EU CONSTITUTION ~
EU leaders abandon constitution deadline

17.06.2005 - 01:04 CET | By Honor Mahony EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU leaders meeting in Brussels have agreed a "period of reflection" on the constitution amid fears that a knock-on effect would mean the document would be rejected in countries still planning to have referendums.

Governments are to come together in one year, under the Austrian EU presidency, to take stock of the situation.

However, they stressed that the constitution itself will not be renegotiated and that ratification will continue.

Announcing the decision, Luxembourg prime minister and current head of the EU Jean-Claude Juncker said "we all believe that the constitution is the right answer to the many questions of the European people.

"We believe ratification must continue".

But it will be up to national governments when to ratify and how - with the process not likely to be ended before mid-2007, according to Mr Juncker.

The current deadline of end of October 2006 "is no longer tenable" said the prime minister who stressed that countries that want to ratify the document via their parliaments may do so while member states planning to have referendums "will decide autonomously when those referendums are to be organised".

Luxembourg under the spotlight
As the next country to have a referendum, on 10 July, Luxembourg comes under the immediate spotlight.

But it is not up to Mr Juncker to postpone the planned referendum - with recent polls showing the No side gaining ground - as this has to be decided by the country's parliament.

Luxembourg MPs must "decide if further debate is required" said Mr Juncker adding that he cannot "prejudge" their decision.

Other countries have already indicated that they will postpone their decision - effectively putting ratification on ice.

Denmark's Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that his country's referendum, planned for 27 September, will be postponed until there is more "clarity" but did not set a new date.

Meanwhile, an Irish government spokesperson indicated that Dublin is also considering postponing its referendum, which had been set to take place in the autumn.

The UK had put it referendum plans on ice already while the Czech Republic and Portugal are planning to.

Only Poland has committed itself to pressing ahead with a referendum on 9 October.

So far, ten countries have ratified the constitution, two have rejected it - France and the Netherlands - and 13 still have yet to ratify it.

Referring to the French and Dutch No, Mr Juncker said "I really believe neither the French nor the Dutch rejected the constitutional treaty", adding that "unfortunately, the electorate did not realise that the constitutional treaty was specifically aimed at meeting their concerns and that's why we need to have a period of explanation to explain this to our citizens".

Europe will not stop
Legally, the constitution can only come into force if all 25 member states have ratified it - meaning that Paris and The Hague would have to put the document to their people once more.

While the rejections in both countries are still too fresh, there could be a possibility to put it to another

Richard Williams on the fall of British jazz
Can you dig it?
It was music's loss but potato-picking's gain. Richard Williams on the fall of British jazz

Richard Williams
Monday January 24, 2005

Guardian [UK]

When Howard Riley arrived from Bangor University to take part in a national students' jazz band contest in Croydon in the spring of 1963, the 20-year-old pianist couldn't believe what he saw. "There were hundreds of us," he says now, the shock of discovery still apparent in his voice. Like most people who played jazz in Britain in the 20th century, Riley had developed the conviction that his chosen musical path was the lonely obsession of a tiny minority. But here, one afternoon at the brand-new Fairfield Halls, was the evidence that others shared his belief in the music's special value.
Riley tells that story in Jazz Britannia, a series of three one-hour programmes starting this week on BBC4. Not long after his trio had finished third in the competition, he was providing background music at holiday camps and on ocean liners. By the end of the decade he had landed a contract with a major record label, a significant step on the way to becoming a respected improviser and teacher.

He now performs his highly original music every year at festivals in Italy, Germany and France. That respect, however, has never been paralleled by an increase in his audience at home, and in conversation last week he mentioned that there is currently no London engagement in his diary. "When I was 15," he said, "I was playing three gigs a week. It's never been quite as good since."

The story of British jazz is that of a series of promising dawns quickly extinguished by lengthy cold showers. If American jazz musicians had to battle to be heard against the forces of racism and corruption, their British equivalents faced the disdain of the establishment and the indifference of a public largely driven by an appetite for novelty.

