Washington (The Weekly Standard) Vol. 015, Issue 03 - 10/5/2009 –
For a talented man who ran a textbook campaign and was declared a great president before he even took office, Barack Obama has been having a rather hard time. The Midas Touch of 2008 has seemed to desert him. The famed oratory has not made a difference. The uniting president has turned into the ultra-divider. The music has died.
It's less that McCain voters oppose his proposals than that his own voters are turning against him: His approval ratings, above 70 percent when he first took office, now are near or less than 50 percent as independents, who gave him his win last November, give him negative ratings, and are dropping away. Presidents tend to drift down to earth as good will is ground down in the process of governing, but Obama's decline has been sudden and swift. Democrats predictably blame this on race, as if the strain of feigning enlightenment had become too much all at once for millions of people, but this seems unlikely in the case of a figure who only a few months ago was so widely adored. In fact, he may have been adored rather too widely, by too many people wanting incompatible things. As disillusion sets in, it becomes more and more clear that he and his country misread one another. People embraced him for opposite reasons, while he held mistaken ideas about them; lies were not told, but conclusions were drawn that were not wholly accurate. He is what he seemed, only not that completely. And here are just five of the ways. I. THE INSULAR INTERNATIONALIST. On the surface, Obama is a man of the world and of varied experience, who has had an existence of contrasts, and seen many aspects of life. He has seen life in Hawaii, Jakarta, and mainland America, life in Cambridge, Manhattan, Chicago, and Washington; he has genetic connections to Kansas and Kenya; he knows the life of the privileged (the political elite and the academic community), the life of the in-between (his childhood family), and the life of the poor (on the South Side of Chicago, where he held his first job). Few American politicians have ever had a geographical reach so diverse and so dazzling--or a political planet so narrow and small.Obama has spent his entire adult life confined in the bubble of deep blue America--a place that makes up less than one-fifth of the country--in blue states, in blue cities, in blue states of mind. His city neighborhoods--Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge--are the back yards of elite universities; he worked in the ghetto (and met its denizens again in Jeremiah Wright's congregation); and he rose in the urban ethnic machine of Chicago: the perfect trifecta of liberal politics, where people's looks, speech, and dress may seem to be varied, but the voting and thinking go only one way. It is a real world, but a small one, and in a real sense misleading; one that sees suburbs and small towns as strange, foreign countries; where centrists are rare, and the right nonexistent; where Bill Ayers really is just a guy from the neighborhood (and the Reverend Wright is nothing unusual), and where no one and no party disputes that the state is the answer, that "social justice" demands redistribution, that less wealthy whites cling to God and to guns out of "bitterness," and that racist white cops (all white cops are racist) always act "stupidly" when they are forced to have dealings with blacks.Obama knows people who make laws, and people who teach law, and people who depend upon help from the government, but few people who make things, or run things, or work in the market economy; in other words, he doesn't know his own country, and has no sense where its center of gravity lies. He seems surprised at the resistance to his agenda: Who knew there were so many millions who are staggered by deficits, who don't see the point of identity politics, and want the state largely out of their lives? Not he, and he still doesn't seem to believe it, viewing the fringe (the far left) as the majority, and the center-right that is the core of the country as a demented fringe element that can be dismissed, condescended to, or shoved off to one side. A man of the world, but not of his country, he is just sensing the depth of his own lack of knowledge. He doesn't seem eager to learn. II. TOO MUCH, TOO SOONAs the biracial son of an absentee father, his life less than smooth in its formative stages, Obama was sold as a much-vetted figure, matured by the pressures of life. Once again, this is true, but in some ways, it isn't: His struggles were real, but were not overwhelming, and compared with others', his sufferings seem slight. Ronald Reagan's father was alcoholic, and often embarrassed his family. Bill Clinton's father died before he was born, his stepfather was violent, and his working mother (much like Obama's) was sometimes away. Theodore Roosevelt