by Dan Froomkin

Barack Obama is heading back onto the campaign trail, running as a champion of the middle class and even hoping to harness the Occupy movement’s public anger at Wall Street.

But the higher he soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president — especially regarding the economy, which is still stagnating, and Wall Street, which remains unpunished and unbowed even after causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

As a result, voters will inevitably be asking themselves: Who is this guy, really? Does he mean what he says? Will he do what he says? And would a second-term Obama be different?

One answer to why Obama underperformed is laid out in searing detail in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind’s latest book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

In the book, Suskind describes how Obama made the conscious choice to staff his economic team with former Clinton appointees whose sympathies were with Wall Street — and that those men were unable to see how drastically out of whack the country’s financial system had gotten both because they helped create it and because it had served them so well.

This is an in depth review of Suskind’s hard hitting and penetrating observations of the dilemma that Obama faced when he took office. It shows that the tentacles of Wall Street are everywhere.

Obama’s populist viewpoints were compromised by the timing of the financial mess he inherited, which proscribed him from taking actions that he otherwise may have been able to implement.

Given the magnitude of the crisis, Obama opted to choose Wall Street veterans to help steer the ship through the icebergs. Hiring inexperience, non-Wall Street advisors would have left him open for wide criticism and may have exacerbated the problem. He was between a rock and a hard spot and it’s difficult, even in hindsight, to determine whether a different set of advisors would have made things better. Opting for seasoned leadership seemed the rational choice.

As it turned out the Wall Street insiders co-opted Obama’s vision, and Obama’s populist rhetoric of ‘hope’ was turned into ‘nope.’

Then, rather than forcefully impose his campaign’s populist vision on these men, Obama again consciously chose to defer to them repeatedly — and tolerated it even when they slow-walked, pushed back against, or simply ignored his instructions.

The White House launched an aggressive counterattack when the book came out in September, initially centered around nitpicking over a few minor factual errors.

In perhaps the broadest on-the-record denial from the White House, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling told CNN: “The notion that this president was not leading and making the tough choices all along is just dead wrong, and I say that as somebody who’s been here every moment… This president has been focused and tough and decisive in leading us in this economic team and I think that is the story, and anything else really does a disservice to this administration and the real record that has been established.”

The White House pushback was followed by brickbats from some mainstream journalists — particularly Slate’s Jacob Weisberg.

But the attacks on the book only glanced off Suskind’s central theme — which is more subtle than his critics have made it out to be — because that theme was derived directly from on-the-record interviews with key players, internal documents that Suskind brought to light, and the outcomes we’ve all seen with our own eyes.

And though the book focuses on the first two years of Obama’s presidency, and a group of “confidence men” that is mostly gone now, the leadership style Suskind describes, and the strikingly similar makeup of Obama’s new economic team, suggest that Obama is still incapable of — or, alas, uninterested in — acting on his own words.

“You do have to start asking yourself a pretty tough set of questions about what his fundamental views actually are on so many of these issues,” says Suskind. “Did he ever believe that he was going to be doing many of those things that he inspired people with in the campaign?”

Mind The Gap

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke eloquently and strikingly about the excesses of Wall Street.

In his September 2007 speech at the NASDAQ, Obama invoked FDR. “Amid a crisis of confidence Roosevelt called for a ‘re-appraisal of values,’ ” Obama said. FDR made clear “that in order for us to prosper as one nation, ‘…the responsible heads of finance and industry, instead of acting each for himself, must work together to achieve the common end.’”

This, he concluded, was “another moment that requires, in FDR’s words, a re-appraisal of our values as a nation.”

In the midst of the U.S. government’s September 2008 bank bailout, Obama told a Nevada audience: “Let me be perfectly clear. The fact that we are in this mess is an outrage. It’s an outrage because we did not get here by accident. This was not a normal part of the business cycle. This was not the actions of a few bad apples.

“This financial crisis is a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years.”

And although he said it wasn’t time yet, he promised: “There will be time to punish those who set this fire.”

In October 2008, he promise to “take on the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to make sure a crisis like this can never, ever happen again.”

And one day before he was elected president, he told a Florida audience: “Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street.”

Obama’s most seminal speech on the crisis was his March 2008 address at Cooper Union. There, he laid part of the blame for the disaster on Clinton-era financial deregulation, including the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. That repeal, which broke down barriers between commercial and investment banking, led to the growth of financial behemoths that were able to take enormous risks with impunity because they were “too big to fail.”

“[I]nstead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one, aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight,” Obama said. “In doing so we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.”

Among the foremost champions of that deregulatory regime were the key members of President Clinton’s economic team, including Robert Rubin, who was Clinton’s treasury secretary, Larry Summers, who succeeded Rubin, and Timothy Geithner, who worked directly under both of them.

But once Obama was elected, and was staring into the maw of staggeringly large financial crisis, he made a fateful decision: He left most of his progressive economic advisers behind — including such liberal luminaries as Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz — and chose to go with name brand Clinton officials instead. Summers became his chief economic adviser, Geithner became his Treasury secretary, and fellow Rubin protégé Peter Orszag became his budget director. (According to Suskind, Obama even offered Rubin himself an office in the White House.)

The “bold visions of the campaign season… resolved into the serious, often risk-averse business of actually governing,” Suskind writes. “In the midst of a battering economic storm, it no longer seemed like the right time to be making waves.”

While the appointments of these men and a slew of similarly pedigreed subordinates reassured the financial markets, their leadership undermined Obama’s populist promises.

Many of them had already spent their interregnum feeding at the Wall Street trough.

Summers was paid $5.2 million for his part-time work for a massive hedge fund in 2008 alone, according to financial disclosure forms that were released on a Friday night several months after his appointment. That same year, he also raked in more than $2.7 million in fees for speaking engagements at such places as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. For one speech alone, Goldman Sachs paid him a cool $135,000.

Rubin, whose influence remained enormous among the new Obama appointees, left Treasury to join Citigroup, a mega-bank that took on ever-riskier, life-threatening stances during his tenure while he managed to snare $126 million in cash and stock.

(How could all this money not be corrupting? Why did Obama trust these guys? Those were questions I was asking from my perch at the Washington Post at the time, and they were never answered.)

Although Geithner didn’t work directly for the banks, he regulated such firms as Citigroup and, as head of the New York Fed, helped engineer bailouts in the fall of 2008 that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.

Rather than give this team clear marching orders, Obama asked them what he should do, according to Suskind’s account. Not surprisingly, they were loath to suggest anything that would harm Wall Street, or, as they put it, spook the market.

Instead of “tough love”, the Obama White House showered the banks in cash and federal guarantees to make sure they could “earn their way back to health”. There was no “haircut”, no restructuring of the banks or the system that had done so much harm. Even the bankers were surprised, according to Suskind.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker — a relative progressive when compared to the advisers Obama chose to heed — told Suskind what his advice to Obama had been: “Well, right now, when you have your chance, and their breasts are bared, you need to put a spear through the heart of all these guys on Wall Street that for years have been mostly debt merchants.”

By late March 2009, public sentiment against the banks, which had been growing since the bailouts of the previous fall, had reached a fever pitch. But when the CEOs of the 13 largest banking institutions in the United States came to the White House, Obama’s own tone was conciliatory.

“I want to help,” he told them. “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. But if I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation.”

The bankers offered a few empty promises about voluntary compensation limits and went on to book two of the most profitable years in Wall Street’s history

There were things Obama and his staff could have pushed for much more aggressively. That list included breaking up the big banks or forcing banks to come to terms with the toxic assets still lurking in their portfolios. The White House team could have listened to the people who saw the crisis coming or had a history of taking on Wall Street. They could have replaced Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, rather than renominating him.

Instead, as Suskind describes, bold action was consistently thwarted by one means or another.

Obama’s management style made that easy. “He feels like he needs consensus to have the confidence of action,” Suskind told HuffPost.

