President on the Emergency Supplemental VIDEO PODCAST

Statement by the President on the Emergency Supplemental FULL STREAMING VIDEO, 10:09 A.M. EDT. In Focus: Renewal in Iraq, and In Focus: Defense, and PODCAST OF ARTICLE (17MB), STREAMING AUDIO THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I've just had a good meeting with Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and General Pete Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretary Gates and General Pace updated me on the deployment of American reinforcements to Iraq.

At this moment, two of the five additional U.S. Army brigades we are sending for this mission are operating in Baghdad. A third brigade is now moving from Kuwait, and will be fully operational in Baghdad in the coming weeks. And the remaining two brigades will deploy in April and May. It will be early June before all U.S. forces dedicated to the operation are in place. So this operation is still in its beginning stages.

The reinforcements we've sent to Baghdad are having a impact. They're making a difference. And as more of those reinforcements arrive in the months ahead, their impact will continue to grow. But to succeed in their mission, our troops need Congress to provide the resources, funds, and equipment they need to fight our enemies.

It has now been 57 days since I requested that Congress pass emergency funds for our troops. Instead of passing clean bills that fund our troops on the front lines, the House and Senate have spent this time debating bills that undercut the troops, by substituting the judgment of politicians in Washington for the judgment of our commanders on the ground, setting an arbitrary deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, and spending billions of dollars on pork barrel projects completely unrelated to the war.

I made it clear for weeks that if either the House or Senate version of this bill comes to my desk, I will veto it. And it is also clear from the strong support for this position in both Houses that the veto would be sustained. The only way the Democrats were able to pass their bill in the first place was to load the bill with pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war.

There was -- one leading Democrat in the House said, "A lot of things had to go into that bill that certainly those of us who respect great legislation did not want there." That's an honest appraisal of the process that we just witnessed. Still, the Democrats in Congress continue to pursue their bills, and now they have left Washington for spring recess without finishing the work.

Democrat leaders in Congress seem more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than in providing our troops what they need to fight the battles in Iraq. If Democrat leaders in Congress are bent on making a political statement, then they need to send me this unacceptable bill as quickly as possible when they come back. I'll veto it, and then Congress can get down to the business of funding our troops without strings and without delay.

If Congress fails to act in the next few weeks, it will have significant consequences for our men and women in the Armed Forces. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Pace, recently stated during his testimony before a House subcommittee, if Congress fails to pass a bill I can sign by mid-April, the Army will be forced to consider cutting back on equipment, equipment repair, and quality of life initiatives for our Guard and reserve forces. These cuts would be necessary because the money will have to be shifted to support the troops on the front lines.

The Army also would be forced to consider curtailing some training for Guard and reserve units here at home. This would reduce their readiness and could delay their availability to mobilize for missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Congress fails to pass a bill I can sign by mid-May, the problems grow even more acute. The Army would be forced to consider slowing or even freezing funding for its depots, where the equipment our troops depend on is repaired. They will also have to consider delaying or curtailing the training of some active duty forces, reducing the availability of these forces to deploy overseas. If this happens, some of the forces now deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq may need to be extended because other units are not ready to take their places.

If Congress does not act, the Army may also have to delay the formation of new brigade combat teams, preventing us from getting those troops into the pool of forces that are available to deploy. If these new teams are unavailable, we would have to ask other units to extend into the theater.

In a letter to Congress, Army Chief of Staff General Pete Schoomaker put it this way: "Without approval of the supplemental funds in April, we will be forced to take increasingly draconian measures, which will impact Army readiness and impose hardships on our soldiers and their families."

In a time of war, it's irresponsible for the Democrat leadership -- Democratic leadership in Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds. The bottom line is this: Congress's failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.

Members of Congress say they support the troops. Now they need to show that support in deed, as well as in word. Members of Congress are entitled to their views and should express them. Yet debating these differences should not come at the expense of funding our troops.

Congress's most basic responsibility is to give our troops the equipment and training they need to fight our enemies and protect our nation. They're now failing in that responsibility, and if they do not change course in the coming weeks, the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.

I'll now answer some questions, starting with Jennifer Loven.

Q Thank you, sir. You agreed to talk to Syria in the context of --

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me?

Q You've agreed to talk to Syria in the context of the international conferences on Iraq. What's so different or wrong about Speaker Pelosi having her own meetings there? And are you worried that she might be preempting your own efforts?

THE PRESIDENT: We have made it clear to high-ranking officials, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, that going to Syria sends mixed signals -- signals in the region and, of course, mixed signals to President Assad. And by that, I mean, photo opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they're part of the mainstream of the international community, when, in fact, they're a state sponsor of terror; when, in fact, they're helping expedite -- or at least not stopping the movement of foreign fighters from Syria into Iraq; when, in fact, they have done little to nothing to rein in militant Hamas and Hezbollah; and when, in fact, they destabilize the Lebanese democracy.

There have been a lot of people who have gone to see President Assad -- some Americans, but a lot of European leaders and high-ranking officials. And yet we haven't seen action. In other words, he hasn't responded. It's one thing to send a message; it's another thing to have the person receiving the message actually do something. So the position of this administration is that the best way to meet with a leader like Assad or people from Syria is in the larger context of trying to get the global community to help change his behavior. But sending delegations hasn't worked. It's just simply been counterproductive.

Steve.

Q Thank you, sir. Would the U.S. be willing to give up five Iranians held in Iraq if it would help persuade Iran to give up the 15 British sailors?

THE PRESIDENT: Steven, I said the other day that -- first of all, the seizure of the sailors is indefensible by the Iranians, and that I support the Blair government's attempts to solve this issue peacefully. So we're in close consultation with the British government. I also strongly support the Prime Minister's declaration that there should be no quid pro quo's when it comes to the hostages.

Let's see here -- Baker, Baker. Are you here? Yes, there you are.

Q Sir, your administration evaluated all 93 U.S. attorneys, in part on the basis of loyalty. That was one of the criteria that was used. What role should loyalty to you play in the evaluation of those charged with administering justice and enforcing the law?

THE PRESIDENT: Peter, obviously, when you name a U.S. attorney you want somebody who can do the job. That's the most important criterion, somebody who is qualified, somebody who can get a job done. The President names the U.S. attorneys, and the President has the right to remove U.S. attorneys. And on this particular issue, the one you're referring to, I believe it's the current issue of the eight U.S. attorneys, they serve at my pleasure, they have served four-year terms, and we have every right to replace them. And --

Q And what --

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish, please. I am genuinely concerned about their reputations, now that this has become a Washington, D.C. focus. I'm sorry it's come to this. On the other hand, there had been no credible evidence of any wrongdoing. And that's what the American people have got to understand. We had a right to remove them; we did remove them. And there will be more hearings to determine what I've just said, no credible evidence of wrongdoing.

Bill.

Q Mr. President, a lot of the disagreement over --

THE PRESIDENT: Wrong Bill.

Q Which one, him?

THE PRESIDENT: No, you. The cute-looking one. (Laughter.)

Q Thanks so much. A lot of the disagreement, sir, over the way you're handling Iraq, disagreements from the public and Congress, stems from the belief that things are not working, despite the surge. The Iraqis have met few, if any, of the benchmarks that were laid down for them so far. Senator McCain walked in the Baghdad marketplace with air cover and a company of troops. But people don't believe that this can work, and they question the continued sacrifice of U.S. troops to help make it work.

THE PRESIDENT: Bill, I'm very aware that there are a group of people that don't think we should be there in the first place. There are some who don't believe that this strategy will work. I've listened carefully to their complaints. Obviously, I listened to these concerns prior to deciding to reinforce. This is precisely the debate we had inside the White House: Can we succeed? I know there are some who have basically said it is impossible to succeed. I strongly disagree with those people. I believe not only can we succeed, I know we must succeed.

And so I decided to, at the recommendation of military commanders, decided to send reinforcements. As opposed to leaving Baghdad and watching the country go up in flames, I chose a different route, which was to send more troops into Baghdad. And General Petraeus, who is a reasoned, sober man, says there is some progress being made. And he cites murders and -- in other words, there's some calm coming to the capital. But he also fully recognizes, as do I, it's still dangerous. In other words, suiciders are willing to kill innocent life in order to send the projection that this is an impossible mission.

The whole strategy is to give the Iraqi government time to reconcile, time to unify the country, time to respond to the demands of the 12 million people that voted.

You've said the Iraqis haven't met any obligations; I would disagree with your characterization. They have said that they will send Iraqi forces into Baghdad to take the lead, along with U.S. troops, to bring security to Baghdad, and they've done that. They said they'd name a commander for Baghdad; they have done that. They said they'd send up -- they'd send troops out into the neighborhoods to clear and hold and then build; they're doing that. They send they would send a budget up that would spend a considerable amount of their money on reconstruction; they have done that. They're working on an oil law that is in progress.

As a matter of fact, I spoke to the Prime Minister yesterday about progress on the oil law. He reminded me that sometimes the legislature doesn't do what the executive branch wants them to do. I reminded him, I understand what he's talking about. But, nevertheless, I strongly agree that we've got to continue to make it clear to the Iraqi government that this is -- the solution to Iraq, an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself, is more than a military mission -- precisely the reason why I sent more troops into Baghdad, to be able to provide some breathing space for this democratically-elected government to succeed. And it's hard work, and I understand it's hard work.