struggled with asthma, and nearly went mad when his beloved young wife suddenly died in her twenties. Franklin Roosevelt had a nerve-wracking marriage, and was crippled by polio. John Kennedy lost a brother, a brother-in-law, and his favorite sister before he (and they) had reached 30; saw a retarded sister institutionalized after a long fight by his family to raise her as normal; was wracked with pain and expected to die in his forties (he did), and had last rites performed four times before he was murdered. It is true that he and the elder George Bush were chauffeured to private school in the depths of the Depression, but both belonged to a war generation, volunteered for the service (Bush in his teens), nearly perished in combat, and saw many friends die. Others faced many professional setbacks: Ronald Reagan's Hollywood career flickered out in his 40s, and he had to start over in midlife, as far less than a star. George H.W. Bush lost a Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen and the nomination to Reagan 10 years after that; Bill Clinton was almost destroyed by his reelection loss after one term as governor; George W. Bush was a failure until he reached 40. Obama was not born a Bush or a Kennedy, and he was denied the normative two-parent idyll, but his adult years have been free of large setbacks and losses. And his political life has been charmed. Obama entered politics in 1996 as a state senator, and 12 years later was president, after a rise so nearly free of struggle (he lost a congressional primary) that it appeared to be greased by the gods. He wanted to run for the state legislature, and the incumbent retired. He wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, and his two major rivals were sidelined by scandal. (Republicans had to import a talk show host from out of state for a doomed run against him: Obama walked away with 70 percent of the vote.) Tapped to deliver the Democrats' keynote speech at their 2004 convention in Boston, Obama emerged with even more luster, and entered the Senate a star. Three years later, he was running for president, while crowds swooned, shrieked, and passed out at his rallies. He held a small, steady lead through most of the summer, but fell briefly behind for two weeks in September, when John McCain's surprise pick of Governor Sarah Palin made the ticket catch fire. Then the markets imploded, and the election fell back in his lap. In the end, he won more states than anyone since the elder George Bush two decades earlier, vanquished two weighty figures of national stature, and broke a race bar once thought to be permanent. Before he was sworn in, he was declared a great man by most of the media, and ranked next to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. "He ventured forth to bring Light to the World," wrote Gerard Baker, in what seemed at the time only partly a parody. "As he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness," Baker informed us. "And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves, 'Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?' " John Kennedy, a previous golden boy, was younger than Obama was when he was elected, and his career too had had a dazzling upward trajectory. But he had served 14 years in Congress, his first Senate win was a hard-fought upset against the odds, and as president he carried a note with "100,000" on it, for the number of popular votes by which he had beaten Richard M. Nixon, as a hedge against hubris and vanity. But past childhood, Obama had never lost anything, had few close calls, and never had to work all that hard for his victories. His hubris would be unconstrained.The scholar Charles Murray has said that no one should work in the White House until he has been chastened by disappointment and hardship, and taught the frustrations and limits of life, and of governance. But Obama's experience has taught him the opposite lesson: that he is invincible, that there is nothing on earth that he cannot accomplish, that magical forces steer fortune his way. Why can't he push four giant programs through Congress in six months? He's the first nonwhite president. Why can't he remake the structure of government? He beat John McCain and Hillary Clinton, an iconic war hero and a former first lady who was backed by her husband, the president. To Obama's mistaken belief that the whole country thinks as do Chicago and Berkeley, he has added the belief that if it does not, he can get his way anyhow, as he has already worked miracles. To insularity, he is adding the arrogance born of easy and early successes, which is setting him up for his first major failure. III. A MATTER OF TEMPERAMENTThe third reason Obama is now in trouble is that his demeanor and his agenda don't fit. Obama's demeanor is calm, cool, and rational. It reassures, and it soothes. It is essentially conservative in