Without the guiding star of Obama’s campaign promises, his economic team settled on what they called a “Hippocratic” motto: First, do no harm. Suskind writes that Volcker saw that as a formula for small, modest actions:

The “do no harm” school, he said, “always sounds reasonable” in that it calls for delay, until matters worsen to the point, “where they’ll be consensus that we need to act in a forceful way. But you never get that consensus, because many of the actors, the institutions and so forth, will follow their self-interest right off the cliff.” Every policy of consequence, meanwhile, is going to “do some harm, something government, mind you, can and should cushion.” But there’s no other way “to create the larger good, something you look back on with pride.”

For a young, new president “with a powerful intellect but little experience, this stance was always available as a sensible course,” Suskind writes. Over time, it “increasingly felt like a prudential path, rather than a backing away from history’s call to arms.”

Sometimes, despite all this, Obama seemed to be opting for more decisive action. That, Suskind writes, is when the staff became insubordinate, “relitigating” matters that had been settled, “slow-walking” decisions that had been made — and in at least one case, outright ignoring what they were told.

The most graphic of many illustrations of this is Suskind’s recounting of a March 15, 2009, meeting at which Obama expressed a desire to draw up plans to break up the banks, which he said would “strike a blow for prudence” and would “begin to change the reckless behavior of Wall Street and show that accountability flows in both directions.”

Instead, his team (led in this case by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who from 1999 to 2002 made more than $18 million working for a financial services firm) wore down his request to a simpler directive: Draw up a plan for restructuring Citibank.

“Well, okay, so we do Citibank and we do it thoroughly and well,” Obama said, according to the book. “That would show everybody that they can trust those guys in government to do a hard job, and do it right. And then we go back to Congress and get the money to do the wider job that really needs to be done.”

Yet even that wouldn’t happen. Geithner simply never went ahead with it, according to the book, opting instead for his preferred strategy of applying “stress tests” to the banks — to find out how much capital they needed from the government and other sources to stay afloat.

That, in essence, is what Japan did for its two decades of stagnation, and we’re now three years along on that same path.

Liberals like Paul Krugman were aghast as the details began to leak. “It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street,” Krugman wrote in late March. “And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.”

The Citibank incident and others like it, Suskind writes, reflected a “pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.”

“The president had lost control of his White House; he had almost no process to translate his will into policy on the occasions when he could decide on a coherent path,” Suskind writes. “But such decisions were rare.”

Back in March 2010, I wrote for HuffPost that “people looking for the reasons why the Obama presidency has not lived up to its promise won’t find the answer amid the minor rifts between key players….. The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change.”

I was thinking of Emanuel in particular. But when it comes to the economy, Suskind describes Summers as the guy who really tied Obama up in knots.

Here’s Suskind quoting Orszag — on the record, by name: “Larry just didn’t think the president knew what he was deciding,” Orszag said. “The question is why didn’t [Obama] stop it,” he told Suskind. “People realized the process wasn’t working, and they kept saying it…. but the president didn’t say, Goddammit!… He didn’t demand that it be changed . . . and that can’t be healthy.”

A few days after the book came out, Geithner publicly denied slow-walking any orders from Obama.

“I would never do that,” he said. “I have spent my life in public service. It’s my great privilege to serve this President, and I would never contemplate doing that. But, again, I lived the original, and the reality I lived, we all lived together, bears no relation to the sad little stories I heard reported from that book.”

Summers, who has never said publicly whether he actually read the book, issued a statement saying that the “the hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion and words taken out of context.”

Still, we don’t have to take Suskind’s word for it. Simply read the White House’s own extraordinary February 2010 “annual review” memo, which top Obama adviser Pete Rouse prepared for the president. Suskind excerpts it in the book and the White House has not challenged its authenticity:

First there is deep dissatisfaction within the economic team with what is perceived to be Larry’s imperious and heavy-handed direction of the economic policy process.
Second, when the economic team does not like a decision by the President, they have on occasion worked to re-litigate the overall policy.

Third, when the policy direction is firmly decided, there can be consideration/reconsideration of the details until to the very last moments.

Fourth, once a decision is made, implementation by the Department of the Treasury has at times been slow and uneven. These factors all adversely affect execution of the policy process.

Meet the New Team

Most of the members of Obama’s initial economic team — including Summers, Orszag and Emanuel — are gone, now.

Geithner, notably, remains.

And in the end, three white, male Clinton appointees with close ties to Wall Street were replaced by — you guessed it — three other white male Clinton appointees with ties to Wall Street.

Chief of Staff Bill Daley, formerly Clinton’s secretary of commerce, came back to the White House fresh off an $8.7 million-a-year job at JPMorgan Chase. His appointment, particularly delighted Wall Street.

National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, who held the exact same job under Clinton, made $2.2 million in 2008 alone, including $887,727 from Goldman Sachs for a part-time job advising it on its charitable giving and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies.

New budget chief Jack Lew, who also had the exact same job under Clinton, made millions in between his White House stints at Citigroup, including a $950,000 bonus in 2009not long after the bank received billions of taxpayer dollars. (Lew told a Senate panel last year that deregulation didn’t lead to the financial crisis.)

By all accounts, they’re a nicer bunch than the men they replaced. None of them is anywhere near as “imperious and heavy handed” as Summers, who Suskind actually caught musing that “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer.” According to Summers, “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”

(Summers recently wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post describing ways the government should mitigate rising inequality. It was greeted skeptically by some progressives.)

But are the new guys really philosophically different? Do they similarly defer to Wall Street? And block bold action? Were they hired to do so?

Because not much seemed to change after the old team left. In fact, many progressives felt that White House economic policy in the months-long debt ceiling debate actually hit a new low.

Part of that may have been political necessity. But even after the 2010 Republican House takeover, there were a lot of ways Obama could have successfully pursued his campaign-era agenda, and there are still even now several things he could do to goose the economy without Congress. But the White House doesn’t act.

Edward Luce, the fearless Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, recently wrote that the management problems continue.

Obama “remains unable to create a properly functioning White House,” he wrote. “Much of governing is about managing. No one, so far, has been given the authority to restrain Mr Obama’s inner circle. The effects have been sorely in evidence over the past 12 months.” And, Luce concluded: “The plain fact is that Mr Obama prefers to campaign than govern.”

The Bush White House famously had no real policymaking process at all — something Suskind first exposed in a prescient January 2003 article in Esquire. But once the decision was made (perhaps inexplicably, probably by Dick Cheney) there was no second-guessing. Stuff happened.

When it comes to economic policy, at least, the Obama White House would appear to be the exact opposite: A lot of process, a few timid decisions, and almost no action.

The early-November de facto demotion of Daley, with most of his duties going to Rouse — the writer of that memo, a veteran Obama aide with an unassuming demeanor and vast experience on the Hill — could mean some changes ahead. But it’s too soon to say, and Rouse is hardly considered the enforcer type.

The Suskind Factor

Like all of Suskind’s recent books, Confidence Men doesn’t just expose the secret goings-on that explain so much about how our government works. It also makes so much of the mainstream press coverage look shallow and credulous by comparison. That may go a long way toward explaining why his work sometimes gets a hostile reception in major media outlets.

Suskind’s 2004 book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill, for instance, was the first truly damning expose of George W. Bush’s White House, putting its author years ahead of most of his media colleagues in recognizing the depths of its dysfunction and deceit in the Bush/Cheney administration.

Time and again, Suskind’s revelations have initially been pooh-poohed by reporters who couldn’t recreate his reporting — and then much later were recognized as being utterly correct.

In his 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, for instance, Suskind reported that terror suspect Abu Zubaida was a mentally disturbed minor al Qaeda functionary who, when tortured, made up plots against imaginary targets — and that, as a result “thousands of uniformed men and women” were sent on wild goose chases.

It took the Washington Post three years to finally catch up with his reporting — but in the meantime, the mainstream media had allowed Bush to routinely cite Zubaida as his Exhibit A that torture worked, unhampered by reality.

