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One midwinter night in 2008, Senator John Ensign, of Nevada, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was roused from bed when six men entered his room and ordered him to get up. Ensign knew the men intimately; a few hours earlier, he had eaten dinner with them, as he had nearly every Tuesday evening since he'd come to Washington. Now they were rebuking him for his recklessness. They told him he was endangering his career, ruining lives, and offending God.
The men leading this intervention considered themselves Ensign's closest friends in Washington. Four of those who confronted Ensign—Senator Tom Coburn and Representatives Bart Stupak, Mike Doyle, and Zach Wamp—lived with him in a nineteenth-century brick row house on C Street *, in southeast Washington, a short walk from the Capitol. The men regarded themselves in part as an accountability group. Despite their political differences—Coburn and Wamp are Republicans, Stupak and Doyle are Democrats—they had pledged to hold one another to a life lived by the principles of Jesus, and they considered the Tuesday supper gatherings at C Street an inviolable ritual.
The regulars at the dinner included the nine men who lived at the house, along with half a dozen colleagues and friends who were non-residents. Every Tuesday evening, they would convene in the first-floor living room of the C Street house, a large space furnished with a long leather sofa and stuffed chairs. A bookshelf was filled with political biographies and James Patterson novels, and paintings of hunting scenes and sailing vessels hung on the walls, suggesting the atmosphere of a men's club, or, as Coburn put it, a fraternity house. (Some of the private bedrooms upstairs, including his, were usually in a state of collegiate disarray.) After some small talk and friendly ribbing, the group broke up, and the men took their places in two narrow, adjoining dining rooms down the hall.
The meals were prepared by a volunteer host couple who lived in the house, and were served by a team of silent young men, also volunteers, who were part of the group's mentoring program. At mealtime, the tone turned more serious, but the subject of conversation was rarely politics. Spiritual issues and the most intimate personal matters were discussed, with the assurance of absolute confidentiality.
Coburn, the senior man in the house, enjoyed these sessions, but at dinner that Tuesday night in 2008 he was plainly troubled. Finally, he spoke out. "Guys," he said, "we've got a problem in the house."
One day some weeks earlier, Coburn said, he had learned that John Ensign, who was married, was having an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of one of his aides, Doug Hampton, and there had been an immediate intervention that same day. Meeting in an upstairs room at the C Street house (a room that was occasionally used for marriage counselling), Doug Hampton, accompanied by Coburn and three lay ministers who manage C Street, had confronted Ensign about the affair. The encounter was filled with recrimination and tears, and culminated in Ensign confessing and vowing to repent. Coburn returned to the Senate, but the others remained with Ensign, handing him a pen and paper and dictating a letter to Cynthia Hampton declaring his intention to end the affair.
"Cindy," the letter began. "This is the most important letter that I've ever written. What I did with you was wrong. I was completely self-centered + only thinking of myself." Ensign wrote that God wished for the two marriages to heal, and for the two lovers to "restore our relationships to Him." The letter was put in a FedEx envelope, and addressed. The three ministers—Marty Sherman, Tim Coe, and David Coe—drove with Ensign to a FedEx station, and watched as he slipped the letter into the drop-box.
Hearing of this weeks later, the men at Coburn's table were astonished. Ensign, a handsome, silver-haired conservative, was a Republican with national prospects. He and Doug Hampton had been extremely close, attending religious retreats together, and even buying houses in adjacent Las Vegas neighborhoods. Cindy Hampton had been Ensign's campaign treasurer. Ensign's Pentecostal faith, embraced when he was in graduate school, had been a central part of his public identity. An active member of the evangelical group Promise Keepers, he had publicly pledged himself to a life of "spiritual, moral, ethical, and sexual purity."
According to Doug Hampton, Ensign, after mailing the letter and shaking his escorts, had telephoned Cindy Hampton and begged her to disregard the package he had just sent. He soon met her again, in Las Vegas, where they resumed the affair.
Coburn's group lingered until well after the men in the adjoining dining room, including Ensign, had said their benediction and dispersed. Ensign had gone to his room, at the far end of the basement. At last, Steve Largent, a former Republican congressman and N.F.L. star—and one of the original C Street residents—spoke up. "Let's go wake him up, right now," he said.
Coburn, Largent, Stupak, Wamp, Doyle, and Sherman went downstairs and roused Ensign. This second intervention ended with Ensign sitting at the foot of his bed, weeping. "You're right," he told his friends. "I'm going to end this craziness."
Some in the C Street group wanted Ensign out of the house, but the prevailing view was that he should stay. Dealing with the affair seemed to pose a test of the group's very purpose: in the fevered atmosphere of an election year, could the men of C Street cope with the situation privately? Looking back, Coburn believed that the Ensign case was a C Street success story. A year after that midnight confrontation, word of Ensign's affair had not leaked, and Ensign and his wife, Darlene, had reconciled.
Doug and Cindy Hampton were together, too, but Doug Hampton was still angry at Ensign. He believed that Ensign had destroyed his life, and, with the help of powerful friends, had got away with it. In June, 2009, after Ensign learned that Hampton intended to reveal the affair, he publicly confessed, and resigned his Republican leadership position. The tawdriness of the double betrayal, of wife and close friend, produced a wave of sex-scandal stories, but the damage was confined to Ensign. Then, a week later, the Republican governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, made his own public confession, a rambling tale of the "impossible love" that he had found with a woman in Argentina. Sanford spoke of an inner struggle over the betrayal of his marriage vows, and mentioned that he had sought the counsel of some of his old circle in Washington. "I was part of a group called C Street when I was in Washington," he said. "It was, believe it or not, a Christian Bible study—some folks that asked members of Congress hard questions that I think were very, very important. And I've been working with them."
The press soon discovered that John Ensign lived at the C Street house. A month later, in the circuit court of Hinds County, Mississippi, Leisha Pickering, the wife of the former Republican congressman Chip Pickering, another resident of the C Street house, filed an alienation-of-affection lawsuit suggesting that Pickering had committed adultery while living there. A picture began to emerge of a boys-gone-wild house of pleasure. The men of C Street, pledged to silence, declined to respond to press inquiries, which only heightened interest ("THE POLITICAL ENCLAVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME," a Washington Post headline read). Public records revealed little; the house was registered to an obscure evangelical youth group, and enjoyed the tax status of a registered church. Word spread that the tenants were paying below-market rents (about nine hundred dollars a month each), which prompted an inquiry by the Office of Congressional Ethics. Even if the residents had been inclined to talk about the house, some knew nothing more about it than the fact that they made out their monthly checks to "C Street Center."
The C Street house was known to be associated with a ministry called the Fellowship, a nondenominational entity that sponsored the annual National Prayer Breakfast. But the Fellowship's more significant work was its invisible ministry to political leaders, dating back to the New Deal era. Through the years, small Fellowship-inspired prayer groups have held weekly meetings in the Pentagon, in the Attorney General's office, in various congressional hideaways inside the Capitol, and in the White House itself. The Fellowship has offered succor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, to Dwight Eisenhower and Marion Barry, and to many of the Watergate felons. D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist who has studied the ways in which evangelicals have become part of the American élite, was astonished by what he discovered about the Fellowship. "They are the most significant spiritual force in the lives of leaders—especially leaders in Washington—of any entity that I know," he says. "They are mentioned more often in the interviews I've conducted than any other group. They have had a more sustained influence over the decades than any other entity. There is nothing comparable to them."
The Fellowship avoids publicity for its activities. Heath Shuler, a two-term Democratic representative from North Carolina who lives in the house on C Street and has attended a weekly prayer session sponsored by the Fellowship since he arrived in Washington, recently said, "I've been here the whole time, and there's talk about what the Fellowship is, but I honestly have no idea what they're talking about. I honestly don't know what it is." Tom Coburn acknowledges that influence and secrecy, two of the chief attributes of the Fellowship, make a provocative combination. "Everybody in this town, and probably in the media world, says, Well, if you're not out front, then you obviously have something to hide," Coburn says. One view of the Fellowship, with some popularity on the secular left, is of a sort of theocratic Blackwater, advancing a conservative agenda in the councils of power throughout the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a friend of the Fellowship, might dispute that view—if she spoke about the group, which she does not.
The Fellowship's participants (there is no official membership) describe themselves simply as followers of Jesus, an informal network of friends seeking harmony by modelling their lives after his. They are assertively nondoctrinal (eschewing even the term "Christian") and nonecclesiastical (denominations tend to be divisive), and although the core figures are evangelicals, they do not believe in proselytizing. I have spoken to Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews who consider themselves part of this network. The group rejects anything resembling a formal structure—there is no titled executive team, and even the name "Fellowship" is unofficial, an informal convenience. The business cards of those leaders who carry them list the individual's name at the top and addresses and telephone numbers at the bottom, with a blank space in between, where the name of the entity might go. A formal foundation does exist—a 501(c)(3) called the International Foundation, which oversees three hundred or so ministries associated with the Fellowship, and has a board of directors that approves a budget for the ministries (in the fifteen-million-dollar range) and the salaries of the parent entity's relatively few employees. The Fellowship's affiliated ministries vary widely in their missions, from operating a secondary school in Uganda to funding a program for inner-city youths in Washington, D.C. The core mission of the Fellowship, however, is interpersonal ministry to the powerful, meant "to turn their hearts to the poor."