its implications, in that it seems to move calmly, and in predictable ways. In the campaign, it was no less than pure magic: It set him apart from the more intense John McCain and Hillary Clinton; it was the reason the associations with Bill Ayers and the Reverend Wright failed to gain traction; it was the reason an audience, wrung out by eight years of Clinton Fatigue topped by eight years of still more intense Bush Exhaustion, looked at its owner and swooned. "The man is calm. The man is unflappable," David Brooks said on PBS after the third presidential debate last October. "There is just an eerie almost coolness about him," Mark Shields interjected. "I think his steadiness, his temperament, has been the dramatic theme of this campaign, dramatic in being undramatic," Brooks later told Charlie Rose. "What struck me is how incredibly even he is.  ...   It's like you're camping, and you wake up one morning, and there is a mountain. And the next morning, there's a mountain. Obama is just the mountain. He is just there." There is reason to think that Brooks is correct, and that voters did vote for this "there-ness," this even demeanor, this cool. But moderate temperaments have always meant moderate politics: Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were cool, and they defined the Cold War consensus; Colin Powell is cool, and he occupies the dead center of American politics, which is why he would have won in a landslide if he had ever appeared on a national ticket--and why he could never have done so, as he would have driven the bases of both parties insane. But if they are the rule, Obama is the exception that proves it, and millions of people who voted for him because they had fallen in love with the mountain are stunned to find out that he wants to move it, and in directions they never had dreamed. Obama won because, while his agenda appealed to the far-left and activist base of his party that wanted sweeping and radical action, his temperament drew in the moderate middle, which wanted a rest, and a rather more modest change in direction. The good thing from his point of view is that his smoothness helped him put together a really big coalition. The bad thing is that the two wings of the coalition now want two quite different things. This is the reason Obama's battles are being waged inside his party, as his two different classes of backers collide. The "temperament" voters want the "small c" conservatism that is incremental and patient, and never moves terribly far from the center, while the "agenda" supporters want the "big l" liberalism that means sweeping and radical change. The temperament voters are unnerved by the bailouts, by Government Motors, by deficits in the trillions, and by public control of the health care professions; the agenda voters want even more of all of the above. The temperament voters want to tamp down the partisan warfare, the agenda voters want to ramp it up further; the temperament voters want a do-over on health care that is at once incremental and bipartisan; the agenda voters want to force radical fantasies down the throats of dissenters. The temperament voters, some of whom are independents, are peeling off from Obama, as the agenda voters become even more fervent. And there are more issues on which they may soon disagree. IV. THE COLOR OF JUSTICEAs the first half-Kenyan to become an American president, Obama was a hero to two groups of people, who looked to him for opposite things. He was both and at once the racial avenger and biracial healer; the promoter of identity politics, and the man who would kill it; the man who would promote race-conscious remedies and make the issue central to the national discourse, and the man who would lead us into the postracial future, in which race would never be mentioned again. The first group cheered Sonia Sotomayor as the Wise Latina who would bring her ethnic perspective to Supreme Court decisions; the second was fine with her gender and background, but bristled at what looked like her assertion that her background and gender made her sure to rule well. The first group cheered Obama when he said Sgt. James Crowley acted "stupidly" when he briefly arrested presidential friend Henry ("Skip") Gates during a fracas following a report of a break-in at Gates's residence; the second group applied the description to Obama himself. The first group agreed when Maureen Dowd and others said townhall and tea-party fury was fueled by the worst sort of prejudice; the second did not. The White House has been smart enough to realize that while the first group was noisy and frequently organized, the second was a great deal more numerous, and that for every racist who had been correctly tagged, there were a great many others who were maligned by the charges, and would only be further enraged. This, and the fact that Sotomayor was confirmed only