Conservative Congressman’s Star Power Extends Beyond Florida District

But the most compelling part of Representative Allen B. West of Florida is his own biography, there for all to see: an African-American Tea Party activist Republican congressman and ally of hard-right Israelis who, after his beloved career in the Army ended under a cloud, defeated the sitting Democrat in a largely white, politically polarized district here and quickly became one of the right’s most visible spokesmen.

Mr. West’s fans in his district, which stretches over two counties along the east coast of Florida, are both numerous and loud; hundreds fill his town hall-style meetings, many of them favoring T-shirts bearing his image. At a recent Tea Party rally in Washington, supporters flocked to him like sea gulls to a crust of baguette. Among the 87 House Republican freshmen, he ranks third in the latest fund-raising period for his re-election campaign; his $433,551 haul came largely through individual donations.

Mr. West’s popularity among conservatives goes far beyond South Florida. He was chosen to give the keynote speech in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and is frequently featured on the Fox News Channel and in other conservative settings where he enjoys explaining, reiterating or unleashing any number of incendiary remarks concerning what he often calls “the other side.”

There was his recent observation that liberal women “have been neutering American men,” and that the president of the United States is a “low-level socialist agitator.”

Mr. West scoffs at the notion that he has become a sensation. “I don’t drink my own tub water or read my own press,” he said in a brief interview before a town hall-style meeting here this week. “I tell the truth and I stand on convictions and you know what you’re getting.”

While Mr. West’s decision to cast himself as an iconoclast has made him a conservative star, it is unclear how well it will serve him as he seeks re-election next year in this swing district, where far more voters are likely to come out for a presidential election than in the midterm cycle.

With its two new Congressional seats, Florida will likely receive intensified national attention among swing states in 2012, perhaps highlighting this district — which was central to the disputed 2000 presidential recount — as one of the best tests of the Tea Party’s endurance outside reliably Republican districts.

Democrats have singled out Mr. West as one of their key freshmen to defeat. “He is the king of rhetoric,” said Mitch Ceasar, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Broward County. “And that is what separated him in 2010. But what swept him in then may be the gust of wind that sends him out.”

The 22nd Congressional District, which may well be redrawn to favor Republicans, is roughly 48 percent quite conservative, and another 48 percent quite liberal, say officials from both parties, who also say each party covets the remaining 4 percent, who are swing voters. The district went for Senator Barack Obama and Senator John Kerry in their respective presidential races.

Mr. West’s place in the Democratic crosshairs stems, he said, from the fact “that I scare the liberal establishment.”

“You’re looking at a black man who was brought up in the inner cities, career military, a conservative, married going on 22 two years, two beautiful daughters, and for whatever reason that really does scare them,” he said. “My theory is that for whatever reason I could cause others like me to reject these liberal social-welfare policies.”

Mr. West, 50, was born and raised in Atlanta, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee on an R.O.T.C. scholarship and holds two master’s degrees.

In the Army, he rose to battalion commander during the war in Iraq. His 22-year military career came to an end in that theater when he was relieved of his command after using a gun to coerce information from an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation. He retired with full rank, honors and benefits in 2004, and moved to Florida with his family. After a short stint as a high school teacher, he worked as a civilian adviser to the Afghan army, ran and lost against Representative Ron Klein in 2008, then came back to handily defeat Mr. Klein, a Democrat, in 2010.

Mr. West’s political beliefs hew closely to the most conservative members of the House; he was among the 59 House Republicans who voted against a deal worked out with Democrats to finance the government through the rest of the year, arguing that the included spending cuts did not go far enough, and says he will not vote to lift the nation’s debt ceiling without more cuts.

His views on the Middle East tend to tack even more to the right of the strongest supporters of Israel. During his campaign, Mr. West posted on his Web site a statement saying: “I do not support any creation of a Palestinian state, to do so would be to create a terrorist state. There is already a state for the Arabic people residing in the region called Palestine, Jordan.”

His recent remarks to a conservative Christian women’s group that women affiliated with liberal groups “have been neutering American men” are the sort that tend to attract attention. “America needs strong men,” Mr. West explained, adding, “the feminist movement was a great thing to push the equality of women but that does not mean you have to make men feel inferior or degrade them.”

Mr. West said he tends to keep to himself on Capitol Hill, where he is busy with hearings, meetings and constant reading. “So the end of the day I’m kind of tired,” he said, “about 10 or 10:30 at night I get to my little bat cave, then I’m back up at 5:30 to get in a five- or six-mile run and I’m back at it again. So right now it is not so much about hanging out with people as it is about making sure I am developing myself as a capable legislator.”

