowls before Cassel’s arrival. “He’d always yell at me and say you can’t make the simple mistake,” Cassel recalled, “because how are you going to yell at your receivers, your running backs, your linemen for making simple mistakes if you’re making them?” Once, Cassel said, he made the simple mistake of forgetting about a noon conference Brady had added to the schedule. When Cassel showed up on time for a 12:15 meeting, Brady glowered. “He was furious,” Cassel said. “He asked me where I had been at 12 o’clock, and I remember saying: ‘Why didn’t you come get me? Because I was in the building, I was just eating lunch.’ And he said: ‘Because I’m not responsible for you. You have to be accountable for yourself.’ ” Cassel was ready in 2008 when Brady sustained a season-ending knee injury in the Patriots’ opener against Kansas City. He led the Patriots to an 11-5 record while passing for 3,693 yards and 21 touchdowns, with 11 interceptions. After the season, Cassel was traded to the Chiefs, who signed him to a six-year contract that could be worth more than $60 million. He arrived with Todd Haley, a first-year head coach who was fresh off a Super Bowl appearance as the offensive coordinator of the Cardinals. Haley is known for his confrontational style, and Cassel spent a good part of the 2009 season playing Gomer Pyle to Haley’s Sgt. Vince Carter. High-decibel communication, Haley conceded, “goes a bit against Matt’s nature.” But Cassel rose to the challenge. Asked when he had seen Cassel at his most fiery, Haley said, “Probably in my office.” On Friday, the Chiefs lifted the curtain on their practice for 15 minutes, long enough for reporters to watch receiver Dwayne Bowe, who leads the team with 15 touchdown receptions, drop a couple of passes during a short-yardage goal-line drill. Last season the Chiefs dropped a league-high 49 passes, and every quarterback-turned-analyst who came to town and watched Cassel’s throws litter the practice field told Haley that Cassel had to get meaner. Cassel disagrees, explaining after Friday’s practice that he preferred “to be more uplifting” and saying, “I think I hold people accountable in different ways.” On Dec. 8, Cassel had an emergency appendectomy. He sat out the Chiefs’ game at San Diego four days later, a 31-0 loss, but returned 11 days after his surgery to lead the Chiefs to a 27-13 victory at St. Louis. He had six carries against the Rams, in a performance that receiver Chris Chambers labeled “gutsy.” Watching a teammate sacrifice his body for the team like that, Chambers said, “makes you want to make plays for him.” Cassel knows his story reads like fiction. He said, “I’m always pinching myself.”

Baltimore Ravens
Kansas City Chiefs
Football
Cassel Matt


Attorney General Plans Reshaping of Civil Rights Division

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census. As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush ’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination. To bolster a unit that has been battered by heavy turnover and a scandal over politically tinged hiring under the Bush administration, the Obama White House has also proposed a hiring spree that would swell the ranks of several hundred civil rights lawyers with more than 50 additional lawyers, a significant increase for a relatively small but powerful division of the government. The division is “getting back to doing what it has traditionally done,” Mr. Holder said in an interview. “But it’s really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal.” Few agencies are more engaged in the nation’s social and cultural debates than the Civil Rights Division, which was founded in 1957 to enforce anti-discrimination laws. The division has been at the center of a number of controversies over the decades, serving as a proxy for disputes between liberals and conservatives in matters like school busing and affirmative action. When the Nixon administration took office, it sought to delay school desegregation plans reached under former President Lyndon B. Johnson . The Reagan administration dropped the division’s policy of opposing tax -exempt status for racially discriminatory private schools. And former President Bill Clinton withdrew his first nominee to lead the division, Lani Guinier , after her writings about racial quotas were criticized. But such dust-ups were minor when compared with sweeping changes at the division under the Bush administration, longtime career civil rights lawyers say. Now the changes that Mr. Holder is pushing through have led some conservatives, still stinging from accusations that the Bush appointees “politicized” the unit, to start throwing the same charge back at President Obama ’s team. The agency’s critics cite the downsizing of a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, an investigation into whether an Arizona sheriff’s enforcement of immigration laws has discriminated against Hispanics, and the recent blocking of a new rule requiring Georgia voters to prove their citizenship. (Under the Bush administration, the division had signed off on a similar law requiring Georgia voters to furnish photographic identification, rejecting criticism that legitimate minority voters are disproportionately more likely not to have driver’s licenses or passports.) Among the critics, Hans von Spakovsky , a former key Bush-era official at the division, has accused the Obama team of “nakedly political” maneuvers. Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, rejected such criticism, saying those cases were decided “based on the facts and the law.” Under the Bush administration, the agency shifted away from its traditional core focus on accusations of racial discrimination, channeling resources into areas like religious discrimination and human trafficking. Department officials are working to avoid unleashing potential controversies as they rebuild the division’s more traditional efforts on behalf of minorities. They are not planning to dismantle the new initiatives, rather to hire enough additional lawyers to do everything. The administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget request includes an increase of about $22 million for the division, an 18 percent increase from the 2009 budget. Other changes are already apparent. The division has filed about 10 “friend of the court” briefs in private discrimination-related lawsuits since Mr. Obama’s inauguration , a practice that had dwindled in the previous administration. In July, moreover, the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities. The division has also lifted Bush-era rules that some career staff members saw as micromanagement or impediments, like restrictions on internal communications and a ban on front-line career lawyers’ making recommendations on whether to approve proposed changes to election laws. Other changes from the Bush years may be harder to roll back. The division’s downgrading of the New Black Panther Party charges, which were filed in the final days of the Bush administration, has had rippling consequences. It apparently prompted Senate Republicans to put a hold on President Obama’s nominee to lead the division as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas Perez . The delay in Mr. Perez’s arrival, in turn, is stalling plans to review section managers installed by the Bush team, including several regarded with suspicion by civil rights advocacy groups. Under federal law , top-level career officials may not be transferred to other positions for the first 120 days after a new agency head is confirmed. Bush-era changes to the division’s permanent rank may also have lingering effects. From 2003 to 2007, Bush political appointees blocked liberals from career jobs and promotions, which they steered to fellow conservatives, whom one such official privately described as “real Americans,” a department inspector general report found. The practice, which no previous administration had done, violated civil service laws, it said. As morale plunged among veterans, turnover accelerated. The Obama transition team ’s confidential report on the division, obtained by The New York Times , says 236 civil rights lawyers left from 2003 to 2007. (The division has about 350 lawyers.) Many of their replacements had scant civil rights experience and were graduates of lower-ranked law schools. The transition report says the era of hiring such “inexperienced or poorly qualified” lawyers — who are now themselves protected by civil service laws — has left lasting damage. “While some of the political hires have performed competently and a number of others have left, the net effect of the politicized hiring process and the brain drain is an attorney work force largely ill-equipped to handle the complex, big-impact litigation that should comprise a significant part” of the division’s docket, the transition report said. At the end of the Bush administration, the attorney general at the time, Michael B. Mukasey , began to make changes intended to reduce political influence over entry-level career lawyer hiring. The Civil Rights Division is now seeking to expand those changes. It is developing a new hiring policy under which panels of career employees — not political appointees — would decide both whom to hire and to promote for positions from interns to veteran lawyers. The policy could be completed as early as this month. “We wanted to create a very transparent policy that will stand the test of time and ensure that we hire the best and brightest,” said Mark Kappelhoff, a longtime civil rights lawyer who is the division’s acting principal deputy assistant attorney general. Some conservatives are skeptical that such a policy will keep politics out of hiring, however. Robert Driscoll , a division political appointee from 2001 to 2003, said career civil rights lawyers are “overwhelmingly left-leaning” and will favor liberals. “If you are the Obama administration and you allow the career staff to do all the hiring, you will get the same people you would probably get if you did it yourself,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a masterstroke by them.” Mr. Holder has elsewhere called for social changes with civil rights overtones, like the passage of a federal hate-crimes law, the elimination of the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine and greater financing for indigent defense. By contrast, he described his Civil Rights Division efforts as more restoration than change. The recent moves, he argued, are a return to its basic approach under presidents of both parties — despite some policy shifts between Republican and Democratic administrations — before the “sea change” and “aberration” of the Bush years. “Of course there are going to be critics,” Mr. Holder said. But, he argued, “any objective observer” would see the recent approach as consistent with “the historical mission of the division, not straying into some kind of liberal orthodoxy. It really is just a function of enforcing the statutes.”