For the past forty years, this mission has been largely driven by one man, a layman from Oregon named Doug Coe. Coe insists that he is not the leader of anything. He sat in on the weekly House and Senate prayer groups for fifty years, speaking only once in all that time. Coe generally avoids interviews and photographers; a few years ago, when Time named him one of the nation's most influential evangelicals, he tried to persuade the writer not to include him on the list, and, failing that, declined to provide a photograph of himself. His admirers describe him in terms that suggest a near-mystical visionary, with a powerful personal magnetism. "Almost everyone, from the moment they meet Doug Coe, they see he's somebody special," Don Bonker, a former Democratic congressman from Washington and a longtime associate of Coe's, says. In Hillary Clinton's memoir, "Living History," she wrote that Coe was "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship to God."
In May, I travelled to Arlington, Virginia, where I met Doug Coe. The setting was a Revolutionary War-era mansion called the Cedars, which, since 1978, has served as the Fellowship's home base. The house sits on seven acres, which rise to the high point of the Potomac palisade, near the Key Bridge, and is secluded by thick woodlands. The Cedars is used as a place for prayer meetings and meals (served by volunteers, as at the C Street house), and as a refuge for friends of the group. It was where William Aramony, the former director of United Way, went when he learned that he was about to be indicted as a swindler, and where Lee Atwater, the Republican political operative, retreated when he learned that he had a brain tumor. Michael Jackson and his family stayed at the Cedars when he came to Washington for a 9/11 memorial concert.
Coe greeted me in the front parlor, and escorted me to a side library. Coe is eighty-one now, and had recently undergone angioplasty, but he did not seem infirm. He was dressed in khaki trousers, a polo shirt, and a sport coat. Sliding into a leather chair, he said, "Tell me your story"—his standard opening with a stranger. Then, in a looping, elliptical narrative, he told me his.
Coe was reared in Salem, Oregon, in a home that valued education (his father was the state superintendent of schools) and the methods of John Wesley. His mother spent hours on her knees in daily prayer and fretted about the soul of her son. Coe, who preferred playing ball to practicing religion, parted from the Church at his earliest opportunity, when he left home for Willamette University to study math and physics. "For me to think that a baby born two thousand years ago to a fifteen-year-old girl in Bethlehem created the solar system—that didn't make any sense to me," he said. Other tenets of the faith gave him pause, too. "I just couldn't figure out a God that would send everybody to Hell except a few of my friends, and my mom and my dad," he says.
Then one night, alone in his room at Willamette, Coe had a religious experience. He describes it, as many born-again Christians do, as an almost corporeal encounter. He found himself promising to give his life to God's work—as long as he didn't have to evangelize, or spend too much time in prayer. He set out to test the efficacy of prayer by composing a list of desirable outcomes, having nothing to do directly with himself, and determined to try to pray them into reality by a certain date. One of the items on his list, he says, was that his favorite professor at school, a political-science instructor, would have a personal experience with Jesus. As the deadline neared, the professor, Mark Hatfield, told Coe that he had "met the Lord." Coe and Hatfield became close friends and prayer partners, and remained so when Hatfield entered electoral politics, winning a seat in the state legislature, and eventually becoming governor and a U.S. senator. Coe travelled with Hatfield throughout the state, the two of them talking about Jesus as if he were present with them. (As one of the Senate's most liberal Republicans, Hatfield opposed the Vietnam War, the Reagan tax cuts, and the Gulf War.)
When the big preachers came through Oregon in the early nineteen-fifties, Billy Graham among them, they all stopped by to visit Hatfield, and Coe began to develop a network of important connections. One who made a lasting impression was a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, a Methodist preacher who had created a unique ministry that existed outside the organized churches and aimed to change the world by changing the hearts of leaders.
Vereide had arrived in America, which he called the "land of the unchained Bible," in 1905, at the age of eighteen, with a burning zeal and uncommon drive. He soon made his way from preaching a horseback circuit to a prominent pulpit in downtown Seattle. On his recommendation, the city's civic leaders created the program that came to be known as Goodwill Industries, putting people to work at reclaiming and reselling surplus goods. In 1934, in a meeting with nineteen of the city's civic leaders, Vereide proposed that they try to order their lives according to the principles of Jesus. They met again the next week, and the next, with the understanding that the gatherings were utterly secret. "This was an intimate circle," Vereide wrote, according to "Modern Viking," a privately published authorized biography by Norman Grubb. "We didn't dare tell anybody what was going on, or even include anyone else," Vereide continued. "It was a sharing fellowship." Vereide began to hear from men across the country (Fiorello LaGuardia sought him out on a trip West), and what had evolved into the prayer-breakfast idea became a national movement. At Vereide's instigation, a prayer group was started in the House, and then in the Senate, and they continue today. In 1953, Vereide's friend Senator Frank Carlson, of Kansas, invited the new President, Dwight Eisenhower, to attend a prayer breakfast. It was the first instance of what has become the National Prayer Breakfast, attended annually by every President since.
The real work of the movement, though, was in the small groups of top men (as Vereide described his mission field) which proliferated across the country. Sam Shoemaker, the New York Episcopal priest who helped to devise the Twelve Step program for Alcoholics Anonymous, in the nineteen-thirties, was Vereide's close friend and adviser, and made key connections for him in New York and in Washington. Thomas Watson, of I.B.M., summoned Vereide to discuss his groups, as did Marvin Coyle, the president of Chevrolet, and J. C. Penney. Prayer groups were spreading overseas, and, by the end of the nineteen-fifties, with Vereide in his seventies, the core group of men around him decided to bring younger blood into the leadership circle. Doug Coe was recruited into the organization, which was then called International Christian Leadership, as field director, in 1959, and when Vereide died, a decade later, Coe effectively became his successor.
Coe's flock consisted of a quarter of the members of the House and the Senate, and a wide international network of parliamentarians, potentates, military brass, and business executives. He had no pulpit and no title, and although he was called the "stealth Billy Graham," he was no preacher. (A video of a talk he once gave to a group of evangelicals shows him prone to disjointed narrative and given to bizarre analogy, suggesting that Christians could use the sort of blind devotion that Maoists, Nazis, and the Mafia understood.) But Coe had a vision for the prayer-group movement that matched Vereide's, and, in some ways, eclipsed it.
Under Coe, the Fellowship's work became more focussed on an intensely personal, "relational" ministry to leaders, many of them public leaders, which made absolute trust paramount. What some saw as obsessive secrecy, Coe says, was a necessary privacy. "We're not being secretive, it's just that no one advertises that we've got a guy here who's an atheist and is having a problem with his life, or maybe stole money from his country's treasury," he said.
The other change under Coe was a refining of the brand of faith that animated the Fellowship. Coe distilled that faith down to the raw teaching of Jesus, as presented in the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and in the first few chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. This approach conformed with Coe's youthful rebellion against the idea of a God who would condemn all but a particular brand of believer. "They tell Jewish friends, You can't go to Heaven unless you're a Christian," Coe says. "Well, the facts are, if that is true, Isaiah could never go to Heaven, Mary could never go to Heaven, Jesus could never go to Heaven. It's crazy."
But there is also a strategic value to this insistently nondoctrinal approach: anybody, of any faith, can admire Coe's Jesus. Rabbi Jack Bemporad, who works in the field of interreligious relations, met Coe on a trip to Iran several years ago. "He wants to have a way of presenting Jesus so that whoever he's talking to will find a way of accepting it," Bemporad says. "He's not dogmatic and saying, 'You've got to believe in the Trinity,' or 'He's the son of God.' " Bemporad became a friend of Coe's, and has visited the Cedars to speak about Jesus as a teacher of Judaism.
Coe also finds spiritual communion with the Dalai Lama ("the Dalai Lama loves Jesus"), and recently sent me a book of the Dalai Lama's meditations on the Gospels. Along with a note, Coe slipped in a small tract titled "A Follower of Jesus," which amounted to a summation of the Fellowship's creed. The Followers of Jesus, it said, seek "a 'revolution of love' so powerful that the division and animosity separating people and nations will be greatly eliminated or replaced by the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation as modeled by Jesus of Nazareth."
"I can tell you that critics to his right think that Doug is just doctrinally soft and confused," Michael Cromartie, the vice-president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, and a friend of Coe's, says. "It's one thing to be an admirer of Jesus the man, but there are people in the more orthodox world who want to say that Jesus did more than just walk around and teach; he actually did something in history, on the Cross, that is crucial to everything."