Now, the same press corps that Suskind showed up so many times seems to delight in pointing out minor errors in his nearly 500-page tome.

Leading the recent charge against Suskind was Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Washington Post Company’s Slate Group. In a column entitled Don’t Believe Ron Suskind, Weisberg repeated White House talking points and accused Suskind of fabrication.

But Weisberg’s stance is less surprising when one considers that Suskind’s book is basically one long evisceration of all things Rubin, and Weisberg is close to Rubin — having actually co-authored Rubin’s 2003 autobiography.

(Weisberg, in an e-mail, insisted he had no ulterior motive. “I’ve long mistrusted Suskind’s journalism. I picked up his new book and got even more suspicious,” he wrote. “I think the guy is a lousy reporter and decided to say so with evidence. It’s got nothing at all to do with Rubin or the White House. I did my own homework. I think you’ll find that most of the errors I found in the book weren’t caught by the White House or anyone else before me.” As for whether it was a mistake not to disclose his ties to Rubin in his article, Weisberg wrote that “it had nothing to do with my story. But obviously isn’t any kind of secret.”)

Meanwhile, in a more rigorous critique, Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein, writing in the New York Review of Books, accused the book of “incoherence” largely based on what he called a contradiction between Suskind’s description of Summers as all-powerful — and Suskind’s own reporting about the several times Summers’ more progressive ideas were rejected as too radical.

But in the book, Suskind never suggested that Summers or Geithner won all their battles; what he described was an environment in which Summers or Geithner — or Emanuel — all won some and lost some; an environment in which any one of the old Clinton hands could shoot down a bold idea as untested, too radical, unsellable, or too likely to spook the markets.

The only consistent theme, especially when it came to dealing with Wall Street or job creation, was that whoever was most cautious tended to emerge the victor, either outright, by winning over the president, or because they could block the execution.

Klein also argued that, while Obama clearly underestimated the severity of the financial crisis, the insufficient response was largely the fault of Congress. “The president is but one actor in the drama of American politics, and he is quite constrained in his capacity to make — or remake — American policy,” Klein wrote.

But Suskind documents case after case in which the White House didn’t even try — and certainly never came even close to twisting arms the way, say, Lyndon Johnson might have.

Words And Deeds

Politically, Obama’s economic policy has been a disaster. There was enormous political will to make the banks pay for their mistakes back in 2009 — and judging by the Occupy movement, it’s still there. It remains unsatisfied.

Bolder action — especially when it comes to reducing the principal on underwater mortgages — would have hugely stimulated the economy. A larger stimulus, or a second one, would have created jobs.

Perhaps more than anything else, not living up to his word has hurt the president across the board.

“It’s about the connection between word and deed,” says Suskind. “At day’s end, what got George W. Bush re-elected was straight-shooter credit.”

Consider what progressive hero Elizabeth Warren told Suskind in a September 2009 interview:

“You can’t run a policy based on a misdirection, on a fiction,” she said. “I don’t know what the president is thinking. I don’t see the president. He meets with bankers. He doesn’t meet with me. But if he’s involved in this at all, he’s got to know that his angry words at Wall Street, at their recklessness and dangerous incentives in compensation, about how they do their business in ways utterly divorced from what’s actually good for the economy — that he can’t just say that sort of thing, and then dump money in their laps and be credible.”

So what does Obama need to do to persuade people that he means what he says? “Words are not enough,” says Suskind.

“Right now, after the record that has expressed itself across four years, the only thing that will be proof of change is deeds — meaning he takes on the assembled power of the financial capital in an ‘either them or me’ way.”

He could also level with the public about the errors he made, and what he’s learned from them.

He could fire Geithner — like some people have been suggesting for nearly three years. (Although the New York Times recently wrote, in a gushing profile, that “Mr. Geithner’s departure could signal additional instability to financial markets.”)

Ultimately, the biggest question for voters who are troubled by Obama’s failure to confront Wall Street despite his words is whether it reflects a weakness of character, a weakness of will, or a weakness in management style. Presumably the latter would be easier to correct in a second term.

But Suskind has no opinion — and wonders if there’s really much of a difference. Either way, it’s a reflection of how Obama wields power. And until something dramatic happens, there’s no reason to think it’s going to change. “This White House,” Suskind says, “is the one he constructed and presides over.”

© 2011 Dan Froomkin

Dan Froomkin is Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. Previously, he wrote the White House Watch column for the Washington Post’s website.

Why God Did Not Create the Universe

There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required

By STEPHEN HAWKING And LEONARD MLODINOW

According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.

This article in the Wall Street Journal was the subject of an article in The Deseret News that is also posted on Watts Cookin’. Our comments are attached within the Deseret News commentary posted under the headline “Hawking’s New Book Dismisses God”. Hawking is widely regarded as one of the smartest men in the world, if not number one, and it is worth our time to listen and learn.

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.

Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He meant that, unlike our homes on a bad day, the universe is not just a conglomeration of objects each going its own way. Everything in the universe follows laws, without exception.

Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not “arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature.” Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was “created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition.” The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth’s human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist.

The Hubble Space Telescope snaps new images of the oldest galaxies ever seen. A senior scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains to WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz and Simon Constable how he did it-and what it means.

It is possible to turn that last statement into a scientific principle: The fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. For example, if we did not know the distance from the Earth to the sun, the fact that beings like us exist would allow us to put bounds on how small or great the Earth-sun separation could be. We need liquid water to exist, and if the Earth were too close, it would all boil off; if it were too far, it would freeze. That principle is called the “weak” anthropic principle.

The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves.

The idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life, but also the characteristics of our entire universe—and its laws. They appear to have a design that is both tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is much more difficult to explain.

Stephen Youll

The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

—Stephen Hawking is a professor at the University of Cambridge. Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist who teaches at Caltech. Adapted from “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, to be published by Bantam Books on Sept. 7. Copyright © by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Printed by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.

By Michael De Groote

Deseret News

Published: Friday, Feb. 4, 2011 7:10 p.m. MST

When British physicist Stephen Hawking came into the auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., the crowd went wild. The Los Angeles Times reported that one fan, 13-year-old Evan Hetland, even dubbed him “the nerd pope.”

Hawking was somewhat the darling of some religious people for his occasional references to God, such as one time when he said that if a complete theory of physics were discovered, then “we would know the mind of God.”

But Hawking’s latest book, “The Grand Design,” written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, leaves little room for God — or philosophy for that matter. A Wall Street Journal article they wrote based on their book is titled “Why God Did Not Create the Universe: There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world — no gods required.”

Ouch.

“Ouch,” my eye! There is no ‘ouch’ for believers. Nevertheless, a compliment to the Deseret News for publishing this story. Hawking’s views are significant and obviously puts religious folks in a defensive posture. As expected the article by Michael DeGroote couldn’t be printed in the Deseret News without a significant counter punch that deflects the issue, and it is good and credible journalism to present opposing points of view.

Believers can take a punch better than anyone. Facts seldom hit a believer square on, they are almost always deflected. Believers are resilient beyond, no pun intended, ‘belief.’  There is no penetration. Once they have talked with God there is rarely any denying. There needs to be another scientific study to explain that phenomenon.

The fact that their God said the earth was created in seven days is meaningless to them. Despite incontrovertible evidence they insist their scriptures are the ‘Word of God.’ Science hasn’t proven there is a god, but it has thoroughly disproved the scriptures of Holy Writ.

Sure, there can still be a God, and Hawking hasn’t even completely ruled it out, but it is obvious that if by a long shot there happens to be a god—it is not the God of the myths of our early recorded history. It is not the God of Christianity, or of Muslims,  or of Jews, the three religions that seem to be on a collision course with Armageddon and dragging the rest of us with them. Those gods have been thoroughly debunked and the rest of the world is plagued with them.

It would be nice to be able to discuss the problems of the world without starting the discussion on the false foundation, the shifting sands, of religious belief. Let’s put mythology aside and try to make the world a better place for everyone for the short time we are all here.