after denying repeatedly that she thought Latinas were inherently wiser than others, and that Obama's poll numbers dropped after the Cambridge fiasco, should warn the president that he is playing with fire, that his race-conscious friends are also his enemies, and that he is walking a tightrope it would not be too hard to fall off. V. EXCEPT FOR WHAT? Barack Obama is often described as an inspiring figure, in the vaunted tradition of Reagan and Kennedy, who can arouse in his hearers a sense of great purpose, and set them to dreaming great dreams. He's a fine speaker, but Reagan and Kennedy inspired by their message: the idea that the country is unique among nations, has a singular mission to promote freedom everywhere; in effect, that the country is great. On this point, Obama is dumb. He stresses the country's faults, not its virtues; goes on apology tours, where he asks the forgiveness of nations with much grimmer histories; calls his country arrogant and dismissive of others, who deserve more respect. Cities on hills, beloved of Reagan and Kennedy, are not in his lexicon, and the idea of the "last best hope" of humanity has not crossed his lips. He finds the country exceptional only in its pretense to be so, and has been at pains to let England and Israel, who gave us our values, know that they're also not much. He doesn't seem to be moved by democracy either, as shown by his indifference to those fighting for it in Iran and Honduras, and his indulgence of oppressive regimes.A normal candidate who struck most of these notes would quickly be tossed on the ash heap of history, but this isn't your average bloke. He is in himself a historical moment, whose breakthrough election was, as was the moon landing, a great giant step for mankind. While denying American greatness, he seems to embody it: No other country had ever atoned for its sins in so stunning a manner, or come quite so far quite so fast.The candidate at once of the left and the center, of the hot and the cool, of the race conscious and colorblind, he is the candidate too of those who deny that their country is special, and those who believe that he proves that it is. The upside of this is that it allows him to run down the country and still seem aspirational; the downside is that public tolerance for his world view has always been limited (think Jimmy Carter), and sooner or later the truth will come through. If he becomes Carter II, then the glow will fade quickly. No president who hasn't stood up for American greatness has ever been loved for too long.These are the five contradictions to Barack Obama that have misled the public, without the intent to deceive. He does have a complex, exotic, and intriguing background; he did rise by his gifts from inauspicious beginnings; he does have a genuinely moderate temperament (it is not possible to lie for this long about one's personality); and it is hardly his doing that being biracial--a net minus when he was born at the start of the civil rights movement--had, by the time he was running for president, turned into a tactical plus. But these things, which were true, were not the whole story. His background was wide, but his political world was remarkably limited; his early years were hard, but his political rise was too easy and effortless; his temperament was cool, but his agenda was otherwise; and in a number of areas he appealed at the same time to quite different people, whose desires were wholly opposed. If his backers were fooled, so was Obama, who misread the electoral mood. He was fueled by his base, but the voters he won with were the slice in the middle, who gave him a slight, steady lead in the election year summer, switched to McCain after the St. Paul convention, and then switched back with a vengeance after the great market meltdown tipped the election into Obama's lap. This gave him his ultimate 7-point margin, shifted some red states in his direction, and secured him the huge lead in the House and the Senate that is one of his sources of strength. That slice in the middle wanted a center-left tilt (emphasis on "center") and not the progressive agenda. They wanted the "small c" conservative temperament; the post-racial healer; the barrier breaker, who would prove that their country was great. Marc Ambinder laments on the website of the Atlantic that "the majority that elected Barack Obama     has gone silent" in the face of the recent vigorous protests, "or, if not silent, isn't nearly as potent as they were nearly ten months ago." But "the majority that elected Barack Obama" has ceased to exist, having hemorrhaged millions on millions of voters, some of whom are now going to protests themselves. The trouble with Barack Obama is that he was too many things to too many people, and no one liked all of them. He was simply too good to be true.Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

