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C) WNYC/On the Media: Army of Three [Transcription et audio d'un entretien sur la nouvelle vague répressive sur les ondes américaines. SI VOUS N'ARRIVEZ PAS A ECOUTER EN LIGNE, ME L'INDIQUER POUR QUE JE VOUS ENVOIE UN FICHIER mp3.]

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_111904_army.html

LISTEN HERE: http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram.py?file=raotm/otm111904c.ra

Army of Three
November 19, 2004

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm BROOKE GLADSTONE.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [TAPE PLAYS]

HOWARD STERN: This is the beginning. Sirius Satellite will rule. This will be the dominant medium in the future because there's no government interference. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE] It's the beginning. [TAPE ENDS]

BOB GARFIELD: That was Howard Stern at a lunchtime event Thursday in New York to promote Sirius Satellite Radio, his future radio home. Also Thursday, Sirius named former Viacom president Mel Karmazin as its new CEO. Government interference, of course, has been the thorn in Stern's side throughout his tenure in terrestrial broadcasting -- the thorn he says finally pushed him to satellite. And, as if to prove his point, just a few days after he announced his move last month, the FCC levied its largest fine ever for indecency on TV. Fox stations were ordered to pay a collective 1.2 million dollars for an April episode of the now-defunct reality show Married by America for a scene that involved strippers and-uhh . . . whipped cream. The FCC said it was responding to complaints from offended citizens -- 159, to be exact.

JEFF JARVIS: I thought that was ridiculous on its face right there, that 159 people could decide what the rest of us millions would watch. And in fact, by the way, the millions had already decided they didn't want to watch Married by America, and it was canceled.

BOB GARFIELD: That's Jeff Jarvis, founding editor of Entertainment Weekly and current blogger-in-charge of buzzmachine.com. Jarvis wondered who these 159 offended viewers were.

JEFF JARVIS: I filed a freedom of information act request with the FCC, asking to see all 159 complaints. And I just got it back, and they admitted to me in the letter, "Well, it wasn't actually 159. It was 90, cause there were a lot of CC's. And those were written by just 23 people." And then I examined the actual complaints that the FCC sent me, and all but 2 were virtually identical. Which is to say that only 3 people in America took the time to sit down and write a letter to the FCC. What the heck are 5 people on the FCC or 3 bozos out there in the country doing dictating to the rest of us what we can and cannot see and hear on our media?

BOB GARFIELD: Do you have any reason to think that the FCC knew that there were, in fact, but 3 actual authors of complaints to the agency?

JEFF JARVIS: Absolutely, yes. In fact, I talked to an FCC flack, and he acknowledged that these things are, are xeroxed like this.

BOB GARFIELD: So that would raise the question of regulatory good faith, wouldn't it?

JEFF JARVIS: Well, yeah. It's first a question of the Constitution, but then it's a question of really stupid enforcement, and this is a political act. This is done to assuage people out there and say we're going to go cover up America. Well, that's not their job, and they shouldn't be doing that.

BOB GARFIELD: Let me talk to you about the general problem of the coarsening of the culture. Is there no point at which you believe the government has the right to make an example of somebody?

JEFF JARVIS: No! Why would the government do that? The marketplace will do that. People already said they didn't want to watch Married by America. CBS, next time around, with the Super Bowl is not, believe me, going to allow a single inch of breast flesh to be shown, because the marketplace won't let 'em, and they'll lose money. I trust the people. I do not trust the government with that, and neither did the founding fathers. That's why we have a First Amendment. So the answer to your question is a simple and absolute no.

BOB GARFIELD: So three prigs or three persons legitimately aggrieved essentially astro-turfed the FCC, and the FCC, which in every other respect is deregulatory by nature, sprung into action and levied this fine. All right, so it's kind of comical and horrible at the same time, but what does it mean?