Coe shrinks at the thought of trying to convert anyone. His gift, those close to him say, is for acting as a sort of spiritual adviser. In 1982, when Ed Meese, the White House counsellor, was inconsolable after his son, Scott, was killed in an automobile wreck, a friend in the White House, Herb Ellingwood, suggested that Meese consider trying a small prayer group. The next morning, at six-thirty, Ellingwood and Meese met on the steps of the Pentagon, where they were joined by Doug Coe, whom Meese did not know. They went inside, into the office of another member of their group, General Jack Vessey, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Meese was surprised; he had sat across from Vessey at national-security meetings, and had no idea that he was even a Christian. The group met every week at the Pentagon, until Vessey's retirement, when the prayer sessions moved to the Department of Justice, where Meese was by then presiding as Attorney General. When Meese left the government, the prayer group relocated to the Cedars, where it meets every Tuesday morning.
"It has meant a great deal to me," Meese told me. "All of us have had family problems, personal problems. It's a place where you can discuss these problems. You come together in the name of Jesus, so you have a natural kind of bond. And the group dynamics are such that you have total confidence that nothing you are going to say is going to make you vulnerable through your colleagues, which is rare in Washington."
Meese later got an idea of the Fellowship's pervasiveness while on a trip to Japan. Coe had told him that a prayer group was meeting at a particular hotel, and Meese, searching the lobby billboard's long list of events and meetings, finally found a listing for "Small Group," giving a room number. Meese went to the room, and found the prayer group he was looking for—a group begun years earlier, according to Doug Coe, at the suggestion of Al Gore and James Baker.
In the Coe era, the Fellowship's international outreach intensified, with an emphasis on a private, faith-based diplomacy that scored several quiet triumphs but also invited a darker interpretation of the Fellowship's motivations. The prevalent critique of the prayer movement's overseas involvement was chiefly advanced by the journalist Jeff Sharlet, whose 2008 book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," painted an evocative portrait of a cultlike vanguard movement that "recasts theology in the language of empire," and facilitated a right-wing American foreign policy. (A second book, "C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy," will appear later this month.)
Those involved in the Fellowship's activities abroad insist that this critique vastly overstates the group's influence, and misrepresents its motivation. One practitioner of the Fellowship's private diplomacy is a former federal bureaucrat named Bob Hunter, who was an official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Jimmy Carter.
Hunter was a consumer advocate in the Ralph Nader mold. (Indeed, Nader was a friend and colleague, and Hunter marched against the Iraq war carrying a sign reading "The Emperor Has No Clues.") When he met Doug Coe, in 1978, he had experienced a midlife religious conversion that he credited with saving his marriage, and he was looking for some way to channel his new zeal when a minister friend arranged a visit to the Cedars. Hunter had a liberal's take on the Gospels. "I was new, I was a blank slate, I didn't have any biases," he recalls. "Jesus basically says that helping the poor is the goal. Reach out and help the least among us. I took that seriously. I wanted to know what Jesus was calling me to do." Coe gave Hunter the prayer test. He urged him to meet in a small group with his new friends in faith, and to start to pray. "He said, 'You need to try to find something to pray for that's bigger than yourself. Something that you guys can't do, because then you can't take the credit for it, when you start to see these things happen. And they will happen. I would suggest you pray for a place. You can pray for a place, or an idea, something. Places are easier, somehow. Maybe you ought to pray for the District of Columbia—they could use it—or the state of Virginia, or Brazil. Or even a whole continent, like Africa.' "
Hunter had no particular interest in foreign affairs at the time, but he and his friends began to pray for Uganda, a place that came to mind, he told me, because Idi Amin was in the news at the time. Soon, they met an Anglican missionary from Uganda, and launched a fund-raising campaign for the Mengo Hospital, in Kampala. Hunter continued to pray, and one day, at an airport, he met a young woman who turned out to be the daughter of Andrew Young, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She introduced him to Young, who helped open many doors in Africa, and eventually Hunter was so well connected that he became an intermediary in getting Nelson Mandela to preside over peace talks for Burundi in 2000.
Hunter brought Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the former African rebel who became Uganda's President, and other key Ugandan leaders into prayer groups. When Uganda's Parliament took up a bill last year that would have punished some homosexual acts with death, Hunter and his friends in the Fellowship felt they had the standing to urge the proposed measure's defeat. Museveni appointed a commission that studied the matter and then recommended that the bill be withdrawn. Using similar connections, in 2001 the Fellowship arranged a secret meeting at the Cedars between the warring leaders Joseph Kabila, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, who later signed a peace agreement.
Even friends of the Fellowship, however, acknowledge that the group has made itself vulnerable to unfriendly assessments, because its insistent secrecy and Coe's indiscriminate outreach to leaders of all kinds raise legitimate questions of accountability. An old friend of Coe's, the late Washington lawyer Jim Bell, a key figure in the early Fellowship, once said of Coe's willful political naïveté, "Doug has chosen to be a political eunuch," a posture that enabled him to befriend, in the name of Jesus, such men as the Somalian dictator Siad Barre.
Coe met Barre in 1980, and in 1983, when he arranged a multi-nation Africa trip for several Fellowship associates, he put Somalia on the itinerary. Coe thought it would be helpful to include a member of Congress in the entourage, and, at the last minute, he asked Chuck Grassley, then a new Republican senator from Iowa, to join. Kent Hotaling, a Coe associate who was on the trip, says that Grassley asked Coe, "What do you want me to do when I get there?"
"Just talk about the Senate group that you're part of, and how people meeting around Jesus, it helps them work out their differences, and that we're coming in the name of Jesus for friendship," Coe told Grassley. Hotaling says that Grassley said just that, and nothing more. "There was nothing from Doug that instructed him to talk politics. He didn't talk politics." But Hotaling acknowledges that Barre almost certainly inferred a political meaning in the visit. Somalia had been a client state of the Soviet Union, until a Soviet-backed coup in neighboring Ethiopia shifted the East-West balance in the Horn of Africa and left Somalia without a patron. No U.S. senator had ever visited Somalia, and the fact that Grassley had been sent by Doug Coe rather than by Ronald Reagan was a distinction Barre was unlikely to make. History hardly required Doug Coe's intervention—Somalia and the United States believed they needed each other at the time—but Coe cannot be surprised at the accusation of complicity in the devastation that Barre later brought to the country. "Somalia wanted guns," Sharlet wrote, and the Fellowship "helped it get guns."
In 1997, Coe travelled to Sudan with a former Republican congressman named Mark Siljander, and met with the country's notorious President, Omar al-Bashir. The Clinton Administration had broken diplomatic ties with Bashir, who had declared Sharia law and undertaken a program of religious cleansing which killed two million Christians and animists, and made refugees of four million more. According to the evangelical magazine World, Siljander may have taken Coe's Jesus-only, no-questions-asked ecumenism too seriously. Siljander wrote a book called "A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide," in which he asserted that Bashir was "a bad man" in the eyes of the West, but "in the eyes of God, as near as I could understand it, he was just another human being, with frailties and failings like the rest of us." In 2005, the F.B.I. began to investigate Siljander's work for a Sudan-based Islamic charity with terrorist ties, and this July Siljander pleaded guilty to felony counts of acting as an unregistered foreign agent and of obstruction of justice. He faces a possible fifteen-year prison sentence.
Just a few minutes after I met Coe that first evening at the Cedars, he told me, "Most of my friends are bad people. They all broke the Ten Commandments, as far as I can tell." He went on to cite the crimes of such Biblical leaders as King David and the apostle Paul, which was his way of saying that judgment is God's work, not his. That is his explanation, or rationalization, for the spiritual friendships that he and others in the Fellowship have formed over the years with such men as Indonesia's Suharto, or General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, the Honduran strongman. On one occasion, the Fellowship decided to invite Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the President of Equatorial Guinea, to the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Obiang, who came to power in 1979 by leading a coup that resulted in the execution of his tyrannical uncle, has been called the worst dictator in Africa. When a State Department official asked why the Fellowship would be inviting such a tyrant to a prayer breakfast, Coe says, the answer was "That's why we invited him." In the event, Obiang did come to the breakfast, but little in his record suggests that his association with the Fellowship has moderated his authoritarian style. Holding others accountable for their actions is a tenet of Christian duty as old as the Church, but Coe says that he does not judge. "Jesus even met with the Devil," he said.
Members of the group concede that some people may seek their fellowship for reasons other than a wish to grow in Jesus. In the early nineteen-nineties, a Russian media entrepreneur named Vladimir Gusinsky, who'd had a falling-out with Vladimir Putin, was looking West for new opportunities. He hired the public-relations firm APCO, which specializes in crisis management, to help introduce him in the United States. One of the APCO executives handling Gusinsky was Don Bonker, the former Democratic congressman, and an established figure within the Fellowship. Bonker brought Gusinsky, a secular Jew, to the Cedars to meet Doug Coe. "We emerged from that meeting, and we were walking to the limo, and Gusinsky stopped me," Bonker recalls. "He said, 'That is an amazing man. I want to come back here and see him again.' "