Civil Rights
Justice Department
Minorities
Discrimination
Eric Holder
Barack Obama


Ethnographic Study Looks at Gossip in the Workplace

Abstract: Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl” ? If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography . Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back. These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests. But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school. The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others. Consider, for instance, the cascade of insults recorded in the earlier study of middle-school gossip by Donna Eder and Janet Lynne Enke of Indiana University. In this cafeteria conversation, a group of eighth-grade girls in the cafeteria were discussing an overweight classmate whose breasts they considered too large for her age: Penny: In choir that girl was sitting in front of us and we kept going, “Moo.” Karen: We were going, “Come here, cow; come here, cow.” Bonnie: I know. She is one. Penny: She looks like a big fat cow. Julie: Who is that? Bonnie: That girl on the basketball team. Penny: That big red-headed cow. Julie: Oh, yeah. I know. She is a cow. The new study found that gossip in the workplace also tended to be overwhelmingly negative, but the insults were more subtle and the conversations less predictable, says Tim Hallett, a sociologist at Indiana University. Dr. Hallett conducted the study along with Dr. Eder and Brent Harger of Albright College. “Office gossip can be a form of reputational warfare,” Dr. Hallett says. “It’s like informal gossip, but it’s richer and more elaborate. There are more layers to it because people practice indirectness and avoidance. People are more cautious because they know they can lose not just a friendship but a job.” During his two years studying the group dynamics at a Midwestern elementary school, which allowed him access on condition of anonymity, Dr. Hallett found that the teachers became so comfortable with him and his camera that they would freely insult their bosses during one-on-one interviews. But at the teachers’ formal group meetings, where they knew that another teacher might report their insults to the principal, they were more discreet. Instead of making direct criticisms, they sometimes offered obliquely sarcastic comments to test the waters. They used another indirect tactic categorized as praise the predecessor, as in the meeting when a teacher fondly recalled a previous administration: “It was so calm, and you could teach. No one was constantly looking over your shoulder.” The other teachers quickly agreed. No one explicitly called the current principal an authoritarian busybody, but that was the obvious implication. Some teachers were especially adept at managing gossip. At one meeting, after someone complained about a student walking around with his hair shaped into horns (“Tell me, how is that part of the uniform dress code?”), the group began blaming the lapse in discipline on the assistant principal. The gossip seemed to be going down the same nasty track as the teenagers’ she’s-such-a-cow episode until another teacher, an ally of the assistant principal, smoothly intervened. First, the teacher interrupted the attack by asking the name of the student with the horns. That deflected the group’s gossip on to the student’s academic difficulties and weird behavior (“He’s gotta frighten the little kids”). Then the teacher masterfully completed the rescue of the assistant principal by changing the topic entirely, reminding everyone of a different disciplinary issue that was the fault of a less popular administrator — the principal, who promptly became the new focus of the groups’ anger. The teachers’ gossip never got as blatantly mean as the teenage girls’ — no one was ever called a cow — but in some ways the effects were more widely felt. As teachers mocked the principal and complained about her being “stifling” and “hyper,” the atmosphere got more poisonous. The principal felt that her authority was being undermined by gossip and retaliated against teachers she suspected (correctly) of criticizing her. Teachers and administrators fled the school, and the students’ test scores declined. “The gossip did serve to reinforce the teachers’ group solidarity, but in this case it was also a form of warfare that brought everyone down,” Dr. Hallett says. “It was reminiscent of the old saying that gossip is a three-pronged tongue: it can hurt the speaker and the listener, as well as the target.” Some bosses have tried turning the office into a “no-gossip zone,” but Dr. Hallett says it is more realistic to try managing it. (If you have ideas for managing office gossip, you can suggest them at nytimes.com/tierneylab .) If, say, an office rival seems poised to trash one of your absent allies, Dr. Hallett suggests you make a “pre-emptive positive evaluation.” A quick “Isn’t she doing a great job?” might be enough to stop the attack. If your rival tries persisting with indirect sarcasm — “Oh, real great job” — you can force the issue by calmly asking what that means. That simple question, a dare made in a pleasant voice, often silenced the sarcastic gossips observed by Dr. Hallett. And if that doesn’t work, Dr. Hallett suggests you try an even simpler tactic that was used successfully at the teachers’ meetings — and that is available in any workplace anytime. In fact, it’s one of the tactics that distinguishes office gossip from nonoffice gossip. When the going gets tough, when the gossip gets mean, you always have one reliable escape line: “Don’t we have some work to do here?”

Gossip
Sociology
Workplace Environment
Science and Technology
Teachers and School Employees