JEFF JARVIS: I think it's very illustrative of what's happening in the media right now. We're all assuming there's a great big gigantic moral Army out there that's taken over America. Well, it actually reminds me of an old Foreign Legion film where you maybe have 3 soldiers, and about 200 helmets stuck up on poles over the wall of the fort, so they look bigger than they are. We're not a Bible-thumping nation. And the problem in media is that is being assumed, that somehow we got taken over by the God squad, and that's a dangerous characterization that's being made as conventional wisdom in media. We in the media should not be in the business of spreading conventional wisdom. We should be in the business of questioning conventional wisdom. It's not as if it's America at war with itself, red states versus blue states. Let's question that. It's not as if a moral Army has taken over America. Let's question that. Instead, what we've seen in the media is that it's been accepted and xeroxed over and over and over again till it becomes accepted wisdom. And it's not right.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Jeff. Well, thanks very much.

JEFF JARVIS: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Jeff Jarvis authors the blog buzzmachine.com.

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2) The International Herald Tribune: The grapes of wrath [Des viticulteurs français s'entêtent à faire du vin avec des cépages interdits.]

EXERCICE: 1) Repérer les accusations contre les vignes/vins en question. 2) Quels sont les avantages de ces cepages selon leurs défenseurs ? 3) Ecrire une courte lettre en anglais à la Commission européenne encourageant soit le maintien de l'interdiction, soit sa levée.

http://www.iht.com/articles/540401.html

The grapes of wrath
Thomas Fuller IHT
Friday, September 24, 2004

Winemakers protect 'outlawed' vines

BEAUMONT, France The wine produced in this remote valley of southern France is dark crimson, somewhat fruity - and illegal. For at least three generations, local families have tended to the gnarled vines that grow from rocky terraces above the Beaume River. The wine they make is banned for sale in Europe because it is made from an American grape that was ordered uprooted by the French government 70 years ago.

Outlawed grapes?

The story has been all but forgotten in France today except among a handful of wine experts and a gaggle of bureaucrats who enforce the law: The French government banned wine made from American grape varieties on the grounds that it tasted like raspberries and was thus offensive to the palate. The European Commission adopted the French rule in 1979, making it illegal to grow these varieties anywhere in the European Union.

The percentage of outlawed American grape varieties is relatively small in France. But the offending vines are also sprinkled widely throughout several East and Central European countries that have recently joined or will soon join the European Union. "You can't tell the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians to uproot their vines," says Pierre Galet, perhaps the world's leading expert on grape varieties. He believes the ban on American varieties is anachronistic.

Yet the idea of the supremacy of European grapes appears to have carried over until today. When Franz Fischler, Europe's agricultural commissioner, was asked in the European Parliament three years ago why the ban on American varieties was still in place, he cited "gustatory defects," which in plain English means bad taste. He also said the wine from the American grapes contained higher than usual levels of methanol, which is toxic.

Hervé Garnier, who tends to the vineyards here, disagrees with this taste assessment. Garnier, a roofer by profession, is leading a campaign to lift the ban. He bangs out letters of protest to Paris and the European Commission in Brussels from his old stone farmhouse overlooking the river, an idyllic little corner of France and an unlikely place for challenging Europe's huge farm bureaucracy.

"We're just a drop of water here compared with total French wine production," Garnier said on a recent sunny day at the farmhouse. "We're not threatening anyone." Last year Garnier produced 7,000 bottles of wine, a fraction of the 8 billion bottles produced annually in all of France. But the ban on American grapes is significant, particularly for France, wine experts say, because it is a symbol of the overregulation in Paris and Brussels that is hurting the nation's venerable but tottering E15 billion wine industry.

Australian wine now outsells French wine in key markets like Britain and the United States, partly because it is better adapted to consumers' tastes, especially in the middle price range.

French winegrowers must abide by strict rules on what grapes they can use. The rules are meant to ensure quality, but they also stifle innovation, prohibiting winemakers from testing new hybrid varieties and grape combinations, experimentation that is common in the New World. Galet, the expert on grape varieties, says it should be up to people to decide for themselves what grapes to grow. "I like dark chocolate and there are people who like milk chocolate," he said. "I am for liberty," added Galet, who once served as an adviser to the French government on the complex grape classification system. He said the presence of the American grapes in Eastern Europe meant that Brussels would be forced to reconsider the ban.