Gusinsky attended the Prayer Breakfast the next year, and has missed only one of the events in the years since. In 1998, when Coe and a group of his close associates made a whirlwind trip through the former republics of the Soviet Union, meeting with leaders introduced by friends in the international network, Gusinsky provided a 727 with a full crew to transport them. It is impossible, ultimately, to know the motivation of someone like Gusinsky, who comes from a political culture in which proximity to power is everything. The Fellowship meant entrée to a rarefied circle, and the prospect of shaking hands with a President. "There's this whole Washington phenomenon, related to access to power and the aphrodisiac of power," Michael Cromartie, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, says. "You bring an oligarch over to the Cedars and he says, 'Ah, these are my kind of people. They have pictures on the wall of all these Presidents, they seem to be in touch with power, they know people with money, this will help my business.' "
If international dignitaries view the Prayer Breakfast as a reliable means of unofficial access, some Presidents—most notably, Bill Clinton—have been more accommodating than others. "Bill and Hillary got it," says Doug Burleigh, who is Coe's son-in-law, and a key figure in the Fellowship. "They came early, they'd meet with the groups early and do a photo op with 'em, hug 'em. They got what this was about." George W. Bush, on the other hand, made it clear to Coe and the others from the start that he'd show up at the Prayer Breakfast but not to expect much more. "George came late, and left early—he did every year," Burleigh says. "Now, I appreciate his honesty. He told Doug, 'You know, this isn't my thing.' "After Bush's first, perfunctory appearance, Clinton telephoned Coe to console him. "He didn't badmouth Bush, he gave it the best spin," Burleigh recalls. "He said, 'Hey, Bush'll get it. He doesn't understand what this thing's about.' "
In 1984, Coe was introduced to a man named Michael Timmis, a wealthy recent convert, eager to do God's work, who had heard that Doug Coe was the man to see. Timmis was a hard-charging overachiever from a working-class Irish Catholic family in Detroit, who had made a fortune in high-risk business transactions. Along the way, he had alienated his wife and two children, and his born-again experience had not helped matters at home. Coe told him that he needed to go back to Detroit and learn how to love his family. Timmis was a bit put off, but the two men stayed in touch, and Coe eventually offered to "disciple" Timmis—to become his spiritual mentor.
One morning a year later, Timmis found his seventeen-year-old daughter, Laura, dead in the garage of the family's Grosse Pointe home. She had committed suicide, after an argument with her parents about skipping school. Timmis's grief was compounded by his fear of also losing his son, Mike, Jr., a troubled college senior whose estrangement seemed irreparable. Coe met the young man during an Easter visit to Grosse Pointe, and got him to promise to visit the Cedars and help to computerize the Fellowship's records. After graduation, his parents held him to his promise, and Mike, Jr., reluctantly headed to Arlington for a week's stay. Four days later, Coe telephoned Timmis to tell him that Mike, Jr., had found the Lord, and was determined to become a missionary in Africa. Timmis and his son reconciled, and Timmis offered Coe any sum he named. No need for that, Coe said, but he added that there was a ministry in Washington that could use some help. "Why don't you help those guys?" Coe asked.
"Those guys" were Coe's sons, David and Tim, and their friend Marty Sherman. The Coe brothers and Sherman had been schoolmates at James Madison University, where they were part of a fraternity for believers, and tried to model themselves after the early Christians described in the Book of Acts. After graduating, they apprenticed with the Fellowship, and saw a chance to branch out when the house on C Street became available.
The place had been built as a convent for St. Peter's Catholic Church, in 1880, and had taken on many incarnations since, most recently as an outreach center for a Hawaii-based ministry called Youth with a Mission (known as Y-WAM), which was looking for a buyer. The house was technically owned by a Y-WAM entity-of-convenience foundation called the C Street Center, and Timmis acquired the house by purchasing the foundation. The District of Columbia allowed the new owner to keep the C Street Center name on the city records, which is why, when the scandal broke, reporters couldn't determine the property's real owner.
The lay ministers used the place as a base for their contact work on the Hill, which became a significantly richer mission field when the Republican revolution of 1994 brought a huge crop of Christian conservatives to town. Among them was Steve Largent, the new congressman from Oklahoma, who was greeted by Tim Coe and Sherman soon after he moved into his office in the Cannon Building. A friendship developed, and, when Largent heard about Sherman's frat house for Jesus, he was curious. When the rules governing congressional travel allowance were changed, enabling weekly commutes to the home district, senators and congressmen scrambled for part-time quarters in Washington, some sharing apartments with other members, some bunking in their offices. The C Street house, with its dormlike rooms upstairs, suggested itself as an obvious option.
Largent, Coburn, Wamp, and Doyle were the first to move in, and they were soon joined by Bart Stupak. (Over the years, the roster of residents included Republican Senators Sam Brownback, John Thune, and Jim DeMint, and Kansas Representative Jerry Moran, as well as John Ensign.) Prospective housemates were usually recruited from the prayer groups. Until the recent scandals, wives of the C Street residents were generally enthusiastic supporters of the living arrangement. "My wife doesn't live here in Washington, she lives at home, and she loves the fact that I'm surrounded by a group of men that know her," Coburn says. "She knows that if I start wandering, Marty or Mike Doyle or Bart Stupak or Heath, they're gonna say, 'Hey, what's the deal?' "
The Tuesday supper was the only formal meal served to the residents, although Jim DeMint could be found most mornings making his way downstairs, in pajama bottoms and T-shirt, to fetch his breakfast of tea, Oreos, and dried cranberries. The men's private quarters were strikingly modest. Stupak had one of the better rooms, a corner space on the third floor, with a private bath, but DeMint slept in a space just big enough for his bed, and hung his clothes in a closet down the hall.
There was shoptalk, but politicking was avoided, a custom that proved useful during moments of peak partisanship on the Hill, such as Bill Clinton's impeachment or last year's health-care debate. "It's hard to hate somebody that you're praying with," Coburn says. Heath Shuler says, "This is really the only time that I see the barriers completely knocked down between the two political parties. They love one another, they care about one another. Now, sometimes, that changes. They'll walk out the door and get on C-SPAN and try to win an Emmy, and that changes. But, truly and sincerely, there is that love there."
Much of the talk in the house was deeply personal. Chip Pickering spoke of his unhappy marriage, and made it clear that he meant to end it, even as he was reminded (vainly) of his marriage vows. Mark Sanford never lived at the house but did pray with the group often enough that his wife, Jenny, sought the group's counsel when she learned of her husband's affair. Those cases became famous failures, but the men at C Street contend that their support group has mostly worked, as on the morning in the spring of 2000 when each of them received an urgent summons to Stupak's home in Menominee, Michigan. Stupak's youngest son, Bart, Jr., had shot and killed himself after a high-school graduation party at the family's home. "There was no decision to be made. I mean, we had to get to Bart and just be there to support him as soon as we could," Largent says. Tom Coburn was at Stupak's side when he viewed his son's body, in the mortuary, and other C Street men helped to repair the damage to the wall caused by the bullet. "We had a contingent of ninety members of Congress come to that funeral," Coburn recalls. "And what they got to see was something that they hadn't seen in a long time: Here's three Republicans and two Democrats lovin' a brother through a problem. They came because they knew what we had."
Soon after the Pickering story broke, an exodus from the C Street house began. John Thune, the Republican from South Dakota, who is said to have Presidential aspirations, was the first to leave, in July of 2009. A group of congresswomen who used the house for a Wednesday-morning prayer session found a new venue, and a moderate Democrat who had been considering a move into the house pulled back. John Ensign asked his housemates' forgiveness, and left, but the taint remained. Stupak and Doyle, pressured by constituents and the press, had moved out by the end of the year. That left only Coburn, DeMint, Wamp, Shuler, and Moran—conservatives who were in little danger of being punished by voters for staying. The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee were said to be scrutinizing Ensign's dealings with Doug Hampton for possible impropriety. The House Office of Congressional Ethics, however, had decided that the residents' rental rates were appropriate for the boarding-house arrangement, and did not recommend that any action be taken. District officials revised the house's tax status, removing much of its exemption.
This spring, a group of core associates gathered at the Cedars and debated whether the time had come to alter the Fellowship's rigid policy of secretiveness. Some in the group had long argued for greater transparency and accountability, if for no other reason than to counter the darker conjectures about the movement. By most accounts, this view prevailed, despite Coe's reservations. Change will almost certainly be minor, and come slowly. A Web site has been designed, and is scheduled to be launched this month.
Marty Sherman and the Coe brothers attended the meeting, and began by apologizing for the embarrassment their program had caused. There has been talk of closing down the C Street house, and even of selling it. "If it has reached the point where the reporting on C Street has been so negative that it becomes how people identify what we do, and what we stand for, then, yeah, it should shut down," Don Bonker, the former Democratic congressman, says. "I've just never thought it was a good idea for people to take up residence. And now, with the negative reporting, I think that is having an injurious effect on the whole movement, on the Fellowship, and what it represents." Closing the place would be easy enough to do, given that Mike Timmis and Marty Sherman sit on the board of the foundation that owns it.
In the meantime, when Congress is in session the Tuesday-night gatherings continue, still attended by members who no longer live in the house. During the supper accountability session, according to Tom Coburn, "a question that'll be asked about every four weeks is, Is anybody here having an affair?" ♦
*Correction, February 11, 2011: The row house was built in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth century, as originally stated.


