Exit another fighting gen.

Michael A. Walsh

Lost in the inaugural hullabaloo was Tuesday’s news that President Obama has relieved Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the colorful and highly decorated Marine who’s been in charge of the crucial US Central Command, which oversees the various wars in the Middle East, since 2010.

Mattis is famous for his blunt style and blistering aphorisms — “be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet” was his clear-headed advice to the Marines he led during the treacherous Iraq War. He’ll retire from both CentCom and the Corps in March, several months short of his expected tour of duty.

ZUMA Press

A rising star — until now: Gen. Mattis greeting a friend while assuming a new command in 2006.

But why? Could it be that, as Obama prepares to cede Afghanistan back to the Taliban, the last thing he needs is an obstreperous general gumming up the surrender?

For an administration whose relationship with the military is, to put it mildly, fraught with tension, Mattis is yet another wall trophy, to go alongside the heads of Gen. Stanley McChrystal (fired in 2010 as the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan) and David Petraeus, who left CentCom to be buried alive at the CIA (and later resigned over the Paula Broadwell sex scandal).

Officially, the administration offers a nothing-to-see-here explanation for Mattis’ departure, noting that his tenure in the crucial job was about average for the post.

Maybe. But politics is at play here as well. The brusque Mattis apparently fell afoul of National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, an Obama apparatchik. Why? Because Mattis says things the Obama team doesn’t want to hear, especially about what might well become the next theater of operations — Iran.

Thinking two or three moves down the line, the hard-line Mattis was known for peppering his civilian superiors with uncomfortable questions: What happens in Iran when and if the nuclear threat is neutralized? What if we have to fight a conventional war with the mullahs? Then what?

The line between frank outspokenness and open insubordination is a narrow one, and under our system, even top-level officers must cede to civilian authority. President Harry Truman famously fired the Army’s top general, Douglas MacArthur, during the Korean War for trying to go over his head to Congress in his quest for total victory on the Korean peninsula.

But officers must be prepared to tell the politicians what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. Choking off discussion to satisfy policy preferences — as the Bush administration arguably did in the runup to the Iraq War — can only lead to disaster.

Similarly, generals should not be politicians. Even after winning World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower agonized about going into politics (for a long time, no one even knew which party he supported), and it’s long been a tradition in certain branches of the armed forces for officers to refrain from voting, lest they become politically invested.

But since the Clinton administration, there’s been a political tug-of-war between the generals and the politicians (think of the fight over gays in the military), which only got worse in the Bush years, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld openly bullied his commanders in the field, and Gen. Colin Powell traded in his uniform for a politician’s suit.

Things have only gotten worse under Obama. We’ve had a dispiriting merry-go-round when it comes to command in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater; such instability at the top threatens the hard-won gains of our fighting forces.

And with at least three of our most effective fighting generals now cashiered or forced into retirement, the president is sending a clear message to the rest of the world.

That message is: Sound the retreat.

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Miami Dolphins slam Norman Braman, Marlins Park deal

The Miami Dolphins ramped up their public campaign for a tax-funded stadium renovation this week, buying full-page ads against their top critic and trying to distance the plan from the unpopular Marlins deal.

The team bought an ad in Tuesday’s Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald knocking auto magnate Norman Braman’s criticism of the Sun Life Stadium deal, which would have Florida and Miami-Dade split the costs with owner Stephen Ross for a $400 million renovation. The Dolphins would pay at least $201 million, with taxpayers using state funds and a higher Miami-Dade hotel tax to pay $199 million.

In a fact sheet sent to media Tuesday morning, the Dolphins listed ways their deal differs from the 2009 Marlins deal. First: Ross, a billionaire real estate developer, would use private dollars to fund at least 51 percent of the Sun Life effort, compared to less than 25 percent from Marlins owner Jeff Loria. Second, Sun Life helps the economy more than the Marlins park does.

“Just because the Marlins did a bad deal doesn’t mean we should oppose a good deal where at least a majority of the cost is paid from private sources and more than 4,000 local jobs are created during construction alone,” the fact sheet states. And while the Dolphins’ Miami Gardens stadium has hosted two Super Bowls since 2007 and is in the running for the 2016 game, “Marlins Stadium does not generate the ability to attract world-class sports events -- other than a World Series from time to time depending on the success of the team.”