It was the arrival of the Beatles that turned even the more inquisitive ears away from the harmonic and rhythmic complexity of modern jazz. "When I arrived at Bangor there were lots of people who wanted to play what I wanted to play," he says. "By the time I left, a lot of guitars had appeared and there weren't very many people interested in jazz."

Jazz Britannia is the tale of how generation after generation of musicians refused to be intimidated by this unequal struggle. It shows, too, how many of them succeeded in placing indelible marks on an idiom that prizes imagination above commercial acumen. Or did, until the current generation of corporate jazzers - Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse et al - came along.

Not that the success of this flimsy, derivative jazz-lite is anything new. At around the time the teenaged Howard Riley was getting to grips with the demanding music of Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, the wider world sent Acker Bilk, with his bowler hat and striped waistcoat and neutered New Orleans clarinet, to the top of the charts with Stranger on the Shore, the theme tune to a BBC TV children's serial. The trumpeter Kenny Ball did something similar with a Russian folk song retitled Midnight in Moscow.

While colouring in the background, Jazz Britannia does the music a favour by concentrating on those players whose work, whatever degree of public acclaim it commanded at the time, has managed to cling on to its value. And in trying to simplify a complicated story, it concentrates heavily on a few figures of particular significance.

We hear a lot about Tubby Hayes, the teenage tenor saxophonist from west London whose virtuosity also extended to the flute and the vibraharp, and who achieved the accolade of being asked to deputise for an ailing saxophonist in the Duke Ellington band. We hear about the alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, a Charlie Parker disciple who arrived from Jamaica and slowly worked his way towards a form of ensemble improvisation that matched anything coming from New York in the turbulent early 1960s. As a contrast to those two prematurely curtailed lives, we hear about the pianist Stan Tracey, a symbol of the perseverance required to spend a lifetime in British jazz. Then there's Courtney Pine, a representative of the multicultural attitudes of a more recent generation.

The series begins in the big-band era. In the first episode, Johnny Dankworth talks of joining "Geraldo's Navy", the dance orchestra that serenaded passengers aboard the transatlantic liners. Shore leave allowed Dankworth and the other young musicians to sit at the feet of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk in the clubs of 52nd Street before returning home to found Club Eleven, the Soho headquarters of British bebop and the predecessor of Ronnie Scott's.

The second part of the series traces the increasing diversity of the music as the 1960s went on. The bassist Jack Bruce and the drummer Jon Hiseman describe the transition from modern jazz to R&B to jazz-rock. We hear from the drummer Louis Moholo, who arrived from South Africa in 1965 with Chris McGregor's Blue Notes, and the saxophonists Evan Parker and Trevor Watts, who reflect on the seminal free-improvisation sessions at the Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden.

John Surman, Mike Westbrook and Keith Tippett then talk about the early 1970s, a time when, in the wake of the chart success of Blood, Sweat and Tears and the appearance of Soft Machine at the Proms, it really seemed as though jazz and its offshoots could achieve a genuine popularity on their own terms. "It was artist-driven," says Tippett, who once appeared on Top of the Pops with King Crimson and went on to fill the Lyceum for a gig by a 50-piece band including free-jazzers, classical string players, members of Patto and Blossom Toes, and his wife, Julie Driscoll, each of whom received #100. "It wasn't business-driven."

Once again, however, bright hopes were to be doused, at least for the majority. "I became unfashionable," Tippett says of the 1980s. "It was very difficult, financially. I had to go potato picking." Bobby Wellins, a flinty Glaswegian whose eloquent tenor saxophone had helped to make such a success of Stan Tracey's suite inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in 1965, speaks affectingly of his descent into disillusionment and drug-dealing.

Peter King, another fine Parker interpreter, remembers going to see a record company and being told that he was too old and ugly. "The work dried up completely and I couldn't find my enthusiasm for playing any more," he says.

Fortunately the climate was to change again and his enthusiasm returned, along with that of Tippett, Wellins and Tracey, who had considered retraining as a postman. In the third episode, British jazz returns from the brink of extinction, and a new generation arrives, spearheaded by two London-based big bands, the Jazz Warriors and Loose Tubes. We see kids dancing to classic Blue Note discs by Art Blakey and Horace Silver, and hear from Gilles Peterson, the indefatigable London DJ, whose love of rare vinyl has helped spark a reappraisal of the British jazz of the 1960s, leading to the reappearance of many long-unavailable LPs, including those of Howard Riley.