The article starts with a story from Viking mythology that explained eclipses were caused by two sky wolves. “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Those myths (read “religions”) gave way to philosophy and now — tadah! — philosophy has given way to modern science. In the introduction,

Hawking says that “Philosophy is dead” because it hasn’t kept up with modern developments in science.

James E. Faulconer, professor of philosophy, and Richard L. Evans, Professor of Religious Understanding at BYU, disagree.

“It was a throwaway line,” Faulconer said. “Very little of philosophy is about deciphering the universe.”

But Hawking is famous for deciphering the universe. In his new book, he explains how M-theory and other physics make the need for a creator god obsolete.

“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Blue touch paper is a fuse for fireworks.

So gravity lit the fuse.

Hawking also uses the idea of a multiverse — that there are many different universes — to explain why such a precise universe exists that can create life.

Just how precisely tuned is our universe?

“By examining the model universes, we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different and, in many cases, unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

They acknowledge that some may ascribe this fine-tuning to God, but if there are many universes — which physics predicts in string theory and more particularly M-theory — then out of the billions of possible universes, it is likely a universe like ours would be created quantum fluctuations as well.

So it is like a lottery.

Of all the possibilities, it is likely that our one universe with all its laws would be one of those possibilities. “(O)ur cosmic habitat — now the entire observable universe — is just one of many,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Stephen Barr is a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware and published “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” with the University of Notre Dame Press in 2003. Barr thinks the best answer to Hawking’s new book is Hawking himself. In Hawking’s 1988 bestseller “A Brief History of Time,” he wrote about what is at the base of physics: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

Barr said, “Physicists can create a mathematical theory of a universe coming into being, but what makes it real? That is a question that a creator, as traditionally understood by Judaism and Christianity, answers. It gives reality to the universe. It’s what explains why there is a real universe that those equations are describing.”

Barr happens to think that M-theory is correct but recognizes that it is not yet a conclusion. “No description of anything, whether math as provided by physics or verbal descriptions, can confer reality on anything.”

Hawking, in fact, hasn’t proposed anything new in his book, Barr said. And so Hawking’s conclusions may be misleading or at least premature. “When he says physics answered the question, he knows that is nonsense,” Barr said.

Steven Faux thinks Hawking is reaching beyond his expertise when he makes pronouncements about philosophy and theology. “Generally, theologians make poor scientists,” said Faux, who is in the department of psychology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and specializes in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. “By and large, scientists make poor theologians.”

Faux, who is a Mormon, said that the job of science is to teach how things work in nature. “Religion teaches about a higher meaning in life, something science can’t get at.”

BYU philosopher Faulconer said, “Scientists have a circular explanation of the world. There is no reference to anything beyond the empirical. So they find nothing beyond the empirical.” He said God is not an empirical concept and that religious people need to look beyond the empirical — beyond the things that can be observed and measured — to know there is a God. “We shouldn’t be surprised when science can’t find God,” Faulconer said, then added in mock valley girl speak: “Well, yeah.”

Hawking sees a mechanical scientific creation that leaves nothing for God to do. Faux thinks Hawking is missing the main point. “He makes a presumption that we know how God works. But we don’t know how God created the earth or the universe.”

Faulconer sees the other side of the equation as well. “I can’t make an argument for God’s existence based on what science accepts. Science gives a perfectly adequate explanation of the world for certain purposes.”

Science teaches how things work in nature. Religion, according to Faux, teaches about higher meaning and purpose.

Barr sees Hawking’s explanations, not as a scientific conclusion, but as a story like those told in ancient times. But even if his particular story is true, it doesn’t exclude God. “It doesn’t take away the fact that the universe being life-bearing is a remarkable thing,” Barr said.

e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com Twitter: twitter.com/degroote

by The Economics of Happiness – the Movie The Economics of Happiness

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

See the trailer to the movie at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZL0dp-xzhw

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm — an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Zac Goldsmith and Samdhong Rinpoche – the Prime Minister of Tibet’s government in exile. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

Los Angeles Times

Published: January 7, 2011 08:52AM

There are writers whose books are stacked on my nightstand: G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Babington Macaulay — writers whom I spend half an hour with before nodding off. They are master prose stylists whose command and fluency of English are the pleasure of reading them, even if the subjects, people and times they write about are unfamiliar and distant to our contemporary minds.

Now I can add to that nightstand stack the recently published boxed set of the Library of America edition of H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices series, which comprises the six volumes published between 1919 and 1927. Reading one or two of Menken’s reviews and essays is the kind of thing that you want to take, like a restorative, before bedtime, to counter the ill writing and easy thinking that daily pass before our eyes.

The Prejudices series is a compilation of reworked reviews and essays that Mencken originally wrote for literary journals and newspapers that contain his unexpurgated opinions about American writers, culture and society. Each volume contains between 30 and 40 essays and reviews ranging over literature, art, politics, philosophy, religion and science. He was a newspaper columnist in the fullest sense: No topic or subject was out of reach (and perhaps some should have been. Mencken considered himself the foremost authority on Nietzsche outside Germany; suffice it to say there are not many Nietzsche scholars urging their students to consult Mencken).

Mencken’s opinions of his literary brethren and America were largely, as we say today, “negative.” This is the writer, after all, who used a bullhorn to rail against the insularity and smug primitiveness of American culture, the writer who gave us the term “Bible Belt” to label the religious South and the now-forgotten gem “boobosisie” to describe the always-upwardly striving middle-class “Babbitts” that were emerging in the early 20th century as an economic market and political force.

Indeed, when it comes to cutting down just about any saint of American literature with his type keys, be it Robert Frost or Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mencken is the father of the modern literary exercise known as the “hatchet job.”

Consider: In an essay on American poets, he rhetorically asks, “Frost?” And then chops, “A standard New England poet, with a few changes in phraseology, and the substitution of sour resignationism for sweet resignationism. Whittier without the whiskers.” A few chapters later, in a dismissal of Emerson, Mencken derides his enthusiasts as a “cult … [that] has been an affectation from the start. Not many of the chautauqua orator, vassarized old maids and other such bogus intelligentsia who drive themselves to it have any intelligible understanding of the Transcendentalism at the heart of it.”

Henry Louis Mencken, who died in 1956, is one of those writers more remembered than read — in part because, with the exception of his continually revised masterwork of lexography, The American Language, most of his books have been long out of print. It took me nearly a dozen years of rummaging through used-book stores in numerous states to find all six of the original Prejudices volumes. Now the Library of America edition brings these works back to life.

It’s only baffling that it took 31 years and 207 volumes for the Library of America to publish Mencken. No doubt Mencken himself would have something to say about that, especially since Frost and Emerson have long been under the Library’s imprimatur.

Deseret News

Published: Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011 12:55 a.m. MST

Twenty-one years ago Michael W. McConnell was an up-and-coming professor at the University of Chicago Law School writing a complicated article about the legal meaning of “free exercise of religion” for the Harvard Law Review. During the revision process a law review student editor left such an impression on McConnell that he convinced Chicago Law School to grant the student a faculty fellowship upon graduation.

“He was an unusually good editor,” McConnell recalls. “He entered into the project in a way that I think helped me to make it a better article from the point of view of what I wanted it to be. He had some very intelligent organizational suggestions and was just very impressive.”

The Harvard Law Review editor who caught McConnell’s eye was Barack Obama.

“We had the opportunity of chatting quite a bit, and I knew he was planning to return to the south side of Chicago,” McConnell said. “It just seemed like a natural (fit) to connect him with the law school.”

In a vacuum, McConnell’s interaction with Obama could seem somewhat extraordinary. But playing an integral role in the ascension of a future president of the United States cannot be considered mere coincidence when placed within the greater context of McConnell’s career. Rather it’s indicative of a pattern in the life of the former University of Utah professor, because time and again McConnell has demonstrated a propensity for gravitating toward interesting assignments and compelling individuals.