A World of Data to Help Your Plans to Go Skiing

Abstract: ALTA, Utah — After a weekend of unusually wet snow, Jim Steenburgh stood atop Alta’s Sugarloaf Pass, surveying the mostly blue sky. Clouds were forming to the south, moving in over Sundance. But no, Dr. Steenburgh predicted, the weather would not come this way. By lunchtime, fat flakes were falling, and soon it was snowing so hard you could barely see the terrain. Dr. Steenburgh, 40, was asked if he wanted to revise his forecast. He did not. “It’ll only be a quarter-inch accumulation,” he predicted. Back at his office, Dr. Steenburgh, professor and chairman of the meteorology department at the University of Utah, wasted no time in tracking the day’s atmospheric events. At 5:36, he sent an e-mail note: only a trace of snow had accumulated, and the snow water equivalent measured on the mountain — the amount of water contained in the snow, related to its weight — was just .02 inch, a very dry snowfall. Dr. Steenburgh knows the Wasatch Range and its particular weather patterns better than just about anyone — except, perhaps, his longtime ski buddy, Mike Kok (pronounced coke), the meteorologist for the Alta Weather Program. Dr. Steenburgh and Mr. Kok are among a breed of mountain meteorologists who have mastered the art of applying vast quantities of meteorological data — from satellites, models and weather stations — to the specific alpine features of their home turf. Dr. Steenburgh is an expert in locally important forces like the lake effect. The Great Salt Lake heats and moistens the air, helping to give the Cottonwood Canyons here about 20 percent more snow than they would otherwise have. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Dr. Steenburgh’s lab provided weather forecasts. But despite the fact that Dr. Steenburgh is a self-described “weather weenie” with a deep scientific interest in the goings-on of the atmosphere, at heart he is after the same information as everyone else. “When I go resort skiing,” Dr. Steenburgh said, “I want to know whether my 7-year-old is going to complain that it’s too cold or too nasty.” For the answers, meteorologists like Dr. Steenburgh and Mr. Kok rely on sophisticated computer models and technology like satellite imaging. But they are still wrong sometimes, precisely because there is so much to take into consideration. Mountains create their own weather systems and present a suite of phenomena like lake effect and orographic lift, which is the forcing of air to rise by rising terrain, like a mountain. Mountain meteorology, like skiing, requires not just technical skill but intuitive understanding of movement and motion and flow. “The atmosphere is a fluid,” said Larry Dunn, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, who skis with Dr. Steenburgh and Mr. Kok. “It behaves just like any other fluid, and you can use physics and mathematics to describe the behavior of that fluid in equations. If you knew the exact state of the atmosphere over the whole planet right now, if you knew where the cold air was, the warm air, the moisture, the wind and its directions, everywhere at all levels of the atmosphere, then you could plug that initial condition into those equations and solve them out into the future and get the exact state of the atmosphere tomorrow or the day after.” While weather has intrigued mankind throughout history, the tools of modern forecasting are only about a decade old. In the late 19th century, the telegraph first enabled simultaneous weather observations from different regions to be pieced together into rudimentary maps of weather patterns. In the early 1900s, European mathematicians first sought to predict the weather using equations, but by 1922 the science had advanced only to a point: If you could figure out a way to squeeze 64,000 people together into the same room to perform calculations, you could, theoretically, generate a weather “prediction” — although weeks after that weather had come and gone. In the 1950s, computers rose to the task. Today, weather data comes from satellite imagery and soundings — measurements of atmospheric temperature and humidity; from weather monitoring stations on the ground and on buoys in the ocean; and from balloons equipped with weather instruments and transmitters, sent up in 12-hour intervals from sites around the world. In this country, much of this information is delivered in raw form, via satellite feed, to the Boulder, Colo., offices of Unidata, a quasi-governmental research corporation that collects the data, renders it readable and sends it out, along with software to analyze it, to meteorologists around the country. At Unidata, a climatologist, Jeff Weber, watches the data stream in — 25 gigabytes of it every day. “There’s a lot of number crunching,” Dr. Weber said — billions of calculations, in fact, involving things like solar radiation, precipitation, wind speed and direction, and vapor pressure, for every series of coordinates on the satellite grid, at each level of the atmosphere — not to mention a consideration of the laws of thermodynamics. “In the old days, we received maps from computer model forecasts at only a couple of levels in the atmosphere,” Dr. Steenburgh said. “Today, thanks to high-speed networking, we don’t receive the maps. Instead we get output right from the computer models, and we generate the maps ourselves.” Dr. Steenburgh writes software programs to download exactly the information he needs. “We can slice and dice this output much like an M.R.I. of the atmosphere and get a much better picture of what is happening,” he said. Weather models essentially take every shred of available weather information and use them to form a three-dimensional picture of the atmosphere. They then solve a series of equations that ask what will happen 12 hours, three days or a week out. There are global models, national models and smaller-scale regional models, all of which are run on supercomputers. Local forecasting “always starts with the big picture — how highs and lows are moving,” Dr. Steenburgh said, adding: “Then we make adjustments for what the local terrain does. How does the mountain range affect that front? Every place has a different local climatology, so it’s about adjusting the characteristics of your mountains.” Partly hidden in the trees at 9,600 feet, just off Alta’s Main Street trail, Collins Mid-Mountain weather station looks like something the Brady Bunch children might have built in their backyard with a 1970s kit and a little help from Dad. A metal bucket catches snow, which is melted using antifreeze. The weight is recorded to establish the snow water equivalent. Giant measuring sticks — one outfitted with an ultrasound “gizmo,” as Dr. Steenburgh called it — gauge the snow depth from the ground up. A cylindrical device topped off by a ring of plastic triangles that resemble a truck’s mud flaps measures precipitation. Despite its homemade appearance, this is one of the best automated mountain weather stations in the country. Snowfall, snow-depth and snow-density measurements are recorded hourly and relayed by radio signal to the top of the Collins chairlift, where they are transmitted by phone line to the base. Almost instantaneously, the weather watchers of Little Cottonwood Canyon have another set of inputs for their arsenal. Hourly automated observations like this are extremely useful to forecasters like Mr. Kok, but they are even better when they are “ground-truthed” by a person. “The computer doesn’t show you what kind of snow crystals are forming,” said Daniel Howlett, Alta’s assistant snow safety director who is known as Howie. “All the computers in the world won’t replace being outside.” Mr. Howlett and his boss both have weather monitoring equipment in their yards, which they check at 3:45 a.m. They call Mr. Kok, who issues daily forecasts at 4:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.; when it is snowing, he is up at 2 a.m. consulting the maps. As soon as they have received Mr. Kok’s forecast, Mr. Howlett’s patrollers begin their avalanche planning for the morning, and then hit the slopes to set off charges. The point of weather forecasting is practical and defensive, after all. And nothing is more practical than avoiding avalanches.

Weather
Satellites
National Weather Service
Snow and Snowstorms
Computers and the Internet


C.I.A. Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was Inflated

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Years before the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing the C.I.A.’s use of torture and deceit in its detention program, an internal review by the agency found that the C.I.A. had repeatedly overstated the value of intelligence gained during the brutal interrogations of some of its detainees. The internal report, more than 1,000 pages in length, came to be known as the Panetta Review after Leon E. Panetta, who, as the C.I.A.’s director, ordered that it be done in 2009. At least one of its authors won an agency award for her work, according to a recent briefing that the agency’s inspector general gave to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The contents of the Panetta Review, which remain classified, are now central to simmering battles over the Intelligence Committee’s conclusions about the efficacy of torture and the C.I.A.’s allegations that committee staffers improperly took the review from an agency facility. The C.I.A. has publicly distanced itself from the report’s findings, saying that it was an incomplete and cursory review of documents, and has blocked its release under the Freedom of Information Act. New details of the Panetta Review, presented last month by the C.I.A. inspector general in a briefing to the committee, came as Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote to President Obama with an odd request: He wants the committee’s report back. The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of Torture The report says the agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Mr. Burr sent a letter last week to the White House saying that his Democratic predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, should never have transmitted the entire 6,700-page report to numerous departments and agencies within the executive branch — and requested that all copies of the report be “returned immediately,” according to people who have seen the letter. The Intelligence Committee publicly released only the report’s executive summary. But Congress has since changed hands, and the committee is now controlled by Republican lawmakers like Mr. Burr who have long opposed the committee’s detention investigation, which they said was a partisan effort to discredit the C.I.A. and the Bush administration. The ongoing controversies, more than a month after Intelligence Committee Democrats released their explosive findings about the C.I.A’s detention and interrogation program, signal just how much all sides are still positioning to control the history of one of America’s most polarizing recent episodes. The latest actions show that Republicans and the C.I.A. are still fighting to challenge the conclusions of a report they consider to be a partisan smear. The internal C.I.A. review ordered by Mr. Panetta was an attempt by the agency to better understand millions of documents that the C.I.A. was handing over to the committee as it began its investigation into the Bush-era detention program. 7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report Among the report’s findings: The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and the number of detainees higher than the agency portrayed. The result of the internal review, led by Peter Clement, who at the time was the agency’s deputy director of intelligence for analytic programs, was a series of memos on what the documents revealed about the internal workings of the program. One of the report’s findings, according to people who have seen the document, was that the C.I.A. repeatedly claimed that important intelligence to thwart terror plots and track down Qaeda operatives had come from the interrogation sessions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed when, in fact, the intelligence had other origins. The C.I.A. has long maintained that the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, a chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, was central to disrupting a number of terror plots, including Qaeda plans to attack the West Coast. Mr. Mohammed was one of the C.I.A. detainees subjected to the most brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding. According to a briefing that the C.I.A. inspector general, David B. Buckley, gave to the congressional staff members in December, a C.I.A. employee who had worked on the Panetta Review complained in 2010 that the agency had never corrected public statements about what was or was not obtained from torture sessions. Does Torture Work? The C.I.A.’s Claims and What the Committee Found The report undercut the C.I.A.’s claims that its tactics thwarted plots and led to the capture of terrorists. The identity of the C.I.A. employee is not publicly known, and it is unclear whether she protested to other agency officials. The Panetta Review played a central role in another of Mr. Buckley’s investigations. Last year, he admonished five C.I.A. employees for their role in accessing a computer network used by Senate staff members working on the detention report — an action they carried out to determine how the staff members had gained access to the internal review. A recent C.I.A. accountability panel essentially overturned his findings, recommending that the five employees not be punished. Mr. Buckley is planning to leave the C.I.A. at the end of the month to “pursue an opportunity in the private sector,” according to an agency news release. Since the fight over the Panetta Review erupted last year, the C.I.A. has said it was not required to give the document to the Intelligence Committee. A History of the C.I.A.’s Secret Interrogation Program The Central Intelligence Agency used waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques on dozens of the men it detained in secret prisons between 2002 and 2008. In a court filing last month as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, a C.I.A. officer said that the review had been stopped abruptly in 2010, had not covered all of the documents the agency had given to the committee and “had not been formally reviewed or relied upon by the C.I.A.’s senior leadership.” “Each document is stamped ‘DELIBERATIVE PROCESS PRIVILEGED DOCUMENT’ at the top of every page, and most of the documents are marked ‘DRAFT’ on every page as well,” wrote the C.I.A. officer, Martha M. Lutz. Ryan Trapani, a C.I.A. spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday that the agency’s June 2013 response to the Intelligence Committee’s report was “the only official, reviewed, confirmed and approved position on these issues by the agency.” Mr. Burr’s unusual letter to Mr. Obama might have been written with an eye toward future Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Congress is not subject to such requests, and any success he has in getting the Obama administration to return all copies of the Senate report to the Intelligence Committee could hinder attempts to someday have the report declassified and released publicly. A spokeswoman for Mr. Burr did not return a request seeking comment on the letter. A White House spokesman declined to comment on how the Obama administration planned to respond. Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy, said he could recall no analogous case of the Senate’s trying to get the executive branch to return a document. He said Mr. Burr was within his rights to ask for the report back. “But if Senator Burr thinks he can erase the report from the historical record, he is likely to be mistaken,” Mr. Aftergood said.