What this means in the long term is hard to guess, not least because British jazz has never dared to peer into the distance. "In some ways it's better than ever," Riley told me, reflecting the experience of musicians of his generation. "In terms of getting records out, anyway. The gig scene is far, far worse. It used to be that you'd play 50 gigs for every record you had out. Now it's more like 50 records per gig. There's a loyal audience, but it's not very big and it isn't expanding."

While giving the appearance of telling the whole story, Jazz Britannia's decision to begin its narrative at the end of the second world war unjustly ignores the work of those who really pioneered jazz in Britain, men such as the saxophonist Buddy Featherstonehaugh and the bandleaders Harry Gold and Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, who could be widely heard in the interwar years. It fails to mention the appearances in London in the 1930s of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins, and it neglects the achievements of the first British musicians who made the move to the US and established their reputations in the heartland of jazz, notably the pianists George Shearing, Victor Feldman, Eddie Thompson and Dill Jones, all of whom were accepted as equals by their American colleagues.

The proliferation of less well-known but no less talented figures is what gives jazz its special flavour, but there is no room here for mention of Denis Rose, a mysterious self-taught pianist from London who deserted from the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943 and was not arrested until 1950, by which time he had become one of the presiding spirits of British bebop. Or, by way of contrast, Pat Smythe, another pianist, an RAF pilot who qualified as a lawyer in his native Edinburgh before moving to London and adding wonderful layers of texture and harmony to Harriott's great quintet. Other world-class originals, such as the saxophonists Bruce Turner and Tony Coe, the trumpeter Tommy McQuater, the clarinetist Sandy Brown, the pianist Mike Taylor and the drummer Phil Seaman, go unmentioned.

In its repeated insistence that British jazz avoided being wiped from the face of the earth only through the discovery of its own distinctive sound, which it dates to the release of Tracey's Dylan Thomas suite, this valuable series puts an unnecessary strain on its credibility.

Apart from occasional pastoral or folk-based works by the likes of John Surman, Danny Thompson's Whatever and Ken Hyder's Talisker, the very best of British jazz seldom shows any sign of overt "Britishness", or of any other distinctive sound or attitude. What has happened instead is that British jazz musicians of all kinds have gradually grown in self-confidence, losing the inferiority complex that had its roots in a deference towards the American masters, taking their place in a music characterised by its infinite inclusiveness and its embrace of musicians of true originality. And of those, Jazz Britannia has plenty to show.

? The first part of Jazz Britannia will be broadcast on BBC4 on Friday evening. A weekend of performances at the Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7536), on February 12 and 13 features Michael Garrick, Soweto Kinch, Bobby Wellins, Courtney Pine, Norma Winstone, Stan Tracey, Louis Moholo, Andy Sheppard, John Surman and others.

Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 20

Coleridge - from : "Dejection" 1802
There was a time when, though my path was rough,

This joy within me dallied with distress,

And all misfortunes were but as the stuff

Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness :

For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth :
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ;

But oh ! each visitation

Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

My shaping spirit of Imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel,

But to be still and patient, all I can ;

And haply by abstruse research to steal

From my own nature all the natural man--
This was my sole resource, my only plan :

Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

ONE SWEET LETTER FROM...
Hands-off approach

Western Mail (Cardiff) 22.01.2005

SIR - I was interested in your report of Professor Kevin Morgan's recent IWA paper on the closure of any real debate and the exclusion of the wider civil society in the new "post devolution" Wales of Cardiff Bay.

As Jim Sillers said of Scotland, "Devolution has produced an exclusive, introverted, introspective and parochial backwater.

However, it is interesting to contrast the Assembly's control freak treatment of the WDA, WTB, Elwa, etc, with their determinedly hands-off approach to say, Health?