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Roles in scrum are Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team. A user story should also break down into smaller pieces called tasks. A task seems to have four phases, namely, definition, assignment, implementation, and following.
Who should do what in Scrum about tasks? Is it the responsibility of scrum master to update remaining hours of a task, or is it the responsibility of the developer (scrum team)? Should developers assign tasks to themselves or is it the responsibility of scrum master accompanied by product owner?

subset: commoncrawl


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Corporate Social Responsibility
Sustainability is one of the core values firmly anchored in Sartorius's corporate culture. It is our primary entrepreneurial responsibility to offer our customers attractive products and solutions. Innovation as well as strategic and operating excellence are the keys to accomplishing this mission. To us, sustainability means that we pursue our corporate objectives from a long-term perspective while clearly addressing social and ecological concerns. We believe that proactive administration of our social and ecological duties is not a means to compensate for our economic actions, but rather is one of the key drivers of our success.
CSR Presentation (2.5 MB)
Sustainable Corporate Management
Through sustainable corporate management, Sartorius aims to further increase its profitability and create long-lasting value. more
Ecological Sustainability
Sustainable production and sustainable products are the foundation of our long-term economic success. more
Social Responsibility
Sartorius concentrates its social commitment activities on areas relating to its core business. more


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Although it is shown here sitting in a Michigan junkyard surrounded by other old rusty Mopars, this 1960 Dodge Dart doesn't look too far gone. Judging from the chrome side trim this was the entry level Seneca model, the lowest Dart sold that year. It is anyone's guess why this old Dart ended up in the junkyard, but this Dodge's low model designation and four doors couldn't have helped the car's chances of avoiding it.
(Photo Credit: gab482)


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Career Imploded
This is a re-posting of a blog from February,18,
Since the posting of this blog, the Food Network
"I was wrong to exaggerate in statements related to my experiences regarding
It saddens me that his culinary career is
Oh my God,
Today I opened my Internet edition of the "St Petersburg Times" and saw the
It seems that the local restaurant, Ooze and Schmooze might never even cook
I am an avid Food Network freak. I love the likes of Anthony Bourdain ( I have
Taken from his website:
"Robert's philosophy is: If you are going to do
In my local town (st. Petersburg, Florida), he was to open the a fore mentioned restaurant in a very romantic and waterfront area of the city. Being near the world famous and well-received Vinoy hotel, and situated a
Magazines like Bon Appetit, Gourmet and maybe even Zagats' might book
Now, this area is already known for it record days of sunshine and lightning.
But something like this in an area striving and yearning for positive
Other tales have come up to test and tarnish this chef. Another was his
There is the fable of cleaning and re-doing the plates of chef's Tom Keller,
While Robert was here to promote the bistro awhile back, he was very inviting and
I hope a lot of this gets cleaned up fast. Irvine seems like a chef with a


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Web elf, The Rachel Maddow Show more
I help maintain the web presence of The Rachel Maddow Show. Let me know if something isn't working right.
I started working in news by booking guests for the old Court TV during Clinton impeachment. Eventually I moved to the web site there and came to msnbc.com to be the "chat producer" during the 2000 presidential campaign season. The idea at the time was for the audience to hang out in the chat room and famous newsmakers would pass through and say newsworthy things. who knew back then that we'd just have to wait ten years for Twitter to catch on?
Contributor to The Rachel Maddow Show


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chands needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 75 designs submitted by 15 freelance designers.
A new software company wants to tell their story with your logo.
Should be Clean, Simple yet Exciting. Read the brief for more...
We are creators of a unique software product and services that allows visual collaboration, knowledge capture and reuse via visual design and modeling.
Our customers are mostly individual professionals from various industries.
Our mantra: Share, Reuse, Innovate
- Logo in Illustrator (Vector) format. - White and black backgroundsStyle: Clean, simple
Ideally the logo should align itself with (some) of the following attributes.
- Creating Synergies,
- Innovation, Creative, Dynamic
- Human, People friendly (non-techy)
- Pushing the limits, Big ideas
- Exciting
Flashy graphics
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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Translation Disclaimer
Welcome to the Animal Shelter at the City of Berkeley, CA. We are part of the City Manager's Office.
The City of Berkeley's Animal Care Services (BACS) is a division of the Office of the City Manager. We provide a wide range of services to our cities' residents and their pets.We provide field services, seven days a week, to the cities of Berkeley and Albany. These services include the enforcement of city ordinances related to animals, removal of killed or injured wildlife, impoundment of stray pets, and investigation of animal-related neglect, cruelty, nuisance and bite cases.At our shelter, we house domestic animals from the cities of Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, and Piedmont. We provide not only a safe haven for these homeless pets, but also adoption services, advice on animal-related topics, lost and found pet reports, and free or low-cost spay/neuter vouchers for Berkeley residents' dogs and cats.