Secondly, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, Bill, there's only 40 percent of our troops that are there on the ground. And so I find it somewhat astounding that people in Congress would start calling for withdrawal even before all the troops have made it to Baghdad.

Let's see here -- Rutenberg. Jim Rutenberg.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Matthew Dowd, your chief campaign strategist in 2004, kind of issued a strong critique of you and your administration this weekend. I'm wondering if you were personally stunned, and if you worry about losing support of people -- of him and people like him?

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I respect Matthew. I've known him for a while; as you mentioned, he was an integral part of my 2004 campaign. I have not talked to Matthew about his concerns. Nevertheless, I understand his anguish over war. I understand that this is an emotional issue for Matthew, as it is a lot of other people in our country. Matthew's case, as I understand it, is obviously intensified because his son is deployable. In other words, he's got a son in the U.S. Armed Forces, and I can understand Matthew's concerns.

I would hope that people who share Matthew's point of view would understand my concern about what failure would mean to the security of the United States. What I'm worried about is that we leave before the mission is done

-- and that is a country that is able to govern, sustain and defend itself -- and that Iraq becomes a cauldron of chaos which will embolden extremists, whether they be Shia or Sunni extremists; which would enable extremists to have safe haven from which to plot attacks on America; which could provide new resources for an enemy that wants to harm us.

And so, on the one hand, I do fully understand the anguish people go through about this war. And it's not just Matthew, there's a lot of our citizens who are concerned about this war. But I also hope that people will take a sober look at the consequences of failure in Iraq. My main job is to protect the people, and I firmly believe that if we were to leave before the job is done, the enemy would follow us here. And what makes Iraq different from previous struggles is that September the 11th showed that chaos in another part of the world, and/or safe haven for killers, for radicals, affects the security of the United States.

Martha.

Q Back to Iran, sir. ABC has been reporting that Iran will be capable of building a nuclear bomb within two years. Have you seen evidence that Iran is accelerating its nuclear program?

THE PRESIDENT: I haven't seen the report that you just referred to. I do share concerns about Iranian intention to have a nuclear weapon. I firmly believe that if Iran were to have a nuclear weapon, it would be a seriously destablizing influence in the Middle East. And therefore, we have worked to build a international coalition to try to convince the Iranians to give up their weapon, to make it clear that they have choices to make -- whether the choice be isolation, or missed opportunity to grow their economies. And so we take your -- we take the

-- we take seriously the attempts of the Iranians to gain a nuclear weapon.

Q Have you seen an acceleration, though?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm not going to talk about any intelligence that I've seen one way or the other. But I do want you to know how seriously we take the Iranian nuclear issue. As a matter of fact, it is the cornerstone of our Iranian policy. It is -- and that's why we spend a lot of time in working with friends, allies, concerned people to rally international support, to make it clear to the Iranian people that there is a better option for them.

Now, we have no problem, no beef with the Iranian people. We value their history; we value their traditions. But their government is making some choices that will continue to isolate them and deprive them of a better economic future. So we take the issue very seriously.

Ken Herman.

Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, are you aware of the current price of a gallon of gas? Can you explain why it's gone up so sharply in recent weeks? And is there anything in the near future indicating that prices might start coming down again before the heavy summer driving season?

THE PRESIDENT: About $2.60 plus.

Q Where are you shopping, sir? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Nationwide average. The price of gasoline, obviously, varies from region to region for a variety of reasons. Some has to do with the amount of taxation at the pump; some of it has to do with the boutique fuels that have been mandated on a state-by-state basis. But a lot of the price of gasoline depends on the price of crude oil.

And the price of crude oil is on the rise, and the price of crude oil is on the rise because people get spooked, for example, when it looks like there may be a crisis with a crude oil-producing nation, like Iran. But the whole point about rising crude oil prices and rising gasoline prices is that this country ought to work hard to get off our addiction to oil -- all the more reason why Congress ought to pass the mandatory fuel standards that I set forth, which will reduce our use of gasoline by 20 percent over the next 10 years. And there's two reasons why. One is for national security reasons, and two is for environmental concerns. And I hope that we can get this done with the Congress, get it out of the Congress to my desk as quickly as possible.

Dancer. Dancing man. That would be David Gregory. For those of you not aware, Gregory put on a show the --

Q Everybody's aware, Mr. President, thank you. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, maybe the listeners aren't.

Q Yes, that's all right.

THE PRESIDENT: That was a beautiful performance, seriously.

Q Thank you. Thank you very much. (Laughter.) Mr. President, you say the Democrats are undercutting troops, they way they have voted. They're obviously trying to assert more control over foreign policy. Isn't that what the voters elected them to do in November?

THE PRESIDENT: I think the voters in America want Congress to support our troops who are in harm's way. They want money to the troops. And they don't want politicians in Washington telling our generals how to fight a war. It's one thing to object to the policy, but it's another thing when you have troops in harm's way not to give them the funds they need.

And no question there's been a political dance going on here in Washington. You've followed this closely, you know what I'm talking about. Not only was there a political dance going on -- in other words, people were trying to appeal to one side of their party or another -- but they then had to bring out new funding streams in order to attract votes to a emergency war supplemental.

And my concern, David, is several. One, Congress shouldn't tell generals how to run the war; Congress should not short-change our military; Congress should not use a emergency war spending measure as a vehicle to put pet spending projects on that have nothing to do with the war.

Secondly, as I mentioned in these remarks, delays beyond mid-April and then into May will affect the readiness of the U.S. military. So my attitude is, enough politics. They need to come back, pass a bill -- if they want to play politics, fine; they continue to do that, I will veto it. But they ought to do it quickly. They ought to get the bill to my desk as quickly as possible, and I'll veto it. And then we can get down to the business of funding our troops without strings and without withdrawal dates.

It is amazing to me that, one, the United States Senate passed a -- confirmed General Petraeus overwhelmingly, after he testified as to what he thinks is necessary to succeed in Iraq, and then won't fund him. Secondly, we have put 40 percent of the reinforcements in place, and yet people already want to start withdrawing before the mission has had a chance to succeed.

They need to come off their vacation, get a bill to my desk, and if it's got strings and mandates and withdrawals and pork I'll veto it. And then we can get down to the business of getting this thing done. And we can do it quickly. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. And we can get the bill -- get the troops funded, and we go about our business of winning this war.

McKinnon.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. On climate change and the decision that was issued yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court, what's your reaction to that decision? And don't you think that this makes some kind of broad caps on greenhouse gas emissions more or less inevitable?

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, the decision of the Supreme Court we take very seriously. It's the new law of the land. And secondly, we're taking some time to fully understand the details of the decision. As you know, this decision was focused on emissions that come from automobiles. My attitude is, is that we have laid out a plan that will affect greenhouse gases that come from automobiles by having a mandatory fuel standard that insists upon using 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017, which will reduce our gasoline usage by 20 percent and halt the growth in greenhouse gases that emanate from automobiles. In other words, there is a remedy available for Congress. And I strongly hope that they pass this remedy quickly.

In terms of the broader issue, first of all, I've taken this issue very seriously. I have said that it is a serious problem. I recognize that man is contributing greenhouse gases, that -- but here are the principles by which I think we can get a good deal. One, anything that happens cannot hurt economic growth. And I say that because, one, I care about the working people of the country, but also because, in order to solve the greenhouse gas issue over a longer period of time, it's going to require new technologies, which tend to be expensive. And it's easier to afford expensive technologies if you're prosperous.

Secondly, whatever we do must be in concert with what happens internationally, because we could pass any number of measures that are now being discussed in the Congress, but unless there is an accord with China, China will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time.

And so those are the principles that will guide our decision-making: How do you encourage new technology? How do you grow the economy? And how do you make sure that China is -- and India are a part of a rational solution?

Let's see here -- how about Bret Bair?

Q Mr. President, thank you. Since General Pace made his comments that got a lot of attention about homosexuality, we haven't heard from you on that issue. Do you, sir, believe that homosexuality is immoral?

THE PRESIDENT: I will not be rendering judgment about individual orientation. I do believe the "don't ask, don't tell" policy is good policy.

Sammon, yes.

Q Thank you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: You're standing out there, I can see you.

Q When Congress has linked war funding with a timetable you have argued micromanagement. When they've linked it to unrelated spending, you've argued pork barrel. But now there's talk from Harry Reid and others that if you veto this bill, they may come back and just simply cut off funding. Wouldn't that be a legitimate exercise of a congressional authority, which is the power of the purse?

THE PRESIDENT: The Congress is exercising its legitimate authority as it sees fit right now. I just disagree with their decisions. I think setting an artificial timetable for withdrawal is a significant mistake. It is a -- it sends mixed signals and bad signals to the region, and to the Iraqi citizens.

Listen, the Iraqis are wondering whether or not we're going to stay to help. People in America wonder whether or not they've got the political will to do the hard work -- that's what Plante was asking about. My conversations with President [sic] Maliki, he seems dedicated to doing that. And we will continue to work with him to achieve those objectives. But they're wondering whether or not America is going to keep commitments. And so when they hear withdrawal, and timetables, it, rightly so, sends different kinds of signals.