From memory, the now departed Ms Hutt "reorganised" Health into 53 different and discrete bodies without any macro, strategic or effective working linkages between them. She then followed up this master stroke by saying, "Health is not my responsibility, I facilitate. Health delivery is now up to the LHBs." An interesting and convenient definition of ministerial accountably?

Could it be that in Wales, executive economic power carries potential advantage - political, party, and personal, whereas its social equivalent is best avoided as potentially career destroying. Or am I perhaps just being cynical? I am sure that the new Welsh political class works to the highest motives.

RICHARD HARRIS
Anglesey Court, Caerleon, Newport

Inauguration 2005 - BUSH WATCH
The Eve of Destruction
George Bush is getting four more years to remake the world in his image. (Too bad for us, he already started.)

by Rick Perlstein - VILLAGE VOICE
January 18th, 2005 2:37 PM

You might wonder--were you someone unfamiliar with or in denial about the ways of the Karl Rove Mafia--how George W. Bush could blunder into nominating someone as attorney general so obviously implicated in the most legally questionable and morally indefensible practices of his administration. You might wonder, too, how the administration seemed to be caught unawares by the bottomless pit of scandal in the past of its initial nominee for Homeland Security secretary.

Or you could realize that such nominations were not blunders, but intentional: that they were made not in spite of Alberto Gonzales's and Bernard Kerik's unsuitability for high office but precisely because of them. Keeping embarrassing facts on file about confederates is the best way to grip them into loyalty like a vise.

It would seem an incredible notion to contemplate, until you examine who it was Bush chose to replace Kerik once his nomination fell through: Michael Chertoff, who as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's criminal division engineered the plan to preventively detain immigrants of Arab descent after 9-11. In 2003, the Justice Department's own inspector general warned that the program raises serious legal liability questions, and Justice Department officials apparently recommended that Chertoff hire a lawyer. Now he's been promoted. Sopranos fans will recognize the maneuver: Taking someone with skeletons in his closet close to your breast is just like Tony's embrace of the apparently upstanding suburban New Jersey sporting goods dealer with the secret gambling addiction, specifically to have someone to pick clean when the necessity arose.

Forcing a guy who knows he's dirty but knows his bosses are dirtier to sweat out a congressional hearing is a perfect way to test his loyalty. It's also a great way to test Congress's mettle--to probe just how atrophied the opposition party's willingness to oppose has become. What's more, once you've got them through the ordeal, you've stockpiled one more scapegoat to toss into the fire in case Congress ever gets hot on the trail of the higher-ups who issued the orders. And it establishes a record for a future defense: Once Congress has confirmed a Gonzales or a Chertoff, how can it then turn around and call the things done by a Gonzales or a Chertoff unlawful?

Then there's the implicit dare, which frames the issue in the administration's favor whether they "win" or "lose" the proximate fight: Go ahead, Democrats, make our day. Vote against them. Then we can show you up as the obstructionists to America's national security you are.

The administration may even have made plans for when the bottom drops out--for when the inevitable indictable offenses see the light of day. That's where Alberto Gonzales, White House ?ber-loyalist, comes in. Formally, any investigation of a federal criminal offense is conducted by the Justice Department, and no indictment can go forward without Gonzales's say-so. Under the old set of rules, we might have been able to count on political pressure to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, as occurred in the investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media. But that's exactly the set of rules this gang has set its sights on upending.

Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, welcome to the Next Four Years: to George Walker Bush's revolutionary second term, where nothing is done by accident, and no sin can be too brazen.

"For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win . . . "

That phrase is a gun, and it's smoking. Written by Karl Rove deputy Peter Wehner in a leaked memo, it establishes as intention what administration officials have heretofore been most eager to cover up. What the Republican Party failed to do 60 years ago is to stop any federal program of guaranteed old-age insurance from existing. Social Security established a principle unacceptable to many Republicans: that government economic programs help people, and can become wildly popular. Now, however, Wehner writes, "We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government. . . . We can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of our country."

The smoking gun isn't pointed just at your grandmother.