Ron Nixon contributed reporting from Washington.

 

Norio Ohga, Who Led Sony Beyond Electronics, Dies at 81

The cause was multiple organ failure, the company said in a statement.

Mr. Ohga was the principal architect of Sony’s move beyond its stronghold of sleek consumer electronics gear and into music and movies. The biggest steps came when Sony bought CBS Records for $2 billion in 1988 and, a year later, Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion.

At the time, when Japan Inc. seemed unstoppable, those acquisitions — along with a Japanese real estate company’s purchase of most of Rockefeller Center — were symbols of Japan’s rising economic power and wealth. There was worried talk of the Japanese commercial “invasion” and the loss of American “cultural assets.”

But to Mr. Ohga the goal was a kind of industrial synthesis, marrying Sony’s technical wizardry in electronics with the West’s talent in entertainment. In a statement, Howard Stringer, the current chief executive of Sony, said it was Mr. Ohga’s vision that drove “Sony’s evolution beyond audio and video products into music, movies and game, and subsequent transformation into a global entertainment leader.”

Still, Mr. Ohga wanted to do more than expand Sony’s corporate empire. Linking electronics and entertainment, in his view, would increase the value of each and secure a lucrative future for Sony. “Hardware and software are two wheels on a car,” he explained repeatedly over the years.

There were good years in Sony’s media businesses. But the real payoff from the electronics hardware and the entertainment software, each lifting the sales of the other, proved elusive. When Mr. Ohga spoke of software, industry analysts say, he was thinking of the kind that comes from Hollywood, not Silicon Valley.

The vision Mr. Ohga championed for years, those analysts say, has come to fruition at Apple, in a different guise. That company, they note, has combined beautifully designed devices, like iPods and iPhones, with software for making media easy to consume and buy.

Apple does not own music companies or movie studios, but it controls an online marketplace where media are purchased.

“Sony was a great product company, and Ohga made it better,” said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But Sony did not really get software or the Internet. That wasn’t Ohga’s domain.”

Born on Jan. 29, 1930, in Numazu, 80 miles west of Tokyo, Norio Ohga grew up in affluence, the son of a wealthy lumber trader. As a child he had pleurisy, an inflammation in the chest, so during the war years he was exempted from working at the nearby military factories, where many Japanese youths labored. Instead, he practiced the piano and took singing lessons.

“By the time I was 18 I knew I wanted to be a vocalist,” Mr. Ohga said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “So just after the war, I had to come to Tokyo.”

Mr. Ohga enrolled in the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and soon demonstrated his strong voice and his forceful opinions about a tape recorder that had just been introduced by the company that would become Sony. Mr. Ohga wrote a letter to Sony’s co-founder, Akio Morita, detailing the machine’s shortcomings for professional musicians and singers.

Mr. Morita, fascinated by the aspiring opera singer’s technical knowledge, met with him and signed him up as a part-time consultant. In 1954, Mr. Ohga left for West Germany to study music and to start a professional singing career that led to performances throughout Europe and Japan. Yet Mr. Morita kept Mr. Ohga on the payroll and stayed in touch.

In 1957, when Mr. Ohga married Midori Matsubara, a pianist he had met in Germany, Mr. Morita and Sony’s elder co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, attended the wedding.

Mr. Ohga eventually surrendered to Mr. Morita’s persistence. He joined Sony as a full-time employee in 1959.

 

Beyond the Oil Spill, the Tragedy of an Ailing Gulf

Even in the worst days of the BP spill, coastal advocates were looking past the immediate emergency to what the president’s oil spill commission called “the central question from the recovery of the spill — can or should such a major pollution event steer political energy, human resources and funding into solutions for a continuing systemic tragedy?”

That tragedy is the ill and declining health of the Gulf of Mexico, including the enormous dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi and the alarmingly rapid disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, roughly 2,000 square miles smaller than they were 80 years ago. Few here would take issue with the commission’s question, but the answer to it is far from resolved.

Eclipsed by the spill’s uncertain environmental impact is the other fallout: the vast sums in penalties and fines BP will have to pay to the federal government. In addition to criminal fines and restitution, BP is facing civil liabilities that fall roughly into two categories: Clean Water Act penalties and claims from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, whereby state and federal agencies tally the damage caused by the spill and put a price tag on it. This could add up to billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars.

On Thursday morning, the Justice Department announced that an agreement had been announced between BP and the trustees who are part of the natural resources damage assessment for BP to provide a $1 billion down payment for early restoration projects, the largest of its kind ever reached. This would be taken out of any final settlement, but would allow any agreed upon projects to get under way.