It's interesting that Harry Reid, Leader Reid spoke out with a different option. Whatever option they choose, I would hope they get home, get a bill, and get it to my desk. And if it has artificial timetables of withdrawal, or if it cuts off funding for troops, or if it tells our generals how to run a war, I'll veto it. And then we can get about the business of giving our troops what they need -- what our generals want them to have, and give our generals the flexibility necessary to achieve the objectives that we set out by reinforcing troops in Iraq.

You know, what's interesting is you don't hear a lot of debate about Washington as to what will happen if there is failure. Again, Plante mentioned that people don't think we can succeed -- in other words, there's no chance of succeeding. That's a part of the debate. But what people also have got to understand, what will happen if we fail. And the way you fail is to leave before the job is done; in other words, just abandon this young democracy -- say we're tired; we'll withdraw from Baghdad and hope there's not chaos.

I believe that if this capital city were to fall into chaos, which is where it was headed prior to reinforcing, that there would be no chance for this young democracy to survive. That's why I made the decision I made. And the reason why I believe it's important to help this young democracy survive is so that the country has a chance to become a stabilizing influence in a dangerous part of the world.

I also understand that if the country -- if the experience were to fail, radicals would be emboldened. People that had been -- that can't stand America would find new ways to recruit. There would be potentially additional resources for them to use at their disposal.

The failure in Iraq would endanger American security. I have told the American people often it is best to defeat them there so we don't have to face them here, fully recognizing that what happens over there can affect the security here. That's one of the major lessons of September the 11th. In that case, there was safe haven found in a failed state, where killers plotted and planned and trained, and came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. And I vowed we weren't going to let that happen again.

Secondly, the way to defeat the ideology that these people believe is through a competing ideology, one based upon liberty and human rights and human dignity. And there are some who, I guess, say that's impossible to happen in the Middle East. I strongly disagree. I know it is hard work. I believe it is necessary work to secure this country in the long run.

Ed.

Q Mr. President, the conservative newspaper columnist, Robert Novak, recently wrote that in 50 years of covering Washington, he's never seen a President more isolated than you are right now. What do you say to critics like Novak who say that you are more isolated now than Richard Nixon was during Watergate?

THE PRESIDENT: How did he define "isolated"?

Q He said you're isolated primarily from your own party, that Republican leaders on the Hill were privately telling him that, on the Gonzales matter in particular, you're very isolated.

THE PRESIDENT: I think you're going to find that the White House and the Hill are going to work in close collaboration, starting with this supplemental. When I announced that I will veto a bill with -- that withdrew our troops, that set artificial timetables for withdrawal, or micro-managed the war, the Republicans strongly supported that message. I think you'll find us working together on energy. They know what I know, that dependence on oil will affect the long-term national security of the country. We'll work together on No Child Left Behind. We'll work together on immigration reform. We'll work together, most importantly, on budget, to make sure this budget gets balanced without raising taxes.

The other day, the Democrats submitted budgets that raised taxes on the working people, in order to increase the amount of money they have available for spending. That is a place where the Republicans and this President are going to work very closely together. I adamantly oppose tax increases, and so do the majority of members in the United States Congress.

Ed.

Q Mr. President, good morning. You've talked --

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Good morning, that's a good way to start.

Q You've talked about the consequences of failure in Iraq, and you've said that enemies would follow us home. I wonder, given that, it seems like that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of people who are charged with the responsibility of keeping America safe. So what --

THE PRESIDENT: What was that again, Ed?

Q Well, you say that the enemies would follow us home --

THE PRESIDENT: I will -- that's what they'll do, just like September the 11th. They plotted, planned, and attacked.

Q So I wonder, in your own mind, how does that vision play out? How do they follow us home? Because we've spent so much money and put so much resources into making this country safer.

THE PRESIDENT: Ed, I'm not going to predict to you the methodology they'll use. Just you need to know they want to hit us again. We do everything we can here at the homeland to protect us. That's why I've got a Homeland Security Department. That's why we are inconveniencing air traffickers, to make sure nobody is carrying weapons on airplanes. That's why we need border enforcement, with a comprehensive immigration bill, by the way, to make sure it's easier to enforce the border. I mean, we're doing a lot. That's why we need to make sure our intelligence services coordinate information better.

So we spend a lot of time trying to protect this country. But if they were ever to have safe haven, it would make the efforts much harder. That's my point. We cannot let them have safe haven again. The lesson of September the 11th is, if these killers are able to find safe haven from which to plot, plan and attack, they will do so.

So, Ed, I don't know what methodology they'll use. We're planning for the worst. We cover all fronts. And it's hard to protect a big country like this, and I applaud those who have done a fantastic job of protecting us since September the 11th. But make no mistake about it, there's still an enemy that would like to do us harm. And I believe, whether it be in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or anywhere else, if these enemy are able to find safe haven, it will endanger the lives of our fellow citizens.

I also understand that the best way to defeat them in the long run is to show people in the Middle East, for example, that there is a better alternative to tyrannical societies, to societies that don't meet the hopes and aspirations of the average people; and that is through a society that is based upon the universal concept of liberty.

Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and it's a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like -- or to the developed world, to people like -- in the United States.

So thank you all very much for your interest. I hope you have a nice holiday. Appreciate it.

END 10:44 A.M. EDT

For Immediate Release, Office of the Press Secretary, April 3, 2007

Technorati Tags: President Bush and White House or Congress and military commanders or emergency war spending bill and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates or House of Representatives and General Pete Pace or President Assad and PODCAST or VIDEO and 15 British sailors or Hamas and Hezbollah

Baseball Diamond in the Rough, Camp Fallujah

Marines Find Diamond in the Rough on Camp Fallujah, Story by Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva Regimental Combat Team 5

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Marines with Regimental Combat Team 5 found themselves a diamond in the rough on an empty dirt lot here.

Several Marines meet weekly to play pick-up baseball games. They’re nothing fancy. The baseball diamond doesn’t even have a blade of grass on the infield. But for these boys of summer, it’s their field of dreams, and it takes them away from Iraq

and back to their glory days when they could have been swatting away at the next walk-off homer.

“Everybody goes back to their past when they get out here,” said Staff Sgt. John L. Heine,a 28-year-old from Buffalo, N.Y. “The stories come out and we’re all trying to play at that level again, even though the skills have faded away.”

Every Sunday, they gather at the baseball field roughed out from the desert floor. It’s humble as far as fields go. There’s no chalk for baselines, just white engineer tape. The fence is a small plastic kind that could be found on a construction site, and the backstop is a mesh net. The field is anything but level— it is gouged and pockmarked with the occasional helicopter passing low, interrupting games.

This is sandlot baseball at its best.

Most days, there’s hardly enough Marines to field a proper team, so they rotate. Each team provides their own catcher. Pitches are slow to give every slugger a chance to park one over the fence. That’s only a couple hundred feet away too.

Rules are subject to interpretation. Two strikes keep the innings going faster. Ground-rule doubles are called when the ball hops over the low fence, and plays at the plate are usually decided by who spouts out the best trash talk.

It’s reminiscent of the days when they played for the love of the game and wood bats meant you were playing with the big boys. For about two hours each week, these Marines aren’t in Fallujah. They’re in their back yards or high school fields, sending a ball sailing so far it might need a postage stamp to land.

Technorati Tags: CAMP FALLUJAH Iraq and baseball or World Series and Regimental Combat Team 5, or field of dreams and Marines or batting averages and pitch count

White House Press Briefing by Dana Perino 04/02/07 VIDEO

Press Briefing by Dana Perino, White House Conference Center Briefing Room, FULL STREAMING VIDEO, Dana M. Perino Biography, 12:45 P.M. EDT . PODCAST OF ARTICLE MS. PERINO: One announcement, and then we'll go to questions.

It's been 56 days since the President sent up his request for more money for the troops, and Democrats in Congress left town last week without finishing their work. It appears they're still content to work on a bill that does not have serious plans to fund troops or make Iraq, America and the world more secure, but, rather, attempt at forcing us into giving up on Iraq without regard to the consequences of failure.

The authors of these bills clearly do not understand what it means to mandate and legislate a withdrawal from Iraq. Just yesterday, a Democratic leader described the debate in Congress as a political dance; while another said the goal was not great legislation, but rounding up votes and sending an anti-war message. Well, they've delivered their message; it's time now for Congress to deliver the money to our troops.

In addition to that, the President has just received from the House Republicans a letter with proof that the House does not have enough votes to override the President's veto. So it's time that we believe the Congress get serious in supporting General Petraeus and the troops and the ground, and not mandate and legislate failure with the current path that they're on with this Iraq war spending bill.

Questions. Jennifer.

Q Thanks. The Speaker said in Beirut today that -- first of all, she's criticizing the White House for what she says is ignoring other Republican lawmakers who have made trips to Syria in recent days. And, also, she said she thinks it's a good idea to establish facts and to try to build confidence with Syria. Why is that not a good idea? And how is that just a photo op?

MS. PERINO: Let me unpack that a little bit. First of all, last week when I was asked about her specific trip, I said in my comments that, in general, we discourage members from going to the region. And that is true. In fact, I looked back, when Tony Snow was asked at this podium months ago, when Senator Nelson made a similar trip, he said the same, that this was a blanket policy -- but I was asked a specific question about Speaker Pelosi, which is why I said that.