EKG Machines

The embryonic heart rate (EHR) then accelerates approximately 100 BPM during the first month of beating, peaking at 165-185 BPM during the early 7th week, (early 9th week after the LMP). This acceleration is approximately 3.3 BPM per day, or about 10 BPM every three days, an increase of 100 BPM in the first month. After 9.1 weeks after the LMP, it decelerates to about 152 BPM (+/-25 BPM) during the 15th week after the LMP. After the 15th week the deceleration slows reaching an average rate of about 145 (+/-25 BPM) BPM at term. The regression formula which describes this acceleration before the embryo reaches 25 mm in crown-rump length or 9.2 LMP weeks is: Age in days = EHR(0.3)+6.

The apex is the blunt point situated in an inferior (pointing down and left) direction. A stethoscope can be placed directly over the apex so that the beats can be counted. It is located posterior to the 5th intercostal space just medial of the left mid-clavicular line. In normal adults, the mass of the heart is 250-350 g (9-12 oz), or about twice the size of a clenched fist (it is about the size of a clenched fist in children), but extremely diseased hearts can be up to 1000 g (2 lb) in mass due to hypertrophy. It consists of four chambers, the two upper atria and the two lower ventricles.

Washington (The Weekly Standard) Vol. 015, Issue 03 - 10/5/2009 –
In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama really broke the presidential pattern. At a glance these annual turns before the General Assembly are all alike. The president stands alone, dwarfed by the absurdly outsized dais angled together from blue-green granite, while the extravagantly dressed audience sits through long stretches of stony silence. The speech itself is always grandiose. Even back in the 1990s, when the world appeared to be going swimmingly, relatively speaking, the president of the United States felt he had to inform the assembled nations about "the great challenges" that "still confront us."
It's a safe bet that great challenges will be confronting us, because even if they weren't, the world's political and diplomatic leaders would invent them to keep themselves busy. Boldly (always boldly) asserting the existence of such challenges lends an urgency that earns the president's speech a mention on the evening news, at least. And it makes the president appear indispensable--not only as the man who calls the world's attention to great challenges but also as the man who, with help from his attendants, will wrestle the challenges to the ground.Or so it usually went, until last week. This time the new president, in his U.N. debut, tried something altogether different. He worked hard to present himself as just one of the guys--one more world leader yakking it up with all the other world leaders down at the bar at the World Leaders Club.He began the speech conventionally enough, by proclaiming a bold challenge. "The time has come for the world to move in a new direction." What challenge could be bolder than moving the world in a direction? So far, so normal. But note the passive voice. There was no we moving the world, and certainly no I. The world would be moving itself."No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation," he said, by way of explaining this strange unmoved movement. "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed." The bipolar world of the "long-gone Cold War," in which two powerful nations pushed or pulled the world this way or that, is no longer possible, he said. And then he went an unexpected step further: Even the unipolar world, in which one country assumes leadership by virtue of its wealth or moral standing, isn't going to work, either. The president himself would see to that, by relinquishing any claim to indispensability. He was introducing us to the no-polar world.In the no-polar world, according to the president, everybody is doing everything all at once. "Persistent action," the president called it. "The future will be forged by deeds and not simply words." The deeds, however, will entail a great many words; on most occasions, words exclusively. There will be summits, conferences, negotiations, and consultations. And in this important work, "America intends to keep our end of the bargain," which isn't to say we'll be bossing anybody around.Take, for instance, the issue of nuclear disarmament. Boldly the president pledged that the United States would "pursue a new agreement with Russia." We would "work with others" to enforce a treaty after we "move forward with ratification." We would "complete a Nuclear Posture Review." And we would "call upon countries to begin negotiations." Pursuing, reviewing, working with, moving forward, and calling upon--dirty work, but somebody has to do it. And when all this labor has ended, the president promised, he will "host a summit" that "will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat" nuclear proliferation. (The word "combat" was not meant to be an endorsement of violence.) The sentence from the speech that best expresses our new no-polar world was this one: "We will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation, alongside bilateral negotiations."We've been told that most presidents appear to the rest of the world to be too aggressive, especially if they're Republicans, and especially when they stand before the General Assembly on that silly dais, talking grandly. But at the U.N. last week the world got its first look at a passive-aggressive president. For now Obama's co-leaders like their new colleague. They rewarded his speech with applause on thirteen occasions. (In his speech to the General Assembly last year, our previous president, Mr. Aggressive-aggressive, wasn't interrupted by applause at all, not once.) Hugo Chávez of Venezuela said he'd been particularly moved by Obama's vision.Yet there's a kink in the logic of the president's performance, and it will become hard to ignore. For his speech was a particularly grandiose refusal to be grandiose--a high-handed refusal to be high-handed. Who is he, after all, to declare a no-polar world? Only the leader of the most powerful nation in the world would have the nerve to announce to the world that from now on, by his decree, no nation will be more powerful than any other. The declaration subverts itself, cancels itself out, as he'll discover when he comes to reap the dividends of his new no-polar world."Those who used to chastise America for acting alone," the president insisted, "cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone." It's only a matter of time before the other guys at the bar start to think: Oh really? Who are you to say we can't? And what are you going to do about it? Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