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Pond & Lake Q & A
Q: The water in my pond is very cloudy. I have some bass, bluegill and koi in the pond so I don't want to use anything that will harm them. Any suggestions on how to clear this up? – Aaron of Illinois
A: The cloudiness of the water in your pond can come from many sources, such as heavy runoff from rain to constant sediments that fall into and around the pond. There is an element that causes cloudy water that many seem to overlook and it relates to a couple species of fish.
I've talked with some of you in the past and you've said one day the water looked clear and the next day it was cloudy. In quite a few cases the only factor that changed from one day to the next was adding either koi or catfish.
Koi Or Catfish Can Cause Cloudy Water?
Yes, these species of fish are bottom dwellers and love to stir up the bottom of the pond. Before adding these fish into your pond just understand that if you want clear water this may not be the best option. In a large pond or lake with catfish or koi it is almost impossible to clear up the water. The only way to do so would be to remove the catfish and koi altogether.
POND TALK: Do you have any koi or catfish in your large pond or lake?
Filed under: Pond & Lake, Water Quality | Tagged: cloudy water, murky water, Water Quality |


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Optimum Performance: Hydration all the more important during summer months | NOLA.com
- Updated: June 29, 2013
Now that summer is officially upon us, we Louisianans can usually expect heat waves that will last until fall. Parents of young athletes, let me ask you a question: Are your children protected from the heat when on the field? I've already discussed the dangers the sun can bring in regards to skin protection, but let's evaluate its effects from an internal standpoint.
Studies show the body is made up of roughly 60 percent water, and it needs plenty of it to survive. The heat can compromise this survival by inducing dehydration, when the body loses more water than it is taking in, subsequently leading to hypohydration, a decrease in body water count. Recent findings witnessed that even when hydration sources were plentiful on the field, young athletes still suffered from the effects of hypohydration.
In fact, according to an article published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism evaluating dehydration levels in young soccer players, "roughly 90 percent of the players who began exercising under warm weather conditions were hypohydrated, and replenishing liquids did not have an effect on athletes who were already dehydrated," meaning players faced a cognitive and performance disadvantage.
In lab and field studies it was proven that "water losses greater than two percent of body weight significantly impaired endurance exercise and mental performance in hot environments." This research has never included young athletes, however, as up until recently most studies were used subjecting well-trained adults, some done under controlled conditions.
Researchers note that during a football camp evaluated for player's hydration levels, children both arrived on sight and remained hypohydrated throughout their stay. The same was found in young soccer players examined.
This means that players were not sufficiently hydrated at home, showing parents can unknowingly send their child into play with a drawback. Made aware of this fact, these players were given sufficient liquid intake. It was noted, "simple intervention plans enhanced hydration status in just under two days."
However, despite the fact that there was a 25 percent reduction in the prevalence of dehydration, a resounding 60 percent of players remained hypohydrated. What does this mean? "Drinking according to thirst did not lead to successful fluid replenishment," according to researchers. Urine samples of the players confirmed this, showing that 88.7 percent of them were hypohydrated.
So, how does a parent prevent their child from succumbing to dehydration? First, keep your young athlete hydrated before activity. Most children remained dehydrated because they were so before ever stepping foot on the field.
The Mayo Clinic suggests beginning hydration proceedings the night before strenuous exercise. To determine if one is adequately hydrated examine the urine. Clear, dilute urine means that person is sufficiently hydrated. Drink one to three cups of water before activity and make sure to replenish both during and after, as well. Be careful, however, because overconsumption of water does exist. Too much water can cause bloating and discomfort, and in extreme cases, a condition known as hyponatremia, when blood sodium is too low.
Consider eating your way to hydration. Fruits and vegetables as are great snacks to consume both before and after play, as they are high in water content. For example, watermelon contains a whopping 141 grams of water per cubed cup.
Interestingly enough, the same journal published reports indicating that "chicken-noodle soup ingested 45 minutes before exercise increased ad libitum (at one's pleasure) water intake during 90 minutes of steady-state exercise compared with an equal volume of water without concurrently raising total urine output." Remarkable.
Hydration should be taken seriously, and maintaining it should be a top priority for any parent regarding their child. Take heed in warm weather, and note that medical attention should be sought, when dehydration becomes severe, inducing bloody stool, diarrhea, fever, vomiting, irritability, or drowsiness.
In most cases an IV administered medically will help an individual regain proper hydration levels, but severe dehydration should not be taken lightly, as this condition could result in death if left untreated. Don't worry, parents. Prevention is easy; it's just a matter of consistency.
via Optimum Performance: Hydration all the more important during summer months | NOLA.com.


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Hello, running windows 7 enterprise 32 bit with outlook 2010.
Within outlook there is an option to "upgrade" your search which sends you to a windows search 4.0 page for vista sp1.
I cant seem to find one for windows 7 , am I going mad? :P
Results 1 to 10 of 10
Thread: windows search 4.0
Similar Threads


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VoltageSpike needed a new button or icon design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 22 designs submitted by 9 freelance designers.
We need toolbar icons that convey that the following"
Compress files (on and off)
Encrypt files (on and off)
Encrypt Email (on and off)
Message Lock
Desired Color Scheme:
Desired Style:
The icons will need to look good scaled down to 32x32.
Accepted File Formats:
.ico, .gif, illustrator files
Hi and thanks for reading this.
We are a small software company with an email encryption and zip compression application. We would like you to design us 3 icons (2 variations each) that convey the following:
1. Compress file attachments (function on, and off off)
2. Encrypt file attachments (on and off)
3. Encrypt the email (on and off).
Vista styling is preferred, but we're open to anything that most clearly communicates these functions.
Besides the adobe illustrator files, I'd like to get the icons in ready to use format.
The icons will need to scale down to 32x32.
I've been all over internet scouring icon sites, so I generally know whats out there. We haven't seen anything that exactly addresses these functions as a group.
Good luck, ask questions.
We really need these icons quickly, so the sooner you get your entry in, the better. I reserve the right to close the contest early.
I'm generally open to paying you via virtually any method, including Moneybookers, as long as the fees are reasonable.


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by DEIDRE WENGEN AND LEN LEAR
When peering into the new storefront at 7150 Germantown Ave., some might say that Mt. Airy has gone to the dogs. And if Tina Grello, owner of Oh So Pretty Pet Supplies and Grooming Salon, has anything to say about it, that would be a good thing. Grello brings her years of expertise to the Mt. Airy store's location, where she provides the local animal community with a wide variety of services ranging from basic grooming to exclusive pet products and spa-like pampering.
Tina, 36, grew up in Bethlehem and attended Eastern College on the Main Line, where she earned a degree in psychology. Now a resident of Wyndmoor, the thin, short-haired, fit-looking animal lover was employed as a social worker for five years at the Center in the Park, a facility for the elderly in Germantown.
After that, Tina spent some dog days working in restaurants but did volunteer animal rescue work in her spare time, helping to find loving homes for abandoned and homeless dogs and cats. She provided foster care for as many as eight dogs at one time. In March of 2003, her love for animals prompted her to open the Oh So Pretty dog grooming salon at 614 S. 3rd St. in Queen Village.
Why did this tail-ented young woman go from working with senior citizens of the human kind to four-legged citizens of the canine kind? "I don't really think it's that much of a stretch," explained Grello. "Before, I was helping people, and now we are helping people to help their animals. And that does give comfort to people as well. I have found that my background in psychology and social work definitely helps in this line of work."
Tina, who has no human children, lived in Mt. Airy for several years and then moved to Wyndmoor last year with her three rescue dogs — Zeke, 5, a Shepherd-Chow mix; Teegan, 4, a Cocker Spaniel-Lhasa Apso mix; and Jolie, 4, a Beagle-Shepherd mix. (The business is named for Jolie, whose name means "pretty" in French.) Large pictures of all three hang on a store wall.
Tina originally had no intention of opening a second grooming salon. However, after moving to Wyndmoor she could not find a groomer in the immediate area for her dogs. (Mt. Airy Animal Hospital, which now makes regular referrals to Tina, had a groomer at one time, but that service was stopped last year.)
"I bought my house in Wyndmoor last year through Elfant-Wissahickon," she said. "When I explained to them my problem finding a groomer and mentioned that I myself was a groomer, they told me about this building here being vacant." Grello liked the building at 7150 Germantown Ave., which was previously occupied by Reese's Auto Tags. She was able to work out a deal and opened the salon at the end of March, where she is clearly barking up the right tree.
The salon currently caters primarily to cats and dogs, but will care for any type of animal if the opportunity arises. Some of the typical treatments include baths, hair cuts, manicures and ear cleaning. The caring staff works to provide customers with exactly what they are looking for, no matter how strange the request may seem. "We do a lot of fun things," said Grello. "We have quite a few owners right now that are really into their dogs having Mohawks."
Unlike her other location in Queen Village, Grello's Mt. Airy site functions as a retail store as well as a grooming salon. She sells non-chemically treated products that are proven safe for all animals. "I love the whole natural, organic, preserving-the-environment thing," said Grello, who makes her tastes evident by wearing relaxed clothing and donning a hip silver eyebrow piercing. "I wanted to bring those natural products here for animals."
Oh So Pretty offers a variety of organic treats, food and cat litter. Even some of the dog toys provide owners with fun, healthy choices for their favorite active canines. Brightly colored rings and shapes made from the loofah vegetable, a member of the pumpkin family, are perfect for playing 'Fetch' but also offer numerous doggy dental benefits. All grooming supplies sold in the store are safe, soap-free products that Grello and her staff recommend and use personally.
And if you are the type of person who takes your pet for walks by the Wissahickon, make sure to stop by the store and check out the animal-friendly water bottles and adorable jogging jerseys. Most importantly, Grello wants to give her Mt. Airy/Chestnut Hill customers exactly what they are looking for. If she does not have a product or toy stocked, she will make sure to find it."
Grello, an avid animal lover, explained "I've always had a dog my whole life, and I've been working with dogs since I was really young. My mom trained German Shepherds, so I've always been around animals and my knowledge just kind of developed over time."
One thing that many pet owners bristle at is the cost of grooming. At Oh So Pretty, the cost of grooming a dog may be $30 to $50 or even more, based on the size of the dog, the type of fur, whether or not it's matted from lack of regular brushing and other factors. How does any professional groomer arrive at his/her prices?
"Most people have no idea how time-consuming it is," explained Tina, who attended a dog grooming school and also spent countless hours observing professional groomers before opening her first salon. "Even a small dog like a Maltese or a West Highland Terrier will take about two hours to do properly. It's 15 or 20 minutes for shampoo and prep work, 20 minutes for a bath, at least 15 to 20 minutes for a blow-dry and about one hour for a haircut. Downtown I had one standard Poodle whose owner wanted a show cut. That grooming took four-and-a-half to five hours."
And people who think that dog-tired groomers are making barrels of money are seriously mistaken. "A groomer can only do five dogs a day at the most," said Tina. "People who have not done it cannot imagine how physically exhausting it is. I know another groomer who recently told me she had groomed six dogs the previous day and that she would 'never do that again."
Tina, whose team also includes groomer Kelly Kirwan and trainer Alexa Karaoulis of Mt. Airy, constantly emphasizes the importance of kindness and patience in not stressing out the animals left in her care. In fact, she does no advertising and takes the money that would normally be in her advertising budget and uses it to provide free grooming to animals in area shelters. Her business has come mostly from referrals and pamphlets left in area businesses and handed out in dog parks.
"My goal is not to make money hand-over-fist," said Tina. "I am not here for the people but for the dogs … But I know that if you are happy with what we did, you'll tell 10 people. If you are unhappy with what we did, you'll tell 20 people. So I have to make sure you are happy."
For more information, call 214-242-2929 or visit www.ohsopretty.net.