American grape varieties have had a tempestuous history in Europe, starting in the early 19th century, when they were brought over as curiosities. A variety known as Isabella was displayed in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in 1817, according to George Gale, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and an expert on the American varieties. People took cuttings of the exotic and sturdy vine and planted them in their gardens; winemakers ordered more from Long Island nurseries. But the American varieties brought with them diseases - chief among them phylloxera, black rot and powdery mildew - that eventually ravaged the Continent's wine industry.

Ironically, the European vines were ultimately spared by the American ones: Well-known European varieties like Cabernet, Merlot and Pinot Noir were grafted onto the resistant American rootstock. Also left scattered across Europe were - and still are - remnants of the original American varieties: Isabella, Clinton, Noah and Jacquez, among others, all of which were banned by France in 1935.

In the 1950s the French government distributed posters offering farmers financial compensation if they ripped up the American vines. The posters said the vines were "relics of the past," that they produced "bad wine" that was no longer "à la mode," or in fashion.

Gale, the American grape expert, believes nationalism was often the subtext of efforts to keep American grape varieties out of European soil. Hitler ordered American varieties uprooted in Germany during the 1930s because he said they were of lower culture. French farmers only reluctantly used rootstock from America when diseases ravaged their crops. Gale quotes the late Jules-Émile Planchon, a French botanist from the late 19th century, who was frustrated by the reluctance of French farmers to take up the American rootstock to save their vineyards. "When one starts along the path of reconstituting the vineyards by means of resistant varieties, what good is it for Europe to ask for help which it refuses, and that America can give us?" Planchon was quoted as saying in 1877. "The soil belongs to all mankind, and it would be a puerile self-love that makes the choice of varieties destined to serve as graftstock a question of national jealousy."

Today, American varieties are grown everywhere from Brazil to South Korea, Hawaii and Eastern Europe, according to Galet, the French expert.

To combat the claims that American grapes are toxic, the grape growers here in southern France produced a doctoral thesis disproving what they called a myth. They also had their wine analyzed in a laboratory, which found no unusual levels of methanol.

Garnier, the part-time farmer, uses Jacquez grapes for his wine. The advantage of the vine, he said, is its sturdiness. It needs little care, thrives in the rocky soil and loves the sun. European varieties, by contrast, need regular spraying with chemicals, he said.

A decade ago, Garnier set up a regional association of farmers and landowners, Mémoires de la Vigne (Memories of the Vine), which seeks to preserve the American vines. The members meet once a year to harvest their grapes and enjoy a feast of wild boar and other local delicacies - and, of course, to drink last year's wine. "Many of the farmers who have these vines are 70 or 80 years old," Garnier said. "If we wait 10 more years there won't be any Jacquez left."

One such farmer is Marcel Matthieu, 70, who tends to his vines in what could only be described as a little Eden. The river rushes beside his small farm of peach trees and chestnuts as the cliffs above reflect the last rays of evening sunlight. Matthieu shrugged when asked about the ban on Jacquez grapes. "It's ridiculous," he said. "If it produced bad wine, fine. But the wine is not bad at all."

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3) The Seattle Times: A real piece of cake [Un nouveau record : le plus grand gâteau de mariage fait à partir de beignets.]
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002084972_wedcake08m.html

Monday, November 08, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Going for world record was a real piece of cake

By Jim Downing
Seattle Times staff reporter

The pile of 1,818 Krispy Kremes is expected to set a Guinness World Record. The doughnut mountain headlined the first Simcha Celebrations Showcase, a trade show yesterday in Issaquah for Jewish weddings and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

Why a doughnut cake? For one, Krispy Kremes are kosher: Every two months, a rabbi blesses and certifies each of the chain's kitchens. And compared with traditional wedding cakes, at $6 or more a serving, a pile of doughnuts, at $6.99 a dozen, can be a bargain.

"Doughnut wedding cakes are very popular now," said Carin Freedel, chief executive officer of Mitzvah Mavens, which hosted the event. A "doughnut cake" is really just a pile of doughnuts. For weddings, the pile can be frosted, decorated and organized into tiers like a traditional cake.

