Letter: A Place for Dirt Bikers

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Re "For Dirt Bikers in the City, There Is No Place to Ride" (news article, Nov. 19): I am a motorcyclist in New York City, and I deeply appreciate that you have written about this issue. Off-road motorcycling is one of the most common ways that riders in the United States get started. For folks who live outside major cities, their first experience with riding is usually in their own backyards, or a farm field.

Because of our geography, New Yorkers are denied this traditional on-ramp to riding. Unless you have enough time and money to make a two-hour-plus trip to Connecticut, or New Jersey's Pine Barrens, there is no legal place to ride on New York City park land!

Riding a motorcycle is a thrilling activity — a family activity — that teaches balance, stamina and agility, as well as stewardship of the environment, civic participation and fair play. Learning to ride a motorcycle on the dirt is safer than learning on the street, too.

In the five boroughs of New York City, there are 12 full golf courses, five horseback riding trails and 17 skateboard parks. Surely we have room enough for one place to legally ride off-highway vehicles.

JESSE ERLBAUM
Forest Hills, Queens, Nov. 20, 2013

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Letter: Alzheimer’s Disease

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To the Editor:

Re "Confronting the Specter of Alzheimer's" (letters, Nov. 20):

Alzheimer's is a very serious disease indeed. But without a treatment plan for the disease, people are debating whether or not to get the "Alzheimer's test." But either way, you must know if you have the disease in case a treatment plan or even a cure is found.

Now, not everyone might want to know if he has this awful disease, but for most it is definitely a must to get this test. Every parent wants her children to be healthy, and most parents want their children, no matter how old, to get this Alzheimer's test, and they should provide one.

BRITTAN BRESNAHAN
Dallas, Nov. 21, 2013

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Letter: Tale of Two Midwest States

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"Right vs. Left in the Midwest," by Lawrence R. Jacobs (Sunday Review, Nov. 24), comparing the divergent political paths of Minnesota and Wisconsin, comes at a time when more empirical evidence is needed in national policy making.

Since 2010, Minnesota has been carrying out more Democratic-driven policies while Wisconsin has been held behind by a "rigid anti-tax dogma." The last three years have begun to show the consequences of each path, as Minnesota creates more jobs, better schools and covers more residents with health care.

This is practically the list of topics that are continually fought over using primarily political beliefs in Washington.

Mr. Jacobs is spot on in his call for more "evidence and common sense" in our political debates, especially when American livelihoods and quality of life are at stake. The comparison of the two states shows that the results of good governance go beyond political ideology, an idea that voters should always keep in mind.

JAMES LEY
Washington, Nov. 25, 2013

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Letter: Art Confiscated by Nazis

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To the Editor:

Re "Enduring Nazi Law Impedes Recovery of Art" (Arts pages, Nov. 20):

Using Nazi-era laws to justify the refusal to return artworks seized by the Nazis is hypocrisy on a grand scale.

Everything the Nazis did was codified in German law. Whether killing Jews or confiscating cultural works deemed a danger to society, it was all "legal." What's really at work here is the sheer inconvenience this moral dilemma presents to the billionaire investors who buy and sell art.

Any suggestion that Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer, legally inherited the confiscated works is absurd. It's called trafficking in stolen property, and no passage of time can erase that sin.

MICHAEL HOLLAND
Nashville, Nov. 20, 2013

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Letters: Common Core and Coddled Kids

To the Editor:

Re "Are Kids Too Coddled?," by Frank Bruni (column, Nov. 24):

The problem with Common Core is not coddled kids; it is high-stakes testing. And the anxiety that kids feel is not from their parents but rather from their teachers, who fear for their jobs.

We can have high academic standards without high anxiety. In Finland, which is the best performing education system in the world, the first high-stakes test that kids take is the high school matriculation exam, which they have between two and four years to prepare for — their choice — and can retake if they are not satisfied with the results. Kids are assessed continuously in class, and get feedback that urges them to do better, but it is not high stakes. Grades are played down.

If we want Common Core to succeed, we have to dial back the high-stakes testing, and test only sample populations every few years. Otherwise, what we are going to get is just more teaching to the test, squeezing out of the curriculum everything that is not on the test and undoing whatever value Common Core may have.

TONY WAGNER
Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 24, 2013

The writer is a fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the author of "The Global Achievement Gap."

To the Editor:

As one of the "white suburban moms" whom Education Secretary Arne Duncan has so caustically waved off, I can emphatically state that I'm not upset because my child isn't "brilliant," nor have I raised him to be "coddled." I'm upset because the implementation of the Common Core in New York State has been an unmitigated disaster, which has resulted in wholly unnecessary stress and disruption in our classrooms.

Also, while I commend the goals of the Common Core standards, the approach seems to be that we must throw out everything that works and start anew, even in high-performing districts that send the vast majority of their students on to college. This one-size-fits-all mentality will end up costing school districts many dollars to implement, funds that we just don't have.

I fear that this grand experiment — like so many others before it (remember No Child Left Behind?) — will fail, leaving districts disrupted and in financial disarray, worse off than when we started.

NATALIE BARRY
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Nov. 24, 2013

To the Editor:

Kudos to Frank Bruni for an excellent counterpoint to the hysteria surrounding Common Core. I acknowledge that the rollout of this initiative was suboptimal. I would also support a postponement in the recording of test scores until the rollout is considered adequate. However, the concept of national educational standards is valid, and long overdue.

It's a national embarrassment where we as a country compare educationally with others. We have a problem when about 50 percent of incoming college freshmen need remedial courses. Students need to be better prepared. This is an objective of Common Core.

I grew up, survived and prospered in an era when students were left back if they did not get passing grades, not everyone made each team and, certainly, not everyone received trophies for sports attendance. In the "olden days," we had realistic expectations and understood our skills and limitations. This is no longer the case.

We now reward subpar performance with good grades and trophies. Common Core is seen as a threat because it upsets the equilibrium.

RICHARD CWIAKALA
Wappingers Falls, N.Y., Nov. 24, 2013

To the Editor:

Frank Bruni defines Common Core as "a laudable set of guidelines that emphasize analytical thinking over rote memorization." There is little that is laudable about holding students to academic standards that are patently inappropriate. They require abstract thinking, multi-step solutions to math problems and detailed analysis of text before young minds are developmentally capable of such tasks.

The Common Core teaching materials have been riddled with errors and often available only weeks or months after the start of the school year. Is it coddling kids to expect that teachers receive well-written and accurate curriculums before implementation and testing?

New York State education officials expected a 30 percentage point drop in the number of students who would pass the Common Core assessments for third to eighth graders. Remarkably, their prediction was right on the money. An elementary and middle school test with a pass rate lower than that of the New York State Bar Exam is inherently unreasonable.

Mr. Bruni says that some aspects of school should be "relatively mirthless." A fourth grader who can't participate in music, art or recess because she now attends a remedial class as a result of a low score on a standardized test aligned to the Common Core can tell you all about "mirthless."

JANE GREENHALGH-WEINKRANTZ
Centerport, N.Y., Nov. 24, 2013

The writer is a high school English teacher.

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Editorial: Government in Slow Motion

Last week, in a fit of fury after they lost the ability to filibuster President Obama's nominees, several Congressional Republicans threatened to retaliate by slowing things down on Capitol Hill. Democrats "will have trouble in a lot of areas because there's going to be a lot of anger," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, specifically warning that a United Nations disability treaty was now in danger of being rejected for the second time.

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It's hard to see how Republicans could slow things down more than they already have for the last several years. Yes, they can prevent committees from meeting and add days of wasted time to every nomination and bill. Just after the filibuster vote, in fact, Senate Republicans refused a routine request for unanimous consent to approve several of the president's uncontested nominees.

But the larger business of governing is already being cast aside. As Politico recently reported, the current Congress has only enacted 49 laws, the fewest since 1947. That's a mark of pride to Tea Party nihilists, but, for the rest of the country, which expects action on fundamentals like jobs and immigration, it's a mark of shame.

When lawmakers left town for the Thanksgiving vacation, they missed their deadline to complete a farm bill. House Republicans want to use the bill to cut food stamps by $40 billion over a decade, which would end benefits for at least three million people during each of those years. Democrats are refusing to let this happen (though, unfortunately, they have proposed their own $4 billion cut). The resulting stalemate could drive up the price of milk.