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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Ten members of the Harvard class of 2012 were honored at the annual Senior Letterwinners' Dinner, held Wednesday night at the Murr Center. Keith Wright of the men's basketball team was presented with the William J. Bingham Award as Harvard's outstanding male athlete and softball pitcher Rachel Brown took home the Radcliffe Prize as Harvard's outstanding female athlete.
Throughout his four years, Wright was a starter and key player on a Harvard team that upended the traditional powers within the Ivy League and repositioned the Crimson at the top of the Ancient Eight—and often in the national spotlight. With his All-America caliber play as a two-time All-Ivy selection and captain, he leaves Lavietes Pavilion as just the second Ivy League Player of the Year in Harvard men's basketball history. Most notably, he captained the Crimson to the first and second Ivy League championships in program history. He helped Harvard win 84 games—including 40 in Ivy League play—both four-year records for a class and achieve the first national ranking school history.
During his career, his Crimson teams dispatched of big-conference names like Florida State, Colorado and, in what became an annual tradition in his four years, Boston College. Buoyed by a defeat of 20th-ranked Seminoles, basketball won the 2011 Battle 4 Atlantis tournament over a field that included defending national champion Connecticut, and Wright was voted the event's most valuable player. Wright and his classmates led the Crimson to a second straight 12-2 Ivy record as seniors and ended their careers where no Harvard players had been in more than half a century—March Madness. Along the way, they took campus by storm, making a Harvard basketball ticket one of the toughest in town and taking all of us along for an unforgettable ride.
Brown took the softball program to new heights, including back-to-back Ivy League championships as well as the program's first appearance in the NCAA Championships Regional Final this season. She has been the unanimous choice as Ivy League Pitcher of the Year each of the last two seasons and is one of only two Harvard softball players to be recognized as a four-time first team All-Ivy League pick.
Brown graduates as the program's career leader in wins, saves, starts, appearances, strikeouts, shutouts and opponent batting average.
The Francis H. Burr Scholarship, which is the oldest of all the athletic awards at Harvard and recognizes one male and one female athlete for all-around excellence, went to Robert Newell of the swimming & diving team and Melanie Baskind from women's lacrosse and soccer. Newell was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist and a Phi Beta Kappa selection and received recognition as a John Harvard Scholar, which goes to the top five percent of each class. The only near "blemish" on his academic record was a single A-minus in his freshman year as he graduates with a 3.99 grade point average in human evolutionary biology with a secondary field in Earth and planetary sciences.
Baskind was a two-sport star at Harvard, captaining both lacrosse and soccer teams while earning an astounding seven All-Ivy League selections. She'll spend next year in Africa, where, fittingly, she'll give her time both in athletic and public health endeavors as part of the Coaches Across Continents program and in AIDS testing at an orphanage in Kenya.
Baskind was a multiple winner during the evening as she also took home the Mary Paget Prize, which recognizes contribution to women's athletics. Baskind's impact went far beyond a list of individual honors which says a lot for an Ivy League Player of the Year honoree. In this era of specialization, it is relatively rare for a student-athlete to make collegiate teams in two different sports. To perform at such a high level is an even more unique accomplishment, and to be elected captain by two sets of teammates is perhaps the ultimate sign of respect from one's peers.
The Harvard-Radcliffe Foundation for Women's Athletics (HRFWA) Prize, presented to Harvard's top female scholar-athlete, was awarded to Kirsten Jorgensen from cross country and track & field. Jorgensen will work withPartners in Health in Peru next year before attending medical school. She is interested in public health and policy, particularly in relation to the practice of medicine along the physical frontiers of the United States. She explored that topic in her undergraduate thesis and has hands-on experience, as a former glacier guide and first responder in her home state of Alaska.
Magdalena Robak of the track & field team received the Arthur L. Boland award, established in 2010 for a graduating senior who will attend medical school. A neurobiology concententrater recognized as a Harvard College Scholar, she was accepted to six medical schools and is already an EMT.
Alisa Baumgartner of the women's ice hockey team was given the John P. Fadden Award as the senior student who has overcome physical adversity to make a contribution to his or her team. She appeared in 89 games before being voted captain by her teammates for this season. Unfortunately, she suffered a serious shoulder injury requiring several surgical procedures which left her unable to practice or compete for much of the year.
Awarded to the senior athlete who has made the most outstanding contribution to Harvard and its neighboring communities, the Francis J. Toland Community Service Award went to Eric Kroshus of the men's ice hockey team. Kroshus has already made his professional ice hockey debut with the Wheeling Nailers of the East Coast Hockey League. He was a leader in community service throughout his time at Harvard and has transformed the service culture on his team, setting a standard for future classes to follow. He was a driving force behind the men's hockey team's "adoption" through the Friends of Jaclyn Program of Nathan Potvin, a 13-year-old hockey player from New Hampshire who often travels to Boston to receive treatment for brain cancer.
He began the Special Teams program to bring mentally handicapped community members to Harvard hockey games and organized team participation in volunteering with the Harvard Square Homeless shelter, a rink visit for a leukemia patient and an on-ice game with the East Coast Jumbos, a team of autistic children. In addition, he takes part in the Keylatch mentoring program for Boston adolescents and has volunteered for Boston Healthcare for the Homeless.
A neurobiology concentrator, Kroshus has won grants and awards for his extensive research, which sure to make an impact on those around him by addressing topics such as stem cells, multiple sclerosis and stroke.
Allison Lee of the track & field team earned the Getchell Award, which is presented to the top graduating team manager. When injury cut short Lee's collegiate athletic career, it did not mean the end of her tenure as a member of the program as she continued to put in long hours in support of her teammates.
Bryan Panzano of the wrestling program took home this year's Reardon Award, which is presented annually to the senior varsity male athlete who exemplifies the qualities of excellent scholarship, character, leadership, and athletic ability. The award is named in honor of Jack Reardon of the Class of 1960, who served as Harvard's director of athletics from 1977 to 1990.
Panzano has been described by his coach as a selfless individual in a selfish sport, and by his own admission he began competing not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to spend time with his older brother whom he admired so much. Those same qualities have allowed him to flourish at Harvard as a leader on his team and in the classroom, as he will graduate this weekend with a 3.828 GPA in romance languages and literature. Panzano was often asked to take on challenges much bigger than himself, as he has competed at four different weight classes throughout his career, including three this season alone.