To certify the doughnut cake's size, Diane Rise, a weights-and-measures inspector from the state Department of Agriculture, rolls out her tape measure and gets to work yesterday.
Freedel said that going for a world record was "just one of those ideas." After confirming with Guinness that no size record for a doughnut wedding cake had been set, Freedel arranged for Krispy Kreme to sponsor the event and provide the doughnuts (all Original Glazed). Christiann Thomas, 26, who teaches high school in Fife, did most of the heavy lifting on the cake, starting with a base of 170 doughnuts.

At one point, the doughnut pile listed. Onlookers fretted. "We had to take off about five layers" and rebuild, Thomas said. "It's a pretty light ... doughnut; ... That's why we had that compression."

As a teenager, Thomas made ice-cream cakes in her family's Dairy Queen on Vashon Island. Despite that experience, and even though each doughnut weighs just less than 2 ounces, Thomas said that three hours as a Krispy Kreme crane took a toll. "I am sore — my back and calves especially," she said.

In the end, concerns about stability stopped the wobbly cake's growth. Eager to make the record official before a collapse, Thomas stacked a final spire of doughnuts and called for a measurement. Just before 1 p.m., Diane Rise, a weights-and-measures inspector from the state Department of Agriculture, pulled out her tape and made the official call: 5 feet, 3 inches. Rise usually checks measuring devices such as grocery-store scales and propane meters. This was her first measurement of a world-record attempt. After checking the cake's height, Rise, suffering from a cold, headed home. "If you decide to set another record, give me a call," she said.

Krispy Kreme staff members then began disassembling the cake and handing out doughnuts five at a time.

While the cake may well establish a Guinness World Record for unsupported wedding cakes made out of doughnuts, it would not be the largest wedding cake. Chefs at the Mohegan Sun Hotel and Casino in Uncasville, Conn., baked a 15,032-pound wedding cake in February.

At the Issaquah show, many of the 89 other booths displayed one-of-a-kind fusions of traditional and modern Jewish culture. Jordana Rene, of Vashon Island, showed her Japanese-style ceramic Seder plates. Marci Catanzaro, owner of Airmazing Balloon Creations, displayed Jewish-themed party balloons. And Greg Bennick, Seattle's only Jewish juggling comedian, told bad jokes.

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4) The Economist: Business books [Un nouveau livre sur la gestion d'entreprise prône une politique de torture envers ses concurrents.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3139764
Business books: Torturing your rivals
Aug 26th 2004 | NEW YORK

A new American business book causes a stir, even before its publication

HOW hard do American businessmen compete? The answer from Europe, which tends to view American business practices with horror and disdain, might be too hard. But a forthcoming book by George Stalk, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Rob Lachenauer, boss of GEO2, a car-engine technology firm, makes the opposite claim. American business schools and executives now pay far too much attention to “soft” management issues, such as leadership, corporate culture, customer care and employee management. Popular business books urge managers to hug their customers or find the “leader within”. Nobody focuses on what really matters in business, they argue: the profits and pleasure that come from making competitors suffer.

Their book, “Hardball,” offers several strategies for the manager who suddenly realises that he is too squishy. Surprisingly, unleashing “massive and overwhelming force” against rivals is not top of the list. Thanks to America's bankruptcy courts, killing a competitor outright gives him a chance to return, cleansed of debt and unburdened of past mistakes. Far better, argue the authors, to weaken rivals to a point of near-death—and keep them there. This can be done in several fun ways: by systematically undercutting their most profitable products and services, luring them into lines of business that will make them less profitable, stealing their ideas and—well, you get the picture.