Republicans continued their filibuster of the annual defense authorization bill after Democrats resisted their attempts to add unrelated amendments imposing new sanctions on Iran and repealing health care reform. The bill has been passed every year for a half-century, but this year could break that streak.

The House has refused to take up important legislation passed by the Senate to reform the immigration system and punish workplace discrimination against gay and lesbian employees. In addition, more than 1.3 million people will lose unemployment insurance at the end of the year, and the House has shown no interest in renewing it.

The most immediate priority for Congress is to reach a budget agreement by mid-December, to relieve the sequester cuts that have decimated so many important programs and now threaten the Pentagon's readiness beginning next year. Negotiators from both chambers have had more than a month to come up with a solution, but Representative Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, has resisted the most obvious one: ending a group of tax loopholes for the very rich and using the money to replace the worst aspects of the sequester. Instead, he simply wants to make other cuts, or raise fees on purchases like airline tickets and duck stamps that affect many people of modest means, thereby protecting high-end tax shelters.

The House is back next week, but the Senate will remain on vacation, leaving only a few workdays before the deadline of Dec. 13 to reach an agreement. Without one, the government will have to be paid for with yet another short-term continuing resolution — a symbol of dysfunction that seems to have no end.

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Editorial: Ukraine Backs Down

It is difficult to sympathize in any way with Ukraine's corrupt and cynical president, Viktor Yanukovich, but the choice before him was indeed nasty. To sign an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union was to invite brutal Russian economic punishment, which Ukraine's badly suffering economy is in no shape to absorb. Europe could only offer medium- to long-term advantages. Not signing, however, inevitably meant protests in Ukraine, whose population has consistently expressed support for European integration. Sure enough, tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets as soon as their government announced last week that it was suspending negotiations with the European Union.

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Thus has Russia won the tug of war over Ukraine. Or has it? Not if Russia's goal is to find its place in the democratic and civilized world, as it proclaimed it wanted when it overthrew Communist rule 22 years ago.

The Kremlin's strong-arm tactics against Ukraine and other former republics seeking closer ties with Europe may be popular with those of President Vladimir Putin's countrymen who still rankle at the loss of empire, but they strongly reinforce the image of Mr. Putin as an unreconstructed cold warrior who will stop at nothing to retain influence over what Moscow calls the "near abroad."

His government has said, disingenuously, that talks with the European Union can continue, with Russia's participation. But Mr. Putin's real objective is to bring Ukraine and several other former Soviet republics into a customs union, and then into a Eurasian Union, with Moscow. The Kremlin portrays this as an alternative to the European Union, but it is not. The European Union is a voluntary partnership based on shared democratic values and economic rules. Mr. Putin's Eurasian Union would be a coerced association with no standards of behavior except for fealty to Moscow.

Mr. Yanukovich is an unsavory leader, a fact he has displayed in his refusal to release his rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, from her blatantly political incarceration. Europe had made Ms. Tymoshenko's release an unofficial condition for any agreement, but as Mr. Yanukovich backed away from the deal, his party in Parliament voted down several bills that would have set Ms. Tymoshenko free.

At the summit meeting this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, the European Union should make absolutely clear that its doors remain open to Ukraine. The association agreement is negotiated and ready for signing any time Mr. Yanukovich or his successor finds the courage to defy Russia. And until then, Europe should seek ways of easing Ukraine's severe economic tribulations. That would show that it does not play by Moscow rules, and that moving Westward need not carry an unbearable price tag.

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Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Rooting for Failure

I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my family's insurance. Of course, I live in Washington State, which has a very competitive market, a superbly functioning website and no Koch-brothers-sponsored saboteurs trying to discourage people from getting health care.

California is just as good. It's enrolling more than 2,000 people a day. New York is humming as well. And Kentucky, it's the gold standard now: More than 56,000 people have signed up for new health care coverage -- enough to fill a stadium in Louisville.

This is terrible news, and cannot be allowed to continue. If there's even a small chance that, say, half of the 50 million or so Americans currently without heath care might get the same thing that every other advanced country offers its citizens, that would be a disaster.

But not to worry. The failure movement is active and very well funded. You probably know about the creepy Uncle Sam character in ads financed by the Koch brothers. Sicko Sam is seen leering over a woman on her back in a hospital exam room, her legs in stirrups. This same guy is now showing up on college campuses, trying to get young people to opt out of health care. On some campuses, he plies students with free booze and pizza -- swee-eeet!

The Republican Party started a failure campaign earlier this year, but then the strategy got sidetracked in a coercive government shutdown that cost us all $24 billion or so. With the disastrous rollout of the federal exchange, Republicans now smell blood. A recent memo outlined a far-reaching, multilevel assault on the Affordable Care Act. Horror stories -- people losing their lousy health insurance -- will be highlighted, and computer snafus celebrated.

Ron Paul, the nuttier of the two political Pauls, recently suggested to a crowd in Virginia that "nullification" of the health care law might be the best way to kill it. I'm not sure what he meant by that, but it sounds illegal.

It's hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly?

Of course not. But for the entity of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.

I get it. This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama's presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans).

Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed -- that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?

Does this mean we throw in the towel, and return to a status quo in which insurance companies routinely cancel policies, deny health care to people with pre-existing conditions and have their own death panel treatment for patients who reach a cap in medical benefits?

The Republican plan would do just that, because they have no plan but to crush the nation's fledgling experiment. Sometimes they bring up vouchers, or tort reform, or some combination of catchphrases. Here was Sarah Palin, who is to articulate reason what Mr. Magoo is to vision, on the Republican alternative, as she told Matt Lauer:

"The plan is to allow those things that have been proposed over many years to reform a health care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there's more competition, there's less tort-reform threat, there's less trajectory of the cost increases. And those plans have been proposed over and over. And what thwarts those plans? It's the far left."

Yes, it is a big and legitimate news story, for a presidency built on technical expertise, that the federal exchange is not working as promised. Ditto Obama's vow that people could keep their bottom-feeder health care policies.

But where were the news conferences, the Fox News alerts, the parading of people who couldn't get their lifesaving cancer treatments under the old system? Where was the media attention when thousands of people were routinely dumped once they got sick? When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy -- medical debt?

All of that is what we had before. And all of that is what we will return to if some version of the Affordable Care Act is not made workable. Republicans have a decent chance, in next year's elections, of killing the dream of progressive presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt. But they shouldn't count on it. What's going against them, or any party invested in failure, is that Americans are inherently optimistic. That alone may be enough to save Obamacare.

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Room for Debate: How Will AIDS Be Eradicated?

In the war on H.I.V., we have seen successes in some African nations and stubborn patterns of new infection in developed nations like the U.S.

Around the world, there are obstacles to prevention and treatment. How will they be overcome?

Read the Discussion »

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Op-Ed Columnist: Obamacare’s Secret Success

The law establishing Obamacare was officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And the "affordable" bit wasn't just about subsidizing premiums. It was also supposed to be about "bending the curve" — slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs.

Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn't real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that "the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending." But such expert views were largely ignored.

So, how's it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?

The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic.

O.K., the obligatory caveats. First of all, we don't know how long the good news will last. Health costs in the United States slowed dramatically in the 1990s (although not this dramatically), probably thanks to the rise of health maintenance organizations, but cost growth picked up again after 2000. Second, we don't know for sure how much of the good news is because of the Affordable Care Act.

Still, the facts are striking. Since 2010, when the act was passed, real health spending per capita — that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth — has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn't risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.

What could account for this good news? One obvious answer is the still-depressed economy, which might be causing people to forgo expensive medical care. But this explanation turns out to be problematic in multiple ways. For one thing, the economy had stabilized by 2010, even if the recovery was fairly weak, yet health costs continued to slow. For another, it's hard to see why a weak economy would have more effect in reducing the prices of health services than it has on overall inflation. Finally, Medicare spending shouldn't be affected by the weak economy, yet it has slowed even more dramatically than private spending.

