SI's Player Value Rankings

SI's David Sabino ranked the position players in the major leagues from 1 (the best) to 450 and the pitchers from 1 to 350, based on projections of their statistical production this season. The categories considered for position players were batting average, home runs, RBIs and stolen bases; for pitchers the categories were wins, saves, ERA and WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched). Sabino also took into account each player's career stats as well as his role on his team, his prospects for improving or declining and his injury history and physical condition. Using these criteria, SI determined each player's value ranking.

Player Value Rankings: Hitters
Player Value Rankings: Pitchers

PVRs: Pitchers | Hitters | OF | 1B/3B | 2B/SS | C/DH

USA Today's team-by-team look at all 30 major league clubs

Learning the rules of the road in China

Thinking Clearly About the Clarity of Scripture

Thinking Clearly About the Clarity of Scripture

In what ways can we expect the Bible to speak clearly to every generation? The author explains what the clarity of Scripture means and what it does not mean.

by RICHARD LINTS

The Discomfort of the Justified Life

Contrary to what we might expect, the more we grow in Christian character, the more sin we discover in ourselves. When the flesh fights back and wages a war against the Spirit, those who are justified experience an uncomfortable internal conflict.

by JERRY BRIDGES

Are We There Yet? An Exploration of Romans 8

What distinguishes the Christian from the rest of humanity? According to Romans 8, it is the indwelling of God’s Spirit in the believer. The author explores the work of the Holy Spirit.

by KELLY KAPIC

Romans 7 and the Normal Christian Life

by KIM RIDDLEBARGER

Called by the King: Election and Assurance in Romans 9-11

How does the gospel message offer assurance to the elect? The author defends the gospel as “power for salvation” and explains Romans 9-11 in light of the salvific nature of the gospel.

by PETER ANDERS

Am I Predestined? Luther and Calvin on the Dangers of Speculating about Election Apart from Christ

by SHANE ROSENTHAL

Govern Well or Be Governed? The Christian and the Civil Authorities in Romans 13

Can Christians afford to submit to their civil authorities? In what sense is civil government God's instrument for his sovereign reign over the world? Using Romans 13, the author helps us to understand and navigate our dual vocations as citizens of heaven and also citizens of earth.

by BRIAN J. LEE

Mercy Ministries: Two Perspectives

by RANDY NABORS and BILL SMITH

Here Comes the Judge

In a culture of entertainment that has turned courtrooms, trials, and lawyers into television entertainment, is it possible even to conceive of objective guilt pronounced by an objective judge on the basis of objective evidence of the transgression of objective laws?

by KOREY MAAS

Sin and Salvation

A Comparison Chart of Major World Religions

Romans Revolution
Why is Romans such an important book in the canon of Scripture? This book reveals more clearly than others the message of salvation. In his epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul gives us a systematic presentation of the gospel. According to the author, the Book of Romans continues to serve as a reliable “road map” for the church by “drawing together the most important strands of biblical doctrine.”

by MICHAEL HORTON

Vote Different

Political video smackdown

'Hillary 1984': Unauthorized Internet ad for Obama converts Apple Computer's '84 Super Bowl spot into a generational howl against Clinton's presidential bid

Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer

Sunday, March 18, 2007

It may be the most stunning and creative attack ad yet for a 2008 presidential candidate -- one experts say could represent a watershed moment in 21st century media and political advertising.

Yet the groundbreaking 74-second pitch for Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, which remixes the classic "1984" ad that introduced Apple computers to the world, is not on cable or network TV, but on the Internet.

(To see the video, go to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo)

And Obama's campaign says it had absolutely nothing to do with the video that attacks one of his principal Democratic rivals, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, the ad's creator is a mystery, at least for now.

The compelling "Hillary 1984" video recently introduced on YouTube represents "a new era, a new wave of politics ... because it's not about Obama," said Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank on politics and new media. "It's about the end of the broadcast era."

But some say the ad is just the latest attempt by outside activists to influence political campaigns -- or the newest way for campaigns to anonymously attack their opponents.

The video is a sophisticated new take on director Ridley Scott's controversial Apple ad that caused shock waves with its premiere during the 1984 Super Bowl, and shows the same blond young female athlete running with a sledgehammer toward a widescreen -- where an ominous Big Brother figure drones to a mass of zombielike followers.

But this time, the woman is wearing an iPod -- and has her candidate's slogan on her chest. And the Big Brother -- whose image she defiantly smashes with a wave of her sledgehammer -- is Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner.