NFL teams play eight home games a year if they don’t make the playoffs, while baseball teams have 81.

Miami and Miami-Dade built the Marlins a $640 million stadium at the site of the Dolphins’ old home at the Orange Bowl in Little Havana. The Marlins contributed about $120 million and agreed to pay between $2.5 million and $4.9 million a year for 35 years to pay back $35 million of debt the county borrowed for the stadium. As a publicly owned stadium, the Marlins ballpark pays no property taxes. Most of the public money came from Miami-Dade hotel taxes, along with $50 million of debt tied to the county’s general fund.

Sun Life is privately owned and pays $3 million a year in property taxes to Miami-Dade. It currently receives $2 million a year from Florida’ s stadium program, a subsidy tied to converting the football venue to baseball in the 1990s when the Marlins played there. The Dolphins also paid for a second full-page ad with quotes from leading hoteliers in Miami-Dade endorsing the stadium plan. Among them: Donald Trump, whose company recently purchased the Doral golf resort. “Steve Ross’ commitment to modernize Sun Life Stadium -- while covering most of the construction costs -- is the right thing for Miami-Dade,’’ the ad quotes Trump as saying.

Also on Tuesday, Ross and team CEO Mike Dee sent a letter to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and county commissioners requesting negotiations over the stadium deal. The letter said the deal Ross unveiled last week is a “baseline for debate” and asked for talks. The letter also urged the commission to adopt a resolution proposed by Commissioner Barbara Jordan endorsing the state bill that would allow taxes for Sun Life. The resolution is on the agenda for Wednesday’s commission meeting.

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Miami police: Fight over child ends in fatal crash

A fatal car crash in Allapattah began, Miami police said Tuesday, as a fight between two women over a child, with one woman grabbing the child and jumping into the speeding vehicle that might have caused the collision.

The night began with a 15-month-old girl, who was living with her father and his girlfriend, neither of whom police identified.

The mother of the child, Mylife Rivera-Vasquez, 20, of Homestead, persuaded the girlfriend on Monday to meet her at Northwest 17th Avenue and 28th Street so she could see her daughter, Miami police said.

As the girlfriend waited in that area with the girl about 8 p.m., Rivera-Vasquez and several other people arrived, police said, and punched the girlfriend several times.

During the melee, Rivera-Vasquez grabbed her daughter and got into a Lincoln Town Car that drove away.

The Town Car sped south on Northwest 21st Avenue, police said, and the girlfriend appeared to have followed in another car.

But as it approached Northwest 20th Street, the Town Car crashed into a Chevrolet Tahoe.

The Tahoe had been westbound on Northwest 20th Street. Police said the Town Car failed to yield the right of way.

Two of the three people in the Town Car — the driver and the 15-month-old — were thrown from the vehicle, police said. All three were taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center.

The driver, Kristofer Daniel Astorga, 22, died shortly after arriving at the hospital, police said.

Rivera-Vasquez and her child, Juliet Rivera, were both in critical condition, police said.

Lt. Ignatius Carroll, spokesman for Miami Fire-Rescue, told Miami Herald news partner WFOR CBS 4 that the little girl hadn’t been secured in a child car seat.

The Tahoe’s driver was in good condition at Jackson, and a passenger in that car was treated at the scene for minor injuries. Neither was identified Tuesday.

On Tuesday, police said Rivera-Vasquez had been charged with two counts of simple battery.

El Nuevo Herald Staff Writer Melissa Sanchez contributed to this report.

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FTC study taking aim at online marketing of booze

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans this summer to recommend ways that the alcoholic beverage industry can better protect underage viewers from seeing its advertisements online.

Distillers, brewers and wineries pour millions of dollars into brand promotion on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and industry critics contend they are not doing enough to prevent young consumers from receiving these messages.

“We’re doing a deep dive on how they’re using the Internet and social media,” said Janet Evans, a lawyer with the FTC, which is conducting a year-long study due to be released by early summer. “We’re focusing on underage exposure.”

She would not elaborate on any potential recommendations that might come out of the study, which began in April 2012.

The FTC is reviewing data from 14 big producers, Evans said, including Beam Inc, the maker of Jim Beam, Diageo Plc, home to Johnnie Walker, and Constellation Brands Inc, which makes Robert Mondavi and Ravenswood wines.