A better story focuses on what appears to be a decline in some kinds of medical innovation — in particular, an absence of expensive new blockbuster drugs, even as existing drugs go off-patent and can be replaced with cheaper generic brands. This is a real phenomenon; it is, in fact, the main reason the Medicare drug program has ended up costing less than originally projected. But since drugs are only about 10 percent of health spending, it can only explain so much.

So what aspects of Obamacare might be causing health costs to slow? One clear answer is the act's reduction in Medicare "overpayments" — mainly a reduction in the subsidies to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage Plans, but also cuts in some provider payments. A less certain but likely source of savings involves changes in the way Medicare pays for services. The program now penalizes hospitals if many of their patients end up being readmitted soon after being released — an indicator of poor care — and readmission rates have, in fact, fallen substantially. Medicare is also encouraging a shift from fee-for-service, in which doctors and hospitals get paid by the procedure, to "accountable care," in which health organizations get rewarded for overall success in improving care while controlling costs.

Furthermore, there's evidence that Medicare savings "spill over" to the rest of the health care system — that when Medicare manages to slow cost growth, private insurance gets cheaper, too.

And the biggest savings may be yet to come. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel with the power to impose cost-saving measures (subject to Congressional overrides) if Medicare spending grows above target, hasn't yet been established, in part because of the near-certainty that any appointments to the board would be filibustered by Republicans yelling about "death panels." Now that the filibuster has been reformed, the board can come into being.

The news on health costs is, in short, remarkably good. You won't hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed. But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected.

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Editorial: More Money to Treat AIDS Abroad

At a time when partisan bickering has crippled Congress, it is encouraging to find agreement on the important issue of curbing the global AIDS epidemic.

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A bipartisan group of 40 senators and representatives has urged President Obama to double the number of people abroad who will be treated for infections with H.I.V., the AIDS virus, by the end of 2016 under an American program that helps foreign governments in poor and low-income countries finance efforts to fight the disease.

The group wants to set a new goal of 12 million people under treatment with antiviral drugs by the end of 2016, double the six million currently under treatment. With no vaccine to prevent AIDS yet available, treatment is an effective way to slow the epidemic because it reduces the risk that an infected person will spread the virus to others.

The group — led by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who is a physician, and Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat of California — includes Senators John McCain, Marco Rubio, Michael Enzi, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, all Republicans. The Democrats who have signed on include Senators Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

It's not clear what the cost of raising the treatment goal might be, but Congress and the Obama administration should cooperate in finding the money, either by reprogramming existing funds or providing additional appropriations. The administration had been seeking, and House and Senate appropriations committees had approved, $4 billion for fiscal year 2014 to support the program helping foreign governments, but the budget battles in Congress make it likely that far less will be available.

The United States also joins other governments and private organizations in financing the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Next week, the fund is scheduled to hold a conference in Washington, at which it hopes to raise $15 billion in pledges from donors to cover the next three years. The United States is by far the biggest contributor to the fund. Other nations need to contribute their fair share.

In the long run, treating infected people before they get sick makes economic sense. It keeps them productive and supporting their families, reduces the cost of caring for those who might otherwise become sick and prevents new infections. It is also the humane thing to do.

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Editorial: Silencing Dissent in Egypt

The military-backed government that has ruled Egypt for the past five months is looking increasingly like the old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak without Mr. Mubarak. In the name of crushing all resistance by the Muslim Brotherhood supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected president ousted by the military in July, Egyptian authorities have now moved to ban most public protests and threaten those who take part in them with jail or heavy fines.

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Egypt's military strongman, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, owes his present power to such protests. Military leaders mostly stood aside in January 2011 when weeks of protest and sit-in vigils at Tahrir Square in Cairo forced Mr. Mubarak to resign. More recently, General Sisi approvingly cited even larger street protests against Mr. Morsi as his main justification for the July 3 military coup. And after that coup, he himself summoned millions of Egyptians into the streets to give advance approval to his violent crackdown on Morsi supporters.

But from now on, it seems, only public demonstrations that support General Sisi and his allies will be tolerated. A new law promulgated Sunday by the figurehead interim president, Adly Mansour, requires all gatherings of more than 10 people to seek advance government approval. It bans overnight sit-ins (like Tahrir Square) and protests at places of worship. Political groups across the spectrum have staged their protests following the end of Friday prayers. The new restrictions also give security forces the right to ban political campaign meetings, a provision that could be used to silence criticism of the Constitution scheduled to be voted on in January.

The Egyptian regime claims that the only opposition to its increasingly repressive rule comes from Muslim Brotherhood die-hards. That has never been the case. As The Times reported on Monday, opposition from the secular left, much of which welcomed Mr. Morsi's downfall, is growing. On Tuesday, riot police beat and harassed a gathering of some of Egypt's best-known human rights activists challenging the new ban on unauthorized demonstrations. With all forms of public dissent now subject to repression, the real level of opposition to the present government will be increasingly hard to judge.

Amid these alarming developments, Washington has struggled to find an effective policy response. The Obama administration was right to suspend the delivery of some American weapons systems to Egypt and to hold up some of this year's planned military aid. Unfortunately, Secretary of State John Kerry then undercut that message against the growing repression by declaring in Cairo that the suspensions were "not a punishment" and that Egypt's transition to democracy seems on track.

The administration has apparently made the calculation that it needs the support of General Sisi and the Egyptian military for its regional security strategy, just as it long believed that it needed Mr. Mubarak. Washington should not let itself get taken in by the Egyptian regime's assurances that its repressive practices are necessary to bring democracy and or maintain stability. Egypt may well be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Mubarak era, but American policy need not be.

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Editorial: The Perils of Polystyrene

Every year New York City residents throw away about 20,000 tons of plastic foam containers or, worse, the peanut-shaped packaging filler that sticks to anything in its path. Polystyrene foam is a plague on the environment. It is brittle. It breaks into pieces — sometimes very tiny pieces — that are devilishly hard to pick up. And there is no easy or cheap way to recycle it. New York City officials are considering a ban on foam containers and loose packaging. They should make it happen as soon as possible. Earlier this year the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, made a pointed case for banning the substance. "It lives forever," she said. "It's worse than cockroaches."

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As now written, the Council's prohibition would take effect in July 2015 unless the polystyrene industry found a safe, practical and inexpensive way to recycle the product by Jan. 1, 2015. Industry says it can, although at this point it is hard to imagine how such a recycling plan would work. Thomas Outerbridge, general manager of the company now building New York City's most advanced recycling plant, in Brooklyn, told city officials in June that his new facility would not be able to recycle polystyrene foam products. They would go straight into the regular garbage, he said. In San Jose, Calif., one of many West Coast cities to ban the foam containers, the city's website explains that the low market value and the high rate of contamination by food "makes it impossible to recycle" these products.

Many companies already have ditched the foam clamshell for less harmful alternatives, like paper or recyclable plastic. In September, for example, McDonald's announced plans to replace polystyrene cups at its 14,000 restaurants with paper cups. New York City should be next. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when he proposed the prohibition on polystyrene foam earlier this year, "We can live without it, we may live longer without it, and the doggie bag will survive just fine."

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Editorial: Room at the Table

There may be a stranger at dinner today — the friend of a friend, the brother of a daughter's roommate, a business acquaintance stuck in town, someone who reminds us how expandable this close-knit holiday really is. And there will surely be someone missing for whom we keep a place set in our thoughts. On Thanksgiving Day, we sit down with the memory of everyone who has shared this holiday with us, and perhaps with an unexpected stranger, the person who helps us tell this one Thanksgiving apart from all the others.

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This has always been the day when the folding chairs come out, when we look for the extra leaf for the dining-room table. Nothing ever seems to run short, except perhaps for the whipped cream. It's as though we cook in expectation of the stranger who might turn up or the great-uncle who came just once. Everyone goes home with leftovers, a Thanksgiving meal in miniature, the cranberry sauce on the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie cheek by jowl with the turkey leg.

It may be clearly established who gives the toast and who carves the roast turkey. You may know perfectly well which of the pies will be the best, reflecting the pride of its maker. It is pretty plain who will do most of the cleaning up. But the one thing you never can tell is how Thanksgiving Day will end up feeling. Some years it has been a Sunday dinner writ large, and in others the grandest of feasts. There have been Thanksgivings too moving for words, when it seemed as though everyone ate to contain their feelings. And there have been Thanksgivings that have ached with loss.