The tagline for the attack: "On Jan. 14, the Democratic primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 won't be like 1984."

An updated Apple symbol -- transformed into an O -- is followed by the dramatically emerging logo: BarackObama.com.

Veteran San Francisco ad man Bob Gardner, whose work has included political campaigns for former President Gerald Ford, said the video is "very powerful" in its efforts to call for a generational change in politics.

"It puts Hillary spouting cliche nonsense to the drones -- while a fresh face breaks through," he says. "It's old versus new."

That theme -- reflecting a generational change in the relationship between media, politics, candidates and voters -- suggests that "Hillary 1984" could have the iconic power with the 21st century political generation that another classic political ad called "Daisy" represented to Baby Boomers, says Leyden. That 1964 spot for President Lyndon Johnson -- featuring images of a child plucking a daisy, which morphed ominously into a nuclear mushroom cloud -- battered GOP presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater because it, too, portrayed "a shattering of the whole world" in both political leadership, and media.

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, said he is aware of the "Hillary 1984" video and has gotten calls from reporters on it -- but he insisted that the campaign is not connected to it. "It's somebody else's creation," he said, declining to comment on the ad's biting content.

Burton said he doesn't know who created the spot, but it shows "there is a lot of energy for Sen. Obama on the Web, in communities all over the country ... and frankly, that energy will manifest itself in a lot of ways."

But in the weeks since its early March debut, the expertly created video remix -- called a mashup in blogosphere circles -- has "changed the zone" between political campaigns, their followers and the Internet, said Simon Rosenberg, president of the Washington-based New Democrat Network, an influential party advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

With presidential campaigns now poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that will blanket television before November 2008, this seemingly home-produced video -- created with software and a laptop, and likely without the benefit of a team of expensive political consultants -- opens a new window, Rosenberg said. It has dramatized a brave new world in which passionate activists outside the structure of traditional campaigns have the power to shape the message -- even for a presidential candidate.

The ad is proof that "anybody can do powerful emotional ads ... and the campaigns are no longer in control," Rosenberg said. "It will no longer be a top-down candidate message; that's a 20th century broadcast model."

It also dramatizes that today, political activists with the Internet as their ammunition have gone from being "just donors to the cause," he said, "to being partners in the fight. And they don't have to wait for permission."

But while the medium is clearly more grassroots, political campaigns have not been averse to having an outside or independent voice -- witness the efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the 2004 presidential race against Democratic Sen. John Kerry -- delivering ads that are tougher and meaner than the candidates might launch on their own.

Eric Jaye, a San Francisco political consultant and key adviser to Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the sophisticated "Hillary 1984" effort is the "best example yet" of a crop of viral videos that have blossomed on the Internet over the past 18 months.

But Jaye predicted such efforts are bound to become attractive tools for political campaigns, which will "orchestrate these videos on the down low to communicate negative messages -- without having to own them in public."

Jaye noted that Obama's campaign -- even as it insists it has no connection to the production -- reaps a clear benefit from the mashup video: "They get to call Hillary Clinton a pabulum-spewing pseudo-fascist, without having to own it."

And he says the individual viral video efforts popping up on the Internet, however creative, come with risk for political campaigns -- especially presidential runs, where nuance and caution usually win out over edginess when it comes to shaping messages that appeal to wide swaths of voters

"They tend to be more entertaining -- but they tend to be nastier. You used to have a series of apologies for what campaign bloggers said. Now you have to have a series of apologies for what people with a video camera and software editing and a laptop do."

Still, Jaye said, there's a clear benefit in the energy such efforts create.

"If people take the time to make a campaign ad, it helps generate more excitement, more laughs. It's fresher," he said. "But it also generates more issues. You have people making ads you don't authorize."

Gardner said the success of "Hillary 1984" means that now "every candidate will have to worry about some guy with a video camera and a Mac being able to do whatever he or she wants."

At the Obama campaign, he added wryly, "they are probably calling their consultant and saying, 'Why couldn't you guys come up with something as brilliant?' "

E-mail Carla Marinucci at cmarinucci@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Bono's NAACP acceptance speech

The Big Question: Does the RED campaign help big Western brands more than Africa?