Although not due out until October, “Hardball” is already causing a stir. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, in which Messrs Stalk and Lachenauer aired their ideas, got an icy reception in some quarters. In their original draft, they had urged businessmen to focus not just on creating “competitive advantage” but also “unfair advantage”. That phrase was replaced with the decidedly softer “decisive advantage”. With the editors at the Harvard Business School Press, the internal police at BCG also balked at some of the language, chuckles Mr Stalk. One chapter heading, urging managers to “Plagiarise, don't shade your eyes”, became “Take it and make it your own”. Another, “Drive up your competitors' costs,” became “Entice your competitor into retreat”. (An earlier version was the thoroughly wimpish “Entice your competitor into doing something different”.) Some of BCG's European partners, meanwhile, have reacted coolly to the book, pointing out that talk of gleefully stomping on one's rivals is far too rude for Europe's cultured boardrooms.

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5) The Economist: Brawling basketballers [Les Ricains trouvent shocking, shocking,la bagarre récente lors d'un match de la NBA.]
http://www.economist.com
Brawling basketballers: Definitely out of bounds
Nov 25th 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC

An inevitable tale of beer, chairs, fans, fists and the occasional erection

OVER and over, the sorry scene has been repeated on American television sets. A basketball game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons last week ended abruptly when a fan threw his drink at a Pacers player. The player, Ron Artest, leaped into the stands to seek revenge. Fans hurled more drink. Several other basketballers joined in, and a massive punch-up ensued. Someone chucked a chair.

On November 20th, the National Basketball Association suspended nine players without pay. Mr Artest is gone for the rest of the season, the harshest penalty in basketball history. Injured fans are filing lawsuits, and criminal charges could follow against both players and fans.

Americans everywhere profess shock. Rarely, they insist, do scraps between players and fans get this bad. “No more making fun of European soccer hooliganism,” noted a Texan in a web posting on ESPN, America's main sports network. Teachers worry that schoolboys, who spend their evenings and weekends watching games and playing “fantasy” sports, the newest internet rage, will have their minds poisoned by the recent violence.

Please. To begin with, dust-ups are a regular feature of American sport. The baseball rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees has long been cemented by the occasional bench-clearing brawl. Last week the basketball bleachers were not the only place where scuffles broke out. A college-football game between South Carolina and Clemson, fierce rivals, dissolved into fisticuffs

As for the idea that American sports stars are puritanical role models, this beggars belief. Almost the only perfect thing about the athletes in question is their bodies—and those have often been pharmaceutically enhanced. Barely a year goes by without episodes of rape, pillage and even murder—all the inevitable result of too much money colliding with too few brains. If the sins of sports stars were limited merely to clobbering the odd fan, then Court TV would be out of business.

As anyone who reads the British tabloids can explain, badly behaved sportsmen are a global phenomenon. So are churlish fans: last week Spanish ones hurled racist insults at black English soccer-players. What is odd about America is that sports are played out in macho conditions not seen since the Coliseum. Most spectacles come down to hyped-up young men mauling each other in front of beer-guzzling fans and scantily clad cheerleaders, while coaches yell abuse.

As for those supposedly offended advertisers, the more benign commercials nowadays promote beer. Others peddle Cialis and Viagra and advise anyone having an erection lasting four hours to see a doctor: try explaining that to a fifth-grader.

Inconsistency is rife. Cialis and on-field tussles may go down without much fuss. But the National Football League, guardian of America's most popular sport, threw a fit about the “wardrobe malfunction” during the half-time show at the Superbowl, when Justin Timberlake ripped the bodice of a fellow singer, Janet Jackson, exposing a breast. Now there is a fuss about a pre-game commercial for “Desperate Housewives”, a television hit: it depicted a Philadelphia Eagle player gladly agreeing to skip the game after seeing one such housewife drop a towel she was wearing. But never mind: another round of apologies, and Middle America's churchgoing fans will settle back in front of the tube, ready to be shocked by the next scuffle.

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Prexy Sks Wrk Wf
Condoleezza Rice's promotion creates a void.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004, at 3:16 PM PT

Will Condi remain Bush's work wife?
Condoleezza Rice's elevation from national security adviser to secretary of state creates two dangerous voids. As has been widely noted, the appointment replaces Colin Powell, a dissenter of considerable stature, with Condi Rice, a compulsive parent-pleaser who appears physically incapable of uttering the words, "You're wrong" to her commander in chief. As the New York Times put it in a Nov. 17 editorial, "as national security adviser, [Rice] seemed to tell him what he wanted to hear about decisions he'd already made, rather than what he needed to know to make sound judgments in the first place."