That is the nature of this day, the only holiday that seems to ask us how we feel. Nobody says outright, "Are you thankful?," the way they say, "Are you full?" Yet the question hovers, even unasked, awaiting an answer. We somehow assume that the gratitude we feel on Thanksgiving applies especially to the larger items in life. But it applies to the smallest, too — to the things we can barely number because we take them for granted.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Savoring a Steak

CHRISTINE and I had been friends in high school — but only friends. Voted "Loveliest Lady" at the Coronation Ball, the signature social event of the Class of 1968, she was clearly out of my league. Plus, she already had a boyfriend. Tom was a suave older man of 21 who had graduated to that "real world" for which we high schoolers were being prepared via the manipulation of our slide rules, the firing up of our Bunsen burners, and our allemande-lefting and do-si-do-ing during the square dancing unit in gym. Two years later, Christine was Tom's bride. I was a guest at their wedding.

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Several years later, Christine and I were both guests at another couple's wedding, and she was recently divorced. We were still a mismatch. She was an elementary school teacher who owned a home in suburbia that had wall-to-wall shag carpeting, the fibers of which she perked up with a little plastic rake. She drove a new Toyota Celica which she washed and vacuumed every week. I was an impoverished graduate student with shoulder-length hair, a wardrobe that skewed toward T-shirts and bib overalls, and a wheezing Studebaker with hot pink dashboard lights and floor mats obscured by beach sand and fast-food refuse. Musically, I was into Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols and, to my horror, she owned albums by John Denver and Olivia Newton-John.

We began dating anyway. When she invited me to dinner at her place, I brought a bottle of the terrible wine a grad student could afford. I petted her hyperactive cocker spaniel, Mandy, who shed so profusely that dog fur danced wraithlike in the air between Christine and me as she cooked.

The meal that night consisted of baked potatoes, green beans and London broil — a slab so thick that when Christine put it in the broiler at the bottom of her stove, it curled up, horseshoe-like, as it cooked. Then, strangely, it disappeared. Where had it gone, we both wondered. The answer: When Christine opened the drawer, it had dropped behind the broiler and onto that section of the linoleum floor where no vacuum cleaner ever goes.

On my hands and knees, I reached in, burned my arms in the name of love, and retrieved the steak, which now sported a coat of Mandy's fur. (Hey, even a guy in bib overalls can be gallant!) "It's O.K.," I said. "Let's just order Chinese." Christine looked at me as if I were crazy. Then she stabbed the steak with a fork, rinsed it under the tap, finished cooking it, and served it on her wedding china. It was delicious.

Thirty-five years and three sons later, Chris and I eat a lot less beef than we used to. Happily married, we're still a mismatch. Retired from teaching, she volunteers in the schools, gardens, handles our finances and runs marathons while I sit on the couch, eating Pringles out of the tube and playing with my imaginary friends — those characters who populate my novels.

Here's my recipe for a sustainable marriage to someone who is your polar opposite:

STEAK À LA MANDY

1. Slather a two-inch-thick cut of London broil with butter. Broil until it curls up, disappears and then reappears coated with dog fur. (Dust tumbleweeds and lint may be substituted.)

2. Rinse and serve.

3. Slather your burned arms with Unguentine.

4. Do not, under any circumstances, tell Martha Stewart.

Wally Lamb is the author, most recently, of the novel "We Are Water."

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Editorial: Pressure and Passivity on Immigration

President Obama made the case for immigration reform again on Monday, in a speech in San Francisco that seemed mostly directed to Republicans in Congress, who aren't listening.

Noting the Republican resistance to passing a single comprehensive bill, he struck an oddly lighthearted note. "It's Thanksgiving," he said. "We can carve that bird into multiple pieces — a drumstick here, breast meat there." This drew chuckles. By suggesting that large-scale immigration overhaul can be done incrementally, he was retreating from an argument that has guided reform advocates for a decade: fixing the broken system requires three things at once — tighter enforcement, an improved flow of new immigrants and legalization for the 11 million living here outside the law.

A comprehensive bill passed the Senate with a strong bipartisan majority five months ago and could pass the House in a heartbeat. But, as long as the House speaker, John Boehner, refuses to allow a vote, it is going nowhere.

With legislation thus stalled and the Obama administration continuing deportations at an unmatched pace, immigration advocates have turned up the pressure with a grave urgency that is not shared on Capitol Hill. The tension is unsustainable. So is the suffering.

In a tent on the National Mall, Eliseo Medina, a veteran of the farmworkers' movement, Cristian Avila and Dae Joong Yoon have been on a fast since Nov. 12, and they vow to continue to the point of collapse. They point out that their sacrifice does not match that of those living in shadows and lost from their families. Others across the country are fasting in solidarity. Advocates have prayed at Mr. Boehner's offices in Washington and Ohio. They have crossed the border and tried to return, offering themselves up to federal agents. They have held vigils at detention centers and tried to block deportation buses.

They have put their lives and futures at risk to push for reforms that a minority is obstructing and to beg Mr. Obama to slow his deportation surge.

One of them, a young man named Ju Hong, interrupted the president on Monday to make his plea. "I've not seen my family," he said. "Our families are separated. I need your help. There are thousands of people. ... "

Mr. Obama then cut him off and began a misleading ad-lib about how halting deportations would be illegal. While the president cannot throw out whole sections of immigration law to bypass Congressional inaction, he does have discretion in choosing how to enforce it wisely. Mr. Obama was firmly within the law when he selectively halted deportations for some immigrants brought here illegally as children and for spouses and children of service members and veterans. He can undoubtedly expand administrative efforts to protect other immigrants left stranded by legislative failure.

Mr. Obama said on Monday that he was up for the hard, messy work of reform. "I am going to march with you and fight with you every step of the way," he said.

But, as he keeps making such promises to people whose family members he is deporting in record numbers while protesting that he is powerless to stop himself, it seems only fair to ask: How hard are you fighting, really?

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Editorial: The War on Thanksgiving

In 1939, Thanksgiving was supposed to fall on Nov. 30, but President Franklin Roosevelt, on the advice of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, pushed it forward a week to extend the holiday gift-buying season. That delighted business owners but upset traditionalists, like the selectmen of Plymouth, Mass., who felt that celebrating early meant "sacrificing the real significance of the day for the purpose of satisfying commercial interests."

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Although Thanksgiving was already tied up with "commercial interests," Americans back then at least waited until after the feasting to start their frenzied shopping. Lately, consumerism has encroached on the day itself. This shift isn't entirely new. Walmart has been open on Thanksgiving for years. Now big retailers, including Target, J.C. Penney, Macy's and Best Buy, will open earlier on Thursday than in past years to get a bigger jump on Black Friday. Kmart is opening at 6 a.m. Thanksgiving Day and staying open for 41 hours straight.

Retailers wouldn't open on Thursday if they thought customers would rather spend time at home. The problem is their policies don't just dilute the spirit of Thanksgiving. They're hard on workers, who are often given no choice but to work on the holiday. One Cleveland lawmaker wants to help. Mike Foley, a Democrat in the Ohio House of Representatives, has drafted state legislation that would require employers to pay triple-time on the holiday or give workers the option of staying home. He has acknowledged that it's unlikely to pass Ohio's Republican-controlled House, but it would make working on Thanksgiving more worthwhile.

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Editorial: Sifting Through the Irish Troubles

Attorney General John Larkin of Northern Ireland has stirred passionate controversy with his suggestion that the passage of time makes it counterproductive to continue investigating the sectarian raids and military operations that took more than 3,500 lives during the Troubles, the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted more than a generation.

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Mr. Larkin, the chief legal adviser to the provincial government, told the BBC that the time had come to consider drawing a limit on prosecutions for acts committed before the Good Friday agreement of 1998, which largely ended years of bloodshed. "Every competent criminal lawyer will tell you the prospects of conviction diminish, perhaps exponentially, with each passing year," he said, arguing that there's a logical need to "take stock."