By Paul Vallely
Published: 09 March 2007
Why are doubts being raised?
The American advertising trade magazine Ad Age claimed in its cover story this week that the U2 front man's idea to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight Aids in Africa by selling RED products has "raised a meagre $18m [£9.3m]... in a year" despite a marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola and others estimated to be as high as $100m. The ratio between the marketing money spent and the amount raised for Africa was thus very poor, it claimed.
How much has RED raised to fight Aids?
The figure is actually $25m during the six months since the RED product range was launched in the United States last October. That is five times the amount given to the Global Fund by the private sector over the previous four years. Which is a pretty significant increase by anybody's standards.
Ah, but how much has it cost to raise it?
Certainly not the $100m Ad Age claimed. The biggest spender of the big brand names that have launched RED products was the clothing company Gap. Its total advertising budget for its RED launch was $7.8m. Even adding in the money spent by the other RED firms - Apple, Motorola, Converse sneakers and Giorgio Armani (the RED Amex card is only available in the UK not the US) - the total spend of advertising, RED sources suggest, was less than a third of the $100m cited in the magazine.
Ad Age, noticeably, cited no source for its $100m, which it presented with the weasel words that "some [people] estimate" without saying who, or how the figure was arrived at.
Experts in the US advertising industry reckon that the magazine added together a variety of figures, such as, one insider suggested, estimates of "the value of the TV, billboard, print and interactive ads as well as a content integration play, in-store materials and a pop-up store that was employed by one of the partners". There was even a suggestion that it included an estimate of the time Bono received on prime time TV shows such as Oprah, and what it would have cost to buy that time at advertising rates.
"It was a phantom number Ad Age pulled out of thin air," a spokeswoman for RED said. "The maths just simply doesn't make sense."
Even so, is that a good rate of return?
Most businesses would think that to raise $25m in just six months on an investment of well under $40m was a staggeringly good rate of return. But to ask that question is to make a fundamental muddle. Gap, Motorola, Converse, Apple and the rest would have spent that money to market their T-shirts, phones, trainers and iPod nanos anyway. The marketing men and women wouldn't otherwise have spent less and given the balance of their budget to the Global Fund.
So what happened was that existing marketing money was used both to raise awareness of the scale of the Aids epidemic in Africa - something that was nowhere near as well-publicised in the US as it was in the UK - and at the same time to promote RED products. Half the profits from those products were allocated to the Global Fund, which suggests that the actual rate of return was $50m total profit on less than $40m outlay.
So has big business done better out of this than poor Africans?
The idea behind Product RED was always that it would create a win-win result. The firms with RED products would do better and so would Africans with Aids. Some charity activists in the United States have been critical of the RED initiative, arguing that it allows firms to take on the patina of philanthropy while cutting their real charitable giving.
But the facts suggest this argument is flawed. The "corporate social responsibility" budgets of most firms are dwarfed by their marketing budgets. Donations to charity tend to be given as one-off cheques. What the RED initiative has set out to do - and with some success if $25m in six months is half the profits RED products have made - is create a stream of revenue for the fight against Aids in Africa which will far exceed one-off payments from corporate philanthropy budgets. It looks set to create a major source of cash for the Global Fund, and one which is sustainable. It is an entirely new model for fund-raising.
But wouldn't people be better off giving more to charity rather than buying luxury items they don't need?
If only that were the choice. But most people wouldn't give the cost of a new iPod to the Global Fund. Some idealists might hope so. The Ad Age article was inspired by a website called www.buylesscrap.org which attacks Product RED for proposing consumption as the cure to the world's evils. "Can't we just focus on the real solution - giving money?" it says.
This is a rather romantic, and American, notion. Private charitable giving has never offered a solution to the major structural problems in the Third World. At best, charities like aid agencies create exemplars of ideal projects, or help build a public mood that something has to be done, forcing governments to act. Aids is too massive a problem for anyone but governments to tackle.
Bono set up RED because he thought that Make Poverty History, Live8 and the One Campaign (a massive lobby in the United States) had successfully put on the pressure to get governmental action at the international level. But not every one wants to join such campaigns. And not everyone gives to charities. There were two areas yet untapped - the private sector and consumers who like buying stuff, like the idea of helping others, but who are too idle or too self-centred to actually get up and do anything. RED was the attempt to draw into the wider coalition for Africa people who, if they didn't buy a RED iPod would just have bought one of another colour.
So, has RED been a success or a failure so far?
The money RED has raised means that some 160,000 Africans will be put on life-saving anti-retrovirals in the coming months, orphans are being fed and kept in school in Swaziland and a national HIV treatment and prevention programme has begun in Rwanda. Some 99 per cent of funds raised go directly to life-saving schemes.
Motorola is printing the packaging for its RED phones in Africa - a requirement agreed to by each RED brand - to help boost African local economies.
Data collected for RED's chief executive, Bobby Shriver, shows that people who became aware of crises through Red's marketing have increased their charitable giving, rather than thinking they have done enough by buying RED.
The United States anti-Aids strategy, with strong personal backing from President George Bush, is now funded to the tune of $15bn a year. The US Congress has just agreed a record $724m donation to the Global Fund for 2007. It is all the result of concerted political pressure of which Red, with its constant advertising exposure of the message that "6,500 Africans died needlessly yesterday of a preventable and treatable disease" has been a key part.
Is RED a big flop?
It all sounds like a pretty convincing success story to me. Buy Less Crap? The only people who seem to need to take that advice are the editorial staff of an American trade magazine called Ad Age.