McConnell has held jobs in which he reported directly to superiors such as Rex Lee, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and for two years he even held top-secret military clearance. In 2001 George W. Bush nominated McConnell to the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (one of a handful of appellate courts just below the U.S. Supreme Court), and after seven years on the bench he stepped away from the 10th Circuit to assume the prestigious directorship of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, a key position at one of the best law schools in the country. On two separate occasions in 2005 he was on the short list of candidates for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and throughout his career he has argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court about issues like freedoms of religion and speech.

Along the way, McConnell, who is one of America’s most important conservative thinkers, laid down deep roots in Utah. His family lived in Salt Lake City from 1996-2009; he taught at the U full-time from 1997-2002 and part-time thereafter until leaving for Stanford.

“When Michael left we lost one of our great intellects at the law school,” said Paul Cassell, a professor at Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law and a former federal judge. “We have other (great intellects) as well, but Michael had a national reputation as one of the leading constitutional scholars in the country.”

Faith dominates the intellectual landscape of McConnell’s life. A devout Christian belonging to a Presbyterian congregation, he chooses from among five different translations of the Bible depending on the purpose of his study. He co-edited “Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought,” published by Yale University Press.

As a member of the Deseret News Editorial Advisory board, McConnell brings judicial experience and razor-sharp legal expertise from a conservative, faith-based perspective that is nationally respected and sought after.

“I think that the greatest divide in American culture is not the difference between faithful members of one religion and another,” McConnell said. “But rather, (it’s) between all believers and those who are either indifferent or hostile.”

The story of Michael McConnell begins in suburban Louisville as the younger of two children. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a homemaker. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout and actively participated in his Christian church. During high school he propelled his debate team to a state championship and wrote for the school newspaper.

“I was not an athlete,” he said. “I ran JV cross country one year. It was very hard, and not very pleasant.”

McConnell went to Michigan State on an academic scholarship. He double-majored in political philosophy and economics, eventually rising to become Opinion Editor of the university’s 35,000-circulation student newspaper. During the summers, McConnell returned to Kentucky and worked as a reporter for his hometown newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“I was really debating between law school and journalism as career paths,” McConnell said. “But one thing I noticed while working at the Courier-Journal was that a number of the young reporters whom I most admired burned out and went to law school. So it occurred to me that maybe it was smarter to just go to law school from the beginning.

He applied to only two law schools, earning acceptance from both Yale and Chicago. He chose the latter primarily for two reasons: he found Chicago’s economic approach to the analysis of law to be quite attractive, and Chicago offered him a significantly better financial package than Yale.

“I went to Chicago because I got a full-ride scholarship there,” McConnell said. “(Yale) didn’t offer me much money, and we were not a wealthy family.”

It was while still at Michigan State that McConnell met his future wife, Mary. Near the end of Michael’s law school, the couple married six days after Mary returned stateside from a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.

After graduating from law school in 1979 McConnell served two prestigious clerkships, first for Judge J. Skelly Wright on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. at the U.S. Supreme Court. Thereafter McConnell burnished his Conservative credentials with a stint in the Office of Management and Budget early in the Reagan administration followed by two years as an assistant Solicitor General to Rex Lee, the future president of BYU.

“I worked with (Lee) very closely at the Justice Department,” McConnell said. “He was truly one of the great lawyers of the 20th Century, just enormously intelligent and able to express ideas clearly and forcefully.”

McConnell returned to Chicago Law School in 1985. From 1988-90, he additionally served on a part-time basis as one of three members on the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board that held top-secret intelligence clearance and reported directly to the Commander in Chief.

In 1996 the McConnells, searching for a more family-friendly environment for their three young children, opted to leave Chicago and came to Salt Lake City.

“Unlike some non-Mormons in Utah, I find Mormon culture quite welcoming and attractive,” McConnell said. “While there are some important theological differences, for us it’s not an uncomfortable or unwelcoming environment. I’d rather have a people around who are involved in their religion and are interested in it.”

While teaching at the U., McConnell developed close relationships with several of his fellow faculty. Debora Threedy, a contracts professor and scholar in feminist legal theory whose political views diverge from McConnell’s, nevertheless became fast friends with both he and his wife because of a mutual affinity for hiking. Threedy and the McConnells maintain cabins in southern Utah near Capitol Reef National Park, and to this day they still get together and go hiking or have dinner when they’re at their cabins.

“I think Michael’s a very thoughtful and kind person,” Threedy said. “He gives me hope that liberals and conservatives can find middle ground, because I’m very liberal and Michael is considered fairly conservative. Although sometimes I will disagree with him about how one should go about it, I think we both have the best interests of society at heart.”

Even among his peer law professors, McConnell carried a reputation for exceptional intelligence and mastery of the law.

“One of the things that’s amazing about Michael is his breadth of knowledge,” Cassell said. “He’s not just somebody who specialized in an obscure field of law, but he has command of a wide range of subjects. … You run into certain people in a lifetime that make you say, ‘Wow, the wheels on that guy are just turning faster than anything I’ve ever seen before.’ I’ve run into two people like that during my life — one is Justice (Antonin) Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the other is Michael McConnell. On both the intellectual wheels turn so rapidly that it’s a pleasure to watch them work.”

In 2005, while McConnell was balancing the 10th Circuit with teaching part-time, a pair of Supreme Court vacancies arose. With his reputation as one of the country’s preeminent conservative jurists and the same Republican president still in office who had nominated McConnell to the 10th Circuit, the national media buzzed about him being on the final list of candidates to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist or Justice Saundra Day O’Connor. John Roberts and Samuel Alito, however, ultimately filled the vacancies.

“I would’ve loved to do it — I won’t deny that,” McConnell said. “But … I didn’t get all bent out of shape. I know both John Roberts and Sam Alito, think very highly of them, and think that the President chose well.”

Stanford approached McConnell in 2009 with an offer to become director of its Constitutional Law Center. With his window for a Supreme Court nomination likely having passed, he accepted the Stanford position and resigned from both the 10th Circuit and the University of Utah.

The McConnells are now empty nesters. They enjoy a close relationship their two Keeshond dogs and continue to avidly hike during regular visits to their cabin in southern Utah, where they recently spent Christmas with their adult children.

In addition to continuing work on freedom of religion, McConnell is working on constitutional issues involving the Federal Reserve Board and giving a lecture this winter at Harvard on the constitutional thought of the first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

“The work on the court was extremely rewarding,” McConnell said. “But it’s very demanding in the sense that the volume of reading and thinking about the cases is pretty much your life. Now I’m able to read and think and write about things of my own choice.”

E-mail: jaskar@desnews.com

© 2011 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved

Los Angeles Times

Published: Friday, Nov. 19, 2010 5:57 p.m. MST

The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. While middle-age and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.

As recently as 1990, all but 7 percent of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17 percent of Americans say they have no religion, and these new “nones” are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25 percent and 30 percent of twenty somethings today say they have no religious affiliation — roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.

Another sociological study should be done regarding the division these issues have had on friendships and associations and the wedge they have driven between people who otherwise would respect and love each other.

‘Us’ have a tendency not to associate with ‘them,’ simply to avoid the inevitable conversational conflicts that arise and make life uncomfortable. The ‘us vs. them’ grouping solidifies the divide by discouraging interaction between people of differing views. Sadly, we have found that silence on politics and religion, the two most valued aspects of an individual, is required to maintain friendships. The question then arises, what good are shallow, artificial friendships? And the answer widens the divide.

The question has been answered. It’s obvious on its face. Politics and religion are divisive to begin with, but mix them and it seems to compound the extent of the intolerance we have for one another.

Politics and religion are the core of conflict and people are frustrated by it. There seems to be no lubricant that works.