Mr. Larkin's point may be valid on the narrow scales of efficiency and expense in the criminal justice system, but it fails miserably on the scales of justice for the many victims and scarred survivors of the Troubles. Public officials have roundly condemned the idea. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain called the prosecution limit "rather dangerous," while Northern Irish politicians angrily asked how time's passage could make murder undeserving of investigation and prosecution. Patrick Corrigan of Amnesty International said it was "an utter betrayal of victims' fundamental right to access justice."

The timing of Mr. Larkin's call for a policy review could not have been worse. A BBC news report has focused on a secret British army unit, the Military Reaction Force, whose members said they had a standing license to kill civilians in the fight against the Irish Republican Army's guerrilla units.

In Belfast, where resentments and memories of sectarian mayhem still burn strong, officials have approved a march by 10,000 citizens and 40 bands on Nov. 30 to protest restrictions on flying the British flag at city hall. Marches and chauvinist flag waving are some of the issues being negotiated in talks brokered by Richard Haass, the former American diplomat, to find ways deal with the explosive legacy of the Troubles.

Much good in safety and sanity has flowed from the Good Friday agreement. There is no need to draw a curtain on a lethal past that clearly remains deeply relevant for the people of Northern Ireland.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: Pigskin Pride and Prejudice

WASHINGTON — I dreamed of Peyton Manning.

In my dream, I was trying to shield him from the bitter wind in Foxborough. But he still looked like a frozen block of ice, with a red nose and watery eyes.

Yet it was so much better than my usual nightmares about President Ted Cruz that I wondered why I hadn't started watching football a long time ago.

When my sports-crazy family would drone on about football at holidays, I would sometimes slip into a bedroom to take a break with Jane Austen.

I had no interest in hearing about sulky brutes cracking heads. When we were children, my brother christened my kittens with the names of Redskins linebackers and slammed their little heads together — until I caught him. I was worried about concussions long before it became a cause célèbre. Kitty-cussions.

Re-reading Austen, I could get lost in a fascinating honeycomb of relationships. I could delve into a rigid male-dominated hierarchical society with pompous wealthy overlords and opportunistic strivers and alluring young protagonists faltering with immature misjudgments and public opprobrium.

Then the Redskins drafted Robert Griffin III, with his gladiator glamour, and I was suddenly a fan, getting irate when my niece's birthday party was scheduled during the Redskins-Cowboys game.

And funnily enough, I was soon getting lost in a fascinating honeycomb of relationships. I was delving into a rigid male-dominated hierarchical society with pompous wealthy overlords and opportunistic strivers and alluring young protagonists faltering with immature misjudgments and public opprobrium.

Austen, the master of tangled sibling dramas, would have appreciated the face-off in September between quarterbacks Peyton and little brother Eli, as their father watched and Peyton wore the 18 jersey in honor of his father and older brother. Austen would have been amused at last year's Super Bowl between the coaching Harbaugh brothers, especially the moment when John Harbaugh, identifying himself only as "John from Baltimore," phoned into a press conference with his parents to ask, "Is it true that both of you like Jim better than John?"

The 19th-century author of "Emma," the best makeover story ever, would have marveled at the macho makeover saga in Miami with the thuggish Richie Incognito trying to harden the brainy, viola-playing, Stanford-educated Jonathan Martin — the "bully" and the "baby," as Mike Ditka curtly called them.

The 22-year-old RGIII swept into town like Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever and rich," as Austen wrote of her 20-year-old title character, but spoiled by "the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself."

Like Emma and Elizabeth Bennet, RGIII has gone through humbling experiences. His humiliations on the field this season alternated jarringly on TV with his commercials for Subway, concocted when the Heisman winner from Baylor was still flying high and grinning cockily.

He went from being cheered as a magical quarterback and magnetic leader to being belittled as a college-level player and blame-shifter. The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins upbraided RGIII, once hailed as "Cool Hand Luke," for acting like "an unteachable know-it-all." Wide receiver Santana Moss suggested that RGIII, and other teammates, have to not blame others, "have to, at some point, stand up and say 'me' or 'I.' "

When RGIII kept getting sacked and knocked down on Monday playing the San Francisco 49ers, he was left on the ground alone as his linemen walked away without helping him up, as they did last year. The poor guy even got painfully kicked in the groin, or the "wedding tackle" — as it was called on the Mike & Mike show — causing the ref to snicker and a fan to tweet, "Well there goes RG4."

Afterward, Ahmad Brooks, a 49ers linebacker, said that "everybody can see" that RGIII has "the heart of a warrior" but should not be playing, given his tender knee in the bulky brace.

RG3-and-8, as some began calling him mockingly, could not stop miming his disgust at a nonexistent offensive line, a cold father-and-son coaching team who are not sympatico with their star, and the cacophony of critics.

After the game, the quarterback denied an NFL Network report that he did not want the team to review films of his bad plays. "People are trying to character-assassinate me, and it's unfortunate," a dejected RGIII said, echoing Mike Shanahan. On ESPN, Herm Edwards, a former Kansas City Chiefs coach, talked about RGIII's eroded trust in his coaches using an expression that would fit right into an Austen novel: "There's a stormy romance, to say the least."

Like every compelling and high-spirited Austen heroine, the Redskins' erstwhile hero has some growing up to do. He has to go through the fire, dig deep and learn some lessons about character.

As Anna Quindlen once observed, Austen's novels are about the search for self, and "this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery." When Elizabeth Bennet mulls her mistakes — the blindness caused by her vanity and the ensuing "just" humiliations — she realizes that these follies have allowed her to finally know herself.

And that search can be undertaken in the locker room as well as in the drawing room.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: Breadlines Return

The Great Recession was the worst downturn since the Great Depression.  And yet, throughout the recent decline and today's sluggish recovery, conditions have never seemed as bad as they were in the 1930s. Breadlines, for example, have not been commonplace.

That may be about to change.

In an article published on Monday, The Times's Patrick McGeehan described a line snaking down Fulton Street in Brooklyn last week, with people waiting to enter a food pantry run by the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. The line was not an anomaly. Demand at all of New York City's food pantries and soup kitchens has spiked since federal food stamps were cut on Nov. 1. The cut — which affects nearly all of the nation's 48 million food stamp recipients — amounts to a loss of $29 a month for a New York City family of three. On the shoestring meal budgets of food stamp recipients, that's enough for some 20 individual meals, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

The food stamp cuts are occurring even though need is still high and opportunity low. In a report released today, the Coalition estimates that one-sixth of the city's residents and one-fifth of its children live in homes without enough to eat. Those numbers have not improved over the past three years. The lack of economic recovery for low income New Yorkers is at odds with gains at the top of the income ladder, reflected in soaring real estate prices, rising stock prices and big Wall Street bonuses.

And there are more food-stamp cuts to come. House Republicans have proposed to cut the program by $40 billion over 10 years in the pending farm bill; the Senate has proposed a $4 billion reduction. With Congress framing its task not as whether to cut the program, but how much, is there any doubt that food lines will soon be getting longer — and children hungrier?

If the current downturn has not mirrored the Great Depression, that's thanks to safety net programs that grew out of the Depression and other hard times. Breadlines have, by and large, been replaced by food stamps, while income from Social Security, unemployment benefits and the earned income tax credit has kept many people from falling irretrievably into the economic abyss.

Without those supports, conditions — which are bad enough — would be much worse, as is clear from the Census Bureau's latest poverty measures. According to the bureau:

• Poverty among children, at 18 percent in 2012, would have been nearly 21 percent, but for food stamps; it would have been nearly 25 percent but for household income from tax credits like the one for earned income.
• Poverty among the elderly, at 14.8 percent, would be nearly 55 percent, but for Social Security.
• Poverty among non-elderly adults, at 15.5 percent, would be 16.4 percent, but for unemployment benefits.

Now is not the time to cut back. Now is the time to provide.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The North Carolina Five

The Uniform Athlete Agents Act was a bill drafted 13 years ago at the urging of the N.C.A.A. The drafters were members of something called the Uniform Law Commission, whose job it is to propose model legislation that the states can then adopt if they so choose. Today, 41 states have the law, or some variant of it, on their books.