Speaker Pelosi is a high-ranking United States official. Nothing changes -- nothing has changed in Syria's behavior over the years when high-ranking U.S. officials go to see them. We sent Secretary Powell early on; the behavior doesn't change. Syria uses these opportunities to flaunt photo opportunities around its country and around the region and around the world, to say that they aren't isolated, that they don't need to change their behavior, and it alleviates the pressure that we are trying to put on them to change their behavior.

And by changing their behavior I mean as in, stop undermining the democratically elected government of Lebanon; stop allowing foreign fighters to flow from Syria into Iraq, in which they are then killing American soldiers and innocent Iraqis and Iraqi soldiers. They are state sponsors of terrorism, of both Hezbollah and Hamas, and they support Palestinian terrorism.

And so that was the reason that we said that we discouraged her from going. But that policy applies to all. So I think that maybe she wasn't able to see my exact comments, so I won't judge her on that. But the policy applies everywhere.

Q With the court's decision today, will the President direct the EPA to decide whether greenhouse gases contribute to the changing climate?

MS. PERINO: I saw that opinion, that ruling. There were several of them that came out today. We haven't had a chance to review the opinion in full. People at EPA and across the government are going to have to do that. I can't speak to the broader implications of the bill. One thing I can say is part of this case that was being argued was with respect to vehicles and regulating CO2 out of the tailpipe. And one of the ways that you do that is by making cars more efficient, so burning less gas, going more miles. And that's precisely what we have been working to do with our increases in mileage standards for both light trucks, SUVs, and we have asked for that same authority in regards to cars. We don't have that authority now, but the President asked for it two years ago, and then again in his State of the Union.

In addition to that, the other way you get there is by mandating alternative fuels and biofuels. And in the President's State of the Union address he said that he wanted to get 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels mandated within 10 years. We call that the 20-in-10 program, which means reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. The way you get there for our program is to increase CAFE standards and to increase these mandatory alternative fuels.

But in regards to this case -- so in that regard, we are regulating the vehicle sector. As far as the broader implications about the case, we're going to have to let EPA take a good look at it, and they're going to have to analyze it and think about what it means for any future policy decisions.

Q Well, on a broader face, why did the administration and the EPA refuse to take a position on whether greenhouse gases cause global warming?

MS. PERINO: No, we -- that's actually not what the case was saying. We have long said that greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming planet, and that human-generated carbon dioxide is a large contributor to that aspect of it.

Q Then it wasn't an EPA policy, which is what this case is about.

MS. PERINO: The question was -- it is a legal question of whether or not the federal government has the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. And the prior administration said that they thought they had that legal authority, but they did not take action. We questioned whether we did have the legal authority. Now the Supreme Court has settled that matter for us, and we're going to have to take a look and analyze it and see where we go from there.

Go ahead, Bob.

Q Back to war funding. As I'm sure you're aware, Senator Reid is now saying that he's signing on to the more stringent legislation, the Feingold legislation. Do you have a comment on that?

MS. PERINO: There's just these shifting sands when it comes to the Democrats and their decisions. It's almost shifting so fast it's like a sandstorm. Last Thursday the Senate Democrats passed a bill that said that -- that mandated our troops leaving within 120 days from last Thursday. Over the weekend, when we said this money is going to run out in April, and he said, oh, no, no, no, they'll be fine until July -- well, then, what is it? Are you wanting troops to leave 120 days from last Thursday, or 120 days from July or whenever it is that you get this bill to the President's desk?

In addition to that, I don't know if there was polling that was run over the weekend that led them to make -- led Senator Reid to make yet another decision and take another position on this bill, but I do know is that standing with the troops means getting them the money that they need now. The Department of Defense has already said that there are impacts; there are detrimental impacts if we don't get this money soon.

In addition to that, I saw some people wondering over the weekend why we had not criticized the Congress last year when the money didn't come by the mid-April time frame. There were some complaints, but we also knew that we were getting closer to a bill that the President could sign. What we know now is that the President has said he's not going to sign the two bills that are underway. And so we respectfully ask the Congress to come back and get that work done for the troops.

Toby.

Q Dana, do you know anything about an American missing in Iran? And, also --

MS. PERINO: I have heard those reports from the State Department. I believe Sean McCormack -- I don't know if he has spoken about that today at his briefing, but we have heard that there may be an American citizen in Iran. It's not completely a unique scenario to have an American citizen go missing there and possibly need consular support. But the State Department is working to seek out as much information as possible, ascertain the facts, find out if he does need any support or help. And I just don't have any further details, but I can tell you the State Department is looking into it.

Q And what does the President think about the video showing the British soldiers in Iran saying that they were actually in Iranian waters?

MS. PERINO: I think you heard from the President on Saturday, he fully stands behind Tony Blair and the British government in their attempts to return their sailors and their equipment. I think the President believes that the Brits have shown that the sailors were in Iraqi waters and that they need to be returned immediately and unconditionally.

Martha.

Q Dana, did the President use the word "hostage" for a specific reason yesterday -- changing it from "captives" to "hostage"? That seems to turn up the heat on this.

MS. PERINO: No. And I saw Tony Blair had used the same word in previous days.

Q And he considers them hostages, captive --

MS. PERINO: Well, they were taken -- as the President said, they were doing nothing wrong, they were summarily plucked out of the water and are being held. So the President believes that's appropriate language. But I stress to you the President stands behind Tony Blair and we reject any notion that suggests that we are ratcheting up the language in terms of trying to prepare to go to war with Iran; that is certainly not the case.

Q And just a little bit more on the American missing in Iran. It said -- the State Department said he had been missing since early March. Do you know why we're just hearing about this?

MS. PERINO: No, I don't. I just really don't have any more information about his whereabouts; I don't know when they reached out. So we'll try to find out more information, but probably that -- just for all of you here, I think a lot of that information is going to be able to come from the State Department, not the White House.

Q Dana, on the testifying for Attorney General Gonzales, you've expressed a wish, the White House has expressed a wish that it be sooner rather than later. Some critics have said the reason for that push is to take the heat off Karl Rove and Harriet Miers in the push for testimony under oath. How do you respond to that?

MS. PERINO: I think that as much as they've tried to rub sticks together to try to create heat around Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, it's just not successful. So our offer stands for -- the President said they can go up and have interviews. I think that there is no credible allegation of any wrongdoing. The Attorney General would like to go up to Congress, would like to answer all their questions and be fully responsive and get on with the business of the people.

Q Another topic, the Supreme Court rejected one of the appeals by the Guantanamo detainees today. Does the Bush administration see that as some sort of a victory today?

MS. PERINO: Well, certainly, we're pleased with the decision and, again, with all the Supreme Court decisions that come out around 10:30 a.m. We don't have a chance to fully review them and for me to get fully briefed on them, because it takes me a little while to understand everything. But, yes, I think on first glance we're very pleased with the decision.

Q But there is a sense that there will be -- this will come to a head in the Supreme Court again.

MS. PERINO: Well, we'll have to see. I can't forecast that. But I think we're pleased with today's decision.

Q To follow up on Bill's question, just so I'm clear. Is the administration going to take a fresh look at the emissions, and are we considering -- are you saying we're considering regulating greenhouse gases on new cars?

MS. PERINO: No. What I'm saying -- I'm sorry, I have to decouple those two things. In regards to the broader possible applications -- or implications of the Supreme Court's decision regarding greenhouse gases, we'll have to take a look. I would remind you and refer you to EPA's website, CEQ's website, in terms of all the things the President is doing. The main one, let me point out, is that the President, in 2001 -- sorry, 2002 -- established a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emission's intensity, which is the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions, by 18 percent by 2012. We are now in 2007, and we are on track -- well on track to meet the President's goal. And there are many other programs that we've been pursuing, both domestically and internationally.

When it comes to this particular case, EPA versus Massachusetts, and the question was whether or not the EPA should regulate greenhouse gas emissions coming out of the tailpipe, my point was that we do regulate emissions coming out of the tailpipe. We do it through the Department of Transportation's CAFE program. And the way to get cars to be more efficient is to burn less gas and to go more miles. And that's what we've been working to do, but we've done that in a way to make sure that the safety of passengers is taken into account, because the lighter you make the car, the more -- possibly the more dangerous it can be for passengers who could get in an accident.

Q But is there an appetite to raise the standard?

MS. PERINO: Well, we already have raised the standard twice for SUVs, and we're looking at a third one. And then we've asked Congress for the authority to do the same for cars. So we're already well down that road. I can't tell you an exact number, because we try to do that based on the experts at the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration.

John.

Q Back on the Speaker's trip. Is it your view that her trip is, effectively, endangering U.S. troops in the region?

MS. PERINO: I'm not suggesting that. I think that the people who are endangering U.S. troops in the region are the people who are perpetrating the violence, and the Syrians, who are allowing these foreign fighters to cross the border into Iraq unabated. There's no judgment in regards to her actions leading to any possible troop being attacked by someone coming from Syria, no. What I'm saying is that it sends the wrong message; it alleviates the pressure off of Syria from things that I mentioned before, which is the human rights situation in Syria, the Palestinian terrorism situation, the support of Hamas and Hezbollah, undermining Siniora's government, the democratically-elected government of Lebanon.