My friend Scooter Libby: No good deed . . .

Pardon Libby Now: It will be good for Bush and good for the country.

Scenes from the Gingrich Campaign: Don't rule out Newt in 2008.

Hamilton's Red-letter spring is made for Hollywood

'That's Not Nice': Our political discourse needs less censorship and more self-discipline.

...Our country now puts less of an emphasis on public decorum, courtliness, self-discipline, decency. America no longer says, "That's not nice." It doesn't want to make value judgments on "good" and "bad." We have come to rely on censorship to maintain decorum. We are very good at letting people know that if they say something we don't like, we'll shame them and shun them, even ruin them.

But censorship doesn't make people improve themselves; it makes people want to rebel. It tells them to toe the line or pay a price. People who are urged in the right direction and taught in the right direction will usually try to discipline and improve themselves from within. But they do not enjoy censorship from without. They fight back. They are rude in order to show they are unbroken.

This is human.
...I [think] the atmosphere of political correctness is now experienced by normal people--not people who speak on TV, but normal people--as so oppressive, so demanding of constant self-policing, that when someone says something in public that is truly not nice, not nice at all, they can't help but feel that they are witnessing a prison break.

As long as political correctness reigns, the more antic among us will try to break out with great streams of Tourette's-like forbidden words and ideas.

We should forbid less and demand more. We should exert less pressure from without and encourage more discipline from within. We should ask people to be dignified, hope they'll be generous, expect them to be fair. When they're not, we should correct them. But we shouldn't beat them to a pulp. Because that's not nice.

If Memory Serves

Our Constitution guarantees every person accused of a crime the right to call witnesses in his or her defense. This right is so critical to fundamental fairness that trials in which it is not safeguarded have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to suffer from a "structural error" so serious that an automatic reversal of any criminal conviction is always required, no matter how heinous the crime.

The central theory of Mr. Libby's defense was that if he made any misstatements, either to the FBI or to the federal grand jury, they were caused by faulty memory -- either his or that of the witnesses who testified against him. For over 30 years, psychological scientists have studied the mechanics of memory and conducted extensive and rigorous research on the subject -- reaching conclusions that are generally accepted in the scientific community. Of signal importance to the jurors in the Libby trial, the science of memory is diametrically opposed to the popular understanding of how the memory and the mind work...

The Libby defense team planned to call Robert A. Bjork, a distinguished member of the faculty at UCLA and a person so qualified in his field that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, did not even contest the point. Moreover, the trial judge, Reggie Walton found the proposed evidence sufficiently reliable to satisfy the Supreme Court's stringent Daubert standard for the admissibility of expert-witness evidence.

However, after a day-long hearing (during which one of the authors of this article testified), Judge Walton barred Dr. Bjork from appearing as an expert witness. Essentially, the judge held that the science of memory is not "science" at all, but common knowledge and common sense. He further held that the right of cross-examination was an effective substitute for the right to offer evidence. Finally, he held that the proposed evidence was more likely to confuse the jury than educate it...

The Scooter Libby verdict was neither fair nor just because the jury never heard one of the most important pieces of evidence: an expert explanation of why faulty memory could be consistent with innocence.

Ms. Loftus is a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Steinberg is a criminal defense lawyer based in Detroit.

Music's New Gatekeeper

From their Silicon Valley cubicles, Apple staffers have become music's unlikely power brokers. Our reporters on the horse-trading that can turn unknowns into stars.

By NICK WINGFIELD and ETHAN SMITH
March 9, 2007; Page W1

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying -- out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular.