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Acciona said its joint venture with South African construction group Aveng and not-for-profit investor Soul City Broad Based Empowerment Company (SCBEC) had been awarded 212MW of projects. This comprises a 138MW wind farm and a 74MW photovoltaic solar plant.
The Gouda wind farm will be built in the municipality of Drakenstein, Western Cape Province (in the west of the country). It will be equipped with 46 3MW Acciona turbines, totalling 138MW of installed capacity. Construction work will start in 2013 for completion in 2014.
Vestas meanwhile made a statement yesterday that it had been appointed preferred supplier for five of the projects, with the orders covering a total capacity of 297MW.


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2015 Ford Mustang unveiled by Richard "The King" Petty at PRI
Chief Mustang nameplate engineer Dave Pericak will be on-hand to answer questions
If you weren't already aware, the all-new, sixth-generation 2015 Ford Mustang has swept the world, literally. Good news is you can learn even more about the Ford Mustang at the Performance Racing Industry Trade show (PRI) in Indianapolis, Indiana December 12 - 14, 2013. Even better news, Ford is bringing with it NASCAR legend, and Ford Team owner, Richard Petty and chief Mustang nameplate engineer, Dave Pericak for a question and answer session.
As the most well-known and accomplished name in NASCAR history, Richard "The King" Petty, has 200 career wins and 7 NASCAR Championships under his belt. After 1,184 races, the most decorated driver in the history of NASCAR racing deserves to be the one to show the new generation of Mustang to fans at this year's show.
Answering all questions Mustang at PRI will be the man who has led the ongoing development of the fifth-generation and the creation of the sixth-generation, Dave Pericak. As the lead engineer for Mustang since mid-2008, Pericak is the man with all the knowledge.
Expect the 2015 Ford Mustang to be on display during PRI at the Ford Racing Performance Parts booth #1925/ #2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Richard Petty will be at the show Thursday, December 12, 2013 at 11am. Be there!


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Bulletin HASKINS & SELLS 11
A Year of Thirteen Months
ONE sees frequently nowadays refer-ence
to the agitation in favor of
changing the calendar so as to provide for
a division of the year into thirteen equal
months instead of the twelve unequal
months by which our time is measured. A
recent editorial in one of the leading daily
papers credited accountants with being
keenly in favor of the change. The editorial
failed, however, to point out the
basis for such preference.
There are always persons who are keen
for change. Many individuals would not
be deterred by a suggestion that they revise
the tariff. Any number might be found
who would be willing to frame a new federal
tax law. The person would indeed be
brave who would attempt to change the
calendar without long and careful consideration.
Those progressives who are keen for
change point out the benefits which would
be derived from having months of equal
duration. Mr. Moses B. Cotsworth, in a
pamphlet issued by The Pan American
Union, entitled "The Evolution of Calendars
and How to Improve Them," has the
following to say on the subject:


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Originally posted on path.org.
Guest contributors Dr. Carlos C. (Kent) Campbell and Bindiya Patel wrote this post to commemorate World Malaria Day. Kent is leader of our Malaria Control Program. Bindiya is a strategy officer at PATH.
Ending malaria is a priority at PATH, and we are proud to be a key contributor to an emerging global campaign that is intensifying the control of malaria illnesses and deaths around the world.
PATH's portfolio of malaria programs has grown exponentially since our first malaria projects were launched in the 1990s. The span of our program experience, expertise, and available technologies has expanded to meet the rising opportunity to stop transmission of malaria infections altogether.
PATH now employs 115 staff across a diverse portfolio of malaria projects, working with 29 countries and a combined annual budget of $79 million. We take a multipronged approach in fighting the disease through optimizing the use of current strategies and technologies, developing the next generation of tools, and working with countries to demonstrate how to rapidly bring down childhood and maternal deaths from malaria—with the ultimate goal of eliminating the disease community by community.
We can't stop at malaria control
Not only is PATH's goal to intensify the development of strategies and tools to reduce the burden of malaria and build toward the eventual elimination of the disease, our experiences over the years have shown us that this must be the long-term goal of all malaria programs, partners, and endemic countries.
Defeating malaria—and forever ending the well-documented risk of resurgence—is the only long-term goal. Some may argue that sustained control of the spread of malaria is more feasible or cheaper, but simply put, malaria control is not and cannot be an endpoint. Rather, it is part of the natural evolution of malaria programs as they move from an initial phase of scaling up efforts to achieving significant reductions in malaria illnesses and deaths and eventually clearing malaria infections in all people.
In addition, there is ample evidence demonstrating that when prevention measures are not maintained, resurgence of infection, illness, and death caused by the disease is inevitable. Attempting to maintain coverage gains short of elimination will both fail to progressively build on success and put us at risk of losing ground.
The challenge, and our work to meet it
Malaria elimination is an ambitious goal and the road ahead is certainly challenging. Many countries still have much work to do in order to scale up the delivery of mosquito nets and other lifesaving tools. PATH is supporting these countries as they scale up by optimizing the use of existing tools, providing the evidence needed to inform program policy and regulatory requirements for elimination, and building the human capacity and information network that is critical if countries are to achieve malaria-free status.
We are also working on innovative solutions like developing a novel semisynthetic artemisinin compound, the main ingredient in the most effective treatment for malaria, to stabilize the drug supply. We are developing point-of-care diagnostics to support elimination efforts and helping to build new tools, including vaccines, to help countries achieve malaria elimination with the goal of 18 to 20 million people living in malaria-free areas by 2020.
In addition, we have long-standing in-country malaria partnerships with more than a dozen countries. Together we are building evidence and informing the dialogue about malaria elimination.
Join us and end malaria
Our goal is to work with partners and national governments to strategically demonstrate that malaria-endemic countries can eliminate malaria infections and transmission. Realizing this feat would be ground-breaking for the global community—and would buoy the support and political commitment needed to help make malaria history.
Will you join us in committing to end malaria once and for all?


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Forever Freedom2Go®
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- Contains Glucosamine, Chondroitin & MSM
- Great Pomegranate taste!
- Packaged in a convenient, easy-to-carry pouch
Enjoy all the benefits of Forever Freedom® combined with the exotic flavor of Pomegranate, in a convenient, easy-to-carry pouch. Forever Freedom2Go® offers the great health benefits of our patented, stabilized Aloe Vera gel, plus Glucosamine, Chondroitin and MSM, and the sweet taste of antioxidant-rich Pomegranate juice.
Glucosamine Sulfate and Chondroitin Sulfate are two naturally occurring elements that have been shown to help maintain healthy joint function and mobility. Methyl Sulfonyl Methane (MSM) is a primary source of bio-available sulfur that the body needs to maintain healthy connective tissues and joint function. Glucosamine, Chondroitin and MSM combine to provide support for healthy joints.
Addthe antioxidant-rich properties of sweet-tasting Pomegranate juice (which contains more polyphenol antioxidants than red wine, green tea or blueberries) – and you have a delicious, winning combination! Not to mention, each daily serving is contained in a neat, easy-to-carry pouch, allowing you to just grab, tear open, and drink in the tasty benefits of Forever Freedom2Go®!
Forever Freedom2Go® is ready to drink anytime, anywhere - at your desk, on the trail, in the car, on the go. Just grab a pouch, tear at the notch, and drink in the tasty benefits!
For more information on Forever Freedom2Go® choose a link below:Forever Freedom2Go® Product Information
* Note: Product content, formulations and ingredients, published on this website, are based on U.S. laws and regulations, which may vary as actual products sold are in accordance with the importing country's local laws and regulations.


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The video made by a Lewisburg resident showing the voting machine malfunction in Union County got national media attention: the malfunction was listed as part of CNN.com's list of voting snags.
The mix-up also made Mother Jones' list of voting snafus, which you can see here.
Heres my problem with their coverage of this: I wouldn't say that it was voter suppression or some form of hacking as Mother Jones seems to suggest, it seems like a voting machine malfunction at its purest form.
Apparently, the membranes of many machines were malfunctioning and needed to be recalibrated.
It happened in Perry County as CNN says and in York County as well.
It seems like this was a technical issue that could have been putting votes for any candidate, it just happened to be calibrated to go from Obama to Romney.
What do you think?