These things are real. We want Assad to take action and change his behavior in regards to those items. But the more U.S. officials go there and try to talk with him, the less he feels the pressure to change. And so we haven't seen change in many years, and we think that the best thing to do is to keep them -- to show that they are isolated and that their behavior is unacceptable.

Victoria.

Q Last week I asked you about Alberto Gonzales' testimony before the committee, and why didn't he suggest to them that he would like to testify earlier. And you said to me that as they had invited him, that they should be the ones to suggest that he testify earlier. Then suddenly Dan Bartlett says over the weekend that he wants to testify earlier. So what changed?

MS. PERINO: The Attorney General thinks it's in everyone's best interests, and we agree with him, that he be able to get up and talk to Congress sooner than later. I think the American people would like to see us resolve this so that we can move on and work on other things. So we'd like to see the hearing moved up to next week.

Q Did Kyle Sampson's testimony change that?

MS. PERINO: No, I think it's been a culmination of factors. It has dragged on for many weeks. It seems to heat up over the last couple of weeks. And I think that the Attorney General thinks it's in everyone's best interests if he testifies earlier.

Q So he doesn't feel that this is starting to get a little bit too hot?

MS. PERINO: No, he just wants to clear the air. They've been fully responsive in terms of the document requests. And now that that's completed, I think it now makes sense to try to move that hearing up. If the senators are going to be here next week, I see no reason why they couldn't go ahead and have that hearing.

Q This week's Economist, which is a fairly friendly magazine, refers to the Bush administration --

MS. PERINO: Fairly friendly to who? (Laughter.)

Q Fairly friendly to the Bush administration --

MS. PERINO: Wow.

Q -- refers to the Bush administration as "this most inept of presidencies." I wondered if you had a comment.

MS. PERINO: No.

Peter, did you have one? Not to stump you.

Q I want to clarify on the -- you're saying it was a bad idea, then, for Speaker Pelosi to go for all these various reasons to Syria. It's a bad idea, then, for Jim Baker to have gone, a bad idea for Frank Wolf to go as well, right?

MS. PERINO: We think that it is not a good idea for U.S. officials to go and meet with Assad, because it alleviates that pressure, and also because meetings haven't produced anything. They've been meeting just to meet, and he doesn't change his behavior. In fact, he uses those meetings as a reason to say that he doesn't need to do anything.

Q When you don't meet with him, he doesn't change his behavior either.

MS. PERINO: Well, we'll see.

April.

Q Dana, is there a fear -- back on the Pelosi trip -- is there a fear that Pelosi will go and meet with government officials there and show that there are two U.S. policies on Syria, versus one policy that the President has stated?

MS. PERINO: Well, I don't know what she was planning to say in that meeting. I would believe that she agrees with us, in terms of the aspects that I've laid out. So I don't know what she's planning to say. We do think it sends the wrong message for U.S. officials to go and meet with him.

Q To follow up on that, is it a contradiction that the President is denouncing the trip, but, yet, is ready for a readout when she comes back?

MS. PERINO: I was asked this morning if she had responded -- or if she had sent back any messages. I said, I don't know, I'm sure that she'd be willing to. If she wants to share information that she found out from her trip to the Middle East, I'm sure we'll be willing to hear it.

Q But isn't that a contradiction, though? If you're denouncing it, why do you want to hear about it?

MS. PERINO: April, that is not a contradiction. What I said is that if she wanted to share, I'm sure we will listen. Imagine if I had said the opposite, you'd be asking me much tougher questions. (Laughter.)

Q Just going to seek your comments on the Matthew Dowd interview over the weekend.

MS. PERINO: I don't know Matthew Dowd. I wish I did. I have heard nothing but fabulous things about him over the years. I know people are very fond of him. Obviously, war brings out a lot of emotions in different people, and possibly changing emotions, as he laid out in the New York Times. And, obviously, not being a close friend of his, I don't know as well as others might about the personal journey he's been on over the past couple of years. But we certainly can respect his views, but respectfully disagree with some of the assertions that he made in the article. But we certainly wish him the very best. He's a really good guy.

Q What does that mean, personal journey?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think that he's had some personal hardship, and also he has a son who's volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces and he's going to be deploying to Iraq. And I can only imagine that that affects a parent's thinking.

Q And so it's really about him, and not about you, about the President, the White House, and the things that he's seen go wrong?

MS. PERINO: No, he might very well have those opinions, but we can respectfully disagree with -- for example, where I think one of the allegations was that the President is isolated. But I think many of you in this room have said increasingly, the President has been listening to a lot of different voices, and dissenting voices and dissenting opinions. And we certainly did that in the Iraq review on the way towards the President's new policy that he announced on January 10th.

Q He's raised "personal journey," which was used yesterday, as well, on television -- it seems to be implying it's really all about him, it has nothing to do with any legitimate disagreement with the White House.

MS. PERINO: No, I think he has a legitimate disagreement, but I also know that he has had some personal hardship.

Q Is that related? Is that relevant?

MS. PERINO: I don't know. I don't know Matthew and --

Q Then why do you bring it up?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think that -- he brought it up in the article, and I think that it's relevant. And I think that it's true that when you have a parent who is going to see his or her son or daughter heading off to war, in a war that is -- where we are fighting a very determined enemy, in which the Congress is not fully backing the troops, it would be a concern. And I'm just not going to judge him. I'm going to allow him to have his views and wish him well.

Les.

Q Yes, thank you, Dana. Two questions on American business. In the --

MS. PERINO: American business for 200. (Laughter.) I've always wanted to be on that show. Go ahead, Les, I'm sorry.

Q That's all right. In the just released 2007 annual report of The Washington Post Company, Chairman Donald Graham writes, "The Washington Post circulation continued to fall, and a sharp drop in classified advertising raised questions about the future of our business." Question, since The Washington Post is a leading part of one of this nation's most important businesses, do you and the President share Don Graham's expressed questioning about its future?

MS. PERINO: No. I think that the free press is alive and well.

Q By striking contrast, The New York Post is constantly gaining circulation. And my question, do you and the President believe that The Washington Post might also gain, rather than lose, if its editorial and reportorial writing were more like The New York Post rather than like The New York Times, which is also seriously losing circulation?

MS. PERINO: Maybe they ought to look at the tabloid format, I don't know.

Q But how about the content, not just --

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to comment on that.

Olivier.

Q Just to clear one thing up about the Pelosi visit, are you asking her to reconsider, or have you spoken your piece now and --

MS. PERINO: We had already discouraged her from going, and other members we do not encourage them to go to Syria. But at the end of the day, every American citizen, including members of Congress, get to make their own decision, and that was a decision they made.

Q Okay, so you're not -- this is not, like, some last appeal to say, please don't go tomorrow?

MS. PERINO: No, not from me. You can -- there might be others at the State Department or somebody who would make that.

Go ahead, John.

Q Dana, just to follow on that, you would have preferred that Frank Wolf had not gone to Syria.

MS. PERINO: Our policy and our feelings apply to everybody.

Paula.

Q You mentioned a few moments ago about the administration's greenhouse gas emissions goals and timetables. Well, could you explain why you measure this in intensity as far as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, because it's been said you could do that by production unit but without a cap on production, you could actually meet that goal and not reduce overall greenhouse gases.

MS. PERINO: I'm not an economist. I barely know what intensity means. I have a very tenuous hold on what that means. But I do know that slowing the rate of growth was important, in regards to the economy. We did not move forward with a full, mandatory cap because we believe that it would have been harmful to United States businesses.

But let me point out, it's not just about the business aspect of it. When you're talking about global emissions, that means -- global means global. So everyone is emitting up into the air. And if there are no actions taken by the major developing countries, like China and India -- China, which is, on average, building one coal-fired power plant a week -- you're going to put the American economy at a great disadvantage, push American businesses overseas, and then do nothing for the environment.

And so our approach has been multilateral and aggressive on various, different aspects of it. But it's the cap that we rejected, and they decided early on in 2002 -- and I can refer you to Jim Connaughton for the thinking behind those decisions.

Q But, again, this was set in 2002. There's been mounting evidence since then about temperatures rising, everything --

MS. PERINO: Absolutely. Climate change is a very real challenge. In fact, we have scientists this week that are at the U.N. meeting, at the IPCC. This is the second in a series of reports that they'll be doing, and they're full participants in the meeting and thinking about it. But I will point out to you that it is the United States who has had better performance in terms of reducing greenhouse gases, but with a stronger growing economy than many of the other countries -- I think most of the other countries who signed on to the Kyoto agreement.

Q Thank you.

MS. PERINO: Just one more in the back, just for Joanie.

Q Can you give the President's reaction to the FTA agreement in Korea last night, and also, how he thinks that will affect East Asia and the United States?

MS. PERINO: Well, the President was very pleased to notify Congress last night that we had finally, after much wrangling and late-night hours, reached a deal. America is a Pacific Rim country, and we have a lot of cultural and trade ties with East Asia. Our relations have never been better than they are today. And we're very pleased that the agreement was able to move forward, and looking forward to working with Korea not only on the trade agreement, but also on the security issues, such as the six-party talks that we're negotiating with them in regards to North Korea.