The FTC report “is something we take seriously and place at high priority,” said Karena Breslin, director for digital marketing at Constellation.

The FTC has made two requests for information since the study began, she said.

The regulatory agency has not said it intends to impose restrictions on liquor company social media advertising but it can make recommendations to the industry.

The FTC is empowered to file suit to ensure consumers are protected from deceptive marketing practices, Evans said, but she stressed that studies of this nature are meant to promote better self-regulation, not provide a basis for a case.

Industry executives say alcohol makers and distributors voluntarily adhere to the same industry-set standard for marketing to underage viewers on social media sites that the industry set for its ads on TV and other media. That requires that at least 71.6 percent of an audience consists of adults 21 and older.

“No one in their right mind would want to advertise to people who can’t legally buy their product,” said Frank Coleman, senior vice president for Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), the trade group that sets the industry’s advertising codes.

Coleman also cited recent data showing the audiences for Facebook and Twitter are skewed heavily towards viewers who are above the legal drinking age.

“According to Nielsen’s latest data, the demographic audience for Facebook is 83.5 percent 21 years and older, and for Twitter it is 85 percent,” Coleman said.

In June 2011, DISCUS revised its code upwards to 71.6 percent from 70 percent, after the FTC recommended it review the standard to better reflect U.S. Census population data.

Industry critics, including David Jernigen, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University, and Sarah Mart, research director of the advocacy group Alcohol Justice, contend the industry didn’t go far enough and should raise the standard further.

Jernigen said it needs to be at least 85 percent to effectively protect youth, so there would be no more than 15 percent exposure to the underage drinking population.

“The industry says its self-regulating but it’s ineffective and social media opens up a whole new set of problems because their ads are everywhere,” said Mart.

Coleman said the group now requires members to install age-checking tools via instant messaging as a gateway to Twitter feeds and other branded Web platforms that ask the user for a birth date before admitting them.

In the first nine months of 2012, beer, wine and spirits manufacturers spent an estimated $ 35 million for paid Web display advertising, but industry executives estimate many millions more were spent on website creation, video production for platforms like Google’s YouTube and social media marketing efforts.

“We’ve significantly adjusted more money to digital for online video, websites, Facebook and Twitter content,” said Kevin George, global chief marketing officer for Jim Beam, which spends 30 percent of its media spend for online outlets, up from 10 percent in 2008, he said.

Many companies are expanding their digital staff. Wine maker Constellation hired Breslin three years ago to initiate digital marketing and now has a team of five reporting to her.

Many alcoholic beverage companies flocked to Facebook because it requires users to post their birth dates when signing up.

Last year Twitter partnered with Buddy Media to offer a screening tool that sends a direct message to fans who click on an alcoholic brand. The message sends the fan a link to a site that asks for date of birth.

Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media last June, which is now folding the platform into its marketing cloud portfolio.

Health advocates and industry critics are crying foul. “Facebook and other interactive platforms are poorly monitored and not well age-protected,” said Jernigen of Johns Hopkins University. “Anyone can say they’re 21 and click yes.”

(Reporting by Susan Zeidler; Editing by Ron Grover, Alden Bentley and Phil Berlowitz)

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Sheryl Crow on Lance Armstrong Doping Confession to Oprah Winfrey

Sheryl Crow (who will be advising Blake Shelton on The Voice this season) opened up to Nancy O'Dell on the set of the singing competition over the weekend, commenting on Lance Armstrong's doping confession.

RELATED: Shelton Taps Sheryl For The Voice

"I think that honesty is always the best bet and that the truth will set you free," said Crow, who caught "bits and pieces" of her ex-fiance's interview with Oprah Winfrey. "To carry around a weight like that would be devastating in the long run."

Armstrong, 41, and Crow, 50, began dating in 2003 -- the same year that Armstrong divorced his wife of five years, Kristin -- and split in 2006.

Last year, a report from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency led to Armstrong's downfall. The shamed cyclist was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and, until now, vehemently maintained his innocence.