But Rice's promotion creates a second void, too, one specifically linked to a particular role Rice assumed inside the White House. As Mike Allen put it in the Nov. 17 Washington Post,

-*-*--
Aides said Bush and Rice know each other so well they have conversations based on body language, with maybe four words exchanged.
[…]
Rice spends more time with Bush than any aide except perhaps Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., and she has developed a friendship with the president and first lady Laura Bush that frequently takes her to Camp David on weekends.
[…]
Rice, a Cleveland Browns fan, bonded with Bush through their love of sports. The president drew laughter when he said in the Roosevelt Room: "Condi's true ambition is beyond my power to grant. She would really like to be the commissioner of the National Football League."
-*-*--

With Rice departing the White House for Foggy Bottom, President Bush isn't just losing a national security adviser. He's losing his work wife.

The terms "work wife," "work husband," and "work marriage" entered the national lexicon in 1987, when the writer David Owen wrote a groundbreaking Atlantic essay describing a particular asexual intimacy that frequently arises between male and female employees working in close proximity:

-*-*--
[L]et's say that you, like me, are a man. In that case your work wife would be the woman in your office who
(a) as you walk past her desk on your way to a big meeting, tells you that you have dried shaving cream behind your ear
(b) has lunch with you pretty often
(c) returns stuff that she borrows from your desk
(d) tells you things about her other (home) husband that he wouldn't want you to know
(e) waits for you to finish up so that you can go down in the elevator together
(f) complains to you without embarrassment about an uncomfortable undergarment
(g) expects you to tell her the truth, more or less, about the thing she has done to her hair
(h) thinks you eat, drink, and smoke an acceptable right amount
(i) knows at least one thing about you—such as the fact that you can do a pretty good imitation of Liza Minnelli—that your home wife doesn't know.
-*-*--

In some ways, Owen wrote, work marriage is an improvement on the real thing:

-*-*--
For example, your work wife would never ask you why you don't just put your dishes right into the dishwasher instead of leaving them in the sink—she doesn't know you do it! Also, she would never wedge your car between two others in the parking lot at Bradlees, sign you up to be the pie auctioneer at a church bazaar, or grab hold of your stomach and ask, "What's this? Blubber?" She knows you only as you appear between nine and five: recently bathed, fully dressed, largely awake, and in control of your life.
-*-*--

If you've never had a work marriage yourself, you've doubtless observed many. Owen told me he was inspired by the work marriage between former Esquire editors Lee Eisenberg and Betsy Carter, but to my mind, the archetypal work marriage is the one between Mary Richards and Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. (To underscore the chasteness of the relationship, actor Gavin MacLeod played Murray a little bit gay.) Writing last year in the Wall Street Journal ("How Workplace Couples Keep Each Other Happy"), Jared Sandberg sketched out a few explanations for why such relationships flourish:

-*-*--
Organizational psychologist Dory Hollander says in many ways it's no different from same-sex workplace friends, except in one respect: "We're sort of wired in our male-female relationships to take on supportive roles, as opposed to same-sex relationships which tend to be more dominative or competitive," she says.

Two decades ago, Ms. Hollander began to notice a "mood regulating" dynamic between opposite-sex workplace friendships that could keep the partners from flying off the handle. "It wasn't an affair. It was like a second marriage. It was an intimacy and caring for each other," she says.

Nine-to-five nuptials spring from the huge amount of waking hours employees spend with their colleagues. The central role work plays in our lives means we often have more things in common with colleagues than with spouses: The little office hells that bond us. The latest office back-stabbings, which take our work spouse's breath away, bore our real spouses senseless.
-*-*--

Presidents don't typically have work wives, partly because the White House is mostly a male preserve, and partly because presidents tend to prefer mistresses. (Nearly half of all presidents since FDR are known to have cheated on their wives either before or during their presidencies.) But since he entered the Oval Office, George W. Bush has never been without one. Why would Bush want a work wife? For the same reasons as anybody else, says Owen, only perhaps writ larger: "Your work wife wouldn't say, 'Why don't you do something about the environment?' like your regular wife might do."