The law essentially criminalizes most contact between sports agents and college athletes — something that heretofore had merely been a violation of N.C.A.A. rules. Agents who give athletes money are now violating the law. "Runners" who act as go-betweens for agents are violating the law. Agents who don't announce to the university that they want to talk to an enrolled athlete are violating the law. It is a measure of how good a job the N.C.A.A. has done in brainwashing the country that the simple act of handing money to — or giving advice to — a college student is now against the law in most of the country when the recipient happens to play a sport.

(And you wonder why so many college football and men's basketball players come out of school so ill-equipped for life? According to Sports Illustrated, some 78 percent of professional football players are either bankrupt or in serious financial trouble within two years of their retirement. Maybe if the N.C.A.A. encouraged players to get agents while they were still in school, instead of criminalizing such contact, athletes would be a little better prepared for what comes afterward. Instead, the N.C.A.A. views this activity as the work of "unscrupulous agents" who are "victimizing" athletes. But I digress.)

Still, on anyone's list of criminal activities, slipping a few bucks to the middle linebacker has to rank pretty low. Which perhaps explains why, so far as I can tell, no one had ever been indicted before for violating the law.

Until last month, that is. That's when Jim Woodall, the top prosecutor in Orange County, N.C., egged on by the North Carolina Secretary of State's Office, which had conducted a lengthy investigation, indicted five people for funneling "illegal" benefits to three former University of North Carolina football players.

At the center of this "conspiracy" is a small-time agent named Terry Watson, who, in 2010, is alleged to have given the three athletes in question a total of around $24,000. What he hoped for was that the players would use him as their agent when they went pro. (They didn't.) The charge is "athlete agent inducement."

The other four were indicted on charges of being the supposed go-betweens. It is one of those alleged go-betweens I want to briefly focus on. It used to be that the N.C.A.A. could only wreck the lives of athletes. Now, it appears, thanks to the Uniform Athlete Agents Act, nonathletes can also have their lives wrecked by the N.C.A.A.

Between 2007 and 2009, Jennifer Wiley Thompson was an academic adviser for North Carolina athletes. Her original crime, in the eyes of the N.C.A.A., was giving athletes a little too much help. She wasn't writing papers for them, but she was helping them make them better. When the football team became mired in a scandal in 2010, the help she had given became public knowledge. She, in turn, became a focal point in the news media. She not only lost her position as an academic adviser, but she lost her day job teaching grade school kids.

She has since lost a second job — and now faces the prospect of jail time for allegedly passing money to a player for plane tickets. "They are doing this because she helped people with their homework?" said Joseph Cheshire, her lawyer. "It is ridiculous. We don't see where she broke the law. We're going to war on this."

It is a war well worth waging. There is virtually no precedent to look to, so this case is likely to determine whether this law has any teeth. If the Orange County district attorney succeeds in his effort to prosecute the North Carolina five, it will mean that other prosecutors, in other jurisdictions, will follow suit. Going after someone who has tainted dear old State U. will be irresistible.

If, on the other hand, the cases go to trial and they are found not guilty, the law will be rendered meaningless, even if it remains on the books.

Meanwhile, in late October, a committee of the Uniform Law Commission met in Chicago to discuss revisions to — what else? — the Uniform Athlete Agents Act. According to Richard T. Cassidy, who writes the blog "On Lawyering," the plan is to "expand the scope of the law and improve its effectiveness." One proposal is to have the law cover high school and even elementary school athletes.

Thus does the long arm of the N.C.A.A. get that much longer.

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Editorial: The State’s Findings on Newtown

One of the painful anomalies in the state's official report about December's school massacre in Newtown, Conn., is the evidence that while Adam Lanza, the shooter who murdered 20 children and six adults, was the object of his mother's great and continuing concern, it did not stop her from writing a check so he might obtain his own pistol in a family already well stocked with firearms.

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Mr. Lanza, a disturbed and lonely 20-year-old, had five weapons, legally obtained by his mother, Nancy, over the years, according to the state report released Monday. The report noted, in meticulous detail, every recovered bullet shell and precise turning point in the shooting spree. Narrowly forensic and carefully written to spare the victims' families greater pain, it concluded that Mr. Lanza had long been obsessed with stories of mass murders and school shootings and acted alone in a raid that he had planned in advance.

The report touches on other aspects of the tragedy, including autopsy results, the police response and the brave resistance of many school officials. It offers no judgment on how heavily the shooter's easy access to firearms weighed in the tragedy. Left unanswered were questions beyond answer: what set him off on such a course and whether his actions could have been headed off years earlier as symptoms showed him to be "undoubtedly afflicted with mental health problems."

The report confirms that Ms. Lanza was murdered in her bed by her son before he set off for Sandy Hook Elementary School. For the three previous months, she had not been able to talk to her son, who was friendless and stayed in his room, sending her emails. Before that he had been obsessed with his computer and video games, including one that happily guides a player on dance-step movements and another entitled "School Shooting" in which a player controls a character who enters a school and shoots at students.

The scant information about Mr. Lanza can only be the darkest footnote to the larger tragedy of the young children and school officials he murdered in their classrooms. The fact that he was a silent, dangerous and suffering individual waiting to leave his mark on Newtown was known to too few people, if any.

The report on his crimes can only haunt the community and present the nation with difficult questions — far from adequately answered — about how to head off the next gun tragedy.

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Op-Ed Contributor: The Charity Swindle

WASHINGTON — BY all outward indications, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association was a leader in the charitable community. Founded in 2002 to provide support to Navy veterans in need, the charity recorded astonishing financial success. In its first eight years, it raised around $100 million in charitable contributions, almost all of it through a direct marketing campaign. The organization, headed by Jack L. Nimitz, boasted of 41 state chapters and some 66,000 members.

This would be a great story of charitable success, except for the fact that virtually everything about the association turned out to be false: no state chapters, no members, no leader with the name redolent of naval history. Instead, there was one guy: a man calling himself Bobby Thompson who worked from a duplex across the street from the Cuesta-Rey cigar factory in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa.

But the money raised was real enough, generated by a series of for-profit telemarketers. The victims, by and large, were unsuspecting small-money donors who received urgent solicitations asking for support for needy naval veterans. Most of the money raised stayed with the fund-raisers, though plenty apparently dripped through to Mr. Thompson and a succession of Republican lawmakers who received generous contributions from the association's political arm. But little ever made it to the intended beneficiaries. In 2010, the scheme was unwound by two reporters for what is now The Tampa Bay Times, but not before Mr. Thompson had fled the state of Florida.

From June 2010, Mr. Thompson was on the run, the search for him hamstrung by the fact that no one had any real idea of who he was. Finally, on April 30, 2012, federal marshals tracked him down in Portland, Ore., finding him with a card to a storage unit containing $981,650 in cash and almost two dozen fake identity cards.

Earlier this month in Ohio, where the charity's registration documents had been filed, the man arrested as Bobby Thompson was convicted on 23 felony counts, including fraud, theft and money laundering. Authorities have identified him as John Donald Cody, a former Army intelligence officer and Harvard Law graduate. Given its sensational facts, the case has drawn more attention than your average matter in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. But the story is worth paying attention to for a more important reason, if we want to prevent more Bobby Thompsons in our future.

The most outrageous aspect of the case is that much of what Mr. Cody did was probably legal, or at least not specifically illegal. The principal beneficiaries were always the association's for-profit fund-raisers. During the trial, one of them, Thomas Berkenbush of Community Support Inc., testified, apparently without fear of legal repercussions, that his company had kept 90 percent of the donations as a fund-raising charge.

That, in and of itself, isn't criminal. The alleged fraud was not that very, very little money ever went to Navy veterans. In fact, the fund-raising explicitly stated that a large portion of donations would go to cover telemarketing and other costs. Mr. Cody ran afoul of the law because he filed registration documents that contained false statements, because he stole the identity of the real Bobby Thompson, and because he pulled money from organizational accounts for his personal use. The irony is that he could have accomplished virtually his entire enrichment scheme without ever violating the law — and others have figured that out.

The I.R.S.'s Exempt Organizations Division, which is responsible for supervising the charitable sector, is chronically understaffed. It can't do much more than process the routine and voluminous reporting of the more than 1.5 million American nonprofits, and keep up with the tens of thousands of applications filed each year to start new charities.