RELATED: Biggest Celebrity Scandals of 2012

During a series of rapid-fire yes or no questions, the retired cyclist confirmed to Oprah last week that he had blood transfusions and used the banned substance erythropoietin (EPO) during his career -- particularly during all seven of his Tour de France victories. Although he expressed a desire to make things right with the people he may have hurt, Crow was never mentioned by name.

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An absentee mayor

Bob McManus

Remember the time Mike Bloomberg jetted off to sunny Bermuda as a monster snowstorm bore down on the five boroughs? Never again, he said afterward, woefully, while the city ever-so-slowly dug itself out of the drifts.

Well, some tigers just can’t change their stripes.

For there he was last week, down in Maryland giving America a firearms intervention while the United Federation of Teachers and his own crack Department of Education negotiators pulled his pants down on teacher-quality reform.

Transforming the city’s public-school system into a national model for quality and effectiveness was once right at the top of Mayor Mike’s personal legacy list.

AP

Busy in Baltimore: Mayor Bloomberg waiting to speak at a gun-violence summit while aides his were bungling teacher-evaluation talks back home.

But then came the third-term blahs, the departure of Joel Klein as schools chancellor, the ensuing Cathy Black debacle, the ascendancy of the thuggish United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew — and the now-pervasive sense that Bloomberg no longer much gives a damn about the city’s 1,400 schools.

Fact is, he’s always been long on big ideas and short on follow-through (congestion pricing, anyone?). The schools seem to be no different.

Bloomberg won mayoral control of the Board of Education early on — a signal victory, though one built on the largely unappreciated efforts of his predecessor, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Then came a lot of churning, but not much change.

Certainly not when it came to dealing with Albany.

He dispatched naïve deputies to the capital city to negotiate charter-school and school-closure reform with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — and wound up with laws studded with subsections designed to weaken, not strengthen, mayoral control.

And that’s how it worked out.

Fast forward to last week’s teacher-evaluation horror show, a repeat of what had come before: Mike delegated, his deputies dithered and the UFT carried the day

More, the union can now credibly — if dishonestly — argue that the potential loss of hundreds of millions in state and federal school aid is all Mike’s fault.

The money is the carrot in a state law requiring that the city and its unions negotiate objective evaluation standards for teachers and supervisors.

This always was going to be a tough fight. Mulgrew would sooner jam hot needles in his eyes than allow even the most egregiously incompetent teachers to be dismissed.

But as negotiations closed in on last Thursday’s deadline, the union had an unexpected ally at the table: Shael Polakow-Suransky, the policy factotum forced on Bloomberg by Albany as its price for allowing Cathy Black to become chancellor.

Black imploded after just weeks on the job, but Polakow-Suransky remained.

And Polakow-Suransky, it seems, is no fan of standardized testing, a key tool — if not the key tool — in any credible teacher-evaluation regimen.

“He doesn’t believe in testing,” says one high-ranking participant in the talks. “He negotiated it away — and when Mike [came back and] found out, he exploded.”

This brought negotiations to an end in a spray of invective, with state Education Commissioner John King essentially (and not unreasonably) blaming the breakdown on Bloomberg while threatening to withhold perhaps $1 billion in education aid from the city.

But, correcting for the bad hand the mayor had dealt himself, Bloomberg is spot on: One can’t objectively evaluate teachers without, well, objective evaluation metrics.

That is, without standardized tests.

Many pupils, if not most, will do fine without much testing.

Still, you can’t perform an education on a child, like an appendectomy. It’s a process, and many children — for reasons of class, culture, economic circumstance or personal disinclination to participate — resist it more than others.

These are the children who desperately need the readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmatic rubric that comprises the core of most test prep.

And in that sense, test performance is an entirely valid — indeed, critical — standard against which to judge teachers.

So if Polakow-Suransky doesn’t like standardized testing — well, too bad about Polakow-Suransky. And no matter that such views enjoy considerable currency among the Columbia Teachers College crew that drives policy at the Department of Education; they have no legitimate presence in Bloomberg administration negotiating positions.

And they certainly shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to the mayor himself.

That is, Mike should have been paying much closer attention to what was being proposed in his name.