Interrogation
Senate Intelligence Committee
Torture
Detainees
CIA
Leon E Panetta
Richard M Burr
David B Buckley


As New York Cuts Budget in Crisis, a Stimulus Must Still Be Spent

Abstract: ALBANY — Throughout the Capitol, from the vaulted Assembly chamber to the first-floor cubicles of the Budget Division, officials are frantically slashing budgets, trimming headcounts and freezing salaries to deal with the worst fiscal crisis in decades. But in Room 246, a high-ceilinged suite recently turned over to Gov. David A. Paterson’s new economic recovery cabinet, there is a different problem to tackle, courtesy of the federal stimulus passed last month: How to spend billions of dollars as quickly as possible. Nearly every day, officials from 20 agencies meet there to sift through hundreds of proposals, from waste-treatment plants to courthouses to emergency wireless systems. On one wall is a map of New York’s 62 counties, marked with the number of projects each has submitted for approval. On another is a list of the pools of federal money available to the state: $404 million to weatherize homes, $1 billion for highways and bridges, even $75 million for nuclear waste cleanup. “It’s better than being on the other side,” said Timothy J. Gilchrist, in between hurried bites of a salad. As the senior adviser for infrastructure and transportation, Mr. Gilchrist was appointed by the governor to oversee the distribution of the federal funds. “I’m Captain Asphalt,” he said. While the stimulus package includes money that New York and other states can use to close their budget deficits, much of it is reserved for large-scale capital projects, money that must be spent quickly — in some cases in a few months — to help jump-start the economy. New York is expected to receive $4 billion — a sum that has drawn contractors, local officials and lobbyists to the halls of the Capitol to push for a share. And it is potentially a political gift to Mr. Paterson, now facing the lowest recorded approval ratings of any governor in decades. Every new project offers the chance to earn a glowing headline in the local paper and win points with legislators and municipal officials, many of whom are still smarting at the budget cuts that Mr. Paterson has proposed for next year. But the money also brings headaches. Every project must navigate a labyrinth of regulations or risk being challenged by federal overseers. And if Mr. Paterson and his aides move too slowly, New York could lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, every new courthouse or sewer is a potential embarrassment akin to the Bridge to Nowhere. Any political fallout from waste or corruption will settle on Mr. Paterson, who, like all governors distributing stimulus money, must approve each project and certify its legitimacy. And even with $4 billion to spend, there is not enough to go around: local officials have submitted 7,675 projects totaling $41.8 billion, with more coming in each day. “Things have been so bleak for so long, where there was no money for any kind of project,” said Steven B. Weingarten, a lobbyist for several transportation agencies around the state. “Once they saw there was money on the table, they said, ‘We need to take a shot, any way we can.’ ” At many state agencies, the rush of stimulus spending presents a bewildering dual reality. Since July, there has been a strict hiring freeze. Now officials must find consultants and staff members for new projects, even while they consolidate or close bureaus and offices. Some programs that faced severe budget cuts, like road and highway construction, are now awash in money. Merely reading through the 1,000-plus-page stimulus bill took Mr. Gilchrist and his staff several days and at least one all-nighter. (The transparency requirements run to 60 pages.) As the days go by, they must stroke and soothe New York’s Congressional delegation, which played a pivotal role in getting New York’s billions and has a keen interest in how the money is spent. In Albany, lawmakers are already complaining that Mr. Paterson and his team have not consulted them enough. The complaints are likely to keep coming. Because of the requirements that the money be spent on projects that have already undergone environmental reviews and met other technical requirements, many pet projects will not qualify, no matter who supports them. Local officials are in much the same position. The stimulus is a gold mine for capital spending, but has relatively little money for operating expenses, which county governments say they desperately need. For many of them, getting stimulus money is like being handed the keys to a brand new car while months of back rent go unpaid. “The repairing of bridges and building roads are a good thing, and they will help us,” said Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, who announced this week that the county could run out of cash by the end of the year. “But they don’t give a county government cash to pay its bills.” Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t take as much money as they can get. Erie County, home to more than its share of crumbling highways and bridges, has submitted nearly 700 projects to the Paterson administration, several times more than any other county. And last week, Mr. Levy created his own stimulus team to comb through the stimulus package and determined what projects might qualify. “These monies,” Mr. Levy noted, “are very competitive.”