State and local authorities are in no better shape. Joel L. Fleishman, a professor of public policy at Duke, estimates that there are fewer than 100 full-time state charity regulators, far too few to exercise any real oversight.

In the Navy Veterans case, amazingly, the I.R.S. did undertake one of its rare field audits. And yet, despite the fact that the main office was a trailer, its state offices were empty lots or postal drops, and its board of directors and C.E.O. a total fiction, the I.R.S. in 2008 gave the association a "clean bill of health." It wasn't until the two reporters came sniffing — first curious about the political contributions and subsequently intrigued by Mr. Thompson's obvious dissembling — that the real story began to emerge.

When it comes to frauds like these, it is neither the law nor the regulators that are the best line of defense; it will always be the careful application of caveat emptor by potential donors. This isn't easy: there are approximately 59,000 charities in this country with the word "veterans" in their names. Only a few people can claim the expertise to say which are the best, let alone which are trustworthy.

As we enter the annual giving season, donors should look to sources like the GiveWell website to find organizations with a track record of effectiveness. Seeking them out — instead of donating to charities that are first to call or that sound familiar or that we've heard are good — is the only way to ensure that money reaches those in need.

Ken Stern, a former chief executive of NPR, is the chief executive of Palisades Media and the author of "With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give."

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Op-Ed Contributors: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

WASHINGTON — THE framers of the Constitution declared that government officials had no power to seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing, and they embedded this principle in the Fourth Amendment. The bulk collection of Americans' telephone records — so-called metadata — by the National Security Agency is, in our view, a clear case of a general warrant that violates the spirit of the framers' intentions. This intrusive program was authorized under a secret legal process by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so for years American citizens did not have the knowledge needed to challenge the infringement of their privacy rights.

Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person's phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin's famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

Despite this, the surveillance reform bill recently ratified by the Senate Intelligence Committee would explicitly permit the government to engage in dragnet collection as long as there were rules about when officials could look at these phone records. It would also give intelligence agencies wide latitude to conduct warrantless searches for Americans' phone calls and emails.

This is not the true reform that poll after poll has shown the American people want. It is preserving business as usual. When the Bill of Rights was adopted, it established that Americans' papers and effects should be seized only when there was specific evidence of suspicious activity. It did not permit government agencies to issue general warrants as long as records seized were reviewed with the permission of senior officials.

Congress has a crucial opportunity to reassert constitutionally guaranteed liberties by reforming the N.S.A.'s overbroad collection of Americans' personal data. But the Intelligence Committee bill squanders this chance. It would enable some of the most constitutionally questionable surveillance activities now exposed to the public eye. The Senate should be reining in these programs, not giving them a stamp of approval.

As members of the Intelligence Committee, we strongly disagree with this approach. We had already proposed our own, bipartisan surveillance reform legislation, the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act, which we have sponsored with a number of other senators. Our bill would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless "backdoor searches" of Americans' communications — including emails, text messages and Internet use — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It would also create a "constitutional advocate" to present an opposing view when the F.I.S.C. is considering major questions of law or constitutional interpretation.

Rather than adopt our legislation, the Intelligence Committee chose to codify excessively broad domestic surveillance authorities. So we offered amendments: One would end the bulk collection of Americans' records, but still allow intelligence agencies to obtain information they legitimately needed for national security purposes by getting the approval of a judge, which could even be done after the fact in emergency situations. Another of our amendments sought to prevent the N.S.A. from collecting Americans' cellphone location information in bulk — a capability that potentially turns the cellphone of every man, woman and child in America into a tracking device.

Each of these proposals represents real and meaningful reform, which we believe would have fulfilled the purpose of protecting our security and liberty. Each was rejected by the committee, in some cases by a single vote.

But we will continue to engage with our colleagues and seek to advance the reforms that the American people want and deserve. As part of this effort, we will push to hold a comprehensive reform debate on the Senate floor.

There is no question that our nation's intelligence professionals are dedicated, patriotic men and women who make real sacrifices to help keep our country safe and free. We believe that they should be able to do their jobs secure in the knowledge that their agencies have the confidence of the American people.

But this trust has been undermined by the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance programs, as well as by senior officials' misleading statements about surveillance. Only by ending the dragnet collection of ordinary Americans' private information can this trust be rebuilt.

Congress needs to preserve the agencies' ability to collect information that is actually necessary to guard against threats to our security. But it also needs to preserve the right of citizens to be free from unwarranted interference in their lives, which the framers understood was vital to American liberties.

Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all Democrats, are United States senators.

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Room for Debate: U.S. Relations With Iran Thaw, and Allies Shiver

President Obama, who has long sought closer relations with Iran, has reached a deal to limit Iranian nuclear plans that would once have been considered unthinkable. "It's a major seismic shift in the region," one expert said. "It rearranges the entire chess board." It now seems conceivable that Iran could have a role in coming Syrian peace talks.

If the United States continues to become more engaged with Iran, how would that affect American relations with regional allies, like Saudi Arabia, a major opponent of Iran?

Read the Discussion »

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Editorial Observer: Cooking Lessons for Life

On the first night, my father made chicken piccata. Flour and lemon, bouillon cubes, the funny-looking hammer. He had no idea what he was doing.

Usually my mother would have helped — she would have done it herself — but that evening, and over the next three in the fall of 2009, she sat on a stool across the kitchen counter, close enough to observe but far enough that she wouldn't be tempted to step in. Neither of them had said it, but both had known that eventually this time would come. He had to learn to cook for himself.

My mother knew it as soon as she saw the scan strewn with tumors — "my assassins," she called them. She came home from the doctor, cried for a long time, and then made two lists. One list of all the women who would be suitable matches for my father when she was gone. And one list of his favorite dinners. Turkey chili. Split-pea soup. Wheat nut loaf. Chicken piccata.

Also, tuna fish sandwiches. "That was the other thing she told me," he said the other day. "It was O.K. to have tuna fish sandwiches once a week."

I'd asked him to tell me about those four nights in the kitchen four years ago. I knew about the cooking lessons at the time, but I wasn't allowed to help or even to witness. No one was. My father is proud and shy, and he doesn't like to broadcast what he doesn't know. So my mother pulled out the dinner list and it was just the two of them, an hour a night for four nights. Forty years of a shared life, boiled down to a few simple instructions: Keep the knives sharp. Put all your ingredients in little dishes. Read the whole recipe. Always wash your hands.

They had tried something like it decades earlier, when everyone was free to be you and me and the world was without end. "She was going to take over the finances and I was going to take over the cooking," my father remembered. "And we both hated it so much that we said, To hell with this! Let's enjoy our lives."

They returned to their corners and they stayed there. As far back as I can recall, my father never entered the kitchen when the stove was lit. He came downstairs to eat when he was called, and at some point he started doing the dishes. But his physical involvement with food preparation was limited to starting the grill, carving the turkey, and cobbling together an occasional plate of salami and cheese to go with his early-evening martini.

As the days shortened, his regret grew. "She often asked me if I would stay in the kitchen with her when she cooked," he said. "I was always too busy working."

That fall, at last, he stayed. And he liked it. "I work to rule," he told me. "I do exactly what I'm told to do. I found it comforting that there were rules to follow."

But then the lessons were over, and in the first week of November, my mother climbed into bed and pretty much didn't get out again. She desperately wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving — it was the most meaningful holiday to her. By mid-month it was clear that wasn't going to happen. She warned us that if we had anything important we wanted to say to her, we had better do it now.

I tried my best. So did my sister and my uncles and my aunt, my mother's best friend. Who knows what any of us said.

On Thanksgiving Day, I spent the morning cooking the parts of the meal we hadn't already ordered from the supermarket. My uncle sat upstairs, watching my mother breathe. That was all that remained of her, the breathing.

My father needed small tasks to keep him busy, so I pulled him into the kitchen to help me with the brussels sprouts. He shook one of those cardboard canisters of salt over them, gently at first, and then the top popped off and a pound of salt poured out. He cursed and left the kitchen.