Q Thank you.

END 1:11 P.M. EDT

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The psychology of baseball

The psychology of baseball - It’s the seventh game of the World Series — bottom of the ninth inning, your team is down 4-3 with runners on second and third — and you’re on deck. You watch as your teammate gets the second out. That means you’re up with a chance to win a championship for your team...or lose it.

You’re known as a clutch hitter, and you’ve hit safely in 22 straight games — an impressive streak to be sure. But as you step into the batter’s box, your hands are sweating and your mind is racing. You think about the last time you faced this pitcher and the curveball he threw to strike you out. You look at him standing on the mound and he looks tired.

You try to pick up clues from his body language. How fast is his fastball today? Will he tempt you with that curveball again?

Psychologists are asking different questions: Does your recent hitting streak really matter? Is there even such a thing as a clutch hitter? Will the pitcher’s curveball fool you? And then there are the more basic ques-tions: How is it possible to hit a 100 m.p.h. fastball without being able to see it for more than a split second? How is it that even sandlot players — mere children — can intuitively do the complex geometry needed to get to precisely the right spot to catch a fly ball?

University of Missouri psychologist Mike Stadler uses research from dozens of behavioral scientists, plus some of his own, to try answering these complicated questions in his new book, The Psychology of Baseball. "Baseball turns out to be a good laboratory for studying psychological phenomena," Stadler says, "because you’re pushing the human system to its limits. And that’s a good way to see how the system works."

Psychologists have been studying baseball players almost as long as the Red Sox had been disappointing fans in Boston, and much of the attention has naturally focused on the most heroic part of the game: hitting. Baseball’s great sluggers, such as Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Albert Pujols, make it seem so effortless, which makes it hard to accept the scientific consensus that hitting is basically impossible. That’s right, impos-sible. Why? A ball thrown by a major league pitcher reaches speeds of 100 m.p.h. and an angular velocity (the speed in degrees at which the ball travels through your field of vision) of more than 500 degrees per second. A typical human can only track moving objects up to about 70 degrees per second. Add to this the fact that it takes longer to swing a bat than it does for a pitch to go from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt, which means a hitter must start his swing before the ball is released and has less than a half a second to change his mind. All that equals impossible.

Not surprisingly, professional baseball players are able to keep their eye on the ball longer (up to 120 de-grees per second) than the average human being. In one study, pro players who were asked to keep their eyes on the ball did one of two things. They either watched the pitch until it reached speeds too fast to keep track of — the farthest a player could track a pitch was 5.5 feet in front of the plate — or, less commonly, they watched for the first few feet and then quickly moved their line of vision to where they thought the ball would end up and watched it as it crossed the plate. So it turns out that your little league coach’s advice — watch the ball until it meets the bat — is actually physically impossible. But even the worst Major League hitters succeed two out of every 10 trips to the plate. Are the hits they get just pure luck? Not exactly.

"I guess what interests me most in some ways is that even though we have the perceptual limitations and even though we have the reaction time limitations, there’s still enough mental machinery there to help us solve the problem," Stadler says. Hitters must make some assumptions and guess where the ball is going to be and when it is going to be there in order to make contact. Because the barrel of the bat is long enough to cover the entire plate but is only a few inches thick, predicting where the ball will end up horizontally across the plate is much less important than pre-dicting where it will be vertically. And a large portion of predicting at what height it will cross the plate has to do with predicting the speed of the ball.

Arizona State’s Rob Gray has used a virtual hitting simulation — something he describes as a "purposefully simplified" video game — to help determine what cues help hitters make contact with the ball. In a 2002 study, he varied the speeds of the virtual ball randomly from about 70 to 80 m.p.h., and hitters failed miserably, with batting averages of about 0.030. That’ll get you cut from a T-ball team. But in the same simulation, hitters fared much better — with batting averages of 0.120 — when pitches were thrown at just two different speeds: slow (75 m.p.h.) or fast (85 m.p.h.). It’s the randomness, not an over-powering fastball, that fools hitters. Gray’s conclusion: "It is clear that successful batting is nearly impossible in the situation in which pitch speed is random and in which no auxiliary cues (e.g., pitcher’s arm motion or pitch count) are available to the batter."

So, back to you now in the batter’s box. You can at least take comfort in knowing that the pitcher you’re facing only has a few pitches: a fastball, a changeup, and maybe a slider or a curveball. You’ve practiced hitting each of those pitches thousands of times during your career, and can draw on your knowledge of those at-bats. There are also cues like the pitcher’s arm speed and the rotation of the ball that help you make an educated guess about what pitch is coming. You may need to get used to a pitcher’s speed, but you have a decent idea of where the ball is going — at least enough of a good idea to succeed at your job 30 percent of the time.

Now the question is: Are you going to perform in this clutch situation, with the game and the championship on the line, or will you choke? Research dating back to a 1984 study by Florida State’s Roy Baumeister (an APS Fellow) and including work by Michigan State’s Sian Beilock suggests that if you put a player in a pressure situation, he develops a greater than normal self-focus — what we colloquially call trying too hard. When you learn a process like a baseball swing, it is important to practice it step-by-step, and novice hitters actually think through their actions of shifting their weight, rotating their hips, and so forth. But experts do this naturally. Indeed, Gray used his hitting simulation to show that when expert hitters were asked to focus on a particular part of their swing, it adversely affected their performance.

"If we force you to go back and think about each stage of what you’re doing, you actually start interfering with this procedural knowledge, this motor memory, and you start messing it up," Gray says. "It’s like tinkering with a machine that’s running really efficiently. You start trying to control everything yourself and it messes it up and it hurts your performance."

It’s hard to imagine a more pressure-filled situation than the World Series, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think the hitter might overthink his swing. But what if he’s a clutch hitter? What if he’s been on a hot streak the last few weeks? The scientific consensus is that there is no such thing as a streaky hitter; though try telling that to anyone who’s been on the losing end of one of David Ortiz’s 15 walk-off hits with the Red Sox or Derek Jeter’s 14 consecutive World Series games with a hit. Still, the statistical analysis seems to show that streaks and clutch hitting could just be a result of simple probability.

Physicist Ed Purcell of Harvard did a statistical analysis and concluded that all streaks and slumps except for Joe DiMaggio’s remarkable 56-game hit streak fall within what could be expected by chance. Think of it this way: If you flip a fair coin a couple million times, it’s not hard to imagine that there might be times when it comes up heads 20 times in a row.

There is additional support for this view. Dick Cramer, baseball statistician and founder of STATS, Inc., hy-pothesized that if baseball did have clutch players, they would be consistent from year to year — much like the league’s best home- run hitters are consistent across years. What he found in fact is that a player might be one of baseball’s best clutch hitters one year, then plummet to the bottom the very next year.

Not everyone is ready to discount clutch hitting. Gray, for example, thinks clutch hitters might know how to relax and not try too hard in situations where there is a lot on the line. So maybe it’s not so much being a clutch hitter as it is being a nonchoker. A study of bowlers lends support to this idea. Professional bowlers, the study showed, are much more likely to bowl a strike after a series of strikes than they are to bowl a strike after a series of nonstrikes. That was true for weekend sports, like horseshoes, as well.

It could be that too much of baseball is decided by factors other than the hitter — the pitcher and the fielders certainly have some influence — to be able to accurately determine whether hitters are clutch or streaky. What happens when a "streaky" hitter comes up against a pitcher who’s also on the top of his game? Or what if the hitter makes good contact during two of his at-bats but is robbed by spectacular fielding plays both times?

"Everything ultimately comes down to the hitter succeeded or he didn’t," Stadler says. "But there’s a lot more behind that number in the box score that the box score just doesn’t capture."

So, let’s say you’re back at the plate, and you’ve fallen behind in the count 2-2. The next pitch comes and, like you predicted, it’s another curve ball. You’re ready. You give a good swing. The ball sails deep into the outfield. The centerfielder takes off to his right immediately, tracking the ball with ease. He’s not actually com-puting any complicated formula in his neurons while sprinting, but he seems completely sure about where the ball is going to land. Then, whack! He runs straight into the outfield wall, and the ball flies over his head for a game-winning home run.

Like hitting, fielding also seems like it should be a mental and physical impossibility — which makes it fas-cinating to psychology researchers. If you put a player in the outfield and make him stay put, he is actually quite bad at predicting where a ball is going to land, yet he will run effortlessly to that spot when allowed to do so. How?

One of the first theories developed to explain fly-ball catching was developed by physicist Seville Chapman, who hypothesized that fielders used the acceleration of the ball to help them determine where the ball will land. To simplify the problem for experimental purposes, balls were only hit directly at the fielders, who then moved either forward or backward in order to keep the ball moving at a constant speed through their field of vision — so, they started with their eyes on home plate and then moved in a way that kept their eyes moving straight up at a constant speed until they made the catch. If they moved too far forward, the ball would move more quickly through their field of vision and go over their head. If they moved too far backwards, the ball would appear to die in front of them.