What makes up an iTunes page? Find out the difference between "swooshes" and bricks.

How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site -- or whether Nickelback gets no mention?

Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.

Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes.

The decisions by the small group of Silicon Valley and music-industry veterans running iTunes can help put an unknown band on the map, adding millions of dollars in sales, while relegating others to the obscurity of the site's virtual back bins.

Push for Exclusives

Apple's muscle-flexing has begun to rub some artists and music companies the wrong way. During a recent radio interview, outspoken British pop singer Lily Allen accused iTunes of "bullying" artists into supplying exclusive content. There's a further worry among music executives that the few spots available to promote artists on iTunes are dwindling as Apple remakes the store into a broader entertainment destination for TV shows, movies and games.

Lily Allen accuses Apple of "bullying" musicians into providing exclusive content.

But so far, most labels comply because of the site's ability to drive sales. During a week when an album is featured on the iTunes home page it can sell about five times more copies on average through the site than it does in the three to five weeks that follow, when the album isn't featured, says one industry executive.

"The way MTV used to be the place where you had to have a video playing as one of the key legs of the stool, iTunes is now one of the key legs of the stool," says Chris Douridas, an influential deejay at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and a former consultant to iTunes.

Not only does securing a spot on the iTunes home page require concessions by music companies -- it also depends on having material that resonates with the tastes of iTunes staffers. Three months before Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment was gearing up to promote a handful of older Prince titles, timed to coincide with the musician's recent performance at the Super Bowl halftime show, the label entered into talks with iTunes. The result: Four albums, including "Purple Rain," received prominent positions in the store and were priced at $7.99 -- $2 less than Apple's standard album price.

"They said, 'We'd like to be able to offer it at a special price,'" says David Dorn, Rhino's senior vice president for digital strategy. "I said, 'We'd like to get in the New Music Tuesdays newsletter and home-page placement.' I gave a little, they gave a little. But no cash changed hands."

Prince cut prices on old albums for iTunes, timed to his Super Bowl gig.

After the prime display, digital sales of "Purple Rain" rose fivefold, according to SoundScan, while sales of "The Very Best of Prince" more than doubled. Three less-known albums in the promotion saw modest increases.

In January, iTunes executives approached several record labels to set up a promotion in which they would slash the prices of 20 greatest-hits albums to $7.99, and Apple in turn would flag the entire group on the home page. The first album that came up, Queen's 34-song "Greatest Hits 1 & 2," originally released by Walt Disney's Hollywood Records in the mid 1990s and normally sold on iTunes for nearly $34, zoomed to No. 1 on the site's album-sales chart. It stayed in the top 10 for the entire 10 days of the promotion.

Groups like Gnarls Barkley have enjoyed significant boosts from iTunes. Last year, the alternative-soul duo's "Crazy" became the first song to hit No. 1 on the British pop charts based solely on digital sales. When the Shins' third album, "Wincing the Night Away," made its debut in January at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album-sales chart, nearly 30% of the first-week sales were made online -- most on iTunes.

For consumers, Apple's growing influence means exposure to a wider range of music. Apple has told some recording companies that music from independent labels accounts for about 15% of iTunes sales, compared with about 5% for physical retailers.

Mike Schiller, a management consultant in Cleveland, says the iTunes home page, along with Apple's New Music Tuesday newsletter, has frequently introduced him to music and movies that he later purchased, including an album by a British act called Guillemots and a Mark Wahlberg football movie called "Invincible." "It's pretty powerful," says Mr. Schiller, 48 years old, who worked as a record-store clerk while a teenager in Omaha, Neb. "It will give you exposure to stuff that you don't normally see."

Rare Growth Story

ITunes is housed at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in a cluster of nondescript cubicles that could easily be confused with a software-development group but for a smattering of music posters on the walls, according to people who have visited or worked there.

The iTunes staff includes people with music pedigrees, including Alex Luke, a longtime deejay who is the director of music programming and label relations. (Mr. Luke still sits in occasionally for stations like Los Angeles's Indie 103.1 FM.) Bruno Ybarra, who co-founded a house-music record label, manages relationships with independent music companies. Denzyl Feigelson, a South African who was a manager for singer Paul Simon's "Graceland" tour, is a music editor for iTunes in London. In all, dozens of iTunes editors and label-relations staffers collaborate in meetings and discussions throughout the week to determine what the home page of the iTunes Store will look like when it is refreshed every Tuesday.