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009)


In Nascar’s Chase, There Is No Head Start

Abstract: By almost any measure, Tony Stewart has had a sensational season driving a stock car in the Nascar Sprint Cup series — so far, anyway — winning three races and nearly $5.5 million, finishing in the top five in half of the 26 races and amassing a fat 179-point lead in the driver standings. And yet, as of Sunday afternoon, none of these impressive statistics will make much of a difference in helping Stewart win a third series title. Now begins the playoffs — the 10-race, 12-driver Chase for the Sprint Cup — and Stewart will have to establish himself again. “The intensity level comes back like it was at the beginning of the year for us,” Stewart, in his first season as a car owner, said in an interview Thursday in New York. “From the weekend we got locked in to the Chase, it was like a waiting period.” But here is the hitch: Stewart will not start the Chase in first place, or alone in second. All 12 drivers who have qualified for the Chase have been awarded 5,000 points, a purely arbitrary number, and have been given 10 bonus points for each race they have won. So when the Sylvania 300 gets under way Sunday in Loudon, N.H., Stewart and Jimmie Johnson , who also won three races, will actually be 10 points behind Mark Martin , who was 515 points behind Stewart after the most recent race on Sept. 12, but who has won four races. (Kyle Busch also had four wins, tying Martin’s series lead, but he missed claiming a spot in the Chase by 8 points.) Martin’s lead will probably not hold up through the afternoon, let alone all 10 Chase races. This is the sixth year of the Chase, and the points leader going into the Chase has ended up winning the championship only two times: Stewart in 2005 and Johnson in 2007. “You’ve got to take what you learned over the first 26 races, but it is like starting over again,” Jeff Gordon said Thursday as the Chase drivers made a pit stop in New York. But a closer Chase means more viewers tuning in — or, to be more accurate, keeps viewers from watching something else, like football. Were there no Chase, Stewart would have such a big lead over Gordon that he could cruise to the title. Team sports also start from scratch when the playoffs begin, and upsets are always part of the postseason drama, no matter how well teams have done (Heads up, Yankees). But in team sports, regular-season excellence comes with a tangible bonus, namely home-field advantage, or, as in the case of the N.F.L., first-round byes. “I think we can do a better job of celebrating the regular-season champion,” Johnson, the three-time defending series champion, said Thursday. “If we could show some kind of advantage to the points leader, I’d be open to that for sure.” The 10 races in the Chase, for all intents and purposes, look the same as the first 26 races of the season, with the 12 Chase drivers running in the 43-car pack. If qualifying is held, the Chase drivers are not even guaranteed to start at the front of the field. The bonuses awarded for winning so-called regular-season races are negligible in Nascar’s play-money points system. None of the other 11 drivers in the Chase trail Martin by more than 40 points, which is the difference between finishing 5th and 16th — in one race. Perhaps more important, the 12 Chase drivers are not separated from the other 31 drivers in the field when points are awarded after each playoff race. A winner of a Sprint Cup race, Chaser or non-Chaser, gets 185 points, plus a 5-point bonus for leading a lap (and, perhaps, another 5-point bonus for leading the most laps). The 43rd-place finisher gets 34 points. So any Chase driver who encounters mechanical trouble early in a race — or is knocked out early by a collision, maybe with one of the 31 non-Chase drivers — can be eliminated from championship contention. “We all agree that it’s very hard to gain points on somebody, but it’s very easy to lose them,” said Juan Pablo Montoya, a Chase first-timer. Early in last year’s first Chase race, also at Loudon, a sway bar broke on Busch’s car, and he finished 34th. Despite winning eight races in the regular season, more than any other driver, Busch dropped to eighth place that day. He had finished the 26-race regular season 302 points ahead of Johnson, who went on to win his third straight title. There are no home-field advantages or byes in Nascar’s playoff system. The regular-season champion does not receive a mulligan after a bad finish, or, as in Stewart’s case, even the lead since the points have been reset. Stewart says he is not devastated by losing his lead; it is not as if Nascar changed the rules in the middle of the season. He will live with it as it is. When asked if the 12 Chase drivers should receive bonuses for winning Chase races, Stewart shook his head, smiled and said, “You get to the point where you start confusing everybody.”

Automobile Racing
Stewart Tony
National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing
Johnson Jimmie
Martin Mark


S.E.C. Nominee Offers Plan for Tighter Regulation

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Mary L. Schapiro , who has been selected by President-elect Barack Obama to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlined an ambitious agenda on Thursday that included tighter regulation of hedge funds and credit rating agencies. She proposed greater federal oversight of insurance companies, which are now largely under the purview of the states, and of credit default swaps , the unregulated financial instruments that many say contributed to the market crisis. Ms. Schapiro signaled that she was considering the reversal of major decisions under the Bush administration that have made it harder for the staff to bring enforcement cases. She expressed reservations about the timetable recently approved by the commission to move American corporations toward adopting international accounting standards. And she promised to quickly re-examine whether the commission should restore a market regulation known as the uptick rule, which makes it harder for investors to make bets on declining stock prices. Ms. Schapiro’s heavy reliance on regulation marked a sharply different tone from her time as a Wall Street regulator, particularly in recent years, when she has said in speeches that she would work closely with industry to reduce what she had criticized as overly burdensome regulation. It remains to be seen how quickly she will be able to fulfill her agenda. While the current crisis provides political opportunities to push for change, many of her proposals were similar to those made years ago by a former S.E.C. chairman, William H. Donaldson, that were successfully challenged by major corporate and Wall Street interests and by other Republican commissioners. Appearing at her confirmation hearing before a Senate banking committee that warmly embraced her selection, Ms. Schapiro had no difficulty rebuffing the tepid criticism raised by some senators that she had been a “safe choice” and that her career record as a regulator indicated she had not taken on many significant or large cases. Cognizant of the political dynamics that have taken hold of a capital grappling with a global financial crisis, Ms. Schapiro vowed to move swiftly to reinvigorate a deeply demoralized enforcement program and overhaul the regulatory apparatus. “There are many reasons for this crisis — and one of them is that our regulatory system has not kept pace with the markets and the needs of investors,” Ms. Schapiro testified. “It is precisely during times like this that we need an S.E.C. that is the investor’s advocate — that has the staff, the will and the resources necessary to move with great urgency to bring transparency and accountability to all corners of the marketplace, to vigorously prosecute those who have broken the law and cheated investors, and to modernize our country’s regulatory system to match the realities of today’s global, interdependent markets.” Ms. Schapiro is the top official at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, which oversees Wall Street regulation on behalf of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Finra was created from the merger two years ago of the regulatory arms of the New York Stock Exchange and NASD, which she had led after leaving government in 1996. She dismissed concerns that both Finra and NASD had failed to detect the Ponzi scheme linked to Bernard Madoff Securities, saying that neither agency ever received any tips and that any enforcement shortcomings were a reflection of the “stovepipe approach” to the oversight of Wall Street. She also rejected concerns that Finra had often fined small companies for minor violations rather than taking on larger companies and bigger problems. “I have never been afraid to go after people who I feel violated the public trust,” she said. “There are absolutely no sacred cows.” She said she was committed to overhauling the enforcement program and would reconsider procedures adopted during the Bush administration that make it more difficult for the enforcement staff to bring cases or levy large fines. She also said that she would create a more coordinated process to handle tips and whistle-blowers and that she would revive a risk assessment office proposed by Mr. Donaldson to study the markets for future risks. Even as they criticized current regulators for failing to detect many of the problems of Wall Street, Democrats and Republicans on the committee rushed to support Ms. Schapiro’s nomination. “You’re extremely well qualified for this job,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the chairman of the committee. Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the banking committee, said that she “would bring solid experience to the table during a time of economic and regulatory uncertainty.” In response to questions, Ms. Schapiro indicated that she would be facing many of the same issues that had frustrated predecessors. She said she supported changing the regulations to require the registration of all hedge funds. That proposal, approved by a deeply divided commission under the leadership of Mr. Donaldson, was ultimately reversed by a federal appeals court and opposed by the Bush administration. In another area where corporate interests have successfully blocked changes in recent years, she said that she would reopen the debate over whether to make it easier for dissenting shareholders to propose and elect a slate of directors. And she said she was committed to quickly examining whether to restore the uptick rule, which was repealed by the commission in 2007. The rule prohibits short-sellers, who borrow stock and sell it in the hope of making a profit when it declines, from trading on shares when they are declining.

