The Skinny: Person Of The Year
The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.
Yes, Time magazine's choice for Person of the Year is "You," you Web-savvy, YouTube-watching, I-Pod-listener. You're the big winner. And everyone with a platform to squawk about it thinks that's just weird.
Online mag Salon's answer is its own Person of the Year -- a specific, albeit obscure individual. Well, at least he was relatively obscure before George Allen called him "macaca," it was caught on video, spread virally via YouTube and now, well, George Allen isn't a Senator anymore.
The person, of course, is Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth, the Indian American and Jim Webb campaign volunteer whom Allen referred to as "macaca," during a public event and Sidharth caught it on tape. The rest is political history.
While Time's choice of was a throwback to our ever interactive media society, so is Sidharth. After producing what Salon refers to as "the macaca footage," and birthing a veritable media frenzy, Sidharth has become "a symbol of politics in the 21st century, a brave new world in which any video clip can be broadcast instantly everywhere and any 20-year-old with a camera can change the world. He builds a legacy out of happenstance."
In other words, don't go out and campaign for a slot in Person of the Year. Just get a camera phone, a MySpace page and call it a day.
Bush To Boost Military
After alarms sounded by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker last week that the Army "will break" without more troops and former Secretary of State Colin Powell calling the active duty Army "about broken," President Bush announced plans to increase the size of the "stressed" military.
The president made his announcement in an interview (transcript here) with The Washington Post, and "offered no specifics," but "other U.S. officials said the administration is preparing plans to bolster the nation's permanent active-duty military with as many as 70,000 additional troops."
According to Army estimates, each addition of 10,000 soldiers to the force will cost about $1.2 billion. But the headline of the Post's story was that during the interview, Bush for the first time said the U.S. is not winning in Iraq. His specific remarks: "An interesting construct that General Pace uses is, 'We're not winning, we're not losing,'" Bush said.
He was referring to the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Peter Pace. The New York Times puts the President's news on its front page as well, and speaks with "administration officials" who clarified that Bush "was speaking generally about the broader campaign against terrorism and was not foreshadowing a decision on whether to send additional troops into Iraq in coming months…"
The Los Angeles Times (which also puts the story on the front page) writes that Army officials, "countering any talk" of a draft, said that "they believe at least an extra 20,000 soldiers a year could be recruited through pay incentives."
Gen. Abizaid Out
One more indication of a change in military strategy: The LA Times reports that Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, who "has been the primary architect of U.S. military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan" has "submitted plans to retire and will leave his post in March…"
Abizaid has "strenuously resisted" suggestions of an increased number of troops to Baghdad while "a growing number of current and former officers have embraced the idea..."
The LAT speaks with "Defense officials" who say that Abizaid submitted his "retirement documents" over a month ago before Donald Rumsfeld's departure.
"One recently retired Army general said Abizaid had wanted to retire earlier but that Rumsfeld blocked the move, insisting his war commanders stay in place."
Now, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates "faces a clear choice between generals who have agreed with Abizaid's push to quickly hand over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces" and those "officers backing a more aggressive U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign." The paper floats Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, and Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, among others, as possible replacements for Abizaid under Gates.
Holiday Travel Tips: Don't X-Ray The Kids At The Airport
In advance of the busy holiday travel season, the LA Times' front page reminds parents not to put their children through airport X-ray machines, as one (probably really mortified) grandmother did at LAX on Saturday in a "bizarre but not unprecedented" accident.
The woman accidentally placed the child into a "plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine." And the airport screener watching the monitor "immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt."
The baby was taken to a hospital where it was determined that there was no dangerous exposure to radiation. The incident, of course, "drew attention to whether officials are staffing often-busy security checkpoints enough to prevent such an accident."
A spokesman for the Transportation Safety Administration told the paper: "We're trying to figure out what changes we can make, short of putting up signs saying, 'Don't put your baby through the X-ray machine.' We're trying to determine how we can make this not happen again." TSA's Web site, however, does inform travelers of just that, notes the LAT: "One item reads: 'Never leave babies in an infant carrier while it goes through the X-ray machine.'"