Apple is a rare growth story in the music business. It nearly monopolizes digital-music sales, just about the only growth area for the beleaguered industry, which saw CD sales fall for seven years running. ITunes sold 1.2 billion songs last year compared with 30 million in 2003, its first year in operation, Apple says. The company says it passed Amazon.com last year to become the fourth-largest music retailer in the U.S., behind Wal-Mart Stores, Target and Best Buy, a claim that isn't disputed by music companies. At the end of last year, Apple was selling five million songs a day at 99 cents each.

Its growing clout has transformed Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs -- who kick-started online music sales several years ago with a set of breakthrough song-licensing deals with major recording companies -- into a figure music executives alternately admire and grouse about. Mr. Jobs recently caused a kerfuffle by urging music executives to consider dropping their insistence on digital copy-protection software on songs, which Mr. Jobs believes is holding back Internet music sales.

Label executives say that since Apple began selling TV shows and movies in the past year, they must begin discussions with Apple three to six months before a major music release if they want a shot at home-page promotion. In physical stores, such prime real estate is typically for sale. To secure prominent "end-cap" placement on CD racks near the ends of aisles at national retail chains, major music labels can pay as much as $5 per disc displayed in the form of discounts, "cooperative advertising" payments and other fees, according to executives. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars for a major promotion involving 5,000 discs or more. Such hefty payments can effectively erase any profit on the CDs on display in an end-cap.

Apple says it shunned pay-for-placement -- as have online rivals including RealNetworks' Rhapsody -- to provide unbiased music recommendations. Eddy Cue, the Apple vice president who oversees iTunes, says the company hopes to recapture some of the spirit of independent record stores, when clerks would give uncompromised tips on promising performers. "That for us was kind of gone in the new retail environment," Mr. Cue says. Customers used to believe that advice on music "was coming from someone who really liked it versus someone who was paid to say they liked it."

Apple isn't under as much pressure to squeeze profits from iTunes because of the money it makes on iPods. In fact, it earns little from iTunes after paying fees for the music and credit-card processing. ITunes typically pays major labels about 72 cents a track, while it pays most independent labels around 62 cents.

Exclusive material greatly increases the likelihood that iTunes will turn up its promotion machine. In some cases, that involves getting artists such as Sting or Willie Nelson to record interviews and performances that Apple sells as a package. The company recently struck up a relationship with the Las Vegas casino the Palms to record live concerts by artists such as John Legend, for which it pays production costs.

The Orchard, an online distributor of music from independent labels, recently agreed to let Apple have an album of material by the artist G. Love one week before other Internet retailers got it. Apple ran a promotion on the front page of iTunes and the album reached No. 17 on the site's album charts, says Greg Scholl, the distributor's CEO.

Yet Ms. Allen, the young British singer behind the hit "Smile," complained during the recent radio interview about Apple's tactics. "They won't advertise your album unless you give them extra material," Ms. Allen said. She said iTunes pushed her to quickly turn out a version of a song, so she planned to give them a "rubbish remix." Ms. Allen said she would offer a better version free on her MySpace page. Apple declined to comment on Ms. Allen's remarks, and a spokeswoman for her label, EMI Group's Capitol Records, said the singer and her manager weren't available to elaborate.

And while Apple has made it a practice to seek out new artists, iTunes still has glaring gaps in its inventory. The best known is the absence of anything by the Beatles and much of the band members' subsequent solo recordings -- a situation that stemmed partially from a trademark dispute between Apple and the band's Apple Corps Ltd. record label. (Apple has said it's hopeful it will get the Beatles on iTunes following a recent settlement between the company and Apple Corps.) Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Radiohead, too, haven't licensed their music to the service. And due to licensing issues, some albums are sold minus one or more songs. Elvis Costello's "Spike," from 1989, is missing one track, while only three songs from the J. Geils Band's 1972 "Full House 'Live'" are available on iTunes.

Still, Apple is being fawned over by much of the music industry. Digital Music Group, a Sacramento, Calif., company that handles online distribution for independent labels, has four people on staff who spend most of their time chatting up iTunes editors and sending them CDs of bands in an attempt to get promotion on the site. Tuhin Roy, the distributor's chief strategy officer, is impressed by the knowledge of the Apple staffers. "Clearly, they know the music they're dealing with," he says.

Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, went so far as to bring urban artist Kevin Michael to Cupertino to perform for iTunes staffers. Apparently impressed, iTunes executives committed to releasing an Apple-only collection of tracks next month, in advance of Mr. Michael's debut album. While some music executives are frustrated about what it takes to woo Apple, "The flip side is, when they do step out on a new artist, it's that much more meaningful," Mr. Deutsch says.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com and Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com

The Great Depression: Richest country: saddest people--any coincidence?

by Bret Stephens

"Oh, my God, I am so starving," says high-school student Brittany Birnbaum, who ate nothing except "a Twix and a half bag of Fritos" before her cheerleading tryout and whose stomach revolts at the sight of her mother's salisbury steak. "You know," she warns, "it's against the law to treat your kids like this."

"My God, I am starving," rejoins Kitum Asosa, starving African. "I would walk 100 miles through the desert to reach a handful of millet. The sight of a sparrow carcass would make my mouth water, if only I were not too dehydrated to salivate."

I am reminded of this immortal exchange--a satirical Point/Counterpoint in the online pages of the Onion--after reading about the results of a study, recently reported in Forbes, purporting to show that the U.S. has the highest rate of depression among a survey group of 14 countries. The study, jointly conducted by the World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School and based on more than 60,000 face-to-face interviews world-wide, found that 9.6% of Americans suffer from "bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder or chronic minor depression." A whopping 18.2% of Americans were also found to be experiencing "mood and anxiety disorders, such as obsessive compulsive disorder and panic disorder."

Apple buffs marketing savvy to a high shine

"Apple's arsenal of attention-getting tools holds lessons for any company: design cool, innovative products. Have a streamlined product line. Invest in memorable ads. Work your customer base to make customers feel special and create word-of-mouth agents. Most important: keep the world and media surprised, to generate gobs of attention."

Robert D. Novak: A Verdict on the Wilson Affair

...The trial provided no information whatsoever about Valerie Plame's status at the CIA at the time I revealed her role in her husband's mission. No hard evidence was produced that Libby was ever told she was undercover. Fitzgerald had argued that whether or not she was covert was not material to this trial, and U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton had so ruled. Yet in his closing argument, Fitzgerald referred to Mrs. Wilson's secret status, and in answer to a reporter's question after the verdict, he said she was "classified."

In fact, her being classified -- that is, that her work was a government secret -- did not in itself meet the standard required for prosecution of the leaker (former deputy secretary of state Armitage) under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. That statute limits prosecution to exposers of covert intelligence activities overseas, whose revelation would undermine U.S. intelligence. That is why Fitzgerald did not move against Armitage.

Some questions I was asked in television and radio interviews after the verdict implied that I had revealed Armitage's name to Fitzgerald.

Actually, in my first interview with Fitzgerald after he was named special prosecutor, he indicated that he knew Armitage was my leaker. I assumed that was the product of detective work by the FBI. In fact, Armitage had turned himself in to the Justice Department three months before Fitzgerald entered the case, without notifying the White House or releasing me from my requirement of confidentiality.

On Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" Tuesday night, superlawyer David Boies said Fitzgerald never should have prosecuted Libby because there was no underlying criminal violation. Boies scoffed at Fitzgerald's contention that Libby had obstructed him from exposing criminal activity. Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 election dispute, is hardly a Bush sympathizer. But neither is he a Democratic partisan trying to milk this obscure scandal.

New York Post Editorial: FREE SCOOTER LIBBY

Bush Should Pardon Libby Now, By Charles Krauthammer

...Everyone agrees that Fitzgerald's perjury case against Libby hung on the testimony of NBC's Tim Russert. Libby said that he heard about Plame from Russert. Russert said he had never discussed it. The jury members who have spoken said they believed Russert.

And why should they not? Russert is a perfectly honest man who would not lie. He was undoubtedly giving his best recollection.

But he is not the pope. Given that so many journalists and administration figures were shown to have extremely fallible memories, is it possible that Russert's memory could have been faulty?

I have no idea. But we do know that Russert once denied calling up a Buffalo News reporter to complain about a story. Russert later apologized for the error when he was shown the evidence of a call he had genuinely and completely forgotten.

There is a second instance of Russert innocently misremembering. He stated under oath that he did not know that one may not be accompanied by a lawyer to a grand jury hearing. This fact, in and of itself, is irrelevant to the case, except that, as former prosecutor Victoria Toensing points out, the defense had tapes showing Russert saying on television three times that lawyers are barred from grand jury proceedings.