When Americans have at a minimum almost a third of their retirement contribution in corporate investments--we now send 6.2 percent of our income to Social Security, and Bush's plan would have us putting four of those 6.2 points into the stock market--we will all be part of, in the apparently benign coinage of Republican propagandist Grover Norquist, the "investor class."

Blogger Nick Stoller describes the consequences thus:

"When someone like Eliot Spitzer uncovers a major corporate scandal, a Republican will be able to say, 'He's attacking your retirement fund.'

"When the employees of a company try to unionize, a Republican will be able to say, 'They are attacking your retirement fund.' " (He will also be able to say they are attacking their own retirement fund.)

"When a community refuses to let a Wal-Mart build in their neighborhood, a Republican will be able to say, 'They're attacking your retirement fund.' "

Environmental regulations will be framed as an attack on your retirement fund. Liability law, too. Corporate taxes, certainly. Maybe even, someday, child labor laws (that's the brazenness: Conservatives never shy from putting forth agendas that seemed unimaginable a year ago). People will presume it is in their interest for the companies in which they hold a temporary position to goose their stock no matter the long-term cost to the corporation, to our institutions, to society as a whole--no matter the long-term cost for all the other classes we belong to, as consumers, as workers, as citizens. All but a tiny group of big-ticket investors would benefit far more on a net basis, as they do now, from the maintenance of a strong welfare state. No matter: The propaganda may prove irresistible.

Breaking Social Security is central to passing Bush's "tax reforms," which will remove taxes on investment income and shift the tax burden to wage earners who can't afford to save any money--thereby creating newly outraged tax-hating constituencies bent on decimating government's legitimacy yet further. Absent unrelenting Democratic resistance, in fact, the next four years will establish the leverage to fulfill another of Grover Norquist's coinages: to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

That's just how the Bushies do things: They plan. Every action is calculated to set in motion a cascade of consequences, to change the world. Take "No Child Left Behind," the education "reform" so brilliantly named you can't be against it without betraying some perverse desire to, well, leave children behind. It is a stone hustle, meant to lay the groundwork to destroy the entire American public school system.

Look at it this way. You've heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the one that produces those anguished news reports every four years about all the countries American schoolchildren lag behind in basic skills. But according to the TIMSS, if Minnesota were a country, it would have the second-best science scores and the seventh best in math. By No Child Left Behind's statutorily required benchmarks of "Adequate Yearly Progress," however, only 42 percent of Minnesota fourth-graders were proficient in math. And NCLB's test targets increase every year. So by one estimate, in 2014, some 80 percent of the schools in Minnesota's world-class education system will be rated "failures."

The benchmarks are insane, you see. If one group within a school out of the 37 categories NCLB measures "fails," the entire school does. Which means, according to the president of the American Educational Research Association, 12th-graders should be proficient in math in exactly 166 years.

Which serves the administration's purpose admirably. Failure, glorious failure: In Chicago, the city must now offer 200,000 students the chance to move out of "failed" schools--but there are only 500 spaces in which to place them elsewhere. So now the public school system must be destroyed.

It's only politics. It was the first George Bush who tried to initiate the privatization of American education but failed; in 2000, Michigan and California pro-voucher ballot initiatives lost by at least two to one. But that was back when 43 percent of American parents gave their children's schools a grade of "A" or "B." By 2004, that number was cut in half. "The tests mandated by NCLB had ripped back the curtain and exposed a major national problem," explains Phyllis Schlafly--even, apparently, in noble Minnesota.

The money has already begun changing hands. "Classroom methods long believed to work are tossed out in favor of those that a few selected groups have tested and approved," The Nation recently reported in a story buried--it's hard to get people to pay attention--on the magazine's website. Bush's multibillion-dollar reading grants, the weekly found, are doled out by "a panel that includes many people with ties to various commercial curriculums."

Public education "is an ossified government monopoly," explains conservative intellectual Chester Finn. So it is time to drown it in the bathtub.

The fantasy of total control has emerged as central to the Bush administration imagination. It comes out in the unguarded utterances: the aide who blurts to a New York Times reporter that he was just one more sad-sack member of the "reality-based community." ("That's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.") The president demanding during the Iraq debate to congressional leaders, "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." A White House aide, to a congregation of Pentecostal ministers, the "current government is engaged in cultural, economic, and social struggle on every level."