Securities and Exchange Commission
Senate
Schapiro Mary L
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry


AECOM Buys Tishman Construction in a Global Move

Abstract: An engineering and design firm, the AECOM Technology Corporation , said on Wednesday that it had acquired the privately held Tishman Construction Corporation. The acquisition, for $245 million in cash and stock, will expand AECOM’s global presence in high-margin construction program management business. AECOM said the cash payment would include proceeds from a recently announced $250 million debt issuance. The high-margin construction and program management market is estimated to be in excess of $100 billion globally, AECOM said. Tishman, a provider of construction management services in the United States and the United Arab Emirates, generated revenue of about $1 billion in 2009, AECOM said. Tishman is currently engaged in a number of projects, including the World Trade Center in New York, AECOM said.

Tishman Construction
AECOM Technology Corporation
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures


Modern Track in Dubai Enters an Old-School New Era

Abstract: As the 6-year-old American gelding Well Armed shot home to win the 2009 Dubai World Cup by a record 14 lengths, he forcefully closed the book on Nad Al Sheba racecourse. Well Armed became the eighth American winner, a run beginning with Cigar’s triumph in the inaugural Dubai Cup in 1996. “It was America in the first, it’s America in the final at Nad Al Sheba … from Cigar to Well Armed,” the race-caller Terry Spargo announced after that last race. Nad Al Sheba was then torn down and replaced by the upscale, modern Meydan Racecourse. It was the beginning of an era on several counts. Among them was that instead of Nad Al Sheba’s sand-based main track, Meydan had a synthetic surface from Tapeta Footings. The synthetic Tapeta tracks, which resemble turf, had been gaining prominence at major racecourses in California and Kentucky, as well as at some in Australia, Europe and South Africa. They were considered safer and were popular for their all-weather capacity. So the Maktoum family that runs Dubai racing decided to follow suit. But Meydan officials had not foreseen a consequence of installing the new surface: a drop in participation by horses from the United States, the only major racing country where the best races are run on dirt. Speed, the essence of American-bred horses, is less dominant on synthetic tracks than on dirt. The only U.S.-based horse to win the World Cup on Meydan’s Tapeta was Animal Kingdom, in 2013. The strapping chestnut was a versatile anomaly, having won the Kentucky Derby on dirt and finishing second in the Breeders’ Cup Mile on turf. But because Australia’s Arrowfield Stud had purchased a majority share in Animal Kingdom before the Dubai race, the Australian national anthem, not the Star-Spangled Banner, was played during the podium presentation. So technically, no American horse has won the Dubai race since Well Armed. From 2010 to 2014, an average of seven horses traveled from the United States for World Cup night at Meydan, compared with an average of 14 in the final five years at Nad Al Sheba. No American horses entered the Dubai World Cup last year, and only three American horses came to run in turf races. “I think it was a big deal that the Americans’ participation petered off significantly over the years,” said Patrick Cummings, who runs the website Dubai Race Night. On the other hand, European horsemen who came to Dubai enjoyed the new course, a surface similar to turf, which their horses race on almost exclusively. With the right horse, trainers could choose between Meydan’s grass or synthetic course. Nonetheless, with American horses largely staying away, Meydan replaced the course before the current racing season with a sand track similar to Nad Al Sheba’s old course. It was the end of a short-lived era in Dubai. In the United States, the tide had already turned against synthetic surfaces. The Santa Anita and Del Mar racetracks in California had reverted to dirt, as did Keeneland in Kentucky. Despite the courses’ outstanding safety records — Santa Anita saw its race-day fatalities more than double after changing from the synthetic surface — several prominent American trainers disliked running on the surfaces, and particularly on those halfway around the world. Keeneland’s change was the biggest blow. Despite record field size, handle, and attendance, the small group of elite breeders who run Keeneland were not enjoying those benefits with expensive horses that were bred for dirt racing. “That is the real reason,” said Bill Casner, Well Armed’s owner. “Horses stay sounder day in and day out by training over a synthetic surface that stays flat.” Two of those elite breeders and owners, Claiborne Farm and Adele Dilschneider, sent over Lea for the 2015 Dubai World Cup on Saturday, the culmination of the Dubai World Cup Carnival, which started Jan. 8. Along with California Chrome, the American horse of the year , a flight transported 14 American horses last week, the largest contingent since Meydan opened. The group would have been even larger had there not been a few high-profile, injury-related defections. Since the Carnival began in January, Meydan’s new track has staged 75 races, but despite the small sample size a few themes emerged. Average field size from the Tapeta surface to dirt declined from 12.29 to 10.85. European involvement generally declined, but there were more Scandinavian runners. Predictability shot up: Of those 75 races, 21 horses won more than once. Few horses came from well behind to win — a feature of synthetic tracks. This season was the least competitive in Meydan’s short history, as five trainers won 74 percent of the races. Last season, 30 trainers had winners at Meydan, compared to just 19 this season. Doug Watson, one of the five dominant trainers, was ecstatic to see the surface change. He said he had never been able to predict how his horses, which he trains on a sand course near Meydan, would handle the Tapeta. He had never finished lower than second in the trainer standings until the move to Meydan, where it happened in three seasons. “I’d go over there thinking, ‘These horses are flying at home, we have four chances tonight,”’ Watson said. “And you’d run eighth, seventh, sixth, and last. You’d be scratching your head, and you couldn’t figure out how they could run that bad.” At first, the Tapeta surface was gray, but after five years it had turned a deep, obsidian-like black. Watson believes the desert heat, which in the summer can reach 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, played a major part in the decision to remove the synthetic surface. “I think it just broke that track down so much,” he said. “It cooked all summer. They put new fibers in every year, but I think it just wasn’t holding up with the heat. It does rain every so often, but there’s no use for an all-weather track here. It’s one weather: sunny and warm.” Watson said most local trainers welcomed the change, as did handicappers. And as Cummings, of the Dubai Race Night site, noted, “the all-weather messes with our longstanding mentality of assessing horse performance and assessing the quality of a race.” “We have all this history on dirt and all this history on grass,” he added. “I think those challenges made the decision a lot easier.”