For instance, take Utah’s political topic of the day—George W. Bush and torture. Read the comments people, are hurling at Rocky Anderson and, by inference, to all those who are opposed to torture. The newspaper comment boards expose how feeble our brains are. The newspapers have tried to supervise the comments, but they haven’t taken the one step that will elevate the conversation—the requiring of identification. Anonymous comments expose the depths of our ignorance. Not one of the people who hurled invectives at Rocky was willing to identify themselves, and the reason for anonymity was shown in the ignorance of their remarks.

We must learn to communicate better. We all need guidance in how to improve.  We need to make a more devoted effort to improve our communication skills so that we can talk with one another in honest dialogue while maintaining civility and respect.

The answer is in the words we choose and the tone of our voice. It requires enormous restraint, but most of all, it requires a knowledge of the subject that we are so cocksure about. When we recognize our own inadequacies and limitations it makes us less dogmatic in our relationships with others.

So, why this sudden jump in youthful disaffection from organized religion? The surprising answer, according to a mounting body of evidence, is politics. Very few of these new “nones” actually call themselves atheists, and many have rather conventional beliefs about God and theology. But they have been alienated from organized religion by its increasingly conservative politics.

During the 1980s, the public face of American religion turned sharply right.

Political allegiances and religious observance became more closely aligned, and both religion and politics became more polarized. Abortion and homosexuality became more prominent issues on the national political agenda, and activists such as Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed began looking to expand religious activism into electoral politics. Church attendance gradually became the primary dividing line between Republicans and Democrats in national elections.

This political “God gap” is a recent development. Up until the 1970s, progressive Democrats were common in church pews and many conservative Republicans didn’t attend church. But after 1980, both churchgoing progressives and secular conservatives became rarer and rarer. Some Americans brought their religion and their politics into alignment by adjusting their political views to their religious faith. But, surprisingly, more of them adjusted their religion to fit their politics.

We were initially skeptical about that proposition, because it seemed implausible that people would make choices that might affect their eternal fate based on how they felt about George W. Bush. But the evidence convinced us that many Americans now are sorting themselves out on Sunday morning on the basis of their political views. For example, in our Faith Matters national survey of 3,000 Americans, we observed this sorting process in real time, when we interviewed the same people twice about one year apart.

For many religious Americans, this alignment of religion and politics was divinely ordained, a long-sought retort to the immorality of the 1960s. Other Americans were not so sure.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new century, the increasingly prominent association between religion and conservative politics provoked a backlash among moderates and progressives, many of whom had previously considered themselves religious. The fraction of Americans who agreed “strongly” that religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions nearly doubled from 22 percent in 1991 to 38 percent in 2008, and the fraction who insisted that religious leaders should not try to influence how people vote rose to 45 percent from 30 percent.

This backlash was especially forceful among youth coming of age in the 1990s and just forming their views about religion. Some of that generation, to be sure, held deeply conservative moral and political views, and they felt very comfortable in the ranks of increasingly conservative churchgoers. But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were “always” or “almost always” wrong plummeted from about 75 percent in 1990 to about 40 percent in 2008. (Ironically, in polling, Millennials are actually more uneasy about abortion than their parents.)

Just as this generation moved to the left on most social issues — above all, homosexuality — many prominent religious leaders moved to the right, using the issue of same-sex marriage to mobilize electoral support for conservative Republicans. In the short run, this tactic worked to increase GOP turnout, but the subsequent backlash undermined sympathy for religion among many young moderates and progressives. Increasingly, young people saw religion as intolerant, hypocritical, judgmental and homophobic. If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.

Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer of the University of California at Berkeley were among the first to call attention to the ensuing rise in young “nones,” and in our recent book, “American Grace,” we have extended their analysis, showing that the association between religion and politics (and especially religion’s intolerance of homosexuality) was the single strongest factor in this portentous shift. In religious affinities, as in taste in music and preference for colas, habits formed in early adulthood tend to harden over time. So if more than one-quarter of today’s young people are setting off in adult life with no religious identification, compared with about one-20th of previous generations, the prospects for religious observance in the coming decades are substantially diminished.

Evangelical Protestantism, which saw dramatic growth in the 1970s and 1980s, has been hit hard by this more recent development. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s the fraction of Americans age 18 to 29 who identified with evangelical Protestantism rose to 25 percent from 20 percent, but since 1990, that fraction has fallen back to about 17 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of young Americans who have no religious affiliation at all rose from just over 10 percent as late as 1990 to its current proportion of about 27 percent.

Continuing to sound the trumpet for conservative social policy on issues such as homosexuality may or may not be the right thing to do from a theological point of view, but it is likely to mean saving fewer souls.

Nevertheless, predictions of the demise of religion in America would be premature. More likely is that as growing numbers of young Americans reject religious doctrine that is too political or intolerant for their taste, innovative religious leaders will concoct more palatable offerings. Jesus taught his disciples to be “fishers of men,” and the pool of unchurched moderate and progressive young people must be an attractive target for religious anglers.

To be sure, some of these young people will remain secularists. Many of them, however, espouse beliefs that would seem to make them potential converts to a religion that offered some of the attractions of modern evangelicalism without the conservative political overlay.

Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, and David E. Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, are the authors of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” They wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

This speech by Brig. Gen. (Ret.) David R. Irvine was given at a protest rally at Pioneer Park in Salt Lake City while former President Bush was signing copies of his recently released book in nearby Sandy. His book contains an admission that he authorized water boarding which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

More than 2,000 people attended the Bush book signing and only about 100 people attended the protest rally. Featured speakers at the protest rally were former mayor Rocky Anderson  and retired Brigadier General David Irvine. These speeches are very persuasive about the need for legal action and we urge everyone to read these speeches.

That a vast majority of Utahns and Americans are willing to turn a blind eye to this clear violation of the laws of the land, and thus endorse torture as part of our culture, is shocking, stunning, and very, very sad. We are supposedly devoted to the idea of Obedience to the Rule of Law. So much for that beautiful concept. It’s a concept that appeared regularly in the speeches of George W. Bush and his administration, but it was all hooey.

This is the speech by Brigadier General Irvine. Anderson’s speech will be posted shortly.

Speech by Brigadier General (Ret.) David Irvine

Pioneer Park, Salt Lake City, November 19, 2010

I would like to begin my comments with an observation. We live in the reddest of red states. As a state, we are pro-life, pro-Constitution, and pro-Rule of Law. PROPOSITION: one cannot be all of these things and ALSO be pro-torture – and still sleep straight in bed at night.

I understand there’s a book-signing in Sandy today, and while I suspect most of you will not be buying that book, I couldn’t resist browsing its table of contents at Barnes & Noble. I was looking for two names, which I didn’t find. One was Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, who’s a friend of mine. Gen. Taguba was assigned to make the first investigation of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. What he found was a trail of breadcrumbs that led back up the chain of command. In his official report, Gen. Taguba recommended that the scope of the investigation be expanded to determine how far up the chain of command responsibility might go for what had happened there. For his honesty, and for making that recommendation, he was directed to retire. There is a retired Air Force three-star in Boise, who was also directed to retire for recommending that James Miller, the Army two-star who imported Guantanamo’s interrogation techniques to Abu Ghraib, be court-martialed.

I spent three hours at dinner with Gen. Taguba several months ago, and was riveted by what he told me. I begged him to consider writing a book. His answer was, particularly on today’s occasion, interesting. He said, “As a military officer, I believe it’s inappropriate for me to make a profit for carrying out an order I was given.” As a lawyer, I said, “Tony, you could give all the proceeds to the Army Emergency Relief Fund,” but he was unpersuaded.

Another name missing from the index was that of Air Force Col. Mo Davis. Col. Davis was assigned to be the lead Judge Advocate prosecutor for the Bush military commissions at Guantanamo. Col. Davis resigned that assignment and retired after being directed to use evidence tainted by torture in the prosecutions of Guantanamo prisoners. Col. Davis is but one of MANY JAGs who either defended Guantanamo prisoners or refused to use tainted evidence as prosecutors, and paid for their integrity with their careers.