For while education isn’t as sexy as assault rifles, he started the reform fight. He really should devote what time he has remaining in City Hall to working for its successful conclusion.

rmcmanus8@gmail.com

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Series for Miami’s emerging art collectors begins Thursday

For art enthusiasts interested in bring their interest home, Miami’s Bakehouse Art Complex is hosting a lecture series for emerging collectors. The first panel, slated for Thursday at 6 p.m., features arists and curators who will talk about fine tuning your taste and learning to make informed decisions. The second session, Feb. 7, is oriented to the mechanics of purchasing. The third, on Feb. 21, explores how to manage your collection.

Moderating all three panels will be Denise Gerson, independent curator who served as associate director for the Lowe Museum of Art for 24 years. Cost is $25 per session or $60 for the series. Seating is limited; reservations are recommended.

Information at 305-576-2828; www.bacfl.org.

Jane Wooldridge

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Don’t mind the helicopters, it’s just practice, Miami-Dade police say

If you see military helicopters buzzing through your neighborhood sometime soon, don’t freak out. It’s probably a military training exercise.

Miami-Dade police sent out a warning Monday that multiple police agencies would be providing support for a joint military training exercise somewhere over Miami and elsewhere in the county. The exercise will include the use of military helicopters.

When and where will this happen? Police didn’t say.

The police statement said the training locations and times “were carefully selected to minimize negatively impacting the citizens of the City of Miami/Miami-Dade County and their daily routines.”

But it also acknowledged that there would be some impact on residents.

“This is routine training conducted by military personnel designed to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification requirement,” the police statement said.

This isn’t the first time such training has been done in Miami. In April 2011, military helicopters buzzed through Brickell, leading to sleepless nights for some people and a lot of griping on social media about it.

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At Obama’s church service, hymns, prayers – and a tweet?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There was preaching, praying and singing at President Barack Obama’s church service on Inauguration Day on Monday. But was there tweeting, too?

As Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley wrapped up his sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House by urging Obama to leverage his power for the greater good, a tweet went out from the president’s own Twitter feed.

“I’m honored and grateful that we have a chance to finish what we started. Our work begins today. Let’s go. -bo,” said the tweet, which went to more than 26 million Obama followers.

Obama typically designates tweets that he writes himself by signing his initials in lowercase: “-bo.” That led to questions over whether the president had tweeted from church – and perhaps provided a new chapter in the debate over the appropriate use of social media.

But a White House spokesman said Obama did not send the tweet in the middle of the church service.

That means it could have been done by Obama in advance and timed for release while he was in church, or that it was posted by Organizing for Action, the non-profit group that now operates the president’s Twitter account.

The new group, which is led by Obama’s former campaign team, plans to try to build public support for the president’s policies.

The group did not immediately comment on the authorship or timing of the tweet.

Even if Obama had sent out the tweet from church, such messages from the pew are no longer taboo, said Scott Williams, a pastor and consultant from Edmond, Oklahoma, who works with ministries to use social media to spread the word and engage members.

“It’s definitely OK – it’s relevant,” he said. He cited a verse from the prophet Isaiah: “Like a crane or a swallow, so did I twitter.”

“‘Thou shalt twitter in church’ is a way that I present it,” Williams said in an interview, noting that many people now used Bible apps on their mobile devices in the pews.

Stanley’s North Point Community Church in Atlanta produced a Christmas music video for iPhones and iPads that has been viewed 3.7 million times on YouTube, said Williams, who is familiar with the 33,000-member ministry.

Stanley delivered his sermon in a very “old-school” setting. St. John’s, a yellow church with white trim, was built in 1816 and often is called the “Church of the Presidents” because every president since James Madison has attended it at least occasionally.

The service included a mix of traditional hymns such as “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past,” a gospel solo by singer Ledisi, and an African-American spiritual, “Great Day.” It also included readings and prayers from Jewish, Christian and Catholic clergy.

Stanley talked about a passage in the Bible where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, setting an example of equality.

“What do you do when it dawns on you that you’re the most powerful person in the room? You leverage that power for the benefit of other people in the room,” Stanley said.

“Mister President, you have an awfully big room,” the pastor said. “It’s as big as our nation. At times, as you know, it’s as big as this world.”

(Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney)

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Diane Lane Fashion Flashback

With classic good looks, killer style and a body that puts women half her age to shame, Diane Lane, 42,  just seems to get better with age.

Join us as we look back at Diane's most stunning red carpet looks over the years!

Related: Who Are The Most Desirable Women of 2013?

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