Dubai
Kentucky
Kentucky Derby
Horse racing


Managing the Present in Order to Protect the Future

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla. — Joba Chamberlain tossed a baseball over and over on a sunny Monday at the Yankees ’ minor league complex here. His valuable right arm was not wrapped in gauze. He did not have a pitching coach inquiring how he felt after each casual throw. Chamberlain tried to act like every other pitcher. Of course, he is not. Whatever the Yankees accomplish in 2008 will probably revolve around what Chamberlain, Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, their three young starters, can do in their first full major league seasons. The Yankees have significant expectations for all three, but they also have rules governing the workloads that will produce those results. Manager Joe Girardi said last week that the Yankees had already decided on innings limits for Chamberlain, Kennedy and Hughes. Girardi would not divulge those numbers, but jokingly said he would tell reporters when the pitchers were “getting close” to their restrictions. Girardi has about as much chance of doing that as he does of sharing the information with the Red Sox. “We will do everything we can to protect these kids,” Girardi said. “It’s the same thing we did in Florida.” When Girardi managed the Florida Marlins in 2006, they became the first team to have four rookies with at least 10 victories in the same season. Aníbal Sánchez threw a no-hitter and won 10 games, Josh Johnson and Scott Olsen won a dozen games apiece, and Ricky Nolasco won 11. They were all 23 or younger, just like Hughes, Kennedy and Chamberlain. But a year later, Sánchez had surgery for a torn labrum, Johnson had elbow surgery, Nolasco missed most of the season with an elbow injury, and Olsen’s earned run average increased by nearly two runs a game. Girardi, who had a turbulent relationship with the Marlins’ management and was dismissed after the 2006 season, has heard the belated criticism about how he handled the pitchers. He called it unwarranted. Since it is Girardi’s job to protect and guide the Yankees’ elite young pitchers, his experience with the youthful staff in Florida is noteworthy. Did he overuse the Marlins’ pitchers and contribute to three serious injuries? Or were the injuries coincidental? Girardi insisted that he was diligent about protecting the pitchers, estimating that there were “about 14 or 15 games” in which they threw 110 or more pitches. He excluded Dontrelle Willis from this analysis because he said Willis, a former 22-game winner, was in his fourth season and was more durable. “I would tell anyone to check what we did with them,” Girardi said. A review of pitch counts showed that Girardi’s recollection of how often Sánchez, Johnson, Olsen and Nolasco reached 110 or more pitches was accurate. The four did it 13 times. They combined to go to 100 or more in 40 starts. None of them started a game on short rest, although Johnson was once used after an 82-minute rain delay. When Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins’ owner, was reached by telephone Monday, he declined to comment on Girardi. “I don’t think any of those pitchers would tell you they were overworked,” said Mike Harkey, the Yankees’ bullpen coach, who was the Marlins’ bullpen coach in 2006. “If anything, they weren’t used as much as they could have been.” With Joe Torre as the manager last season, the Yankees had their Joba Rules, which limited pitch counts and called for scheduled days off for Chamberlain. Those rules will be in place this season and will also apply to Kennedy and Hughes. Girardi said the organization, not only him, would decide how to best employ and protect the pitchers. “In my mind, it’s thinking of ways to be creative to keep them amongst their innings,” Girardi said. Girardi said teams usually did not want pitchers to throw more than 30 to 40 innings above what they did in the previous year. Kennedy logged 165 1/3 innings in the major and minor leagues last season. Hughes pitched 110 1/3 innings at both levels, but he was also sidelined for three months. Chamberlain worked 112 1/3 innings over all, but he was switched to the bullpen with the Yankees. He is preparing to be a starter this season. “I think we’re starting it as a starter and just going to go from there and see what happens,” Chamberlain said. Chamberlain acknowledged that it was “kind of frustrating” to have limits as a pitcher. But Chamberlain also noted that he knew the tale of Generation K, the three Mets starters in the mid-1990s who had substantial workloads early in their careers, then fizzled. Jason Isringhausen salvaged his career as a closer; Paul Wilson and Bill Pulsipher never realized their potential. “Being 22, you’re young enough to know you can do it,” Chamberlain said. “But you’re also kind of mature enough to know that, ‘Hey, I’d rather have 10 or 15 great years than one or two O.K. years.’ I’ve got to just take it and be patient and learn and try to make the most of what I’ve got.” Then Chamberlain shoved the focus off him and onto the team, continuing to sound more mature than young. “My end goal is to get No. 27,” Chamberlain said, referring to a Yankees 27th World Series championship. “It’s not about how many innings I throw.”

Baseball
Girardi Joe
New York Yankees
Chamberlain Joba
Hughes Phil
Kennedy Ian


Police Question Olmert in Possible New Criminal Inquiry

Abstract: JERUSALEM — The prime minister of Israel , Ehud Olmert , was questioned by police investigators on Friday in connection with what appeared to be a new criminal inquiry. The police revealed nothing about the subject of the investigation, and all other details were subject to a court-imposed gag order. Investigators, led by the chief of the national fraud unit, arrived at Mr. Olmert’s official residence in the morning and stayed just over an hour, said Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman. Three other criminal investigations involving Mr. Olmert are under way. They all relate to events in the period before he became prime minister in 2006, but while he was serving in government. One inquiry focuses on his purchase of an apartment in a historic Jerusalem building in 2004. Mr. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, is suspected of having received a significant discount in return for helping the development company that was renovating the building to obtain special building permits from city hall. The other investigations focus on Mr. Olmert’s activities when he served as minister of industry and trade and revolve around suspicions of breach of trust. Mr. Olmert has always denied any wrongdoing. His office said on Friday that he had answered all the investigators’ questions and that he would continue to cooperate with the inquiry. The questioning of the prime minister on Friday was carried out with unusual urgency. The police request for an hourlong interview with Mr. Olmert was received on Wednesday, the prime minister’s office said in a statement. According to the Israeli news media, the police insisted on carrying out the interrogation within 48 hours, and won the attorney general’s approval. Mr. Olmert, a generally unpopular prime minister, has been dogged by investigations during his term in office, but enjoyed something of a respite in recent months. In November, the police recommended closing yet another inquiry involving Mr. Olmert and his role, as finance minister, in the 2005 sale of a bank, citing insufficient grounds for an indictment. On Friday, critics called for Mr. Olmert to suspend himself. Shelly Yacimovich, a legislator from the Labor Party, a major partner in the governing coalition, said the scope of charges against the prime minister was unprecedented in Israel. “It has been proven beyond any doubt that the prime minister can’t be under serial investigations and also suspected of crimes and also lead the country,” she told Israel Radio.

Police
Israel
Finances
Olmert Ehud
Politics and Government
Courts


Bondholders to See Tribune Documents

Abstract: WILMINGTON, Del. — Some bondholders of Tribune Company are being granted access to legal documents to investigate the debt-laden sale of the media company in 2007 to the real estate investor Sam Zell . Tribune and a committee of unsecured creditors, some of whom were the architects of the buyout, agreed late on Wednesday to provide the requested documents to the bondholders. Tribune creditors blame the leveraged buyout for driving the Tribune into bankruptcy a year after the sale. The Law Debenture Trust Company, which says it represents 18 percent of Tribune bondholders, will now have immediate access to previously denied documents and e-mail messages related to the sale, according to the Trust’s lead lawyer, David S. Rosner. “The overall point is that we wanted to get discovery to assess the claims arising from the leveraged buyout,” said Mr. Rosner, of the New York firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman. As a result of the agreement, the chief judge of the Delaware Bankruptcy Court, Kevin J. Carey, removed the issue from the court’s schedule for Thursday. Lawyers for the bondholders will look for evidence of a breach of fiduciary duty and fraudulent conveyance to support their assertions that Tribune’s banks, advisers, and two shareholder foundations may have placed company property beyond the reach of creditors. “If the bank debt of $11 billion that resulted from the L.B.O. is knocked out through litigation,” Mr. Rosner said in an interview, “that will likely enable the bondholders to be paid because there will be less claims and more value.” Tribune, which owns 16 newspapers, 26 television and radio stations and the Chicago Cubs, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2008, declaring assets of $7.6 billion and debt of nearly $13 billion. Objections to the pending sale of the Cubs to the Ricketts family, the owners of TD Ameritrade, are scheduled to be heard at Thursday’s hearing. A spate of high-dollar, high-leverage deals in 2006 and 2007 put hundreds of American newspapers, including many of the biggest, under new ownership. Mr. Zell’s Tribune takeover was the biggest of those deals, and it was the first to land in bankruptcy.