This demonstration of Russert's fallibility was never shown to the jury. The judge did not allow it. He was upset with the defense because it would not put Libby on the stand -- his perfect Fifth Amendment right -- after hinting in the opening statement that it might. He therefore denied the defense a straightforward demonstration of the fallibility of the witness whose testimony was most decisive.

Toensing thinks this might be the basis for overturning the verdict upon appeal. I hope so. This is a case that never should have been brought, originating in the scandal that never was, in search of a crime -- violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- that even the prosecutor never alleged. That's the basis for a presidential pardon. It should have been granted long before this egregious case came to trial. It should be granted now without any further delay.

The Libby Travesty: Mr. Bush owes the former aide a pardon, and an apology.

WSJ Editorial
The word "guilty" had barely crossed the airwaves yesterday in the perjury case of Scooter Libby before critics were calling it proof that President Bush "lied us into war" and demanding that Dick Cheney be strung up next. Maybe now Mr. Bush will realize that this case was always a political fight over Iraq and do the right thing by pardoning Mr. Libby.
The conviction is certainly a travesty of justice, though that is not the jury's fault. The 11 men and women were faced with confusing evidence of conflicting memories in a case that never should have been brought. In the end, they were persuaded more by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's story line that Mr. Libby, a former aide to Mr. Cheney, had lied to a grand jury about what he knew when about the status of CIA official Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson.
In hindsight, the defense seems to have blundered by portraying Mr. Libby as the "fall guy" for others in the White House. That didn't do enough to rebut Mr. Fitzgerald's theory of the case, and so the jury seems to have decided that Mr. Libby must have been lying to protect something. The defense might have been better off taking on Mr. Fitzgerald for criminalizing political differences.
For that, in essence, is what this case is really all about. We learned long ago--and Mr. Fitzgerald knew from the start of his probe in 2003--that Mr. Libby was not the source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak that started all this. Mr. Libby thus had no real motive to cover up this non-crime. What he did have strong cause to do was rebut the lies that Mr. Wilson was telling about the Administration and Mr. Cheney--lies confirmed as lies by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004.
Mr. Libby did talk to some reporters about the Administration's case for war in 2003, and he did mention Ms. Plame in some cases. So the jury apparently decided that, when asked about those conversations by the FBI and grand jury, he had lied about his own sources of information about Joe Wilson and his wife. In other words, he has not been convicted of lying to anyone about the case for war in Iraq, or about Mr. Wilson or his wife.
Rather, he has been convicted of telling the truth about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame to some reporters but then not owning up to it. One tragic irony is that if Mr. Libby had only taken the Harold Ickes grand-jury strategy and said "I don't recall," he probably never would have been indicted. But our guess is that he tried to cooperate with the grand jury because he never really believed he had anything to hide. This may also explain why Mr. Libby never retained an experienced Beltway attorney until he was indicted.

None of this has stopped critics of the war from trying to blow this entire case into something far larger. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hailed the conviction as proof that the White House tried to "manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics." But the charges against Mr. Libby had nothing to do with intelligence, and Mr. Wilson was himself so discredited by summer 2004 that the John Kerry campaign dropped him as a spokesman once the Senate exposed his deceit.
What Mr. Reid and others are doing is showing how much all this really has been about a policy dispute over Iraq. The fact that they are now demanding Mr. Cheney's head is further evidence of the political nature of this entire episode. But it should also be a warning to Mr. Bush and his advisers that they too bear much responsibility for Mr. Libby's conviction.
Rather than confront Mr. Wilson's lies head on, they became defensive and allowed a trivial matter to become a threat to the Administration itself. They allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself and Mr. Fitzgerald to be appointed even though Justice officials knew that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been the first official to leak Ms. Plame's name to reporters. Mr. Libby got caught in the eddy not because he was dishonest but because he was a rare official who actually had the temerity to defend the President's Iraq policy against Mr. Wilson's lies.
As for the media, most of our brethren were celebrating the conviction yesterday because it damaged the Bush Administration they loathe. But they too will pay a price for holding Mr. Fitzgerald's coat. The Bush Administration will soon be history, but the damage Mr. Fitzgerald has done to the ability to protect media sources and to the willingness of government officials to speak openly to reporters will last far longer.
Mr. Bush will no doubt be advised to wait for the outcome of an appeal and the end of his Administration to pardon Mr. Libby. We believe he bears some personal responsibility for this conviction, especially for not policing the disputes and insubordination in his Administration that made this travesty possible. The time for a pardon is now.