I put the food out at 6 p.m., just as my mother spiked a temperature of 106. Nobody ate. She stopped breathing on Friday.

I asked my father about his last words with her. There weren't any, he said. "Everybody talks of these times they shared with her toward the end, and I didn't. I can't think about what I would've talked about."

But he has the cooking lessons. Knives sharp. Ingredients out. Read the damn recipe. "It was the way we could have a conversation," he said.

"Every time I cook, she's in my head. Even when I see the little dishes I think about her. She's just there, on my shoulder, when I'm cooking."

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Editorial: Little Rock Moves On

When the Supreme Court ordered an end to racial segregation in public schools in 1954, there was no foretelling what its mandate for integration "with all deliberate speed" would come to mean. In Little Rock, Ark., the site in 1957 of one of the most explosive desegregation struggles, it has come to mean decades of litigation that may now be nearing an end.

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Last week, the state, three Little Rock-area school districts and two citizens groups agreed that it was time to phase out nearly $70 million a year in subsidies that have helped those districts achieve workable desegregation through methods like crosstown busing and the creation of magnet schools. The payments would end in 2018. A federal judge will hold a hearing in January on the fairness of the agreement.

Not everyone is satisfied with the quality of Little Rock's schools, especially in high-poverty minority neighborhoods. But the agreement may bring an end to one chapter in the long fight for racial equality, one that began with the school board's unanimous decision to enroll nine black students in Central High School and took a notorious turn when Gov. Orval Faubus decided to play to segregationist politics and mobilized the National Guard to block the students. Mob violence followed, persuading President Dwight Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce the Supreme Court ruling and escort the students to class.

Ernest Green was the first black student to graduate from the high school — an event happily witnessed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had warned Mr. Eisenhower that any hesitation in Little Rock in the name of states' rights would "set the process of integration back 50 years." History grinds too slow on what "all deliberate speed" means, but the news from Little Rock provides hope that the nation can labor beyond its racist past.

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Editorial: Getting to Yes With Iran

The interim nuclear deal between Iran and the major powers is an important step toward resolving the increasingly dangerous dispute over Iran's progress on production of a nuclear weapon. President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran deserve credit for resisting fierce domestic opposition and a 30-year history of animosity between the two countries to get to this point.

Even though the temporary agreement does not achieve permanent and total dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program, no one can seriously argue that it doesn't make the world safer. It would freeze key aspects of Iran's program for six months and lay the ground for negotiating a comprehensive, permanent deal. The alternatives are ratcheting up sanctions and possible military action, with no assurance that those steps would stop Iran's nuclear advances. A negotiated solution is unquestionably better; it is alarming to hear Israeli politicians reject it in extremist terms and threaten unspecified unilateral action.

The deal buys time to work on a long-term solution that constrains Iran's nuclear program and guarantees that it is put to peaceful use. That will be even harder to achieve, and the risks will be even greater, if negotiations fail. It is crucial that talks on the next phase begin very soon since the next six months will fly by.

As with any deal between adversaries, caution is warranted. Iran kept the nuclear program secret for nearly two decades before it was uncovered in 2002 and has resisted full disclosure of its activities. But the interim deal has protections that should make cheating harder, including unprecedented daily inspections of enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo by United Nations experts.

Iran has agreed to stop enriching uranium beyond 5 percent, a level sufficient for energy production but not bomb-making, and will dismantle links between networks of centrifuges. While Iran can still enrich below 5 percent, it must convert new enriched uranium to oxide so it is harder to use militarily. Its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is close to weapons-grade, would be diluted or converted into oxide. Iran agreed not to install new centrifuges, start up ones not already operating or build new enrichment facilities. Much of the work on the plutonium reactor near Arak, which could provide a second path to a bomb, would be halted. The two sides effectively put aside the question of whether Iran has a "right" to enrich, but that will be central to any final deal.

In exchange, America and its allies have offered "limited, temporary and reversible" sanctions relief — enough so President Rouhani can show his people benefits for Iran's concessions but far from all that Iran has lost. The interim deal would provide $6 billion to $7 billion in sanctions relief, including freeing up about $4.2 billion in oil revenue that is frozen in foreign banks.

Even so, Iran would still be deprived of $30 billion in oil revenue over the next six months. American officials say that if Iran cheats on the interim terms or fails to reach a final agreement, the eased sanctions will be reversed and new and tougher ones imposed.

The perils ahead are many, including adamant objections from Israel and Saudi Arabia, which oppose re-establishment of relations between America and Iran. The major powers have promised Iran that new sanctions will not be imposed during the interim deal. But key Senate Democrats said they plan to push for new penalties, though those would probably not be effective for six months to give diplomacy a chance. That is not a lot of time, but the new agreement offers more hope than ever before that the United States and Iran can find common ground.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Less Than American

Not so long ago, it seemed the debate over immigration reform was all about borders. Politicians competed to offer the most draconian solutions — higher fences, longer fences, electrified fences, armies of guards, fleets of drones, moats and crocodiles. Never mind that the Border Patrol had already more than doubled in a decade. Never mind that many of those here illegally never hopped a fence but simply overstayed a student or tourist visa. The nativist mythology has us under siege from relentless hordes striding toward Arizona on, in the fevered imagination of Tea Party Congressman Steve King, "calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." To pacify the border neurotics, authors of the bill that passed the Senate last summer included $46.3 billion to militarize our southern flank.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Bill Keller

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Now, with the bill stranded in the House, it seems the immigration debate is all about citizenship. To opponents, the idea of offering 11-plus million undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship — even a 13-year slog like the one envisioned by the Senate bill — is anathema, so politically toxic that the measure's most prominent Republican sponsor, Senator Marco Rubio, pulled back as if he'd put his hand on a lit stove. To proponents of comprehensive reform, or at least to activists on the issue, citizenship is the prize, and nonnegotiable.

It's beginning to look as if advocates of fixing our broken immigration system will face an unpleasant choice: no bill at all, or a bill that legalizes the foreigners who are already here but does not offer most of them a chance to become citizens. On Capitol Hill several lawmakers are quietly drafting compromises that give the undocumented millions little hope of full membership in America.

The first thing to note is that this is progress. The Republican mainstream view has moved in the last year or so, from Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" to something considerably less callous. Most Republicans in Congress now say they can live with legalizing the undocumented as long as (a) we don't call it amnesty and (b) we don't reward lawbreakers by bestowing the precious gift of citizenship.

The second point that needs making — and my Times colleague Julia Preston made it last week — is that while citizenship is the priority for pro-immigration activists, to immigrants living here as a fearful underclass the aim is not so clear cut. For many of them, the priority is to be made legal, to come out of hiding and live their lives without the threat of deportation, without the risk of exploitation by unscrupulous employers, without wondering whether your spouse will make it home at night.

"The entire narrative behind comprehensive immigration reform has elevated the path to citizenship as this must-have component of an acceptable bill," said Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a network of immigrant organizations that includes many foreigners here without visas. "What you hear from the undocumented is: 'We like the idea of citizenship, but what really hurts us is that we are vulnerable, that I can't easily get a job to feed my family, that I can't drive a car without being at risk, that I want to be able to visit relatives back home and come back safely."

Just to be clear, I believe (and so does Oscar Chacon) that deliberately creating a class of disenfranchised residents goes against the American grain. There are few precedents for consigning whole categories of people to a sub-citizen limbo, and they are not proud moments in our history. (See the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) It is clearly in the public interest to have people become assimilated, taxpaying, participating stakeholders in our democracy. Most Americans polled, including a majority of Republicans, agree that those now in the country illegally should be allowed to eventually apply for citizenship.

If House Speaker John Boehner is willing to brave the fury of his extreme flank and put the matter to a vote, a path to citizenship stands a decent chance of passing the House with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans. You might even think Republicans would want to get immigration settled and off the table so they could begin wooing Hispanic voters on more favorable ground — social issues, taxes, education. But among the people most immersed in this issue, I can't find many who expect Boehner to suddenly become a statesman and defy his fanatics. In part, let's be honest, that's because the Republican stance is, "We protect America from Obama." It is also in part because they fear newly enfranchised Hispanics will become Democrats — which the Republicans, by opposing citizenship, make a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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