ZURICH – Lawyers for Roman Polanski filed a motion in court Tuesday asking that the director be released from Swiss custody — the first step in his legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States for a 1977 statutory rape case.
The Swiss Federal Criminal Court announced the filing and said "the decision will be made within the next weeks." That statement meant the 76-year-old filmmaker is not expected to be freed anytime soon from prison, as he would stay incarcerated through the verdict and through any appeal from either side.
That criminal court will decide on the legality of the American request for Polanski's apprehension, Swiss Justice Ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He noted that the Justice Ministry and Polanski could later seek to overturn any decision at the Federal Tribunal, Switzerland's highest court.
"We will examine the ruling and then decide what we will do," Balmer said, declining to speculate on if or when Polanski could get out of jail.
The motion filed by the director's newly hired Swiss lawyers for his release was accompanied by proposals for bail and "guarantees," Polanski's French lawyer Herve Temime said. He would not elaborate on those, but added that house arrest at the directors' Swiss chalet in Gstaad was one option.
"Our first concern, and principle concern, is that Mr. Polanski be set free" from jail while "remaining on Swiss territory," Temime told reporters at the Justice Palace in Paris. "He has a chalet in Switzerland. He would naturally accept to be placed under house arrest during the followup of the extradition proceedings."
The Swiss Justice Ministry did not rule out the possibility that Polanski could be released on bail under very strict conditions that he doesn't flee Switzerland, but said house arrest had never happened before in a case like this.
"In most cases the imprisoned person has to remain in detention for the whole process," said Peter Cosandey, a former Zurich prosecutor specializing in international criminal cooperation.
"The chances that he will be exempted from prison are rather small," he added, because Polanski isn't a Swiss citizen or a permanent resident and is considered at high risk of fleeing justice.
Polanski, director of "Chinatown," "Rosemary's Baby" and the Oscar-winning "The Pianist" was arrested Saturday as he arrived in Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award from a film festival.
Authorities in Los Angeles consider Polanski a convicted felon and fugitive, and a Swiss justice official said there has been an international arrest warrant out on him since 2005.
The director had pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl. He was sent to prison for 42 days, but the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. On the day of his sentencing in 1978, aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time, Polanski fled to France.
Under Swiss law, the United States has 60 days to file a formal extradition request. That is first examined by the Swiss Justice Ministry, and once approved, it can be appealed at a number of courts.
Although the director, who lives in France, often stayed in Gstaad and traveled widely through France, Germany and other European nations, a Swiss official said this was the first time that law enforcement authorities had solid information from the United States so they could make an arrest.
"Last week, we received precise information when and where he would arrive, enabling us to make the arrest. That was the first time," Balmer said.
Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, appearing Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show, said the filmmaker was "looking forward to getting this resolved." He said he did not understand why such a long-standing case was being pursued now.
"His lawyers were advised that extradition was not being sought in the past. I'm not sure why this has presented itself today," Berg said.
A dual citizen of France and Poland, Polanski has been the focus of an international tug-of-war. The French and Polish foreign ministers have pressed the Swiss to free him on bail, and contacted U.S. officials all the way up to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so see if U.S. justice officials could drop the case.

French officials in particular have been horrified by U.S. and Swiss actions, with the French culture minister saying the director had been "thrown to the lions."

The arrest has left Polanski's latest film — "The Ghost" — in limbo, with several months of work before the political thriller is ready for theaters.

Polanski's agent Jeff Berg said the director had completed much of the editing but the film still needed music scoring and sound mixing. Based on the novel by Robert Harris, "The Ghost" stars Pierce Brosnan as a fictional British leader and Ewan McGregor as a ghostwriter for his memoirs. The movie was filmed in Germany.

For now, Polanski is living in a Zurich cell where he receives three meals a day and gets one hour of daily exercise outside. Family and friends can only see him for an hour each week but he is allowed numerous visits from lawyers and consular diplomats. Since his arrest, he has seen his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

The Justice Ministry has insisted that politics played no role in the arrest, which was prompted by a request from the U.S. Marshals Southwest Regional Fugitive Task Force, which includes the Los Angeles Police Department. The departments of State and Justice had to sign off on the request before it was sent.

Polanski has asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges' refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.

An HBO documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," has suggested there was behind-the-scenes manipulations by a now-retired prosecutor not assigned to the case.

His victim, Samantha Geimer, who long ago identified herself, has joined in Polanski's bid for dismissal, saying she wants the case to be over. She sued Polanski and reached an undisclosed settlement.

Earlier this year, Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza in Los Angeles dismissed Polanski's bid to throw out the case because the director failed to appear in court, but said there was "substantial misconduct" in the handling of the original case.

A native of France who was taken to Poland by his parents, Polanski escaped Krakow's Jewish ghetto as a child during World War II and lived off the charity of strangers. His mother died at the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp.

Polanski has lived for the past three decades in France, where his career has continued to flourish; he received a directing Oscar in absentia for the 2002 movie "The Pianist." He and Seigner have two children.

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Klapper reported from Geneva. AP Movie Writer David Germain in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.