BP is not the only company involved with the Deepwater Horizon accident that could be on the hook for these damages. In a sign of the bitter legal fight brewing among defendants, BP on Wednesday sued the maker of the blowout preventer, a valve on the oil rig that failed, and the owner of the oil rig, arguing that their negligence led to the spill.

But for people along the gulf, the issue of who pays the damages is less important than will they get paid.

Officials and coastal advocates all along the coast agree that the money could be an enormous boon for the gulf, as it would be impossible to obtain money like that through the normal political channels. But that is the only agreement.

Negotiations are under way among the area’s Congressional delegation on a bill that would follow the presidential commission’s recommendation in allocating four-fifths of BP’s Clean Water Act penalties — which could range from $5.4 billion to $21 billion — on the Gulf Coast. Without separate legislation, the money would go into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to help pay to clean up future spills; once that fund reaches $2.7 billion, the rest would go into the Treasury.

But while such bills have been proposed in the House and Senate, gulfwide support of any one bill remains elusive. Disagreement remains among gulf state legislators over basics like how the money would be split and what it could be spent on. Among the concerns are how much leeway states would have to fund projects not related to ecosystem restoration — Alabama officials, for example, have broadcast a desire to build a convention center — and whether the money would be shared equally among the states or allocated based on the spill’s environmental impact, in which case Louisiana would get a much larger piece.

A deal among the gulf state delegation, of course, does not ensure the bill’s passage through Congress, particularly given the pall of austerity that has descended on Washington. Donald Boesch, a marine science professor at the University of Maryland who was on the presidential oil spill commission, said the political concessions necessary to a gulfwide agreement, like the flexibility to spend the money on economic projects, could deter lawmakers from other states, who would be hesitant to allow money to go to projects that are not directly tied to spill recovery.

Some lawmakers, Professor Boesch said, have also been given pause by the relentless criticism from Louisiana’s political leaders of the Obama administration’s post-spill regulations. Arguing that the new rules have jeopardized the state’s drilling-dependent economy, Louisiana lawmakers have recently championed bills in the House of Representatives that would speed up and possibly bypass federal reviews of offshore drilling leases.

“To many it seems what they’re asking for is to get back to the way they were operating before, without recognizing that things have changed,” Professor Boesch said in an interview. “You’re not willing to take steps to protect the environment, so why are you to be believed that you can take steps to restore the environment?”

If the political route fails, there is Plan B: the federal authorities could direct some money toward restoration as part of an eventual settlement.

“If no new legislation is passed,” David M. Uhlmann, an expert in environmental law at the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail message, “the Justice Department is likely to negotiate for a large natural resource damage claim, perhaps even at the expense of civil penalties, and may try to obtain additional funds for restoration efforts as part of any criminal plea agreement or civil consent decree.”

This could please environmentalists, as natural resource damage claims are required by law to be spent on restoration, and it could also make BP happier, as the payment of such claims have tax advantages and simply sound better than penalties.

Thursday's announcement that BP would be paying a large sum for early restoration could be a sign of this strategy.

But, Professor Uhlmann added, “far more would go to restoration if Congress takes action.”

Like all else in this spill, the natural resources damage assessment, while scientifically driven, is not untouched by politics. A plan of action requires some agreement among the various players, which has thus far been in short supply.

And if the money is worked out, said Oliver Houck, a professor at Tulane Law School who specializes in environmental law, there is still no consensus among scientists and officials on how best to fix the gulf’s most pressing problems.

“Even if all the other dominoes fall right, and none of them are falling right, you’re left with what to do with that big money,” he said. Speaking of Louisiana’s wetlands loss, he pointed out that the damage was more extensive and the solutions more limited than many acknowledge.

“We may be better off using this money to assist people to relocate people and move out,” Professor Houck said, “and let natural healing take place.”

 

Sprint's Common Cents brand falls into the sofa cushions, replaced by Virgin Mobile Beyond Talk

 By Tim Stevens posted Apr 9th 2011 10:46AM It was some... curious timing. On May 6th of last year Sprint's new boy toy Virgin Mobile announced the Beyond Talk prepaid plan. Then, just a week later, Sprint launched its own, separate prepaid plan, Common Cents. Beyond Talk started at $25 a month for 300 minutes while Common Cents was $.07 per minute, all contact free. The latter of those two is now dying away, never catching on despite what must be said is a rather catchy name. Its users are being lumped into the Virgin payLo scheme, while Beyond Talk will take over the kiosks and marketing avenues currently occupied by Common Cents. There, with its rag-tag group of featurephones and data plans,