This theory seemed too simple to Mike McBeath, a psychologist at Arizona State. For one thing, Chapman’s model predicted that fielders would use the same process for balls hit to their left or right, simply making a sideways calculation along with the basic speed calculation. But that would mean balls hit to the side should be harder to catch, and McBeath (and every sandlot outfielder) knows that’s simply not the case. Any outfielder will tell you that a ball hit directly at him is the most difficult to catch, so McBeath reasoned instead that, when a ball is hit directly at a fielder, the fielder lacks some crucial bit of information for making the catch. He came up with a method that was similar to Chapman’s but included an extra piece: He hypothesized that fielders kept the ball moving through their field of vision in a straight but diagonal line. So if the outfielder is looking at home plate when the ball is hit, he then keeps his eyes on the ball and runs so his head moves along a constant angle until the ball is directly above him, which is when he snags it. To test this, McBeath had fielders put video cameras on their shoulders, and the cameras moved in this manner.

Yet ask any Major Leaguers about this, and you’ll get blank stares. McBeath did talk to pro outfielders, and responses ranged from "Beats me" to "You’re full of it." That’s because there’s no conscious processing in-volved; it’s all taking place at the level of instinct, even though the geometry is sophisticated.

It turns out that outfielders aren’t the only ones who operate according to McBeath’s strategy. Dogs use it to catch Frisbees, bats and insects use it to catch prey, infielders use the model — only upside-down — to field ground balls, and, now, robots use it, too. Because the algorithm for catching fly balls is actually so simple, McBeath has been able to work with robotics experts to program robots to catch fly balls. (Or at least to get to the right spot; catching is a different problem for a robot with no hands.)

"It’s neat," says McBeath, an expert on perception. "It’s not always true that the way humans and animals do things is the best way. The geometry of a moving fielder from the perspective of the fielder seems like it would be a nightmare of a formula. But what we’ve shown is that we can reduce it down to this really simple geometric solution."

Chapman’s model is still used to describe the special case of catching balls hit directly at the fielder. Both fly-ball catching theories require that the fielders make adjustments on the go, which explains why we’re so bad at predicting where a ball will go if we stand in one place.

It also explains why our World Series outfielder ran straight into the wall when tracking the game-winning home run. Using McBeath’s method, players tracking a fly ball only know that they are capable of getting to the spot where the ball will land. This intuitive geometry offers no insight into whether that ball is going, going … gone.

Are the good players born or made?

It’s tempting to assume that there is some innate ability involved in becoming an elite ball player. Baseball playing does seem to run in families — think Ripken or Bell or Bonds. Plus, studies have shown that baseball players are a select group of athletes with amazing skills such as being able to track objects moving at ex-tremely high speeds of angular velocity.

Back in 1921, psychologists at Columbia convinced Babe Ruth to take a series of tests and found that he re-acted faster to sound and visual signals than the average human being. His hand-eye coordination was better than most of the population, and he could perceive information significantly better than the average person.

"The secret of Babe Ruth’s ability to hit is clearly revealed in these tests," wrote Hugh Fullerton, the author of the Popular Science Monthly article that described the tests. "His eye, his ear, his brain, his nerves all func-tion more rapidly than do those of the average person."

Similar tests were recently done on St. Louis slugger Albert Pujols and, not surprisingly, he also ranked near the top of the human population. But psychologists haven’t been able to determine a causal link between this superior physiological functioning and succeeding at baseball. These characteristics might make people better at baseball, but it could be that baseball players with these abilities are better because they practice hitting base-balls all the time.

Mike Stadler, University of Missouri, subscribes to a set-point theory, meaning that players are born with a certain range of talent, but they get to the top of their range through hard work and practice. For most of us, no matter how hard we practice, we won’t make the Major Leagues. Others have the talent to make it, but need to develop their skills to become superstars.

Certainly speed, reflexes and hand-eye coordination are important, but there are other factors as well. All fielders seem to follow Mike McBeath’s theory to help them catch fly balls. But McBeath, Arizona State Uni-versity, found that some are naturally more aggressive, trying to stay ahead of the curve, so to speak, and these fielders tend to be more successful getting to balls that are difficult to catch. Others lag behind, wait for the ball to move off the straight line and then must make adjustments, which slows them down.

Baseball teams use personality tests — the most famous of which are William Winslow’s Athletic Motiva-tion Inventory and the Athletic Success Inventory, which is based off AMI — to help them weed out the great players from the good players when it becomes draft time. Instead of looking at players’ heights and speeds, these tests distinguish between their levels of ambition, coachability and leadership. Baseball teams don’t like to give away their secret formulas, but University of Washington’s Ronald Smith and others have looked at the correlation between these tests and success in professional baseball. Smith’s studies found a few characteristics — achievement motivation, coping with adversity and peaking under pressure —correlated well to a long career in the Majors, but, in particular, hitters with higher self-confidence are more successful Major League players. This characteristic doesn’t seem to be as important in football or basketball, probably because the whole team is more responsible for a successful outcome in those sports. In baseball, it’s just the pitcher against the hitter.

"For hitters, failure is such a commonplace experience that you have to have people who maintain confi-dence through even a long string of failure," Stadler says.

Does a fastball rise and a curveball curve?

The terms "rising fastball" and "off-the-table" curveball have become part of the baseball lexicon. But most psychologists and physicists agree that neither really exists. Because of gravity and because a pitcher throws from a mound a few inches above where the batter stands, it is impossible for a fastball to rise — even for a sidearmed pitcher.

Still, many hitters swear they’ve seen — and even been struck out by — these tricky pitches. As a graduate student working on his PhD dissertation at Stanford, Mike McBeath, now at Arizona State, was intrigued by this contradiction and took a month off from his research to write a paper on the illusion of the rising fastball. What he came up with is a model that explains how a fastball could be perceived to have risen even if it had in fact dropped a few feet from the time it was released.

If a batter misjudges the speed of a pitch and is expecting the ball to be slower than it actually is, he expects that it will fall farther by the time it crosses the plate. So he swings where he thinks the ball should be crossing the plate, but that swing is actually a few inches under the ball. Because it is impossible for him to follow the ball from the time of release to the time of contact, the result is a ball that appears to have been so fast that it jumped up over the bat.

The opposite is true for the curveball. The batter assumes the ball is coming faster than it actually is, so by the time it gets to the plate, it’s lower than the batter expected, giving the impression that it fell a few inches.

"The curveball definitely does curve some," McBeath says. "There’s been high-speed photography verifying that. It’s just that it appears to curve in funnier ways than it’s verified to do."

Side-to-side curvature has very little impact on the batter because the bat is big enough to cover the entire plate. Misjudging the speed, however, can cause the batter to swing over or under the ball So, maybe players should really be talking about "rising" and "off-the table" swings rather than pitches. ###

Contact: Ian Herbert ian.herbert@gmail.com, Web: Association for Psychological Science

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Freedom Calendar 03/31/07 - 04/07/07

March 31, 1806, Birth of U.S. Senator John Hale (R-NH), early leader of Republicans’ anti-slavery movement in Congress.

April 1, 1846, Born into slavery on this day, Jeremiah Haralson (R-AL) served in state legislature before being elected to U.S. House in 1874.

April 2, 1855, Republican John Langston becomes nation’s first African-American elected official, in Brownhelm, OH; later served as U.S. Rep. (R-VA) and as diplomat in Republican administrations.

April 3, 1944, U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Texas Democratic Party’s “whites only” primary election system.

April 4, 1887, Republican Susanna Salter of Argonia, KS is first woman elected mayor in nation.

April 5, 1839, Birth of African-American U.S. Rep. Robert Smalls (R-SC), who escaped slavery by commandeering a Confederate gunboat.

April 6, 1869, Republican Ebenezer Bassett is first African-American presidential appointment, as President Ulysses Grant’s Minister to Haiti.

April 7, 1862, President Lincoln concludes treaty with Britain for suppression of slave trade.

“I believe the time will come when the sense of justice of this nation, when the enlightenment of this century, when the wisdom of our legislators, when the good feeling of the whole people will complete this grand work by lifting up out of degradation a race of men which has served long and faithfully by placing it, so far as the laws are concerned, upon an equal footing with all other classes. I have faith in this country.”

Rep. Joseph Rainey (R-SC), the first African-American in the U.S. House of Representatives (1870-79)

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Presidential Podcast 03/31/07

Presidential Podcast 03/31/07 . In Focus: Defense and In Focus: Budget Management , Subscribe to Our Odeo or podnova Podcast Channel and receive the weekly Presidential Radio Address in English and Spanish with select State Department Briefings. Featuring real audio and full text transcripts, More content Sources added often so stay tuned.

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Bush radio address 03/31/07 full audio, text transcript

bush radio address 03/31/07 full audio, text transcript. PODCAST and, President's Radio Address . In Focus: Defense and In Focus: Budget Management

Subscribe to Our Odeo or podnova Podcast Channel and receive the weekly Presidential Radio Address in English and Spanish with select State Department Briefings. Featuring real audio and full text transcripts, More content Sources added often so stay tuned.

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. In recent days, the House and Senate each passed emergency war spending bills that undercut our troops in the field. Each of the Democrats' bills would substitute the judgment of politicians in Washington for that of our generals on the ground. Each bill would impose restrictive conditions on our military commanders. Each bill would also set an arbitrary deadline for surrender and withdrawal in Iraq, and I believe that would have disastrous consequences for our safety here at home.