What I DID find in the index, under “interrogation,” was a citation to just three pages. Those three pages were, for me, revealing, first, because all that the author had to say on that quite singular subject only took three pages. Second, because they show that we, as a society, have moved beyond “The Dog Ate My Homework” defense in junior high to a more sophisticated “My lawyer said it was OK” defense in national security policy. In this sense, those three pages are historic, because the war crimes trials following World War II specifically rejected the “reliance on counsel” defense. As I read that slightly tortured rationale, I could not help thinking of the small group of civilian lawyers who gave the President permission to ignore settled law. They had three things in common: (1) no military experience; (2) no law enforcement experience; and (3) no interrogation experience. I also was reminded of the senior, flag-rank, Judge Advocates General — of all of the uniformed services — who had written letters and memoranda of protest against the abuse and torture of prisoners to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at the beginning of this unfortunate business. Their letters were all classified SECRET, lest the American public find out that these learned and experienced military officers believed that the interrogation policies of the Bush Administration were violations of federal and international law.

I’m here today to recommend some alternate reading to what’s being signed and sold down south. The book I recommend to you is Because It Is Wrong, by Charles Fried. Professor Fried was President Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General, and his 200 page book is a lawyer’s and philosopher’s rebuttal to the three infamous pages I’ve mentioned. General Fried was quite blunt in a recent interview with Reuters: “I think that [the Bush administration] broke the law, and what they did was disgusting and terrible and degrading.” In an interview with an Australian paper a week ago, Fried said: “[T]he illegality of waterboarding isn’t a close call, even though we have come to call it ‘simulated drowning’ or ‘enhanced interrogation.’ It has been a crime for decades. In the past, we have prosecuted American soldiers who engaged in the equivalent of waterboarding. We have also prosecuted German and Japanese commandants who ordered it. Some were even executed.”

In 2007, General David Petraeus issued a directive to all forces in Iraq, which said: “Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient means to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.” These guys are hardly lefties, but they could not disagree more with former President Bush on this important point.

I’ll conclude by sharing what I believe is a brilliant analysis of where we now are by my favorite Supreme Court commentator – Dahlia Lithwick, who writes for Newsweek and Slate. On November 10th she wrote:

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems NOT to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it . .

Torture is being held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that waterboarding is illegal torture. So what? President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer.

If a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, “Damn right.”

Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all waterboarders now.

Buy the book. Because It Is Wrong. It’s a Reaganaut’s view of torture – wrong under any circumstances, period. If torture is really the panacea for cracking tough cases, why do we not incorporate it as a standard practice in our criminal justice system? Torture has not made us safer. It’s unreliable. It’s inconsistent with who we are, it’s foreign to our values, it increases the danger to our troops. Since 2006, I’ve worked closely with a group of about 60 retired admirals and generals who have written and said exactly that to Congress, to the current President and to his predecessor, shortly to be signing books. The group has included former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, combat division commanders, a director of the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and senior Judge Advocates General. Our informal co-chairs are a former Commander-in-Chief of Central Command and a former Commandant of the Marine Corps. This debate is not about who’s a wuss on terror; it’s about what makes the most sense for national security and upholding the Constitution.

Thank you.

On November 6, 2010 The Tribune printed a movie review of ‘For Colored Girls’ by Tribune movie critic Sean Means. His review is printed below.

The following week Richard Scharine, a professor emeritus in theatre and ethnic studies offered a response.

For convenience they are both published here on the same blog segment.

For Colored Girls

Movie review By Sean P. Means

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: November 6, 2010 08:41AM

Eight observations after seeing “For Colored Girls”:

Observation No. 1 • The source material for this drama, Ntozake Shange’s 1976 Broadway play, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” must be quite a stage event — chock full of meaty monologues with poetic, powerful language that any actress would be eager to deliver.

Observation No. 2 • It looks like a lot of African-American actresses — sick of the slim pickings usually offered them in Hollywood (the options are often limited to playing Martin Lawrence’s wife or Denzel Washington’s daughter) — jumped at the chance to be in the movie version. The cast includes one Oscar winner (Whoopi Goldberg), three Tony winners (Goldberg, Phylicia Rashad and Anika Noni Rose), and such great but less-heralded performers as Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington, Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise and Janet Jackson.

Observation No. 3 • Putting these lofty monologues into a movie script, where they have to rub against the street-level dialogue needed to propel a narrative, would be a challenge for a great screenwriter.

Observation No. 4 • Tyler Perry is not a great screenwriter, and his instinct for bargain-basement melodrama — including scenes of rape, child abuse, spousal abuse and a back-alley abortion mill — exploits the victimhood of Shange’s characters.

Observation No. 5 • Perry is not a great director, either, and he pushes his cast and composer Aaron Zigman to over-the-top histrionics.

Observation No. 6 • In spite of Perry’s hamhanded approach, there is still power in “For Colored Girls,” thanks to some stunning performances: Newton as Tangie, the hardened bartender who uses sex as an escape from her pain; Elise, who lives across the hall from Tangie and hides the abuse delivered by her unstable boyfriend (Michael Ealy); Washington as Kelly, a social worker who’s powerless to help Crystal; and particularly Rashad, whose Gilda, the apartment manager who sees all, is the glue that holds the narrative together.

Observation No. 7 • The male characters Perry has added are villainous to the point of absurdity — a rogue’s gallery that includes a rapist, a child abuser, a philanderer and a closet homosexual. The only positive male figure, Kelly’s cop husband (Hill Harper), is good-hearted but ineffectual.

Observation No. 8 • Anything I, a white male, have to say about “For Colored Girls” is probably irrelevant — because I’m not the audience to which Perry is catering. For the African-American women, it’s a chance to see their own lives and problems expressed in touching language.

movies@sltrib.com

—

For Colored Girls

Tyler Perry raises the histrionics to turn a beloved play into a melodramatic mess.

Where • Area theaters

When • Now open

Rating • R for some disturbing violence including a rape, sexual content and language

Running time • 137 minutes

-0-

Comment on Review ‘For Colored Girls’

By RICHARD SCHARINE

(Richard Scharine is a professor emeritus in theater and ethnic studies at the University of Utah Theatre Department and artistic director for People Productions.)

Published: November 13, 2010 01:01AM
Updated: November 13, 2010 01:01AM

While I can sympathize with Sean Means’ reluctance to present himself as an expert in what appeals to African-American women (“‘For Colored Girls’ amps up the melodrama,” Tribune, Nov. 6), some of his observations could use examination in a larger context.

One of the major contentions of Spike Lee’s Tanner Humanities Lecture in September was that, for America, “Race is the elephant in the living room.” One aspect of that “elephant” is a self-assumed censorship by Caucasians concerning the African-American milieu.

In our culture it is a given that we cannot understand their lives and have no right to express an opinion about them. Too often such an attitude is less a reflection of sensitivity than laziness. If those of another race are beyond our understanding, then we bear no responsibility to them and there is nothing we can learn from what happens to them.

They are even more isolated from you and me, the hegemonic norm, than are gays, because no one can even pretend that race can be “cured.”

It is instructive to note that while Means quite rightly shows no hesitance in assuming the relevance of his opinion about the English film “Nowhere Boy” or the French “Breathless,” he finds it necessary to add a caveat to his review of “For Colored Girls.” He does not hesitate to assess Tyler Perry as neither a great screenwriter nor a great director, but implies that (for all he knows) these qualities may be irrelevant to black women viewers. Why?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “hath not a [black woman] eyes? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

I make no claim to objectivity on this subject. I am a white man who has taught and directed black theater for 37 years, the last 10 as the artistic director of People Productions, Utah’s only African-American-themed theater.

I saw Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbo Is Enuf” on Broadway in 1977 and directed it for People Productions in 2001. It is our hope to do the play again sometime next year.

However, I also make no claim to special insight into the lives of black women because I have directed plays about them, even as I won’t pretend to be an expert on 17th century England because I directed Caryl Churchill’s “Vinegar Tom,” or on 15th century Spain because I directed Lope de Vega’s “Fuente Ovejuna.”