Dubya's first work wife was Karen Hughes. When she left for Texas in 2002, Rice was poised to replace her. "It may be her finest moment as a strategic thinker." observes Ron Suskind, author of a widely read Hughes profile in Esquire. Now that Condi's going, who can fill her shoes?

Until today, White House Domestic Policy Adviser Margaret Spellings would have seemed the logical choice (especially since her job left her with a lot of time on her hands). Spellings was an ally going back to Texas days, and by all accounts she's a cheery and supportive presence. But Bush scotched that possibility by appointing Spellings education secretary, a job that will finally draw on Spellings' expertise (she took the lead on the No Child Left Behind bill) and, more to the point, will remove her to a government building on Capitol Hill.

Who does that leave? Kristen Silverberg, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. "She's too young," opines Washington Post Bush-watcher Dana Milbank. (Silverberg's in her early 30s.)There's Harriet Miers, newly appointed to replace White House counsel Alberto Gonzales (and formerly deputy chief of staff for policy). In Texas, Miers was Bush's personal lawyer. Don't advice columnists say you shouldn't get personally involved with your lawyer?

Two White House reporters with whom I discussed this dilemma questioned my premise. One of them made a particularly eloquent (but necessarily anonymous) case:

-*-*--
There's no reason Condi can't remain his work wife. Going to the State Department doesn't make her GU (geographically undesirable). Like many power couples, they'll face the challenges of demanding careers that make scheduling quality time difficult. Sometimes, she'll want to talk and he'll want action (I'm talking about crises like Iran, of course). But that's just the way it goes. The important thing to remember is that you need to communicate with each other to make it work.
-*-*--

But I think this misses the spirit of the thing. Because this relationship is built on a million everyday interactions, none of them of great consequence, a work husband and wife really need to be situated in the same workplace. Maybe it's time for Bush to start thinking about choosing a man for his work spouse. I claim Slate "Press Box" columnist Jack Shafer for my work spouse (over his protest), and though the relationship is extremely dysfunctional, very little of that stems from the fact that we're both heterosexual. Maybe President Bush's next work spouse should be his chief of staff, Andy Card. I say they should give it a shot.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

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By Rich Smith
November 11, 2004

Back in April, we discussed the implications of Lucent's (NYSE: LU) announcement that it is at risk of federal prosecution for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by its Chinese subsidiary. The investigation was initiated when Lucent voluntarily informed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) of deficiencies in its internal business controls and procedures in China.

Ordinarily, you might expect the Feds to cut a company some slack when it rats itself out like this (although that hasn't been the case with other forthcoming companies such as Titan (NYSE: TTN), which saw its sale to Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) fall through over a similar investigation). And in any case, Lucent's in a rather tricky position here because at the time it informed the SEC and DOJ of its China situation, these agencies were already looking into an alleged FCPA violation by Lucent in Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this week, the Saudi situation took a turn for the worse. On Monday, Lucent announced that Richard McGinn, Lucent's CEO from 1996 to 2000, and two other ex-Lucent officers have received "Wells notices" from the SEC, advising that they may be civilly charged with bribery, failure to keep accurate accounting records, and failure to maintain adequate internal controls over company funds. Investors may be tempted to take heart from this announcement, as it was addressed to the officers themselves and not to the company. But that would be a mistake.

One of the key provisions of the FCPA is that it makes a company liable for the acts of its agents. Thus, if the ex-Lucent execs are found to have done something improper here, it will logically follow that the company was at fault as well. Moreover, the fact that the SEC is proceeding to the formal investigation stage strongly suggests that the SEC thinks its charges have merit, and will continue to pursue them.

As we pointed out back in April, "these investigations tend to drag on, and to drag down a targeted company's stock price while they last. Lucent shareholders may well be in for a long next few months." And indeed, since that article ran, Lucent's stock has dropped 15% in value, despite the company (1) turning in its first profitable year since 2000 and (2) being granted a windfall tax refund by the IRS in the meantime.