The Democrats loaded up their bills with billions of dollars in domestic spending completely unrelated to the war, including $3.5 million for visitors to tour the Capitol, $6.4 million for the House of Representatives' Salaries and Expenses Account, and $74 million for secure peanut storage. I like peanuts as much as the next guy, but I believe the security of our troops should come before the security of our peanut crop. For all these reasons, that is why I made it clear to the Democrats in Congress, I will veto the bill.

Democrats in the House and the Senate also recently passed their annual budget resolutions. Their budgets would raise your taxes and raise government spending in Washington. And their budgets fail to address the most serious challenge to our Nation's fiscal health: the unsustainable growth in entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare.
Overall, the Democrats would raise taxes by a total of nearly $400 billion over the next five years. To put this in perspective, this would be the largest tax increase in our Nation's history, even larger than the tax increase the Democrats passed the last time they controlled Congress.

Let me explain what it will mean for your annual tax bill if the Democrats get their way. If you have children, the Democrats would raise your taxes by $500 for each child. If you're a family of four making $60,000 a year, the Democrats would raise your taxes by more than $1,800. If you're a single mother with two children working to make ends meet, the Democrats would raise your taxes by more than $1,000. If you are a small business owner working to meet a payroll, the Democrats would raise your taxes by almost $4,000. And more than five million low-income Americans who currently pay no income taxes because of our tax relief would once again have to pay. Whether you have a family, work for a living, own a business, or are simply struggling to get by on a low income, the Democrats want to raise your taxes.

The Democrats plan to spend all those extra tax dollars. In the Senate, Democrats have passed a budget that would spend $145 billion more than I have requested over the next five years. In the House, Democrats have passed a budget that would spend even more -- $213 billion above my request.

With their budgets, the Democrats have revealed their true intentions. During the last campaign, Democrats said that under their "pay as you go" approach, they would pay for their new spending. Now we see what they meant by that. The Democrats have chosen a "tax as you go" approach that requires you to cut your spending to pay higher taxes. And Democrats will use these higher taxes to spend more of your money on their special interest projects.

Our Nation cannot afford such reckless taxing and spending. Under my Administration, we have kept your taxes low and restrained government spending in Washington. Now, America's economy is leading the world, with an economic expansion that has produced 42 months of uninterrupted job growth and created more than 7.5 million new jobs. The fastest way to stop this growth in its tracks would be to allow the Democrats in Congress to impose higher taxes on you so they can spend more of your money.

I believe there's a better way to balance our Federal budget. Last month, I sent Congress a plan that would eliminate the Federal deficit in five years, without raising your taxes. In the months ahead, I will work with Republicans and responsible Democrats in Congress to pass a disciplined budget and to stop the Democratic leadership from taking our Nation back to tax-and-spend policies of the past. By setting clear spending priorities and keeping taxes low, we can keep our economy growing, support our troops in the war on terror, and ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a more prosperous and hopeful America.

Thank you for listening.

END For Immediate Release, March 31, 2007

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Discurso Radial del Presidente a la Nación 03/31/07

forre el audio de la dirección de radio 03/31/07 por completo, transcripción del texto. (nota de los redactores: ninguna lengua española mp3 lanzó esta semana, apesadumbrada) PODCAST Discurso Radial del Presidente.

Suscribir a nuestro canal de Podcast de Odeo o del podnova y recibir la dirección de radio presidencial semanal en inglés y español con informes selectos del departamento del estado. Ofreciendo transcripciones audio y con texto completo verdaderas, más fuentes contentas agregaron a menudo así que la estancia templó.

Buenos Días. En los últimos días, la Cámara de Representantes y el Senado ambos aprobaron proyectos de ley para gastos de guerra de emergencia que perjudican a nuestras tropas en el terreno. Cada uno de los proyectos de ley de los Demócratas sustituiría el juicio de políticos en Washington por el de nuestros generales en el terreno. Cada proyecto impondría condiciones restrictivas sobre nuestros comandantes militares. Cada proyecto también fijaría un plazo arbitrario para rendirnos y retirarnos de Irak - y yo creo que eso tendría consecuencias desastrosas sobre nuestra seguridad aquí en casa.

Los Demócratas inflaron sus proyectos de ley con miles de millones de dólares en gastos domésticos completamente no relacionados a la guerra, incluyendo 3.5 millones de dólares para que turistas visiten el Capitolio, 6.4 millones de dólares para la Cuenta de Salarios y Gastos de la Cámara de Representantes y 74 millones de dólares para asegurar el almacenaje de cacahuates. A mi me gustan los cacahuates tanto como a cualquier persona, pero considero que la seguridad de nuestras tropas debería venir antes de la seguridad de nuestra cosecha de cacahuates. Por todas estas razones es por eso que dejé en claro a los Demócratas en el Congreso, que vetaré el proyecto de ley.

Los Demócratas en la Cámara y el Senado también aprobaron recientemente sus resoluciones presupuestarias anuales. Sus presupuestos les aumentarían a ustedes sus impuestos y aumentaría los gastos del gobierno en Washington. Y sus presupuestos no enfocan el desafío más serio a la salud fiscal de nuestra Nación: el crecimientos insostenible en programas por derecho reglamentario, tales como el Seguro Social y Medicare.

En su conjunto, los Demócratas aumentarían los impuestos en un total de casi 400 mil millones de dólares en los próximos cinco años. Para poner esto en perspectiva, sería el aumento tributario más grande en la historia de nuestra Nación - aún más grande que el aumento tributario que los Demócratas aprobaron la última vez que controlaron el Congreso.

Permítanme explicar lo que significará para su factura anual de impuestos si los Demócratas se salen con la suya. Si usted tiene hijos los Demócratas aumentarían sus impuestos 500 dólares por cada hijo. Si usted es una familia de cuatro personas ganando 60,000 dólares al año, los Demócratas aumentarían sus impuestos en más de 1,800 dólares. Si usted es una madre soltera con dos niños que trabaja para llegar a final de mes, los Demócratas aumentarían sus impuestos en más de 1,000 dólares. Si usted es dueño de un pequeño negocio trabajando para poder pagar a sus empleados, los Demócratas aumentarían sus impuestos en casi 4,000 dólares. Y más de cinco millones de estadounidenses de bajos ingresos que actualmente no pagan impuestos sobre el ingreso debido a nuestro alivio tributario tendrían que pagar nuevamente. Ya sea que tenga familia, que trabaje para ganarse la vida, que sea dueño de un negocio o simplemente esté luchando para vivir con un ingreso bajo, los Demócratas quieren aumentar sus impuestos.

Los Demócratas planean gastar todos esos dólares extras provenientes de los impuestos. En el Senado, los Demócratas han aprobado un presupuesto que gastaría 145 mil millones de dólares más de lo que yo he solicitado para los próximos cinco años. En la Cámara de Representantes, los Demócratas han aprobado un presupuesto que gastaría aún más - 213 mil millones de dólares por encimo de lo que yo he pedido.

Con sus presupuestos los Demócratas han revelado sus verdaderas intenciones. Durante la última campaña los Demócratas dijeron que bajo su enfoque "pague a medida que gasta", ellos pagarían sus nuevos gastos. Ahora vemos lo que quisieron decir con eso. Los Demócratas han escogido un enfoque "imponer impuestos a medida que gasta" que requiere que se rebajen los gastos para pagar impuestos más elevados. Y los Demócratas usarán estos impuestos más elevados para gastar más del dinero de ustedes en sus proyectos de intereses especiales.

Nuestra Nación no puede darse el lujo de tributación y gastos tan imprudentes. Bajo mi Administración, hemos mantenido sus impuestos bajos y hemos limitado los gastos del gobierno en Washington. Ahora, la economía de Estados Unidos es la primera en el mundo - con una expansión económica que ha producido 42 meses de crecimiento de empleos sin interrupción y ha creado más de 7.5 millones de nuevos empleos. La manera más rápida de frenar a raya este crecimiento sería de permitir que los Demócratas en el Congreso le impongan a usted impuestos más elevados para que ellos puedan gastar más del dinero de usted.

Yo considero que hay una mejor manera de equilibrar nuestro presupuesto federal. El mes pasado envié al Congreso un plan que eliminaría el déficit federal en cinco años, sin aumentar sus impuestos. En los meses venideros yo trabajaré con Republicanos, y Demócratas responsables en el Congreso para aprobar un presupuesto disciplinado - y evitar que los líderes Demócratas regresen nuestra Nación a las políticas tributar-y-gastar del pasado. Fijando prioridades claras para los gastos y manteniendo los impuestos bajos, podemos mantener creciendo a nuestra economía, apoyar a nuestras tropas en la guerra contra el terror y asegurar que nuestros hijos y nietos hereden un Estados Unidos más próspero y optimista.

Gracias por escuchar.

Para su publicación inmediata, Oficina del Secretario de Prensa, 31 de marzo de 2007

Etiquetas De Technorati: Discurso Radial del Presidente a la Nación, y Presidente Bush, o Congreso y comandantes militares, o Cámara de representantes, o Presupuesto federal y cuenta del gasto de la guerra de la emergencia o extensión económica