The point is this: The appeal of ‘For Colored Girls” — as it is for all good black theater, all good English theater, all good Spanish theater, etc. — is its universality. It expresses the pain of loss and of being alone, the joy of love, the wonder of growing up and the comfort of friendship. These things don’t change with your skin color.

Tyler Perry’s film may be good or bad, but if it is good it is not just “for the African-American women.” It is for all of us.

Man up, Sean. You know a lot more about “colored girls” than you think you do. They’re your sisters — and your fellow human beings.

© 2010 The Salt Lake Tribune

Rice declared on her Facebook account:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t:  Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being a Christian or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to belong to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

“I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

As expected, pro and con comments are appearing all over the internet. On Watts Cookin Blpg we have posted a column by Leonard Pitts on the subject. We will post others as well as comments.

The Washington Post

August 6, 2010 12:01AM

Washington • Earlier this week, as the United States Senate went through the motions of debating Elena Kagan’s nomination to a Supreme Court seat that almost certainly will be hers, readers of The New Yorker across the country could review journalist George Packer’s masterful article “The Empty Chamber,” tracing the decline and fall of that same Senate.

Packer shares with thousands of citizens what every reporter who covers the Capitol knows: that the public disdain for Congress, measured in record low approval scores in polls, is mirrored by the frustration of the members of both parties who have to serve and bear the scorn.

I heard it over lunch one day last week from a conservative Republican senator with three years of seniority. He was bitterly disappointed that he did not find the collegial, challenging body that his predecessor had described to him — or the cross-party friendship that Vice President Joe Biden had told him he once enjoyed in his travels with a Republican counterpart from the senator’s own state.

Packer does as good a job as I have ever read of tracing the forces that have brought the Senate to its current low estate. But he does not quite pinpoint the crucial factor: the absence of leaders who embody and can inculcate the institutional pride that once was the hallmark of membership in the Senate.

The Senate was designed not as a representative, small-d democratic body but as a deliberately minuscule assemblage, capable of taking up the most serious national challenges and dealing with them appropriately, because of the perspective and insulation provided by its lengthy terms and diverse constituencies.

Its best leaders have been men who were capable, at least on occasion, of rising above partisanship or parochial interest and summoning the will to tackle overriding challenges in a way that almost shamed their colleagues out of their small-mindedness.

Many forces — from the money chase, to the party realignments, to the intrusiveness of 24-hour media — have weakened the institutional bonds of that Senate. But it is the absence of the ethic embodied and enforced by its leaders that is most crippling.

In the end, Packer reports, “the two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances — a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic president with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis — that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon.”

Two days after the passage of financial reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threw in the towel on energy legislation. “And so,” Packer said, “climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.”

Is this too harsh? Regrettably, no. What gives me hope is that so many of the younger members of the Senate in both parties are giving voice to the frustration they feel with what the Senate has become. If their ranks are reinforced by this November’s election, and if they start talking to each other and realize how widely shared their feelings of dissatisfaction are, perhaps the change could bubble up from within.

But it would be so much easier if there were leaders ready to lead. And the danger is that if this doesn’t happen soon, no one in the Senate may remember what it has been at its best.

Salt Lake Tribune

Murray » Geniah Stuber, a third-grader at Parkside Elementary, knows why it’s important to learn to read.

“So then you can be, like, smarter,” she said Tuesday during reading time in Mrs. Buehler’s class.

Learning to read by the end of third grade also is a key predictor of children’s future success, according to a new report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But nationally and in Utah, two-thirds of students are not proficient readers when they start fourth grade, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Process or NAEP.

“Up to third grade, children are learning to read,” said Abel Ortiz, the foundation’s director of evidence-based practices. “Starting in fourth grade, they are reading to learn. So if they don’t learn to read by third grade, that greatly impacts their ability to learn in later years.”

It also affects students’ long-term earning potential, Ortiz said, and for low-income kids, their ability to leave poverty behind.

As a teacher back in the mid-60s I taught health to all the seventh graders at Logan Junior High School. After two weeks I would make a list of those students who would be juvenile delinquents by the ninth grade and took it into the principal.

The list was composed entirely of non-readers, and it proved to be a very good predictor of future behavior. Children who cannot read when they get to junior high are doomed. It is not their fault—it is society’s fault.

Our prisons are full of  kids we failed.

Why did we fail them? Because we were ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’

We were and still are, unwilling to pay for the necessary teachers and classrooms to assure 100 percent readership by all third grade students.

The old saying, “pay me now or pay me later” is so applicable to our situation in education. If we had spent the money on reading education in the first three years of school we wouldn’t have to spend it on the last 50 years of all those non-readers we failed.

When we recognize that it is not the kids’ fault, but ours, we may resolve to do better. When we recognize that many of those people in prison are people we failed we may become more compassionate, and hopefully sooner than later.

In 2009, 69 percent of Utah’s fourth-graders scored below proficient on the national assessment, similar to the national rate of 68 percent. But in the Beehive State, students who are Latino, American Indian or Asian/Pacific Islander are falling behind their white peers at even higher rates than nationally.

The persistence of the “achievement gap,” often attributed to differences in family incomes and first languages, is “profoundly disappointing to all of us who see school success and high school graduation as beacons in the battle against intergenerational poverty,” wrote Leila Feister, the author of the report, “Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters.”

The foundation study paints a much bleaker picture of reading proficiency in Utah than the state’s numbers.

In 2008, only 23 percent — compared with 69 percent in the 2009 NAEP — of fourth-graders were not proficient in language arts, according to the Utah State Office of Education.

Reed Spencer, the state’s K-12 literacy coordinator, said the state and national tests measure different things with different methods. For instance, NAEP surveys a representative sample, but the state test is administered to every student. The Utah exam measures students’ knowledge of state curriculum, while NAEP measures literacy in a variety of ways.

“It’s more difficult than any state assessment, not just ours,” he said.

But he said reading levels in Utah are “solidly upward.”

“Are we where we want to be? Of course not,” he said. “We try to push the importance of literacy, especially early on.”

To get all students reading at grade level by the end of third grade, the foundation report offered these recommendations:

» Improve health and education in early childhood, starting with healthy births.

» Encourage and enable parents and caregivers to be involved in children’s educations. Families should read to and converse with their kids to help develop language skills.

» Use data-driven initiatives to transform low-performing schools into high-quality teaching and learning environments.

» Reduce the chronic absences and summertime learning loss that often contributes to the under-achievement of children from low-income families.

During the 2010 Legislature, Sen. Karen Morgan, D-Cottonwood Heights, pushed to require Utah schools to hold back students in first through third grades who are not reading on grade level. But lawmakers, worried the penalty was too stiff, passed a version of the bill that only requires schools to notify parents by midyear if their first-, second- or third-grader is reading below grade level. Schools also must tell those parents what interventions are available and give the students “appropriate reading remediation.”

Also, Utah holds back fewer students than any other state, earning a No. 1 ranking in the Casey Foundation study. Only 2 percent of school-aged children in Utah have repeated one or more grades since starting kindergarten, according to the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health. The national average is 11 percent. The report did not link reading proficiency to the rate at which a state holds back students.

To improve kids’ skills, Spencer suggests parents read regularly with their children, discussing any new words and asking kids to explain what the stories are about. Adults also should not shy away from using sophisticated language with kids, he said. That helps develop vocabulary and grammar skills.

Spencer also is a supporter of year-round school schedules to prevent the dreaded loss of learning that many students experience during the summer if they stop reading and studying.

“It would be great if, as a country, we could start shifting toward more learning friendly calendars,” he said, “that don’t necessarily add days to the school year but spread them out differently so the amount of consecutive time of not [learning] isn’t so long.”

rwinters@sltrib.com

Tribune reporter Lisa Schencker contributed to this story.

More online

To read the “Early Warning!” report go to http://datacenter.kidscount.org/databook.

Everytime I listen to this I am put to sleep.