Tribune Co
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Zell Samuel


Honoring the Hands of a Pianist and a Survivor

Abstract: Neither index finger works anymore, not a good thing for a woman whose life is devoted to the piano. Then again, those fingers are more than 103 years old. At that age, some parts are bound to give out. So Alice Herz-Sommer copes. A couple of immobile fingers are not about to keep her from her daily routine of two and a half hours at the piano, starting off with a Bach prelude. “I play with eight fingers,” Ms. Herz-Sommer said by phone from her apartment in London. “I change the fingering. But I manage. When you want something very, very, very much, you are able to do it. You have to be strong-willed, ja?” As that “ja” suggests, her English bears hints of German, the language she spoke at home while growing up in Prague a century ago. But her voice bears only strength, without a quaver to suggest this is a woman who will turn 104 in three weeks. That she is strong-willed is a given. Only the strong, or the lucky, survived Nazi concentration camps. Theresienstadt, near Prague, was no exception. Ms. Herz-Sommer was one of the relatively few who made it out of there alive. Theresienstadt, also known as Terezin, was not a typical camp. In disproportionate numbers, the Jews herded there from 1941 to 1945 were musicians, writers and composers. They put on concerts and plays, and the Nazis used them as propaganda, trying to show the gullible that life was beautiful for these Jews. In fact, Theresienstadt was a place of starvation and disease, and a transit station for those sent on to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps. Of the roughly 140,000 people who entered Theresienstadt, only 17,000 survived. Of 15,000 children, about 100 made it. Ms. Herz-Sommer, an accomplished pianist, arrived there in 1943 with her husband, Leopold Sommer, and their son, Raphael. Like other artists, she played for time. “It was the greatest challenge that can be,” she said, recalling her more than 100 concerts there. “I was sitting for hours, day and night, and practiced and worked on it. Chopin I played very often. Actually, they saved my life, the études by Chopin.” “The people who came to these concerts were old and desolate and ill,” she said. “They came every evening. It gave them the force. The music was our food. This I can say.” She shared her memories by phone because she could not make it to a free concert attended by 600 New Yorkers on Saturday night at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The concert celebrated her approaching 104th birthday, and paid homage to Theresienstadt’s doomed. A chamber orchestra of freelance musicians and members of the Oratorio Society of New York performed works that were played at the camp: Mozart, Mendelssohn, Puccini, Verdi, Bruch. There were readings about Theresienstadt by the actors Lynn Redgrave and George Hearn. A Mendelssohn concerto exquisitely performed by a 13-year-old violinist, Sirena Huang, brought down the house. The program was put together by Caroline Stoessinger, an artist in residence at John Jay. She was haunted by Theresienstadt, she said, even as a girl reared in the Ozark Mountains, far removed from the Holocaust. “I don’t really know how it all came about,” Ms. Stoessinger said. “You know how it is. You find a piece of paper, or one sentence in a book, and you worry about it and puzzle about it.” Music played at a concentration camp may seem odd for a college whose focus is law enforcement. Not really, said Jeremy Travis, the John Jay president. People need to remind themselves constantly how those who abuse authority can go wrong — terribly wrong, monstrously wrong. “WE have students who study genocide, who think about the role of governments and laws in promoting discrimination and hatred,” Mr. Travis said. “There are many ways to approach those topics. One of them is by reading history. One is also by listening to the music performed at Theresienstadt.” One is also by remembering. Ms. Herz-Sommer remembers. She remembers how her husband, taken from Theresienstadt, died at Dachau. She remembers how she survived with Raphael, who became a cellist and died in 2001 at 65. She remembers how she moved to Israel, then relocated to London in the 1980s. And of course she remembers the music. “Especially Beethoven,” she said. “He’s a miracle. Beethoven is my religion. I am Jewish, with Beethoven as religion. Beethoven is a fighter. He gives me the faith to live and to say to me: Life is wonderful and worthwhile, even when it is difficult.”

Nazi Policies Toward Jews and Minorities


Senator John Cornyn in Shift to Right, Some Observers Say

Abstract: After more than a decade representing blood-red Texas in the United States Senate, John Cornyn finds himself in an unusual spot: burnishing his conservative credentials. One would think the senior Texas senator’s reputation would be secure: Mr. Cornyn, who has ascended to minority whip, spent two election cycles as the chairman of the Senate’s Republican campaign fund-raising arm, and National Journal last week ranked him second in its 2012 list of the most conservative senators. But with the departure of Kay Bailey Hutchison, his more moderate fellow Texas Republican, and the arrival of the state’s unabashed new junior senator, the Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, Mr. Cornyn seems to be shifting discernibly right, as evidenced, Republican observers say, by his recent positions on everything from cabinet appointees to a bipartisan immigration plan. Mr. Cornyn’s aides say that this perception is not reality and that anyone looking at the last few weeks rather than the last 11 years is missing a solid conservative voting record. “Senator Cornyn has relentlessly fought for a conservative agenda — first in Austin, and now in Washington,” Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cornyn, wrote in an e-mail, adding that Mr. Cornyn “is proud to have Ted Cruz in the Senate.” Since New Year’s Day, when Mr. Cornyn voted for the tax bill to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff and Mr. Cruz, who had not yet been sworn in, said he would have voted against it, the Texas senators have not parted ways on any legislation of note. It may be, some observers suggest, that Mr. Cornyn is feeling liberated after years of seeking middle ground with Ms. Hutchison. “Hutchison was putting more pressure on him to vote in ways that maybe weren’t always in concert with his principles,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant and former press secretary for Ms. Hutchison. It may also be that Mr. Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, who is up for re-election in 2014, is an astute observer of his party’s shifting sands. Image Senator John Cornyn, center, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, at the Capitol in Washington. Credit Christopher Gregory/The New York Times As the leader of the National Republican Senatorial Committee , Mr. Cornyn watched Tea Party candidates upset Republican incumbents in each of the last two primary cycles. While those in more conservative states won their elections, others lost to Democrats who might have been ineffective against more moderate opponents — leading establishment Republicans to blame them for bungling an opportunity to gain control of the Senate. In Texas, Mr. Cornyn saw Mr. Cruz snatch a Senate seat out from under Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the deep-pocketed Republican who most believed had the 2012 race locked up. Although Mr. Cornyn says he is prepared for a primary challenge, his prospects of getting “Dewhursted,” as some Texas Republicans have taken to calling it, appear slim. “It’s impossible to do to Cornyn what’s been done to Dewhurst,” Mr. Mackowiak said. For one thing, there is no obvious Cruz-like challenger waiting to challenge him; thus far, he has one primary opponent, Erick Wyatt, a military veteran from Rockport, a self-described “constitutional conservative” who is aligned with the Tea Party. Nor is there early evidence of a Democratic candidate likely to give Mr. Cornyn a run for his money in the general election. For another, Mr. Cornyn’s seniority, national fund-raising connections and Senate leadership post are valuable assets that make him less vulnerable to the rumblings of the far-right interest groups that called for his head after his reluctant vote for the fiscal cliff deal. Since then, both Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Cruz voted against Senator John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state, notable because they were two of just three senators, all Republicans, to do so. Mr. Cornyn, who has voted against several of President Obama’s nominees, said Mr. Kerry had a “long history of liberal positions,” while Mr. Cruz said he had a “less-than-vigorous defense” of national security. The two are taking a hard line on a bipartisan blueprint for an immigration overhaul that includes a path to citizenship, saying that securing the border should be the priority. They both voted against the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, though their rationales for doing so were different. Mr. Cruz said that it was a states’ rights issue; Mr. Cornyn said a provision about tribal courts violated the Constitution. And they have both been major players in efforts to block the former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense. Mr. Cornyn, an early opponent of Mr. Hagel’s nomination, led the charge to ask the president to withdraw the nomination. Mr. Cruz made national headlines for his aggressive, pointed questioning of Mr. Hagel. When Mr. Cruz was asked whether he thought he was having an effect on Mr. Cornyn’s politics, he said, “John Cornyn and I are working together very, very closely, and I think Texas is well served by having two senators work hand in hand to fight for conservative principles.” Debra Medina, a Texas Tea Party activist and former candidate for governor, said those who share her political beliefs distrust Mr. Cornyn. But while some politicians will never get a pass from the Tea Party, she added, “Cornyn is not by any stretch in that category.”

John Cornyn
Republicans
Ted Cruz
Tea Party movement
Senate races
State Legislature elections