It shows up in the tautological narcissism of Bush's National Security Strategy document, which actually uses the phrase "the best defense is a good offense," and artfully constructs a vision in which whatever the United States does to preserve its interest is always already "peaceful," even when it requires war, is always already "democratic," even when it requires installing governments by fiat, is always already selfless, even as it establishes only two categories of states, those who cooperate and those who do not, in a situation of crisis defined unilaterally and whose time horizon stretches to infinity.

"In the new world we have entered," it avers, "the only path to peace and security is the path of action." The manifesto takes on ominous overtones when read alongside the famous post-9-11 draft Pentagon report that establishes a royalist conception of "sweeping" executive power as the only way to keep us safe: because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action to characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

"Unity in Purpose, Energy in Action"--more than one commentator has noted its resemblance to slogans of fascist movements throughout history.

And of course out of fantasies of perfect control have always sprung the world's greatest human catastrophes. There will always be things even the most energetic executive cannot come even close to controlling. Conservatives used to warn us about the dangers of such utopianism--of the unintended consequences of hubristic attempts to "socially engineer" brave new worlds conjured in the heads of liberal intellectuals. Now Americans are once again learning that lesson, but the perpetrators are . . . conservatives.

And their utopia, heaven help them, is Iraq.

What comes next there? For the subject who fantasizes total control, chaos is only an injunction to more radically confident maneuvers that enlarge the struggle for control. As always, the parallel is Vietnam. "The administration's reluctance to recognize the Iraqi resistance as largely homegrown pushes it to exaggerate the role of foreign terrorists, to blame anti-American feeling on meddlers from abroad," which spells expansion of the conflict into Syria and Iran, according to Thomas Powers in The New York Review of Books. A "radical map change," he convincingly speculates, this American encirclement of the world's productive oil resources could unify all our present allies against us in a conflict that "might last fifty years."

The next four years? Anticipate another possible terrorist attack, certainly. Tommy Thompson, leaving his post as secretary of Health and Human Services, used his newfound freedom to wonder aloud why his bosses hadn't done anything to prevent an attack on "our food supply, because it's so easy to do." The EPA said an attack on any of 123 chemical plants would threaten over a million people--then the Department of Homeland Security took over the job, changed the measurements, and found that only two would do that. The chemical industry gives a hell of a lot of money to the Republicans.

Although the wholesale collapse of the American economy would be worse. Nikita Khrushchev used to call the divided city of Berlin, because of its military strategic value, "the testicles of the West," which he only need squeeze to make America scream. Now the testicles of the U.S. are the billions of dollars of American currency held in reserve by countries that do not necessarily wish us well, like China--in effect, it's the money we borrow to keep our economy afloat. China is one of those countries that would likely object to our encirclement of the world's petroleum supplies. Soon enough, China's oil demand will approach our own. If Beijing chooses to call in its loans to us and make the dollar a worthless currency, sensible folks might be looking for someone to impeach. Would Bush's kept Congress be able to do the job?

At that pass, reflects John Dean, Richard Nixon's legal counsel, who served time for Watergate, "only the attorney general can select a special counsel to prosecute." Which takes us back to the beginning, and last week's hearings. "As attorney general," Dean says, "Gonzales can resist any and all efforts to prosecute high officials of the Bush administration, absent photographs of Dick Cheney choking Condi Rice and dangling her off the Memorial Bridge for messing with his policies."

Welcome to the eve of destruction

BUSH - IN HIS OWEN WORDS !
Now Playing: Washington Post - Bush Press Conference 15.01.2005
The Post: Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught?

THE PRESIDENT: Because he's hiding.

The Post: Our allies have done all they can do to help catch him?

THE PRESIDENT: We're on the hunt.

The Post: Do you think others are on the hunt, too? Are you happy, content with what other countries are doing in that hunt?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
The Post: Anyone you're not happy with? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Look, bin Laden is elusive, and he is in a remote part of the world